The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 647 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today I am so lucky to have two Scriptnotes producers in the studio with me. Megana Rao, welcome back.
Megana Rao: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
John: Drew, of course, you’re always here.
Drew Marquardt: You’re stuck with me.
John: We are doing a compendium episode, a best of things. Drew, as you were putting this together, you realized that this is familiar territory here.
Drew: It’s an endings compendium. Going through, I found out that Megana had already made an endings compendium in Episode 524, which was very good, but I’m gonna try and one-up you.
Megana: I so welcome that. Yes and me, please.
Drew: That’s the best way to do it.
John: Talk to me about the things you chose for this, which Megana may have already chosen for her episode too.
Drew: We’re starting out with a clip from Episode 44, which is breaking down how an ending works. It’s a really great primer for what you should be looking for in endings. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 170 and talk about twist endings. There was a great article that provided a framework for that. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 366 to talk about denouements, that little moment after you’re climax where you’re wanting to wrap everything up. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 392, talking about how that last moment or last image develops and how to fix an ending that’s not working.
John: The reason why this is relevant for me this week is I was just doing the Sundance Labs. One of the things you do in Sundance Labs traditionally is show a scene from your movies or movies you enjoy. The theme for this lab session was endings. Susannah Grant was talking about the ending of Erin Brockovich. It’s not just about winning the case. It’s all the things that happen after that and how you tie up all those relationships and things that actually matter to your audience. Endings were on my mind.
It’s great to have both of you here for this. We’ll start with this Episode 44 clip and then hear bloops between them. But the three of us will be back here at the end for our One Cool Things, little wrap-up, and then we’ll do our Bonus Segment. We’re gonna talk about reunions, which is something that happens after an ending.
Drew: Yeah, like right now.
John: Yeah.
[Episode 44 Clip]
John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start looking at writing screenplays and start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re gonna walk away from your movie with. They’re gonna walk away from your movie with an ending.
And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.
Craig: I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first 5 pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s gonna end. That’s insane to me.
John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”
The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line. It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. And so often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.
So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first 10 pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody or they just have to finish. And so those last 10 pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started, which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.
My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”
Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right, because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this – not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this – and that ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.
And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected – it always seems to me it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.
That’s the point is that there is an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was, so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re gonna get to, like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City, because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.
Craig: I’d like to see that movie.
John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence. What is the need in Wizard of Oz?
Craig: But that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away.
John: That’s right.
Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just gotta want to go back home. I know you ran away. You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”
That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending – it’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning. We’d be done with this thing.” But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point, the ending is defined by faith and decision.
And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies – and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re gonna cross the streams. We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t gonna do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.
John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s gonna be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie, they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.
Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about – sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.
John: And we are specifically talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we see? How are we gonna meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?
And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.
Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing – and frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning, because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.
John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise but was actually very illuminating, because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie, because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.
Craig: I love it.
John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.
And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.
Craig: I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean I know what the character thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.
When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life – and Pixar does this better than anybody. And they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films.
I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s gonna leave that and go back. And I like that, but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go. They design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl – the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.
And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with Boy Scout; flying, talking dogs; and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.
John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines. And the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?
And so quite early on, I had to figure out like, what is it that the son can — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing that that’s going to be incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that. I could feel that. Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to, what are the steps that are going to get me to that point?
And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, in this case Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.
Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that ending – the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.
John: This talk of endings reminds me of – I met John Williams. At USC, the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.
And John Williams made this really great point, that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s your ending. And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.
Craig: Oh, for sure.
John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.
Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumb’s up. But if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer.
And similarly, when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie, when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.
John: But what I want to make sure that people who are listening – we are not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point, and so one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.
Craig: Yeah, and maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside in fact he was awful, and in a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he just died alone. And yet there’s something nice about the image, because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there.
[Episode 170 Clip]
John: So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley. Whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.
This blog post talks through twist endings. It defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.” And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies, because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.
Craig: Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal of identity, in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster.
John: The Crying Game where the woman you love is not –
Craig: Is not a woman.
John: Ta-da.
Craig: Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.
John: That would also maybe play into the third version, which is the reversal of perception. And reversal of perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was.
My movie The Nines has that aspect, where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all.” But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.
Craig: Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder, in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.
John: Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen, because in some ways, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal, but a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes, you’ve spent eight hours on this thing, and then to say like, “Oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you,” might feel like a betrayal.
Craig: No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.
One of the other twist endings he identifies is the reversal of motive. I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. He cites Seven, where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.
