John August

Scriptnotes, Episode 721: Preparing to Direct (with Eva Victor), Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes, Episode 721, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Let’s say you have finished writing that script that only you could write and perhaps only you could direct, but how do you learn how to direct? Today on the show, we’ll talk with the writer, director, and star of the much-acclaimed film, Sorry, Baby, about their journey behind the lens, which landed them best directorial debut by the National Board of Review and a lot of other awards attention. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Eva Victor.

Eva Victor: Oh, thank you for having me. You know what? You guys have gotten me through some interesting, difficult days. Your voices are very comforting to me. It’s interesting to see your faces.

John: Weird, huh?

Eva: I totally attribute faces to voices, and it’s a very surreal moment. Thank you for this. I’m excited to be here.

Craig: It’s great having you. I’m sorry if we are disturbing you, if the cognitive dissonance is freaking you out.

Eva: Exactly. Thank you for saying that.

Craig: Yes. I want you to feel okay about this, but you might not. I get that. I remember the first time when I was a kid, I would listen to Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea what Howard Stern looked like. Then they started putting up ads for Howard Stern around the subways and stuff. I was like, “What?”

Eva: That’s a particularly surprising one.

Craig: Yes. That was really shocking. Well, Eva, I have a little bit of like, okay, you were comforting me, too, because even though I don’t spend a lot of time being cool and looking at things that other people are looking at, for some reason, back when you were doing videos, I guess on YouTube, but maybe there was something else, I saw you did one where you’re talking to your imaginary or potentially real offscreen boyfriend, “Babe,” about the heterosexual pride parade. I loved it so much, and it sent me down a whole rabbit hole of all of your videos, and I just thought you were hysterical. It’s so funny.

I have to say, not surprised at all that somebody as funny as you has made a movie like this because I think funny people are better at drama than drama people.

Eva: You know what? That is so cool. The journey of the year has been accepting that I did make videos in the past. I think I was-

Craig: You’re awesome.

Eva: At that moment, it felt really right for that to be what I was talking about. Looking back, I’m like, well, that day that video made sense, but now it’s random, but also have to give it up for whatever journey your journey is. It’s your journey, and that’s okay.

Craig: Tell me about it.

Eva: I’ve come to terms with the fact that there were skills built there. One of the main ones is moving through humiliation and putting yourself out there and feeling devastated by yourself to make something happen, and the pain of not doing something is greater than the pain of doing something and feeling ashamed.

Craig: Sure. Well, that’s what we do, and I like the way you phrase that. The pain of not doing things is worse than the pain of doing them, but the point is pain. Welcome to the show.

Eva: Welcome to the show, okay.

John: I wanted to save talking about short-form video to the bonus segment because we had Quinta Brunson on the show, and she came up at a BuzzFeed, and you were doing Comedy Central, and she learned so many crucial skills there. I want to talk about what skills transfer, what skills don’t transfer, and what you learn from that, but before we get that, we’re obviously going to talk about your film. I also want to answer some listener questions on talking to actors, writing exercises, when to share the script with people.

I also want to confess that the poster for your film is great. It’s you holding a cat, and so I assumed for months before I watched the film that, oh, the baby is the cat, that she’s talking to the cat, and the spoiler is that it’s not about the cat. It’s not about the cat. The cat is a small part of the movie, the adorable part of the movie, but not a large part of the movie.

Eva: I know, and the poster conversation was one of the more intense parts of making, because I went in this huge circle, and the main issue was trying to communicate a tonal movement through an image, and all the images that I was compelled by were sentimental value. I was like, oh my God, that’s the best version of a dramatic poster, and that’s what, if we had made a drama, simply a drama, it should have been– It was interesting, after having worked on posters, to be like, “This is the best image for the film.” That said, it is deceptive, and then I got a lot of feedback that people were like, “I can’t watch because the cat dies,” and I was like, “Oh my God, no.”

John: Again, another spoiler, the cat does not die. The cat thrives in the film.

Eva: That’s the only thing that does okay.

Craig: The cat starts healthy and just gets healthier?

Eva: No, grows up. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect cat.

John: Indeed. There’s another famous screenwriting book called Save the Cat, which apparently your film follows, but we have our own script notes book that’s out there in the world, and we have two little bits of follow-up on that before we get into the meat of the episode.

Eva: Whoa, look.

John: What, wait, what? Oh my God, there it is.

Craig: She’s got it in front of her. Oh my God, incredible.

Eva: Because you know what? I really need it. I’m a little bit through it, but I have to pause because it got to, it called me out a little too much, and I need to recuperate.

John: Not by name, but just by implication.

Eva: It’s like, “Eva, you are a bad writer in it.” I was like, “Oh.”

John: Oh my God. We almost took that one out and it almost dropped in the line edits, but you know what?

Craig: We figured it would be motivating. John, what do we– oh, we have some follow-up from Liz.

John: Drew has the flu, so he’s on the call, but he’s a rough voice. Craig, do you want to be Liz in the script notes book?

Craig: Sure, I’ll be Liz. Liz writes, “I bought the script notes book for my husband Nick, a longtime listener, for Christmas. I’m an author and through a series of unexpected events, ended up in a pitch meeting for a script this week, my very first time pitching a script. My husband suggested I read the pitching chapter in the book. I did, and the advice in there was such a huge help. The meeting was a big success, so thank you so much for writing this book.” That is so nice, it’s almost too nice.

John: Yes, it’s really nice.

Eva: Tell me the me- where’s the sad part?

Craig: There’s no conflict.

Eva: Where’s the underdog? Jeez, [unintelligible 00:06:32] must be nice.

Craig: Right. I kept waiting for my husband. Once I heard my husband suggest it, I thought, oh, this is going to lead to we’re getting a divorce, but-

Eva: Story-wise, interesting, yes.

Craig: Unfortunately for us, Liz’s life is nearly perfect.

Eva: Liz, I’m so happy for you, but you are incredibly unreadable, but congratulations.

Craig: Liz and her perfect husband Nick. Well, thank you. It is very nice. I’m glad. Listen, that was the point, Liz, was that we would help people. It’s nice to see that it’s working in the world.

