Thinking on Your Feet with Ryan Condal

Prologue

Ryan’s Unusual Path

Building a Writers Room

Breaking Story in the Room

Writing During Production?

The Politics of Rewrites

Game of Meetings

Thinking as a Product of Movement

Q – Sequels

One Cool Thing

Boilerplate

DRAGONS! DRAGONS! DRAGONS!

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 743 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, today on the show, I want to discuss setting and character movement with a writer whose show must be setting records for the number of characters and locations per episode. Ryan Condal is the co-creator and showrunner of House of the Dragon. Ryan, which has just started its third season on HBO. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Condal: Thanks for having me, guys. This is very exciting. I listened to you– I still listen to you at points, but I was a deep, heavy listener when you first launched, when I feel like there were five podcasts. Now there are 13 million. Thank you for the service that you do to our writing community.

Craig: Thank you. This is great to talk to you in this format because you and I have spoken many times, but it’s always been under the context of, “Hey, this person you are using–” or, “Hey, what do you think of this director?” We’ve been helping each out over the course of the last few years, but it’s nice to be able to talk about stuff that is not that, but just craft.

John: Craft, yes. Also, as the one person on this Zoom who does not have a highly successful HBO show, I just want to ask some questions and learn from the two of you about doing this.

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John: I want to talk about your show, obviously showrunning, but also your unusual path to becoming a showrunner because it’s not what you would expect in terms of just starting in trenches and moving up. It seemed quick, but also you started in the process later, which is going to be very hopeful news for, I think, a lot of our listeners that you didn’t show up in Los Angeles at 21 and PA on a set. You went in through a different route.

Ryan: Yes. I was working in marketing and advertising. I’d always wanted to be a screenwriter. I was the weird kid that knew I wanted to be a professional writer when I was 12 or 13. Then at some point, I had a really great humanities teacher in high school who had worked in the development world, I think with Disney, and taught us three-act structure. This was back in the 1990s. Just as Netscape Navigator was coming online. All of this stuff was not readily accessible the way it is now.
He broke down Star Wars in the three-act structure and taught us the Joseph Campbell hero with 10,000 faces thing alongside of it. It just broke my brain because I was such a huge movie fan. I think at the time, I, as many people do, thought it was the directors and the actors making it all up and didn’t realize there was [laughter] a craft involved with that. Then I was like, “Forget novels. This is exactly what I want to do.” Like Craig, I grew up in New Jersey. I did not have any way into the business. I just tried to learn everything I could with books and by buying screenplays off those tables in New York City. Then I found Terry Rossio’s Wordplayer blog.

John: I remember that site.

Craig: I think it’s still there.

Ryan: It’s great. It’s a great resource. It still is a great resource. I printed all those out, put them in a binder. Then I just started writing feature screenplay specs. I had a business degree, so I worked in media advertising, then pharmaceutical advertising. I wrote at night and then eventually got my company to move me to LA. I kept writing at night. Eventually, number 13, my 13th spec, I sold just after the 2007 Writers’ strike.

John: I want to go through all of that because I also want to dig into more what you were doing while you were doing copywriting for a pharmaceutical company because it’s related. That’s actually similar to my story and a path that I was going to take if I hadn’t ended up in film school. I want to dig into more of that because I think it’s very relevant for a lot of our listeners in terms of how do you make the most of what you can do where you are and how you learn from that. Also, at a certain point, you’ve got to jump and make the move to the town that does what you want to do.

In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about dragons overall because Craig and I play Dungeons & Dragons every week. There’s a lot of dragons in the world. The dragons in your show are very specific and move beyond what we are used to from the original series. I want to talk about dragons and their use in your world, but also dragons as probably the most depicted onscreen creatures that don’t actually exist in the world, and what it is about dragons that makes them so appealing.

Craig: They exist.

John: They exist, indeed.

Craig: They’re real.

John: In us, there are two dragons.

Craig: By the way, I also was working in advertising-

John: That’s right. Oh, great. I didn’t know that.

Craig: -and copywriting, yes. It was for a company that made promos for CBS shows. It was entertainment adjacent. In a weird way, the closer you get to entertainment through advertising, the worse it is. I would much rather have been trying to sell pills than bad sitcoms. I’ve always said, and I’m curious if you had the same experience, that one thing that advertising taught was concision because they said you have 30 seconds, really 28.2 seconds, to tell a story, beginning, middle, and end with a point, and it has to somehow stick in people’s heads. That was a skill that I still, I’m not sure I actively use it, but I think I passively use it all the time. Curious if you still feel that, the siren call of the concision of advertising.

Ryan: For sure. I worked in specifically print advertising, so on the professional side. Whereas you were entertainment adjacent, I was basically the creative person that was as far away from entertainment as possible. If the first creative job that’s furthest away from entertainment, that’s where I was. I was doing direct-to-professional, direct-to-doctor advertising, this highly technical, science-driven stuff. For me, it was extremely creative. Actually, I worked on both sides because I have an accounting and economics degree, because my parents wanted me to get a real job, which, thank you, I understood why.

I actually started in account services. I started as Pete Campbell and then desperately wanted to make my way over to become a Peggy. It took years, but I eventually made my way over there. I had seen it from both sides, but it is really important. It’s even more so when you’re not in a filmed medium, because you basically have an image and a headline, or maybe a headline and a tagline. It’s basically matching words to images in a way that they work in harmony, but it’s not saying the same thing. You’re not showing people a picture and then saying what the picture is.

It’s lateral thinking to try to tell a whole story in a still image and arrest people and stop them as they’re flipping through their medical journal or their prescription pad or whatever.

John: My advertising degree was in Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. The local businesses there were a lot of agriculture advertising. How do you talk to farmers about this new seed, this new product? I really enjoyed the classes I was in, but quickly realized, “Man, I don’t want to do this for a living.” You would see people who were winning the local advertising awards, and it’s like they were so happy to get the award, but I did not want that life. I loved the classes I was in. I loved the graphic design of it all.

I loved the really precision copywriting and recognizing who your audience is, what are they expecting, how do you surprise them, how do you deliver what they need to hear. I think it was also relevant to the business we all ended up in. You’re working with a team, and so you might be the copywriter, but there’s an art director, there’s a creative director. There’s an account executive, there’s the client, and there’s clear parallels to everything we deal with in terms of here’s the studio, here’s the director, here’s the producers.

It’s making sure they all feel heard, but also that the thing you’re delivering makes sense and is the best work possible. That’s a skill you develop just from practice. I was lucky to have a lot of practice in those couple of years in college.

Ryan: Yes, and also, as I moved up. I think I worked in advertising for seven years before I eventually broke in. I’m moving up. I was a mid-level person, but I had a group with me, and I had to go out and pitch and pitch these places that definitely wanted an ad campaign, but they didn’t necessarily want you. That experience set me up in a way that I didn’t even realize until I went into my first pitch, because you sell a spec, you work your whole life to just write something that people want to buy, and then you do it.

Then the next job you get, you have to do this entirely different skill that you haven’t learned. Then it’s actually contrary to everything that makes you want to be a writer, where you want to sit in a room by yourself and not have to talk to anybody. Then suddenly you have to go in and sweat it out and explain your ideas to people who are not necessarily dying to buy your thing. All that stuff really lined up, and you make a great point, John, about the collaboration of working in a team. It’s so similar, right? The art director, the creative director is sort of the director.

The account executive is like the studio executive. The copywriter is kind of the writer. You have editors. You have traffic coordinators that are moving things around the set.

John: You have media buyers who are very much like the exhibition people.

Ryan: Exactly.

Craig: There’s a skill that you learn along the way that, like I said, I was doing the same thing. You did this too. You transitioned into feature film writing. That’s where John and I were feature film writers, and John still is doing both. Feature film writing can be very solo. It’s very monk-like. Eventually, once the thing gets made, it’s like an advertising agency where they weirdly tell the copywriter to go away. [laughs] It’s the stupidest ad agency ever. When you come around to writing television, you begin to work with Carlton Cuse, and you’re working on Colony.

I presume, because Carlton Cuse is a traditional television drama developer, that there was a room, that there was a writer’s room, that there were people in there. I know for sure that on House of the Dragon, you have a writer’s room. I’m super curious about this because I continued my monk-like deal for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, but in looking ahead to what I do next, I’m not only for a change of pace, but for creative necessity, I know I’m going to need a big, large room.

I would love to hear from you how you use a room to your advantage, what the challenges are of a room, especially when we’re dealing with a story this big. The temptation might be, “I need to focus all of these thousands of plotlines and people through one mental lens,” but you also need all of these people to generate all of these different points of view because there are so many characters. You can’t write that. I’m going to show that basically he’s writing two characters at a time. I can do it. Talk me through the pluses, the minuses, the values and strengths, and the challenges and the wins of a big, old writer’s room. Teach me.

Ryan: It was definitely something that I had to learn. I was solo, only a feature writer for five years. I was working. I managed somehow to work that whole time. Look, 2011 was a pretty lean year, but I reported income every quarter. I worked getting polishes and rewrites and other jobs. People liked me, and I was cheap also. I would get hired to do a lot of–

John: Great combo.

