 Good evening. I'm Amy Barbie and I'm the Executive Director of the LBJ Foundation and I have the pleasure to welcome you to this screening of The Sun. You're in for a treat and also a bit of a jolt. Warning, there is violent content as I believe you have all been advised. I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors, the Moody Foundation, the St. David's Healthcare Frostbank, University Federal Credit Union. Thank you for making our friends programs possible. And tonight we have a rare opportunity to experience a preview and discussion of AMC's 10-part series, The Sun, based on Philip Myers' epic novel about a Texas family. The AMC series debuts on April 8th but we get a sneak peek tonight. And it's very appropriate for the screening of The Sun to take place at the LBJ Library. Since the book covers 150 years of Texas history from Johnson's Hill Country to the coastal plains, it can't help but intersect with LBJ's Texas. The book includes a scene from LBJ's Senate campaign stop, arriving on the ranch in a cloud of dust via helicopter, character Jeanine McCullough muses. The man she saw in front of her was so happy in the crowd, so happy to be watched and paid attention to there could not be room inside him for anything else. That certainly describes LBJ. And the man who made this all possible, Philip Meyer. Philip Meyer did not take the traditional route, dropping out of high school in Baltimore at the age of 16 and getting his GED while working as a bicycle mechanic. The age of 20, he decided to become a writer and after his third attempt was admitted to Cornell University. That is not an easy feat. After graduating, he worked on Wall Street, then decided to get his MFA from the Missioner Center for Writing here at the University of Texas. Meyer, who lives in Austin, spent five years researching his novel, conducted hundreds of interviews and immersed himself into the characters who lived in Texas in the mid-19th through the early 20th centuries. The son was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Literature and won the Western Heritage Book Award and the Writers League of Texas Book Award. In a few minutes, we will watch the first segment of the AMC series, which is 45 minutes screening, which will be followed by a discussion with Mark Updegrove, Pierce Brosnan, Philip Meyer, and Kevin Murphy. But first, to give us historical perspective on the son's sweeping family saga, spanning 150 years and three generations of the McCullough family, please welcome the author of the son and co-creator and executive producer of the AMC series, Philip Meyer. Thanks for coming, guys. And thanks for that very sweet introduction. So I'm going to get to talking about this episode we're about to see. But first, there are a few people I'd like to talk about and thank the people who are the reason we're all here tonight. Jim Magnuson, the director of the Mitchell Center. Jim is the reason I came to Texas. He's the reason I fell in love with the state. He's the reason I made my home here. And of course, Marla Aiken did her part as well in that. Don Graham, who's Texas History Class, taught me the foundational stuff that ended up both in the novel and in the show. Michael Adams, who advised me at the Mitchell Center and got me this fellowship to live at J. Frank Dobie's Old Ranch, where I wrote a lot of this book. And when I wasn't writing, I was engaging in the most typical of Texas hobbies, which, as we all know, is clearing brush. So I brought my own chainsaw to the ranch, as one does. And every afternoon when I was done writing, I would go and knock down Cedar. And I probably ended up clearing three or four acres and got the place looking a bit more like it had been when Dobie lived there. And there came a point where I realized, okay, for the past six months, you've spent about half your waking hours clearing brush. So now maybe you're a real Texan. And the other half, the reason we're here tonight is AMC. I'd like to thank those folks for believing in this project and frankly for taking what was a pretty huge risk on me. And this might seem counterintuitive looking in from the outside, but it's quite rare for folks in Hollywood to allow an author to adapt his own book. There are a lot of good reasons for this, kind of these issues of Ken the guy who wrote the book, get enough distance from the original kind of source material to reimagine it for the screen. Does he understand the TV and film have a completely different set of strengths and limitations compared to a book? And is this person going to be capable of adapting to a completely different way of working? You know, as an author, you're alone in your room all day by yourself. You don't talk to anyone. And when you're making a TV show, you were with other people all day long, collaborating with them. And in fact, once those people sign on to your project, it's not just that you have to collaborate with them because to be nice, but their jobs are actually on the line of things go bad. So sort of unlike being an author, which if I mess up, okay, the only one who suffers is me. When you're working on a show, you're sort of boing the careers of all the people who are along on the project with you. So because of that, there's a very difficult balance in Hollywood between making sure that the people's voices get heard and making sure the project stays good. Nothing good gets done by committee in Hollywood or anywhere else. There has to be a kind of singular voice and a vision. But there's a very