Christopher Vogler, Author: They said we have something called "The Tall Poppy Syndrome,"
that when one poppy grows up higher than the others somebody comes along and cuts that off.
Film Courage: You talked about going to the film school in Denmark or working with the
Danish students certain cultures have less of a “return with the
elixir” [The Hero’s Journey] at the end just as as in life that doesn't always happen.
Christopher: Oh, I'm glad to talk about the differences from culture to culture because this
really just came up and hit me like I'd stepped on a rake or something when I first started traveling
I found that I was carrying with me a bag of cultural assumptions that came from growing up in
the midwest I lived on a farm most of my childhood and my diet was entirely old Warner Brothers
movies and cartoons and what was on television then so Superman and Zorro and things like that
and there were a lot of cultural assumptions embedded in that like the hero is a good Force
the hero can change things the hero can save us the hero usually is unselfish and is has the best
interests of society in mind and as soon as I got out of the frame of the United States of America
I started meeting all these other ideas that for instance in Eastern Europe they would say to me
yeah you mentioned these characters who think they can change the world and who think one
person can make a difference we actually have some of those but we don't call them heroes
we call them fools and idiots because nobody can really change the world it just is how it is and
you know you're foolish if you think you can you can mark the system so I began to
understand that I needed to broaden my ideas and some cultures were just outright disapproving of
the term hero and I've noticed that some people like the screenwriting teacher in Denmark had
clipped out the word hero and he just he didn't teach the hero's journey he taught the journey
and I think that was actually a wise move because it does away with a lot of cultural baggage that
we have about heroes you know when I first started teaching about it people assumed oh you're talking
about male Heroes because when we say hero we usually mean a male hero and I said no no no
that's that's not the way I mean it it could be any gender it couldn't even be genderless being
animal or you know spirit so don't get hung up on on gender or you know their natural equipment but
I began to see that I needed to broaden my view of things and so different cultures have different
emphasis we in the west tend to gravitate towards stories that have a single hero or
at most what they call the two-hander where there will be two people like it my buddy type story or
romance where the two are kind of balanced equally but a lot of cultures don't acknowledge stories
like that at all and they only think a story is something about a whole community or a group or
a family and so I've had to do some editing of my thoughts and try to to get closer to a world
view rather than my own cultural view it still has value and it certainly translates around
the world everybody kind of gets the Hollywood model and they copied a lot of places but it's
very healthy that they reject it in some ways and have their own standards and and views about that
and I'm fine with that sure because I think In some cultures it's considered a bad thing to
stand out what is it the the nail that is the highest gets hammered down there's different
sayings so yeah but in ours we're seduced by the the individual who takes the reins and
against all odds and rises up against the crowd so that's right we hold it up as some high value
that somebody puts their hand up they volunteer they stick out of the crowd they're you know
rugged individuals or something like that but as you say in other cultures the base assumption is
no we're all the same here mate as they told me in Australia they said we have something called
The Tall poppy syndrome that when one poppy grows up higher than the others somebody comes
along and cuts that off so you better keep your head down and and you know not stand out or not
claim to be higher or better than everybody else and I think this is a real difference
in cultures that the Western culture American movie culture is generally pretty aspirational
it's it's aiming for or striving for greater achievement more risk greater reward
sort of selling that idea that you know you don't you don't get without you give some risk and so
that's not believed in every culture and and that has to be taken into account I don't know this
this may get I'm not trying to go political here but in in American films too the the individual
takes on the the corporation the government whereas maybe in some countries that could be
a death sentence they wouldn't make it and so just the the risk of of how we may appear to Brash or
I'm foolish I don't know where I'm going with this but yeah I think that there's a tendency
in Western culture and Hollywood movie making to think that unless the story involves somebody
who steps up and who does the extraordinary thing who takes the great risk then that's a story not
worth telling and I have just seen a documentary I'm sorry I can't remember the name of it but it
had something to do with people who were running bird rescues in India and they had this certain
kind of bird of prey called a it's a scavenger really called a kite and the kites were just
dropping out of the sky because of pollution and so these two men brothers had decided that
that was their mission in life was to rescue these birds and give decent burial to the ones who died
and nurse the other ones along and the end of the story was actually quite hopeless and it painted
this sad picture of a world where their little efforts were not making any difference at all
and and the forces of the world were converging more and more so that there would be less and less
of these birds and more problems but there was something although is very sad there was something
noble about it the fact that they were trying anyway and so it was a a challenging thing to me
from my Western perspective because I kept hoping that they would have a breakthrough or that they'd
get a government grant or that they'd somehow you know turn around this pollution situation but they
they didn't give me that and that was okay because I felt something that I don't normally feel which
is this sense of despair that there are certain things going on in the world we can't do anything
about but isn't it wonderful when somebody tries so you got a little bit of both views with that
one and I think that's the balance we look for you know a totally grim outlook on on life is hard
that's hard to watch for anybody in any culture but the balance is what I think is healthy.