Eva: You know what? The paper is good paper for a book that’s more– because it’s very paper-paper. It’s not glossy. It gives the energy of more of a manual that you can look to where you need to. That, to me, the paper makes the stakes approachable. It makes the book approachable to me. I thought that was very thoughtful. Orange is amazing, so you guys nailed it with that. The content of the book is amazing too, but also the look and the feel is really powerful.

John: All right, so that is a review from Eva Victor, acclaimed filmmaker.

Craig: That’s pretty great.

John: A lot of people have been leaving reviews online, which is great also because it helps people find the book. Thank you for leaving them on Amazon or Goodreads. I want to single out one reader who gave us only four stars. Fine, you can give us four stars.

Craig: That’s good. It’s four out of five. That’s great.

John: Yes, but most people are five stars. Four, it pulls down our average when someone gives us four stars rather than five stars, which is fine. This man wrote, “2,105 words on the Scriptnotes’ book.”

Craig: What?

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes too so people can read through it because it’s really impressively written. It’s a guy, Dimitri Papadimitropoulos.

Craig: His name is 2,105 words.

John: It’s incredible. What I like so much about his review, he says, “The book’s generosity is not that it is kind, though it often is, but that it treats the reader as an adult, someone who can tolerate complexity, contradiction, and the unglamorous truth that artistry is frequently indistinguishable from persistence.

Eva: That’s a five-star review to me. I don’t know where that–

Craig: It feels like it’s a six-star, and he might have tried to go to six, but it just busted him down to four.

Eva: That’s okay.

Craig: That’s common.

John: Eva, I thought that was a good jumping-off point to talk about artistry frequently is indistinguishable from persistence because that is the thing about filmmaking is that you say, “Oh my God, that was an amazing movie,” and it’s like, “Yes, but it wasn’t just brilliant because it was brilliant because the person had this great idea, it was so much hard work day after day, year after year to get things done.”

I think it’s the thing we talk about a lot on the show, but as I went through my career and as I’ve met and worked with some great directors, it’s just been always such a revelation. It’s like, “Oh, you’re just working really hard.” I think it’s a thing that’s just underappreciated, especially as we get into sometimes award seasons and you think, “Oh my God, this is the person is a genius, that person is a genius.” It’s like, “No, they’re just working really hard.” There’s luck and there’s all these things. There is talent, but it’s all these things.

I want to maybe frame some of our conversation with you around this because you came up, you have some experience, but as I’m reading through the press notes on this, you wrote the script not even necessarily intending to direct it. Can you talk us through the journey to this is a script and now this is a script I’m going to try to direct?

Eva: Yes, totally. I think that theme is very relevant for me. I feel like there was a moment that I realized my career would never be made by somebody else. It picked me up out of oblivion and gave me an amazing role that was the big role for my– There was this realization of you are the one who has to get you where you want to go. I have always been like, “Well, I’m not going to fail because I don’t work hard. I’m going to fail because I’m missing some intrinsic quality that people have.” I was like, “It’s never going to be because I don’t put in the hours.”

That discipline has kept me from I think mentally losing my mind. It’s like, “Well, what can’t I control?” I can write more. I can study. I can watch films. I can get my day job to a place where I’m making enough so I have these hours. I had a development deal with the studio that happened because of my internet videos. That was a very difficult experience because I was turning in page one drafts for, honestly, years thinking that if I just wrote the perfect draft, then I would get the momentum and attention from the people I needed to make that film happen but that didn’t come. That made me lose my goddamn mind. It made me really internalize something about I am fraudulent, I can’t do this, I’m not meant to write.

Then I wrote scripts for a body horror thing that didn’t make sense, but it had a lot of heart. I sent that around to people through my agents at the time. My rejections were very impersonal nos. The one person I’d met before I sent this script to read it and said, no, but the rejection letter meant everything, was Pastel, Barry Jenkins company. When I met Barry, he was like, “Your videos…” which I was even at that point ashamed of or whatever. He was like, “It’s filmmaking. It’s just not the way that other people do it. It’s a small version, but you are directing this. You’re making decisions about how people look, where the camera’s going, and what people are saying.”

I think that gave me this optimism or like, “Oh, man, someone sees the hard work behind these.” Then when I sent them the script, they sent a very generous no and made this really beautiful letter about the script and what was valuable about it emotionally. Then why they weren’t the right partners for it. That was weirdly like a letter that I read and cried out of like, “Oh, but there are people out there who are understanding.”

Then I had been, over the course of five years or so, been stewing on the idea for Sorry, Baby, but was like, “Man, the words, if I start writing them down too soon just for this particular project, I’m going to get too depressed about how bad it is compared to what the story means to me.” It took me a really long time to piece together the writing of it. Then finally, I sat myself down in a cabin in Maine and was like, “It’s time. You’re writing this.” I wrote it and sent it to Pastel again because I was like, “They get me.” They were like, “Okay, what do you dream of for this?” I was like, “Well, I’m going to act in it…” hoping that–

John: I want to clarify, at this point, you are an actor who’s been cast in things independently because you have acting credits. It’s not crazy to think that you’re going to be acting.

Eva: Right. It’s not crazy, but it is a different thing.

Craig: Yes, but there’s that concern that, oh, well, if we had Jennifer Lawrence, then maybe we would get the blah, blah, blah.” You’re like, “No, it’s going to be me.”

Eva: It was very clear that when I’m the lead actor, that means that the film is this big.

Craig: This big. [chuckles]

Eva: I was like, “I’m willing to sacrifice whatever thing that is.”

John: Eva, can I ask you about the script that you sent to Pastel? Does it closely resemble the movie that Ashley has made? The footprint of the film is very small. It’s a cabin in the woods and while the times are shifting around it, the actual literal geography it’s inhabiting is very small. Was it always that way?

Eva: Yes, it was always that small. It’s very similar to the script that we shot. There are some changes. Mainly, I did a little work with Pastel around the character of Lydia. Then once we got Naomi, that opened it up for me of how this person talks. There were a few scenes that we adjusted the dialogue. I have not had this sense, and I don’t know if I will, how little we had to work on the scripts. What do you think?

