The Leaning Factories 281
To make the environment as creative as possible, 1
Rocket Road had to be completely renovated. Elon him-
self picked the colors, the furniture, the spaceship-looking
trashcans, and the toilets. “I was looking for creative uri-
nals. It’s a nice pot,” Elon said.^54 The factory became so
futuristic that a couple of scenes from a movie were filmed
inside of it.
Elon enjoyed watching the moviesChicagoandLordof
the Rings: The Two Towers.^307 But he doesn’t like movies
that rely on character stupidity in order to advance an
already implausible plot. “They come across a downed
moose that obviously wasn’t killed by a bear and then one
woman finds bloody claw marks in the stone wall because
some kind of creature was so desperate to escape something
chasing it and she doesn’t even say, ‘Hey, look at this, this
is weird?’” Elon said about a bad movie he saw. “Didn’t
anybody in the group go down into that cave with a bad,
bad feeling? It’s like I can see right through the story, it’s
like I can see right around behind it to this idiot who’s
sitting at the typewriter inflicting this crap on me in the
first place.”162,170
One morning, Elon read a strange e-mail. “Will you
read this for me,” Elon asked Justine. “I’m not misreading
it, right? That is the actor?” she asked. In the e-mail, the
star of the movieIron Man, Robert Downey Jr, asked if
he could visit Elon as part of his research to learn how
to live and act like an engineering genius.^155 “When I was
trying to bring the character of genius billionaire Tony
Stark to the big screen in Iron Man, I had no idea how