The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 639 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are you or your characters doing what you’re doing? We’ll look at intrinsic motivation, both on screen and in the brain, because Craig loves neurobiology.
Craig: Love it. I love it.
John: Love it. It’s good stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, will human beings ever leave the solar system?
Craig: I have an answer for that. We’ll save it for the people that paid for it.
John: Absolutely. Craig, happy birthday.
Craig: Aw, thank you, John. 53 years old.
John: Nicely done.
Craig: Prime number. Always like that. Always enjoy a prime number. Still in my early 50s.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Still in my early 50s. Hanging onto the early 50s. I know that for people in their 20s, early 50s is hysterical. Oh, congrats on your early 50s, grandpa. Back in the day, John, you were in your early 50s, you were on a glide path to the golden watch-
John: Absolutely.
Craig: … and retirement on the golf course and then rapidly ensuing death, I think. Now it feels like you’re just getting started.
John: You are. You’re literally just warming up.
Craig: Just warming up. The mere presence of statins to control your cholesterol, that alone-
John: That alone, it’s a lot.
Craig: My goodness.
John: I’m sure you’ve seen all these memes about the cast of Cheers and the actual age of the cast of Cheers when that show started. You realize Kelsey Grammer is 29 or something.
Craig: Coach is the one that always rattles, because Coach is 56 or something, and he looks like he’s 80, and died shortly thereafter, by the way. He didn’t live long. I don’t think he made it past the second season.
John: Which is how we got Woody Harrelson.
Craig: Woody Harrelson. But yeah, Cliff is 35. I don’t know what was going on. I don’t know what was going on.
John: I’ve seen explanations that basically, a lot of how we perceive people in older photos and stuff is because people set their clothing style and their hairstyles when they’re young, and they carry those forward, and we associate those hairstyles and ways of dressing as being an older person. That’s why when you look at photos of your parents when they’re in high school, they look old for their age.
Craig: People wanted to be old. When you look at the people on Norm, for instance. I don’t even know what Norm did for a living. Did they ever even say?
John: Yeah, they did establish it at some point. Cliff was the mailman.
Craig: He was an accountant. Norm was an accountant, and then he loses his job and wackiness ensues. But if you were a 34-year-old accountant, you wore a shirt and a tie and a rumpled jacket and that was it. People wanted to be grown up. Remember how much you wanted to be grown up?
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: Now I feel like no one wants to grow up.
John: I’m thinking about my kid. She does, but I don’t know, there’s also a celebration of youth. I get that.
Craig: And being current. I think they felt older. I think they wanted to be older. But now, here we are in our early 50s and 20s, still wearing sneakers and jeans. People just didn’t do that. I don’t know, maybe we should go for the more rumpled-
John: That’s what we should do.
Craig: … middle-aged guy look.
John: We’ve established on the show I intend to live a very, very long life. I don’t want to jinx that by saying-
Craig: You do.
John: Yeah, but I’m fine living to 100 or 110.
Craig: I’ll tell you what. You’re gonna live as long as you live. That’s the best part. You just keep going, and then it stops.
John: We’ve talked about this also on the show. You have no intention of retirement, or does that hold any appeal to you, or is that like a beach vacation, where it doesn’t?
Craig: It doesn’t hold appeal to me currently. In my mind currently, retirement means failure, like you failed so bad at what you were doing that an entire industry said, “We’re done with you. After all this time, we’ve collectively decided you should eff off.”
John: It’s a soft cancellation.
Craig: Yeah, a soft cancellation, exactly. I could. Then the question is what would I do?
John: You’d play a lot of D&D.
Craig: I would play a ton of D&D and solve a lot of puzzles, not go to the beach, hellscape. I have a purpose. It keeps me going. Man, there are days. I love it so much that even when I absolutely loathe it, what else am I gonna do?
John: You do your thing.
Craig: It’s a hard job.
John: It is a hard job running a show, keeping a universe going. Let’s do some follow-up. Many times on the podcast we’ve talked about AI, including this experiment we did a year ago, feeding the Scriptnotes transcripts into a model. We found the results that came out of that really disappointing. Ben wrote in with some feedback on that.
Drew Marquardt: He says, “I’ve spent the last decade at Google working on creative and AI, machine learning, then generative AI for video. The models like ChatGPT and Gemini are amazing, but as you’ve found, relatively generic for specific tasks like story analysis, and are missing things like discernment or taste. You’ve also found that narrow models, like those trained on your show transcripts, are only mediocre. What this perspective is missing is human in the loop training, or HILT,” I’m gonna say hilt, “where someone tells the model that this output is good and this one is bad, on and on and on as the model gets better. The world models won’t do this for script analysis, because the use case is not important enough. You probably won’t do it for the show because it’s too time-intensive. But if you did, or someone did, the models would get better quickly and could even be trained on a director’s taste or an executive’s taste. You could input Denis Velleneuve’s body of work and find projects he would like. If you trained it well enough, it could help steer and shape them based in ways he would or might, and these patterns on top of patterns are opening up whole new ways of interrogating storytelling and taste.”
Craig: Ben is basically collaborating with the Borg. That’s what’s happening. I understand that it’s been difficult for you guys to assimilate into the Borg collective. However, I’ve been working hard, and there is a method where we can assimilate you much faster, and then you can assimilate your loved ones much faster. And eventually, we’ll all live in a cube in space.
John: It’ll be fantastic and great. I want to talk about a few things here. First off, this idea of training on taste. It’s actually been happening in Hollywood forever. Development executives are trained on their boss’s taste. It’s not just what do we think is gonna make a good movie, but what do I think my boss will actually like, and what do I know my boss will not like? There are specific red flags, and you never show those things to your boss. Sure. That may not be a great way to model what’s actually gonna be a successful movie, what’s gonna win the Academy Award, but it’s what’s going to get it through the next step of the process.
Craig: It’s funny, when Ben used the example Denis Velleneuve, in my mind at first I imagined Denis going, “No, it’s not possible. No one can understand what I want to do.” And then I thought about Denis, because he is the most humble man. I could actually see him going, “This makes sense. I believe actually computer could tell me what to do next, maybe better than I could do,” because he’s lovely. That’s my bad attempt at a Canadian French accent. I understand what Ben’s saying. All I know is that it’s all horrifying, and I kind of wish it would stop. I really do. I don’t like this at all.
John: Some of what Ben is describing we actually see in daily practice at Netflix. The Netflix algorithm, which is showing you, this is a thing you might like, it has that human-reinforced training, because it’s saying, oh, did you actually watch this whole thing? It’s taking you having finished watching a thing as a marker that you liked it, even if you’re not clicking the thumbs up, thumbs down, like, oh you must like this. We’re gonna feed you more of this. It has all the patterns for figuring out, this is other things you’re probably going to enjoy. But on the creator side, it’s a little bit more frustrating, because they will tell you, oh, if you don’t show this plot point within the first 10 minutes, people are unlikely to finish the show. Those can be frustrating notes to get from that.
Craig: It will be regressive. There was a time before the world of television, for instance, as we know it, where everything was driven by this research nonsense. Every show started to look the same. Everybody needed a dog or a funny next-door neighbor. Then it was a big challenge for shows that didn’t fit that model to even get on the air, much less get watched. But then some of them did and were huge hits, of course, because it turns out just because we say we like something doesn’t mean that’s all we like. Everybody likes fried chicken. If a restaurant that was famous for 17 different things decided to only do fried chicken, you’d be like, “Okay, I guess [unintelligible 00:09:09],” but otherwise, no.
Then television just opened up into this glorious – we’ll make anything, no matter how weird or bizarre. I don’t think AI would’ve done a very good job of that. Movies have now regressed, so it sort of flip-flopped. So many movies became cookie cutter nonsense, based on research and so forth. But maybe the success of some outliers might be getting us away from this.
But nonetheless, my sister of all people emailed me the other day, and she was saying there was somebody that was talking to her about this AI predictive platform that will tell you what shows and movies will be a hit. It just never ends. They just keep trying. I don’t think that’ll ever work.