Craig: I think you worked on the script a lot. I think that what people sometimes think is that all the work on the script happens after the “first draft,” which is never really a first draft. Some people do write first drafts, but a lot of people hand a script over that they have been– you’ve been thinking about it for years. Then when you went to your Stephen King cabin, what came out was something that was already thought through. There was an enormous amount of intention and structure and care and thought.

I suspect, having seen the movie and having seen the way you directed it, that you had already directed the movie in your head. You saw it. You saw it, you heard it, you felt it, you smelled it. It’s all there. It’s okay for that work to happen earlier. I think it’s the best thing. I think it’s why people say yes. There’s a certain kind of movie that you can write that’s about, oh my God, the aliens are crashing to the moon, and you can figure that shit out as you go. For this, what I was so impressed by was how seamless the writing and the direction was. You are a walking billboard for what I think should be the gold standard for how we make feature films, a writer-director.

I just feel like even though there’s a conspiracy to convince all of us that somehow directing is this unattainable thing as opposed to writing, which we can all do, no. No, it’s not. You’re doing it already.

Eva: There is so many layers of the reasons why I didn’t think I would want to direct it that all have to do with not understanding what the job is and you can learn things to do a job. That you’re not born with information, even though it feels like you are. The college I went to, I never had any interest in directing. It was mostly plays where I went. I had no interest because I was like, “Well, this kind of guy does that and that kind of looks this way and talks this way. I don’t want to be in charge like that because I’m not compelled to be him.” It’s like, “Oh, I have my own way of doing that.”

It took a bit of soul searching to realize, oh my God, I’m desperate to direct this. I know how it looks and feels. I need to hire geniuses around me to help me find the words for visual language. It was a lot of, I don’t know, but I want to do it. I think I don’t know is so awesome.

Craig: Best words.

Eva: You’re allowed to make your first movie. You’re allowed to be doing something for the first time because you have to do it. I really fell in love with also– What was reassuring to me was the process of collecting images and moments and pieces, almost like a little scrapbook of information was a very enjoyable private process of building a world. I felt, as the work of director unfolded and I discovered what it was as I was doing it, each part of it felt like a miracle.

At one point in the edit, I was like, “Thank fucking God I like this and it’s [crosstalk].” I love it and I need it. Thank God because otherwise, why would you ever put yourself through this deeply intense experience that lasts forever?

Craig: It lasts forever and every day lasts forever, but also is way too short. It’s this nightmare of time that is never enough and is yet too much. I just feel like you’ve put your finger on something incredibly important, which is we all have a sense, whether we’ve learned it from school or from culture of the kind of person director should be. A kind of person a director should be is a man and he is a big– He’s Michael Bay. Basically, in my mind, it’s–

John: A bit of that personality.

Craig: It’s Michael Bay and I am not Michael Bay. I will never be Michael Bay. I don’t have whatever that is. That’s not me or Ridley Scott. I’m also not that. I am an ink-stained wretch, but ink-stained wretches are also wonderful directors. I love that you overcame the internalized image of what is because I honestly think that’s the thing that hurts us the most is we just start with a belief that we’re not.

Eva: Yes. Trust me, now it’s a different issue, but that one I overcame. I’m not to get through that, but I’m like, now it’s the first, honestly, if we’re going–

Craig: Please.

Eva: Now, because the writing of this film, now my experience of it is nostalgia for a time when I now remember it as flow. I don’t think it was. I toiled over that script. It was just I sent it when I was done with it. Now I’m like, “Oh, yes, directing, whatever, but writing, you guys, this needs oil. This is squeaky or something because it’s been so long. Now there’s eyes on me.” I thought the most painful thing was not having–

Craig: It’s the worst thing.

Eva: It’s the worst. Then this is also like, yes. I’m like, “Okay, now you’re trying to kill me by celebrating my film?”

John: How dare you say yes?

Eva: Well, just be honest, but also be nice. I’ve made a film. I only know how to make that film. It’s a mind fuck.

Craig: It is.

John: Can we rewind and talk about how you learned to make that film? That’s what’s so useful for so many of our listeners, is that you have a script and you have people say like, “We agree you should direct this. Now learn how to direct a film.” What did you assign yourself? What did other people send you to look at? What’s the process?

Eva: You know what? Yes. This I would love to talk about. First off was like, okay, you didn’t go to film school, so there’s a lot of fraudulence around not knowing things about film. I learned lenses will be good. Encyclopedic, ordering the books from film school, reading the books from film school. Research that was very dry, but I was like, “Let’s just read this. Let’s put post-its through it.” Quickly realized like, “Okay, this is simply information that actually I need.” It was a process of constantly being like, “Okay, that fills that need. Now what is missing still?” Then it became, I need to watch a million movies. I’d been watching movies, which is why I wrote a movie, but I was like, “I need to watch films. Then as I’m watching them, not fall into watching them, instead watch them.”

John: Look at them, study them, pull them apart. See what they’re doing.

Eva: Exactly. I became very into backwards shot listing films. A photo of every setup and blending them up and understanding when we return to the same set, it was very mathematical. When are we returning to the same setup? How long are we on Laura Dern’s face and Certain Women before we get to his face? Why? I became more aware of my taste. I was like, “Oh, I like the economy of not moving until we have to.” I became aware of what the film was needing from a visual standpoint.

I was backwards shot listing and would write out the shot list. Obviously, it’s not a complete picture because you never know what someone left out, but you get a sense of how cohesive vocabulary is built in a film. Certain Women was a really helpful one for me because that is three parts. There was chapters to that film and they’re related. How do you make three women who are strangers become related?

Then I created a shot list for my film, which instead of shot listing, because that felt random, I drew storyboards of everything. By the way, I had ample time. Man, fill your day with some shit to do because no one is knocking right now. We were just taking our time. It was drawing everything and every frame of the film. You could go through the storyboard and watch the film, which some of the shots are really what is in the storyboard. Then obviously, some very important changes were made in collaboration with my DP, Mia, who making decisions for good reasons later on. It was like an instinctual storyboard. What is the first thing that feels right?

