Sal Khan and Francis Ford Coppola fireside chat

All right, so very exciting, uh, we're here at Khan Academy with the team, and we have some students from Khan Lab School as well, uh, with, uh, the I'd say legendary Francis Ford Coppola, uh, most known for film making.

Uh, I, you know, obviously The Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now, Patton, I think by the time you’re in your m—The Outsiders? Outsiders, yes. You have more Academy Awards than most of us, um, but, but not just I. I think the one thing that we’re all going to learn today is, uh, as much as Francis is a legend and knows so much and is so steeped in film that his interests go well beyond film, obviously wine now and other things.

Um, maybe a good place to start, since you, you are known as so much as, as a legendary filmmaker, is how did you get into that? What was your, what was your arc from maybe being the age of some of these students at Khan Lab School? You know, in your middle school, uh, to, to eventually become a filmmaker.

Well, for some reason, my father, who was a classical musician, uh, moved every 8 months, it seemed, and we were always in a new house, in a new neighborhood, and I was always the new kid at school. And my name was Francis, so they was, "Oh, it's a girl's name." So I got all of the typical hazing when you’re the new kid.

But I was, I was very good at science. I was very interested in science and electricity, and I used to love to read the lives of the inventors. And I, and I felt I knew all about that, so much to this extent that when my father asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I said a nuclear physicist. And he said to me, "Francis, you can't flunk algebra three times in a row and be a nuclear physicist." And I said, "Why not?"

But nonetheless, I was discouraged that I could ever be a scientist, which is what I wanted to be because I was not good at math. So whenever I went to a new school, you were very strong at geometry.

I was very, I was, I won the geometry medal! Yes, so it's not I was really good at, but geometry you can see.

And you can see the, you can see the whole all the time. Sometimes it's not clear, but you see it all, and I was good at that. But, um, so whenever I went to a new school, uh, I would always head to the theater department because they always needed people who were good with, uh, electricity and technology.

And, and also that's where the girls were, and I wanted to meet them. So I figured if I was, you know, around the theater department working, I would get to meet the girls. I could have also gone to the football team where they had girls, but I didn't qualify for that.

And interesting note that to understand me is that when I was 9 years old, I was paralyzed with polio, which was a big, um, epidemic in 1949, and it struck kids, many, many, many children were paralyzed until only a few years later, I think in 1951, 52, they developed a SE sulk vaccine and the Sabin vaccine.

But, but my generation, polio was the scary children's disease, and I got it, and I, I missed the sixth grade because I couldn't walk. But through the wonderful opes of the U March of Dimes, it was a charity called the March of Dimes. Everyone donated dimes to it, and they sent a, um, therapist who slowly brought me back to the ability to walk about a year and a half later.

Wow, and I mean, so how did you go from, you know, that state that you're talking about where you were a little bit involved in, in drama and theater to actually deciding that you wanted to be a filmmaker and actually making films?

Well, I had an older brother, 5 years older, who was a very good student and very handsome and very accomplished and, and wonderful to me, by the way. And um, I just wanted to be like him. In fact, he, he was already interested in writing stories and his name was August Floyd Coppola, and I just thought that was so cool that I, I made my own name Francis Ford Coppola just to imitate him, although years Ford was not part of—for Ford is my middle name—but, but I used it because my brother had.

I was born in Detroit, and my middle name was after Henry Ford because my father, who was a classical musician, played for the Detroit Symphony. And in those days, there were, the big orchestras were on the radio—that was the Ford Hour.

And so is your brother H—how was so, how did that tie into?

Well, I just wanted to do what, be like him if I could. You know, when you’re five years apart, there’s no contest of you competing. He can beat you up, he’s smarter than you. I mean, but he was so kind to me and encouraged me that, um, I thought if he had—he was so good at school that the family thought he was going to be the first doctor in our Italian American family.

And um, so I thought I would be an eye doctor so I could work with lenses and prisms because I always, uh, loved prisms and what light can do in a lab. So later in college, he flipped and became a philosophy major and told my father he was going to be a novelist.