John: Obviously, reversal of motive is often found in comedies also, where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. In the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack, like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen, and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products. Their motive was very different, and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting.
And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect, because you’re like, “Oh, that’s the twist,” and then the next scene, you’re going to see that actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting. So sometimes you can misdirect twice or you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.
Craig: Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. What just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks… She is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there undercover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.
And here he also has reversal of fortune. This one was a little – I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory. What you thought you were going to get, you’re not quite getting.
John: Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory, or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar, who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” And so this is basically, there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly that Twilight Zone kind of fiction may have that, like suddenly at the end, the great and short version, where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.
Craig: Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending. One of my favorite Simpsons jokes, it was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it, so he doesn’t have to go to Hell. But then he does finish it and he ends up in Hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment, where he’s put on a conveyor belt and-
John: And force-fed doughnuts.
Craig: … force-fed donuts, except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many donuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes.” Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment. And then we have reversal of fulfillment.
John: Which I found the most challenging of the ones he described, and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.
Craig: Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.
John: It’s not only that they’ve done this, but one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.
Craig: Right, that the gifts are now useless for each other. Yeah, that works. That sort of, kind of is also-
John: It’s ironic too.
Craig: It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.
John: Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at, what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist, and so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending, the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”
So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information, and then at the end, providing it, and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s the only thing your story has going for it, it’s unlikely, I think, to be completely satisfying.
Craig: That’s right. I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all. It does not.
The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie whodunit. All of Agatha Christie’s stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it, and you never could figure out who did it, and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time. Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her.
And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high-wire act to do when you… We all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I wonder what the twist is.” I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, “Well-“
John: “Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.”
Craig: Yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.
John: There’s a meta level of expectation, that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending. So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, “Oh, but that’s not really true.” And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.
What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names, because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him, because three times is certainly a pattern.
Craig: No, for sure. Frankly, it’s started to feel a little desperate. We don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently, and then we can enjoy it along with them.
By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this mystery writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization, because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft, because the twist…
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first-person account. A guy is living in this little town. Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him. He describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator. And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.
John: Yeah, we like that. In many ways, I think that’s that kind of reversal of expectation. That’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. You thought this was going to play by the rules, and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens. It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.
Craig: It’s my One Cool Thing.
John: Oh my god. Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is. I know what it’s parodying.
Craig: Repeatedly.
John: Repeatedly. And then, through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.
Craig: Indeed.
[Episode 366 Clip]
Craig: My fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. It’s not, with me, as always, any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.
It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say, “How does the movie end?” Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax, when things have settled down. And there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.
I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you. If you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.
John: Great. “Denouement” is a French word. “Denoue” is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something, because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created, sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages. Correct, Craig?
Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.
I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say, okay, what is the difference here? And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.
In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing. That’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. And at the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0.
The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last, that this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person. This is the new reality.
John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally, and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing, or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.
Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding, because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says, “Okay.” We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. They have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?”
Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax: Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement: Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.
John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end, and Manny’s final question is, “So what are we doing for New Years?” It’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before, that the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.
In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son is now born and saying like, “Oh, did all that really happen?” and the father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.
They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking, “The characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.”
Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her.
And the denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” But what’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is okay. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name. And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there, and it could have – she was a criminal – but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on.
And then she punches a guard in the throat, because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie. And it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief, you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. And here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat, because you change but you don’t change completely, because that feels gloppy, right?
But both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.
John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A-plot of your movie. Your A-plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally. It’s how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.
Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important.
For instance, if your theme is “all you need is love,” then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there.
If your problem is, “Okay, my character is Vanessa. And Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved,” which is an incredibly trite movie – I apologize to Vanessa – at the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success, because then I start to wonder, okay, what was the lesson here?
Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes. The denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.
John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, so if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.
Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather, letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big (sings) and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely.
The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is okay.
John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories. We don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.
Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film, you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring, because you’ve not been safely placed back down.
There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started.” And if you are not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.
Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.
John: Let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script, I will generally jump forward and write the last 10 pages, so some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.
Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often, you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last 10 pages, which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.
Craig: That just infuriates me, the very thought of it, because I obsess over those the way I obsess over the first 10. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie, essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.
John: Probably so.
Craig: I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way. Creatively, obviously, inside the robot management, I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But yeah, I’m a big planner.
John: I’m very instinctual, and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.
Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.
John: Let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement, because the denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationship, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?
Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit. Whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job, when they see the last bit of the movie, they will in their minds add on the following words: “And thus it shall always be.” And if you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad.
John: True.
Craig: Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there.
Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this (sings). It’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “Our life is hard and it’s tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go, and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say “and thus it shall always be,” meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place – let’s just call it 1910 – is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be.
It doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be “and sadly ever after.” But the point is it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important, because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.
John: Yeah. Everyone is going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding; so whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.
[Episode 392 Clip]
John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last beat has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.
Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it doesn’t change much for me. But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.
John: I start with it too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry, that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.
But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much “we shot the script,” those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change, because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and where it’s delivered it to.
Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.
Craig: To start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. The last shot really is about sunsets, but of course it’s not.
For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.
We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. She would cite how sometimes she would ask people what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other, and there’s pride.
Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.
John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up.
And way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question and someone asked us, “I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” And my answer was, “You should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.”
And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of “this is where I think the movie lands” is crucial. It’s like “the plane is going to land on this runway” tells you, okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.
Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle, you don’t have a thing to trace, were you a good circle drawer?
John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?
Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.
If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click, connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I think it’s just Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind, but also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.
John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.
So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about. The narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.
Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable.” Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound. We start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place, because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.
John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy. Each of the books has had that sense of reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.
Being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different, because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.
Craig: Yeah. Reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.
John: It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.
Craig: It is. But then when you look back, you go, “Oh yeah, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that all along. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.
John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.
Craig: You should do it.
John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.
Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.
John: Silver Bear.
Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel at the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope?
The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story. And the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you.
I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that.” That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-
John: For sure.
Craig: … and often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here is how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “You know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, “Yeah, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.
John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen, that they’ve not seen. You’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.
In a pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.
Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot…
For instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.” See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning.
If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.
John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there; actually painting out the world so we can see like, okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.
And so in the script stage, what was a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.
Craig: Yeah. I hate being the guy who’s like, “Would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this?” But the last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and starting a new hope, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though, it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. The journey was this is a kid who is all on his own, who forms a new family, so going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the victory.
Craig: Dead family.
John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than the – I imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.
Craig: Yeah, it would be like (sings). You’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family. We’re friends. We did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”
John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters, things just feel different. Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.
In some cases, it’s reshoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways. And it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.
They’re thinking about, “What does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here?” And the music is going to be a big factor. There’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.
Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention, because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.
In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my god, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship.” Okay. Now, we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.
But the ending can never be just, “Do you know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.
John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or an extra thing. And generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.
Craig: How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.
John: Sometimes though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that, it’s like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.
It was really talking about, like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie, because doing that, you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.”
Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. If something is not working in that, where your circle is supposed to connect up, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong or the beginning is wrong or they’re both wrong. But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and then this thing that sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix. John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.
John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.
Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.
[End of Clips]
John: We are back here for the end of this episode to do a classic thing we do at the end of every episode, which is our One Cool Things. Mine was an article I read this past week by Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post. It’s called “America’s best decade, according to data.” If people talk about like, “Oh, things today are terrible,” well, when were things good? When you ask them these questions, was it the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s? It turns out it was when people were young is when things were good. Generally, people remember things being better at their time. Starting a little bit before they were born up until their teenage years was the best time according to most people.
Drew: Are there any outliers, or do we ever feel like it’s not our youth?
John: This article didn’t really point to any areas in which there was notable exceptions to that rule. But by any objective measure, most things are better for most people right now. It’s hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.
Drew: That’s crazy, because it was objectively the ’90s.
Megana: Because you were such a young man, I feel weird asking this, but do you find that to be true?
John: That what, the ’90s were the best decade?
Megana: No, when you were younger.
John: You do have some sort of halcyon vision of how things were, but no, I don’t personally think things were better in the ’70s or ’80s as I was growing up. It was easier for me because I was a kid, but that was a time before the internet. The world wasn’t better before the internet. For all the challenges the internet has brought, it’s also a good thing that I wouldn’t want to give up. There’s a lot of stuff that’s better about living now, so I’ll take it. Megana, something to share with the audience?
Megana: Yeah. I just finished this book. I just finished Miranda July’s latest book called All Fours. She’s a filmmaker and a screenwriter and a novelist. I don’t know how to describe this book without giving too much away or being too reductive, because you could say that it’s this coming-of-age midlife crisis for this woman who finds herself in her late 40s and dealing with her body aging. But I just find Miranda July’s writing to be so delicious and intoxicating. It just completely swept me away for the two days that I was reading this book. If you have travel or summer plans coming up, I would definitely recommend a read.
