Welcome back to Late Boomers! We’re your hosts, Cathy Worthington and Mery Elkins, and on this episode, we dive deep into the world of creativity, reinvention, and storytelling with our remarkable guest, Michael Mandaville.

In our conversation, we celebrate the art and perseverance behind storytelling—whether through film, fiction, or personal reinvention. Our guest, Michael Mandaville, is a best-selling novelist (with Murder in the City of Light reaching #1 on Amazon), filmmaker, martial artist, entrepreneur, and a true champion of creative exploration. Together, we discuss the realities of making movies, the evolving landscape of the entertainment industry, the powerful influence of AI, and how reinvention is possible at any stage of life.

Key Takeaways

• The Power of Perseverance: Michael Mandaville shares how creating stories, whether novels or films, requires years of dedication, resilience, and the ability to push through rejection and obstacles. Hitting #1 on Amazon in four categories was a meaningful marker of authenticity and effort 02:32.
• Creativity Across Disciplines: From sorting script pages as a child on Hollywood sets to directing Liam Neeson, Michael’s journey shows that creative talent can span industries and forms, including martial arts, which taught him discipline and adaptability 25:03.
• The Changing Face of Film: We explore how streaming, AI, and new technology have transformed movie-making and storytelling, allowing indie creators and boomers with rich life experiences unprecedented access and influence 17:51.
• Resourcefulness in Action: Michael reveals how he directed a feature film on a $10,000 budget by leveraging available resources and thinking outside the box, reminding us that starting imperfectly is better than not starting at all 34:24.
• Reinvention is Vital: Whether learning prompt engineering for AI or using YouTube to master new skills, Michael’s story is a testament to lifelong learning, adaptability, and the importance of jumping into projects before “perfect circumstances” arrive 41:24.
• Relationships & The Human Side of Hollywood: Michael’s anecdotes about working with stars like Liam Neeson reveal the importance of respect, communication, and understanding different working styles in creating magic on set 28:20.
• Advice for Aspiring Creatives: Don’t wait for everything to be perfect; take action, adapt, and let momentum drive your creative journey—whether you want to write a book, make a film, or embark on something new 39:43.

Connect with Michael Mandaville

• Find his books on Amazon
• Visit his website: www.creativeexplorer-michaelmandaville.com/

Inspired to start your next creative project or ready to reinvent yourself? Hit subscribe, rate, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app! Don’t forget to share this episode with your friends, family, and anyone dreaming of their “next chapter.”

For more stories of creativity, resilience, and reinvention, keep tuning in to Late Boomers—because it’s never too late to begin your best chapter yet!

Stay curious, stay creative, and see you next time on Late Boomers!

Cathy and Merry

Mentioned in this episode:

Late Boomers is part of the eWomenPodcastNetwork.

eWomenPodcastNetwork

Welcome to Late Boomers. I'm Cathy Worthington.

And I'm Merry Elkins.

We're the podcast that celebrates reinvention, creativity, and making your next chapter your best chapter.

And whether you're launching a new business or writing a book, pursuing a passion project or simply just exploring what's next, we, we love bringing you guests who prove it's never too late to create something extraordinary.

Today's topic is one that's fascinated people for generations, storytelling through film and fiction. Movies have the power to transport us, inspire us, and help us see the world through someone else's eyes.

And what many people don't realize is how much perseverance goes into creating those stories. Whether you're writing a novel or producing a film, there's years of work, rejection, rewrites, and unexpected twists before the audience even sees the finished product.

Especially today, when technology is changing everything, the film industry is evolving rapidly. Streaming has transformed distribution, and independent creators have more opportunities than ever to bring their stories direct directly to audiences.

That's really true, and it's really exciting for boomers because so many people reach a point in their lives when they finally have the experience and the perspective to tell the stories they've been carrying around for decades.

Our guest today is someone who has successfully navigated multiple creative worlds as a filmmaker, entrepreneur, martial artist, and now a best selling novelist.

Yeah. And his latest mystery novel, Murder in the City of Light, recently reached the number one spot on Amazon. And he's also worked in the film industry alongside some major Hollywood talent.

Please welcome Michael Mandaville.

