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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 Episode 729 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week, Craig and I are off on different adventures, so producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a compendium episode. Drew, what do you have for us?

Drew Marquardt: We’re doing endings.

John: Endings? But we’ve done endings before.

Drew: We have done endings before. I didn’t realize we’d done endings before, but Megana did a wonderful Episode 524, which is our first endings compendium. I am going to use a few different episodes, so hopefully you can listen to them both.

John: Endings compendium part two?

Drew: Part two-ish. There’s a few bits from the previous episode. I figured we’d start with Episode 44, which is Endings for Beginners. That’s just a good overview of how endings work.

John: Episode 44, wow, reaching way back there.

Drew: Way back. Then we’ll go to 366 on denouements, and how that works, and the last moment of your film. Then we’re going to go to Episode 648, which is Farewell Scenes. It’s just you and Aline, but it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve done.

John: Great.

Drew: I love it. Then we’ll end on Episode 392, which is about how and why endings change and how to communicate it at different stages of production from your first idea all the way through to the end.

John: This all sounds great. I remember going through the endings chapter of the Scriptnotes book, and these were the episodes we were pulling from to get that material that’s in there. It’s nice to hear them again as conversations.

Drew: That’s my secret. That’s how I’m pulling these topics.
[laughter]

John: You’re like, “What was in the book? Oh, yes, that’s it.”

Drew: Just checking it out. That’s what we’ll do it. We’ll listen to these four segments. You’ll hear the loops between them. Then at the end, in our bonus segment for premium members, we will continue the discussion we had with Drew Goddard recently talking about casting minor characters in your story and particularly writing character sides because a thing that often happens is you have a character who may not have very many lines in the show or in the movie, but you need more material for them to actually audition with.

You write special scenes that are longer than what will actually be in the movie because if it’s just three lines, you’re not going to really be able to get a sense of that character from those three lines.

John: Love it. Great.

Drew: We’ll do that. Join us after these four segments. We’ll do some closing business and then our bonus segment.

John: Thanks, Drew.

Drew: Thanks, John.

[Episode 44]

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings and let this be more of a craft episode because a lot of times, as you start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

I thought we’d spend some time today talking about endings and the characteristics of good endings and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig Mazin: Yes. I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. For me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends because, essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending, everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader. It’s the same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. You’re saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you a story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. It will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.” The ending is where you won or you lost. It’s the punchline.

It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. So often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on. So many writers, I think, spend all their time working on those first 10 pages, the first 30 pages, that start powering through the script. Those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. Those last 10 pages are just banged out, and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started. Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully, you’re enjoying how it starts.

Hopefully, you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended. My impression of The Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yes, I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always talk about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this. That ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.

I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. There’s a decision, and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. That is connected. It always seems to me it is connected through all the way back to the beginning in a very different way from what is there in the beginning. That’s the point is that there’s an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision.

There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.

John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you’ve promised the audience that they’re going to get to. If you’ve set up a location that they’re going to get to, is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? You could have ended the movie when she got to Oz or when she got to the Emerald City because she was running the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated.

If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that on the movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. There’s also her need. Her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that she’s with to find some independence. I don’t know. What’s the need?

Craig: That’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith in a choice and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away. At the end of the movie, she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. Essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home, you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away.

You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.” That’s what The Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. Yet, the ending, it’s funny. A lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click her heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.” The point is then, okay, fine. Maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point. The ending is defined by faith and decision.

I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters have decided, “We’re going to cross the streams. We’re going to have faith that we’re going to do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.”

I see it all the time. I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yes. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. By the end of the movie, they’re able to do something that they weren’t able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. It’s a great way of thinking about, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. We look around, and we think, “This character could go anywhere and do anything.” Stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie because, frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.

John: We are talking about movies, not TV shows. A movie is really a 2-hour or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, on one section of a cinematic world. You’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we’re seeing so we can meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end, what’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world, and why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

You will change your ending just as you change your beginning, but you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing, frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. To me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment. It makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process, while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it.

I’m not writing those last pages in a panic and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision. Then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: I have the OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all, but I won’t start writing until I know the ending. What I mean by “ending,” I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make. Then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind? When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack.

If you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life. Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. It’s funny because I really started thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. I was watching Up, and they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back.

