The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you are listening to Scriptnotes, it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
I love talking to screenwriters about their experience getting their first movies made because it’s the difference between writing a script and actually creating a movie. Last year, we had Justin Kuritzkes on to talk about his experience with Challengers and Queer, back-to-back with Director Luca Guadagnino. Today, we’re here talking with Nora Garrett, the first-time writer of Guadagnino’s current After the Hunt. Welcome, Nora.
Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.
John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I think one of the reasons why I love this as an example is we have so many listeners who are working on their scripts, they’re aspiring writers, they’ve written some scripts but they’ve never gotten a thing made. And so that transition point between like, these are all the words I have on paper and this is a movie that’s actually existing in theaters, just talking through that process gives people a sense of the journey. Craig and I could talk about it and our experiences, but that’s not what happens in 2025 and you have just gone through this process.
Nora: Yes, that is true.
[laughter]
John: I’m sure there were moments that were great and moments that were surprising and fantastic and also terrifying.
Nora: Yes. Oh, I mean, there were so many moments of abject terror that I felt like I was just in a complete state of disassociation watching myself go through it and be like, be cool, relax. [laughs]
John: Yes.
Nora: Yes, it happened really fast. It’s interesting to be on the back end of it now looking back.
John: Cool. I want to talk about your journey as a writer, sort of getting up to this point, getting this in the hands of a director who actually made your movie with Julia Roberts starring. Because we have the actual script in front of us, I want to talk a little bit about the words on the page and your experience writing those words, but then seeing like, oh, those actual actors have to do these things and that whole process.
Nora: Yes.
John: And revisions, probably the most revisions you can also imagine. I saw from the cover page, you went to double white, so you went all the way through the colors.
Nora: Yes, we sure did.
[laughter]
John: We’ll also answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about day jobs, because until very recently, you had a day job doing other things, and I want to talk about what your experience has been trying to have an identity as the person who is a screenwriter and a filmmaker and an actor, but also the day job of it all.
Nora: Of course.
John: Cool. Well, let’s get into it. You and I are both from Colorado, so.
Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?
John: Yes. I saw that you were born in New York. Were you raised in Evergreen?
Nora: Yes, I was raised in Evergreen. Wow, where are you from?
John: Boulder, Colorado.
Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.
John: Talk to us about Colorado, because my experience of Colorado was that I had no idea how lucky I was growing up there. Then you go back and like, “Oh, my God, this place is so pretty.”
Nora: That was exactly my experience. Exactly. We moved from New York when I was four, but I was adamant that I was a city girl to the point where I have vivid memories of touring the houses that we eventually lived in Evergreen. I was telling the real estate agent, I was like, “I’m a city girl, I don’t belong here.” [laughs]
John: You’re four. Yes.
Nora: I’m four. I’m four. I think my father at that point was like, that’s when he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do with this girl.” It wasn’t until I left Colorado to go to NYU and then came back from the city that I realized that this is such a gorgeous, bucolic place to live. My experience of Colorado, and I think it’s still true, is that it’s a pretty big artistic town in the middle of the country.
John: I grew up in Boulder. We had the Shakespeare Festival. For not being at a hub, we had a lot of cultural things.
Nora: Exactly. I was dancing at first at Colorado Ballet and then I transitioned to acting and I went to Denver School of the Arts, which is a local magnet arts high school. I think that there was a lot of local theaters and a lot of local theater that I was able to be involved in alongside the Thespian Convention and the Shakespeare Festival. I always felt like Colorado had a liberal and an artistic bent to it, even despite being in a landlocked state. [laughs]
John: Can you talk to me briefly about dancing? Because you’re the only person I know who’s gone from dancing to screenwriting. Dancing, my perception of it, especially ballet, is that it’s all about reducing differences between things, being flawless, and practicing thing until it’s absolutely perfect. Then I don’t want to say you’re interchangeable with other people, but there’s just no flaws to be seen. Did you love it? Why did you stop dancing? What got you out of dancing?
Nora: Sure. That’s a very astute observation. I think that I loved ballet. I loved it so much because of the regimentation that you’re talking about, I think. I think I was someone who really responded well to structure and that’s been true throughout my entire life. I responded really well to six days a week, very rigorous, two to three hours a day of ballet. I responded to the same rigor when I went to school and took that really seriously.
I think having parameters was important to me, but it’s a ruthless job. Ultimately, I stopped because I had sort of a prescient notion at the age of 13 that I was like, I’m never going to be a prima ballerina. The best I can hope for is corps de ballet. Just because my body simply didn’t do the things that they needed. I didn’t have clean lines. I don’t have hyper-extended elbows or knees or really good turnout. What I did get from that experience was a certain amount of discipline, regimentation, but also it was very performative. There was a lot of opportunity for performance at Colorado Ballet because it’s not like ABT where it’s super competitive to get in the nutcracker.
John: I shared your love of just being, for me it was like testing and standardized testing in school. I loved actually just being right and knowing that I finished the thing and I was done and I’ve gotten the correct answer. I loved that there was a correct answer. While I was always good at writing, and I loved being praised for writing, there was something just really comforting and nice about just like, oh, no, I got like 100% on the test, and that was really easy.
So much of what we’re doing now, there is no right answer and there’s no perfect word for this thing. There’s no perfect scene. You’re always dealing with the imperfection of it all. Going from ballet, which you’re right or you’re not right to acting, there’s no right performance. What was the transition there?
Nora: Yes. Again, really great questions. I feel like the ballet of it all, I mean it’s really just containers, right? I don’t know. I got familiarized with Anne Bogart’s work in college, but she’s a director who talks a lot about the container of something and specifically the container of archetypes. I think with ballet, there’s a really rigid container of steps, but there’s still room within those steps for expression.
A lot of ballerinas take acting lessons because you don’t have words, so you really have to give an ontological experience of emotion to the viewer. I think that with acting, I thought there was a right way, for sure. I was not able to enter into going from pretty much regimented dance to regimented acting classes. I was not able to segment my brain and be like, okay, there were steps that I learned and there were perfect ways to do things in this medium and there’s not in this medium. I thought those two things were transferable to my own detriment, really.