Well, thank you guys, Appreciate that. And I'm happy to be on here talking with you.

Michael, welcome to Late Boomers. We're delighted to have you with us.

Thank you. Thank you very much. A lot of stuff to cover, don't we?

Let's start with the exciting news. Your novel, Murder in the City of Light, as we mentioned, recently hit number one on Amazon, and that's a milestone so many writers dream about. What was going through your mind when you saw that ranking and what did that achievement mean to you personally?

Well, that's a good question there. I think that one thing is that you see it up on Amazon, which is really the top of the pyramid in terms of books. I mean, it started with books. The whole Amazon project now is everything so actually getting on there. And number one and a number of, I think, four categories. I hit number one.

And which categories?

One was forensic murdered literary criticism. Another was forensic science because of the detective element. I have to look, I think one Might have been a historical literary. I have to look at the other one I didn't have right here off the top of my head. But so it was four categories. And of course, the idea that it hit forensic science was kind of meaningful because that means that I was actually following along. And all the books one buys to go, okay, how do you conduct a murder investigation? Actually paid off. Looking through all those books and trying to be exact.

I think today, particularly with the use of AI and Google and social media, the challenge is for a great deal of accuracy as much as possible, because otherwise you destroy the authenticity of the work. I've certainly seen people write about Paris, which I've been to many, many times, and you, well, tell yourself, well, no, that's not where the Pantheon is, or that's not where the. The du Magot cafe is, near St. Germain des Pres or other. Right.

So I love that part of Paris.

Yeah, yeah, we love Paris. Merry and I too. Michael, you've built a fascinating career. To get back to your career, that it spans filmmaking, entrepreneurship and writing. Like, looking back, what first attracted you to the film industry and what were some of the lessons you learned early on that still guide you today?

I started in the film industry because my Aunt Molly, she worked at 20th Century Fox for Daryl F. Zanuck. And so she was a script consultant, reader, worked with him to deal with meetings. And so at some point, I think it was about five, five years old, six years old somewhere in there. And my. My mother had gotten ill and so my Aunt Molly would take me into the studio and usually I just like to read. So I was pretty quiet as a kid and give me a book and I read. And she was the one who gave me books like Robinson Crusoe or the Three Musketeers and all these different books.

I started reading at 5, 6 years old somewhere in there. And so I always tell people that my first job in the film industry was working for her, where I sorted the pages for a movie called the Longest Day. Oh, and from, you know, remember the Xeroxes, where you could sniff the Xerox, One of those kind of. So I would sort the pages. I think it was five or six and then six years old and she gave me a quarter. So that was my first film job, I like to say.

And that's great.

Subsequently, she also put me into a number of movies on the Fox lot when I was there, called one was the Great Race with Tony Curtis, hello Dolly, number of a couple of other ones. So I think the first thing That I found so intriguing. That was part one was. Yeah.

Back in the day when they actually used to shoot on the lot. On the lot, yeah. Hello Dolly was all on the lot.

Yeah.

I even when I saw that movie, I even saw the buildings in the background that they didn't have CGI to take out.

Right.

They didn't take it out. I thought that was really weird.

It is kind of strange when you go, wait, what's happening?

It's really non professional filmmaking.

But the second part is that I grew up in Culver City where MGM was and so curious kids. We, with my friends we would jump the lots at 3, 5 and 7 and then go into the Hogan Heroes prisoner of war camp on the back 40. So we would be kids running around in those lots playing in my favorite Martin spaceship or the ship on the Mutiny on the bounty or the 90s street. 1890s street in MGM. On and on and on.

What a great play.

It was a marvelous thing to grow up with on so many levels. And one felt, oh, slightly larcenous and playful all at the same time. Because here you are trespassing away without, without, without any intent to do anything wrong of course, but just being playful. So between those two, that kind of started everything. Like there's magic here to be had. How do I do this?

It is magic. But you know, you know more than better than most people that filmmaking, everybody sees it from that glamorous side, but you probably have seen the, the realities behind the scenes. So what do you think would surprise most people about what it actually takes to get a movie made?