Then I shadowed my friend Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow. I was like, “Oh, I’m ready.” I’m not ready, but I’m ready to start being ready. I’d been on set as an actor, but on set as an actor, it’s like, “Come in. Do you need water? Do you need Diet Coke? You’re good for the day. Good job.” I find acting very stressful in moments, especially when you’re there for some time, but not the whole time because it’s so vulnerable, but it is a different experience of things are hidden from you to protect you, which I feel complicated about, but whatever. Some things are just not your job to know.

When you’re on set sitting behind a director with nothing to do on the set besides watch that person, you realize how different people advocate for their film and the different styles of how people advocate, but also how a film is built moment to moment. It’s non-miraculous. It’s like by the end of the shoot, you have the pieces to go to the kitchen. Mixing metaphors is okay, I guess. That was my stuff. Then what you do is you take meetings with different heads of department, and through, they made a lookbook. Actually, I’m going to make a lookbook in return, and then you have a conversation with Image, and then you become specific.

The cool thing about directing a film is you make decisions every day over time. The film is built over time, and that was reassuring to me too because at first you’re alone, but then you bring people in, and it’s not just yours. That’s a relief really to, okay, you got that character thing, fucking God, that’s yours. Say it how you want to say it.

Craig: I think that what you just said from start to finish is, I’m going to use the word probably because I want to be kind and charitable to film schools, it is probably worth more than four years of film school. What you just laid out there, in part because you just belied the need for film school. You taught yourself what you needed to learn. I love that. I went through the same thing because I didn’t go to film school. There’s a special technical film school for directing, which you didn’t go to, and I didn’t go to, but we’re smart. We read stuff quickly and learned things quickly.

The thing about lenses, I don’t need a semester on lenses. I need 30 minutes on lenses to get the basic breakdown of it, and then I need to be on set and go, “Can we try something longer?” The cinematographer’s like, “Yes, you know what? 50. That’s cool.” Then you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s the thing.” You start to get muscle memory. All of these things you laid out, the way you storyboarded, the way you broke things down, reverse-

John: Reverse shotless thing is so crucial.

Craig: -shotless thing is genius. That’s genius.

John: I want to just pause for a second because people may not quite know what we’re describing. You’re watching a scene in a movie, and you can figure out, okay, well, we are a close-up of her, but there’s also a two-shot and there seems to be a wider shot, and so you can basically figure out, what were the actual shots they had on the day to make that thing? That was the plan going into it, but then you can also look at, how did they actually use it? When did they move into coverage? When did they stay wide? All the information is right there. You can see it because it’s in the film, and that is so useful.

Part of this is reminding me of, I don’t know, people who watch Drag Race. There’s bedroom queens who basically, who do really good drag at home, and they’re on Instagram. There’s also obviously queens who need to go out and actually perform in front of other people. That to me is the transition from you shotlessing at home and then going to a set and seeing Jane direct it on the set for her movie because you are watching like, “Oh, this is what it’s actually really like. This is what the actual decisions look like in the field where it can’t be perfected on Instagram.” You’re making choices moment by moment.

I’m sure you found this, and Craig, I know you’ve encountered this. When you are on a set and it’s not your movie. You’re still watching the monitor, and you have so many opinions. It’s like, “I can’t believe we’re moving on. There’s no way that’s going to cut right. That’s not what it is.” You recognize, no, but the director knows what they need. They know that, okay, between these two things, they know what’s important.

Craig: Sometimes.

John: Sometimes. Craig’s also a show writer who obviously does have control of a film.

Craig: Every now and again, they go, “Okay, we’re moving on.” I go, “No, we’re not.”

John: No, we’re not.

Eva: Declaring we’re moving on is like, well, that’s crazy. You can’t really go back on moving on. Okay, you have to be sure.

Craig: My thing on moving on is before I move on, I check with the tent. Who’s in the tent? My script supervisor is in the tent, and a producer is in the tent. My assistant is in the tent, people who have been watching this, and I’m like, “Are we feeling okay about this? We’re good? Do you think we got it? We got it? We got it. I feel like we got it. Okay, moving on.”

You’re absolutely right. It’s like an abandonment, and it’s the worst part of directing is that you have to do more than you have time to do so you move at such speed, but you get better as you go. You are, I assume, a much better director week– I don’t know how many weeks you shot for. Let’s say five, four?

Eva: 24 days.

Craig: Five weeks. Week five, you were a better director than week one, almost certainly.

Eva: Definitely. You know what? You don’t really self-reflect like that but then Naomi was there the whole time. She was there the first day, and she was there the second to last day. She was like, “Bitch, what the hell?” She was so proud of me. I was like, “Realize, so true.” You know what? There was actually something else I wanted to add, which was a really pivotal part of my building the film two years, was we did shoot two scenes from the film in a very small– Me and my DP and a group of my DP’s students at NYU came to shoot in an Airbnb in New York where we both lived two scenes, and the prompt for my producers who produced it and it was a practice setting, the prompt was, two scenes that scare you.

I did a scene that was terrifying for me to direct because I didn’t understand the mechanics of the movement of the people, a lot of movement. Then the other one was as an actor, this scene in the bathtub where Agnes tells Woody what happened.

John: It’s a Sundance Labs thing. That’s exactly what you do.

Eva: Exactly. Then I worked with an editor, Kate Broca, who that was the moment when I was like, “Oh, you cannot cut from a Y to a Y.”

Craig: Ah, love this.

Eva: I’m like, “Oh, man, what a master class in failure and a good [unintelligible 00:30:51]. I didn’t really realize it was a test, but then there was this moment when they were like, “What would you have changed about how you shot it?” That was the moment when they were like, “Okay, yes, you understand what you would change.” Also shadowing a set is very interesting because I shadowed a couple days on Billions, the show that I was on, just to watch those directors. The budget of that shoot is one real particular thing. The vocabulary of the show is very heavily covered. We go over every shoulder, clean, we do everything.

Then Jane’s film was a particular budget that was much larger than the budget I was going to have but to go backwards, to get a sense of scope and how much can you get done in a day when you have more days, when you have less days, when you have an actor who can only be there three days. Just to get a sense of a few different things, to understand that things on your set will be particular to your set.

