CHRISTOPHER VOGLER is a former Hollywood studio executive and story analyst whose book THE WRITER’S JOURNEY has been called “the screenwriter’s Bible”. Born in Missouri, Vogler grew up on a farm outside St. Louis, studied journalism, made documentary films for the Air Force space program, and attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, before entering the film industry as a script reader. At the Walt Disney Company he wrote an influential memo on story structure that went viral and deeply influenced Hollywood thinking. Based on the Hero’s Journey concept of mythologist Joseph Campbell, Vogler’s work has become the cornerstone of many college writing programs and has had a wide influence in Hollywood and around the world. His 12-stage guide to story structure has inspired artists and writers and has become a kind of orientation device for people facing challenges or trying new things. He has worked with major directors and movie stars to give their stories some of the magic of myth and the wonder of fairy tales. His book, THE WRITER’S JOURNEY, is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition.
CHRIS VOGLER Talking Points, Interview Questions
How did The Writer’s Journey start?
From an early age, I was on a quest. How do stories work their magic? Why so powerful, so exciting?
Mom and grandmother read me fairy tales. The stories were like a mental laboratory where I tried out ideas. I was already looking for patterns, and trying to figure out which ones would make good Disney movies – at five years old!
Major Influences
Old movies and cartoons on TV blew my mind. I saw patterns, same kind of scenes, same kind of camera moves, music and sound effects being repeated from movie to movie. Hitchcock, John Ford, swashbuckling Warner Bros. movies with Errol Flynn. Zorro, Superman, Batman!
Drive-in movies were fantastic temples of outdoor entertainment. Glorious Westerns, fantasy and science fiction, epics of Egypt and Rome and the Vikings. I wanted to be part of this storytelling business. I wanted to tear open the screen and jump in there.
Still on the quest, looking for the keys of story. That led me to journalism school, then to making documentary films for the Air Force.
I was in the “Space Force” before they called it that. I made films for an outfit in Los Angeles called the Space and Missile Systems Organization, (SAMSO), responsible for rockets, missiles and military satellites. I worked on secret programs I still can’t talk about.
On the GI Bill I went to USC cinema school. Two big things happened there: I discovered the work of Joseph Campbell – THE KEY TO STORY! And I learned that a good way for me to get into the film industry was to set myself up as a story analyst or script reader.
WHAT IS THE HERO’S JOURNEY?
A metaphor.
A map.
A guidance system.
A handy Swiss Army knife for analyzing stories.
An encoded guide to achieving higher consciousness.
What was your journey to getting The Writer’s Journey published twenty-five years ago?
It started as a now-famous seven-page memo that I wrote when I was working for Disney. It revised Joseph Campbell’s complex system into a Practical Guide that could be used by writers and executives to improve their stories.
It went viral in pre-computer days, & was passed around the group mind of Hollywood by fax and copier machine.
A junior exec at Disney took credit for it, and it was endorsed by the production chief of the studio, Jeffrey Katzenberg. I heard about it, stepped forward to claim authorship, and was rewarded by being sent to work with the Disney Animation division, where they were developing THE LION KING.
The people at Disney Animation thought my ideas were a good match for the Lion King story, and I got to sit in Walt Disney’s chair for a brief time, making quite a few suggestions that found their way into the movie.
I kept adding ideas to the Practical Guide memo, and I started teaching story analysis at the UCLA Extension Writers Program where I tried out my ideas on my students.
A book agent took my class and said I had a great idea for a book. I wrote many proposals and went to New York to pitch to conventional publishers, but nobody wanted to take the risk. It was “too California”, too esoteric, or there were already enough books about Joseph Campbell.
I ALMOST GAVE UP. But a lucky accident got me back on track. A talkative friend of mine happened to be at the gym on an exercise bike next to a young publisher, Michael Wiese, and my friend was kind enough to pitch my book.
Wiese contacted me and agreed to publish my book. He was a forward-thinking guy who got in on the ground floor of desk-top publishing, putting out a string of do-it-yourself books on independent movie production and other movie crafts.
THE WRITER’S JOURNEY was instantly accepted and used by screenwriters, the intended audience, but also by novelists. ROMANCE NOVELISTS were among the first to appreciate it.
It got a big boost when it became a textbook in high school and college writing programs.
Then we noticed people from all walks of life were using it as a guide to their own journeys through life.
Travel agents, veterans returning from war, nurses in training, therapists counseling families going through separations, consultants designing corporate presentations, executives going through mergers and downsizing.
There is a Hero’s Journey for everyone. Anyone who is going through a transition in life, facing a big challenge, trying to do something new and different.
At a conference, Jeff Bezos told me the Hero’s Journey eerily described the stages and challenges he went through in founding Amazon.
A VISION, AN EPIPHANY
The concepts in THE WRITER’S JOURNEY really crystallized in my mind in a rather intense vision or epiphany I had while I was in film school.