So then I said, "Well, I'll be a playwright." Then, so when I went—was ready in high school to be, uh, consider college, I thought I would try to become a drama major and, uh, and, uh, and eventually I entered school as a playwriting major.

But I, of course, worked in the technical part of the, of the theater doing the lighting and stuff. One day when I was up on a ladder hanging a light, I saw the teacher who was always directing the shows, were always directed by faculty members, and I saw the teacher telling the kid, the actors, "Oh, you go here, you go there." I could do that!

And so in college, I started to direct plays and ultimately, I was going to try to, you know, be a writer and director in the theater. And in the theater—in our country, the great theater graduate school—there are actually several great ones, but one of the great ones is the Yale Drama School, which is a graduate school.

So I was going to go right to the Yale Drama School, and one afternoon I was in around the plaza of the college. I pretty much just hung around the drama department; that was my life.

And I noticed a little theater that said, "Today, 4:00, screening of Sergei Eisenstein's film 10 Days That Shook the World." I had never heard of Sergei Eisenstein, and, uh, it was a silent film. But I had nothing to do, and I went in, and there were about maybe six other people in the theater. No one was that interested, and it was truly silent, and it lasted almost 4 hours.

And I had never seen a film like that in my life that the editing itself made up for the fact that there was no sound. When they shot machine guns, you could hear them just by the way it was edited.

Because this Eisenstein, who was a film director in the '20s, invented and came up with new ways of cutting film together, which is spoken of in his era as Montage. The curious thing that if you could take a shot and cut it next to another shot and it means something different than either of the shots, it's a kind of magic alchemy.

And I was just so impressed with that that I said, "I'm not going to the um Yale Drama School. I want to go to the UCLA Film School," and I changed my whole life and went on to be a film student in America at a time when no film student had ever gotten to make a feature film.

So that raises the question, H—how what was it about either the mindset that you took to it or how you developed yourself or, or even just fortune that put you in the right place that allowed you to do that that you just described? A lot of students weren't able to make a feature film.

Oh, well, you know, in college, in the drama department, I became very Machiavellian. Do any of you know what that word means? You all know that Machiavelli was a minister. He was actually on the outs with, um, the prince in, uh, in Florence, and his name was Niccolò Machiavelli.

So he wrote a little book about—a handbook for princes, and you know how to double-cross people and how to do all those what we now call Machiavellian things. There was more to him than that, but he's famous for that little book—the little book you can read in about two hours; it's called The Prince, and it's all the rules of doing all those political things.

I became very Machiavellian in college because I wondered why only the faculty members got to direct all the plays and those students. And so I did a little research, and I learned that the plays were paid for by the fees the students paid upfront for so-called co-curricular activities or extracurricular—in other words, the yearbook or the, uh, the newspaper or the drama department—those were all considered like clubs, and they were funded by student fees.

There were two clubs when I went to college, uh, at HASTRA College, which is where the debate that um, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump had two debates ago, was HRA that theater that they were in. I know it backwards, but so what.

What I did is I became president of both the musical comedy club and the drama club, which were very different kinds of kids. But I became president of both, and I merged them together. And then, having merged them together, I made a rule that, um, you couldn't be in a show to act in a musical or a play unless you had not missed the club meetings, or at least you couldn't have missed three in a row, because no one ever went to the club meetings.

So, and then, but I did a good thing with it. We had the meetings, but I also invited everyone who wanted to to do a little experimental workshop or a little one-act play. So the meetings were good, but during the meeting, I had a vote and passed the rule that faculty members could not direct shows that were funded by student money.

So suddenly all these drama teachers who had come there so they could direct the big shows couldn’t direct it. So I, I was the only student who wanted to direct, so I did.

You actually ran for president of two separate clubs and enacted those rules with that in mind that I will get enough support by forcing people to go to these meetings in two clubs to become—to allow myself to direct the the shows.

Well, it’s a funny thing about power. You very—you don’t necessarily know that you’re amassing it, but you sort of do, but I was going in that direction, and it worked very well for me because I got to do, uh, not only could I direct the production, but I used the strength of the the having the finance which was coming from the club to—and we did ambitious shows. We did original musicals, we did a production of Streetcar Named Desire, we did all these wonderful, and many of the things were wonderful that, you know, brought life to the drama department, uh, because of it.