Craig: I think you did a fantastic job. It’s funny, I was watching through and I was noticing, first of all, I have a particular– It’s just taste. It’s not that I don’t like when people move cameras around. I just don’t like it when cameras move around for no fucking reason. I like a camera to be still and I like the people to move around. I loved how still it was so frequently.

I noted as I was watching how many scenes didn’t really seem to need coverage. You had a nice two-shot and it worked that way. That’s how the character were interacting and it was great. The scene that I was like, there’s one that was probably tricky, was when Decker and all of his grad students are around a table. Shooting around a table is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare that nobody– I’d rather shoot a car chase than a scene with that many people around a table.

Eva: That makes me feel better because I’m like, “How do you fucking shoot a car chase?” Would never break that–

Craig: It turns out it’s because you can edit the shit out of car chases, but the eye lines around a table, that’s nightmare stuff for me. You did it really well.

Eva: Thank you. There are a few mistakes in the film, continuity issues, and one of them is in that scene, I’ll never say what it is. Okay, you just have to live with the fact that happened. I think, honestly, Billions prepared me for that.

Also, so much of understanding a scene is who is the scene about and his special attention to Agnes. It’s like, that helps. That helps these boys can be in a two-shot, a three-shot, and they will be cut to highlight that this is less vulnerable.

Craig: Then you got to explain that to them. Sometimes actors don’t like that.

Eva: No. They’re my close friends, so they understand.

Craig: It’s a tricky one. You’re like, “No, I actually think that you guys come through better in this.” [crosstalk]

John: Just so we can see the chemistry between the two of you.

Eva: When I’m in a movie, i.e. one other time besides this, now there’s no bullshit of I know I’m a character. If I’m next to someone who is on set every day and I’m here three days, I get it. I’m here to get you here. It’s interesting. It’s interesting.

John: Eva, you’ve perfectly set up a question we have from Anne. She writes, “How should writers talk to actors? Specifically, do you tell them about their function within a script, or do you just talk about the human being their character is?” It’s that balance between this is the character, this is who you are, the world is that, and functionally, this is what I need you to do. This is your job at this scene. What’s your instinct there? How you talk to actors?

Eva: Depends on the actor. I feel like I’ve now been in enough rooms where people don’t know I’m an actor or they forget. I hear people talking about actors, “Be careful.” I don’t talk about actors like that. I really think what they do is psychotically intense and next-level vulnerable. When I wrote Sorry, Baby, every character I wrote as if I got to play the character. I was like, “You’re going to say something I like. I want the words to be good because what if I do it?” It was very important to me that every actor was who they were in the film. I obviously was a part of every casting decision, but I’m like, “The world is as important as the people who lead it.”

I don’t know, talking to actors, you get a sense of how an actor wants to be treated. Some actors want to be handed off the role, and that I love to do. I love to be like, “You’re the expert now, go fly, you know more than me.” Often actors who are writers too are like, “I get who I am in this.” It was interesting because Naomi is completely brilliant. We never rehearsed. She really wanted to just do it. She’s so connected.

It was a very different process than, for instance, Lucas Hedges, who is brilliant as well, equally brilliant. We rehearsed for weeks beforehand. It was amazing to work with actors who I was learning from who were more seasoned than me because I was like, “Oh, every actor, their soul is how they do things.” It’s great if an actor knows themselves well enough to say, this is how I like to be treated.

John: Let’s go back the other way then. You’ve cast an actor in a role. What is that conversation like? If you’re the director, how do you have that conversation about let’s talk about how you like to work? Any tips on how to have that conversation with an actor?

Eva: My thing was always offering up meetings, calls, rehearsals, and going off of how they responded to that and what they needed for their process. My process as an actor was- I worked with Rebecca Dealy, who is an amazing casting director and also an acting coach, and so my process was also about building my character privately- I think offering everything that anyone could want and then respecting whatever they need.

Craig: That’s a great way of thinking about it because as much as I understand the impulse here that Anne has, which is tell me how to talk to actors or should we give actors this information? They’re all different. Big surprise. They’re all different. One thing that one actor craves is the thing that another actor will throw an absolute fit over. Learning that is easier for some people. It’s probably easier for you, Eva, than it is for me. I’m a little dense. It takes me some time sometimes to realize, oh, this person doesn’t need that and this person does need that. Just because this person needs it doesn’t mean that person.

It takes me a little bit of time. I’m not instant with it. I let them know when I start. I’m like, “Feel free to tell me, hey, this would help, this would not help.” Then my attitude is, I’m here to get the best performance out of you. Help me help you. What do you need?

Eva: There is, I discovered, a lot of value in acting across from your actor because it’s like you’re not coming down from on high with a note. I don’t really believe in the idea of a note. Anytime a director has given me a note– I like the idea more that a director delivers a secret or an idea or just that like, “What if she had this thought?” To me, there’s an immediate trust that happens if you’re in a scene with someone of, I have to have your back and you have to have my back. When I’m acting with you, I can’t judge your performance, [unintelligible 00:39:05] whatever you say. If I have an idea of what you could do differently, I’m going to give you something different, which is–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Eva: It’s less condescending of, I have an answer. It’s more like, “What if I said it like this? What happens with you?”

Craig: You direct them by altering your performance.

Eva: Not in secret.

Craig: No. You let them know. That’s amazing. It’s funny. I do wish they were like– because I want to be a good boy. Really, more than anything, I don’t want actors to feel like, I don’t know, I don’t want them walking away going, “He’s just difficult today.” I want to do right by them, but sometimes it’s impossible.

John: Craig, you’re trying to balance, you want their performance to be fantastic and you also have to look at the entire scene and entire story, everything around it. That’s the challenge, is you’re always balancing all these different competing desires.

Craig: I’m not acting.

Eva: Every day on set, you have to make a calculation of like, “Okay, if I give this person this thing, then this is taken from this person.” If I go late this day to make sure I know I have it, but does this actor need to feel like they have it, that will report me because it’s their first day, because this scene is vulnerable or whatever. That calculation of like, “Okay, we are going into overtime and because I haven’t done that, I can do that this day,” constant calculations of what is best for the film. Having to kill your darlings even of like, that person will not be happy with me tomorrow, but I won’t go late tomorrow. It’s a busy mind.

