(audience cheering) (upbeat pop music)
- All right, everybody, our next guest
once sang, "Play That Funky Music" on stage with Prince
and he's also one of the most prolific filmmakers
and honestly just figures, people, humans,
comedians, director, writer, artist of our time.
Please welcome the one and only Tyler Perry.
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I'm like how do I sum you up?
- I'm here. I'm here. How are you?
- How are you? - Good to see you.
- Oh my God. - Good to see you.
We get to meet in person.
How's everybody? (audience cheering)
I'm great. Good to see you.
- I'm so excited to meet you in person.
- Finally. - I know.
Finally, yes, finally, finally.
Good to see you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Please.
- [Drew] Well okay before the break
we actually threw out a tease about three possible fears.
- Yeah.
- Germs, tunnels and spinach.
Which of the two are you actually afraid of?
- There are two that I'm afraid of.
- [Drew] Okay, which ones are they?
- Germs and tunnels.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Why?
- So COVID must have been great for you.
- Listen, no, what happened was I was on tour.
I was performing about 3, 400 performances a year live
and I got the flu in Tennessee very early on.
Worst thing to ever happen, I had to perform 18 shows
wrapped in a blanket 'cause I wouldn't cancel.
So I just became either washing my hands
or didn't wanna shake and do all that stuff
so I was ahead of COVID on this.
(audience cheering)
- By the way it's true, whenever I'm pumping
a hand sanitizer somewhere and it's empty
I'm like no, we should keep caring.
- [Tyler] Yeah.
- Let's keep this up.
- [Tyler] That's exactly right, exactly right.
- I feel like we lived for a hundred years
with everybody like hi nice to meet you.
We can end that. (audience laughing)
- And who invented this handshake thing?
I mean just like, - [Drew] It's so weird.
- I like this, hi, that works, just stay over there.
- Also I get a lot of clams.
- Yeah, clams?
- Like wet, clammy hands.
- Yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's never good.
- It happens a lot and you're just like mm, hi.
- [Tyler] No, you're that way,
I'm going no no no, can you dry that?
Let's dry your hands so we can actually we can shake.
Or I'll do it - Well you have boundaries
which is good. - Like dry your hand, baby,
dry your hand. (audience cheering)
That works.
- [Drew] By the way, one of the closest I got to you,
which I was so excited was Gayle King.
- Yeah yeah. Big flower.
- She was on the show, we were talking about you
and you know what, I think we have a clip.
It'll explain it better.
- You noticed I wore my flower in honor of you?
- [Drew] Yes.
- And then Tyler Perry texted something about how
he hated it. (Drew laughing)
He hated the flower, he thought it looked
like a big orange wound and I said I did it for you.
(audience cheering)
- Um, so.
- No, no.
(audience cheering)
No, no, no, no, that's fine.
The flower she had on looked like a wound,
like she'd been shot in the shoulder.
That's fine. (audience laughing)
A little overkill but that's fine.
- It did look like a wound.
- [Tyler] Yeah. Yeah.
- I'm actually seeing Gayle this evening.
- [Tyler] With that? Wearing that?
- Well I was wondering if there's any chance
I could get you to take a picture with me for Gayle.
- [Tyler] 100% let's do it. - Really? Okay.
- Let's do it. Let's do.
- Would you ever. (audience laughing)
- Oh that's perfect.
- Oh my God, thank you, okay perfect.
- Wait, who's got the camera?
- Ash.
- Gayle King.
(audience cheering)
I want it near your face a little bit hiding your face
just a little bit, yeah, just a little bit.
(audience cheering)
That's so great, that's so great.
- You know what's so great is you just handled that
like such a director.
- Oh yeah, I want your face in the shot, yeah yeah.
- You were like put your face in the flowers,
not too much, I wanna see it but right here.
(audience laughing)
It's interesting because that actually segues
into being a director is like an all in thing.
How are you so prolific?