real and very logical pressure out there of, we know the way this works. We've done it this way for 30 years. We know if we do it this way, we'll keep our jobs. You know, in my area, you're not going to get us fired kind of thing. And that is always in conflict with the fact that all good art by definition is new. It's always different from the things that have come before it. And that difference and that newness is what actually makes it good. There's a fundamental difference between a Rembrandt and a copy of a Rembrandt. And there's a fundamental difference between a novel by William Faulkner and a novel by a guy who's imitating William Faulkner. And so a lot of people wanted this project. There are a lot of big offers and people wanted to buy the rights to the book from me, but no one wanted me attached. No one wanted me involved. They saw me as a pure liability, which actually was probably intelligent. And the only exception to this were AMC and a studio called Sonar who collaborated with AMC to make the show. And they said, all right, Meyer, we'll try it. You and your buddies, who are my mission center, like fellow students, you can be the creators, you can do most of the writing, executive produce the whole shebang. This will be your show. This was a massive risk for them to take. I knew how to tell a story and writing scripts is a bit easier than writing novels. But I was completely ignorant of how the business worked, completely ignorant of how a set worked. I don't think I've even met an actor by then. But the network was very patient with me. And we spent three years developing the show with them, working kind of pretty closely on a daily or weekly basis. We all knew we wanted to tell a big story. We knew we wanted to tell a story in a way that really hadn't been done before. And at the end of that three years, AMC finally said, okay, we're going to give you a writer's room, we're going to hire a showrunner, whether it's a person who actually knows what they're doing. And four or five months after that, they gave us a green light to make the show. And then we were casting, finding locations, building sets, and then finally actually shooting. So I'm extremely humbled and grateful to those folks because they, you know, it seems like the smarter thing to do, oh, you hire the original guy, but it's actually a huge risk. And so a lot of these people had to head back to New York to beat this big snowstorm that's coming in the snowpocalypse. And I'll mention their names anyway. Joel Stillerman, Charlie Collier, Stefan Reinhardt in New York, Susie Fitzgerald, Kerry Galogally, Emma Miller in LA, of course Drew Brown. And on the sonar side, Jenna Santiani, who was with us almost from the beginning of the project, and Tom Lasinski, who runs Sonar. Again, I know you guys took a huge risk on the project, on me, and I really appreciate it. Another group of people were thanking the Texas Film Commission and Governor Rick Perry, who were big fans of the book and who were actually instrumental in getting the project brought here to Texas. We filmed the whole show here. The entire crew was from Texas and they knew it was kind of their story and they really gave it their all. So I'm really grateful for those guys too. So a bit about what you're actually going to watch here. In this episode, we're getting introduced to Eli McCullough, who's the main character, both in the show and in the book. We're seeing him at two different points in his life. In one time period, the kind of earlier period, he's a boy or a young man. It's about 1849. He's born on the frontier. He's born into one of those families who lives way, way past the line of settlement. He spent the first 10 years of his life living in the Republic of Texas, which has recently become a state. And then we see him later in life. So this other time period of the show, we see Eli in 1915. He's a man in late middle age who's wrestling with a lot of the changes that are happening in his world. By then, he and his family have a ranch in South Texas, very close to the border. And again, it's 1915, Mexico's and Shambles were five years into their revolution. There are three different factions fighting for control of the country. And there are a lot of refugees spilling north into the US and to Texas, and along with the refugees, a small but sort of meaningful criminal element. This is 1915 is the beginning of what Anglo Texans have historically called the Bandit Wars. And what the Tejanas have referred to as either the killing or the time of killing or the hour of blood. And like the book, the show is going to alternate constantly between these two stages of Eli's life. First as young man on the frontier, coming into himself and man as a mature man at the dawn of the 20th century, the dawn of the modern era, who over the course of the first season and over the course of the show begins to wonder if these principles that have always guided him through a very violent world or very violent upbringing and violent adulthood, he's beginning to wonder if these principles are still relevant in the 20th century. Eli is torn between the love he feels for his family, and the sense that they may not be prepared enough for a violence that is about to come at them. So Eli in 1849 is played by Jake Bluffland, the wonderful actor who you guys may remember from the movie mud. And Eli in 1915 is played by a little known guy named Pierce Brosnan, who is with us here tonight. It'll be taking some questions after the showing. So as you guys