There's an old saying, and I think you guys will know this, that the most exciting day in your life is your first day on a moving movie set and the most boring in your life is the second. And so, right, it's a bit like the army, as this saying goes, hurry up and wait. And so the amount of time it takes to get what could be 30 seconds or 4 minutes or 7 minutes or whatever the number is can be so ponderous and then so frenzied. And I think one thing that people see is will watch that but at the same time then they will sometimes come away with the notion, wow, there is really a lot of people doing all this work for one moment. Costume, props, cinematography, and not to mention the correlation of both time with the ad and the money with the UPM line producer, etc, So I think they're very surprised at that. The second is that they wonder when I did the take A movies they go, why are all these trucks here, you guys got so much transportation, it is astounding. So I think the American sensibility is different than the European one. A little more softer, a little less formalized by unions, et cetera.

So there's a big difference there that's been noticed. So. And I take people on set and say, oh, what are you going to do today? And like a friend of mine, dear friend of mine, he goes, would you. I said, what do you do? And he's a lawyer. And he goes, well, I processed all these forms and court filings. He goes, what'd you do today, Mike? Oh, we crashed 19 cars. I had fun.

Yeah, I think that's a lot more fun. Yeah, a lot more, in my view. But you also work across multiple genres and storytelling formats. So when you're developing a novel, what kinds of themes, characters or questions tend to capture your imagination? And also, what draws you to mystery and suspense in particular?

Well, I. I tend to have a. A very deep focus on geography, geopolitics, history. I'm very intrigued by that. You will probably never have me write a story, murder set in a kitchen, because I'm really not going to argue over the type of mushrooms or. Or some other. Some other food scenario. I'm not a foodie person, but I tend to like the history part.

And usually I pull on a thread there and something intriguing happens. And so for my Stealing Thunder series, the six books of that, it had to do with a defense tree the US has with Japan and the interworkings of the Chinese government. And the. Even today you could see Xi Jinping. There's the Shanghai group, and then there is the Communist Party youth group faction. And you notice how many purges have taken place over the last two years from the Chinese leadership. Well, there's a reason for that. There's a lot of power plays in the background going on that might not be overt, but I think there's 17 out of 20 removed who might be pushing him out of power or be a threat.

So I start with that. Or in the case of Murder in the City of Light, I started with the idea of a. Actually, the one article I could tell you exactly where it started was somebody had discovered a party taking place in under the catacombs of the Trocadero. And they literally had a full bar in there. They had a movie projector for old movies. They were showing classical movies like John Wayne movies and a bunch of others, and probably a couple hundred people, probably with some ecstasy and a few other things going on. I would Tend to imagine. And if you actually went down the little secret entrance on the side, and this is true, I found this in a newspaper article.

So if you went down an entrance where they were working in the Trocadero and you passed a certain point, they had a motion detector set off a dog barking sound like a Doberman pinscher. So nobody would go past the point without having a pass. And I thought, okay, somebody somewhere has got some real genius for party ideas here. So that's put me off and Murdered in the City of Light. And you start digging about catacombs and a few other topics, and all of a sudden things start to form. It's like any kind of brainstorming, I guess. It's kind of cooking without ingredients, but in different ingredients for me. But then start to label in the characters and who are they? And in the case of my protagonist, he can't speak French very well.

And so that's some part of a mechanism that he bumbles through the French world without that. And so I think there's a interesting thread there that you have to then keep pulling on until other things yield.

Well, let's dig about your book, because I love the title, Murder in the City of Light, and I love the story about the catacombs. But can you tell us a little more about the story without giving away any spoilers? And. And what can readers expect? And. And, I mean, what inspired you to write it? A newspaper article?

Well, the newspaper article was the initial thread, I would say. And then I went into examining the history of France, of which I know quite a bit, including about the French Resistance during World War II. And I'm a World War II history junkie. So the museum. There's a museum there called the Musee de la Resistance, and it's right across from the catacombs now, but it used to be behind the garment parnasse. And it was a true shame, because it took me 45 minutes to find it. And I'm like, what's wrong with you people? Because this is one of the moments of your history of confronting the occupation that should be out in front with the other museums. It was very disturbing in that regard.

