A Talk with The Peaceful Warrior
TLC: You have a new book The Journeys of Socrates which begins with a quote from Martin Buber: “Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.” I assume that the journey of the Peaceful Warrior , for you from way-back-when, has probably had more than one secret destination
Dan Millman: It really isn't one, it's always a number of destinations. I really haven't strategized my life. I didn't have a strategy out of college, I didn't know what I was going to be doing; I thought maybe a little stuntwork and some writing, but neither one turned out very well at first. I moved up to Berkeley and visited my old coach in the gymnasium, and he said, “You know, I hear the coaching job at Stanford is open,” so the next day at 22 years old I was the head gymnastics coach at a major university. So that's how my life has happened; it's serendipity.
TLC: You have a new book The Journeys of Socrates which begins with a quote from Martin Buber: “Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.” I assume that the journey of the Peaceful Warrior , for you from way-back-when, has probably had more than one secret destination
Dan Millman: It really isn't one, it's always a number of destinations. I really haven't strategized my life. I didn't have a strategy out of college, I didn't know what I was going to be doing; I thought maybe a little stuntwork and some writing, but neither one turned out very well at first. I moved up to Berkeley and visited my old coach in the gymnasium, and he said, “You know, I hear the coaching job at Stanford is open,” so the next day at 22 years old I was the head gymnastics coach at a major university. So that's how my life has happened; it's serendipity.
After that, though—I mean I was a house painter, I was a data entry person in computers; that was after— Way of the Peaceful Warrior was written and had gone out-of-print. It was subtitled originally A basically true story . My editor made that up; she thought it would be a cute subtitle. The bookstores however were not amused and it ended up dying because the stores didn't take any copies. I was an out-of-print author. Then in 1984 a 72-year-old retired publisher named Hal Kramer was given an out-of-print copy of' Way of the Peaceful Warrior and he was so excited about it, he said “I'm going back into publishing and I'm starting with this book. It's got to see the light of day.” So he made me a very modest offer, a hundred dollars, and he said he couldn't afford any publicity but he'd write a few bookstores and let them know. It took two years for the major chains to be willing to put a copy in each store.
So it had a modest start but then the word-of-mouth started: one person told two, two people told four and now it's twenty-two languages and two million copies in print around the world, which it's my guess means its been read by six-million people or so. And twenty-five years after the book was written, finally, a movie. One of those other secret destinations. I had no idea. Life just keeps happening while I'm walking through it.
At the event last night, previewing what I discovered, by the way, to be a very engrossing film, you mentioned the fact that Nick Nolte who plays the wise man character, Socrates the service station attendant, was once considered for the Dan part. Was that really so?
I'd never heard that until Nick mentioned it. Nick was an athlete, he was a football player when he was young so he had a real physicality about him, so maybe he was one of the names that were considered. But when the time came, he was ready to play Socrates. I think the magic about Nick, is not just being one of our finest actors, in my opinion, but that in every movie he has that presence.
This is a teaching film, it has a message—like Yoda and Luke Skywalker or Mr. Miyagi and the Karate Kid. And because it has this message, you have to really avoid sounding preachy—and nothing sounds preachy out of Nick Nolte's mouth. The words flow so beautifully, you just take them in, so I think that's why he was the right choice even though there were some other fine actors who were considered for the role, including Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman.
Speaking of The Karate Kid , people think it was an influence on me but in fact, Peaceful Warrior was written four years before The Karate Kid ever came out, so if anything, The Karate Kid might have been inspired by Peaceful Warrior.
I found a very real difference between the two: in Karate Kid , his winning remains the most important element of the movie; as I remember it, the boy learns lessons along the way but it's really about winning that match, whereas one of the things I was struck by in the Peaceful Warrior movie was that the whole ethos about winning as the most important aspect was really reframed. The purity of the experience of the gymnast becomes more important than the competition and the winning.
Yes. To young Dan and his teammates, you train in order to get to the destination which is Winning the Gold. Winning. Victory. Then you can be happy, once you get what you want. One of the central messages of the film is that you're either happy now or you're never going to be because all we have is this moment. You can only live happily ever after on a moment-to-moment basis.
It's about unreasonable happiness. People can be sad, they can be angry at times but beneath it all, there's just that remembrance of being alive, being able to experience it all, the passion of life.
Another point: We all have access to wisdom, and its different from knowledge; you can know a lot of things but wisdom is application. As Socrates says to Dan at the gas station, “You know how to clean a windshield but wisdom is doing it.” So there's a real practical grounding. And gymnastics is the grounding, it's the backdrop, but nobody can say it's just a sports movie. That's simply the way Dan grounds out. You can see his progress, his inner progress, through what he's able to perform.
They did a beautiful job with Scott Mechlowicz, blending him in; he's believable as a gymnast—they used some of the top Olympians as stunt doubles and seamlessly interweaving them with the shots of him. Scott and his teammates trained for almost two months, rigorously, six hours a day, doing weights and strength and basic gymnastics movements and positions to prepare for the role.
Could you say something about the blend of fact and fiction in the way that you employed elements of your experience?
Well, being a Pisces, my life is kind of a blend of mystery and imagination. This feels like a dream to me even right now. But I've taken great care for the last twenty-five years to let people know what parts of the book were factual and accurate and what parts were from my creative imagination.