I liked that, but I thought that’s not quite that difficult of a test. Then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say, “I have moved on,” is to let that house go. They design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid. That’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with boy scout, flying talking dogs, and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.

John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two storylines. The implied contract with the audience is, you know the father’s going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it, like the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father’s going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended? Quite early on, I had to figure out what is it that the son can–

The son is really the protagonist in the present day. What is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. Knowing that that’s going to be an incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel all that, knowing that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? You’re really working backwards to, “What are the steps that can get me to that point?”

It’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories against Jenny Hill that fills in this missing chapter and why that chapter is missing. It’s backtracked into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present-day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Exactly. John, there has to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out because I can talk specifically about how that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. The decision meant something, and it was interesting, and I liked that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully, people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of, I met John Williams. He was at USC. The scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and they were talking about the movies they worked on together. John Williams made this really great point. It was that the music of a movie is the thing that you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s like the one thing you, as an audience member, get to recycle and play in your head is that last theme.

As I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. It’s like, what is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? That’s your ending. We’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to you.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yes. In fact, when people are testing movies that have absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98, and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up. If you ask these people tomorrow or the next day, would they pay to go see it? You might get a different answer. Similarly, when you end on a bummer or on a flat note, it’s just like the air goes out of the theater. People will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when, in fact, they just didn’t like the ending.

John: Yes. I want to make sure that people are listening. We’re not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point. It’s one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end. That’s absolutely fine. As long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yes. Maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside, in fact, he was awful. In a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We sickly root for it. Then he goes back home. It basically says he just died alone.

Yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all that, the final images of him alone on his farm putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll, is somebody that he truly loved and was good to. There is a bit of hope there.

[Episode 366]

Craig: It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end when we say, “How’s the movie end?”

Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. The real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it. This is the moment after the climax. When things have settled down. There’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. It’s an important thing. I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films.

They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. Dénouement is a French word. Dénouer is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because when you think about it, they’re tying everything up. You also think about it like undoing all the tangles that your story has created. It’s like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re matching the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct, Craig?

Craig: Yes, absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something. We’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene, but there’s something to let you know this is the denouement. In that sense, I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement to say, okay, what is the difference here? The climax, I think, we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. All of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax, you save the victim, or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the money, whatever it is that the plot is doing, that’s what happens there. The climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. The test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needs to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. At the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has, in fact, transformed into character 2.0.

The denouement, which occurs after this, to me, is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person, this is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge, they have succeeded in that final challenge, generally, and we’ve come out of this. Was it just a one-time fluke thing? Are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? That is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes, is to show that this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: That is why so many denouements will begin with “six months later,” “one year later,” because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is, “Right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed.” She says, “Okay,” we need, six months later, one year later, to know, yes, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple, so they have this new reality, but it is lasting, and their love is real.

We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, all right. Did they make it or not?” Now, that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant, and then the credits roll, and it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. That smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment, and when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gotten back to the car at the end, and the main and final question is, “So what are we doing for New Year’s?” It’s establishing that they’ve been through all this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing before. That was the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly, the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral, and they see all the real versions of folks. The actual denouement, as we’re describing right now, is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who’s now born and saying, “Oh, did all of that really happen?” The father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, you see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking like, “The characters are on trajectory I want them to be on.”

Craig: Yes. The climax of Identity Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s something she does. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her. The denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later, and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” What’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby, and everything’s okay.

He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. He then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name because she doesn’t know who she is. He found her birth certificate and found her real name. You get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. It could have. She was a criminal, but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on. Then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie.

It is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full-circle moment. In Identity Thief, you have both. She, at one point, says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. The way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. Here she’s going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change, but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy. Both of those things are full-circle moments.

In the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full-circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yes. A crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally, is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore, it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. For instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life, but the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. If your problem is, okay, my character is Vanessa, and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie.

I apologize to Vanessa. At the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success because then I start to wonder, “Okay, what was the lesson here?” Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp, and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes, and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place and a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have questions about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all this thing. By changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life, and see that, and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yes, exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent, and permanent in a lovely way. Very often, the denouement will dot, dot, dot off the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big, dum-dum, da-dum, and that’s your end. You can do that. Some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Elsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over.

Everything’s finished. Then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Therein is a dot, dot, dot. They just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. You understand more adventures are ahead, but for now, everything’s okay.