But I went twice there, and then another six times. I've been to the present museum. It's free. And so in that thought process, starting with the thread underground, the Trocadero, I said, what if an analyst would stumble upon some of these people in the Resistance and who would have yet to be confronted by justice, of which, sadly, there were a number of them, and there were a lot of collaborators with Vichy France and the Germans and the Gestapo and all these horrendous organizations. And some of them snuck by, and the Klaus Barbies of the world, you know, and others tend to ferret them out and point them out. But the wheels of justice sometimes turn obscenely slow. And one in particular was this one Maurice Papon, who actually literally served in the French government in 1978. So I added that into the mix.

And the essential story is an American defense analyst newly put to the US Embassy is called late at night, nobody's there, says, go get a police report. So he goes, not to the prefecture, to police. He actually goes to the scene of the crime, kind of clashes with a French detective a little bit who mutually. They find out they both hate bureaucrats of all types. I think we all hate bureaucrats of all types. Anyway, so that was a good. And so he starts pulling on a string and gets involved a little more and a little more and then becomes integral to the investigation. And this murdered girl, you know, is not much older than his daughter.

And so obviously there's a. A certain empathy there of, like, justice and if you were the parents and all this sort of thing. And so who goes through a bit of the French organized crime and involves film students, etc. And going to various iconic places like the Pantheon and others in France. So it allowed me to really explore the French culture deeply, you all. I also had to figure out how. How to construct proper profanity, helped by that elderly woman, I suppose.

It sounds like a blast. Your book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll have to check it out. Many of our listeners, you know, are lifelong movie lovers, including me. And the film industry has changed so dramatically over the past decade, from streaming services to artificial intelligence and changing audience habits.

Where.

Where do you see filmmaking heading in the next few years?

That's a great question, because I actually have. I've always been on an interest point of technology. What's the next new thing? And example? I will go to a conference coming up called VidCon, which is about online creators in Anaheim, and they literally draw 30, 40,000 people there. And I've gone for about 15 years. And when I first went, I told people at the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, I'm going to go to this conference. And they have their own digital conferences, but they are nowhere near as cutting edge and dynamic as these, because you can actually get the. There's three levels of passes. Community, creator, and industry.

Industry is okay, but overpriced. But I think the. The Creator one is several hundred dollars. But the point is though, is these are people creating now and actually saying, how did I get a million followers in a year?

Let me tell you, what do they call this conference?

Vidcon V I D C. So you

will literally,

it's very, very good. And like I said, I've gone for 15 years now and there will be people in the traditional film industry who've never heard of it, who don't go, who won't actually go and hear more cutting edge techniques. And again, these are techniques that don't take three, four, five, seven years to evolve. They're within six months or a year or less. Yeah, it's cutting edge. And you, you guys both know how much. But both TikTok and YouTube have assumed a greater role in the attention of the audience over, over. So I think also that I also do animation and animation software or something.

But what's intriguing is the animation software that I started using literally this last week added a huge AI component to it. So while I animate and you could clearly see, okay, that's animation. And now it's going to output photorealistically through a Nvidia RTX board. But basically saying, the animation you make, we can now make photorealistic. Type in your prompt to tell us the style and then it can be output. Now that just happened this last week and this last six months.

Doing it in the Disney style of the Warner Brothers style, or the style of a great.

You could very well do it exactly like Frozen. You could do it like a manga comic book. You could output it as a, shall we say, stylistic graphic novel. And a friend of mine, and I actually, I met him online, just liked his work. I said, hey, that's nice work you did. And he was probably typical of the film industry, going, yeah, what do you want? And I went, hey man, I just like your work. Bye. And he goes, oh, sorry, everybody always wants something out of me.

And I go, no, I just thought you did a very nice piece of work there. Was very elegant. I'm trying to learn this. And you know, I struck up a friendship and actually he put together scenes for a graphic novel. And he asked me, he goes, you know anything about World War II, Michael? To which every single one of my friends laughed hysterically. They go, you've got to be kidding me. And so I did in dialogue and kind of the American World War II military unit dialogue, how they'd speak. And he did a lot of the graphics work.