John: To some degree, in musical theater where there’s a track, and to learn a track, you have to drop in that thing, I have such respect for the swings who can come in and just go through any track and a thing, but it really is not directly comparable, the experience.
Nora: No.
John: We have a lot of guests on the show who’ve gone through improv classes. They always were recommending improv classes. The thing about that is there’s no time to stop and make the perfect choice. You just have to continue with what you’re doing.
Nora: Absolutely, yes. I think for acting, it’s something where you can really get into a point where I’ve certainly been there, where you just belabor the thing. I think that it took me a long time to realize that sometimes, especially for someone who can be really cerebral like me, it’s better to just get yourself into a different track and just go with the first instinct as opposed to trying to find the perfect choice.
John: We had Greta Gerwig on the podcast a while back and she was talking about coming out of the mumblecore tradition and how she loved and respected a lot of it, but she got really frustrated that there wasn’t a text to anchor yourself back down to. You felt like as an actor, it was just too terrifying to have nothing underneath your feet to get back down to and that she felt like she could actually push much further once there was a text underneath there.
I hear some of what you’re saying there. It sounds like ballet, yes, you’re getting every step right, but then you’re finding ways to express yourself within that. As an actor, if you have scripted lines, you know those scripted lines, you’re making choices about that rather than every other moment.
Nora: Right. I think that the best-case scenario as an actor is you get to the point where you know the lines so well that everything feels spontaneous within the structure of the memorization and within the structure of having the understanding of your character. Everybody gets to that point differently, which I think was something that took me a really long time to understand. Some people really need to focus on every single line and the motivation behind every single line in order to trick their brain into being spontaneous, and some people can’t do that. They have to just veer straight into the spontaneity. I think I was very convinced that I was like, no, there’s one method and I must find it. [laughs]
John: Was that the reason for going to NYU was to find that method, to find that answer?
Nora: I knew I always wanted to be back in New York, which based on my four-year-old dictums, I think.
John: It’s Eloise returning [unintelligible 00:09:52] and stopping that, yes.
Nora: Exactly. I read all the Eloise books. I read Eloise in Russia. She went to Russia.
John: Of course, she did. Yes.
Nora: Of course, she did. There’s hotels in Russia. I was very adamant that I was like, I’ve got to be back in the city. I belong in the city enough with like, I don’t know if you felt this when you left Colorado, but I met people who didn’t know what elk were.
John: Oh, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. They’re not necessarily like, no, they’re these giant wild creatures who doesn’t wander through your backyard. Yes.
Nora: Yes, exactly. They’re bigger than deer. I was like, “Oh, yes, everybody knows what an elk looks like.” My first friends at NYU were like, “No, you know what an elk looks like. We do not.” I think I was in high school looking back on it. I think that I was told I was a talented performer. I don’t think that I was going off of a feeling of like, wow, I love this and I’m obsessed with this and I just want to follow this. I think I was chasing the feeling of being good and of being someone who was talented and had that sort of external validation. It wasn’t until I got to NYU that I was like, “Oh, I really love this.”
John: Can we talk about NYU? Because I visited New York in college and was like, “Oh, this is overwhelming.” Specifically, the NYU area is just an overwhelming place. My daughter did a summer program there in high school. She’s a city kid. We lived in LA and Paris. She’s like, “I can’t handle the street harassment. Just the daily life of it all was tough.” What was your experience coming from Colorado to a place like NYU?
Nora: My family lived in New York for a really long time, like my extended family. I would go back and visit. I think what I was super attracted to was the autonomy of it. I’ve always been someone who was like–
John: Yes, developing quickly.
Nora: Yes, very quickly. I think that I felt like a person who was an adult faster than other people, which not true, but I felt that way. I’ve always been really attracted to the notion of being there and you can get yourself wherever you want to go and you’re not reliant on anybody else to get you there. There’s a certain amount of autonomy in that respect that I wanted to have. I was desperate to get out of home. Not because of anything bad, but just because I was like, I want to be alone.
John: Also, you’re like the protagonist in your own story and you recognize that you have to leave home in order to have your great adventure.
Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.
John: When did you read your first script? You probably read some plays in high school, but when did you get the first sense of that when it wasn’t like another classic play that you’re reading?
Nora: That’s a good question. I have to think about that. I read a ton of plays for a very long time, but also read a lot of books. That was my first introduction to writing was just being a huge nerd and reading a ton. I remember very distinctly learning how to use a parenthetical for the first time as a very young kid. [laughs] I think that it must have been in college because of– I want to say that I’ve read a script before this, but we did have a class I think my sophomore year of college, where it was acting for film within the container of, you’re at a school for acting for the stage.
We read The Talented Mr. Ripley. The goal of the class was to learn a certain filming technique as opposed to a theatrical one. We read The Talented Mr. Ripley seven times, I think, back-to-back. That was probably my first experience. I remember being really struck by how little was on the page compared to plays.
John: Let’s talk about that, because classically when I look at plays right now, there’s sometimes a lot of scene descriptions where it’s setting up to look at the thing, but then there’s pages and pages and pages of dialogue. What you’re saying, it’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this is for an acting exercise, so it’s really about how are you able to communicate to when the camera’s enclosed, what is the edges of your frame? What was not there on the page that you were expecting to be there?
Nora: More, I think. [laughs] I just thought–
John: You thought it would be much more scripted in terms of every little movement, every step?
Nora: Yes. I thought it would be– it’s not only about stage direction, because I think also, I was very obsessed with the canonical plays. I loved Edward Albee. I loved Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams stage directions are verbose. It is just like a stack of stage directions or very stacked, rather, I don’t know. I think that going to reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, I was like, “Oh, this is so much about the actor’s performance.” I think that that varies script to script, because now I’ve read so many. In that one particularly, I was like, oh, wow, it really is about who you are as an actor bringing yourself to this, because it’s not the same type of roadmap, I think.