Ryan: Absolutely. Talented and cheap. They love that. First drafts. Lots of first drafts. Then I ended up signing with WME. I changed agencies, and I was looking for a new features agent. My TV agent now, Ryan Drazen, and then Theresa Kang, who’s now still in the business but no longer an agent, came in, and they were like, “We want to make you a showrunner.” I was like, “What?” Because I had been writing in all this big genre stuff. They’re like, “We see you as a creator.” They put me out during pilot season.

I pitched NBC on this property they had that Carlton was attached to. It was called The Sixth Gun. We sold the pilot. Then I wrote a pilot, and they really liked it, and then they made it. The reason you’ve never seen the TV show is because they made it, and then they threw it away.

John: That’s a classic pilot.

Ryan: You choose to do.

John: I have those too. You’ve got the experience of learning how to make a show and how to take something you’ve written in your head and actually produce it. By this point, had you had features produced? Had you had Hercules or A Knight of the Seven–

Ryan: Hercules went into production while we were filming Sixth Gun. 2013 was a pretty great year because that was finally after it felt like I’d been wandering the desert for six years, but it all happened. Further, Craig Mazin crossovers with Ryan Condal, number six on the call sheet in my pilot was Pedro Pascal. Should have been number one on the call sheet. Then maybe we’d have a television show, and you and I would both have very different careers.

Craig: You know what? Even Dan and Dave had him at number 105 on the call sheet. It took him a little while there.

Ryan: He knew I was a massive fan of Game of Thrones because we talked a lot about all this stuff. Then, about six months after the show had gone away, he called me out of the blue, and he was like, “I’m up for Game of Thrones. I need to take you out to lunch. I need to know everything that you know.” We sat down, and we chatted. At some point, he just sent me a picture of him in Wushu spear training, and I was like, “This is insane.”

John: Pedro Pascal, it’s crazy.

Craig: He was always Pedro Pascal.

John: Yes. Sixth Gun was a pilot that you shot, but you didn’t have a room for that, right? That was still just you writing a thing. It wasn’t the next show that you actually had to have a room, correct?

Ryan: Correct. I had the depressing experience of hiring a writer’s room for The Sixth Gun and then not calling anybody into work. It’s also run and gun that they make you do all that stuff if it gets picked up so you’re ready to go, and then it didn’t. I had a test of interviewing and reading writers for the first time and all that.

Craig: It comes to fruition when you and Carlton get Colony on the air.

Ryan: Yes, correct.

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Craig: Now you’ve got to walk me through this. It is a rare thing that when we talk to people, their lessons are important for me. [laughter] They’re either parallel to me or things that I would never– They’re just different genres or different kinds of modalities, but this is like, I’m going to need to do this on my next show. Help me. Talk me through building a room and running a room and how you and your vision and, I guess, we’ll just call it primacy as a showrunner, interacts with the material as you go.

Ryan: I just went out looking for the best samples that I could find. That’s where I started. It was definitely a process I refined over time. I think I went into it assuming that, “Everybody here is a professional writer. I think the tone of the show is rather apparent on the page. It’s the Nazi occupation of Paris, except it’s modern-day Los Angeles, and the Nazis are aliens, and we never see them. We deal with the Vichy government, which are the evil human collaborators who have decided to work with the aliens against the humans against their own interests.”

It was much trickier than that. That first season was pretty fraught because the pilot had a certain tone to it, but then we had to expand the story. I knew where I wanted to go with it generally, but I don’t know that I had– We did 10 episodes in the first season. After that, it was actually 13 in seasons 2 and 3. Learning how to break something, because my brain was so wired for three-act structure, 120 pages, to try to expand out to doing that and making also individual episodes within it, there was a lot of trial and error.

We didn’t have a ton of time with when they wanted on the air. The first season was very fraught, but I went out and tried to hire the best writers that I could. I tried to get a bunch of different people from different backgrounds with different experience. Look, they all came to the room with really interesting stuff. It was also going through an experience of figuring out what USA wanted for the show. We knew NBCUniversal wanted it. We expected sci-fi was going to pick it up because that’s where all the sci-fi shows were, but this is in the Mr. Robot period when they were like, you know.

John: “We’re no longer blue-sky crime shows.” Yes, I do think.

Ryan: Exactly, but also trying to figure out what they wanted to put on the air and all that. It was really just trying to read the best samples I could. I did a lot of background research calling people that they had worked with previously. We did deal a little bit with budget stuff in terms of writer budget because it was a basic cable network, so the rates are such and this and that. I actually hired a bunch of people that didn’t have a ton of experience because I was trying to find the drafted free agent-

Craig: Yes, I can remember.

Ryan: -in the rough.

Craig: Let me interrupt you for a second. Reading samples, let’s talk about that because that’s something you’ve had to do now for all the shows that you do. I don’t know if this is the case, but even going from season to season to season of House of the Dragon, some writers may drop off to go do other things and you may want to bring in– You never really probably stop going through this process. When you pick up a script to read, typically they are not spec scripts. I think that’s probably not a thing that people do anymore.

John: There are still a few of those left. We’ve had some people on recently talking about actually still loving to read spec scripts because it’s a chance to see that someone can write in another writer’s voice and tone.

Craig: Do you still get those, maybe for House of the Dragon?

Ryan: I never did, but I agree with John. I think everybody should go back and do it. I know it’s never going to monetize itself because nobody buys specs anymore, but I just think that that’s actually the best way to show that you can ape somebody else’s thing.

John: Style, right.

Ryan: I was reading plays. I was reading a lot of features, TV pilots, basically all original material. At some point, I read a short story that somebody submitted.

Craig: As you go through that process, how long do you read typically? If you’re on page two and you’re not immediately like, “Woo-hoo,” how far do you go in all honesty?

Ryan: Great question, Craig. At the beginning, I was like, “This is my job and I have to read it until page 58.” Now it’s much more just looking to be hooked and have somebody convince you to stay on from page 5 and then page 10, much, I think, the way a studio would go through reading a submission.

Craig: There’s just too many submissions to–

Ryan: Yes. I’m just looking for somebody that can write and that can surprise you and delight you and deliver complex ideas in a simple way, write great characters, write interesting scenes. Look, it would be great to fill a room with the “five-tool” player across the board, but really you need a bunch of people in the room that can break story, move story along in the room, and be tireless in just pitching, pitching, pitching. Then you need a few draft writers. It’d be great if you had all draft writers, but you need a few people that can write a draft that then you can rewrite. Because in most cases, you’re going to want to go in and–

Craig: You have to do what you do.

Ryan: Yes. Just to put it in the voice of the show. Also, at some point, you’re just in production, and there’s budget and actor notes coming in and whatever, and you just have to take over and do it. At first, I was trying to just basically draft the 1927 New York Yankees.

Craig: You’re right. [laughs]

Ryan: Then I got much more easy on myself after that, where it’s just trying to find, “This writer has a ton of experience. This writer’s done a show like this before. This writer knows– I have this writer, this writer, Ti Mikkel, in the room, who is like a scholar of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Craig: A lore master.

Ryan: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Right. You need some lore masters. How do you determine who your drafters are? Do they all know at the beginning, or do you– as you break the story, you go, “Okay, I’m going to have you write a script, and you write a script”?

Ryan: Yes. They reveal themselves through the writing process. I will say, I was very lucky in both cases. On Colony, I had this wonderful writer that I worked with, Wes Tooke. He was the most senior-level person in season 1, and then just became my writing partner throughout. This is the way I’ve pursued my shows from there. It’s just something that works really well for me to have a senior writer who, essentially, we do everything together because the show is so busy. It’s you and me. Then on House of the Dragons, it’s Sarah Hess, who, infuriatingly, her first job was on Deadwood with David Milch.

John: Find Sarah.

Ryan: She had gotten her MFA in, I think, dramatic writing. She just thought that writers’ rooms were the brilliant, uber-genius writer would just lie on the floor in the writers’ room and then just dictate Shakespearean dialogue to everybody, and you’d furiously write it down. She had very different experiences after that. She worked on House and Orange Is the New Black. She’s amazing. For me, once I had that, then it’s like everything else is a bonus. I had that with Wes on Colony. People would come in and out of the room, but Wes was with me all three seasons.

Then with Sarah, we’ve had a similar experience. There was a lot of turnover after season 1. Actually, one of those writers, Ira Parker, went on to create A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. A terrific writer and actually tried to get him to come help us produce season 1, but it was COVID, and they were trying to have children. He’s like, “I’m afraid to come to Europe.” It worked out great for him and great for the franchise. Now, in season 3 to season 4, we basically have the same writing staff.
Whatever I’ve done, [chuckles] Sarah and I have managed to craft this really nice thing that we have. We love it. It works really well right now. Answering your previous question about the draft writers, they reveal themselves through the writing process. That’s the glory of it. To the TV writers out there that are trying to do this for a job, you can be the lowest person on the totem pole, and in that first draft, you can be a hero to the showrunner. All we want is somebody to deliver that thing that needs a little polish. Better if you can take the notes and make it better. Then you’re like, we’ll put a cape on you.

