Self-Help Guru Mark Manson Talks Bringing ‘The Subtle Art’ To The Screen

The cinematic adaptation of Mark Manson’s classic self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k that we’ve got is not the first stab at bringing the tome to the screen.

“We got all sorts of pitches and crazy stuff,” the author recalled. “Reality TV shows, sitcoms, kids shows, just crazy stuff. With 90 percent of them, I was like, ‘What? Are these people high? What are they thinking?'”

“My goal with being in this world is to get the ideas out. I don’t need to have a reality TV show on some cable channel that features me jumping up and down and going into people’s houses or whatever.”

The Subtle Art movie is a vibrant vision and brisk journey that brings the book to life in a whole new way. Landing in theaters and then on VOD in January, the biggest sales month for Manson’s wisdom, is perfect.

I caught up with the accidental guru to discuss the film’s winning off-the-wall concept and why Disappointment Panda had to be a part of it.

Simon Thompson: I first read The Subtle Art a number of years ago, and when I heard that it had been turned into a film, it was genuinely one of those moments where I stopped and was like, ‘How the hell are they going to do that?’ It’s a film. It’s not a traditional documentary, and it’s not a TED Talk-esque self-help tutorial. It’s unique and almost as if the audience experiences this rather than just watching it.

Mark Manson: That was a goal from the beginning, and it was one of the conversations I had with Matthew Metcalfe, the producer, and then later on with Nathan Price, the director. A big goal of the book when I wrote it was that I wanted this to be a self-help book that scrambles and disrupts everything that people understand about a self-help book and creates something very new and unique out of it. We wanted to apply that same ethos to the film. You don’t want me on stage with a mic wrapped around my face getting people to stand up and cheer. We also didn’t want just to do a documentary because there’s not as much hard material to access as you would with a documentary. You’re not digging up archival footage and talking to professors and stuff; most of it is just stories, anecdotes, and timeless concepts. We want to have fun with it. We wanted to play around and do some crazy things to make it funny and weird, and I feel like we did that, so it makes me happy to hear you say that.

Thompson: When some of the ideas for the vision were presented to you, like you in a pool in the middle of what is effectively a Busby Berkley-style musical number, what was going through your head?

Manson: Nathan came up with that scene as this big dramatic intro, and it’s really funny, actually. When I initially signed on, and we did the contract with GFC Films to make it, my agent, being a very good agent, forced a bunch of clauses into the agreement where I had creative input and veto over anything I didn’t want to do, I must consult on the script and all this stuff. When we sat down and started making the film, Nathan and I had a couple of meetings, and he started running all these ideas past me. It took about 15 minutes in the first meeting for me to realize that I didn’t know a f**king thing about filmmaking (laughs).

Thompson: There are plenty of people in the industry who are in that boat and would not admit it, so thank you for that.

Manson: (Laughs) That’s so funny. He started reading all these ideas by me, and I just looked at him like, ‘Alright, dude, it sounds good, so f**k it. Let’s go for it.’ I thought it was pretty zany and off the wall, but I wanted it to be a little crazy and weird and catch people off guard. If that scene is what it took to achieve that, then sure, why not?

Thompson: You wrote the original book, so you chose what to put in there. Being interviewed for this, and a lot of this is interviews with you, how comfortable were you? It’s different in many ways to writing words on a page, and not everything from the book is featured in the movie and vice versa, and there are some changes in how it’s presented.

Manson: That’s a great question. The actual process was very comfortable. At this point, I’ve done a million interviews like this and talked about my life, so that felt very comfortable. I realized very early on in the process that I just needed to trust these guys and go with it. They told me, ‘We’re going to interview you for three full days, so it’s probably 15 to 20 hours of interviews. We’re going to build the movie around that, and we’re going to have animations, we’re going to have these crazy scenes, and hire actors.’ I’ve seen their previous movies, and they were good. During the actual interviewing itself, I felt fine, but I wondered how it was all going to fit into everything. Was I going to embarrass myself? Was I going to look like look ridiculous? I just had to trust that they knew what they were doing.

Thompson: It was filmed in New Zealand during the pandemic, so you had to spend two weeks in quarantine in a room on your own. After two weeks alone, being able to talk to other people for hours every day must have been a nice change.

Manson: The quarantine was a pretty intense experience, although it’s funny because I was living in New York City at the time. New York City during the pandemic was awful. The beauty was that the visa to get into New Zealand to do the film lasted six months, so my wife and I stayed there for that entire time. There was a lot of anxiety initially, like, ‘Okay, Mark’s coming over, and he’s in quarantine, and we’ve got to get the shoot ready.’ I told him, ‘No, guys, I’m not going back. There’s no way of going back anytime soon so take your time. Find the right locations, get all the equipment ready, and if you need another month, take another month.’ I had been there for six weeks when the filming happened, but it was great because it allowed me a bunch of time to sit down with Nathan and talk through ideas and structure and figure all that stuff out.

