“I am called a movie producer…but really what I am is a storyteller,” writes Brian Grazer in his book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. “A couple of years ago, I started thinking about curiosity as a value I wanted to share, a quality I wanted to inspire in other people. I thought, What I’d really like to do is sit down and tell a few stories about what curiosity has done for me.
“I’d like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me make movies. I’d like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me be a better boss, a better friend, a better businessman, a better dinner guest.
“I’d like to tell stories about the sheer joy of discovery that open-ended curiosity offers. That’s the kind of joy we have as kids when we learn things just because we are curious. You can keep doing that as an adult, and it’s just as much fun…
“…I don’t sit in my office, gazing out the windows at Beverly Hills, waiting for movie ideas to float into my field of vision. I talk to other people. I seek out their perspective and experience and stories, and by doing that I multiply my own experience a thousandfold.
“What I do, in fact, is keep asking questions until something interesting happens.
“…Being curious and asking questions creates engagement. Using curiosity to disrupt your own point of view is almost always worthwhile, even when it doesn’t work out the way you expect.
“That’s part of the fun of curiousity – you are supposed to be surprised. If you only get the answers you anticipate, you’re not being very curious. When you get answers that are surprising, that’s how you know that you’ve disrupted your point of view.”
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Actor-director Ron Howard and Brian Grazer co-founded Imagine Entertainment in 1986. They have produced Parenthood, Nightshift, Kindergarten Cop, The Paper, Backdraft, Splash, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Get on Up,and The Da Vinci Code series among many other notable films.