John: Yes, it’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now. Here’s the counterexample. Imagine you’re watching this film, and you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason, the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place, and I’ll deposit you back safely where you started.” If you’re not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. That’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often, what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. For me, it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from, is the denouement.

John: All right, so let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationships, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit, whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie, they will, in their minds, add on the following words, “And thus, it shall always be.” If you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time.

The Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this, [vocalizes song], and it’s very jaunty, and he’s on a roof, and it’s silly. Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “This is like our life is hard and it’s tricky. We’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms, and they are trudging off to a new home, and the fiddler is the last person to go. He plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. The denouement is to say, “And thus it shall always be.”

Meaning, we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka, and whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be. It doesn’t always have to be, “And happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be, “And sadly ever after.” The point is, it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yes. Everyone’s going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. Whether it’s a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.

Craig: Yes.

[Episode 648]

John: Today, I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye, presumably for the last time. We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also what are the characteristics of a farewell scene? This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. Big Fish, of course, it’s obviously a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there, too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart.

Maybe buddies who’ve come to, they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there. I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?

Aline Brosh McKenna: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada, where they see each other on the street, and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. Then Meryl says, “Go.” I say, “Meryl,” because in the way it was scripted, actually in the scene description, it said she looks at the driver, “Go,” was in the scene description. They had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver.

It snaps you back into her actual MO. It’s funny because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing and that has a finality. You need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca, and then they ran into each other in a bar two days later. It needs to feel– and the same thing with rom-coms, if it’s end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back. You don’t want to feel like cut to four days later, where it’s like, “This is insane.”
You leave your pants on the floor. What is this? How do you make any ending feel like it’s stuck?

John: Yes. That’s why I think, because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing, regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time. Let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s going to be the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end.

The location that they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.

Aline: Oh, that’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Oh, the irony.”

John: Yes. It could be the location rhymes that we’re back in the place we were before. The dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes the thing that happened before. Looking through these examples, we’re going to see that there’s a bunch of non-verbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these, and that’s honestly the characteristics of these, and that’s why sometimes we’re not going to be playing the audio for this because there’s a lot of people not talking.

Aline: I hope you’re going to put these up on the website because this is fantastic. This is fantastic. This is really good. Now, I did send you that funny– there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big that he goes back to class, and there’s a girl named Susan in his class. They wink of like, “This is going to be Elizabeth Perkins,” but they drop that, and so they’re never going to see each other again.

I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. Then you have E.T. is probably one of the– and as we had discussed, I think Past Lives is people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of they’ve been separated for so long, and this is another separation, possibly permanent.

John: I think what’s important about Past Lives is a good example of this is that you’re closing, hopefully, two characters’ arcs. It’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey, too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that. If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate, but I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.

Aline: Can I ask you a question?

John: Please.

Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?

John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating, and also as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that there was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all, and then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did? That sounds weird.” It felt like it was more of a–

Aline: Of a cheek moment.

John: Yes, cheek moment rather than on-the-lips moment, and I was like, “Ugh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.

Aline: Yes, lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple of friends who were lip kissers, and I feel like, which was always like when you start coming towards you and time slows down, and you’re like– because my lip-kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to, that’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you, and you’re like, “Uh, slow motion, turn the page.” I think post-COVID.

John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.

Aline: Can you imagine if I lip-kissed John on the way out here? Drew would be so uncomfortable, or if I lip-kissed Drew on the way out here, it would be so weird.

John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.

Aline: So weird. I mean the French–

John: Yes, but it’s the cheeks.

Aline: The cheek. Yes, and it felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker. We don’t do that in America, but I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not. You’re saying it’s a full lip kiss. Interesting.

John: Of course, we can look at the video.

Aline: What do you feel about not knowing what he said?

John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?

Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has sort of a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think it suits Sofia Coppola’s vibe. I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that like, people are layered and mysterious, I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.

John: We, as an audience, need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us, unless we’ve seen that the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do. Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it. Because oftentimes, in these things, one character is being stoic and sort of holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves, but we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.

Aline: Something I think about a lot is that– because if you have a quieter movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. ET, interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. Like, the enemy is Keys, it never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be a shootout, an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.

I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge. I would put this up there with Casablanca, for me, in terms of a merely really meaningful goodbye. I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. In the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.

[Episode 392]

John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. This came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so that she flew off into space with some other characters. It was an important change in sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.