How do you write, produce and direct
as many projects as often as you do?
- I wish that I could tell you
that I, this is what I do when I do this and I do that,
but I was, I bought up in the business.
The first time I ever did a play I wrote it,
directed it, I was selling candy,
I was running backstage,
on intermission I was onstage,
so I trained myself to do a lot of things.
I don't know how not to do it, you know?
And it wasn't out of just I wanted to be involved
in everything, it was just I was broke.
Couldn't afford to pay anybody
so I had to learn every job,
which has served me very, very well.
But I don't know how not to do it
so when someone says that to me,
that's not foreign and strange.
I have people that work for me who worked in Hollywood
and worked on other shows and they're like,
this is impossible, this is not how it's done.
How are you going away for two weeks
and coming back with 22 episodes?
How are we shooting 22 episodes in two weeks?
How are we doing that?
But for me it just, something about my brain,
it just seems to work.
- [Drew] So what do you say to them in that circumstance?
(audience cheering)
- I wish I could say that I understood it
but I didn't come up in this Hollywood system
so I don't know that it's, how rare that is.
- [Drew] How do you inspire them?
You're like okay, we're gonna do 22 episodes
by doing this or we're gonna do all of this work
that seems impossible and I'm gonna say
this is the sort of, this is the direction
I'm gonna give you for that.
This is the motivation, this is the systems.
How do you cajole, inspire and make it happen,
make the impossible happen?
- I'm on set with them every day and every scene
so I'm there 12, 14 hours a day side by side
arm in arm with them, moving it forward.
And having, what else has helped
is having people who have never done it before.
So they didn't come up in a system
that said this is how it has to be done.
They came up in the system that says no,
this is how we do it.
And it doesn't seem foreign or strange to them.
I mean it feels like we're just doing a normal job.
- I have a question for you.
- Okay.
- If you could only write, produce or act
for the rest of your life, what would you choose?
- Uh, writing.
Writing, yeah. (audience clapping)
Because I never had a day of therapy
but what I did was I would write
and from the time Oprah said on her show when I was a kid
she said it was cathartic to write things down.
I started writing
and I was using different characters' names
because of the subject matter that I was talking about,
I didn't want somebody to find it and realize
I had been through those kinds of things.
But writing for me was the therapy
in the sense of if a character got up and moved
from one sofa to the other, I'd be like,
well why did they do that?
And I had to chase down that motivation.
So I started applying it to my own life.
Why do you feel that way when somebody said this?
And I chased down the motivation to something
that had happened to me in the past.
So in understanding that, it's like a puppet master
with the string that's making you behave a certain way
when something happens.
By chasing down the motivation, I was unable to tie,
untie string by string in my own life.
So the writing is phenomenally informative.
- Did you ever think, oh, Oprah taught me
to be a writer to help me get in touch with things
to become the person I am and then I'm gonna become
really good friends with her and help her
run her network?
Is that a beautiful full circle moment for you
to admire someone and then have that reciprocity with them?
- It really is, even the understanding
of feeling as a kid running home from television,
she came on 3 o'clock in New Orleans
and I'd come home to watch her show all the time
'cause I wanted to see what she was talking about
to feel like in that moment,
a broke kid in New Orleans with nothing,
I know you, I feel so connected to you.
I know millions of people did
but I felt like I really know you.
And then to get a phone call from her
after "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" comes out.
I'm walking down, this is what Oprah would do,
I'm walking down the street in Vegas.
My phone rings and I'm about to cross the street
and I said, "Hello?"
I'm like, who is this?
"Hello?"
"Hey, it's Oprah."
And I'm about to get killed
because I'm stepping out in traffic
because she's just calling me blind and cold like that
and 18 years later we've become great friends
so here we are, yeah. (audience cheering)
- Okay, you're so brilliant,
it is very hard to cut to commercial
but we're gonna go and then we'll be right back
with this brilliant man.
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