Unlike certain Oprah writers of recent memory…
Right. The back of the book says Fiction/Personal Growth. We didn't play memoir, and I've never claimed that. Some people don't reality-test very well and there are enough illusions around, I didn't want to add to that. The producers asked me, “What shall we say at the beginning of the movie? Shall we say ‘Based on a true story'?” and I said “No. Say ‘Inspired by true events.'” And there are enough true events from my life that come through into the movie to make it pretty compelling.
The motorcycle accident that I suffered and the injury, were, if anything, understated and quite accurately depicted. I didn't actually drive quite as crazily as was depicted in the film, but yes, that happened. It was an amazing stunt, wasn't it?
… and you did meet a mystically-attuned garage attendant late one night…
Late one starry night in December 1966 I was walking home from a late-night date (actually with the woman who was sitting next to me in the theater last night. She was my first wife Linda, who was there with her husband Bill.) I got hungry and, though I'd walked past that old Texaco station many times, on impulse I just walked in and met this cosmic old guy. He didn't tell me his real name but he reminded me of the ancient Greek, immediately, and I ended up calling him Socrates.
From the time I spent time with him and the time I wrote the book, thirteen years passed, a long time, and in that time I met other mentors, other masters, I traveled around the world, so he became the spokesperson for everything I wanted to share.
My life has included other mentors beyond that. A book coming out sometime next year will be called My Search for Spirit , which will tell the story, the very true story, no fiction, of those mentors and my path to Spirit, which I think will provide a map to some of the obstacles on the Spiritual Path.
By the way, you referred to The Journeys of Socrates , my latest book of fiction, about my old mentor. I gave the galleys of that to Nick Nolte before they started shooting the film so he would have a really rich backstory to understand even better the character and the odysseys he'd been on, and I think he brought some of that depth to his portrayal.
What was your response to the film when you finally saw the whole thing?
I was moved to tears numerous times watching it. Joy [NOTE: Mrs. Dan Millman, also a character in the Peaceful Warrior ] and I sat alone in the screening room—the producers wanted us to have our own experience of the film. When I saw it, when it opened up and we got into the gas station and the story unfolded, tears came forth spontaneously. I think I was moved first of all by relief. I thought, “Oh my God, this is a good movie! They could have ruined it so many different ways.”
And the second thing, as the movie went on, I was seeing these moments from my life and it was just surreal—seeing Scott Mechlowicz beautifully play my role—it wasn't about duplicating or mimicking me.
Scott wanted to meet me before the shooting started and said he wanted to get my gestures and to really be me, and I said, “Scott, you've got to just play you, because this is about our common humanity, it's not about Dan Millman, who cares about that? This is about all of us.”
This is about our lives, our journeys. That's why so many people have written to me saying “I felt like this book was about me.”—whether or not they'd had an accident or anything like that—because it's about all our searches, awakening to what's important in the world.
Tell one of the moments when the tears came.
There wasn't a particular moment, it was just like a wave…but that intimate scene between Dan and Joy when she reaches out to heal him and touches his heart has to be one of my favorite scenes. I just get this glow watching it but, my God, there were scenes there—the montage of him coming back, you know, and training, and scenes between him and Socrates. I say him in third person because even the character I write about in the book as me , that was a long time ago, so I have my life now as a writer and a speaker and “Dan Millman” has a life of his own in the book, and then another “Dan” animates it on the screen.
What I liked so much about Scott is that he could play a self-absorbed, self-satisfied, kind of arrogant, successful young gymnast, with the ladies, and his studies, and everything was going well, and yet remain vulnerable and likable. Did you notice that in the film? So we could identify with that, and to identify with the character means that you can benefit from his experience as he goes through his adventure.
If those characters speak to the heart of the viewer, then this movie might end up spreading across America. Like the book, it has a modest beginning, six cities, and it's going to depend, as the book did, on people's word-of-mouth: If they tell other people “Wow, this is a good picture! Worth paying to see”—then it might do some good.
And that's your hope, that it will do some good?
Yeah, more than just entertain—it is entertaining, but that it might actually help create a shift, one of those leverage points as Socrates says in the movie, to insert the right leverage at the right place at the right time, to remind people of some things that are healing, that are nourishing in all our lives.
Lovely. So is there anything that in particular has now emerged as a goal for you? For your writing and your speaking?
You know, as I indicated before, I don't have goals and strategies. I know so many people use their Day Planner and they write down their affirmations and they have this plan and they visualize positive outcomes and all that, but that's not how my life has worked. Like when I give talks, I don't use notes—because then I'm up in my head, remembering my notes. I just open my heart and open my mouth. That's what I do in life, just one moment at a time. If I face that moment well then the rest take care of themselves. I'm going to continue to write books as long as they cry out to me to write them.
In fact I have a book coming out in December called Wisdom of the Peaceful Warrior: A companion to the book that changes lives because I finally decided it was time to take substantive points from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and write the way Socrates might comment on them to further elucidate and illuminate what these incidents were about. That's coming out in December of this year, and then My Search for Spirit. Beyond that, it's all a mystery…Faith is the courage to live our lives as if everything that happens is for our highest good and learning. Not a bad place to end…
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