John: It won’t work. We lived through a time of classic testing of movies and TV shows. We’d have test screenings. You’d get numbers, like, how did you do on your top two boxes, and that was a big predictor of your success. There you were actually showing it to a real audience. The experience as writers and creators was, I can hear it with an audience. We can actually see and feel how the audience is responding. Sometimes those were useful, much more useful than the numbers were useful. I’ve also done TV shows back when they actually had dials.
Craig: Turning the dial.
John: They were turning the dial. The problem is, the dial is not really showing whether you’re gonna watch that next episode. It’s just how did I feel in this moment. Turning those dials is not a good marker. The other big problem with classic research and some of these AI model research is that it can only account for what’s inside their realm of measurability. They can see, oh, did this person complete the show. But did they actually like the show, or did they hate-watch the end of the show? You don’t know.
Craig: You don’t know. Did they think about the show a week later and change their mind? You don’t know.
John: You don’t know. All the other outside factors, like what’s happening in popular opinion about it, is there water cooler talk, what are the critics saying, that’s not factored in. And that’s a big factor in whether somebody really enjoyed that program and wants to keep watching that show or wants to watch another season. You don’t know.
Craig: Also, what we do in part is designed to surprise. If the system is designed to provide you something different, the most exciting thing is something that is excellent and different. How is a machine supposed to predict excellent and different? It’s hard to account for surprise. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
John: Please.
Craig: Gödel. Kurt Gödel, wonderful mathematician, proved that within any closed set of mathematical rules, like our math, there will always be some things that are true that cannot be proven, which is a bit of a mind-bender. He actually proved that. I don’t know how. These mathematicians are operating on levels that I simply don’t understand.
John: And thus you need postulates and axioms and other things that are just fundamental givens.
Craig: They prove all of them, actually. It’s quite remarkable. But you can’t create a system that accounts for everything that is true within the system. There will be some things that are true that cannot be proved, which is why, for instance, there are things that we know that are true that take years and decades and centuries to prove, like Fermi’s paradox and so on. This I think is true for entertainment. There will always be things that will delight people that you cannot account for, given the known set of what delights people.
John: It’s true.
Craig: Good luck. Why am I taunting AI? I should stop taunting AI.
John: Let’s move on to some more follow-up here. We talked about blueprints and whether blueprints are a good way to describe what we write.
Drew: David G writes, “I used to work in construction management, and I would say that it is probably the most similar field to filmmaking than any other. By the time we finished building a building, most of the time, the building ended up looking exactly like the blueprint had shown. However, during the building process, we would request something called an RFI, or request for information, to the architect when we got into the field and something didn’t work, either because something unforeseen was in the way or for any other reason we couldn’t make it work. While by the end of the project the structure and idea of the building is like the blueprint was showing, lots of little changes were made to keep the project moving. Sounds like a movie, right?”
John: It does.
Craig: Kind of does, yeah. I get RFIs all day long. Every prep meeting I have. Sometimes I get an RFI that I’ve already gotten 12 times, but someone new texts me the RFI. I’m like, “Oh my god, if one more person asks me this question.” Yes, I think as much as we want to metaphorize filmmaking to construction, it’s still not great. It’s a tough one. I think sometimes the best metaphor for turning a screenplay into a show or movie is turning a screenplay into a show or movie. That’s what we should be linking back to. It is very within itself.
John: We talked about important movies two episodes ago. We had a lot of feedback on that. Let’s start with Brandon, who’s talking about games.
Drew: Brandon wrote, “I work in games, and this is a question that often comes up in that medium, particularly from younger writers and narrative designers, not just, do I need to have played whatever game, but do I need to play this entire genre.”
Craig: Oh my god.
Drew: “It’s even worse in games than movies, because games are such a comparatively huge time suck. It naturally leads to a lot of people with imposter syndrome quietly wondering whether they need to go drop $40 and 60 hours of their personal time or risk being laughed at out of the room.
“The answer I always give regarding this question is, there’s no single game you have to play to make a great game of your own. Many of your favorite games were made by people totally ignorant of the genres they wound up defining. However, playing those canon games everyone gushes about can help in two very specific ways. One, it prevents you from reinventing the wheel during that early, high-level pre-production phase when you’re trying to figure out what stuff you’ll need to figure out from scratch versus what someone else has already figured out 20 years ago. And two, it gives you a handy box of touchpoints and easily communicated shorthand when you’re up against a weird problem and need to find a clever solution in a hurry. Writing a 1,500-word design document for a dialog system takes a lot longer than saying, ‘You know, like Mass Effect,’ and dropping a YouTube link.”
Craig: Those are all great points, Brandon. I’ll add a third thing. It keeps you from coming up with a genius idea that then everybody turns, looks at you, and says, “You mean like the ending of blah-dee blah?” The point is, no, you don’t have to do everything, and also there are other people. It’s okay if someone raises their hand, says, “I’m so sorry, but that was in blankedy blank.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. Damn. Back to the drawing board for me.” Among the group, hopefully, people have seen the important things. Also, wait 20 years and people forget the things that everybody knows.
John: Some pros and cons here. I’m thinking of examples of outsider art where people who came completely outside of a system ended up making amazing things, because they just did not know any of the conventions of the genre or what had come before them. That can be really exciting. But you also have hysterical examples where people just didn’t understand what music was. I can’t think of the name of the band.
Craig: The Shags.
John: The Shags, exactly. The Shags.
Craig: They’re incredible. Frank Zappa called The Shags the best band there ever was.
John: They had just no sense of what-
Craig: None.
John: … rock-and-roll music was.
Craig: They had no sense of tempo, rhythm, lyrics, melody, instrumentation, or arrangement, coherence. It is a remarkable to listen to, and that’s why Frank Zappa said if you presumed that what they did, they did intentionally, they would be the most brilliant musicians of all time, because no musician could do that naturally. But of course, it was also terrible.
I think people maybe get a little too obsessed with watching everything, playing everything. What happens is you turn into more of a critic or a repository than you do a creator. And the more stuff that’s banging around in your head, the more likely it is that you’re gonna play this weird, “I have to do something no one else has done before” game, which will send you down some weird, artificial, over-engineered pathways.
John: An argument for sampling, and sampling broadly, is it helps you figure out what your taste is, what do you actually enjoy, what do you love. I would say don’t just play these games, but actually figure out what is it about this that’s working for you, what is not working for you, why is this a good experience for you, and so not even being so mechanical about what I’m gonna take from this, but basically how is this making me feel. That applies to games and to movies and to TV shows. What is it about this that you love? You can carry that forward, rather than this specific stuff, like this plot or this mechanic.
Craig: You get a chance maybe to play a game that you enjoy on one level. Let’s say I love the gameplay, don’t like the story. This game, love the story; game is so boring. What if I took the stuff I liked from this and stuff I liked from this, put my own spin on it? Because when Neil was working on The Last of Us – it’s a zombie game. There have been a billion zombie games. It’s a third-person shooter. Been a billion third-person shooters. But there had also been games where there were these interesting two-person relationships that weren’t really AAA video games and there wasn’t a lot of action. Fusing these things together is really interesting. Jonathan Blow, who has made some incredible indie games-
John: Braid and other things.
Craig: Braid is a great example of somebody saying, what if you took a very simple platformer, added a little quirky backwards time unroll element, but then tell a story that is so bizarre and deep and rich and weird and kind of Vonnegut-ish, and you get something remarkable like Braid.
John: In the case of Blow and Braid, you have to have played enough of those games to understand how platformers work and what the conventions are in order to be able to subvert that.
Craig: You follow your love. If you have this real deep love for a certain genre, what do you do now to do your own weird spin on it? Rian Johnson made Brick. He loves noir films. I’m sure he watched a gazillion of them and then thought, “I also love John Hughes movies. Now, let me see about smushing my loves together.” But he understands the rules.
