Leadership Moves with Mallika Dutt Episode 14: Money, Movies, and Movements with Abigail E. Disney Transcript Mallika Dutt: Welcome to Leadership Moves, presented by Inter-Connected. I'm Mallika Dutt. How do people of wealth leverage their status to advance social justice? How do we use the power of storytelling to shift economic paradigms? In this episode of Leadership Moves, join Abby Disney and myself in a candid conversation about Money, Movies, and Movements. Good morning everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome to this next conversation that we're going to be having for the Build Leadership Move series. I'm really excited because today we're joined by Abigail Disney, who is -- I mean, there's all these very formal descriptions of Abby that I can share with you, but here's what I would like to say. Abby is one of those people who really takes storytelling and meaning making to a whole other level of engagement. Yes, she comes from the Disney family. So film and storytelling is an ancestral legacy for her. She's taken that to a place of really calling in conversations about justice, about equality, beyond that really a new way in which we can all live together on this planet. She's done an extraordinary amount of work around economic justice issues. She's going to talk about her current film that is really challenging the inequities and the economic systems, particularly here in the United States, but really which has global implications. She has produced and directed films that have really been quite iconic, made history. She won an Emmy for Armor of Light. She produced Pray the Devil Back to Hell. She is constantly rabble- rousing around wealth, demanding more taxes for people of wealth as part of movements that have looked at how we address Covid from more equitable perspectives and demanding that people of wealth be taxed more. And of course she is an incredible philanthropist and does her philanthropy very creatively through a number of different vehicles and organizations. And most recently, she has co-founded something called Level Forward that is investing in cutting edge media of different sorts and bringing more of these voices into the public sphere. Aside from all of that, she's one of the smartest, most generous and funny people that I know. So I am so delighted to be having this conversation with you here today Abby, welcome. Abigail Disney: Thank you. Thank you, Mallika for that lovely introduction. Mallika Dutt: Abby, I'd like to begin with having a conversation with you about something that you're passionately engaged in right now, and that's the film that you're making about inequality at this moment, which draws from your heritage, from your Disney identity, as well as your commitment to social justice. So can you tell us a little bit more about the film, what it's about, and what's exciting you about it these days? Abigail Disney: Well, first of all, the idea of my Disney heritage cracks me up a little bit. But yeah, it's a really unique name to grow up with, and it has really shaped a lot of my life both for good and bad. And one of the people who works in Anaheim -- I mean, I grew up going to Disneyland with my grandfather holding his hand. We would go in the back entrance, and so we would meet all the cast members, and it was a beautiful thing. And everyone knew him, and he knew everyone and he asked about their families, was the CEO of the company who insisted everyone call him Roy. So these are the memories I have as a child. He taught us that those were the hardest working people you'll ever, ever meet, and you better respect them or there's hell to pay for it. And he always made a point of picking up garbage. I know that sounds like a trivial thing but he went out of his way to ensure that people saw him do that, because he wanted to make sure everybody know that the CEO didn't think he was too good to pick up a piece of garbage. So flash forward to two years ago, I get a Facebook message, and I don't generally read my Facebook messages, but it's from this guy named Ralph who said the company is really intransigent, we're trying to get a new contract with the Union and the company, and they just won't move. Is there anything you can do to help us? And at the time, I answered him with like, well, no, I don't have a role at the company, and they really don't care what I think. So I said, no, I can't help you. And then I kind of didn't sleep for a while because I had to admit to myself that there wasn't exactly nothing I could do, because I still had the opportunity to kind of raise my voice. It's just I didn't really want to do that. But I did. And it led to a whole series of newspaper articles and things. So we picked up a camera and we went out to Anaheim and we met with Ralph and a couple of the other people that work with him. And we've been looking at their lives and what it's like to come home as a cast member when you're not really sure you can feed your family, what it's like to be losing your housing over and over again. What it's like to be 20 years old and really want to go to college, but there's just not enough money to do that. So we're going to be talking about that, but what we want to do is use Disney as a thing that draws people in and then make sure they are only doing what every company in America does. They are only lifting everything they're doing from every business school textbook. And the problem is Disney but it's also not Disney; the problem is the way we think we're supposed to operate businesses now. And it's the result of 50 years of -- well, more than 50 years but the more immediate version is the result of 50 years of conscious reconstructing of the American economy to center capital and ownership. And so I'll be using animation, I'll be using storytelling, I'll be using talking heads telling us the history of this, so hopefully we can move some hearts. Mallika Dutt: So Abby, you believe deeply in the power of storytelling for shifting hearts and minds. And this example that you just shared with us is a testimony to that commitment. Can you talk a little bit about why you think storytelling is so important? What do you think it allows us to do? And what is your -- as the director, as the creative mind and the creative voice, what is the way in which you enter into that space of storytelling? What is it that you're trying to bring alive? Abigail Disney: Well, I always say it's not hearts and minds because it's hearts. We drag our minds behind our hearts, but we make our decisions with our hearts. And very often that's a good decision making process because it's rooted in the heart. But when fear takes over and other things took over -- storytelling is everything, I'm sorry to say, because narrative drives so much of our decision making. And most of the world is now sort of enslaved by a very specific narrative about the way the economy works. And so we've been taught in the United States that the economy is like the weather. It's just a thing that happens. And so you really need to get in there and interrupt the narratives that are disabling people from defending their own interests and from speaking up for people who can't speak for themselves, and that's really what I'm trying to do. You use one narrative to replace another one. And what I have found is when you're using storytelling to interrupt these destructive narratives, you have to speak all to the heart. What I found was every time in a film that I've resorted to a little bit of explaining to the front part of the brain, people kind of step out of your film a little bit, and it's tempting to want to lecture the audience. But if you can invite them into a story, and if you can get them to feel that thing called flow, where they sort of are losing themselves in the story, that's when they open up the most, and that's when they're open to new narratives and new ideas. Mallika Dutt: How does this approach of really speaking to people's hearts and bringing new meaning and new narratives into very old constructs for how we have been doing, not just the economy, but everything in our world, how does that then play into the voice that you carry into corporate spaces? Because you've also been very -- out there, very vociferous, very articulate with other economic leaders, with CEOs, with other people of wealth. And so you've been speaking to this agenda for a long time. Tell us a little bit about what it's like to be presenting the counter narrative when you are inside the boardroom or inside a corporate space, and how this approach of speaking to hearts through moviemaking and through filmmaking connects with that other approach? Abigail Disney: I've been invited into boardrooms kind of all my life, and from a very young age I was engaged in corporate decision making around our family's assets and engaged in a dialogue in our house about business decision making.