#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, cofounder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption one and two has some of the deepest, most complex, and heart wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio
Sure.
What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time? Maybe films that were highly influential on you. I mean, Godfather.
God well, I think for me, probably Godfather two more than Godfather one, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather two. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think and the bit Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema when you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island, and you get that shot. It's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.
How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography? And how much is the acting? You got De Niro. You got Young, Pacino.
Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, at least co wrote the script. So it's almost like the writing and directing almost become the same thing. Well, it's one of those films, both of them are those films which I was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything's good, where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes, you know, define what you think about things. You know, it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about the godfather.
What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have you have movies like 2,001 Space Odyssey. Slow. Yes. It used to be back in my day, it used to be slower.
Life got faster. Life just got, you know Yeah. As I think as we moved from the seventies into the eighties into the nineties, people had seen so many films. They just started to edit films faster, and people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look and just that meant you realize that person was gonna betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, parti
Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster. Right? Yes. A mixture of crime and humor.
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