I had just digested the Hero’s Journey concepts from Joseph Campbell, and at nearly the same time, the first Star Wars movie came out.
It sure looked like George Lucas had read Campbell’s book, and that like me, he had figured out that it could be a great design template for making epic fantasy movies.
I pulled a couple of all-nighters to write a term paper about how Star Wars, Close Encounters, and 2001: A Space Odyssey had resurrected the ancient story form of the Hero’s Journey.
I turned in the paper and went home exhausted. While I was sitting there surrounded by all the research books I had consulted, I felt into a kind of trance.
I felt myself surrounded by benevolent beings of light who had something to tell me.
A stream of information came flying to my head like a burst from a pulsar. I felt my brain being rearranged as thoughts and ideas that had been swirling around for the past few weeks connected at many points, creating a much more complex crystalline lattice structure, where before my brain had been a simple structure like a cube.
I had a sense of a complete vision of the arc of my life, extending back to my birth and beyond, through all my ancestors and the beginnings of life, and extending into the future through all the stages of my career and far beyond my lifetime.
The beings assured me that if I used the information in my vision for the good of all, they would look out for me and I would be well taken care of.
When I emerged from this trance, I had a pretty clear idea of who I was and what I would be doing with the rest of my life.
This was not my only such vision or visitation by benevolent spirits. There’s a whole chapter in THE WRITER’S JOURNEY called “Trust the Path” where I describe one of these encounters and the advice I learned on that vision quest.
THE HERO’S JOURNEY IS A THOUGHT FORM
I think this journey pattern is something like one of Plato’s ideal forms, something that exists somewhere as a pattern or a vibration, and that we as human beings are tuned to respond to it in the organs of our bodies.
WHAT’S NEW IN THE 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
New chapter on the chakras. I explain how I realized that when I talked to executives about scripts I had read, I automatically pointed to different centers on my body to express how the story had affected me. I realized I was pointing at the chakras, and began exploring how writers could use them as targets for the emotional effects they are trying to stir up in the audience.
Also new in 25th Anniversary Edition is an analysis of Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Award-winning movie THE SHAPE OF WATER…
A chapter on the essence of a scene – every good scene is a deal or a business transaction.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE VIBES, MAN
That’s one of my mantras. Like we used to say in the hippie days. Everything is vibration.
I think what storytellers are doing is changing the vibrational patterns of the audience – usually to let them be more human, more conscious, more compassionate, more responsible.
HOW DID YOU USE THE HERO’S JOURNEY IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS?
Big time on THE LION KING, but also on every movie I touched, everything from FIGHT CLUB to VOLCANO to THE THIN RED LINE.
It helps in the selection process, it helps in development, and it helps in production and even in marketing.
I was used as an expert witness on story matters in legal copyright cases.
Because I was interested in EVERYTHING I was known as a crack researcher at Disney, and was asked to produce research papers on comic book trends, Chinese and Irish fairy tales, myths of the Aztecs and Incas, epic poems, etc.
UNUSUAL JOBS
Consultant for Procter & Gamble – looking for the Hero’s Journey of shampoo and toilet paper!
Consultant for the Swarovski Crystal Company. I did wonderful research for them on the mysterious properties of crystal and glass.
Worked with directors like Roland Emmerich (10,000 BC) and Darren Aronofsky (THE WRESTLER, NOAH, THE WHALE) and actors like Steve Guttenberg, Will Smith, and Helen Hunt. I consulted on a string of pictures for Will Smith, including HANCOCK, I AM LEGEND, MEN IN BLACK II and FOCUS.
Wrote the screenplay for a European animated feature, JESTER TILL, about the adventures of the real-life medieval trickster Till Eulenspiegel, the “class clown” of Europe.
Wrote RAVENSKULL, a Japanese-style “manga” comic book based on the famous novel IVANHOE.
FUN COLLABORATIONS
I LOVE working with artists. It was great to work in an artistic atmosphere at Disney. I could write a description of a scene or a character and somebody would immediately start drawing it.
Loved working with a talented comic book artist in the Philippines on the Ravenskull project.
Loved commissioning an artist friend to do the beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations in THE WRITER’S JOURNEY.
Icing on the cake, a brilliant Italian composer, Luigi Maiello, was inspired to create a Hero’s Journey symphony in twelve movements, based on my book. It’s great music to write to, very cinematic and dramatic.
WHERE IS THE MOVIE BUSINESS GOING – STORYWISE?
In the coronavirus age, we may see more internal stories of people in isolation – one-person dramas.
Story length being stretched and squashed – people like short snips of story but also have a taste for stories that go long and deep, immersion in entire, endless worlds.
Artists are always pushing boundaries of taste, taboos, and trying to shock by doing the unexpected. There may be a rebound to stories that are innocent, naïve, comfortingly predictable.
Chris Vogler's Writer's Journey Blog 