John: Also, you look at the differences between a stage play and a screen play. A screen play only needs to be filmed once. It only needs to be actually acted once. Those scenes, they’re going to do it once and they’re going to be done. You can experiment with that versus stage play. In theory, this is a set of instructions for creating basically the same experience again and again and again, no matter who’s in those tracks and who’s in those roles.
Nora: Exactly.
John: That’s an inherent difference between those two things. You’re reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. You start probably reading some other things. When did you start acting in people’s films? Were you acting in shorts while you were at NYU? What was the first time that you were on a set with a camera aimed at you?
Nora: Sure. I did start doing short films in school. I think they really started kicking off probably around the summer after my junior year because NYU and specifically Stella Adler, where I was studying, they have a very rigid– It’s so funny to look back on it now because the stakes felt so high, but they basically were like, “You’re not allowed to act anywhere beyond the confines of this school until your junior year,” which not everybody subscribed to. Again, I was the rule follower and someone who was very serious about this education. I felt like, okay, I’m not ready. I’m a nascent creature. Then I have to wait until one teacher tells me I can go off.
Yes, it was probably around summer of junior year. I have done so many short films, some of which have seen the light of day and some of which have not. I think that I’d probably be terrified watching them back now. I think it all started because I was dating a guy who was very into film. I think his friends were also very into film. They were these people who were involved in the acting school, but they knew they wanted to go to Hollywood. They knew that they wanted to be screenwriters. They had a–
John: They’re the worst. They’re terrible people.
Nora: I believe the term is film bros now. If I’d had that verbiage, I would have used it back then. They’re still my friends to this day, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. I grew up watching Legally Blonde, Charlie’s Angels, Liar Liar, and The Big Green on repeat. I was like, those are my four. That’s what I’ve got.
[laughter]
John: [unintelligible 00:17:01] right.
Nora: Yes, exactly. They had seen everything. I felt like, “Oh, those are the people who make this,” but they were also very committed to making short films. Because I was dating this guy, and I was an actor, I got into that web.
John: We have a lot of listeners who are making short films. What advice could you give to them about having been in a bunch of short films and student short films and posts? What are good experiences? What are bad experiences? What are things you wish those directors had a better sense of when they cast you in something?
Nora: Great question. I feel like I would say really use short films as a sense of experimentation. I think I took everything very, very seriously. I felt like I never knew what short film was going to catapult me to fame. [laughs] That’s what I felt like. Honestly, I was like, “Someone’s going to see this, and then I’m going to be famous at the age of 20.” It’s just not that. You’re making stuff with your friends, and it’s really, truly a time to learn and expand and make really bold choices that may or may not work.
I think that when no one’s watching, it’s really the opportunity to veer into that and steer into that scope. I think as an actor, it’s a great time to learn about your own process and what works for you and watching yourself back, and trying to figure out the dissonance between, oh, this is what I meant to do, and this is what’s actually on the screen. I think everyone in the short film process probably feels that way. Yes, that’s what I would say.
John: I’m friends with some folks who’ve been making a bunch of short films using folks who are very good at social media. These are folks who film themselves constantly. I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be fascinating to watch 10 years from now is how many of those people graduate towards doing bigger, longer, expanded things. These are people who get a chance to iterate all the time.
I think what you’re describing is that they can just constantly experiment, but they’re not used to the sense of an ongoing narrative. They’re used to a 90 seconds, but if you have to tell a story in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it’s just a different beast. Or if you need to work with a larger, more experienced crew, it’s not just you setting up lights yourself. It’s a different thing. I’ll be fascinated to see how that works.
I’d love to just push a little bit more on, you’re an actor who’s agreed to be in a short film. What are your expectations going in? What do the directors and people who are helping out to make the film need to know about? How do they make it a good experience for an actor?
Nora: Sure. Okay. I feel like some of my best experiences were when you knew that– It’s a couple of things. I think you want to feel like, especially with short films where it’s sort of run and gun and everybody’s doing a lot of different jobs, I think you want to feel like your voice is being heard and you’re being valued as a creative entity within the film.
I think it’s important that you know that you’re going to be taken care of throughout all the process, throughout all the extenuating processes after you film. I think it’s important to, and again, this might not be important to everybody, but I think it’s important that you know what cameras you’re shooting on and you know that those cameras are going to look really good, that even if this isn’t a perfect product, you’re going to have something that’s really good for your reel and that it is going to be edited and that there is going to be a final product that you can eventually see.
John: That it actually goes to you and it disappear.
Nora: Exactly. That’s happened to me before. I’ve shot shorts that never seen the light of day. I think it’s much more holistic when you understand that this is going to be something that you can watch because everybody needs it at that point. It’s not the same thing where you’re like, okay, well, I committed my time and energy for free. The promise of that is I’m going to have something to look at at the end of the day. I think it’s a matter of short films are so stressful. I do think there’s a certain way that you have to protect your cast from that stress.
John: Some of these short films you were making with friends, which is great and that’s a safer experience, but were there things where you just auditioned, like you saw, noticed, and you went and auditioned for, you submitted for, and you were just working with strangers?
Nora: Yes.
John: What is that like as a person? You probably didn’t have reps or you had no one on your team at that point. How are you making sure that this is going to be a good situation that you’re actually safe?
Nora: [laughs]
John: For example, would you only meet in a public place or would you go to a place-
Nora: Oh, sure.
John: -where there’s an apartment? I would just love some good advice.
Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–
John: I’m not thinking just for our actors who are listening, but for filmmakers, make sure people feel good about the experience.
Nora: I think something looking back on my experience, especially immediately post-collegiate when I was auditioning a lot for these– I was on Backstage, I was on Actors Access. I did a big cattle casting call for Columbia Film School, which was actually one of the best. I did the same thing for USC when I moved out here. Those were some of the best experiences because you’re meeting film students who are doing their MFA and you’re auditioning in Columbia and you know that it’s the container of the college, so you know that all these people are very committed to doing something and making something and have the resources.
I don’t know if I ever auditioned in someone’s living room. I’m sure I have, but I think for Friends, I think there’s a certain desperation of a young actor that really, at least for me, I would have done anything. You know what I’m saying? I think I would have gone anywhere, seen anybody, done anything, because I was like, again, I was just like, put me in pictures kind of thing. I was just like, “I’ve got it.” I think also there’s a lot of stuff told to young actors that is really hard and harmful. I don’t know if you watched The Rehearsal.