already know, but we'll certainly be reminded of here, Pierce is absolutely tremendous. So that said, I'll get out of here. And thank you guys for coming. I hope you enjoy this. Well, I have the pleasure of welcoming our panel this evening. And we will start with former director of the LBJ Library, Mark up to Grove. We then have the mark okay, the author of this amazing series series and book that you have just seen, Philip Meyer, someone of course, who needs no introduction, Pierce Brosnan, and show runner and producer, Kevin Murphy, Kevin. Well, gentlemen, welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library. Glad to be here. Thanks very much. And congratulations on a stunning accomplishment. It's just magnificent. And I want to start with you, Pierce. A list actor that you are, with the pick of so many projects, what led you to the sun? Philip Meyer, his book, when this book came out, I read it. And it was heralded greatly and all the papers. And I wanted to see what it was about. And the book stayed with me. And then last summer, lo and behold, the part of Eli came to me and I was going to go off and do a movie in Russia. And that fell apart. And I said to my agent, look, I don't want to sit around on my backside here, I want to go to work. And he said, Well, you've just been offered this 10 part series AMC. And I read the first five scripts and they were just really well founded. I love the part of Eli. And so it was the writing, the story, the character, the challenge of playing a man like this. And you know, before I knew it, I was here in Texas. I was up on a horse and playing this man. But you had read the book prior to knowing that the role was available to you. Yes, I mean, the the book, I went out and bought it as I live in Malibu. And we did have a bookstore then I went down, I purchased it. And then lo and behold, it burnt in a fire in the house. But that's another story all together. But no, I mean, it was, I think Eli and I and myself found each other at the right time there last summer. And I came in at the 11th hour to this production. There was another man's name on this character. And Sam Neil, but Sam, for one reason or another, couldn't make the commitment. And they came to me. And so it was, it was a baptism by fire in many regards. But it was it was a beautiful baptism. Well, they're lucky to have you, Philip. It Philip is an Austinite, but a native of Baltimore, Maryland. And came here studied at the the Michener School under Jim Magnuson. I wonder, you've written this, what I think will be a classic Texas epic. How does a kid from Baltimore, Maryland, write an epic Texas novel? Yeah, I guess I came here in 2005. And I didn't know much about the state, but I fell in love with the place right away. Within a month, I thought, okay, I'm gonna stay here. And I was working on my my first novel, American Rust at that time. But I knew, I think I took a Texas History class at Don Graham. And I knew that I was going to write about Texas is probably 2005 or six. There are two types of novelists. They're on one, on one hand, you have the type of writer who as long as the the story is sort of psychologically real on as long as the you believe that you're inside the mind of this person, they don't care if they get the facts right, right? And that was just fun. And unfortunately, I'm the other type. So if I don't understand everything about a world I'm writing about, I stopped typing. So it's this is sort of like OCD quality that has punished me for a lot of my life. So for this book, I ended up reading about 350 works of nonfiction, I actually stopped reading all books about the West, because it's so tough with this story and this mythology to figure out what's true and what's not, you know, even someone like Cormac McCarthy, they're sort of strange factual errors and blood meridian and things with otherwise a masterpiece. So most of what we know about the West and Texas and the sort of story of the settling of this land is from fiction and most of it is in fact fiction. So I wanted to write a book that actually was just fact. And I think like that's kind of how it came about in some ways it was easier being from outside because there was nothing you know, I wasn't worried about making my grandma mad or cutting me out of the will, you know. And I presumed for a while that a lot of people will be mad at me and there was sort of this, the sort of thought, well, geez, I say sort of true but unflattering things about some Native Americans towards the commandes are fairly violent toward their enemies. I say true but occasionally unflattering things about Anglos in South Texas, especially 1915. But I think in the end, the book and the show treat everyone so even handedly, you know, there are no heroes. There are no villains. Everyone comes off as a real person. So maybe the people forgive us because of that. Are these characters based on actual people that you that you discovered when you were reading history? Are they composite characters? Who are they and how did how did you conceive? Yeah, they're composites. I mean, Eli McCullough, the only the sort of closest thing, he's sort of a composite Charles Goodnight and Herman Lehman, you know, his most famous Comanche captive. But even in the end, you sort of have to do enough research, you learn enough about the world and then you forget everything, right? Because I found that would have too many facts in my head actually paralyzes my artistic brain or my creative brain and I sort of stick