Kevin Williamson, clearly so deeply immersed in the world of classic ’80s VHS slasher movies. How do you take all that knowledge and remix it into something that feels current and interesting? I think follow your nose and you’ll find your genre. But you don’t have to play everything. That’d be crazy.
John: That actually ties very well into our next question, our next follow-up here.
Drew: Paris writes, “Looking through your list of important movies, I realized I’m totally screwed. I’m 24 years old. I was born in 2000, and I wasn’t exposed to many films growing up. I began trying to catch up in my 20s, but there’s so much I haven’t seen. It’s overwhelming. I looked through the list and made a highlighted version of my own films, and I’ve seen 85 out of the 400. If the 1970s were on there, I’d be toast. Any advice where to start? I don’t want my lack of cinema knowledge to affect my writing.”
John: Paris sent through their highlighted list of things that they’d missed, and there’s really great films on their list of what they’ve missed. My advice to Paris would be to start in the 2010s, pick three movies you’re curious about, watch them, and then go back a decade, and then go back a decade. Let it be fun homework. Don’t feel like this is a thing you have to do. Just really follow your curiosity down this rabbit hole and see what it is that you like. I don’t think if Paris were to say, “I’m going to spend the next two years and every day, watch a movie off this list,” I don’t know that’s necessarily the best use of their time.
Craig: No. It will also, again, turn you into a movie critic. You’ll become a culture hoarder, as opposed to somebody that’s watching things that they love, because the entire exercise will feel forced and artificial. One method, Paris, may be to pick a movie from a director that has a bunch of movies on this list. Scorsese probably has a bunch on this list, Soderbergh, Coppola. Watch one of their movies. See if you like it. If you like it, keep watching their movies. A little bit like playing every track on an album. If you started with Do the Right Thing, for instance, if you loved Do the Right Thing, check out some more Spike Lee movies. If you watch Raging Bull and you love it, it’s time to switch over to Goodfellas or Mean Streets or King of Comedy. Same with the Cohen brothers. It might be better to just find the filmmakers you love and follow them. And then every now and then, just stick in a random one.
The other option is you can just say, “I’m gonna watch one of these dramas. Every month I’m gonna watch four movies. I don’t care. Just four. Each week I pick a different genre.” Drama, comedy, thriller, horror, whatever it is. Just mix it up. Keep it light. It’s not homework. You’ll be fine.
John: I would also say movies can be social experiences. See if you have friends or somebody else who wants to get in this movie club with you. Then you can have a discussion about what you saw.
Craig: Absolutely. One of my great joys now that I’m old-
John: 53.
Craig: … 53 is I get to show movies, especially from the ’90s, which ’90s were great for movies-
John: Great years.
Craig: … to Allie, who’s in her 20s, or to Bella, who’s just in her 20s. I showed Bella Matrix for the first time. I showed Allie Godfather for the first time. That’s so much fun. The other thing is, find somebody older who is like, okay, I think you will love this. Let them be your AI, who knows you, thinks of your taste, and goes, “I think you’ll love this.” And most importantly, I always say to anybody I’m showing a movie to, “You get to pull the rip cord whenever you want.” If you’re bored, I don’t care if it’s The Godfather, whatever, if you’re bored – give it 30 minutes. You’re bored after 30 minutes, next movie, or we’ll go have a sandwich. That’s fine. It shouldn’t feel like you’re eating gravel.
John: 100 percent. Last little bit of follow-up on here from Willy.
Drew: Willy in Dublin writes, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore. For sure, you can be at a disadvantage in a professional situation if you haven’t seen canonical works, but I think that people who have different experiences can make valuable contributions to the creative process, as long as there is a lingua franca for collaboration. What’s the point if everyone thinks the same?”
Craig: Multiple logical leaps inside of Willy’s comment there.
John: Yeah, I would say.
Craig: So many.
John: Yeah, a little straw manning.
Craig: Yeah, just goalpost shifting. First of all, you say, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore.” So you mean to say you want to push back on the idea that – you contradict yourself within that first statement. Which one are you pushing back against? Because if they’re movies that you can’t ignore, that means you absolutely need to see them, and if they’re movies that you don’t absolutely need to see, then there are movies that you can ignore.
John: I think Willy’s pushing back against this idea of canonical lists. These are really arbitrary lists of-
Craig: Of course.
John: … 100 movies that a lot of people seem to like and a lot of people talk about as the movies of that decade.
Craig: Nobody is suggesting that if you don’t see those things, you have, quote, “no valuable contribution to the creative process,” nor do these movies contribute to a “lingua franca for collaboration.” Collaboration is an entirely different thing. If everybody sits down and is forced as an entry point to watch the same 100 movies, there is no chance that that means that they will now, quote, “think the same.” No. They’ll argue about them all.
John: But to go the other illogical extremes, you have the example of The Shags. If you are the screenwriter who is The Shags, who has basically seen no other movies and has no understanding of how movies work, you’re gonna write something that’s gonna be perhaps fascinating on a textual level, but it’s not going to be a movie.
Craig: I’m not sure that you would be writing a movie. The Shags are such an incredible outlier, because they didn’t want to do it either. Their dad made them do it. They didn’t know. They had neither the desire – I guess we’re gonna be talking about motivations shortly. They had no motivation to do what they were doing, other than their father being like, “You can become the next Partridge Family.” And they just tried their best.
John: Good stuff. Let’s get into our main topic here. On April 6th, the New York Times Connections puzzle had the words “desire,” “drive,” “resolve,” and “will,” which were the four that lined up. And the category put for that was “intrinsic motivators,” which is nice, a good way of looping those together.
Craig: Interesting way [crosstalk 00:25:51].
John: We talked a lot on the podcast about motivation, about goals and needs and wants. Episode 569 we talked about inspiration versus motivation and touched on some of this. But I thought we’d dig in a little bit deeper on intrinsic motivation, which is basically what is driving a person internally to do a thing versus the situation. It’s not about external forces like deadlines or ticking clocks or circumstances. It’s about something inside them that’s driving the character to do a thing.
Craig: They have a list of things that they require something to meet to be considered alive. It needs to reproduce. It needs to ingest and possibly excrete. But my favorite one is it needs to show irritability.
John: Interesting.
Craig: Irritability is reaction to stimulus. We have, as living creatures, an innate irritability. Things bother us and create a want. But the interesting thing about humans, and certainly when we’re writing characters, these irritabilities can sometimes be physical in nature. People have been asking forever, what’s the whole point of this? That makes you irritable, not knowing things. Curiosity is a great one. So what is the intrinsic motivator for Hercule Poirot? He wants to know. Somebody could say he’s really committed to justice. I don’t think so. In his spare time, it’s not like he’s working down at the courts as a prosecutor. He’s just curious. Curiosity alone is a spectacular intrinsic motivator.
John: That’s a thing they can actually study in animals. You think animals are just responding to stimulus, so they’re trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but they will actually go into an electrified area, because there’s curious ones in there. Certain animals will do these kinds of things.
We talk on the show sometimes about negative intrinsic motivators, so fear, shame, jealousy, self-doubt. But I’d like to talk a little bit more about the positive version of those, the actual drives, because I’ve been watching shows and movies recently where I feel like after two hours or eight hours, I still couldn’t really tell you what is motivating them internally, what the positive intrinsic motivators are, what’s their desire, drive, resolve. If it was a musical, I couldn’t sketch out their “I want” song. There isn’t one in there. They can feel a little bit lifeless, because as humans, I know they should have something like that driving them.
Craig: When this happens, we tend to refer to the characters as flat or thin, two-dimensional. And it’s because the characters are only apparently motivated by circumstance. But ideally, circumstance is the second thing that happens. The first thing that happens before the show or movie even starts is they already are irritable about something. Something is missing. Something must be known. Something must be uncovered. Are you a BBC Sherlock fan, by any chance?
John: I watched all that.