John: Yes.
Nora: Yes, but I was watching it this most recent season and it just broke my heart, because I was like, “These people just want the opportunity to be on HBO and it feels like, God, I really recognized myself in that.” I was like, “I would have done anything too. I would have made out with someone for 12 hours on a soundstage.” Because there’s a certain amount of you just really– you’re told for so long that this business is impossible and you’re told that you have to do whatever it takes and you’re told that no one’s going to make it. Part of doing whatever it takes is sometimes, I think, hopefully now it’s different, but compromising what you believe to be artistic integrity or just the integrity of self. Yes.
John: As an actor, you’re constantly waiting for someone else to pick you to do a thing. As a writer, you can just write your own thing. When did you start writing in screenplay form? When did that start off?
Nora: I always wrote since I can remember, and started with prose and really bad poetry. Got into slam poetry in high school, which is embarrassing, but I feel like I should say it.
[laughter]
John: If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. This is a part of your identity.
Nora: Exactly. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that if I say it-
John: Slam poet.
Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–
John: Former slam poet, Nora Garrett. Yes.
[laughter]
Nora: If you only knew. Yes. I got really deep into it.
John: Oh, yes. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. [crosstalk]
Nora: Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing, but I loved it. I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series, and so I wrote a couple of web series. They were just bad. They were bad. I think it was also the Girls’ renaissance.
John: Oh yes, of course.
Nora: Everything was that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. It’s only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is and how you can’t repeat that. That’s what we were all trying to do. Yes.
John: You’re writing those things and you’re writing stuff that you would shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say like, oh, this is what was on the page. This is what it’s actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. You do get a lot of experience that way.
Nora: Yes. My last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. That was really like we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. They looked horrible. They were just awful. I would love to think that I had the cognition at the time to have any creative feedback about the artistic process, but I think I was really just caught up in how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time. I think it’s also when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you’re just like, oh, this isn’t even that art form.
John: No. [chuckles]
Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.
John: Yes, absolutely. It’s an image on a screen, but that’s really about as close as we got there.
Nora: Right, exactly. You’re like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they’re supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes.
John: When did you write your first full-length feature-y script?
Nora: The truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature.
John: That’s great.
Nora: Yes, that is the truth. [laughs]
John: Talk to us about the idea of it and going into it. I guess we should say that I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won’t have seen the movie yet. How do you describe it? Maybe describe what your initial intention was for it, and if it’s different than the final thing, tell us what changed.
Nora: It all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. Again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a character who had, at the core of their identity, a secret? This secret is something where I thought it could go one of two ways. I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long, and I was trying to gamify the system in a way, but I was obsessed with the price of it, and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price.
I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of This American Life. Basically, the upshot of that was that statistically, people who are more successful in our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. That can ensure more success. I thought, A, I felt validated by that, but B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion? Again, what’s the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.
Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you’re coming online enough to understand what you’ve done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life and specifically when you start having adult relationships? Then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help, or is there an eventual consequence?
John: From that initial instinct, were you trying to feel like, well, what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to explore this thing? The Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. She’s uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth, how do you live an ethical life? She has this secret at the start of it. Was that baked into the idea initially?
Nora: Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first logline, I did think about the professor and student relationship. Having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself. It was the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience.
John: Yes, so very classically, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they’re wrestling with and digging through. It makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there’s a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies.
The thing we always do for [unintelligible 00:30:09] is about Episode 483, Philosophy for Screenwriters. We were talking through that and that we don’t see it. In this case, your creative character was just so exactly wrestling with that situation. Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I’m not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie?
Nora: Yes. I think the genre that it started out initially was the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real? I think that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, when you’re like sort of what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true, and what is false in what’s happening right now, that to me is the source of that almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? Then I think Luca was more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama?
John: Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that has a negative connotation right now, but we used to make melodramas. Is there something delightful about the drama is the drama in a way?
Nora: Yes, of course. Yes. I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yes.
John: Let’s talk about Alma and all the balls you have her juggling. She is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. There’s that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student who is daughter-like to her, but also obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage which is okay but has some weird dynamics and strains in it. Her husband is a psychiatrist.
She has a best friend who’s also in the department and they have a complicated relationship, an Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition, which I’m not quite sure what it is weighing on her. She has a secret. She has a secret from before. She has a comfortable life, but a lot of things pull in her in different directions. In other stories, one of those might be sort of enough, but there’s a lot happening there. Then these aspects conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper?
Nora: I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that I was part of a group of female writers who we’ve all share our work with each other. One of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you’re just going to finish your first draft in 12 weeks. Basically, the idea–
John: That’s a classic sign-up kind of thing.
Nora: Yes, exactly.
John: A boot camp, like you’re just doing it.
Nora: 100%. You’re just doing it. I thought, okay, I’ll do that. That could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.
John: [unintelligible 00:33:26] containers I’ve heard so far.
[laughter]
Nora: Yes, containers. [laughs] I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer myself. [laughs]
John: Oh, okay, great. Yes. We’ll get to that in the bonus segment.
Nora: Yes, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. Part of that was really beneficial because you just got out of your own way. I think that it’s hard to look back and narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the triad of Julia Roberts’s character, Ayo Edebiri’s character, and Andrew Garfield’s character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.
I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to to see if this was someone who was very calm, cool, and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of.
I think also I was interested in substance use. I don’t know, just sort of that as somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being degrading to their body. I think especially as a woman and especially as a female character, women’s bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. I was interested if you can take the Brad Pitt character where he’s constantly eating in half of his films and give that trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. [chuckles] That notion of just hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind.
John: Great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. Over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script? Did you get through it?
Nora: I did because, again, I love rules. I did finish it. Again, it was just really bad. I think all of it was a really good exercise in learning that just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it’s not the final iteration by any means.
John: Let’s talk about that, getting it from it’s finished to actually to good. What was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?