to the facts, which prevents the characters from really, you know, coming alive. In terms of everything else is a composite. I mean, the problem with all these powerful Texas families is you have one or two interesting members, and everyone else is a drunk or a lush, you know, you know, they spend their money on helicopters or cocaine or something like this. And not naming names, obviously, but but but and this so this family that has three very powerful people, they're all very different. That's definitely an invention. It's hard to find, you know, even in some of the Kennedys, it's hard to find one strong man and maybe a few weaker brothers or something. But yeah, Kevin, this is not only an ambitious novel and screenplay, but an extraordinarily ambitious production. How do you stage something like this that takes you back 100 years? There's a very cinematic quality to this this mini series, which has got to be enormously complex. How do you do that? How do you ensure that your your production is in keeping with the times? Well, having advanced lead time is probably the most important asset that we have. And the way that AMC put this together was I was brought in once Philip and his partners had written the initial script adaptation. And my job was to help put together a writing staff, help arc out what that first season was going to be, pitch it, get it approved by the network, and then put together all the other stuff. For those that don't know what I do is I'm a showrunner, which is basically the final like arbiter of responsibility for all of the creative and production decisions, which is your scripts and hiring your directors and your casting and editing music, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the real the real problem with the show is we had a good amount of money from our awesome studio at AMC and Sonar to make one really good show. But what you have seen tonight is two really good shows because we have a complete set of Comanche cast members and Young Eli. We have a complete set of a sizable cast of 1915 cast members. They're all in different locations. They're all shot with a different look. They use different lenses on the cameras and it's a really, really difficult undertaking. And the only way that we're able to do it in a responsible fashion and have it look as good as what you saw up there is because AMC let us write seven scripts before they picked up the show. Whereas normally like you shoot a pilot, you have one script and then you're like running and you're maybe like you're writing is like a week ahead of what you're about to shoot and that's not a good way to get anything done. So in this case, I think AMC was very smart about how they asked us to kind of set things up and I think hopefully it shows on the screen. It's one project in two productions. Exactly. So we have to make each dollar has to stretch twice as far. Yeah. Pierce, what makes this very complex character Eli McCullough tick? Well, the man is born of war. He is born of violence. He's a man that's fractured, deeply fractured. He's someone who's lost by the time we see him in the story, he's lost three families in his life. He's a man who knows that he's born of violence. He knows that he has to control the violence in his own life. But he's a good man at heart. He's a man that's also kind of the head of his time within the family that he has and the surroundings of his life. And so the ingredients of this man kind of stuck to my bones. I know something about life. I know something about being a father. I came to it from a father's perspective. As a man who has got sons and now grandchildren. So there are many emblems of the man's life that I identified with. But there's also the duality of the character. He's a man that's been brutalized by the Comanches and he is a Comanche really. He has the essence of that breeding in his bones. So there I got my son's cold and I'm just getting over it. So yeah he was... it was a feast of a part to play and I think when you watch it and you go through the story of the next 10 episodes more will be revealed of this man. And it's the ambivalence of playing a character which are not sure if you'd like him or you agree with his barbarity in life. So all of those ingredients was what kind of made me revel in playing the character. He's very much oriented to the future as you can see in this first episode. But is he haunted by the past? No he's completely haunted by his past. And again as you as you go deeper into the into the episodes this is revealed and how could he not be haunted and fractured by such a savage upbringing? Philip you have a very hectic past yourself. I'll be it not a haunted one. But you were born to be a novice and you knew that from a very early age. Just talk briefly about what led you to put pen to paper as an author. Sure I was a juvenile delinquent. I mean I was genuine you know I was kind of a nightmare for my parents. I got arrested the first time in the seventh grade. I take it back it is a haunted past. I'm sorry. I remember my mother coming to the police station I was having an old year in the seventh grade 13 12 and I was handcuffed to a radiator looking at her. I was like her sweet innocent boy in her mind because I read a lot of books you know I was always sort of read. I can't really learn to read. And by the time I was 15 I'd stopped going to school and dropped out when I was 16 and but I was just I would just devour books even I was working as I was 16 full-time bike mechanic