And you literally create a scene and take screenshots and then assemble those screenshots into the graphic novel. So that's one way of a couple interesting avenues of the industry. Number one, if somebody says, oh, you got a movie and you want to pitch it, here's the graphic novel. Because nowadays, how many people can you get to read a script, but you can get them to flip pages in a graphic novel. That's one. And number two, it conveys what is called a multimodal sensibility. Not just words on the page, where I have to imagine it's now taking the dialogue on the page with an already known framing and tonality so people can see. Oh, that's what you mean.

And now it's coming alive more. So I think there's these opportunities like that to create in that particular arena. And I started doing beta testing for large Luma Labs. So I had. Which is a major AI output, generative AI company, multimodal, Very nice people, very smart. And they had Nast, I want to say, last November, they received $900 million in funding from a Saudi fund.

Wow.

So almost a billion dollars to move this ball down the field, as it were, in AI. And part of that is interesting because you can go into the AI and say, okay, I'd like to have a. Like a World War II submarine base. Da, da, da, da, da. And you could type it simple. And you go, okay, why is there an elephant in the middle of my submarine base? I mean, it comes up with this hallucinogenic kind of output at times. Right. But if you disappeared.

Yeah. It. And somebody's arm goes up into their ear or something. I mean, in. Some of it gets a little screwy, but.

Yeah. But I actually want to interrupt you and ask you. It sounds like this is going to invade the world of publishing too. And that's pretty scary.

It is. It's very disconcerting that what I've certainly spent thousands and thousands of hours learning about writing, reading, got a master's degree, etc, is all that going to be eclipsed by AI? And so it certainly is disconcerting in that regard. Some part of it is the inevitability of, well, were we candle makers? And now is this electricity? And you're not going to shut down electricity and go back to candles. As much as the electricity is sputtering on and off at times when it was first came online, people didn't give up on it. And I think AI is the. Pardon me.

It still does. Yeah. I want to pivot a bit because I know that you're devoted several years to martial Arts. And that's not something people immediately associate with writing novels or directing films. So how has martial arts influenced your mindset and discipline and perhaps even your approach to storytelling?

Great question there. I've been doing martial arts since I was 7, and so I undertaken judo, Shaolin, long fist, wing Chun, taekwondo, and for the last 40 years, next year will be Kenpo, karate. So I teach and I learn. You, never you. The nice part about it, Merry, is the idea that you can teach, but you never stop learning, no matter what. And I've had literally somebody who is a white belt, a yellow belt, an orange belt, they're starting off and they will do something, and I will go, huh? Why'd you do that? I'm learning. I'm still learning from them because they're new, they have a new perspective. And the second part is, I tend to learn visually and by words.

That's my. I can like to. I like to read a lot. I don't actually listen to a lot of audiobooks because I can't remember the lyrics to songs very well and other things. But if I read the book, I will remember a great deal of it.

Yeah.

The key to a teacher is to find the key that that person learns, and then one way or the other, even if I'm not an audio learner, to gain skills in that area to do my job, which is teach them well. The benefit is if it's audio, movement, dance, visual, written, any of these modalities, I gain mastery because I force myself to adapt to their key to unlocking their learning. And therefore, the mastery comes back to me in five, six, seven different directions, different levels.

Like drifting.

That's right. And so like what, Merry?

Directing. Oh, directing all these people.

And one actor will respond like, there was a famous scene with Frank Sinatra and Edward G. Robinson, and apparently Frank Sinatra would do two, three, four takes, and he was done. Edward G. Robinson could do 30 rehearsals. Very meticulous, came from the Yiddish theater and everything. So he would do 30. And I mean, these don't match. So you bring Robinson in and go, okay, we're going to go through your 12 or 15 little attempts here and adjust it.

When you get to the number 26 to 30, we'll bring in Frank. And now he's up to speed, and Frank is right where he wants to be as far as being impatient performer. And then put him together. And now maybe you have some magic. But if you don't understand both mechanisms, you're going to get Frank just tearing the pages off and running out, going to see Ava Gardner. So you're kind of in trouble there. Now you don't have an actor. And Edward G.

Robinson just gets more frustrated because he can't bring his level up so very much like that in terms of the directing. And how do you find an equilibrium between method for producing what we want to be magic, which it's not always by the numbers in the stamp, right. Otherwise everybody do it.

Right. And speaking of famous people, you've had remarkable opportunities to work with people including Liam Neeson. What was that experience like and what did you learn from watching someone at the top of his profession?

