I tell stories every day. That’s all I do. Whether I’m playing producer, or playing director, or writer, or telling stories to try to get people to put up money for a film. 

And sometimes my audience will listen to me for about thirty seconds before they decide whether they want to hear any more. 

    And other times, I know I’ve got them. We have an hour and a half meeting. And they’ve just had lunch, they’re just very relaxed. It’s completely different kind of storytelling to those different audiences. I could have all the time in the world to sit all night long with my editor if I choose to, and that’s one kind of storytelling. 

    How does one learn how to do it? It’s what Steve was saying earlier, it’s a matter of practice. When it doesn’t go right the first time, or the tenth time, then of course, you have to keep trying. 

    Much of it is discovering where to begin the story. I discovered that the story shouldn’t be begun at the chronological beginning. You have to figure out very quickly, what does this person care about? Because he doesn’t care about what I care about, and that’s o.k. So what does this person care about? And then based on that, you tell your story. 

    And it’s a very intuitive thing, and it’s practice. You have to practice, because knowing what might just barely spark their interest, and how you begin a story so that as soon as possible, you become interactive, 

    As Larry Prusak said, it’s not like the Monty Python approach to learning, where you open up someone’s head, and you pour the information in. You’re waiting for him to respond, to come back. Because the sooner the audience responds, whether it’s hundreds of people watching a video at the same time, or whether I’m speaking to an individual, the sooner the audience experiences the story and really feels something, the better the story is. That’s the objective. And that’s always our objective: to have the person really experience something.

A STORY TO RAISE MONEY: A STORY IN TWO SENTENCES

    Telling stories to try to get people to put up money for a film. is the most important part of what I do, since none of this would get done without the money. That one minute conversation that I have, and the story that I tell him, is one of the most important stories that I have to know how to tell. 

   For instance, on a different project that I’m doing right now, I had a phone call with the president of HBO. He is the kind of person who’s actually going to put the video out there before an audience, so that very many people will get to see it. So in many ways he is the most important person for us, since the video is not just something we’re going to watch ourselves, obviously.

   And that’s what happened with the HBO executive. The fact that he took my call is something in itself. I had all these notes. I had all these things I planned to tell him and we were on the phone for 15 seconds but he wanted to know the story in two sentences. And I just stopped and I started to laugh.

    And I said, “Well…”

    And he goes,  “Is that the beginning of the first sentence?” (Laughter) 

    And I laughed, because I didn’t have it in two sentences.

    He goes,  “I believe you have a good story. I know you have a good story. But call me tomorrow at noon, when you have it in two sentences. O.k.?” (Laughter) 

    And I said, “I’ll talk to you at noon.”

Participant: How about negotiating with him? For four sentences? (Laughter) 

Katalina Groh: No, no, not with a distributor. And he was right, because he hears stories all the time. He cares about good stories. He looks for good stories. But he wants to know he apologized the next day. I had my two sentences. They were pretty good. We ended up talking for an hour on the phone. So my first two sentences were the right ones. And we 

Participant: What were the two sentences? (Laughter)

Katalina Groh: It’s actually what end up being on the front of the box cover. It is “It’s very American story about what it means to be from some place else.”

Participant: That’s nice!

Another participant: It’s one sentence.
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