Nora: I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belonged to the cabal of people that I went to college with. I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was very financially stressed.
Part of that was by necessity and then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. Then I re-outlined, re-broke the second draft, re-wrote it, and then started sharing it. I started sharing it with a group of just really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected. Then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends.
John: Yes, I was going to ask. Knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to hear some stuff and see what’s working there. What did you learn in that reading?
Nora: I don’t know if you have this, but there’s an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud. [laughs]
John: Absolutely. All the things you’d never notice were like, oh, my God, that actually isn’t the text. There’s a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work.
Nora: Yes, 100%. Or I’m like, “God, I use that word so much, like container.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? That makes no sense.” It’s, yes. After getting over the initial hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing, after that, I tried really hard to just step back.
I think it’s really important when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it’s like I had actors who, it was during the actor’s strike, and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other job. It was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors. If they are struggling with this moment or if this doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth, then I know something needs to change.
John: Yes, if they can’t sell it, it probably is the line.
Nora: Exactly.
John: It’s not the person reading the line. Through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of Imagine who ended up taking it? What was that process of I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?
Nora: It’s so funny looking back on that version of myself because I feel like–
John: Looking back, what, two years?
Nora: Yes, [laughs] looking back. It’s not long ago.
John: The younger me.
Nora: The younger me. No, but I think it’s– I’ve had for so long, I’ve been really timid and skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. All of my friends, for the most part, there’s obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. You have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place and then suddenly you’re seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you.
Again, that gap is one that can be difficult to close, but also, it’s that awkward thing of I don’t want to ask my friend to help me. I don’t know what, I really don’t know what changed. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I had this script, and two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, “I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions.”
I submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. [laughs] I remember reading it and I was just like, “Whoa, okay.” [laughs] I think they issued some boilerplate statement that’s like, “We suggest you reapply or suggest you take this writer’s notes.” I don’t think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, “This is bad.”
John: You’re on the website now.
Nora: [laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it. There’s something crazy making in that because you’re like, “What is good?” I can’t say what’s good.
John: It’s a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure, and that there’s just no objective measure of any of it.
Nora: Exactly. It is that thing where it’s like okay, obviously, when the film comes out, we’ll see. There’s a big feeling of just like, “Okay, you hate my writing, and this person doesn’t hate my writing.” I think that I read the feedback, and I had that moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m horrible. Everything I do is bad.” Then I thought, I don’t know, my friends like this, and I trust them, so I’ll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I’ll just keep going. Again, I think that that’s an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, “You’re right, blue cat.”
[laughter]
John: “I’m embarrassed to tell this to you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
Nora: Yes, exactly. I asked a friend of mine who was representative. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me, and he set me up with my now manager, Sidney Blank. I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother’s house in New York. I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta. I took off of Meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting.
I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it’s the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it’s really talky. A lot of conversations, there’s a lot of $5 words, it’s very cerebral at times, there’s no major set pieces. I was pretty certain I was like, this would just be a really good sample, and I’ll be able to get in rooms, hopefully.
John: Getting a room on a succession-like show would be a dream with a script like this.
Nora: That was the dream, 100%. I was like, “Hopefully, I get a manager, and then hopefully, I start working in rooms.” Sydney was the first person who said, “I really think we can make this into a movie.” That was, I think, December of 2023, I think.
John: Yes, so recent.
Nora: It’s so recent or maybe two. I don’t know.
John: What are years?
Nora: What are years? It was very recent, though. Then that next year, which I think it– yes, God, I think it was 2023. Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. Incredibly lucky for me that she was right.
John: That’s great. Imagine read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process?
Nora: I remember that meeting really well. Yes, they met with me, and I met with them, really. It’s also so funny going from auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people’s offices. I had a meeting once in like an ante room of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at 6:00 AM. It was so bad. Then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, “Oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship.” Whereas before I’d been in the position of me trying to really sell myself.
It was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi. Immediately, Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can’t believe any of this is happening.
John: My first paid job was also Imagine. I went through there. Colorado and Imagine. Time shifted or something.
Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.
John: It’s so good. It’s rising up the charts quickly. At this point, they’ve purchased your script, they’ve optioned your script, or what it will be?
Nora: No. It was just a meeting of– Then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him. I had a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it, so we decided to go with him.
John: That’s great. Did you do drafts for Imagine before you went off to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened?
Nora: No. I think this was so atypical across so many different lines. It’s hard to say that because obviously, I don’t have another experience to draw from. I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. Once he signs on to something, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it. He’s like, “This is getting made. We’re going to get it made within the timeframe that I have.”
The process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience where I didn’t even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine’s repped by CAA. Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. Luca’s name was right up there at the top. They asked me after we decided to work together to hone in and find a smaller list of directors. I made a list of four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it’ll be the best day of my life, and Luca was in that little grouping.
We sent the script to his agent who happens to be married to Julia Roberts’s agent. Imagine really wanted things to be we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. The way it happened because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. Then she actually came on first because initially, Luca had a scheduling gap. No, he had a film that was going. Then that film, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. Then he came on.
John: That’s great. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia, for which she was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. You feel lucky to be in the room, but also, you’re trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make?
Nora: I think it’s really difficult being a first-time screenwriter in some ways because– especially coming from the acting world and just having zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms. I think I felt like, “Wow.” I feel so lucky to be here across the board. Again, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to look back and be like, “Oh, what was–” It just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now. I think it would have been insane for me to, at that point, be like, “Luca, no thank you.” That’s crazy.
I think that the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. I don’t want to spoil things, but I used to work there, and he was staying there at the time. Our first meeting was there, and my old manager was there. I remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1:00 AM every night, and he was there. I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino and he was like, “What?” This is a crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I’ve been so many times in such a different capacity, and now I’m meeting with this person here.
I love Luca as a director, and I’d seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. Then, of course, the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash.
[laughter]
Nora: I was like, “Oh, no, I knew it.” I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you’re just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect and I have no idea.