And how did you, so in college, you get this great experience, you’re directing, sounds like big productions. How did that translate, you know, when you first did, you know, your first movies you did? Screenplay for Patton?

Well, I went to UCLA. In those days, there were two or three big film schools; there was UCLA and USC, and in New York, there was NYU.

To make it more clear for you, Martin Scorsese went to NYU, George Lucas went to USC, and I went to UCLA, and no one from any film school had ever made a feature movie ever. So, you know, I sort of went to UCLA with a big advantage because I had been a theater student, and a theater student—one of the, you know, fundamental things a theater student has to learn is about writing and acting.

Well, writing and acting are the magical ingredients of any theater or cinema performance. You could see a movie, and it could have beautiful photography, and it can have great art direction, but if it has terrible acting and a dumb script, it’s not going to be successful.

Yet a film that has a wonderful script and wonderful acting that has terrible photography and terrible art direction and, and everything else can be a hit. So I always say that acting and writing is the water and is the oxygen and hydrogen that make water. That if you, if, if you focus on the writing and the acting, of course, you want the music and the photography and everything to be beautiful, but those are really where the magic I think happens.

So having come from theater, I knew a lot, a lot more about acting than any of the cinema students who were much more into the camera. The great film director Orson Welles once said that you can learn everything about how to make movies in a weekend, meaning the camera, the editing, and more or less. Of course, that's a little overdoing it, that he, when he made his first film, had a great photographer.

But nonetheless, it’s somewhat true. The camera and stuff is not the hard part; the hard part is the writing and the acting. So having focused on that in theater, I had an advantage when I went into the film school because there were philosophy students—Terrence Malick was a philosophy student—um, there were—they were crazy to get their hands on cameras, and I had already worked with actors.

So, and also there’s a sort of prejudice against actors in—I don’t know if you know what I’m saying—but there’s a sort of jock mentality about actors among the film crews. They think, "Oh my God, they’re such a, you know, what do they do after all?"

But what an actor does is really hard because if you play a violin, not only do you have to be able to play the violin, you've got the violin be between you and the audience. The actor has to sort of do what, like a violinist does, except his instrument is a self or herself.

So it’s really terrifying to be an actor and, uh, at the same time, fight the self-consciousness that anyone would have. So I always approached movies and theater with tremendous respect for the actors, and the actors—we actresses today like to be known as actors because it comes from the, the verb to act; it’s the one who acts, not that you act a role, which which it indirectly means, but it’s the actor means the, the principal person making movement within the story could be a man or a woman could be an actor.

So actress is sort of like professor—lady professor. It’s diminutive. Um, so at any rate, I had this advantage of having been a drama student and also having been enough Machiavellian that I could conspire, which is what you have to do to get a movie off the ground, certainly in those days, to try to conspire to put together a movie, which I did, and I got to make.

And because I was the first student to really make a feature film, uh, some other students from USC heard about this weird guy, notably George Lucas, who was about four years, five years younger than me, four years younger than me. And so he kind of came around, a skinny kid with a beard when I was directing a picture at Warner Brothers, and this kid is watching me.

Everyone on the show was old and wore suits; here's a skinny kid with the beard, and I looked at him looking at me, and I said, "Well, what do you see?" And he said, "Not much." And with that, we became friends immediately, and we started hanging out together, and ultimately he became sort of an assistant.

He wouldn’t say that now, but because he was younger, and I've known George Lucas throughout all of his career, produced his first movies like THX 1138 and American Graffiti before he went off on his own to do the astonishing work that he did, and he's remained my friend. He's, he's one of the few directors who still lives, more or less, in Northern California. I think Salman knows him.

And did I answer your question?

No, absolutely, but you know, just following up on George is something you just told me which I found fascinating. But the more I hear your story, I'm connecting dots. Um, he—to you, aren’t just known for writing and directing these great films, there’s also a famous character in popular fiction that is based off of you.

