John August

Directors

The One with Eric Roth

Episode - 475

Go to Archive

Adaptation, Directors, Film Industry, QandA, Scriptnotes, Writing Process

John welcomes legendary screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, A Star is Born, Dune) to discuss his writing practice and how he gets in the head of his characters.

We answer audience questions on how to trust your voice and approach adaptations.

Finally, in our bonus segment for premium members John and Craig discuss election night and the days after. Like we did after the 2016 election, we’re including the bonus segment on the main feed this week. (Note: This was recorded on Friday before the final states were called.)

 

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 11-20-20 The transcript for this episode can now be found here.

Casting a blind teenage actress

Directors, News, Projects

I’ve written a new movie that I’m planning to direct. It’s called The Shadows. It’s a thriller.

I wouldn’t normally announce something like this so far in advance, but casting is going to be a unique process that will require a major search.

The hero of the film is a 15-year-old girl named Abby. She’s stubborn, resourceful and anxious. She is also blind. I’m looking for a blind actress to play this role.

To learn more, you can read the casting announcement.

We’re all starring in our our show

Directors, Genres

The first episode of the final season of Broad City is told through a social media story shot on the characters’ phones. It was a huge challenge:

The opening episode came with a unique script and was filmed entirely on the iPhone (using six iPhone Xs that were constantly swapped in and out) over a four-and-a-half day shoot that saw the crew canvassing Manhattan, much like Abbi and Ilana do in the final product. They filmed in September and then entered into an edit that wasn’t completed until early December.

“It looked very different than our other scripts. There was more post work with lots of emojis and text where you could thread the story through other means besides just live-action footage, which was very different and freeing in a way,” said [writer-creator-star] Jacobson.

I suspect we’ll look back on the late 2010s as an inflection point when scripted comedy incorporated new comedy grammar, from jump cuts to close-ups to emojis. Explains director Nick Paley:

“In the edit, I went into it asking, how do you make a joke land and how do you time it? Then I found adding the titles and visuals to be really liberating and a way to add jokes and story beats organically and move the story along. The expectation with social media stories is that time is jumping moment to moment, and that is a gift in terms of storytelling, because it lets you get to the most interesting part of a scene.”

The episode is terrific. It manages to maintain the conceit of being an Instagram-like story while still feeling like an episode of the show. The direction and editing are great, but the main reason the episode works is the writing. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have a sharp eye for how modern life has become weirdly performative. We all want to be the stars of our own shows.

How Can This Possibly End Well?

Directors, Story and Plot, Words on the page

Interviewed with other screenwriters for the New York Times, Christopher McQuarrie makes a great point about action sequences:

The best action sequences are free of exposition, with stakes that are established in advance or, better still, self-evident. They don’t ask an audience to think, to process, to remember. Instead, they keep the audience’s collective subconscious focused entirely on one simple question.

The question is not how will it end? If this mattered, there would be no Ethan Hunt, James Bond, Jason Bourne, John McClane, Indiana Jones, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin. We know they’ll come out on top in the end. We count on it. It is a contract, a sacred pact between filmmaker and audience.

The only question that matters is, how can this possibly end well?

McQuarrie just signed on to make two more Mission: Impossible movies. You can hear my interview with him about his transition from writer to writer-director in Scriptnotes episode 300.