Yesterday’s Schwarzman Session, part of a series of special guest-led discussions serving “fresh ideas over a meal” at Yale’s Schwarzman Center, felt surreal in theory and natural in reality. This had a lot to do with the spirit and generosity of the special guest, Shawn Levy, a Yale theater graduate who’s now one of Hollywood’s biggest offscreen stars. But it also had to do with the fact that his audience yesterday, whose questions and comments Levy met with personal stories and professional wisdom from a decades-long career, was only two dozen people.
To put that into perspective, consider the audience Levy received for directing and producing last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. Or the audience for Stranger Things, one of Netflix’s most-watched series, which Levy executive-produces. Or the legions of Gen Zers who grew up with Night at the Museum, a film he directed along with two sequels. Or the crowds who thronged to Levy’s 2021 hit Free Guy, an increasingly rare blockbuster built on original IP (though it did brim with nods and references, including to New Haven).
The talk yesterday, titled “Crafting the Hollywood Dream: A Conversation with Shawn Levy,” was a prelude to a much larger appearance next month, when Levy will take the Woolsey Hall stage with movie star and frequent collaborator Ryan Reynolds. That event should easily draw a capacity crowd of up to 2,650.
Yesterday, however, the two dozen of us, mostly Yale students, had Levy to ourselves, in a conversation that subtly shifted from a primer on the industry to a primer on life. And today I want to relay some of the many pieces of wisdom he imparted, albeit without the attending context Levy confidentially shared. Call it a sizzle reel of advice, whose insights don’t need a screenwriter to adapt them to the Hollywood or, for that matter, the New Haven dream:
• “Be open to being surprised. Be open to the unexpected.”
• “You have your idea of who you want to be. Make sure you are constantly checking it against who you are.”
• “The way you open is critical. The opening five minutes is where you make a pact with the audience. You tell them who you are, you let them know what they’re signing up for, you declare your tone.”
• “Being able to say that sucked—I was wrong” is key. “You have to have bad ideas on the way to the good ones.”
• “All the non-film things I studied” at Yale—theater, English, art, photography, history, philosophy—“help me do my job.”
• “The way that you lead has to come from you. You can’t put it on like someone else’s clothes.”
• “Every single thing you do, do it as perfectly as you can, because you never know what will be the thing that changes things.”
• “Even if we make something great, if it isn’t marketed well, it will fail.”
• “What you work on might bomb. Or it might be a hit. You can’t control that. What you can do is savor the process.”
• “It’s only an outcome”—a final result—“if you stop trying.”
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring Shawn Levy, provided courtesy of the Yale Schwarzman Center.