Yeah, that’s Han Solo because George felt that I was—that I just took crazy, reckless chances and would jump off the mountain without knowing what was down there to land on, and that I would end up with no money. So he created—you can look it up, say Francis Coppola, Han Solo, and you’ll find out. So I'm sort of the dashing failure.

Do how do you—do you agree with that? Do you see yourself in Han Solo?

Well, I know what—you know, George is what I used to call—I always call him an old stick in the mud because George is very conservative, although his imagination is wild. But in his personal life, he’s pretty conservative, and I'm the opposite. I'm much more—uh, I'm not afraid of taking chances and taking risks because you—we, so far what we know you get this one life, and the worst thing that could possibly happen when you’re this old, old, old man or old woman is to say, "Be there getting ready to die saying, oh, I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that."

I wish—that’s—that’s—you don’t want to do that. In my case, I'm going to say, oh, I got to make movies, and I got to see my kids make movies, and I got to make wine, and I got to do experimental workshop, and I'm going to be so busy talking about all the things I got to do that when I die, I'm not going to notice. [Laughter] It.

And that’s my recommendation.

So, and I think that that connects to another thing that, um, and it’s pretty obvious when people hear you, but above and beyond this, I mean, learning itself, and I think this is a connection between yourself and what we try to do here at Khan Academy.

You know, at its core, learning is a bit of a passion of yours in and of it itself.

Well, it just totally makes sense. I mean, in life there are many wonderful things you can do—there are many pleasurable things. Many of them, unfortunately, have a bad side. If you’re drinking wine and, and, and alcohol in moderation can be, can be a wonderful thing, but too much will make you sick, or, or anything you do that brings pleasure.

If you think girls are great and you're running after girls, then your wife is going to—I've been married 53 years, so I know the value of having, having, uh, one wife for a lifetime.

Uh, but you—you know, so you can’t do that. So, you know, if you eat too much, you’ll just get disgustingly fat, which I have a problem with.

But, but, but in life, learning is as much a pleasure as any of those things, and there’s no bad, bad part. There’s no—it doesn’t bite you back. You can’t learn too much and over—oh, I’ve overlearned this month. I just don’t feel well.

The only thing I know, like learning like that, is music. I don’t know any way unless maybe if you’re listening to eardrum-breaking rock and roll, where it could be bad, but music is generally good for you.

And we can talk about that because there’s a philosophy that believes that music is the only way that we can really understand what’s really out there beyond our senses.

At any rate, so, so learning, I—I always thought when I was a little kid, if they said to me, you know, Francis, you’re about to learn about this and about that, and you’re going to learn about algebra, and algebra comes from the Arabs. It was called algebra, and they probably learned it from the Greeks, and it’s really an exciting way to—I—no one ever told me at the beginning of my education what a lot of joyous fun it was.

It always had me scared that I was going to get that visit from Miss Henchman to my father, and then I would get a, uh, you know, in those days, there was, you got hit if you got bad report cards, which I did.

So, so—but no one ever told me the exciting side of learning and that not only that, I used to, oh, how much school am I going to—you never out of school. I'm 77, and I learn so much every night. I'm learn—now I'm learning about genetics, which is really fascinating about the human genome and the chromosomes and the genes, and it's amazing to know that the scientists didn’t even understand it really until the '80s. I mean, that’s recent.

Some of you were probably, well, not you guys, but some of you were born in the '80s, and imagine they didn’t even understand how the gene worked, and they don’t entirely now. Well, that’s what I'm learning about now, and, and it’s—it’s thrilling. It’s so exciting.

And or to learn about history and understand really, you know, we all know that the world is troubled, uh, and that a lot of it focuses on, uh, the Middle East and Islam. But no one knows that really you have to go back almost to the First World War to understand the bad feelings that were engendered at that time.

And, uh, and also that Islam is not so—Islam was the, the Zenith of of intellectual study and science in the 13th section, uh, uh, 13th century in terms of, uh—well, it’s interesting because in Islam you have to pray five times a day, and you have to point when you pray towards Mecca, uh, so it was to their advantage to really understand time, so they knew they would pray at the right time each day.

So they studied the heavens to be masters of time, and the reason that the Islamic science knew so much about the heavens and time, uh, was for that reason, you know, it’s because they—and they wanted to point in the right direction, so they brought so much to us in these areas of, uh, astronomy and navigation.