basically. Sucking down books sucking down books sucking down books and I started college when I was 21 and something it was like the freshman competition course like hey do this writing assignment and for some reason it was the first time I've been treated like a grown-up by a professor I don't know. Something clicked it was like I mean the closest experience I can say is it's almost like sort of hitting puberty at the second time. There's something that's in you. You can't stop it. You have to kind of ride it out and you either are going to embrace this thing or you're going to try to hide from it. So I spent the next ten years I wrote two failed novels. I won in college. It was very long. It was also very very bad. Like all my friends got to about page ten of six hundred. I put that one down and said oh you're obviously a literary genius Meyer. So I started writing a second novel and at this point I was working at this investment banking job. I got about halfway through it and I was sure absolutely certain that I was some kind of massive literary success with this. So I quit the investment banking job. I finished that second novel which was then rejected by about a hundred like every literary agent in the country. I was out of money. I moved back into my parents basement. It's about thirty. Every parent's nightmare. Yeah so hey what's up guys. Your son's back. He's back in the old neighborhood and got a job working with my friend's construction company and we're modeling houses and driving an ambulance when that didn't pay enough. And then I went through a couple years. At least I'll go to graduate school. Applied to like eight or ten graduate schools was rejected by all of them. And I should point out this whole time I had not published anything. So my data point for thinking I was a good writer came entirely from some crazy thing in my head. I mean I literally published nothing. So I was like Meyer where's your book. I was like well it didn't get published. I was like didn't you leave this job on Wall Street to do this. Like why are you living in your parents basement. So eventually there's a kind of art there. Well there was basically in a very serious way start to question artistically everything you're doing. And there's a very kind of deep dark two-year period. And when I came out of it I sort of knew my artistic voice. I knew how art works at least in a way that I could grasp. And I had kind of crossed over from being an apprentice to at least a kind of a tradesman as a novelist. And that's when I got into Mitchner right away. And that was sort of the beginning of this of this path I guess. And so a failure and sort of like staring down the demons and knowing what it means you to make art. You know I've never written for money ever. I've never worked on a project that I didn't that I wouldn't have done for free. And so I mean I'm obviously credibly spoiled. But I also have I think I have a very, very high risk tolerance you know which I've been at all the kids. It makes it a little easier. My parents are very encouraging which also made it made it easier. But I think at a young age I just realized oh you know what my ego means nothing. Failure means nothing. Embarrassment means nothing. That all those things are you have to pass through them to get to the thing that you want. It's a remarkable story and perseverance. Just a note. Philip went from his parents' basement to writing a novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It's just a remarkable story of endurance. Thanks mom. Kevin why did this story matter today in today's America? That was one of the things that you know that brought me to the project was reading the book. It just was transformative and what I really loved in Philip's book and Philip's writing and what we've tried to really tease out and preserve and build upon in the show is the exploration of cultural divides. And the real truth is that even though we have kids go into our school rooms and they put their hands on their heart and they pledge that we're one nation indivisible under God that's not really true. We've always been a nation of very, very stark divisions and we've been a nation of conquer and conquered, of dominator and dominated. And that goes all the way back to the Arawaks and Columbus meeting for the first time. And it's always been a case where sometimes it's economic, sometimes it's racial, sometimes it's socio-cultural, but that has always been there and it's a big part of who we are. And I think right now wherever you may happen to be on the political spectrum, the events of the last couple of years have kind of reminded people how truly divided our country is. And I think that if we can do anything productive in our art and telling our story is looking at this particular moment in time, or period in the state of Texas and looking at how all of these different cultures had this unbridgeable chasm between them. And I think that by looking at this as we go through our first season of the show, we recognize that those divisions that we thought were brand new actually been here all along. And I think once you acknowledge the elephant in the room, you acknowledge the division, then you can start exploring solutions as to how to build a bridge to bring us together and make us a better and stronger country. And I think that that's, for me, that's what makes the book worth adapting in which the television series worth, you know, creating and spending years of our lives executing. I learned backstage that Pierce