Thompson: Let’s talk about the discussions and decisions around what to keep from the book, what to change, and shifting the emphasis because the film is slightly different.

Manson: We benefited greatly from the book, having been out for so long. By the time we did shoot the film, I had a good five years or so of feedback on what parts of the book resonated with people. It was also clear what parts of the book I had never really heard from people about. I knew what my greatest hits were by the time we got there, which helped a lot in understanding what took priority when it came to putting things into the film. We went through and shot almost everything in the book, about 90 percent, and we also added a few things that weren’t in there. In terms of deciding what stories took precedence and what ideas and principles should be front and center, a lot of that was based on years and years of reader feedback I’ve gotten.

Thompson: I read the book several years ago, and it has helped me in two key life moments. The first was when my wife and I relocated from the UK to the US, and the other was when I had a heart attack in 2021. That, and the lessons in the book, helped change my life for the better. It’s great to know that these stories influence this phenomenon’s evolution.

Manson: I’ve heard so many crazy stories. It’s funny because my editor, when we were pitching the book, we had meetings with seven or eight different publishers. We were going around New York and taking these meetings, and they were all like, ‘I’m not sure if that’s the right fit,’ but then we walked into Luke Dempsey’s office. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I’m a cancer survivor, and I’m going to publish your book. I don’t care how much it costs. I’m publishing your book.’ That alone made me go like, ‘Okay, he gets it. We don’t even need to have the meeting.’ That he said that showed me he understood that the biggest struggles and pains in our life give us perspective on what matters. If you don’t have those struggles, or you don’t have that pain, you rob yourself of that clarity.

Thompson: You have had several approaches to turn the book into something over the years. Have they all been similar ideas, or have they varied wildly?

Manson: (Laughs) We got all sorts of pitches. Reality TV shows, sitcoms, kids shows, just crazy stuff. With 90 percent of them, I was like, ‘What? Are these people high? What are they thinking?’ First of all, I have never had aspirations or goals to be in movies or TV. To me, this is just a nice perk of the occupation and the book’s success. I feel like a tourist in this industry. When GFC came along, it was a production company that specialized in making documentaries about books and doing it in a more story-centric way instead of just a bunch of dry interviews with academics and experts. That made sense to me. My goal with being in this world is to get the ideas out. I don’t need to have a reality TV show on some cable channel that features me jumping up and down and going into people’s houses or whatever. I guess you could say I don’t give a f**k. If the book is going to be in this medium, I wanted it to feel like it was in its natural environment. It’s not being twisted and contorted to fit some studio’s idea of whatever they wanted to do.

Thompson: Were you quite surprised that Universal wanted to pick this up and distribute it in the way that they have? It’s a major studio putting it out in theaters in this climate.

Manson: I’m as surprised as anybody that this is happening. When I did accept the offer to work with GFC, my agent told me as an aside, ‘By the way, 99 percent of these things never get made or never come out, so don’t get too excited,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ I had zero expectations from then on out. Everything from actually shooting the film to it getting picked up by Universal to it having a theatrical release, every step of the way, it’s just been like, ‘Oh, wow. Really? Sweet. Awesome.’ I did not have that on my bingo card, so I’m thrilled, and this feels like a very fortunate series of circumstances I have very little to do with.

Thompson: It works on the big screen. I saw it in a theatrical environment, and it really does work in that space. It’s also landing at the beginning of the year when many people focus on improvement and goals. Many fail to sustain that, even with the best of intentions. This is proof that if you commit to it, it can create real change in your life, but it won’t be easy and won’t happen overnight.

Manson: From a pure marketing perspective, January is the biggest month for self-help, period. It’s my biggest month for book sales and the biggest month for traffic on my website, so it’s a logical time for a movie like this to come out. Like the book, the film offers an important message around this time of year. If you’re setting goals, make sure you’re setting them for the right reasons because if you don’t, you’re not going to stick to them and think hard about what you actually want. I guess you could say that what we think we want is us running on autopilot.

Thompson: At the end of the movie, there is a phone number. If I call that number, what will I get?

Manson: (Laughs) That’s a great question. I don’t know. I might have to call it, I guess.

Thompson: That connects to the Disappointment Panda from the book. I love that character, and seeing them feature in the movie was great.

Manson: (Laughs) Disappointment Panda was a huge hit. In many of our early conversations, as soon as we knew we would make the film, one of the first conversations was, ‘Okay, how are we going to use the panda? Obviously, the panda has to be in it. How are we going to do this?’ It works really well.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is in select theaters from Wednesday, January 4, 2023, and Digital Download from Tuesday, January 10, 2022