Craig: Yes. The story of showrunning is you’re surrounded by thousands of people who are desperate to help you, and almost all of them are hurting you. [laughter] They don’t even know it. They’re trying. They want to help. They’re just something’s wrong in what they’re doing, and it’s hurting. Then, when you find somebody who wants to help you, who helps, you cling to that person.

John: Do not let go.

Ryan: Do not let go.

John: Yes. Craig, I’m realizing a meta thing that’s happening here is you’re asking very questions about how to run a writer’s room and stuff like that. Craig, we’ve talked about this on the show so many times, and a lot of listeners are probably voicing this. It’s because it’s usually episodes that I’m just talking to a showrunner, where you’re not here. We’ll put together a playlist of just me asking these questions because every showrunner has similar but different answers. I’m thinking about Jackie Schaffer talking about how she casts a writer’s room.

Basically, she knows what she’s really strong at, and she knows what she’s lacking in terms of what she needs for herself to have the best chance at making this show. Who are the writers that she’s able to bring in, and who can help her in her weaknesses? Both as writers, but also, this is what I’d like to talk to the writer about, is that what you need in the room, because it’s great to read these writers, but then you meet with them, and then you do the background checks. You must be thinking about how is this going to gel in the room and how much are you physically in a room together?
Is it virtual? What does your writer’s room actually even look like?

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Ryan: We’re very old school. I’m all in person. I can’t do that virtual stuff. I drift off. I can have a meeting on Zoom, like a story meeting, but I can’t break story on it. It just drives me crazy. We were lucky with the way House of the Dragons fell. I remember our last ominous conversations in the room were all about this weird virus that was spreading around. My Spanish scout for all of our locations in season 1 was over the first week of March in 2020. At some point, HBO called while we were out there, and they’re like, “You need to stop going to airports.”

I was like, “What does that mean? How are we going to get home?” They were like, “No, you can go to that airport. Just don’t go into any of the other airports.” We just got in a closed-air van with everybody breathing on each other and drove around and did scouts that way. We were able to be in person. We weren’t forced– because by the time the season 2 room came around, everybody was vaccinated and had to be vaccinated to be around. Then we got on. It was a very old school room, corkboard and cards.

I like the physical satisfaction of finishing an episode and being able to put all those cards together in a neat little binder stack and taking them off and putting them on and moving them around on the board. I like all that sensory stuff.

John: What would be on a card for this? How many words is on a card? Is it just describing a scene? Is it describing a beat? What does a card look like in this big writer’s room corkboard?

Ryan: It’s usually beats, but a beat usually is a scene. In the way that we break TV, Rhaenyra does a thing. Daemon brings Rhaenyra her crown, everybody kneels to her. That sort of thing. Because you want to be able to read it from wherever you’re sitting in the room. The writer’s assistant sits there and keeps all of them cataloged. Then writes all the bullets that are informing the scene beneath it. We really try to break everything out as detailed as possible. When the writer sits down with the outline, they know basically all the slug lines that are going into the script, the order that they’re going in, at least on that first pass.

Then here is what the scene is about. This is where it begins. These are who are in it. This is where it ends. This is the dramatic experience that we’re taking the audience through in this scene. This is whose POV it is, et cetera.

John: How long is the outline that the writer is going off with?

Ryan: We give them a room break, essentially. The writer’s assistant has a room break outline. That’s maybe, I don’t know, maybe six, seven, eight pages. Then they come back with, like, a 10- to 13-page sort of Microsoft Word, not final draft, but like a prose.

John: A plan.

Ryan: Yes. It’s like putting flesh on the skeleton. That’s a layer of flesh. Then the first draft is a layer of flesh. Then you just keep concentric circles of detail.

John: When that outline draft comes back or when the first draft comes back, is that a thing that is discussed in the room or is that there’s just a thing between you and the writer? What happens with that draft?

Ryan: Sometimes. It just depends on, unfortunately, with the way this particular show is made, and Craig knows this, I’m never doing one thing at one time. Everybody thinks that because Craig and I make shows that take 2 years between seasons, they imagine that there’s like 6 months of work and then it’s 18 months of us just like walking our dogs and just thinking. Thinking of ideas and all that.

Craig: Oh, that sounds nice.

Ryan: Yes. It’s Fallujah the whole time. We are usually breaking story in that phase while we’re in the teeth of the first cuts and posts. I have two offices in London, and I just run between them. It depends on what’s going on at the moment. Half of my day goes to posts. Half of my day goes to meeting with the writers. Generally, what we do is everybody reads the draft, but then it’s Sarah and I reading it, taking a meeting between the two of us, making sure that we’re going to give cohesive notes together to the writer, sitting with the writer, giving them notes, and then sending them off.

At the end, I like to “Okay, here’s where we are with all the scripts.” Sarah and I have done a pass, or I’ve done a pass, or Sarah’s done a pass. It’s gone into the network. “Here’s the first two episodes. Here’s the first four. Let’s get together and talk about them. Does anybody have any concern?” We do a lot of that, but I know in the network model, there is a lot of the whole room reads the scripts. There’s notes, especially in comedy and things like that, where looking for better jokes and punch-through things and all that.

John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, like an Aline classic, she would project it on the wall and just go through line by line and look for all jokes and things like that. That’s a very classic way to do that. Because you are preparing to shoot this show and you’re probably shooting multiple episodes at once and you’re cross-boarding, it’s just not realistic to do all the times.

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John: My question is, is the room running all the time while the show is shooting? Because at a certain point, I imagine the room wraps, but you still have episodes left to shoot.

Ryan: No. All of the scripts have to be done. Season 4, we have essentially written already. HBO will have all of the drafts this summer, first drafts. Our first drafts that we’re choosing to share with the network, so it’s probably the sixth draft. We won’t start production until early next year. Early 2027 because the schedule is such a Jenga tower. Everything is scheduled to set and location and all that. The schedule affects the budget and all that. My producer actually has to sit with all of this stuff this summer and build it into a schedule and a plan, and when we’re going to be in this country, when are we going to be in this country.
Because we shoot everything out of order, it just all needs to be. It’s really nice because by the time filming starts, that’s the only time where we’re doing one thing, which is just covering set, doing production.

Craig: You sure you don’t want to do what I do?

John: Oh my God, Craig.

Craig: Why don’t you do what I do? It’s so much more interesting. [laughter] Don’t have all your scripts written. Just have a plan for the season. Write three scripts. Start shooting. Know that you have six more scripts to write while you’re shooting and directing. It really, I’m telling you, it keeps you alive.

John: Yes, that spark.

Craig: Do that.

Ryan: I have such anxiety that the very idea of that would just paralyze me. I am a–

Craig: Guess what? I have that anxiety too. [laughter] It’s still this way, but this is why, even though– yes, John’s right, there’s been many showrunners on. There are certain stock questions that I suppose a showrunner will be asked about rooms, but I particularly go, “Okay, here’s a guy who makes a big fantasy epic at HBO.” If all things go well, my next show is going to be a big fantasy epic at HBO.”

Ryan: You’re going to be doing one of those.

Craig: I’m really interested in this. [laughter] You have all the scripts done before you start shooting, which sounds like a dream to me and probably a dream to everybody.

Ryan: We, of course, rewrite while–

Craig: Naturally.

Ryan: You’ll rewrite a scene. You’ll realize you need a scene, and then you can make little moves.

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Craig: At least the network and the budget planners, they have everything there. On the way, when you’re getting these scripts from your collaborators, you mentioned you’re going to probably do a pass, and then you’re going to rewrite some of them. How do you manage when you have to mildly rewrite somebody, “That’s nice”? Or, “Uh-oh, we just rewrote it.” Is that an expected situation? I’m curious how, especially because your show is so much about politics, how you manage the politics of situations like that in rooms.

Ryan: I just go for as much a kind honesty as much as possible. I think there are showrunners that don’t address it at all, and then that’s weird. I think there are people that try to address it and soft-shoe it, and then they read the draft, and there’s not a line in it that they’ve written. I just try to have an honest conversation with the writers. It’s like, “Look, it’s a very specific world. It’s a very specific syntax. I’m weird and specific myself. This is what I had to do. Read it. If you want to talk about it, we can talk about it.”
I always assure them, “This does not mean that you are not a great writer. That’s why I hired you.” I try to do as much of that as possible. Really, I really do mean we have gotten to a point with the show, thankfully, where one of the other writers beyond Sarah and I has been with us since he helped us cover set in season 1. He started writing in season 2, but he got to learn the show by being a covering producer in season 1. He had come out of the British television system. His name is David Hancock. Thank you, David. People know the system now, and they know what to expect.
A lot of times, what I will do is do the heavy rewrite. The studio reads it whenever. Then, once we get into the play, because where I will be in the fall is we’re going to be doing HBO notes and production notes, and we have to cut this because of budget and whatever. I will tend to hand the drafts back to the writers once we’re doing more targeted stuff. I feel, actually, my experience has been, I’ve been much more successful getting back what we need when it’s more micro, when you’re not looking at the whole forest, when you’re just looking at a tree.