Liam is a very nice man and it was very watching him. He is quiet, he is a private man, I would say. I think it's interesting because I think some degree of the adulation of the movie star. He one time said to me, he goes look, I've come pretty far from basically working on a forklift, moving Guinness bottles around to where I am right now. So I think he still has a bit of that kind of sensibility of like this is a, this is a bit much at times. So I think there's certain humility he has about that, which I thought it was pretty remarkable given some people with obscenely huge, shall I say un unearned egos to some degree. The funny story I had with Liam was the first time I'd really met him was we were filming Taken one. We were up on Hollywood Boulevard at a base camp and he had said about was at base camp and we were going down the street on Taking one to electronic store where they're going to shoot the packaging of the present to his daughter.

And, and this Liam's assistant came out and goes michael, Liam, I'd like to speak to you. And I went okay. And so I went in and Liam was sitting there and he had his contract on the table with a highlighter, certain parts highlighted. And he goes I am 12 hours portal to portal. And I went huh, they I've asked for your contract to know what the obligations were. I've never been able to get it, other reasons whatever. And. But huh, that's news to me.

And he goes here, you could take a look, read it. And I go no, if you're telling me I'm. I'm sure it's true. It's exactly in there. I mean he had it right, Larry sitting on the table. And I just kind of looked and went yeah, that's your contract. Okay, well. And he, we're down the street and he goes michael, we're not Going to get this next scene.

And I go, well, let me go. Let me go check. And he goes, come on, we're not going to get it. And I said, well, Liam, I have to wear the coat of a pessimist, but I have to keep the heart of an optimist. So if you give me three minutes, I'll come right back. So I went out, I got on the walkie, I checked with our ID and our assistant director, who said, well, we got about 15 minutes to light and we're moving in this and 20 minutes that, and we'll have Liam down in 25. I mean, the math was, well, clearly going to go past his 12 hours, portal to portal. I said, okay, scratch the scene.

This is our first day. We're not going to, you know, impose on him today. And it's a isolated scene so we could figure out where to put it later in the schedule. We'll figure out a spot and make it work from there. It's the first day, so people are trying to get other names and the machine is not very well oiled. And you guys know. So literally that was just a one minute conversation. I went in, I said, okay, Liam, we're going to scratch the scene.

Your car is waiting outside, and we'll see you tomorrow. Okay, have a good evening. He was like, what? What? Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? And I think he was anticipating that it was going to be pushing. And I said, no, we're good. We'll figure it out. And he goes, you're sure? And I go, yeah. And he stood up then and he came at me, which is like kind of a. A momentary, not in any mean way, but a.

You know, it's. It's Liam Neeson. So naturally you have that kind of feel like, oh, okay, he's coming towards me here, and nothing, you know, no intentional intimidation even on his part. He was just shocked, I think, that we were going to scratch the scene. And he came up and you're sure? And I go, yeah, I'm sure. And then he grabbed me by the shoulders and he shook me, and he goes, are you sure?

Oh, God, how scary.

Nicely. It was all done nicely, but it was playful. And I said, yeah, yeah, we'll figure it out. And not a problem. And then we started talking. And the funny part is we talked for about 25 minutes. Then I'm not gonna, you know, if he. If he wants to keep talking, I'm gonna keep talking.

It's Liam.

Yeah.

And then finally he goes, okay, I'm gonna get going. And I go, okay, I'll see you tomorrow. And the ever since then, he and I had a very good understanding that, look, if you do what you're. What the contract says, in other words, what you agreed to, everything's fine. And so we always had that good sense of communication, that regard. So otherwise he's, you know, just very quiet. And I did bring my son on Take Taken two. I brought my son Johnny in and said, we're on the pier at the very end of the Malibu pier, and the trailers are way over here at the parking lot.

Another very difficult thing to deal with on all these California agencies. But that's another story. But I said, here's my son Johnny, and if you need him to run to your trailer, run over and bring you a pencil, he's here to do exactly that. And of course, you know, made it easier for an assistant, right? Pardon me?

Just like you did when you were a kid at the studios.