Craig: Oh, man, is it ever. It’s like your busy mind has made something absolutely beautiful. I really do appreciate it. I know we have more questions, but this isn’t a question. This is for me. It’s just a statement. What I love so much about what you did was you made a movie about relationships and half of the movie, and I’m just guessing, but half of the movie by weight is you alone, and it’s still about relationships. It’s always, there’s always a ghost in the room with you. It’s incredible how dialed in you are to the only thing I care about in stories which is relationships, and just so well done, just so well done.

Eva: Thank you so much. There are so many ghosts that are on the cutting room floor that in the script, I was like, “Yes, that is my favorite thing in the script that just once the film starts to become–”

John: It tells you what it wants to be. I was looking through the script yesterday and I noticed like, “Oh, these are whole scenes that are in the movie,” and basically what you cut were things that broke out of your POV. The script had scenes that did not have you driving the scene, and then those scenes, they didn’t last in the movie, and that’s not surprising, and I’m sure they were delightful. I’m sure they’re really funny, but the things that were there, they weren’t absolutely necessary, and therefore they fall out.

You had the first scene at a sandwich shop. You had two guys talking about paninis. You had an Agnes and Natasha scene. You had two jurors talking. They’re all funny and great, and I could totally imagine why they were in the script, and I can completely see why they weren’t in the finished movie, and that’s also directing.

Eva: If you had told me we were cutting those scenes, I would have been like, “Let’s just not fuck each other.”

Craig: That’s the fun part. You don’t know.

Eva: It’s crazy, and it makes me so relieved that we shot more than we needed. I mean, I know obviously there are sacrifices that have to be made when you have more pages. It just took everything, but honestly, strategically, those scenes for me, the way I felt about them in the script were like, “I’m deliberately giving my audience intermissions, energetically intense stuff,” but then it’s like, right, an intermission makes tension fall through the floor, so why would you ever do that?

I was like, I didn’t understand that they would change the pace of the film and would be so jarring that whatever tonal shifting I was trying to do that kept people locked in, there was a jolt that was too jolty and would make no one trust me with the other transitions of tone.

Craig: Yes, people lose confidence.

John: Absolutely. Well, I’m really happy that the script you’re putting out there shows the scenes in there because it’s such a good lesson for like, you can see like, oh, this is the shape of a movie before it films, and that this is the shape of a film afterwards, and you discover things along the way. My question is, how early did you know those scenes were dropping out? Was it after the first assembly where like, “Oh,” or did it take a while to figure out that those were things that weren’t helping you out?

Eva: I went through the mental intensity of shooting the film mainly happened in the edit where I was finally seeing myself on screen and the energy of the film wasn’t diluted by cut, and then you shoot a piece at a time, but when you watch it, you’re like, “Oh my God, this is a sad movie.” I was surprised somehow that it was a sad movie and I had to [unintelligible 00:44:19]. Take a second, I really fought for the sandwich scenes, but the second that, for instance, there was a first scene with John Carroll Lynch, and then there’s a panic attack scene, and the second, that first scene–

John: It’s so good. The second scene is so good.

Eva: The second scene becomes-

John: Important.

Eva: -completely different. What that scene did in the film was it gave us too much information about Agnes being mentally unwell that it’s math. It’s constant calibration, constant, “Well, yes, what if we try?” It’s like puzzle making, and you just have to try everything because you are going to get basically questioned by everybody on why each thing, and you can only choose it if you know what it is.

Craig: You have to be able to justify it. Everything does impact everything. It’s like making a jigsaw puzzle, but when you put one piece down, the colors change on the other pieces. It’s a really weird thing to do, and it is hard to say to a great actor like, “Oh, by the way, we left one of your–” People have left scenes with Meryl Streep on the cutting room floor. You just have to do it sometimes because you find what you needed, and everything was a theory. The fact that your theory worked out 98% of the time is insane. It’s miraculous.

Eva: Really wonderful actors, they know that the movie working makes their scenes work. In the Natasha scene that got cut, when I told Kelly, who plays Natasha, “We cut this one scene,” and she was like, “Yes, that makes sense. It was the same scene as a scene before.” I was like, “Oh, sweet, Kelly, nice to know.” I was just like, “Oh, yes, people get it.” People understand that what that does for something else is more.

John is able to be proud of the film because of how his character experienced as a breath of fresh air, completely new energy, 75% of the way through the film. There’s real power in that. Yes, it’s nice when actors get why. I wish every script that you could read was a shooting script. My God, would that be– That is the one cool thing about when you get to know people. There’s a lot of cool things about getting to know people who do this, but one of them is you can make them send you shooting scripts instead of–

John: The sanitized, yes.

Eva: I’m just like, “This is a key to the kingdom,” which I feel like should be more possible.

Craig: Yes, I agree with you. It’s also comforting to see how a great movie had a shooting script that was 90% correct.

John: I think we’ve actually achieved our goal and our thesis, which is basically that it’s not brilliance, it’s actually mostly just hard work. You can’t distinguish and differentiate between the two of them. This conversation about like, “Oh, no, it was just really hard work.” Yes, inspiration and incredibly talented people, but also hard work and constant questioning of, “Wait, am I actually doing this right?” Eva, thank you so much for this education.

Eva: I have a question for you guys. You have both had psychotically successful things. I am curious about your return to the page. Maybe this isn’t your experience, but I am–

Craig: I’m scared.

Eva: -conflicting that– Well, beyond scared. I think reconciling with the fact that each process is humblingly different than another process and work in a new way that you have to relearn, but coming off of attention.

Craig: Attention is the poison, so you can’t. In my experience, when attention is as focused and relentless as it is on something like you and your movie during award season, it is poison in your veins. It’s a beautiful thing, of course. It’s a sign that people connected and loved what you did, but attention causes pain and you need to be alone to write. I really believe that. I don’t think you can write in a room with glass windows and everybody staring at you. You need a little time. You need a little time to flush it out.

I call it going down the well. That’s what Bella Ramsey and I call it, going down the well. You’re going to go down the well and you’re going to be at the bottom of a well for a bit. People are going to wonder, why are you at the bottom of a well? You should be on top of the world. You’re like, “I’m crying a lot.” They don’t understand, but that’s okay. Then the attention, this is the best part.