John: It should be obvious, but you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” I’ve actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I’ve been inside this entire movie for years, and so I really can describe everything that’s in here and why everything is in here. I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. It’s not like if this script had plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn’t have the ability to talk about what’s really inside it. You’re the only person who’s already seen the movie, which is- A hard thing to remember.
Sometimes as you’re talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” They’ve never been inside this. They’re just trying to find their way in. You had this meeting where they’re immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we’re going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with them?
Nora: I think Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the thorny social dynamics and really exploring the socio-political world in which these characters were in. I think that something I was scared of when all this was initially happening is I’d heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting denuded and the teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized.
I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he’s really able to silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.
John: Entering the movies, if it’s worth the psychological thriller, there’d be probably a clean answer to how somehow these things sort out. My experience with watching the movies, I went to a 10:00 AM screening in Culver City with just myself, and I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with afterwards.
Fortunately, I grabbed a sandwich nearby, and there were three women who’d just seen the movie, too, and I heard them talking, so I could join their conversation as– Let’s talk about these three things because it very much is one of those movies where you want to have some discussion about what really happened there. For a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places they got to.
Nora: Yes.
John: Can we take a look at some pages from the script? This is how we’re starting the movie. This is the initial scenes as they’re meeting all the different characters. I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. Emma Hoff, the Jill Robbins character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don’t give any specific more information with her at this point, but we’re going to see a lot of specific behavior from her. Frederick Mendelson, her husband. Can you read the description for him?
Nora: Sure. Frederick Mendelson, Alma’s husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over.
John: Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. We meet him in that parking lot.
Nora: Hank Gibson, 40, Alma’s colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower-class background.
John: That last clause, having worked his way up, that’s not evidence that we can’t see that on screen, but we’re going to see it in his behavior later on. That’s just the cheating that we embrace in a screenplay.
Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]
John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.
Nora: Maggie Resnick, mid-to-late twenties, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy.
John: Cast in the movie, played by Iowa Deberry. Her being Black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the screenplay, you didn’t know that.
Nora: No, I didn’t know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn’t any specific notion of race.
John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.
Nora: Forties, a professor, emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.
John: Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. It’s delightful. Again, it’s the specificity that I’m loving about these things. Then we’re meeting her almost in class. We’re going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. We’re meeting Fabiola, not a housekeeper. She’s hired to help. She’s to do everything in person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don’t have kids. We’ll try to put this first three pages up, so people can download them.
There’s a lot of behavior, a lot of setting of worlds and establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven’s apartment life, which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London?
Nora: It was actually in London, yes. Something that Luca is very rigorous about research. He has a research that he’s used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. He is very adamant about verisimilitude. He is a wonderful set designer who makes-
John: The sets are incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. They’re always jammed. All these people are hoarders until you get to one point very late in the movie where we’re at a place that is incredibly spare and spartan.
Nora: Yes, exactly. That was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, where it’s like you’re walking-
John: You’re asleep no more.
Nora: Exactly. You’re walking around the sets and you’re opening drawers and you’re like, God, there’s actually what you would have in your drunk drawer if you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019. This was what it would look like. He was very meticulous about that. I think that that’s a wonderful thing for actors to have, for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to set up entering into these characters’ lives prior to feeling like, oh, we’re just at the fulcrum point.
John: Talk to us about the language, because we’re catching glimpses of them in class, and they’re just talking in what’s almost– It’s legalese or medicalese. It’s almost incomprehensible to what they’re saying to each other because it’s all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. To what degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft? How much of this came in later on? What was that process?
Nora: My cousin is getting her master’s in philosophy at Stanford. I really plumbed her experience and also literally some emails that she’s gotten from professors about announcing talks. The language that’s in the script is a very sanded-down version of the opacity that exists in that world. It is legalese. It’s jargon. Something when I was taking philosophy classes ad hoc, postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. The barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose.
There’s a part of me that loves the idea of you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences, but there’s another part of me that feels like, “Come on, guys, just say the thing.” I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. That was something where Luca really thought if this is someone who’s supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. That required a crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself.
John: It also creates structural issues because you need to find where do those scenes go in a natural way that’s advancing the actual overall plot that we believe that she’s teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and are happening after this.
Nora: Exactly, yes. How can we use those scenes that otherwise would be cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add drama?
John: The tension reaches the boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma just outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie who’s talking with their partner Alex and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It’s a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is that the thing that came along in the process?
Nora: Portions of it were always in the script, certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals.
John: Oh, great.
Nora: Yes.
John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.
Nora: Talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you’re just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals.
John: Is it in New York City?
Nora: No, San Francisco. She’s lovely and so warm and disarmingly so. We had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script, so it at least wasn’t like a complete cold meeting. Luca basically ran it so that obviously, the actors were all very busy, so we had to stagger who was involved in rehearsals. Sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. It started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I, and then slowly but surely, then Io came, and then it was Chloe, and then it was all of us.
John: How far in advance of production was this? Months?
Nora: Gosh. Not terribly far. I would say May, and then Luca went into prep in June. We started shooting early July, I think.
John: I’d love to read through some of this back half here because you’re at the point in the movie where people can more clearly state the themes and what their actual thing is. It’s not couched in specific language, or it could be a little more direct. If you put me at page 82, I’m nowhere near the actor. Anyway, Deborah is. I just want to read through some stuff here. She says, “I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.”
Nora: “Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown.”
John: “There are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible.”
Nora: “You’ve constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. You, you lie all the time, living in an apartment 10 times cheaper than what you can afford, dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting, fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility, another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It’s all a lie. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank, too.”
John: Again, it’s a moment where you actually can pull off all the niceties and things. You’re also answering an audience question. I was watching like, “Wait, if she’s rich, why is she living in that crappy apartment?” It’s rewarding the audience for that question you asked. You’re actually answering that question that was never audibly asked before. It’s like, “Why are you doing this thing?” Getting to express these, you’re not entitled to comfort, is an aspect too.
It’s almost like the audience is not entitled to a nice, tidy ending. It’s setting up, hopefully, the right invitation for the audience about what they’re going to get to because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was and stuff like that, they’re going to be answered but not answered to the degree that here’s the clear, it’s not the sixth sense. It’s not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It’s not that kind of clear answer.