John: Awesome. I’m traveling, so I’m excited to read. I’ll add it to the list. I actually met Miranda July at one of the Sundance filmmakers’ labs along the way. My proposal to her, which was almost literally a proposal, is we should get married and have a daughter named June so she could be June July August. It was just there. It was out there. She’s lovely. I think we would’ve made a great couple.
Megana: I think that that is how those decisions should be made.
John: We are so suited for each other. Drew, what is your One Cool Thing?
Drew: My One Cool Thing is an app called Callipeg. It’s an animation app. You can do it on your iPad. To unlock all the things, it’s two bucks a month or something like that. But I’ve used it to make little things. You can rotoscope really easily on it. It is just fantastically useful if you want to just make a quick sketch animation thing. You don’t have to know – I don’t know how to actually animate. Using it takes a little bit of time. But it’s really fun and I love it.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but spell it for us so we can look for it easily. Is it Callipeg with a K or with a C?
Drew: It’s with a C. It’s C-A-L-L-I-P-E-G. It’s a French animation app.
John: Excellent.
Megana: How fun.
John: Nice. That is our show for this week. Thank you to Drew and to Megana, our producers. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our classic outro this week. Matthew, thank you. Matthew, for folks who don’t know, started on Scriptnotes as being a person who did outros and then became our editor. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Megana, you saw that we now have hats?
Megana: I have not seen the hats.
John: My hat’s inside. I’ll show you the hat.
Megana: I can’t wait.
John: There’s even drinkware. No mugs. As you know, I am anti-mug, but we do have other drinkware.
Megana: Sadly, you are anti-mug.
John: I’m anti-mug. We can get into my anti-mug stance. That’s another episode. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on reunions. Drew and Megana, thank you so much.
Megana: Thank you.
Drew: Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Megana, we are catching you just coming back from a reunion, a college reunion. Was it what you expected? Was it nice to see people? What is a reunion like in this time of Instagram where you could keep up with people you want to keep up with?
Megana: That’s such a good question. I feel like the people that I end up keeping up with on Instagram are not necessarily the people I want to keep up with.
John: If Megana follows you, she secretly hates you.
Megana: No. I would just say that a lot of my friends who I was most excited to see do not post that regularly on Instagram. Maybe it’s the mystery that made me more excited to see them. But also, a lot of the friends that I wanted to see have had babies recently, and so they also have-
John: Reasons why they’re busy.
Megana: Yeah, their hands are full.
John: I’m always a little suspicious of people who are not on Instagram.
Megana: Are you?
John: Weirdly, I am. I know people have their valid reasons. Maybe they get sucked in too much or they just don’t want people to know about their lives. But also, that’s how I would assume I’m gonna reach you is on Instagram.
Drew: It’s like being in the phone book.
Megana: That’s so interesting, because I recently got hacked, which is humiliating and embarrassing. But you knew that.
John: I knew that. I think I was the person who-
Megana: You were the person who told me I got hacked.
John: I messaged you like, “Megana, there’s a problem here.”
Megana: After that, I was so irritated with just the process of getting my account back under control that I was like, “I am gonna absolutely delete Instagram.” It’s interesting that you would’ve been suspicious of me had I done it.
John: I’m nothing if not self-contradictory. Talk to us about this reunion. You go back. You see college friends.
Megana: I went back, saw college friends, saw college friends’ families, held a lot of babies, which was nice and something that I enjoy doing. It’s just wonderful to see people become more themselves. I know college is such a special time where I think you are so free of obligations, but it’s just wonderful to have seen my friends develop in their careers and just how that manifests and how they carry themselves. I felt very proud in a dance mom sort of way.
John: This is your first reunion being back since you moved to Hollywood, correct? Your previous reunions, you would’ve been still at Google, I’m guessing? Where does this find you?
Megana: Yeah, which was a big change to explain to people that I don’t know all that well, but yeah.
John: Nice. Now, Drew, it’s complicated to explain your schooling history.
Drew: I’m weird, yeah.
John: You’re weird, yeah. You did not go to a classic college situation, so you don’t have a college reunion in the same sense.
Drew: We don’t. No. I went to conservatory in the UK, which I think most schools in the UK, I’m not sure if they do any reunions. I feel like that’s far too sentimental for them. No, so it’s just been keeping up on… Also, I have a tiny class. I’ve got like 20 kids basically. That’s probably not gonna happen. We have to figure out ways to do that ourselves.
John: Have you been to high school reunions?
Drew: I haven’t, because that also is a weird situation for me. I went to a little art school in the middle of the woods.
Megana: I don’t think I realized that.
Drew: I went to a place called Interlochen Arts Academy.
John: I’ve heard of that, yeah.