Craig: Loved that show. One of the things that I love about it is when Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have a case, he starts to go insane. He wants to smoke. He wants to shoot heroin. He loses it, becomes violent and irritable. That precedes any circumstance that comes along. Sometimes we end up with these characters who are defined simply by their job, their present circumstance. Then a new circumstance happens, and they have a new job to do. But who are they? What happens when this job ends? If I’m supposed to stop caring about them when the job ends, why would I care about them now, while the job’s still going on?
John: That is the real frustration. It could be that the story really is the writer and how the story is being structured. It’s just not given any opportunity to actually explore those things. That character may actually have those things, but we as an audience aren’t getting to see any chance of that, because they’re generally not musicals so there’s not a chance for them to fully articulate what it is they’re doing or having some other character they can talk to about the thing. We need to find ways to structure and expose what is that internal drive that’s pushing them to a thing.
Craig: Now, there may be moments where you show a circumstance, and that circumstance becomes the internal drive. But it’s soon. You don’t want to wait around forever. And that circumstance that creates the internal drive must be clearly separate from the new circumstance that is the main body of the plot.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I can’t tell you much about the character Joel in The Last of Us leading up to his daughter’s death. He works in construction. He’s a contractor. He seems all right. I don’t know his internal states. I don’t know what his intrinsic motivation would be. She dies. Twenty years later, now I understand what his intrinsic motivation is in general, whether it’s to avoid or whatever. Then the new circumstance begins. But it is within the context of that prior irritability. As much as possible, when you’re thinking about – you at home, when you’re thinking about writing the story and the characters, you need to know what the problem is before the problem shows up.
John: There’s generally either a lack or some other object goal that’s out there that’s a little bit more vague, but a thing that they’re trying to do. There was a New York Times story this last week about a guy who was really good at quiz shows and quiz competitions and how he went from little, small ones to bigger ones and ultimately ended up applying to a specific university in the UK so he’d get into the university quiz challenge system, but then got there and found his teammates actually weren’t any good. He pulled out, because he only has one shot to do this. They had to reframe everything around him. He was really driven. It’s the kind of character who if we were doing a How Would This Be a Movie, you love, because you can definitely see why he’s trying to do what he’s trying to do. It’s not some external thing that’s pushing him. He clearly has a drive to enter this challenge and succeed and to win. He needs this thing.
Craig: But of course, I want to know why. What is the thing that I can connect to that is universal? Even though his expression of that thing is unique, I want what’s underlying it to be anything but unique.
John: Absolutely. That goes back to where we first meet this character and how he first gets introduced to this world of quiz competitions. It was probably that moment which he first said, “Oh, I know all the answers to this thing,” and suddenly, he was better than everyone else around him. It’s that desire to excel, to be seen as being better than everyone else, but also there’s an internal state where he needs to see himself as being so good at this.
Craig: I love those things. I, like just about everybody, love Queen’s Gambit. Scott Frank is as good as anybody at this. My favorite episode of Queen’s Gambit was the first one. First episodes are notoriously difficult. But what was so beautiful about the first episode was that he took the time, lots of time to tell us all about this person before the obsession began and before the plot began, to create irritability. She was lonely. She was abandoned. She was in pain. She was self-medicating. She was desperate for something to be good at, something that made her feel good. And there were two things that made her feel good: drugs and chess. Watching her begin to fall deeply into both of those was such a gorgeous way of showing how sometimes these things that we think of as just awesome, like being the best quiz solver or being a chess master, are in themselves forms of self-management for conditions that are common to us all.
John: A movie I loved this last year was Nyad. It’s the story of Diana Nyad and her quest to be able to swim from Cuba to the United States. In that, there are external things that she could gain by doing this, but clearly it’s an internal drive. She has this unique obsession with being able to do this and being able to prove to herself that she can do this thing, and that’s what’s pushing you through the whole movies. We see the consequences on everybody else around her, and yet we’re still rooting for her, because we can see – we don’t want to be in the water there with her, but we can see why she wants to do it.
Craig: We understand the underpinning. If all Moby Dick were about was whale hunting, no one would care. It’s really important to create that essential irritability, to find the grain of sand under someone’s skin. It’s usually something that they are not born with, but it is the result of some circumstance. If it’s innate from birth, that means there was nothing to create there. You want to have something and the environment that causes a disruption that is specific to somebody before you then cause a really big disruption to them.
John: I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to this article, this review in the National Library of Medicine, that’s really talking through intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. They actually did scientific studies on how these drives actually function in the brain and in actual human beings and talks through the different theories that built up over time for how this all worked. When you actually put people in labs and MRIs and you’re monitoring how they’re doing things, you get this sense that what is happening internally versus externally are related, but there are distinct things that you can see there.
What it really comes down to is the importance of agency, the ability of a person to say, “I am choosing to do this thing.” We see that in real life where you have a kid who loves to do a thing, and then the minute you talk to them about the thing they love to do, they don’t love to do it anymore, because it’s no longer their unique thing. Also, it’s the ability to envision an outcome and plan the steps towards it are crucial for intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation.
Craig: That’s a really interesting point, the idea that you need to see an outcome. Your characters must – we talk about a goal. I think a lot of times, people think too much in terms of the external nature of that goal. But part of what we all do as humans is envision success. Envisioning success is rarely about the circumstance. It’s about the feeling. We don’t want to win because winning is good. We want to win because winning feels good. Why? What is it doing for you? What negative feeling is it taking away? What negative thought is it replacing or contradicting? What is it proving? How is it going to remove your irritability and make you feel good? To me, envisioning an outcome is entirely about envisioning a feeling that you desperately want.
John: It’s not just about where you’re gonna get to, but how it’s gonna feel when you get to that place.
Craig: All about feeling.
John: They outline what they call a Rubicon model, which is five steps, which is whenever a character’s facing or a real person’s facing a thing, there is a pre-decisional deliberation, which is basically where you’re sitting and you’re thinking about what your options are. You have intention formation, which is your planning. It’s the anticipation. It’s thinking about how you’re gonna do this thing. Volitional action, which means agency. You’re making a choice. You’re doing a thing because you want to do it. You are achieving that outcome. You’re consuming it. And crucially, then you’re also evaluating it. We’ve talked about this on the podcast. It’s not scoring the touchdown. It’s getting the kiss from your wife afterwards. That’s the real achievement.
Craig: It’s the relationship at the end. When you look at these five things, what they remind me of most immediately is Dungeons and Dragons. Right now, you’re DMing a campaign; I’m playing. Woo! Inevitably, there’s a circumstance where it’s like, “There’s a room in there, and we know there’s a bad guy and we know there’s another bad guy. Let’s come up with a plan.” Notoriously, plans go awry in D&D. It’s designed that way, because if your plans always worked, what fun would that be? It would just be like, “Oh, we’re the dream team in the Olympics. Ha ha, we win.” But we do all these things. There’s so much deliberation, prediction, planning. Then we do the actions according to the things we want to achieve. There is an outcome achievement, which hopefully is a victory. And then there’s a postmortem about how we did it, how we could’ve done better, how we did better than we thought.
But here’s the crazy part. It’s not even real, and it’s so satisfying, because as humans, we can model real outcomes and get the same hit off of them. That’s why we like movies and TV. They are modeled outcomes, where we watch other people achieving a feeling we want to feel. And we get a little whiff of their crack hit. And that’s worth the subscription to Max or whatever. That’s what all of these things are.
That’s what I love about what we do. We are creating situations for people where they can sit back and watch somebody else go through all this hard work and suffering and then get the win. In real life, suffering sucks. A lot of times, the win when you get there does not feel at all like you thought it would feel. In fact, there is a shocking emptiness that can occur sometimes when you get there and you think, “I was meant to feel all of this, and I don’t feel any of it. Now what do I do?” That’s always fun.
John: I would say part of what was leading to this segment was some recent movies and some TV shows I was watching I felt like weren’t working on these levels because it was just like, you were killing the monsters. You did all the step threes. You took all the actions. But I didn’t have that lead-in to the options, so it just felt like you were on rails the whole time you were doing this thing. And I didn’t get the reward afterwards, because I couldn’t see that, did we actually do the thing we wanted to do. I didn’t feel a sense of victory.