It got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last bit has changed from the pitch, to the screenplay, to the movie. I want to focus on why that moment is so important, and also why it tends to change so much.

Craig: Interesting. It’s funny, because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it actually rarely doesn’t change. It doesn’t change much for me, but that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

John: I start with it too. As I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end bit. When I pitched it to Disney, and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry. That last line, the last image of that last moment, it’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed the ways that things change.

I would say even movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, we shot the script, those last moments, and sometimes the last image, really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s delivered it to. Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms: somebody rides off into the sunset, so the last shot really is about sunsets, but of course, it’s not. For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.

We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s TED Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships, and how when– She would cite how sometimes she would ask people, what was the last image of some movie, like Karate Kid? A lot of people don’t remember, it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel, and then Mr. Miyagi, looking at each other, and there’s pride. Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be, and you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

John: Yes. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to someplace. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. That destination is generally that last bit, that last moment, that last image, and so of course, you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up? Way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question, and someone asked us, “I have a couple of different ideas for movies, and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” My answer was, you should pick the one with the best ending, because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

If you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it, or get really off-track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of, this is where I think the movie lands, is crucial. It’s like, “The plane is going to land on this runway.” It tells you, “Okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately, I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place.” You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said, “You need to draw a circle,” and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have like a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?

John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson. It’s like, how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

Craig: No, absolutely horrendous. If you asked me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. The reason I bring this up is because, to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place, and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course, we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning, and the beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle. If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where I think people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story is developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.

One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, [unintelligible 00:48:02]– they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd’s The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” Then at the very end, they’re playing the song, and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” That’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind. [chuckles]

But also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.

John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle, and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about a story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how, in general, a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases, they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed.

Just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s that the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way. So, it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. That’s what we’re talking about. Like, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable,” right? Where we begin is the control, our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. Sometimes it’s very profound. I mean, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.

John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, okay, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended, and that there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy, and it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we’ve been on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. Yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space, and has a different appreciation for what’s happened. As I’ve been able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last bit and how the last bit has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character in their journey.

Craig: Yes. I mean, reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer-

John: No.

Craig: -but he does, and that’s–

John: [chuckles] It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.

Craig: Well, it is, but then when you look back, you go, “Oh, yes, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that [unintelligible 00:51:29]. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next– Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not bad [crosstalk]–

John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

Craig: Yes, you should do it.

John: Yes. I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books, about his assassin.

Craig: Oh, yes, Silver Bear.

John: Silver Bear, Dark Finch.

Craig: Silver Bear, Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric–

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this, but what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel in the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is, I think my favorite feature script, and so, of course, it hasn’t been made. [chuckles] They make the other ones, not those.

The last shot, to me, was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story, and the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you, and that’s– I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion,” and I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-

John: For sure.

Craig: -and it often changes frequently. This is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here’s how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well, you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this, let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny. Let’s make it–” and the intention is gone. Then you get to the movie, and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending–” And you’re like, “Yes, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” [chuckles] You see how it goes?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s freaking brutal.

John: Yes. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously, we’ve talked about in pitches that– I always describe it as like, you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So really, you’re talking a lot about the characters, and how it starts, and you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff, but you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last bit, because you’re really talking about, what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who’s watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.

In the pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the reader to take away from reading the script.

Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is, ultimately, I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot– For instance, let’s say I’m in a room, and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “In our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid– I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about The Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he could maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last, he knows who he is.” See? Like some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.

John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write the scene that gets you that moment. As you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at like, what is the medal ceremony like? Who’s there, what’s said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there? Actually, painting out the world so we can see, “Okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way.” This is clearly the intention behind the scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end. In the script stage, what was sort of a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.

Craig: Yes. I always wondered– I hate being the guy who’s like, would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this? The last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony, right? Then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. I always wondered, what would happen if the last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man, and kind of starting a new hope. That vibe of returning, I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.

John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that, though, it would just feel like one more bit. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal, and you had the swell, and you had– Whether the journey was, this is a kid [unintelligible 00:57:17] all on his own, who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was, it wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory, so–

Craig: Dead family.

John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement, rather than sort of the– I would imagine the music would be very different if he’d gone back to Tatooine. [crosstalk]–

Craig: Yes. It would be [unintelligible 00:57:38]– No, you’re right. I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”

John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and you’ve– 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written as on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. As people are embodying those characters, things just feel different.

Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around, and where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up, and so you have to make some change there. In some cases, it’s re-shoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene, and you realize that this was not the moment that you thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it’s just a matter of like, this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on?

You talked about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried a bunch of different ways. It would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice. Thinking about like, what does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here? The music’s going to be a big factor, so there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie, and you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

Craig: No question. This is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention. Because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan, but if we know the intention, and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end, you require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. If we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my God, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. Okay, so now we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.” The ending can never be just, “You know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

John: The danger is, a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, “Okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little bit, or like an extra thing.” Generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion, and that’s the challenge.

Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling, is the biggest.

John: Sometimes, though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film, and he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh, that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I’d seen before, I was like, “Oh, yes, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.” It was really like talking about like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place, and so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations, and change what we’re following over the course of the movie. Because doing that, you could land at that place, and it would feel really meaningful.”

Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning, right? If something’s not working in that where your circle’s supposed to connect at, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong, but it’s usually one or the other. It is, I think, tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and this thing sits on top of the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” John, you’re absolutely right, sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

John: Yes. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.

Craig: Right. Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

[Boilerplate]

John: That is our show for this week. Thank you, Drew Marquardt, our producer, for putting together this compendium, which was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. 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 a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can go back and read the endings chapter and see what we pulled from these conversations into the book. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes, and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware, you’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers, you make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on casting minor characters. Drew, thanks for putting this episode together.

Drew: Of course. Thanks, John.

[Outro by Eric Pearson]

[singing]

My name is John August, I am captain of the Scriptnote

His name is John August, he is captain of the Scriptnote

We sail the open seas dispensing umbrage and reason, all things we have expertise in

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[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew. In our conversation with Drew Goddard, we were talking about his time on Buffy and Angel, and how it was often the job of the most junior writer on that staff to write up character sides, which I wasn’t clear was a thing that staff writers did, but makes a lot of sense.

Drew: I had no idea either. From my time as an actor, I’m thinking back to all those sides I got through that I was like, “oh, that’s why it wasn’t ever something that was in the show or in the movie.”

John: Talk me through this. Because you were often auditioning for shows, you were in the UK doing a lot of this, and you would get sides that had scenes that were not necessarily in the finished product.

Drew: Yes. Sometimes it’d be dummy sides from other shows or other things. Weirdly, the one that I can remember most is not one that I auditioned for, but a friend was doing a movie with a kid, and they were auditioning for this weird show that was going to be on Netflix about kids, and it’s like ’80s, and that kind of thing.

John: Oh, yes–

Drew: Yes. It was Stranger Things, and we were doing these sides with Anthony, and they were very specific. I remember watching Stranger Things and being like, “This wasn’t the scene that we did, but it’s close enough.” It’s like, oh, well, things change in production, but maybe it was something completely different.

John: Yes, and so the idea behind this– and this is a thing I’ve done in features a fair amount, is you will have a character who may only have three or four lines in a thing, but they’re crucial. Like, the camera’s going to be on them. You want to cast the right person, but if you just gave them those three or four lines, there’s no runway. There’s no building up.

There’s no beginning, middle, end. You’re not seeing a range in there. They have a face, they have a body, they can say these lines, and it’s really hard to do. And so what you’ll end up doing is writing longer scenes that actually give you a chance to hear their voice, really get to see what they can do. I’m thinking right now for Go, the character of Manny, who’s played by Nathan Bexton in the movie, he’s in a bunch of scenes and has important things to do, but he’s always the third most important character in those scenes. And so, I needed to give him basically a monologue where he could just do the character as himself.

Drew: For some of those characters, is it more important to see if they can hit the big beats that you need them to, or to see how they handle the shoe leather of it all, kind of?

John: What I need, if they’re just a functional role, so if they’re like the police officer in a thing, give them some yada-yada– do I believe them as a police officer? Otherwise, it’ll not work. For something like Mannie, you needed to see like they had a personality– How he could fit in that car with those two women, what is that vibe going to be like? I needed to give him just like much more space, and so give a sense of humor, what’s driving him, what’s motivating him. In a weird way, you’re also kind of helping that actor if they get the role, have a sense of who that character really is beyond the borders of just that one little scene that they’re in.