That's exactly right. Same thing. And it made it easier on his assistant. And then my son Johnny was thrilled to be talking to Liam Neeson. So as working, not an imposition. He's young, make him run.

It sounds like you're so good at understanding people and very resourceful. And one of the things we love discussing on Late Boomers is resourcefulness. We understand that you directed a feature on a very small budget, like $10,000, which is totally unimaginable today. So how did you pull that off? And what can creatives and entrepreneurs learn from that?

Sure. After Taken 3, I had worked on that film 13 months with, I think, 17 days off, something like that. And so it was a very, very long haul. And I would. I literally. And I've never had writer's block, and I'll just take something, run with it, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'll just keep going. But I was just so exhausted, I just look at my computer and kind of stare.

So I would take this walk around my neighborhood and go through the park over here and come back, and I would do it a number of times, a couple times a day and, you know, at night, certainly. And I said, huh, I'm going to come up with a movie. Something to do with this walk. And of course, as you keep taking the walk, you keep coming up with ideas. And then I said, how can I do this? And back in to the resources needed to accomplish the task. People usually think very big when they just want to do kind of a guerrilla movie. And then everything becomes very uneven. And then you don't finish.

And it's all about delivery. If you can't deliver at the very end, nobody cares. So I built a set in my garage, and I literally had one side of the set. But then when I had to do the camera reverse, in the camera, it was a policeman interrogating witnesses. And the witnesses basically saw a. A bully gets killed in this park. And each of the witnesses, as one finds out, in a kind of Agatha Christie, 10 Little Indians vibe, each one of them was hurt by some way, this bully, and I mean, drug dealing, assaulting bully kind of person. And he, the detective, basically interrogates them.

And they all have to justify where they were and how they knew him. So little by little, I would take this walk and start building from the resources I had, which was the garage, which was. I had a teleprompter to help the actors say their lines directly into the camera. And the idea of doing it directly in the camera was, if I do it to you, Merry, and I'm doing this, and I'm the cop. Well, you're the suspect, but you're the audience being the suspect. And then when it's reversed, you are the audience being the cop to a suspect. So the internal emotional gauge of the resource, which was, how do I manipulate. And the audience, which is what you're doing with any kind of art form anyways, to manipulate them into thinking a certain way or experience.

So I literally shot that. And like I said, it was less than $10,000. But that included the SAG deferrals of about six, eight actors. And. And then I had a little B footage where we go into various spots to get gray, grainy footage. People remembering what happened, which reflects their memory. So when the memories, of course, are hazy, a little blurry, a little black and white, the sensor on the camera I had would be a little grainy and a little blurry and a little black and white. So it actually optimized for my intended artistic choice.

So I think one thing is when you ask your viewers to go, well, what can they do? Well, you write down a list of resources. What's your intent? Where can you take those resources and put them at the forefront of your production, whatever it is, and go, how do I make that not possibly a liability, but a asset? And so just how do you figure out how to move those columns over? So if you can't rent a storefront from the money, well, do you have a friend's van? And you make it kind of a funky kind of, you know, I'm selling this in a restaurant's parking lot, and they're going to get a cut of the profits. But now I don't have a storefront kind of vibe for artwork or. Or. Or clothes you make or anything. So I think that versatility, which one gets. You get that with a little more age than you do. Youth is the idea of wisdom.

Takes time.

Well, and. And speaking to that, a lot of people think they need unlimited resources before they can pursue a dream. So your experience seems to suggest otherwise. What advice would you give someone who's waiting for the perfect circumstance before starting a creative project?

I would say, is it ever a perfect day to go drive your car?

No. No.

Certainly in Los Angeles traffic. I would say, no. Is it a perfect day before you walk out the door, or do you somehow go, oh, I've got a band aid on my thumb because I caught it in the door, so I can't go out today? No. We do it under a thousand circumstances where we start well before we are ready with everything that's perfect. And I think the idea is momentum overrides that. So you have to have momentum and movement in one way or the other. Things present themselves. If you absolutely do not wait for perfect circumstances, they will never arrive.