Craig: Makes sense.

Ryan: Also, I have Sarah, which is awesome because a lot of times I’m doing the pre-production stuff and whatever, and she’s doing the “Can you please do this scene or do a scene where this thing happens?”

Craig: Can you send me Sarah, please? Can I have her now?

Ryan: Now, Craig, actually, she’s in an HBO deal.

Craig: Oh, interesting. That means she’s literally free to HBO. I understand what you’re saying. Interesting.

Ryan: She’s available in a year.

Craig: No. What about you leave her there and you come over with me?

Ryan: Dude, I want to do that as my next job. I want to be the number two. I want to be the right hand. Where like, “What can I do? How can I be your hero where I can go home and sleep at night?”

Craig: I have talked about this with Justin Marks a bit.

Ryan: Not get balder.

Craig: Yes, exactly. Justin is making Shogun season 2 while we’re making The Last of Us season 3, and his offices are right below ours in the same lot.

Ryan: Oh, nice.

Craig: Every now and then, we just walk over and complain to each other about our lives, which is great. There is this strange desire to either, yes, not be in charge, or their fantasies about just being murdered. [laughter] Then you don’t have to finish.

Ryan: It’s a dark place.

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Craig: It’s a hard job. It is a hard job. When I look at your show, just watching the first episode of this season.

John: Yes. We should talk about it. The naval battle is just like, come on. Thank you.

Craig: I watch this, and here’s my curse. I am enjoying this thing, and I am in awe of this thing. Then there’s this third part of my mind that’s like, “Oh, no, the meetings. The amount of meetings.” Just for that shot, there were meetings. I just feel for you.

John: Which scenes actually have to be on the water versus which things are going to be just blue screens? Just like, ugh, yes.

Craig: When he falls through, the special effects guys are like, “We can practically have the wood go, or do it–” It’s like there’s four million effing meetings. It is exhausting. That episode looked like there were many meetings.

Ryan: Yes. We stole it from original Game of Thrones, but original Game of Thrones called it Game of Meetings because that was what pre-production was.

Craig: Worst novel ever.

Ryan: We’re House of the Meetings. Yes, you have your eight episodes, and then each set piece that’s that size, like the Battle of the Gullet, and we have a number of those this season, those become episodes unto themselves. They have their own production meetings. Their own office staff that follows them around and notes them. Even with that, as you know, you can’t be in multiple places at a time. Sometimes you’re off in a different country filming that day, and because prep continues all the way through the production, that was first up. Luckily, we did all of that before we started. We did the prep for it before we started shooting. It’s a lot.

Craig: It’s intense. It’s intense. So much of what is difficult about making a show like yours is that you have the work of putting this down on paper. I presume you have the same experience I have that the more you do this, the more you realize you can’t put enough detail on the page. Every time you write a little extra detail, you save yourself a meeting, but you can’t make a 900-page script. You’re looking for that balance, and then there is this brutal process of, “Okay, how are we going to do this?” Sometimes it gets in my head when I’m writing, where I’ll start to write something and go, “Okay, then how are we going to do this, and how many of me–” Then I’m like, “No.”

John: No. That’s not your responsibility.

Craig: You know what? I get one chance to write my draft, and everybody gets it, and people go, “Wow.” Then someone goes, “We can’t do it.” Then I’m like, “Okay, now we can discuss what we can and can’t.” I wonder, as you’ve gone along, in response to budget realities and just the logistics of doing things, has that leaked back into the writing process at all?

Ryan: For sure, because I just want to save myself time. We do a lot of breaking of the big set pieces. We try to break them out ahead of time in a way that you want to preserve that creative experience. Going back to me as the 12-year-old, I am one of those weird writers that actually still really enjoys sitting in front of Final Draft. It’s actually my happy place within the craziness of making this show. It’s probably because I just get to be alone, and it’s the only place where I’m not being asked the question.

I do enjoy that kind of monastic pursuit because it’s such a small facet now of this massive thing that takes two years to make. You really only write a first draft for, I don’t know, a few weeks out of that entire two-year cycle. Just because it’s so complicated, we try to actually break it out in the room first, and then talk about production methodology, and “What is this?” and talking with my producer. My producer and production designer are basically on, they take a few months off during the teeth of post, but they’re basically on 18 months out of the 2-year cycle.

They’re very accessible, so I can talk to them about, “Is this a thing that we can make? Is this a thing that you think we can do?” Figuring out that stuff in advance. Of course, you rewrite it a million times as you get into the making of the show. With the Gullet, we did this, Loni Peristere, the director who’s actually a neighbor of yours right now, because you’re in Vancouver, right?

Craig: Yes. Not physically at the moment, but two weeks from now, yes, back to Vancouver.

Ryan: Yes. He’s up working in Vancouver right now, making big television. He and I talked about this. He had worked on the previous season, so I knew he was going to do this episode. We talked about it for months, going into it, production methodology, and all that. Then, through pre-production, he actually made this thing that we ended up calling the Supercut, which was basically a really fancy animatic that was previs with the dragons. It’s pre-animation storyboards that he had storyboard artists cut and film, almost like a Ken Burns documentary, to try to put movement into the storyboard.

Sometimes it was just slug lines from the script, but just to understand the structure of the battle. Then we ended up rewriting. We found a whole bunch of this stuff, the individual ideas works, but how are we intercutting all of this so it feels like you’re building and building and building? We actually edited the sequence before we ever even made it with this multimedia thing, shared the Supercut with all of the crew so that everybody knew what we were making. Honestly, I don’t know why it took until the third season to do it.

We always have previs with the dragon sequences and all that because they need to know exactly where the dragon is, what it’s doing, because that’s how they program the moving saddle and the camera moves and all that. It’s all programmed to what’s going on in the previs. The stuff with the ships and the guys fighting on the deck, that’s stuff that you tend to figure out closer to the day when you’re actually going to shoot it. Some of it gets figured out on the day. We were able to rewrite the sequence and put in story beats, and cleverly disguised explainy dialogue, and things like that so you knew where you were going.

It was such a wonderful thing to have because otherwise I would have gone into filming that sequence. I went into filming that sequence in a total state of terror because we spent so much money on it, and everybody was waiting for it, and so much was riding on it. I knew what it was going to be in the end, and I could see it. I just knew that as long as it’s in the little video monitor, we have it and we can go make this thing. Sure enough, when I’m more clear of it, I want to go and watch the Supercut again because I’d love to see how close it is to the final thing that we did.

Craig: It’s a hell of a thing, I will say. I texted Franny, who is our collective boss over there at HBO Drama, and I was like, “Ugh. No.” We had a pretty big battle sequence in season 2. I felt pretty good about that. Then–

John: It wasn’t on the water. It wasn’t on the boats. No flying creatures.

Craig: No. Then I saw this thing. I will say we do have a sequence. It’s very different in nature.

John: Stuff’s coming.

Craig: I’ll say, you guys, really, the bar is so high. First of all, the amount of people that watch your show is just insane and remains insane, which is great because over the course of time, these big shows will start to slough viewers away, and you guys still are just absolutely crushing it. The quality of the storytelling is so evident, and also the quality of the craft, because I’m sitting there looking for bad comps. That’s all I do all day, and post, like when we get there, it’s look at one shot 500 times until it’s correct.

It was just so well done. I know how hard some of those shots are. To see it all put together so expertly, it just inspires me to do as well as I can do over in my end of the mushroom spectrum.

Ryan: Thank you.

Craig: It was a hell of an episode. It really was, and emotional.

Ryan: Yes. That’s the key of the thing. It all comes back to the script because if it’s just empty spectacle. We tried to put as much drama, tension, emotion, all those things into it.

Craig: You did.

Ryan: I have to say I’m surrounded by an incredible team. I just have an incredible team. It’s like I work with a proper British film crew, like a high-end British film crew, everybody at the top of their game. Lonnie should be directing features. He’s an incredible director, so collaborative, so patient. It really takes a whole village.

Craig: No, it takes apparently a city.

Ryan: Yes. Now everybody’s in an arms race with each other. We’re in an arms race with the original show. It’s like HBO projects are in an arms race with each other. You just keep having to push it and push it and push it. Eventually, we’re going to, I don’t know, find the singularity or something and collapse into a black hole.

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John: Before we do that, Ryan and Craig, if you’ll permit me, I’d love to talk about something that’s been on my list for a while to talk through. The two of you guys on this Zoom together, I think, is maybe a good place to start in it. There’s this idea that we often have that thinking and thought are a product of language. That basically, it’s our language that gives us the ability to do things, to think things, to think thoughts. I was reading articles this last week about this idea of motricity, that essentially our ability to move is what is actually where thought comes from.