Nora: Initially, it was. Certainly, the drafts that were circulated was very much like you got the answer. I think you’re absolutely right that it is a sense of a metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having.
John: Well, congratulations on the script and on the movie.
Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.
John: We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer.
Nora: Great.
John: Anita writes, “When is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? How long can you go with a character who’s talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to show that?” A script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It’s like, okay, what’s too long where I don’t actually need to show the thing? I don’t know.
To me, it’s just, it’s the instinct. I’m like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and show the story, but there’s other times where you just tell the story. If it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on to the after that long, I think my instinct is to stay. What’s your instinct?
Nora: I think it’s a difficult question. It was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there’s that feeling of how long can you hide the shark in Jaws. You know what I’m saying? How long can you make it? There’s going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually, you move towards satisfaction in the end. There’s a sense of what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying.
John: The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, there’s still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not? Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it’s trusting the filmmaker. It’s showing the actual real truth. That’s not the case. You’re going to have to do a little more work to undo that dialogue.
Nora: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s about rewarding people’s faith while creating as much tension as possible.
John: Let’s take one last question here from Nami. “I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.”
Tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s the buildup to a sneeze. It’s the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, “Oh God, something bad is going to happen.” It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there’s a bomb underneath the table, and you see the countdown underneath the table, or a longer-term thing where you’re just like, oh, there’s this sense of dread.
I think one of the issues that we’re living with as a society right now is that sense that there’s an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment. You’re just not quite sure when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like. In movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you’re cutting into something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we’re still worried about what happened before, or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment?
Your movie has a lot of tension in this building up to just mysteries that we’re trying to figure out. A lot of checkouts guns are being loaded in your movie. Any more instincts about tension and suspense?
Nora: First of all, I love The Twilight Zone. Again, I think it’s a delicate dance between feeling like what you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging, or what can you get away with not paying off and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement.
John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience?
Nora: Sure. I’ve been really interested in Substack, recently. I think that it’s a great little corner of the internet when there’s a lot of scary corners of the internet. I also think it’s really great to just read Flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. Jessica Tofino is a writer who runs a great Substack called Flesh World. It’s a lot about the beauty space. I’m really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. There’s another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. He writes flash fiction. I just started reading him, and I love it. It’s really tightly told and very evocative.
John: That’s great. A couple of things to respond to on there. Flash fiction as a concept can be great. These are little short bits. It’s almost the textual equivalent of TikToks where it’s just like, here’s the idea, you’re in and you’re out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. I respond to it the same way. It’s like, just one more, just one more, just one more.
Substack is so fascinating, too, because there’s so many really good writers on Substack. Anytime you mention Substack, people are like, “But what about the Nazis?” It’s a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and that it’s corporatizing a bunch of independent voices, and yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating.
Nora: See, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn’t even know about any of that. [laughs]
John: Oh, that’s great. Literally, I’ll post something on Blue Sky about this post that I really liked, and the first comment will be like, “Oh, too bad. It’s on that Nazi platform.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”
Nora: Oh God. No, everything is ruined. I have to think of a new, cool thing.
John: The scolding that happens in popular culture is true, and that’s also part of your movie, too. Your movie is building off of reactions to me, too, but just the general sense of there’s no good way to be a decent person in the world.
Nora: No. I think it’s also a certain sense of, God, there’s nothing that seems particularly clean in this world now. Everything is touched, everything is tainted in some way, and it’s like how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy?
[laughter]
John: Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One podcast by Jesse David Fox. We had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. The Good One podcast, it’s scripted, but it’s talking with- funny people about how they do their work. One episode I really liked recently was Ben DeLaCreme’s episode.
Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.
John: He’s an incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but talking through the behind-the-scenes of RuPaul’s Drag Race but also the bigger issues of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we’re trying to do. You’re always grappling with, well, what is drag anymore? If drag isn’t dirty, is it still drag? All these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. One of many good episodes of The Good One podcast.
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.
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Nora: Thank you for having me.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. Let’s talk about day jobs because you are now a produced screenwriter, but for a long time, you were doing other things along the way. Let’s talk about some of the different day jobs you’ve had, some pros and cons of a person who needs to keep a roof over their head but also have brain space and time to do the things they want to do. What day jobs have you had over your life?
Nora: What day jobs have I not had? I was a personal trainer. I was a personal assistant. I was a professional organizer. I was a data analyst. I was studying to be a paralegal. I was a waitress and a cater waiter and a hostess.
John: That’s good. That’s a whole range of things. Let’s talk about the service industry side first, because you mentioned how at Chateau Marmont, you had been a hostess at Chateau Marmont. Then you’re going there for a meeting, which is a very classic moment. That’s a movie moment right there.
Nora: Very movie moment, yes.
John: As a hostess or as a waiter, some pros I can imagine is you leave the job, you’re off the job, you’re done. Great. You probably have a little bit more flexibility when it comes for auditions, which is the thing you were having to do.
Nora: Yes. Being a waiter was one of my favorite jobs.
John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?
Nora: I worked at Dominic’s before it closed down, may it rest in peace. It was a great restaurant. Then I worked at Crossroads, the vegan restaurant, which was– That was one of those environments where the chef was really totalitarian. You had to call him chef. That was my first experience of that. Then I worked at Little Dom’s and Chateau Marmont.
John: In picking those jobs or in giving those jobs, were you trying to optimize your hours to make your life manageable in a way that you could also write and do other things? Talk to us about that decision.
Nora: Yes. I always really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to be on a schedule that wasn’t a nine-to-five because not only could you get everything done that one needed to do during the day at a time where it wasn’t completely clogged with other people, but also, I liked being able to have my days free to write, to audition. The hard thing about working in the service industry is it’s like your days are free, but also, you’re working very late. There is that counterbalance of like there were times that I would write when I got home from work because you’re just so wired. You’re up until three, and then you’re sleeping until noon.