So when you do have imperfect circumstances where you gauge probabilities and then get you like kind of a data loop, a feedback loop going, huh, I got to change this and this and this. And every film I've worked on had compromises. Every book I've written, I had to go, well, I have to fix this over that. And even today, certainly in the AI World, I will put forth a very detailed prompt. I'm getting. I'm actually taking a course on prompt engineering now. And the. The idea is that you learn this and then you fix it.

And how many times have you fixed up your house and gone, well, I got to repaint that. Oh, I'm sorry. Weren't you doing it perfect the first time? Oh, now you have to repaint. You didn't.

Right?

Yeah, right, right.

Make a list of those circumstances where you started without it being perfect. To remind yourself, go.

And people of all fields, we always ask this question because every creative person that we talk to says, don't wait,

don't wait, don't wait.

Right. I love that question.

Napkin tomorrow at the coffee shop and write your book.

Well, talk about, you know, the. The times when you had to reinvent yourself because you've been successful in so many careers. So. But talk about reinventing and leaping into something new and what helped you navigate these trans transitions?

Well, right now, AI is the big thing, especially with filmmaking, and it's changing the creative. It's granting more creative independence to people. The idea of their voices coming out, which I think is a big plus, pulling people more into it. In examining this, of course, it's a new world where you could type in a prompt and you get some weird hallucinogenic response. You go, well, this is kind of worthless. And then I actually started testing it and. And then researching about. And there it comes.

Is when you start to research things, you go, oh, that makes sense. I didn't know that. Oh, I can take that piece of information and then define it and say, I need to acquire that skill, whatever it is. And it's like my. We have another house, and we fixed it up and rented it out. After. Rented out a long time, we upgraded it and did that. Well, my son Johnny is very, very good because he will.

Like, I helped him. I was kind of like the third assistant, and there were two of us, let me put it that way. But I would he. We did tile, electrical, plumbing, everything. And you have. You get onto YouTube University. Oh, huh. I could do that.

So the skill need not be. I have to go get a degree. The skill needs to. The. The mentality needs to be, oh, I've reached a little impasse. What skill do I need to get past that impasse? And that keeps your momentum going very specifically. So with AI, I literally started taking a course in prompt engineering, which I go, well, that's a lot of writing. Oh, I love to write.

So that's good. That really makes use of my skill set. And a lot of people just type in fast stuff and they expect it to deliver. But if you're very specific, you can really make great inroads. So part of the process of reinvention is reassessing, and I think part is reallocating your interest points. And if there's one thing I think people who've gone a bit through life is discipline. And as Merry brought up about martial arts, whether you want to do this technique or not, or kick that bag 50 times. Too bad.

Quit whining. Kick the bag, Michael.

Yeah.

And you. You could tell yourself that, you know, who cares? If you're complaining, nobody cares.

And, Michael, what's next for you? Something we should be watching for.

Well, I'm working on a sequel to Murder the City of Light right now.

Okay.

I also. I'm working on a. I wrote a book called Journey, so Dreams Might Come. Very literary. Very, very Magical realism is what it is. And I actually am kind of doing another novel outline for a book in that direction as well. Very literary. And so I've got a number of those.

I went to Europe in March to a TV convention called Series Mania about Eurocentric television.

Oh.

So Murder in the City of Light and my other book, America, I've been pitching his TV shows. Oh, good. I've gotten a little. Some hooks in the water there and I'm pushing on that as well. So.

Fabulous.

Just as my dad says. He said, stay busy, stay out of jail.

Great. Michael, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your insights on filmmaking, storytelling, entrepreneurship and the creative process.

Congratulations on again on success with Murder in the City of Light. We're really looking forward to your next books and movies and whatever else you have planned.

And where for our listeners should people learn more about you?

Well, they could go to Amazon and look up Michael Mandaville and they will find my books. I also have a website called creative explorer-michaelmandeville.com I use that because I think we're all creative explorers and that allows us to not kind of put ourselves in a silo and be able to go wherever we want. So I kind of like that self labeling, I suppose. So those would be the two spots. I'm also on Twitter X these days at Mike Manabel, so. Right. That's both of you for your generosity of spirit and your kindness and your questions and. And I love the entire mission that you're on about repurposing and rethinking and reinventing because that's the human journey itself.

That's so nice of you. And thank you for joining us on Late Boomers. And thank our audience for joining us on Late Boomers.

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