That what differentiates plants from animals, and Craig, maybe your fungi people have a sense of this too, is that plants don’t need to move anywhere. That’s why they don’t have brains. Animals have brains because we need to move someplace. The idea of moving someplace, the need to move someplace, makes you have to model the future. It has to give you deliberate action, the idea of going from here to there and actually thinking as we, as characters, think and as we, as writers, think. Really, that’s the reason why we use so many words that are related to movement.

We talk about pushing an idea forward. We talk about getting inside something, like looking at something from the outside. We move forward with something. So many of our words that we use to describe thought really come from motion. Ryan, the reason why I was thinking about you for this is that, watching your show over the last, now three seasons, you never have characters sitting down. Characters are always on their feet. People pointed that out. As opposed to the original Game of Thrones, which has a lot of chamber things where people will take a seat.

I’m pressed to think of many examples where characters are sitting in your show. There’s a couple of small council meetings where they’re there, but you keep people up and moving a lot. I want to talk about character movement, but also how character movement relates to characters thinking and characters making choices, and if they’re not moving, we can’t see the thinking behind them.

Ryan: That’s really interesting. I had never thought of it that way. It’s funny because I feel like we are a castle-bound show more than Thrones was, and maybe this is my anxiety thinking about how much we are bound to the castles. Because really, I’ve talked about this show as the original series is this sweeping epic. It’s Lawrence of Arabia. It’s pure David Lean, the whole thing. We have elements of that, but then we are more of this family saga. I’ve talked about this as a gangster epic where basically the capo de capos dies, Viserys dies in the first season, and then all of his other capos and the soldiers are fighting, and they all happen to be family. It’s this Greek tragedy gangster epic. Because it’s just based on essentially these two factions, the greens and the blacks, they are bound to their castles a lot. There’s less Western going on in this show than in original Thrones.

John: It’s a civil war within the Targaryen family, but it’s just these two houses, and you’re centered on those two places.

Ryan: Yes. The original show is figuring out who is going to be king, whereas we have two sovereigns. We have a king and a queen, and they are protected in their castles. So much of the story is based around them and what they’re plotting and doing at the time. I think it’s probably my anxiety just saying, “Well, we’re castle-bound, so we should be on the move and on our feet.”

One of the big reasons for that, thanks to the incredible resources that we had to make this show right from the very start, I’m incredibly indebted to David and Dan for making the most successful TV show of all time because it meant that we came right out of the gate with a tremendous amount of resource. We had the equivalent resources that they had in Season 5. We had coming out. We’ve built these incredible composite sets. We have multiple sets that are built on these 50,000- 60,000 square foot stages, where they are built to the walls of the stage.

The Red Keep, everything but the throne room, which is its own set, the Red Keep, you can move from room to room and film continuously, and you’re not hiding blue screens or anything like that. Of course, the directors take advantage of that. There’s a lot of steadicam. There’s a lot of movement and a lot of walking where somebody doesn’t leave the room, and you have to cut to bring them into the next room. You follow them out, and it creates this sense of movement. I’m very glad to hear you, a filmmaker, say that because it’s certainly, definitely in the DNA of what we’re making.

Craig: I like this idea. I think this is a very cool idea, that I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out exactly what the secret of consciousness is because it’s a microscope looking at itself. I do think there is something compelling about how movement underpins a lot of this. Even if you watch something where no one moves, My Dinner with Andre, no one moves, but they talk to you in ways where you are going places.

In scenes, I find where two people are sitting– and I love a good sitting-down scene. Last season, there’s a scene where Dina has to explain to Ellie she actually knows who killed Joel. Spoiler: he died. In shooting that scene, we really dialed in on when someone would lean forward. There’s a moment where she slides cookies over to her, which is like– Then micro movements become big things, but there is always some movement happening. I think this is very smart. When you’re directing, it’s almost the first thing that happens in the day because your actors come in and you just start blocking, and blocking is how are we moving? It does make a huge– I think about it too when I’m writing all the time.

John: There’s a scene I was working on yesterday where, because of stuff moving around in the script, I needed to move it from a sitting scene to a location where it was not going to be possible to sit. It’s largely the same dialogue, but it feels so different to have the characters on their feet and moving around during the scene. I had to find different ways into it and out of it because it’s just a different vibe when characters are standing at a place versus sitting in a place.
Ryan, back to your show, in Dragonstone, they have a massive table where all the council is there to meet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them sitting at that table. It’s always just Rhaenyra at the end of the table making a decision.

Craig: You have to look down. It’s the point of view. If you’re sitting, you can’t quite see the full-

Ryan: Got to see the map table.

Craig: Got to see the map.

Ryan: There’s lots of standing in that room for sure right now.

John: Also, we’ve talked on the show countless times, characters sitting on a table, it’s difficult to shoot. One of the great things about characters standing is that you can cover that more easily than you can if they’re actually sitting down at the table.

Craig: You still have some eyeline issues.

John: Yes, there are going to be some, particularly as characters are moving around, but it’s also more dynamic, and you could probably also stay in the wides a little longer for it too.

Craig: There’s something, too, about the notion that sitting implies a temporary safety. The person you’re with, you are safe. This is a break or a moment where characters are allowed to turn away from what is immediate need or immediate threat and can become a little internal.

This is why, even though I really do not personally enjoy shooting scenes where characters are on horses because they’re annoying to do– they’re really annoying. The problem is where the camera goes. It’s very annoying. It’s hard to do. Those are the best sitting scenes because they’re moving, but they’re sitting, and it is a much more interesting, safe discussion. Whereas, yes, when you’re standing, there is always the implication we might have to turn around, run, and start killing people immediately, and I like that.

Ryan: Yes. I would also say the counterpoint to that is in our sitting council scenes, and probably have more pages shot in the small council chamber in the Red Keep than any other set on the show thus far, just because it’s existed since Season 1, and there are so many multi-page scenes in there. When everybody is sitting, you can create movement in the edit by having the overlapping dialogue of the person who’s talking. You’re not watching them. You’re watching the reaction somebody else is making.

Thus, you create this sense of layering and complexity in the scene because it’s like, well, Damon’s ranting about something, but it’s not necessarily what he’s ranting about. It’s how the other people are side-eyeing each other. We’re not a cutty show, but you can, in those moments, take those big static stage scenes and bring a lot of life and movement and energy into them that way.

Craig: Yes. I like to remind myself of that when I’m shooting the first wide. It’s like, “Well, this is a school play.” It’s like, “Okay, it’ll get better. It’ll get better. It’ll get better.”

Ryan: That’s right.

John: In the show notes, I’ll put links to some of the things that I was thinking about as I was putting together this little segment. Barbara Tversky has a book called Mind in Motion, which has a lot of stuff about this. There’s a neuroscientist, Rodolfo Llinas, who also talks about this. The idea that what we call thinking is actually the evolutionary internalization of movement. Thinking is basically just imagining action. It’s imagining things. It also may help explain why we can only think about one thing at a time. We should, in theory, be able to think multiple things at the same time, but you can only move one direction at a time, and so we’re just adapting that system to do our thinking. I’ll put that in the show notes for people who want to explore more.

Ryan: I love this. This is really great. I want to read this.

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John: We have some listener questions, or at least one listener question. Anna writes in.

Meredith Stedman: Anna writes, “John and Craig, eight years ago, I wrote in about my anxiety surrounding the decision to quit my salary job and pursue screenwriting full-time. You gave excellent encouraging advice. Since then, I’ve written several films for major studios. I can’t thank you enough. Your encouragement was exactly what I needed to hear, in some of the darkest, most imposter syndrome-fueled moments.”

John: That’s great.

Meredith: That’s very nice. “My question is about sequels. One of my films coming out later this year has commissioned me to write the sequel. I’m thrilled, but I’m finding myself oddly tripped up by the craft of reintroducing characters the audience will have already seen on screen. Do I give them a character description, even though we’ve already met them? How much context do I provide for moments from the first film that we’ll flash back to in the sequel? Essentially, how much catching up should a sequel screenplay do for the reader? How much can it assume they already know?

You’ve both written hugely successful sequels. I spent all my allowance to see Charlie’s Angels full throttle, no fewer than eight times in theaters as a preteen. I’d love to hear how you approach the craft of returning to characters and worlds the audience is presumably already familiar with.”

John: Oh, that’s a great question.

First off, congratulations, Anna. It’s interesting talking about television and then thinking about feature films because season to season, episode to episode, how much do you need to reintroduce those characters, but with a feature film, there’s no guarantee that people saw the movie before this, or they even remember the movie before this. You do need to find some way to meet those characters again in a way that is rewarding if the person knows who the character is, also makes sense if they don’t really know who the character is. It’s some degree of reestablishing the premise of who this character is, so we understand their function within this world.

It’s not the same as we can assume somebody who’s watching the second episode of Season 3 of House of the Dragon has a sense of who these people are, but you cannot do that for a feature film.

Craig: We also have this wonderful tool called previously on.

John: Previously on. It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Which is massively important.

John: Unless you’re on Netflix, which doesn’t do it.

