“Mostly you can feel it in the room,” he says. “When a team isn’t working, you see defensive body language, or you see people close down. Or there’s just silence. The ideas stop coming, or they can’t see the problems. We used to use Steve [Jobs] as a kind of a two-by-four to whack people in the head so they could see the problems in the movie—Steve was good at that. “But it becomes harder and harder as time goes on, because as directors get more experience, they sometimes have a harder time hearing other points of view that might help them. There are so many parts you have to get right, and
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