John: Talk to us about you’re waiting on these people. You’re waiting on decision makers. You’re waiting on parents, people who could be reading you, who could be casting you and things. To what degree is that a factor, or you just stop thinking about it?
Nora: I think the great gift of entering into this industry as an actor is the lack of control that you have in that profession is huge. The amount of control you have as a writer feels like the greatest relief in comparison. The thing that was always really difficult for me about being an actor was this feeling of like I can’t just go home and practice my instrument. I can’t go home and play violin, but you can go home and write. Then you have a product, and you have something that you can look at and read over and edit, and it’s immediate and pleasurable in that way.
There was a huge sense of frustration and a huge sense of, I think, impotence. Bradley Whitford, I think, talks about that. I think it was a commencement address at Juilliard or something like that. This idea that you have so much passion and desire and drive and need, and then you have this blockade of being like, “Well, if no one’s going to let me do this, I can’t do it.” I think it’s important to find something that’s lovely about working these type of day jobs in this city of Los Angeles is that almost everybody is trying to do the same thing as you. That can be demoralizing at times, or it can be really lovely to think like we’re all in the same boat, and so we might as well try to do something together.
John: If you were a waiter in Denver who dreamed of being a professional actor, well, you’re just delusional.
Nora: It’s like you’re in the wrong city.
[laughter]
John: Let’s talk through some of the other day jobs. Personal trainer? Was it personal shopper or a personal assistant?
Nora: Personal assistant. I wish I was a personal shopper.
John: That would be incredible. Personal trainer, I have many friends who are trainers, like my trainer, but other friends who train folks. Yes, you can set your schedule to some degree, but you’re always relying on other people showing up, not showing up. It doesn’t stop, I suspect.
Nora: No. Personal trainers do not get paid enough to teach classes. The people teaching your Pilates classes, your HIIT classes, they do not get paid enough. I was teaching a class that was-
John: You weren’t doing one-on-one clients. You were doing classes.
Nora: No, because I worked at a very fancy place where you had to teach the classes with the students. It was dance cardio because I used to be a dancer. It was very Jane Fonda adjacent. The reason I stopped is because I got a stress fracture in the middle of one of my classes. Being a dancer, I was like, it’s fine. I’ll go for another hour. I did. I was like, I’m in a lot of pain. That was the reason that job ended because I had to be in a boot after that. That was a crazy experience because it’s just I’ve never worked out so much in my life.
John: I have actor friends on Big Fish who would teach spin classes and things like that. It’s like, Jesus, your body.
Nora: You don’t even feel good. You’re a receptacle for food, and then you’re just constantly sweating.
[laughter]
John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.
Nora: This is at Meta.
John: Was that your last day job?
Nora: That was my last day job. I had taken a break from working in restaurants to be an assistant for the longest gig I had an assistantship for, which is about five years.
John: Assistant to what kind of person?
Nora: I did a couple. I did actresses, and then I had a stint with producers at CBS and then produce director. I bobbed around.
John: This was personal life stuff? Basically, get me this thing, deal with the plumber, that kind of assistant thing?
Nora: It was both personal life stuff, and it was also all of my on-set experience. I’d been on set a lot, which was invaluable. It was also partially writing experience as well and staffing and reading and coverage and all of that kind of stuff.
John: If you’re working, imagine like an actor on set and you’re a personal assistant for them, what is your relationship between it? Your first responsibility is to that person, but you also have to deal with the crew and production itself. How does that interface work?
Nora: It’s really difficult. I think being a personal assistant is one of the most fraught jobs because it’s all of the intimacy of an intimate relationship without any of the perks. I think it’s really difficult to hire someone to basically be a facsimile of you. Once they get good at it, I think there’s all sorts of identity politics that happen where you’re like, “I want you to be able to write my emails,” and you’re opening up your life to someone. I think it’s really difficult on both sides.
John: This does tie back into your movie then, of course, because I share everything with you. You don’t share anything back.
Nora: Exactly. This notion of like, oh, I’m being collected in some way, but I’m also collecting. I think the weird, tacit understanding of being a personal assistant is that obviously, most people who become assistants are trying to replicate a guild thing where you’re like, okay, I’m going to learn from you.
John: I’m the apprentice and you are this.
Nora: Exactly. That’s a difficult thing because you have to, I think as a boss, have to understand that your assistant has ambition. At the same time, if they’re really good, you don’t want to lose them. It’s a really strange dynamic. I think it’s difficult on both sides.
John: That gets us to meta. You just apply to an open job?
Nora: I went down the LinkedIn rabbit hole where I was– I mean, God, just throwing cover letters into the void. I think I was just at a point where I went back to restaurant work. I went back, and I was a counter service waitress at Pine & Crane.
Going back to a restaurant at 31 is much different than in my twenties. My body was just getting wrecked. I was getting really mentally exhausted and feeling really bad about myself, especially compared to my friends who had enough disposable income to go on vacations and do fun things. I was like, “Okay, someone’s got to give. I’ve got to figure something out.” I started the LinkedIn route. I was actually recruited by meta because of some editing work that I had done for a nonprofit.
John: Some video editing or some text editing?
Nora: Some text editing. Yes, some text editing and development that I had done for a nonprofit. They’ve recruited me to be a data analyst.
John: Let’s talk through your advice to, let’s say, the next Nora is moving out from New York to Los Angeles and is looking for a day job so that they can act or write. Where to first? Do you think restaurants is the right, best first place? What’s your instinct?
Nora: I love restaurants. I think especially because it’s where I earned all my friends. It’s where I earned. It’s where I met all my friends. I had to work. I think especially most people who are attracted to this business are people who really thrive on novelty. The lovely thing about a restaurant is that every day is different. You really observe human behavior from close proximity. It gives you a lot of wonderful skills of memorization but also performance. As depressing as it is to have spaghetti sauce on your hands and under your fingernails for five days out of the week, it’s like there’s also some type of brilliant resilience in that.
John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.
Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.
Links:
- Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
- Nora Garrett
- After the Hunt
- Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
- The Rehearsal
- Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
- Big Reader Bad Grades
- BenDeLaCreme on Good One
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- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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