Craig: Right. Because Netflix doesn’t want you to have ever stopped watching anything. That’s their punishment. On HBO, where there’s a week between episodes and then time between seasons, we have previously on, and it is important, even if you’re mid-season and you’re coming up to an episode and not watching it. I have a suspicion this will occur frequently for you, Ryan, in this season. There’ll be a previously on, and it will refer to the things that happened in the prior couple of episodes. Then there’ll also be one thing from season one that you throw in there because it’s going to be relevant. This is something that the nature of our show certainly will be doing that, because we are replaying, essentially, three days from a different perspective. It’s a lot easier.

In movies, you don’t have that. When you introduce these characters, since you’re specifically saying, tripped up by the craft of reintroducing characters, put them in a context that either is a familiar one for where they started. Stu is a dentist in Hangover. I think he’s back doing dentistry in Hangover 2. Meet them where they are and see that they’ve tried to return to their normal lives, but you can’t or show them having changed dramatically because of the events, but whatever it is needs to somehow be in contrast or comparison to where they were. Just have characters comment a little bit on the time that’s passed.

There should be some bit of overlap, some little piece of something that, even though a movie professes to have wrapped everything up by the end. Introduced that really there was one little thing, one little flappy bit that wasn’t wrapped up. Have that be your way into some of these characters so that not only are you meeting them with some context, but you’re also beginning to imply why this sequel needs to exist, which certainly isn’t because the studio wanted to make a lot more money. That would be crazy. That would just be silly.

John: No, that never happens.

Craig: No, that’s not why we do them.

Ryan: I would also say, do what I do, which is go watch your favorite sequel movies and just see what they’re doing and see how those new characters are introduced. Have they jumped forward years in time? Is it the next day? How are they doing that? What are the things that you like? Then just steal it. I mean steal it in the way that you steal it and adapt it for your own.

John: I think about the Indiana Jones movies. They don’t have to fundamentally reestablish Indiana Jones, but those initial scenes with him or with any character who’s coming back need to have a quality of that original thing that’s in conversation with the first movie. People who are rewarded for remembering who that character is, but can also quickly be up to speed if they don’t know who that person is, if they know what their function is. James Bond movies are the same kind of situation. It’s like, who’s Q? Who is M? What is their function? We’re ready to go.

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John: All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is this article by Amy Deng. It’s a blog post by her titled, I Solved My Mystery Fatigue with AI. She says, “Here’s the bold version of my claim. An AI-literate patient running a good process with a frontier model can outperform most primary care physicians for ambiguous, multi-system symptoms.” In her case, it was this fatigue that she could not figure out what was actually happening to her. When she would go to her doctor, they would say, “Oh, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s this.” She was frustrated by the lack of a clear answer here.

What she did is actually take the AI out of it. It’s just like it makes good sense, which is she was tracking and logging her symptoms. She was doing the tests that made sense. She was analyzing them, but most crucially, she was using that analysis to figure out who are the experts who could actually maybe address this thing? Who should she actually go talk to? Because so often, I think we go to the first person who seems to be relevant, and they’re going to only answer to their limited expertise. Which, it’s just a chance to– what I like is that she felt like a protagonist in a story faced with a situation who’s doing protagonisty things and taking agency to figure out what to do next.

I would just recommend people to read this, especially if you’re facing something where, this is vague and weird, and I don’t know what this is. It may be a good place to start thinking about other ways through something.

Craig: Just to challenge the headline here…

John: Please.

Craig: Her mystery fatigue wasn’t solved by AI. It was solved by a doctor that she found through AI.

John: It was solved through her taking agency to find the right doctor to do a thing.

Craig: The doctor did it. I’m just saying that, yes, you can also say, “I’m going to take the time to research the best doctors out there with AI or without AI.” The headline is, I Solved My Fatigue with AI, the implication being AI told me, stop eating this, start doing this, and take this medicine, which it did not do in this case.

John: No, it did not. No.

Craig: Yes. The idea of, I figured out the right doctor for me through AI, that is the kind of thing that I think AI– yes.

John: Yes. I think you and I are often spoiled, and Ryan is in London right now, we have, in Los Angeles, access to all the specialists to do all the things. Craig, with your diabetes diagnosis, you were able to find the doctor who was the right person for this. Had you been in a smaller market that didn’t have that person, you could be struggling.

Craig: Exactly. Yes.

John: I’d say, yes, 10 years ago, you might be able to Google this, but would you be able to find the right path through this? I think it does help in these situations.

Craig: Yes. I can see that completely. I’m just challenging the slightly clickbaity headline there.

John: You should challenge it.

Craig: Yes. I have a game, John, again.

John: I can’t even imagine.

Craig: I’m really enjoying this one. John, you’ve played Myst, I assume. I don’t know.

John: Oh, yes. I loved Myst. Oh, my God.

Craig: Ryan’s nodding his head. Okay.

Ryan: Yes.

Craig: You’re one of us.

John: They’re trying to make a Myst series. I think it’s a really challenging series to make.

Craig: The book-based, metaphysical lore of Myst was not why I played Myst.

John: No.

Craig: Not sure.

John: Was it puzzles, Craig, that you loved?

Craig: It was puzzles. No offense to those guys, the great brothers who did those things, but the story was not necessarily– It was rather opaque and not the most compelling part of those games. There have been Myst-ish kind of things that have come along. This one is rather Myst-ish and quite stylish. It’s called Dimhaven – The Lost Source.

John: I’m clicking through the link. It looks nice. It’s at dimhaven.com.

Craig: Yes. They made Quern, which is another cool game. What I like about this one is it’s got a particular, really weird style. You arrive on an island that is in some vaguely Eastern European-ish kind of place. There’s a mystery, and you’re looking for your uncle, and stuff is happening.

What is particularly nice about this, and I find these games really struggle with this, is that they’ve tuned it to a pretty good difficulty level. They tell you, “We’re not going to hold your hand. You have to figure this stuff out on your own.”
It’s got a great level where you’re like, “What am I doing?” I’m going, “Well, what if they mean this?” or, “Ooh, wait, aha.” They built these puzzles so you get some solidly good ahas in it.

I’ve made it past the first and second sections. I’m on to the third now. I’m really enjoying it. It plays fairly well on the Steam Deck. It’s not really great on the Steam Deck. There’s some funky stuff. I’m so happy by having a game four inches from my stupid eyes that I’ll deal with the Steam Deck issues. It’s on Steam, so you can play it on anything, really.

John: I’m looking at the Steam page here. It looks like it’s also playable on the Steam clients for PC and for Mac as well.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. It would be preferable to play it probably on those than on the Steam Deck.

John: On a desktop. Yes?

Craig: Yes. You can play it on a desktop, exactly.

John: Then, of course, we’d have– I’ve been installing a game on my computer, which I’m not allowed to do. Therefore-

Craig: Why? Huh?

John: -if I have a game on my computer, Craig, I’m going to play this game on my computer rather than doing the writing I’m supposed to be doing. That’s why. Games are for iPads for me.

Craig: All work and no play, John.

John: Ryan, do you have something to share with us, a one cool thing?

Ryan: I do. John, I know you’re very techie, so I’m sure you’ve brought up VPNs before, but I have a very specific VPN thing that I uncovered over the last year. I’ve lived in London since 2020, so a lot of the things that I like and enjoy, sports in particular, have been taken away from me. NHL hockey is very hard to follow when you’re living in London. There’s also time issues. I haven’t seen a Super Bowl in six years. I haven’t seen an Oscars in six years. That’s a separate thing. I’m sure there are others that work.

I use this Nord VPN, and I actually put it on my Apple TV. For anybody that’s also marooned in another place where you can’t get the things that you want, it’s very easy to toggle on, toggle off. Actually, I used it for a year to access HBO Max, because HBO Max just launched here two months ago.

Craig: It used to be Sky.

Ryan: I could not bear to watch our shows on Sky because they put commercials in it, and they compress it and crush it to death. It was just very depressing to me.

Craig: Yes, they do.

Ryan: Peacock, Paramount+, the other things that aren’t yet available here in the UK, it defeats the things that– Look at it. I’m not stealing these things. I’ve subscribed to them. I’m just not in a locale where you can get it.

Craig: You’re busting the geo fence.

Ryan: Exactly. It sits on my Apple TV. Turn it on and off. It’s been great for watching sports.

John: That’s great.

Ryan: MLB is really the only thing that doesn’t like it, but MLB you can actually get over here with the MLB app. I’ve figured out everything other than the time problem of the Super Bowl starts at 1:00 in the morning.

Craig: I use it because I’m in Canada, and a lot of stuff gets geo-fenced out of Canada, including HBO, which, up there, they don’t have HBO Canada yet.

Ryan: I didn’t know that.

Craig: It’s Crave.

John: Crave, yes.

Craig: Then I got a Crave subscription, so you know. Sometimes, I’m like, “What did we do in that scene?” I’m like, “I can’t f– Just go on HBO Max and put– Okay. Crave.” What’s annoying about our production facility is that their whole WiFi IT thing prevents any VPN from being used.