Of course, the—the Islam—the those states were close to ancient Greece, so they preserved a lot of the knowledge that had been in Greek, and that’s how we have, uh, such things, you know, as algebra.

Yeah, and, and before we open it up for some questions from from the audience, how did how did we get connected? What, what was your con, how did you bump into Khan Academy?

Well, I ran across, uh, the name and that you were going to, that you had a course in algebra, and I said, why was I so stupid that I didn’t—I couldn’t grasp algebra? So I looked at the beginning algebra course, and I said, "Gee, if I had had this, I wouldn’t have failed algebra three times," and I understand no one ever explained it that there was—that this was a method for solving problems.

Uh, I always say, why do I care what x means? I want to know what something that I know means, you know, but no one explained to me that it was a—it was essentially a procedure, an algorithm, as you wish, to learn how to solve a problem.

They didn’t say that to me; they just said, "You're a bad trouble. You're flunking algebra."

And since I wasn’t—not at the school from the, the beginning, I was a new kid, I just assumed I was stupid, which is what they told me.

Yeah.

So with that, let’s let’s open it up for, for some questions.

Hi Mr. Coppola, I'm Karina. I'm on the pops team; you already know, we chatted. Um, thank you so much for coming. This has been educational and hilarious at the same time. Outside of human genetics, what learning do you feel like you still have to accomplish, and what excites you now about film?

Well, what excites me about film, there are many fields that interest me. I mean, history, uh, philosophy. Philosophy is the study of how to think. I mean, what’s better than to learn how to think?

Because you have to realize when these early, early people occupied the Earth, they didn’t—no one was there to teach them anything, so they had to decide for themselves using the thought process of, well, there’s Earth, there’s fire, there’s water, there’s air. Maybe these are the basic elements.

They just were using their ability to think to uncover, so that’s a wonderful field. But in terms of film, what’s interesting to me about film is that in the last, um, 15 years, film, which used to be a photochemical, which used to have photographic film that you’d put in a mechanical device and would take a series of stills, then you had to send it to the lab and develop it—in the last 15 years, all of the elements of filmmaking have changed from photomechanical and mechanical to digital electronic.

So the editing machine really is a computer now in which you compress the images and put it in a computer, and then you can cut them together as you wish. The camera has become so high in its quality that a digital camera is sufficient to take the picture, which only 35 mm film used to be able to take, and, uh, the projector in the theaters you go to when you go to the movie theaters, they’re not—they’re not loading up cans of film.

They’re also digital, and they’re possible to connect to them through satellites. So in the last 15 years, everything about filmmaking or cinema has changed totally to a different technology, and my feeling is that how could that happen without, to some degree, it change the essence of what a movie is?

Because now it’s being made so totally differently that perhaps there are new horizons that wouldn’t have been possible in the old days when it was really a piece of photographic film. New things that we can do, uh, that we couldn’t do before.

And that’s sort of, personally, what I'm, I'm experimenting with something I call live cinema.

What is live cinema? Live cinema means it’s, uh, in my case, a story is to be told through, uh, what looks like a movie, except the actors are actually doing it live in that moment.

Now, we all know that they do live television, like some of you probably saw Peter Pan, or um, The Sound of Music, but whenever you see a live show on television or a soap opera or something, it looks like television; it doesn’t behave like a movie.

Yet when we see a movie on television, we know it’s a movie, just even though it’s coming in the same way, it looks like a movie. The way the story is told is different; the shots are telling, uh, the action in a different way.

So what I'm interested in is learning how to, it to be cinema still, that it looks and behaves like a movie. You wouldn’t know that it’s even, uh, not a movie except the actors are doing it live in that moment, and to do that, uh, I did two workshops recently, one at UCLA and one in Oklahoma Community College where the school invited me to work with their students and let me do my, my idea there as an experimental workshop—what we call a proof of concept to see if you could do it.

And, um, and I learned so much that I wrote a little book that I'm just finishing called live cinema and his techniques, and it’s my hope personally that I would get the opportunity before I do the final, oh, I got to do this, I got to do that, um, to get to do some live cinema something I've written.

