Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 18

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
RUSSELL BRAND
the way that you’re going to get
there. You create the correct
characters, you create the correct circumstances. When that
has a strong base, you can return to that so many times; you
can keep coming back to it.
RM: Yeah we have a name for
it—we call it callbacks.
RB: Yeah, callback, stitchback,
you know.
RM: Stitchback, I like that. Is
that English?
RB: Yeah, we use stitchback, back
reference, and then callback because there’s so much cross-cultural pollination.
RM: All three mean the same
thing?
RB: Yeah, pretty much.
RM: That’s a fascinating phenomenon—the callback. Don’t
you think? You can’t call back
to something that didn’t get a
laugh the first time.
RB: No, you can’t.
RM: Right? So, you set up and
you get a joke, and you leave it
in the ground for 20 minutes,
a half an hour, and then you
punch it again, and for some
reason, they laugh without
having the setup again. That’s

just a mystery to me.
RB: It’s like hypnosis, I think. You’ve
planted. You’ve told them that it
is funny. Sometimes I use neurolinguistic programming, or like
physical gestures with comedy.
So when I’m setting up stuff that
I know needs applause, I use this
hand that you will be applauding when I’m doing this gesture.
Then whenever I go back to that
stuff, they automatically applaud
because I’ve tied it in with that
gesture. So you have to sort of
plant these symbols throughout
your work.
We watched a film the other day
in preparation, like the film East
is East. Do you know that movie?
It’s sort of a cross-cultural movie about Asian families living in
the UK. It’s a slice of life type film
including rites of passage for a
couple of sons. What’s really interesting…
RM: Got by me, sorry.
RB: Well, I’m using your language,
so you should know roughly what
I mean from the shorthand. It
uses symbols brilliantly. The father wants his sons to go through
with these arranged marriages,
so he has this chest in which he
keeps their arranged marriage
paraphernalia. But that chest is
that man’s heart. The youngest
son won’t ever take off his hood,
he stays within there.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

Throughout the film, we see people looking at each other through
windows, between doorways.
The makers of the film understand that there’s stuff that they
can’t do with language that they
can do with symbols, but these
symbols can be created linguistically through non-visual medium
or through an erratic medium like
stand-up company or through a
written screenplay. You just have
to know this symbol—that’s just
how the phallus works, because
we have a presumed knowledge
of the phallus. We have an innate
understanding of its inconsistent
nature, and the possibility of castration all tied up into that symbol that applies as well in Africa
as it does in Northern Europe or
wherever you use it.
RM: In order to get to that performance, let’s talk about your
stand-up work to begin with
before we go to fiction. Let’s
talk about the process. Do you
sit down and write?
RB: No, I don’t. I collate experiences that I know have been
humorous and impactful. With
Messiah Complex, I knew that I
could talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. It was like, what
do you find most fascinating? I
thought it was genuine heroes–
Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Jesus
Christ, Gandhi.
I thought I would have to take