What the Psycho shower scene teaches us about creative inspiration
Stills from the shower scene in Pscyho
Our knowledge of creativity is mostly very hazy, and so is the language we use. For instance, inspiration is a widely used term with multiple, mysterious meanings.
Inspiration can be a mood. You’re feeling inspired, feeling creative.
Inspiration can be that lightbulb moment when an idea suddenly appears.
Most importantly, inspiration can be when we experience someone’s creative work, then use it to create something new. How exactly this works is not something that gets talked about.
That’s what I want to delve into here. How do we draw inspiration from other artists?
The inspiration for “Good Times”
Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards of the band Chic
Niles Rodgers from the band Chic drew inspiration from a song called “Hollywood Swinging” to write the famous and often sampled, “Good Times.” I explore this further in Everything is a Remix.
Rodgers copied the bassline from “Hollywood Swinging,” but after the first three notes, he changes it entirely. The two songs have little in common other than these few notes.
That’s inspiration in action. You copy a certain, specific element of a work, transform it, and combine it with other material.
The inspiration for Bane
Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises
Here’s another example, this one from the realm of acting.
Thom Hardy didn’t have much to draw from when conceiving the voice for Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. One of the few things he knew was that Bane is of Latin origin.
Hardy looks for a Latin character to emulate and finds a boxer named Bartley Gorman. But after Gorman’s voice gets filtered through Hardy’s imagination, there’s only a subtle similarity left. You can hear Gorman speaking here and Hardy’s Bane voice.
Without knowing this story, nobody would ever connect these voices.
Inspiration is simply this…
In all these examples, copying is the crucial starting point. Remove that bit of copying and they would have created something utterly different.
Inspiration is creative copying. It’s copying a specific part of someone’s work, transforming it, and merging it into your work.
One of the most extraordinary examples of creative copying is from the film Raging Bull. Martin Scorsese used the Psycho shower scene as the template for the storyboard for a scene where the character gets savagely beaten. Some of the compositions are similar and the pace is similar. But again, nobody knew about this copying until Scorcese revealed it.
That’s creative copying. Pick a specific element, copy it, merge it into your work, transform it to meet your needs.