I want to remind you all that I used to be a drama counselor in a camp when I was 17, so I used to just all summer—I, first one, first week, I do plays with the six-year-olds, then I do plays with the seven and eight-year-olds, then the nine and ten-year-olds, and then finally at the end of the summer we’d bring the boys at 15 and the girls at 15 from the nearby girls camp and do a musical. Boy was that an experience!

Hi Mr. Coppola, my name is Gia; I work on the sustainability team here at Khan Academy. It’s such an honor to have you here. I'm a huge fan of your films. I also love films of your daughter, Sofia Coppola. I wanted to ask what kind of advice did you give her when she was starting out her film career, and also how did you balance your role both as her father and as co-producer of some of her early films? Thank you.

Well, Sofia was always a very, um, precocious little kid. She was, uh, even at age six and seven, she was—I remember I once took her when she was maybe five or four. We all had to make—on Godfather 2, we had to go to the Dominican Republic, and we flew in this plane, and we got off in Miami, and it was really hot and, uh, humid, and I said to her, "Sofia, how do you like Miami?"

And she said, "It’s not my Amy; it’s your Amy."

So I knew I was in for a ride with Sofia, but it’s interesting; she came to me when she was around 21 or 22, and she said, "Dad, you know I’m interested in fashion and I’m interested in fashion photography, and she’d done some modeling and designing clothes, and I’m interested in writing stories, but I really want to be a painter and paint. Am I just a dilettante?"

And I said to her, you know, parents always make the mistake of wanting their kids to focus in on something. I'm telling you the opposite: don’t focus; do everything you love because if you learn about everything you love, one day what you’re meant to do in your life will just come together for you.

It will be something that makes use of all the different things. Someday you’ll find what you want to do, and it will involve story and it will involve fashion and all those things.

And it turned out that a few years later she made a short film at her high school, and, uh, I could see that she had a lot of talent.

So I do think that parents often—because, you know, we in the past there was a terrible depression way before in the '30s, but people were trying traumatized that their kids needed to study something they could make a living with.

And, you know, the best way to do that is just don’t specialize. I think people may disagree, but don’t specialize too young because being interested in one thing might stop you from thinking you could be interested in nothing; be interested in everything you can be.

Everything you love, you should learn about because then one day it will all come together and be useful for whatever it is you choose you want to do with your life, and that was the case with Sofia.

Hello, I'm Sam from Khan Lab School, and I was wondering if you could travel back in time to middle school, would you do anything differently?

What’s middle school? What grade is middle school? Sixth grade? Well, sixth, I was—sixth grade, I was paralyzed in bed, watching television, watching television day and night, and that was before the remote control, so I had was stuck. I couldn’t walk to change it. I was a prisoner of, uh, of mid-'50s television.

But, you know, my school—you; I went to 22 schools before I went to college, so I, I was always—I felt like an outsider. I, I had no friends at all. You don’t have time to make friends when you’re there for six months, and I always did badly, so I was always in trouble with my father.

I wish that I had the sense to say when he was coming at me seeing my report card with his belt folded in his hand, I wish I had said, "But you take me out of school every six months, so how can I possibly get good marks?" So I was a sad lonely kid through middle school and wanted to have friends, uh, and kept moving to different places.

And when you move as far away as, like, from New York to California, it’s really different. In those days, LA—Los Angeles was so different from—uh, they didn’t have baseball; they didn’t have comic book stores; they didn’t have White Castle hamburgers, and, and so I was just miserable at your age.

I hate to say, but Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, the, the writer—the famous American writer said that if you want to be a writer, you should have an unhappy childhood. So I had an unhappy childhood.

Hi, I'm Anne from Lab School, and I was just wondering what were some struggles that you had directing your first movie?

Well, my real first movie was a little horror film that I made in Ireland when I was about—I mean a feature film when I was about 21. And, um, you know, I guess what struck me was I always have been a person with a lot of good ideas or a good imagination, and I would always see all these things.