Brosnan came over to the United States from London and started his career in the early 1980s in Hollywood and got in his first interview, Remington Steel, which became a very successful series. And it's, I guess it's the luck of the Irish. But Pierce, how has your industry changed since you arrived in Hollywood all those years ago? Well, that's a very broad question. And it's changed and it hasn't really changed the essence of being an actor and performing as an actor remains the same. But there is so much content now and there are so many platforms for the content to be seen by the public at large. The world of TV has certainly become, you know, has found its golden glory again, it seems. And that's why I wanted to be part of this production. I wanted to, I had been looking actively for a show like this. And just because the writing is so nuanced and so textured and the quality of players and the exploration of characters and stories are so diverse. So in many respects it has changed from the days of 1981 when I came to America and did Remington Steel. And there was just a few channels. Now you have this glut of content to choose from. But the essence of being an actor and performing in TV or performing in a movie are the same principles. You have the character which you have to study and inform yourself about. And then you have a camera and a director. So it's somewhat the same but it has a greater complexity and more variety. This might be a rhetorical question, Pierce. But is this the golden age of television? Has television ever been better than it is today? Oh, I think it's, I think it's magnificent now. I think what you, the choices that people have, I mean, the movies are somewhat diminishing because of TV. And because you have, you have these 10-pole movies which are so enormous that they will start to fill stadiums. But the intimacy of drama and a piece like The Sun or any of the shows that you watch to be cherished, I think, in people's homes. Serious drama has moved. When we were all kids, Serious Drama was, there wasn't even the term, it was a Serious Movie. All real drama was on TV, was on movies. TV didn't become good until the early 2000s, basically. Now that pendulum has swung so far, you know, so a movie like Moonlight or something where there's a Serious Drama, it was a very good movie. These things were, you know, there were dozens of these movies in the 90s. There were dozens of them in the 80s. Now, if you're lucky, there's one a year because all that storytelling really has moved to TV. The people who would write that stuff, like me, have moved to TV. Actors have moved to TV. Everyone who's Serious has moved to TV. I mean, the reason that this first episode looks so cinematic, we had a feature director, a young guy named Tom Harper, a brilliant guy. The guy who's the DP, the cinematographer, is another big featureist guy, right? So you have all these people who in the 90s for sure would have ended up working in movies. You know, now they've come to TV. I mean, this is a radical change in the business. You know, no one, I think very few novelists in the 90s would have ever thought, I'm going to work in TV. No, because it was like, what are you going to work, right? I mean, but now everyone I know is another novelist. I was like, oh, how do I get my own TV show, man? I mean, everyone is thinking about TV and there's something more compelling. I think about a 10-hour TV show that you can watch from your house on your 60-inch screen than there is about a two-hour movie, which a two-hour movie now feels like a short story to me. You know, after watching the wire and all these kind of legendary shows. Kevin, Pierce alluded to how the series evolves, but tell us what we can expect as the season progresses and as we get into the next season. Well, as the season progresses, you start to see that there's a family triangle that forms and on, you know, at one point you've got Jeannie and then you've got her grandfather, Eli, and you've got her father, Pete, which is a people familiar with the book. We've moved her forward a generation, so we could have, you show things in television as opposed to get into people's heads in that way. So it allows these characters to really have meaningful scenes together because they're closer together in age. But what you're going to be seeing is as Eli and the family increase their desperate efforts to make up for the oil rig that was destroyed at the end of this first episode and trying to find oil, Eli does find oil and he finds it in an unexpected place and he finds it with Jeannie being there with him and it becomes sort of a tug of war between Pete and Eli kind of for the heart and soul of this amazing young woman who over the course of several seasons, as the other characters, you know, age, she will step into the center and at some point in the future of the series, she will become the lead character. So we're eventually going to get to all the wonderful places that's in Philip's book, it's just we're not starting at that place. And as we move forward, the 1915 storyline will become the 1919 storyline, will become the 1936 storyline, our 1849 storyline with Jacob and young Eli, that will also continue moving forward in time through the Civil War, through the eventual fall of the Comanche Empire and then the end of the Old West until it catches up with where the series begins. Yeah. Pierce, growing up in Ireland, did you, there's a mystique about Texas, that seems. Growing up in Ireland, did you have perceptions