Craig: You didn’t feel a sense of victory because probably in this circumstance, the characters couldn’t have really felt the sense of victory. They could’ve just realized it. If you don’t have that preexisting irritability, that thing that we can connect to, and you’re put into a situation where you have to do this impossible thing or else a lot of people will die, okay, I’ll do it. I did it. Good. That’s what you end up with. Good work, you. Roll credits. But that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there for understanding something deeper was satisfied. And if we don’t have that in place before the person shows up with the job offer, then we’re just not gonna be as engaged.
John: This outlines intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards. Whatever you do and whatever you achieve should have a mix of the two of them. Intrinsic rewards: agency and autonomy, so a sense of control, a sense of achievement, enjoyment, and interest, that you actually enjoy, the characters inside this world enjoy doing this thing, these interests; and novelty, which basically this was a new thing for them they were able to conquer. The extrinsic rewards are things we’re always used to, so food, social status, money, a sense of safety. Those things we can expect. But it’s those intrinsic rewards I think so often we are not rewarding enough in our characters. We’re not giving them a sense of this. They’ll survive this thing, but they haven’t had a good time. We haven’t seen them enjoy it.
Craig: Have you seen Game Night?
John: I love Game Night. It’s so good.
Craig: Game Night’s wonderful. It’s a great example of this. They do such a good job of setting these characters up as people that love games. They love winning. It excites them. It excites them and it also brings them together. It’s the thing that makes them love each other is that they’re really good at unraveling puzzles, answering questions, and winning a game. That’s enough irritability for us, because when you jump into the future, that’s a little wobbly now, and then this new thing happens, and we get to watch their enjoyment of it, and they fall back in love with each other again. The characters need to get a hit off of this stuff. If it’s just a grim slog, then how am I supposed to enjoy this? If you can’t enjoy any of this – and it’s gauged in subtleties. If you have a very grumpy character – and I’ve been writing one of those for a while now – sometimes just the tiniest smile tells us a million things. But we need to know it’s happening, or else it just doesn’t matter what you do, Grumpy’s gonna be grumpy. That’s not gonna make us happy.
John: Last little takeaways here. I would say if you’re looking at your story and you’re worried that we’re not getting a sense of what their intrinsic motivations are, are they curious, are they out there, are they looking through various options, are they foraging, or are they doing what you’re telling them they need to do? They’re being forced into a situation by your plot?
Craig: That would be bad.
John: That’d be bad.
Craig: Passive characters, which generally no one likes, are not merely passive because they don’t do stuff and stuff happens to them. Sometimes they’re passive because they’re doing stuff, but they only have one choice. If there’s no choosing, their actions feel passive, because what else are they gonna do?
John: I guarantee you could say this story, the characters, it has no choice but be passive. They don’t have any choice. They don’t have any options. They’re in prison, literally. There are great prison stories. The reason why those great prison stories are great prison stories is, within their narrow set of options, they are making real choices and they’re taking agency.
Craig: That’s right. If you end up in a situation where someone’s like, “We need you to do the following impossible thing. There’s one way to do it. This is how you do it,” and you say, “Got it,” and then you do it – now, even this little thing in Star Wars, like, there’s only one way to blow this thing up. You gotta shoot this thing down a hole, and that’s the only way to do it. That is what he does, but before he does it, he turns off his targeting computer and uses the force. He makes a choice. And that choice is why that works. Otherwise, think of how terrible that would’ve been.
John: Bad sequence.
Craig: You have to do this thing. We showed it to you on a computer graphic. “I did it.” Great.
John: All the other complications you’ve thrown at them, it’s like, “Oh, but now this thing is in your way. This thing is in your way.”
Craig: Who cares?
John: Doesn’t matter.
Craig: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The only way to win this is to hit a hole in one. Okay, I hit a hole in one. Yay. Meh. Whatever. Whereas Tin Cup – have you seen Tin Cup?
John: I’ve seen Tin Cup.
Craig: Oh my god, one of my favorite endings. Have you seen Tin Cup?
Drew: No.
John: Ron Shelton.
Craig: Ron Shelton. Great movie. He’s got this thing where he’s stubborn, he’s very good, but he’s his own worst enemy as a golfer. He tries to hit too hard. He hits too long. People keep telling him, “You gotta lay up,” meaning instead of going for 200 par, just hit the ball short and then hit it again and you get 100 par. It’s better for you. It’s smart. He ends up in this situation where he’s gonna win this tournament, he’s bounced back. Everyone can’t believe it. And he has a chance though to just make the most awesome shot ever over this water trap. He has to hit the ball super far to do it. They’re like, “Don’t do it. Just lay up or it’ll cost you the tournament.” He’s like, “No, I’m going for it.” You’re like, “It’s gonna happen.” He hits that ball, and it goes right in the water. Then he’s like, “I’m doing it again.” He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water. He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water.
People are like, “He’s blown up his career, the tournament, his life. He’s stubborn. He’s learned nothing.” He does it again. He hits the ball, and it goes all the way over the water, and I think it gets in the hole. I can’t remember. But the point is it gets over the water. It’s an impossible thing. People go crazy, like, “He did it.” You understood then, just doing the thing you were supposed to do, you always have a choice. That’s why Ron Shelton’s just brilliant at that.
John: Excellent. As we wrap this up, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this NIH study. Also the story of Brandon Blackwell, who was the quiz bowl champ, which is a great story. All the UK listeners are saying, “Of course Brandon Blackwell. Everyone knows that.”
Craig: “Everyone knows Brandon Blackwell.”
John: But not here in the U.S.
Craig: Brandon.
John: Brandon.
Craig: Brandon Blackwell.
John: An American.
Craig: Bloody American.
John: Bloody American.
Craig: Coming over here winning our pub quizzes.
John: Let’s do some listener questions.
Drew: Proud Dad writes, “My daughter is a high school senior, and she was accepted to both the USC screenwriting program and Princeton. In our 30-minute morning drives to her high school, we listen to Scriptnotes faithfully, and it’s still one of our favorite memories. So thank you for being in our carpool for so many mornings. This might not be a fair question, because we know Craig doesn’t think school has anything to do with being a screenwriter.”
Craig: Correct.
Drew: “And we know that John did the MFA program at USC. But we would love your thoughts as if you were weighing the pros and cons with your daughters. Long-term, my daughter would love to work in television, but she’s very passionate about playwriting and is torn between either USC, where industry contacts and writers’ room opportunities are common, and Princeton, where she can learn from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and playwrights. We’d love to hear your thoughts.”
Craig: It might be too late here, huh?
John: It could be.
Craig: Complicated also is that I went to Princeton, so now you’re dealing with both of our alma maters. First of all, congrats.
John: Congrats.
Craig: Thanks for listening.
John: Both good schools.
Craig: What do you think, John?
John: Obviously, it’s whatever she wants. She has to make the decision between these two places. If she really believes that she wants to work in television, then USC will be great for that, because she’ll get that television experience. But all that said, I think undergrad is really about learning how to learn and learning how to do all the other stuff that’s interesting and exciting to you. It’s all the classes that are not about film and television and playwriting. And that’s gonna matter a lot more. She’s not gonna go wrong either place.
Craig: I agree. I don’t know how this ended here, but my guess is that she should go to the place that she feels the most excited about going to. She should go to the place that makes her feel good. She should envision her goals and see where they fit better. Princeton does have a remarkable creative writing program, and they’ve always had remarkable teachers there. The late, great Toni Morrison taught there, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates. You certainly would learn from remarkable people. That said, I’m not sure that makes you a good writer. I think that just makes you somebody that sat in a room listening to great writers talk.