But when you make a film, you have to take what’s in your mind and what is your imagination, and you have to find practical ways to do it, and it’s not always as easy as you think. That’s kind of what they say in car terminology, when the rubber meets the road.

In other words, the world of imagination and fantasy is wonderful because you have no limits. It’s just as you could just cook something up in your mind, but then to translate that into a form that other people can see and enjoy involves a lot of practical stuff—of scheduling, and budget, and, and, uh, you know, your—the shot you had in mind you can’t really fit it in; it’s not like you thought.

So you have to learn as part of the creative process to learn to be inventive and flexible to try to—there’s two rows. There’s what you imagine and to what you can do, and you have to be the one between those and use whatever cleverness you can to to get there.

So I—when I made my first film, I realized that that the practical side was really very important or you wouldn’t get the great ideas in the film.

So, you know, just to close out, and I think all of us would love to sit here all day and continue to, to all, you know, the whole week. Um, but, but just to finish off, uh, you know there’s some parallels between what we’re doing and—and things that you’re interested in, and that you have experience in, especially as you, you just talked about film going into a new era with the technology.

Obviously, we're trying to do things along those lines in education, trying to reach a lot of folks. What advice, in any form, would you have to everyone here, both the students and the members of Khan Academy, as we go off on our journey?

Well, all human beings and all animals really seem to be good at play. We like to play; it’s a natural thing we do. And, uh, we have to realize that work that we do later in life is really a development of that.

So I try to keep the work I do as much like play as I can. I can make a quick demonstration if you want—a quick—absolutely!

Could I have—um, where can I get about this group of kids in a circle? Where is there will to do that? You want to get in a circle here? Go over there where we can see you!

Okay, this is an acting exercise. All right, so in a—no, no, not that many—just the—on, okay? How many you want?

Well, everyone's sitting down; here, go make a circle over there—I would do it with everyone, but they—I don’t see a space. Now make a circle; all hold your hands in a circle.

Okay, good now make the circle as wide as you can, come out to me right now. Is that about it? A little more?

Okay, now there’s an acting exercise. Actors have to be very concentrated because they have to appear when someone says something to them they have to make it seem as though they’re seeing it for the first time.

Like if you say something to play, it’s in the script, so you know you’re going to say it, but how do you do? So we play a game, uh, when I work with actors, I try to make it as much fun as like this game is called sound ball, and the way it’s played—if I go like this, I have an imaginary ball, right?

I'm going to throw it to you; you catch it. Now here's the—now throw it back to me. Okay, now I'm going to throw it to you, but I'm going to make a sound when I throw it, ready?

Bop! Now when you catch it, you catch it with bop! Bop!

And then you throw it to me; you give it its own sound, your own sound. You want to—boop!

Okay, so when you catch it, you catch it with the sound that person threw with you, and this is to teach actors concentration to because they don’t know when a line is going to come to them.

All right, so here we go! Can you do it? Throw the ball to him, throw the ball to anyone you want! B!

Make a sound—yeah, catch it with the sound—yes, and with another sound! Make it louder sound!

Oh, you got to do it a little faster. Go ahead! Z! Can you do it faster?

Z, don’t make it hard—make the sounds clear so they can do it! Now, what we’re going to do, we're going to do the same thing; we’re going a little faster, and I’m going to throw a second ball in!

Oh, really high! Ready? All started! Ready? Popop, popping, bing! Z, boop!

You do it once more, but you get the idea; you have to be aware if you’re an actor, you have to be aware and not look like you’re aware, but if someone’s going to throw you the ball, you want to be there to catch it.

You ready? I'm going to do it again! Popop, bop-ing! Sop! Bing! Bop! Bop!

Zip! Zip! Bing! Bing! Boop! Boop!

You get the idea! Thank you very much!

But there are a million acting games called theater games that we could play, and whenever possible, if you can work and develop something that you want to develop like, in this case, concentration, it’s better to do it in the form of play because then the day becomes fun.

So I try to make all the work, especially creative work, 'cause that’s so much fun, as you know, uh, as much play as possible.

Awesome! Well, thank you! Thank you so much; I think this is going to be a huge treat. This was a treat for us, and I think everyone watching on Facebook and online—thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!