Ryan: Oh, correct.

Craig: We can’t do it at work. Yes, when I’m at home, and I want to watch something on HBO Max, absolutely. NordVPN, that’s the same one I use. I just put myself in Los Angeles and off and running.

Ryan: Great. Then, actually, HBO Max, now that they’re available here, it’s different content based on where you are, so you can toggle between them.

Craig: Oh, that’s cool.

Ryan: I had not seen Chernobyl. I was alone last summer because we were shooting, so my family went away. I had not seen Chernobyl since it came out. I was like, “I’m going to fire up Chernobyl again.”

John: Feel good.

Craig: Let’s feel depressed again.

Ryan: HBO Max, Europe did not have it, and why would they?

Craig: Which surprised me because I was like, “It’s a European story. Why would they not have it?”

Ryan: Right. It was just so strange to me. I was like, “Okay.” I toggled back, and then I found it.

Craig: I wonder if the reason is because it was a Sky co-production. Sky, in fact, paid more for Chernobyl to be made than HBO did.

Ryan: How interesting.

Craig: I wonder if in the split that became something that-

Ryan: They got in the divorce?

Craig: They got in the divorce.

Ryan: Interesting.

John: Yes.

Ryan: Crazy.

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John: All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman.

Craig: Supposedly.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Eh.

John: Our intern is Lauren Loesberg. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli. He’s dusted off his Game of Thrones outro.

Craig: Oh, nice.

John: I think he added some drums because there’s a lot of new drums in your music there. I love it very much. Also, great, I really like the tapestry, the embroidery intro now. It’s great.

Ryan: Yes, yU+Co is the maker of our title sequence. They’re incredible. Love those guys.

John: Good stuff. 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 like the one we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. If you buy it in London, there, it’s a narrower book, but it’s the same content.

Ryan: Yes. Learn something, right?

John: Learn something. Absolutely. Stop watching Chernobyl and read a book.

Ryan: Seriously.

John: You can find clips and other helpful videos on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @Scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. The show notes with all the links to things we talked about today are in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. Craig, why do you love our premium subscribers?

Craig: Well, John, they help pay for all of our wonderful people, including our producer, and our editor, and our equipment.

John: Our intern. Our paid intern.

Craig: Our intern, our paid intern, and of course, the fees that are required to host the show. When all is said and done at the end of the year, if there’s a little bit left over, charity.

John: Charity, yes. We’re supporting the Entertainment Community Fund and other great work here in Los Angeles.

Craig: Basically, we’re angels.

John: That’s what it is. Nobility.

Ryan: Good people.

Craig: We’re saints.

John: Saints.

Craig: I can’t even say it without laughing.

John: You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, dragons. Ryan Condal, an absolute pleasure talking with you about your show. Congratulations, and keep doing it.

Craig: Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan: Thank you, guys.

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John: All right. Ryan Condal, your show has a lot of dragons. Dragons were established in the House of the Dragon in Game of Thrones universe by the original show, but you got a lot more of them. We’ve learned a lot more about their individual personalities. Some of them are very feral. Some of them are bigger, much bigger than other dragons.

Craig: Some of them have ridiculous underbites that need some sort of-

John: Orthodontist.

Craig: -oral maxillary surgery.

Ryan: Sheepstealer actually just had a blog post about how AI solved his underbite.

John: Oh, good. That’s nice.

Craig: Finally, because it found him a great underbite doctor.

John: What I love about dragons, as I said in the intro, is that they are universally known and discussed within our minds and our consciousness, but of course, they were never real. There’s just so many varieties of them. These are not talking dragons, but of course, we had talking dragons from early fantasy, from Smaug going forward. The dragons in your show, they function as weapons of mass destruction. You’re always concerned about who has a dragon and who doesn’t have a dragon. They changed everything we know about land combat, sea combat, air combat. The only defense against the dragon is another dragon, except that there’s also giant grappling hooks-

Craig: Grapnel.

John: -and crossbows that people have to be prepared with. Talk to us if you could about how you think about a world that has dragons in it and how that world would have to function differently because dragons exist.

Ryan: Well, what is unique about our show versus what Game of Thrones had is there were no dragons in that world. It’s the reason that we’re telling this prequel story is because we want to understand where Daenerys is when we find her in that first episode, and why the great have fallen. This is the beginning and the end of the dynasty because they lost their superpower, and then they became just like everybody else.

In her world, dragons return for the first time in 150 years, 130 years. In our world, they are an existing part of the ecosystem. There’s this whole dragon economy, dragon infrastructure. That was really fun to design, and I felt like that was the thing that, yes, we’re doing the sequel prequel to Game of Thrones. Of course, we are very happy to be drafting behind that particular indicar, but you also have to have your own reason to exist, and you have to find ways that this world is very different.

We find the Targaryens at the height of their power, the richest, the longest period of peace in the realm’s history, because they are so powerful and because they have so many dragons. That means there’s a dragon pit and a dragon mount, and these structures that are built to house them. Then there are dragon keepers. There’s this monastic order of people who take care of them and train them. There are saddles, which Daenerys never had on Drogon, or Viserion, or Rhaegal. All of these things fit into our world very specifically. All that stuff was really fun to design.

Even going into incredible levels of detail, we were like, “Well, how do you mount a saddle to a dragon?” I guess it could just sit up there, and you just put it on really tight. Then you’re doing, well, with the reins, you’re not putting a bit in the dragon’s mouth to steer them, so how are you steering them? We actually crafted this whole story where when they’re very young, the ones that are born in captivity, essentially, they have this hardware that is basically surgically implanted into them to mount the saddles to and then to mount the steering implements to.

Their armor heals around it as they grow. Then eventually, it’s like a piercing or an implant that sits beneath their skin. When you pull on it, they learn to, that means go right or go left or dive or whatever. Then a big wild dragon like Sheepstealer doesn’t have those implements, so he doesn’t have a saddle. He’s ridden bareback, as we saw. The difference between a wild dragon and a domesticated Targaryen dragon, fancy purebred dragons.

Craig: The wild dragon is an asshole.

Ryan: Yes. Well, Craig, he was minding his own business. Then this woman got in his kitchen, claimed him, and then rode him home and then took him into the Battle of Trafalgar. He was reacting to-

Craig: He did what you’d do.

Ryan: -the stimulus that he was there. He was not doing anything bad. He was protecting himself, protecting the rider. That’s the danger– If you had jumped on the back of a grizzly bear and ridden it into your-

Craig: Then who’s the asshole? Is what you’re saying.

Ryan: -nephew’s birthday party, you’ve got to expect that there are going to be some kids that are not going to have a good time.

Craig: There is a very funny scene where, as the bear is eating children, you’d stay on the bear, and you’re just like, “Stop it. Stop. No. These are good kids.” The bear just keeps eating.

John: It’s a very dark sequel to Paddington there.

Craig: I’m curious, as you explore the morphology of dragons, and I think a huge underbite is a fascinating thing to do, and you can see how, like in the animal kingdom, there isn’t as much uniformity as we might expect, but there is a general shape and style to these dragons. I think it’s perfect. Meaning, if I were to, say, be doing a show where there might be dragons, which I might be–

John: Might be happening.

Craig: Might be happening. My initial instinct is to say, “Let’s hold back on the dragons.” Because, at this point, it’s going to be tricky to create dragons that don’t feel like Westeros dragons. We have this general platonic sense of what a dragon is. They got it down pretty good. I’m curious if you guys have ever thought, what if we built an entirely– is there a different kind of dragon, or something like that, a worm, where you get the weird cousin of a dragon?

Ryan: Yes, we might have something like that coming down the pike. That’s where we get to every season, is there has been dragon growth from seed of the season in terms of either new ones or just the number. Just introducing new ones, or there’s a birth or whatever. The dragons, they’re great fun. They do everything you ask them to do, which is one of the great–

John: They hit their marks.

Ryan: Yes, they hit their marks. They take direction very well.

Craig: Don’t complain.

Ryan: Yes, that’s right. They don’t take lunch breaks.

John: A question for you about conception of the dragons within the world. They’re magic in the sense that they feel real within the world, and yet if we stop and think, nothing that big could actually fly. It doesn’t actually fit our rules of physics. How often are you thinking about how would this thing be able to turn around that quickly? How often can it breathe the fire? What are those discussions like? Because as the writer, you must be making those choices, but then as you’re seeing shots come together, you’re like, “Ah, does that actually make sense?” Talk to us about what you’re thinking about the in-world reality of dragons.

Ryan: Yes, and we try to keep it really real. That’s the wonderful thing about Game of Thrones is that everything just feels real. It’s real with about 15 degrees of fantasy, which is what you need. That’s why people read the books and come and watch the show. We try to keep it very real. I remember David Hancock, one of our executive producer-writers on the show, referred to them in Season 2 when we were planning, mapping out the show as big stinky war planes. They need fuel, so they need to eat.