There’s only one person that can make her succeed at what she wants, if what she wants continues to be what she currently wants – because that changes – and that’s her. It doesn’t matter where she goes. It truly does not matter where she goes. If she’s good at doing this, she’ll be fine coming out of Princeton, she’ll be fine coming out of USC. There are loads of people who graduate from USC, Stark, the whole thing, who just don’t really make it. There are loads of people who do what you and I do who didn’t go to any film school or went to schools that weren’t known for going to film schools. It’s a real chaotic mess out there. It comes down to the individual, to the outlier.
She should just go to the place she actually wants to be. And you know what? Maybe you meet a future spouse. You never know. Do people even do spouses anymore? Are we just old because we’re married?
John: You met your wife at Princeton.
Craig: I did. I met my wife at Princeton. That’s the thing that I got out of Princeton, to be honest. It didn’t help me with my career. It certainly wasn’t a great freshman year experience. We all know that. A lot of people that go to Princeton are super into being alums and everything, and I’m not. I don’t care. I went there, but it was a school. But I did meet my wife. I also learned things there that I carried through. The classes that I took that I was not expecting to take were the best ones. Best class I ever took in my life, Princeton University, Animal Behavior. Learned more about humanity in Animal Behavior class than anywhere else. That’s the fun part. Throw your plans out the door. Open yourself up to new experiences and see what happens, because you might walk out of there wanting to be a doctor.
John: I was a journalism major at Drake University undergrad, and then I applied to and got into USC for film school. I will say that graduate film school is nice, because you get people there who actually have some – they’re not all just random freshmen doing stuff. USC, if she got into the film program as a freshman, she’d be around people who want to make films and television, which is great, but they’re also a ways away from doing that. The nice thing about a grad program is you’re closer to doing the real things. You’re able to get internships and really be out there in the world doing stuff.
Craig: There is that, no question. There’s also, though, a very strange thing about the culture of aspirants. There’s a weird thing in the air, this choking ambition and striving and wanting and people jockeying. Sometimes you can get dismayed by who’s getting rewarded and who isn’t. And you just think, “This is not fair. That person’s bad. They’re pretentious. They’re a fraud. No one can see it except for me.” Eventually, people figure it out. But when you’re around a lot of people trying to do the same thing, it can be kind of gross.
I do remember that feeling early on in my career, where it just seemed like everybody was like rats clawing through a maze to find one small piece of cheese. Occasionally, there was a rat on top of you. If you heard about a rat getting a piece of cheese, you felt despair, like, “I thought the cheese was a lie. Oh my god.”
John: I also felt a fair amount of imposter syndrome, like I did not belong in the Stark program when I got there. That’s a thing you need to get through too. The nice thing about going to someplace outside of one of those film programs is you’re not gonna be surrounded by quite that much of the culture.
Craig: I think allowing yourself to develop as an individual and being a little more pure about it is probably a good thing. On the other hand, there are opportunities that you can get going to places that have these connections. But I don’t know. That’s the thing. You and I are pretty good examples, because you did one of those choices. I did the other choice. We’re both doing the same job. We’re on the same podcast.
John: Crazy, that.
Craig: In our 50s.
John: We’re both 53 years old.
Craig: Fifty-fricking-three.
John: Let’s answer one more question here, one from Jonathan.
Drew: Jonathan writes, “How much should the writer consider the trailer when writing the script? I’m thinking in terms of early reveals that tie into the premise and would likely be shown in the trailer to advertise the film, but could still be a surprise to the reader or anyone who sees it without having seen a previous. I’m reminded of taking my friend to see The Sixth Sense and how shocked he was at the ‘I see dead people’ line, not just the ending.”
John: I argue that you should consider the trailer as you’re writing, think about how would you actually present this movie to an audience, while knowing that you have zero control over that as the screenwriter. For movies I’ve done, I’ve written trailers and sometimes those are shot, or teasers and sometimes those are shot. But rarely have I had real direct control over that, including when certain crucial story pieces are revealed.
Craig: A nice thing is that I do get quite a bit of influence on the TV side over the marketing materials. I do work closely with them on that. I agree with you. I think, Jonathan, we’re both saying yeah, you should consider the trailer. There are really two moments in the trailer that I try and think about. One is how does it start and one is how does it end. What is my last shot of the trailer? What is my last moment of the trailer? Is there a mic drop? Is there a holy crap? Is there a single beautiful line? Is there a question? But the opening of the trailer is just as important. What do I see? What do I hear? What sets the tone?
The middle stuff of the trailer you can imagine will be some simple storytelling and some cool shots and some laughs and some action, surprise. But it doesn’t mean you should sit down and try to write one of those moments. More like if you put yourself in the mindset, it might help you get there, or as you’re weighing possibilities, if one of them pops out and you think, “That’ll actually be great in a trailer. I don’t know if it’d be super great in the show or the movie, but in a trailer, it’d be great,” write it in so you have it. You could even say, “This is for marketing.” I’ve done this before, although I do try to avoid doing the thing where you – I don’t think I have – where you put stuff in a trailer that you don’t put in the show. I don’t think I’ve done that. You know sometimes they’ll do that?
John: Yeah.
Craig: I think if it’s worth going in the trailer, it should be in the show is my feeling, or the movie.
John: I would agree. The reason why you need to think of the trailer is that the trailer is essentially your elevator pitch. Why does this movie exist is really the trailer. If you cannot tell your story somehow visually in that little bit, there’s probably something that’s not quite working with your story. That said, Go was an impossible thing to cut a trailer for. It’s hard to sell the premise of Go, at least the story premise, but you could show what it felt like, either communicating story or communicating a vibe or feel.
Craig: If you watch trailers for Cohen Brothers films, that’s almost always what you get, which is this absurdist, weird feeling that’s more than story. It’s more a sense of the madness that’s inside of the movies they make, which are pretty much always beautiful and brilliant.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually two episodes of Search Engine, this podcast by PJ Vogt, and it’s looking at why there are so many illegal weed stores in New York City, because all these storefronts are selling weed illegally. He’s going into what the history was there and why it got to be this way. He has to go back to California’s pot legalization system and what went wrong in California and all the things they were trying to fix when they legalized weed in New York and how it all kind of didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out. In attempting to fix the mistake with California, they made new mistakes, which has led to this proliferation of illegal weed stores and made it very hard to open legal ones.
Craig: John, how many weed stores do you think there are in Vancouver? Just take a guess.
John: The answer’s either gonna be zero or-
Craig: It’s definitely not zero. It’s legal to sell.
John: Hundreds.
Craig: 93 million. There are 93 million weed stores. There are weed stores inside of weed stores in Vancouver. Vancouver smells like rain and weed. It is insane. Also, just side note, I’m not answering this question as much as I’m just now rambling about weed, have we talked about the drivers in Los Angeles lately? When I moved to Los Angeles, I remember thinking, oh my god, everyone’s insane, because I think they were on coke. I think all the drivers on the road were on coke. People were switching lanes constantly for no reason, which feels very cocainey to me. Now, I think everyone’s just edibled up. They are slow. They are slow. The light changes green, and it’s like, all right, sure, I guess I’ll go now. I preferred the cocaine drivers. I really did.
John: The other thing I have noticed over the course of my 30 years driving in Los Angeles is when you moved to Los Angeles you had to learn that in order to take that left-hand turn, you are going to need to go into the intersection and then when the light turns-
Craig: And turn left on the red.
John: Left on red, yeah, which sounds impossible, but-
Craig: Three cars get to go. That’s the deal.
John: That’s the deal. I think decade by decade, people have gotten more nervous and more nervous about doing that.
Craig: They’re not nervous.
John: They’re stoned.
Craig: They’re stoned. They’re just like, “Oh man, I missed the light. No worries. Hey, guess what? Light’s gonna come around again, man. It’s all good. I just had five peach strawberry gummies.” This is me being this 53-year-old guy going on about goddamn stoners. I just want them to be on cocaine so that they’ll go through the light. I need to go places.