Eva: Goes away.

Craig: I mean, oh my God. You think it won’t because they just can’t take their eyes off of you and then it’s gone. Then you’re like, “Oh, thank God.” Then, of course, later you’re like, “Oh, no, it’s going to come back.” That’s a different dread. My advice is give yourself a little bit of time.

Eva: Thank you for saying that. As you’re saying that, there was this journey. I was making these videos. It was daily attention on the videos. The turnaround was so psychotic. DMs from people that would break my mind. What had to happen was I stopped. I had Cold Turkey run away for a few years and decide who am I, what is going on, what do I want to write, what do I care about, and it’s like, “Oh my God.” I totally did that and I needed so much silence. Hearing you say that, I’m like, “Oh shit, I actually know about that and that’s amazing.” It’s a different thing, but it is this crazy thing.

John: I would also say that I suspect your curiosity will overcome your fear at a certain point because your curiosity is, as I’m sure driving you through a lot, there’s things you want to explore and do. Just the same way you were intentional about thinking about how you want to direct, you’re going to be intentional about thinking about what do I want to do now? What is interesting to me? What is a thing I want to tackle? You’ll find a clever way to do it.

It could be a new original story or it could be an adaptation of something that you’ve always like, “Oh, I know how to do this thing. Why does this thing not exist in the world?” Then you’ll make that thing and it’s going to be awesome.

Eva: Isn’t that crazy? Thank you so much. You guys are so nice. Always time with everything. Yes.

Craig: It’s really annoying. It’s annoying. We have no problem accepting that for our physical selves. No problem at all. You cut yourself as a kid, it hurts, and then it scabs up, and the scab is itchy, and then it goes away, and then it’s pink and weird, and then it’s okay, and then it’s like it never happened, and it’s just time. We are so frustrated that our emotional pain takes time.

That’s what Dennis Palumbo, who’s a therapist that I went to for many years, and he came on our show and talked on our show, he would often say to me, I would say like, “When does this stop?” He would say, “Tincture of time.” I’m like, “Shit, but also good.” Tincture of time. Yes. A little bit of time. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be more than fine. You’re going to be great.

Eva: Thank you.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. I have a book that I’m reading that I really love that I want people to read. It’s called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. It’s by Sophie Gilbert. It’s really good. I think you’d both like this a lot. It goes back to some earlier times and the cycles of feminism, post-feminism, and to this churn that happens. Women, and particularly young women, get co-opted into this system of beliefs and any attempt to form an identity for themselves gets marketed back towards them. It’s really smartly done.

Here’s from her opening chapter, which is her thesis. She says she wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and that we were a joke. Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? I just loved her framing on all of this because it just does feel like you have girl power, and then it becomes a thing that is sold back to women that they can buy and purchase.

It’s about culture. It’s capitalism. It’s also really about porn, which I hadn’t thought so much about, but the degree to which porn is always on the edges of culture and warping things in a weird way. I thought it was just a great book. Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl. It’s a book out from last year, but I’m just now reading it.

Eva: That is amazing.

John: Craig, what do you got?

Craig: My one cool thing is the Vancouver SkyTrain. I love riding a train, but I’m a New York boy. I love the subway there. The subway goes pretty much everywhere, and I love it. Vancouver is not New York. It’s a much smaller city. It doesn’t have a subway. It’s got this little monorail thing. I just never took it. I never got on it. I was just like, “Oh, it’s a train.” The studio complex where we are based and where all of our stages are is just walking. It’s like a two-minute walk from a SkyTrain station. I was like, “Should I take a train?”

I am so obsessed with riding the SkyTrain. It is so much better than driving. It’ so much better. My mood driving to work, I get in my car and I’m already angry that I’m driving. Then my blood pressure and rage accelerate so that when I finally arrive at work, I am already just at a 9 of pissed. Then I have to go to meetings. The SkyTrain is like, ah, and it’s clean. There’s a train that comes every three minutes. In the subway in New York, you’re like, “Oh, I just missed it. It’s going to be 12, which is really 15, or there’s a stoppage.”

This thing never stops. Three minutes, just [onomatopoeia] and it’s lovely. I’m not saying anything that a lot of Vancouverites don’t know, but if you do live in Vancouver and you haven’t taken the SkyTrain, and you’re wondering, fantastic way to get around.

John: Love it.

Eva: They’re going to be so happy you said that.

Craig: I should get money.

John: Absolutely. Eva Victor, do you have something to recommend to our listeners?

Eva: Yes. I was going to do this mini Nutella that I got in Spain today. Instead of that, I have decided to shift my one, so this is me sneaking in two things. There is a website called rainymood.com. If you go rainymood.com, you can listen to rain sounds and it can be a tab open on your computer while you do other things. I find it incredibly relaxing. You can also listen to music while you listen to rainy sounds, which I think is really beautiful. Rain has always been a comfort to me and consider checking it out.

Craig: The website has rain. It’s like you’re looking through a window that has rain coming down. It’s a beautiful website. This is really nice. The SkyTrain is its own vibe. Also, it’s Vancouver. It’s always a rainy mood. This is shocking right now, what’s going on behind me, the fact that it’s not raining. When I go to sleep, my iPad is doing white noise, but it’s technically brown noise because I’m baby still. I’m just an old baby. The older I get, the closer I return to looking like an actual baby. Soon, the diapers will come.

This actually seems like something that might be nice for when I’m writing because I don’t like specific noises, but rain is comforting like that. This is lovely.

John: Love it.

Eva: No word.

John: No words.

Craig: Love it.

John: Great. Awesome. Thank you so much. 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 us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with our signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The ScriptNotes book is available wherever you buy books. Eva Victor has hers with her in Spain. You’ll find us on Instagram @ScriptNotesPodcast. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for ScriptNotes and give us a follow. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Eva Victor as a premium subscriber. Nice.

Craig: We’ve been siphoning $5 a month out of her pocket for a long time.

Eva: Five is a fucking steal. You guys are seriously doing more than $5 a month, but I love it.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Maybe just Venmo then.

Eva: I’ll send a [unintelligible 00:58:02] to you two.