This has actually became a thing where we had this thread in Season 2 that some of the pressures of the war and the scarcity are actually caused by the dragons because people are– now that they’re really active, because a lot of times they’re in this kind of torpor, hibernative state where they’re not taking in a bunch of energy, but when you’re taking them out and flying them and burning things with them all the time, they need more sheep to eat and more goats and more cows. That means the people don’t have those to eat, and they were being requisitioned by the crown.

The way all of that stuff swirls in the ecosystem, and they need rests. We made a point at some point about Vhagar needing to– it was so big that with every movement that she makes, she then also needs an equal amount of rest to restore herself. Vhagar is so big that she can’t even fit in the dragon pit anymore. She’s actually outgrown even the crazy-sized human structures that we’ve built. She’s the one dragon that outgrew captivity.

We talk about all that stuff all the time, and trying to make them sentient magical fantasy beasts that are also just real animals at the same time. We try to walk that line all the time. Grizzly bear at the nephew’s birthday party, that’s where a Sheepstealer, he’s mystically bonded to Rhaena. Then also does this very understandable wild animal thing afterwards.

Craig: He couldn’t tell those people apart.

Ryan: Yes.

Craig: He just couldn’t tell them apart.

Ryan: He doesn’t know sales.

Craig: No.

John: The mystically bonded thing is an important aspect that was established because with Daenerys in the first season, she was the mother of dragons, and then it was the fire that– there was a whole thing that made sense why she could. A plot point that becomes very important is, well, who can actually ride these dragons? There is a mystical, magical thing that is part of that.

Craig: It’s in their genetics.

John: Yes. It’s genetics. It’s some magical thing that’s happening through it. It’s the force. It’s a thing that actually connects the rider to the dragon, which I find really interesting. That’s why, as we see Sheepstealer in this moment, who’s raised outside of this space, we wonder whether is he actually able to understand her or is she just interacting with a wild animal that seems-

Craig: I got to tell you, that feels like a story that might go somewhere. That feels like an interesting narrative challenge that will end up with either a satisfying or tragic result, or both.

Ryan: Possibly both. The whole notion of the bond with the rider is something we’re really interested in. It’s not something you want to overexplain because the characters in the show, they understand it to a degree.

John: You don’t want to get to Midichlorians. Yes.

Ryan: Yes, exactly. Only binds to one rider at a time. The bond is for life, either the life of the rider or of the dragon. Beyond that, we don’t– Some people have stronger bonds with their dragons than others. Just like Anakin Skywalker was a much more powerful Jedi than many of the other Jedi around him. We play with all that stuff. It is that walking the line of, you want that 15% of mysticism, but then you want the rest of it to feel really grounded and real. When a dragon lands, you want to see this big bit of earth turn up. When they jump off a cliff to fly, you want to see them immediately swoop down.

John: Fall first down.

Ryan: Because you want to see gravity take over. You don’t want to just have the sense that their wings are just guiding them.

Craig: They’re weightless.

Ryan: They’re flying via some internal anti-gravity device. It’s not that. They need to eat. As Viserys warned us in Season 1, the idea that Targaryens control the dragons is an illusion. Viserys has had the strong belief that we control them enough for it to be dangerous. That was all really interesting. Then you get into the themes that they bring to the show, like mutually assured destruction. Craig has also experience working with nuclear power and how dangerous it is.

Of course, the characters don’t have the term mutually assured destruction, but they understand that if I deploy my dragon to overtake a castle, I could burn the castle to the ground and destroy everybody that I’m trying to get to bend the knee to me as my subject. Or on a different level, on a chess game level, this is my queen. It’s the most powerful piece I have on the board, but I don’t want to expose my queen such that I’m going to have my queen killed, because then there’s probably some statistic of once the queen is off the board, most chess games go in the other direction.

We’re playing with that thing too, and it’s fun. Then also, they can be really confounding to the writers at times because they are so all-powerful. There’s a lot of dragon math going on all the time. Who’s where? How quick can they get to where? Why can’t this problem just be solved with a dragon?

Craig: There you go. Why exactly aren’t we just sending the dragon to burn the thing? That is tough because you want to preserve the right to be awesome. When a dragon shows up, those wonderful, dramatic moments where a dragon shows up and just obliterates everybody. You love those, but every time you use one of those, you are telling the audience, “We can do this.” It is an interesting narrative to figure out, like to put these limitations on, they need rest, they need food. Having the rider go out and do that exposes the rider. Restraint in the use of these big, stinky warplanes makes sense.

Ryan: Then there’s also the math of everybody’s terrified of Vhagar because that’s the big one that, until Rhaenyra claimed Vermithor and Silverwing with Ulf and Hugh, or Statler and Waldorf, that was the terror of, I don’t even know if Syrax and Caraxes, my dragon and Damon’s dragon, together could take Vhagar. Maybe they could. We would certainly give her a bad time, but we might not also be able to overtake her.
That’s great fun, but it’s also, you have this Kaiju Uber God, even within the world of Vermax and Moondancer, Jace and Baela’s dragons from the first episode. Those are large velociraptors with wings. They’re great fun, and they’re maneuverable and quick and all that, and they can get away, but they’re not fighting Vhagar either.

Craig: They don’t do great with boat anchors.

Ryan: Yes. That’s very true.

Craig: It’s their one Achilles heel, boat anchor.

Ryan: That was the bummer for Rhaenyra with the dragon seeds not– She signed up these guys to be her air force, and they don’t understand the chain of command and what following an order is, because if they had done that, either Vhagar would be dead or they would have come to the Gullet. Because those things aren’t taking down Vermithor. He would have ripped the ship out of the water.

In the writing, that’s some of the work that we have to do to make these things engaging and compelling and also suspenseful because in the book, Vermithor and Silverwing and Seasmoke do actually show up at the Gullet. Stay tuned. I think this is airing after this has happened, but they do show up at the Gullet because at the end of episode one, the Gullet’s not over. You see the cleanup going on in episode two. That’s how we honored what was in the book. If they were there, it just wouldn’t have been as suspenseful what was going on down on the ship.

It’s nice because we have a bunch of different-sized dragons, and then we have baby dragons you can’t even ride yet. That stuff is fun, and that’ll come into the narrative as well. We get to play with a bunch of the different toys, but there are some times where you’re just sitting there staring like, “Why doesn’t the dragon just solve this whole problem?”

John: I do like that you mentioned that one of the fundamental things that it gives you is the power of flight and the power to move a character from one place to another place.

Ryan: Incredible.

John: Because one of the challenges of a medieval-ish world is that it’s just hard to get places, and dragons solve that. It’s the transporter of Star Trek.

Ryan: Or you just get yourself a good teleportation…

John: Craig, I was going to say, Last of Us is so much about just how hard it is to get a place. Did you consider adding some dragons? It would have made your show significantly better.

Ryan: If you can get a bloater early on and saddle it.

John: Just float it like a balloon.

Ryan: Just saddle a bloater and ride it.

Craig: We’re stuck with horses.

Ryan: Is it possible we could get a fungus dragon? Could we merge our worlds and see what happens when–

John: Love it.

Craig: In Baldur’s Gate, you absolutely could because in Baldur’s Gate, there’s a race called the Myconids. This is in D&D lore, and the Myconids are sentient fungal beings. When they defeat creatures, they absorb them into the fungal colony and turn them into fungal zombies, essentially.

Ryan: Excellent.

Craig: Well, they could do that with a dragon.

John: Absolutely, 100%. The story writes itself.

Craig: They already did that. They did that in Game of Thrones.

John: The undead dragon did happen.

Craig: Did it.

Ryan: That’s fair.

Craig: Oh, but there are great undead dragons, though. There’s the whole world of undead dragons in D&D.

John: In the Umbral Moths, the Shadows.

Craig: You got dracolich.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: Run. You see one of those, run.

John: Illithid dragons, come on. That’s the good stuff.

Craig: I don’t think there’s an illithid dragon. I think–

John: No, I’ve seen them.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve seen them where a master brain, one of the Great Brains, takes over.

Craig: Oh, the Elder Brain?

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: It makes an illithid dragon?

John: Yes.

Craig: I haven’t seen a picture of them.

John: I’m insanely jealous of your next show, Craig, but I’m also so glad that I don’t have to do that, and then I get to just watch it as a fan and not stress out about.

Craig: Maybe you do have to do it. Maybe you should.

Ryan: I can get all the things that I want. I cannot be in charge.

Craig: We can line stuff up. I’m just saying.

Ryan: Let’s talk.

Craig: You know.

John: After this show, Ryan Condal is going to go off and do In Therapy, a show of two characters sitting across from each other on chairs. Love it.

Ryan: Or no chairs, John.

John: No chairs. They’re standing. It’s like a therapy, but people are standing up.

Craig: One person seats. [chuckles]

John: It’s just a monologue.

Craig: I simply–

John: He’s going to do a podcast. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s a one-person podcast.

Craig: Listen, I rarely can say to somebody, “I know exactly how you feel,” but I know exactly how you feel. You’re doing a great job.

Ryan: Oh, thanks.

Craig: Congratulations on a fantastic start to Season 3.

John: Congratulations.