Anyway, I will [unintelligible 00:58:30]. It’s so silly. This weed thing is so silly that New York has illegal weed stores. It’s like hearing, I don’t know, 20 years ago someone’s like, “Oh my god, did you hear that in, I don’t know, whatever, Toledo they have illegal cheese stores?” You’re like, “Why do they need… What? Sell cheese. It’s fine. Everybody else is.” It’s over. It’s over, New York. Just let them sell it. Have we talked about Shogun?
John: We have not talked about Shogun.
Craig: That’s my One Cool Thing this week. Shogun, the mini series on FX, Hulu, Disney Plus. It’s FX. I want to give the mayor of television, John Landgraf, credit here. It is FX, which is also Hulu and also Disney Plus. I watch it through Disney Plus. Anyway, I’m really enjoying it.
Shogun is one of my favorite novels of all time. I have read that novel multiple times, and I rarely do that. I was deeply influenced by the 1980 miniseries. I learned a lot about storytelling from that. I watched the miniseries. I was 9 or 10. Absolutely blew me away. For 1980, it was remarkable. It was on ABC, I want to say. I would say half of the dialog was in Japanese, subtitled, which just didn’t happen. The Japanese people were played by Japanese people, which also often didn’t happen. Toshiro Mifune, the Laurence Olivier of Japan who starred in all those wonderful Kurosawa movies, played Lord Toranaga, which was remarkable. And Richard Chamberlain played the love interest, because he loved the ladies. LOL. And I was obsessed. And so then I went and read the book, and I got even more obsessed, because the book was just full of all these other details, and you also realize what they mushed to put in a miniseries on network television. Here comes Shogun, written, created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo. Have we ever had Justin on the show?
John: I think Justin’s been on the show. Justin’s a friend.
Craig: He and Rachel, who is his wife, or rather, I should say he is her husband – they belong to each other – they’ve created the show. And it’s excellent. It is doing a much better job than the 1980 miniseries of being authentic to the time period. And I love the attention to detail. You know I’m a detail nut. It’s so clear how they’ve gone into every little corner and made sure everything looked right. They’re telling the story in a really interesting and beautiful way. But also – maybe this is the coolest part of my One Cool Thing this week – it releases an episode every week. It comes out on Tuesdays. I look forward to Tuesdays. It’s almost over. But each Tuesday, I’m like, “It’s coming, it’s coming.” That’s how you’re supposed to do it. For the life of me, I still cannot understand why anyone would make a – like 3 Body Problem on Netflix.
John: I wondered what was going on with 3 Body Problem.
Craig: Massive show, and they’re like, “Here’s all of it.”
John: It makes the footprint so much smaller.
Craig: I just don’t know. Game of Thrones worked great. They all want to have their next Game of Thrones. They got the Game of Thrones guys and just forgot the one thing about the Game of Thrones, which is you put out one episode a week. People look forward to it. They watch it together. They talk about it together. People write recap essays. Anyway, so congrats to Justin and Rachel, but also congrats to FX for doing it correctly. This is the way to do it and they’re gonna win everything.
John: They will. It’s also a strange Emmy season this year, because so many things were not – you’re not eligible for an Emmy this year.
Craig: No, because we’re not on the Emmy cycle.
John: You’re not on the air.
Craig: The awards cycle got so thrown off by the strikes. Next week I’m going to the WGA Awards for a show that aired over a year ago.
John: I’ll see you there.
Craig: Fantastic. What will you be wearing, John?
John: I’m debating between-
Craig: Who will you be wearing?
John: It’s black tie, but not everyone actually wears black tie. Are you wearing a suit or a tux?
Craig: I’m gonna go tux.
John: Great.
Craig: I’m gonna go tux, because how often do you get to wear a tux? I’ve got it. Why not wear it?
John: It’s also in the afternoon, which I think is great.
Craig: Yeah, so you can leave and go about your day. You’re going suit or tux?
John: I think I’m gonna go tux. I’m gonna go tux.
Craig: You’re gonna go tux? Why not? Go tux. Go tux. It’s at the Palladium. Great. I’ll see you there. The WGA Awards show is particularly amusing for the following reasons: one, not on television. No one cares. Even fewer people care than normal. Two, this is my favorite part, because the WGA is, and I will say this forever, stupidly divided into two unions, the WGA West and the WGA East, and because the WGA East really is like, “We’re also gonna have our own at the same time,” stupid, like we don’t have planes, they run a separate awards show for the same categories simultaneously. Not with different nominees. Same nominees. But they need to have their own award show running at the same time. But because they can’t exactly run at the same time, because it’s not televised, it starts to wobble out of sync a bit, which means inevitably you get a text.
John: “Congratulations” or “sorry.”
Craig: “That sucks.” You’re like, “Wait. Oh. They haven’t even said my category. I’m leaving.” That’s the other thing about the WGA Awards, because it’s not televised. People just start leaving. By the time you get to the last award, there’s the janitor. It’s like, “You guys got five minutes. We got a wedding coming in.” I think this will actually be quite nice because it’s the first post-strike award.
John: It’s also outside of the award season, which I think is actually kind of great.
Craig: It means nothing. It predicts nothing.
John: It predicts nothing.
Craig: It’s great.
John: It’s already a very loose awards show, so I think it should be a loosened vibe.
Craig: It will be pretty relaxed.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Ben Singer. 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 where you’ll find 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. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. 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 humans leaving the solar system. Craig, happy birthday once again.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so we talked about the 3 Body Problem, just very briefly. 3 Body Problem involves an alien civilization that is coming towards us. But my question is, do you think our human form bodies will ever leave the solar system?
Craig: Yours and mine?
John: Not yours and mine, but humans like us, flesh and blood humans, will we travel the stars? Because it’s a staple of science fiction.
Craig: It is a staple of science fiction. I’m gonna say something that a lot of people disagree with. My answer is no.
John: My answer is no also, but maybe for different reasons.
Craig: Maybe for different reasons. My answer is no because I think this is a simulation. I think the solar system is probably the limit of the high-res work that’s been done in our simulation. Beyond that, it’s the distant mountains in a video game, which is why the universe keeps expanding the more we look at it.
John: Wow. Craig, you’re not a Flat Earther, but you’re sort of like a Flat Solar.
Craig: I feel like everything beyond the solar system is real, but no more real than what’s in the solar system. It’s just not as fully ressed out, and there is in fact nothing to get to. If the simulation wanted it, then yeah, they would probably be like, “Okay, we’re gonna actually fill in this other galaxy so they can go to that place in fast travel and land on a thing there.” But I don’t think so.
John: I want to put a pin in the simulation thing, because I want to go back to the show The Boys, which I’m convinced is in a simulation as well. But my argument for why flesh and blood human beings will never leave the solar system is we’re just so incredibly fragile. We’re just not designed to do these things at all. And by the time we have the technology to really get us out of those places, it’s gonna make much more sense to put our synthetic versions, our digital versions on a thing and ship us out.
Craig: I agree with you, and I also feel like the designers of the simulation put so much space in between us and even the rest of the solar system. Mars is the next planet over. It still takes like eight months to get there.
John: I do think we’ll put some physical human beings on Mars, maybe not in my lifetime, but not too long after.
Craig: There’s not a huge reward for it, I gotta be honest with you, other than, “We did it. We made it to Mars.” I don’t know if you saw the brilliant Disney film Rocket Man.
John: I’m sorry, I missed it.
Craig: 1997’s Rocket Man.
John: It’s on the list of 100, but…
Craig: We really got into [unintelligible 01:08:00]. You got to Mars, and guess what? It’s red. Anyway, you want to go home now? It’s not great. Melissa, many years ago, she was like, “They’ve opened a new shopping outlet in Ontario. We should go see it.” I’m like, “Okay.” Ontario, not Canada, but east of Los Angeles. It was Christmas. We went there. I walked in and I said, “We’re going home now.” To me, Mars may be the Ontario shopping outlet. But to get to even as far as let’s say Pluto, the demoted non-planet, would take god knows – how many years would it take to get to Pluto?
John: It depends on how fast were you able to get our rockets up to.