Drew: It’s great, but you have to take a lot of planes to get there, and a reunion’s not that easy.
John: I’ve had both high school and college reunions, and I’ve found them both great. College reunions, it’s nice to be back in the campus space. It’s like, “Oh, Peggy’s bar is still there,” all the stuff. You recognize what’s there, what’s the same, what’s changed. Just that feeling of being back in that location takes you back in that time, which is really, really nice. You get to see friends, of course, and catch up, and people have gotten married and divorced and all the changes that happen. You see who aged well and who did not age well, which is always fun to see.
But weirdly, high school reunions, I can chart more progress in the high school ones, because they’re the people who I didn’t want to see, who I did see at my 5-year and my 10-year. You’re still very competitive, who’s doing what, and people are showing off. At a certain point, people who’d left Boulder, where I grew up, were boomeranging back to Boulder. That I found really strange too. People who went to California, who went to New York, and suddenly they’re back in our comparatively small town. People who I never thought would come back were back. Getting to my 10-year and then my 20-year reunion, even the people who I didn’t especially like, I was happy for them. I was just happy to see people thriving a bit.
Megana: That’s so interesting. I have so much affection for the people that I went to high school with. Most of them are still in Ohio. I’m actually in the process of making up for a high school reunion that was compromised by COVID, I guess. It’s interesting, because most of my peers and the other student counsel people still live in Ohio. I want one of them to just step up and take the reins, because they live close by and could easily organize it.
John: Let’s paint the real picture here. Of course you were the student body president.
Megana: Yes.
John: As a student body president, it is this tradition where you are therefore responsible for putting together the reunions, which seems like a lot of pressure to put on a 17-year-old for future life decisions.
Megana: It is a lot of responsibility. I would happily do it and just choose a bar for people to meet up at, but then when I start having this conversation, other people have really strong opinions. I’m curious to hear your take, because that last time that we started talking about this, the other class officer people were like, “Oh, we’ll do it at this fancy event place, and we’ll get alcohol, and we’ll charge this much for tickets.” I was like, “I certainly don’t want to organize that, but I also really don’t think that I would want to go to that.” Don’t you want your reunion to be a casual thing? What’s your guys’ take?
John: I’m a little bit sympathetic to what they’re saying, because there’s a sense of providing a little bit of structure for it, makes it so it’s not just so casual that it’s just at a bar. My 10-year reunion was a little bit more structured in the sense of, it wasn’t just an RSVP. You did have to pay in advance so that they knew how many people to expect and they could actually plan stuff. The later ones were a little bit more ad hoc and thrown together and it was in a bar. But at that point, it was who was still in town and available. But my strong advice for you is just pick whoever has the strongest opinions and say, “I agree. You should be in charge.” Is that possible?
Megana: I think that it could be. I think it’s probably my own guilt that is preventing me from doing that. But I think that that would probably be a happier solution all around.
John: The local person should head it up, because it’s so hard. It’s easier now to do that remotely than it ever has been before, but still, they’re on the ground.
Megana: I keep being like, “Oh, we should go to this bar in town,” and it’s like, nope, that bar closed. I just don’t know stuff like that anymore.
John: Reunions are also a fascinating thing in movies. Obviously, The Big Chill, but there’s a lot of other of people getting together over time. It’s a question of do you show them in the original thing and then jump them forward or is it just them meeting now and having to catch up over what’s happened. I’m surprised there’s not been a Breakfast Club reunion movie, for example. That feels like a missed opportunity.
Drew: That’d be cool.
Megana: That is so interesting. I guess my cynical take is that not that much changed after that Saturday.
John: Probably not, yeah.
Drew: It’d also be fun to see them at a reunion with everyone else in the school and you’d be able to fill in all those other characters.
John: We would do it. Obviously, all of our sequels tend to feel like reunions as it is. Bad Boys 4 is a reunion movie. There’s something nice about getting the gang back together for one more run.
Megana: Whenever you do a sequel, you have to start the characters worse than you hope they have their happy ending, just so you can reset the conflict. It makes me a little sad to think about doing that to those kids.
John: It’s fine. That’s what we go to movies for is seeing that.
Megana: The Deadline article is coming out as we meet.
John: It’s so good to have a little reunion of the three of us here. Megana, thanks for stopping by.
Megana: Thank you.
Links:
- Episode 44 – Endings for beginners
- Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings
- Episode 366 – Tying Things Up
- Episode 392 – The Final Moment
- Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
- Too Many Cooks
- America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post
- All Fours by Miranda July
- Callipeg
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.