Hollywood producer Brian Grazer has been bringing stories to the masses through the media of film for decades. In his upcoming book, A Curious Mind, published by Simon & Schuster, Grazer presents the stories famous people tell about themselves, and the secret ingredient for greatness, Grazer suggests, is curiosity.
Grazer told cNet.com, “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.”
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Grazer, along with Ron Howard, started Imagine Entertainment, which put out hits like Apollo 13, Splash and a Beautiful Mind. His book is a compilation of interviews with greats such as Steve Jobs, Muhammad Ali, Jonas Salk, Carl Sagan, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, and others. One notable moment was when Fidel Castro said he liked Grazer’s famous spiked hair. Less pleasant was his reception by Isaac Asimov, whose wife Janet cut the interview after ten minutes because she felt Grazer wasn’t sufficiently prepared to interview her husband. Grazer told cNet.com, “I had arranged a meeting with one of the most interesting, innovative and prolific storytellers of our time, and I managed to bore him so thoroughly in just ten minutes that they couldn’t bear it and had to flee the black hole of my dullness.”
However, most of Grazer’s other interviews were quite successful, and he identified the trait of curiosity common to the great people he interviewed as “the process of asking questions, genuine questions that are not leading to asking something in return.”