Craig: This is a whole thing. You can’t go the speed of – all these things, you can’t do it. You can’t. As it turns out, you can’t.
John: I saw this movie called The Martian. It turned out it was actually really hard to get a person onto Mars, but especially off Mars.
Craig: Really hard.
John: Really tough. Really tough.
Craig: How long to go to Pluto? How long do you think it would take you to get to Pluto? You have to go very, very quickly.
John: It takes a while for light to get there, so getting a human being there, it’s tough.
Craig: About 12 years.
John: That’s also why I say the digital version. Time is useless to that. It doesn’t mean anything to you. Then you don’t have to do all this stuff like putting Ripley in her cryo bed.
Craig: That’s the other thing. Everybody comes up with the same solution, including 1997’s Rocket Man and 3 Body Problem and everybody else that sends somebody really, really far. Freeze them.
John: Freeze them.
Craig: You can’t freeze people. That whole thing, you just can’t.
John: [Crosstalk 01:09:52].
Craig: Everyone just wants to freeze everybody. The only way to get there is to-
John: Captain America.
Craig: If you can suspend somebody like that, we should be investing in that now, here. Our whole thing is freeze yourself and we’ll wake you up when we have a cure for your disease, which is why some people have actually done that. As it turns out, their body is completely damaged, a cracked ice cube. It doesn’t work. That’s always been the thing. I just think it’s too difficult. If we have the technology to actually be able to escape our own galaxy and make it to another one – and by the way, the space between galaxies is vast.
John: Yeah, it’s big.
Craig: Then we probably have the technology to solve every problem that currently exists on this planet.
John: Drew, what’s your opinion on leaving the solar system?
Drew: I am optimistic. I think eventually, I feel like we’re bugs that’ll hop and maybe pop out eventually. I think your point about us being fragile is fairly true right now. I’m stuck on you think that we live in a simulation, because you’ve mentioned it a few times. I never thought you were actually serious.
Craig: We absolutely live in a simulation.
Drew: Why? I don’t know why. It bothers me. Maybe it’s a personal thing.
Craig: Of course it bothers you. You wanted this to be real.
Drew: What about microbiology? What about the little tiny things? That’s not just waiting for the resolution to come through on how all that works?
Craig: I think that stuff’s been coded in and engineered quite beautifully.
Drew: But wouldn’t you need a supercomputer of-
Craig: Yes, you would need a very powerful computer to do this, one that is far more powerful than the computers we have. But they have it. Look at this way. We’re making simulations. They’re not great. They’re okay. But think of the simulations we can make now versus the ones we could make 50 years ago, meaning none. 50 years ago, there was the Game of Life, where it was little blobs going bleep bloop bleep. Now we have sims. We have artificial environments where people are running around and doing things. We have AI, all the rest of this. Can you imagine a world where we could create a simulation where the people inside the simulation were fully artificially intelligent?
Drew: Yes, but wouldn’t there theoretically be – because every piece of code has problems. It screws up and it needs to be defragged or – I’m using the wrong words. But we’ve never experienced that. We’ve never had really glitches or anything like that. All of it seems to be working right.
John: Or we may have had glitches, but then our memory was fixed.
Craig: Also, time does not move the normal way. For instance, our lifetimes may be processed through in a nanosecond of some higher versions. Think of how many simulations we can run with a battle simulator. We could run the battle of, I don’t know, the Battle of Sekigahara, to refer to Shogun. We can simulate that and run that probably three million times in a second. Now, do you see where I’m going here?
Drew: Yeah.
Craig: We don’t have any sense of actual time lapsing. My point is – and this is not my plan, just that others have come up with this – that if you give us 300 years from where we are now, 300 years, think of how far we’ve come in 10, 300 years, could we design a simulation where the people inside the simulation felt like they were real and independent and alive and intelligent?
Drew: Limitedly, but you wouldn’t be able to have 8 billion people feel like they were alive.
Craig: Okay. Then what, in 1,000 years maybe we can have that?
Drew: Sure. I guess by the same logic that I’m like, eventually we’ll hop planets and get on the solar system, eventually we would have this.
Craig: The only way, and if we do that, and that simulation is up to the level that our reality is, wouldn’t they start making simulations? The problem is the only way we’re not in a simulation is if we are the first ones in a chain of simulations. That’s why I think – it explains a lot.
John: It does explain a lot. I want to get back to The Boys and Gen V, two shows I genuinely enjoy, but I get a little bit frustrated by the characters in those worlds feel realish. Same could be said for the Marvel Universe too, where you can do all these supernatural things. You can fly and all this stuff. But that actually breaks all of our laws of physics.
Craig: Correct.
John: Someone I want to be in that world to say, “Oh, no, this must be a simulation where you’re changing these parameters, because these are not possible things.”
Craig: I am obsessed with this one moment – it’s in one of the Avengers – where Tony Stark gets thrown out of his own building. I think it’s the first Avengers movie. He’s falling from his skyscraper, and then Jarvis sends out the Iron Man stuff, which-
John: Assembles around, yeah.
Craig: … lands and assembles around him. And he almost hits the ground and then he puts his repulsors on to stop himself from falling.
John: They’re liquefied.
Craig: There are people right under it who should be vaporized. Also, the G-force of falling that hard and stopping like that is akin to hitting pavement. The Marvel characters follow no physics. Their arms should be ripping out of their sockets based on the things that they’re doing. It’s okay. It’s Marvel.
John: It’s Marvel, absolutely, so I’m willing to forgive it, just like I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I’m writing a story with ghosts in it, I’m gonna follow all the-
Craig: I love Ghostbusters.
John: I want to follow that thread down, so great.
Craig: Once you say, okay, we’re gonna throw some physics out the window, literally, for everybody, then yeah, go for it.
John: But circling back to a conclusion, I think the actual physics of traveling outside the solar system are not going to make sense for physical human beings.
Craig: I agree. It will not make sense for physical human beings. I think we’re here to be here. I think this is where we are, and this is where we shall stay until they reboot.
Drew: We’re real.
Craig: Yes, we are real. We’re as real as anything.
John: Just because I think we’re gonna get emails about this-
Craig: Oh, really?
John: You believe we’re in a simulation, but you’re not nihilistic about it. You don’t believe that nothing matters. You actually do believe that things matter.
Craig: I don’t think anything matters ultimately. I think that existence is absurd. But I feel like there’s a way to behave. There are values that I think are important, that are programmed into us or you could say are part of our shared genetic code and the expression of bio-evolutionary instincts to be pro-social. It feels good to help people. It feels good to do the right thing. It feels good to contribute. It feels good to fulfill a purpose. Look what we do for a living. If we die today, it’s not like everyone goes, “That’s it. Pack it up, everyone. Mass suicide. Those guys aren’t around anymore.” But we do it anyway, because we’ve found purpose for our lives. And then that’s that. Look at Drew. He’s gonna cry.
Drew: I’m sticking to my guns.
Craig: Nothing wrong with that. By the way, I’m way out of line with almost everybody. Most people believe in God and angels. I’ve gone past the atheists now into some whole other dimension of stupidity. And here’s the best part. It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, unless I get thrown in Hell and burn in a lake of fire forever, in which case that will be very annoying and confusing. Time’s sure spinning for me. We stood outside and watched the eclipse. We took a pause in the middle of this to watch the eclipse. It looked beautiful.
John: Yeah, it looked beautiful.
Craig: It looked so vivid and real.
Drew: That’s because the moon is real.
Craig: It’s as real as my eyeball.
John: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you.
Links:
- My Pal Foot Foot by The Shaggs
- Braid by Jonathan Blow
- Connections from the New York Times
- Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show? by David Segal for The New York Times
- On what motivates us: a detailed review of intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation by Laurel S. Morris, Mora M. Grehl, Sarah B. Rutter, Marishka Mehta, and Margaret L. Westwater
- Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? by PJ Vogt
- Shōgun on FX
- 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 Ben Singer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.