of Texas? Did you have any knowledge of Texas history that might have informed the way you approached this project? Well, I grew up on the banks of the River Boine in County Meath and it was a small country town. So there was just two cinemas, there was the palace at one end of the town and Lyric at the other. And I was, you know, I was brought up on a staple of Weston's. The Weston was very much part of my childhood and it was always playing cowboys and Indians in the fields. I was always an Indian and I just, you know, I lived with my grandmother and she always brought the crutchies in. There was Omar Crutchie and she used to come around every springtime with her two sons and they were, they knew how to make the best bow and arrows and how to put the pennies on the railway line and make the best kind of arrowheads. So that was very much part of my childhood. And so the Weston has had a romantic place in my heart as I think it does in everyone's heart. And I did one other Weston before this with Liam Neeson, a movie called Serpent Falls. But this I don't really consider a Weston. It's a family drama set in 1915. But I do play a man who straps a gun on his hip and has blood on his hands and violence in his psyche. But the Weston has always been, I've always been attracted by it and I ride horses, I love horses and so it was really for me the challenge was getting my tongue around the Texan accent. So I kind of jumped in with both feet and because I came into this project at the 11th hour, I didn't really have time for wiggle room or doubting myself. I just had to go for it and I had a wonderful dialect coach who we listened to Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Rick Perry, Senator Poe, and various other people. And somehow I picked the bones out of it and that's the voice that you hear tonight. Philip, you conceived this novel in your head and then you had the challenge of writing the screenplay to put it on film. Talk about that challenge, the challenge of taking a novel and making it into a film or a mini-series. Yeah, so just a point of clarification, it was originally going to become a mini-series and then the MC made it into an ongoing series. So that's yeah, they twisted our. So in theory they'll be a season two and it'll continue on. But originally that is what we sold as a mini-series. The screenplays are funny because the biggest difference is that you realize you're not making art when you write a screenplay, you're making a blueprint for other people to make art. And I had sensed this the whole time, we're developing the project and stuff. And it wasn't until the first or second day of shooting Pierce and Sidney Lucas who in the scene you guys saw with the hanged man and the wildflowers which we've written this. And I thought, okay, this is quite good. This will play pretty well. And then I saw these guys do it and there's something like quite magical. And I realized, okay, the words, they're important, but the art is happening here. The art happens in front of the camera. No one goes and reads old screenplays. You go and you read old poems or novels. You go see, no one goes and reads, you don't go see a blueprint of a cathedral. You go see the cathedral itself. And that is what a screenplay is. And realizing that, yes, sure, you're an artist, but not really. You're like the coach and support staff for these guys. And of course, the role is quite important, but it's not the same as being a novelist. It really is learning, okay, what do the actors need? Pierce texts me about some line that he disagreed with and I would say, look, don't mess with these scripts. And he's like, all right, Maire, I'll do it. And then I would look at the tapes for that day and he would do it. And I would look at the tapes and he was like, oh, crap, he was right. And of course, I should have listened to him because of course he knew. There's too many syllables in this sentence. I can't get it all out. So that's the biggest difference is you're sort of you're sort of a coach and support staff rather than being the kind of, you know, that the guy who's actually playing. I mean, and in some ways it's nice. Yeah, you kind of write it, sit back and this guy has to do the hard work. Sorry. Yeah, but in terms of adapted, I mean, you know, you, we get so many versions of this because originally it was a miniseries. So they got the other creators and I also went to the Mission Center. They also went to UT here. You know, we saw this as an eight hour miniseries for a long time and then the AMC said they wanted something longer. So then we saw it as a five hour sort of five season arcs that we spent over the course of these three years were developing and we broke down five seasons of stuff. And once you divorce yourself from the idea of like being faithful to the novel in terms of incident and you said, well, I'll be faithful in terms of the types of people, the types of characters, the philosophy that you're getting at, the sort of tone or sense of the world. But in terms of the things that happen in the book, they don't have to happen in the show. And in fact, a lot of parts of the show are prequels to the book parts of the show or don't happen in the book at all. And I think this is all for the better. Well, what you've made collectively is indeed art. We give you a hearty congratulations on the project. We look forward to seeing it as it rolls out. And we thank you very much for being here tonight. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you.