Craig: You’re a big filmmaker now. I don’t know.

John: Absolutely. You can send and become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on short-form video versus directing feature films. Eva Victor, congratulations on your directing of your feature film, your writing of it, your starring in it. All the attention for it, which is wonderful, but will also pass and then allow you to do the thing after that next. It was so great having you on the show. We’ve tried for a while and I’m so glad it finally happened.

Eva: I am so happy. This is such a milestone for me in a way that’s beyond, so thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Eva.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Eva Victor, we first became aware of you, Craig specifically, because you were making funny videos. You were working at Comedy Central. You were doing other stuff too. Can you talk to us about what you learned making those videos, but why it didn’t take a transfer directly to what you were doing for making a film? That era in making short videos, what was that like for you?

Eva: The most important skill, as someone acting in the film that I was directing, was to look at a take and quickly know if I had what I needed in my performance or if I needed to go again. The muscle of judging my own self and giving myself a note was quite harnessed, which was really helpful because I wasn’t afraid of what I saw. I knew what I looked like. I knew how I sounded. Mostly, was noting myself. I rarely gave notes to other actors. It was more just like, “Let’s do one like this.” I wasn’t building someone. They did that. They did an amazing–

I think also, understanding visual vocabulary and having one vocabulary for one piece. I was making videos, and then that got me the job at Comedy Central. I started making my videos at Comedy Central. I had this series there, which was this web series on their YouTube called Eva vs Anxiety. I got an episode of that, and they made me script stuff. I was like, “Oh, man, I like to come up with the things.” They’re not funny once I write them down or something. I liked when it was more exploratory, but I had to script them for the process of working there.

The first episode we shot was shot with, in my opinion at that time, high production value. It became clear to me, this is not funny for this medium. It actually requires me to hold the phone, and I have to be the director of it because if someone else is, you can tell. It just was, oh, the visual vocabulary that’s appropriate for this medium right now is handheld. You can almost see my arm in it. It has to be for this thing to be funny.

Craig: Editing that chops off the last word. It’s a very–

Eva: Yes, like no air. Yes, exactly. I think part of the reason when I got to, Sorry, Baby, I was like, the first shot’s going to be like 100 seconds because I now can take time. Just understanding that each thing is going to have its own way of being and a way it needs to be. Also, me just doing a monologue, listen. Also, it was interesting because at the time, whenever I took meetings, the only thing I ever heard was, “Well, what’s your Fleabag?”

I always said to people, you would not recognize it because it wouldn’t look a damn thing like Fleabag. What are you talking about? I think there was this limited idea at the time that like, “Oh, if I make these videos online and those translate to Twitter, that means when you make a film, it has to be as close to that because that’s what we know get the views on Twitter.” I’m like, “No, it would be a totally different scope and story.”

In a lot of ways, it opened a door to me practicing a lot and messily trying to understand how to build something. Also, it got me in the door. Once I was in the room, it was hard to find people who could see past the idea of a viral video. That’s what I was useful for.

Craig: I think it’s notable that you dealt with authority in an impressive way because I think when I was starting out, I was young, I was maybe 24, 25, I would put authority ahead of my own instincts all the time because I’m like, “But that’s their job. What the fuck do I know?” I think one thing that your generation has the benefit of is that you had a platform to do it yourself minus any authority. The authority came to you because of the things you did without the authority. When they start to dish out the authority, it feels like there’s a reasonable chance for you to go, “No.”

Eva: Yes, or you make something with the authority and you’re like, “Well, yes, this isn’t working.” They are like, “Wait, so how do you make it work?” It’s like, “Well, right.”

Craig: I stop listening to you and the things that you want me to do.

Eva: Something that was hard about working at Comedy Central was we would have meetings on a weekly basis about who was watching the videos and how much they hated any of the women working there would comment about how ugly everyone was. We would have meetings about how are we going to work on that. Then it was also like, “Well, the viewership base is people who we can’t isolate.” It was a lot of corporate stuff that I was like, “This is crazy I’m in this meeting.”

Then again, I guess that probably also prepared me for nothing shocking to me now. Sometimes you meet with people and it’s like, “Damn, that’s a crazy thing to say to me but the men on the internet said something so much worse.”

Craig: I made the mistake of going to– I never go on Instagram. I have an Instagram account, but I never use it. I went there because my daughter put something on there and I wanted to watch it. Then because I never use Instagram and I’m on the website, there’s things on the left that have red numbers. I’m like, “Are these my friends talking to me?” I click on it and it’s just like a list of people literally telling me to die. Because I make a show based on a video game and it is a little crazy.

It didn’t feel great, but then I was like, “Wait, close the box, put box back in lead lined coffin, put coffin back in ground, never look at again.” No one is ever going to tell me in a meeting like, “Honestly, our feeling is that you should die.”

Eva: Not your people, but just people in general.

Craig: Maybe right on again.

John: Craig, I suspect that five years from now, you and I are going to be talking with a filmmaker who came out of Instagram, Reels, and TikTok. Just like there’s a film grammar for what you’re doing at Comedy Central for those videos, there’s a film grammar for TikTok, for Reels. These people are incredibly talented at what they’re doing. They’re so smart and so sophisticated and they have such high production values, but it’s just not a film TV kind of thing. Them learning how to do that, it’s going to be so fascinating.

A friend of mine has a bunch of YouTube creators who are so smart and so good, but this last summer they did this thing where they all made short films, which is just really trying to learn what the film grammar is like. It’s just so different. Because you’re really good at one thing, you think anything, I’m great at being in front of a camera, but it’s different as Eva will tell us.

Eva: I will say, if you want to figure out how to do something, you have to watch a million things that they want to do. It’s the only way. If you want to make a movie, you watch movies. You have to watch movies from every time of the world. It’s interesting because I feel very grateful that when I was making videos on Twitter, there was 13 people doing that. Man, is it a crazy place now? I don’t know. There’s so much talent.

I am really excited to see what comes because access to an audience has never been easier, and that is so much of what stands in the way of people being able to do things. Having an iPhone is like–

John: Yes, it’s crazy. Eva, thank you so much. Congratulations again.

Craig: Absolute joy.

Links:

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