Drew: I feel like there was recently– Someone put out their audition tape, and then– it was a woman. She auditioned for a thing, and then she showed the finished product. She made bigger choices in the audition tape than I felt like she was doing in the thing, which they’re two different skills, aren’t they? Like, auditioning and showing what you can do there. Are you ever like, “That was a really great choice, and I’m going to adopt that”? Or is it usually like, “Great, they can go that far, but we know exactly what we want”?

John: Honestly, they’re two different things slightly, because there’s the audition tape where it’s just the actor without any coaching just delivering a thing, and that’s a situation where playing big is probably the right choice. Because if you play small and you’re not getting them where they want to go, they may not reach out to you again. They always feel like they can reign you back in rather than make you get bigger.

Drew: That makes sense.

John: It’s harder to negotiate bigger, but a lot of these scenes that I was writing, especially with Go, we had people coming in and physically auditioning in front of us, and giving more space there meant that we could actually direct you towards this thing versus that thing. There was a show that I was doing with Jordan Mechner that we never ended up shooting the pilot, but we went through a lot of casting on it, and the sides we built for that showed two different aspects of the character. It gave us enough space where we could say like, “Could you try that with your real accent? You’re trying to hide a British accent there, try to hit us with your real accent.” It just gave some space there. If it was just story, story, story, that’s not going to be helpful.

Drew: I do feel like finding the right people for those smaller parts is so important. Me and our friend Nima Yousefi were talking– he’s rewatching Mad Men, and I’ve seen that show a million times. We were just talking about it, and he has a theory that Mad Men doesn’t work without the character of Joan, and specifically, if Christina Hendricks is not cast as Joan. And I think he’s right. Like, she’s obviously a huge part of the series. She starts out sort of as a peripheral character, and I don’t think it has the same– it’s not the same show without her.

Whereas some of the big leads, the Jon Hamm characters, anyone could play that. It’s hard to think of someone else doing that, but that’s a type you can get a strong leading man, and even the Peggies and stuff like that. This is being very specific to Mad Men. Those smaller characters, getting that right, I think informs the tone and the flavor of your movie or your TV show in a way that it’s fundamentally different without them. I don’t know, is that overwhelming at all that you’re trying to find the right person, or do you just [crosstalk]?

John: Yes. I mean, this is going to be the first year where we have the casting awards for the Oscars, and casting is so fundamental. As writers, you’re creating these characters in your head, and you’re putting them on paper, but then they get assigned off one by one to people without your control a lot of times. And so, if you have the ability to write scenes that are designed to showcase what is special about this character, what it is that is going to be unique about this character, it’s another opportunity to steer the ship in the right direction from the page.

Drew: Yes, that makes sense.

John: Yes. I love it when people share their casting sides, you know. Listen, I’m not a fan of actors showing their auditions for things when someone else got it, or their better auditions for things. That’s not helpful, but I do love seeing the process behind it, and it’s great to see, this is the person’s audition tape, and this is them actually doing the part. That, I think, is really helpful. If it’s smaller than their audition, it’s probably because they were directed smaller, or because it’s just what actually fits in the story overall. As an actor coming in, you often don’t know what the whole shape of it is. You’re just getting these pages, and if those pages can give you some sense of who that character is beyond just those lines, that’s helpful.

Drew: My favorite pages I ever got was for when I did Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Part of it is because David Koepp wrote that script, and that script was fantastic, but it was very active. My character was like going through boxes, and you’re trying to find a needle in the haystack with papers. It just gave me something to do, and I feel like that was such a gift. I feel like most things are just talky, and I think if you can do that for actors, you’re going to get a lot cooler stuff.

John: The other thing I would stress, and this is a thing that casting directors will often put together their scene, they’ll do like cut-and-paste versions of scenes to get this down, is to minimize the other person talking. And so, the theater lines, just to get rid of that, so it’s as much as possible, the person auditioning is driving the scene. Yes, there should be some moments where you’re seeing them react and listen, because active listening is important, they’re not just waiting for their time to talk, but they need to be the main person on camera, or main person in the scene, because they’re the only ones we’re supposed to be paying attention to.

There’s that cliche which happens in a lot of movies you see, where it’s like, oh, this person came in to read lines opposite somebody, but then they got cast as the thing. Sure, it happens some. I’m sure that there’s some anecdotal [unintelligible 01:12:09] truth to that, but that’s not the point in well-written scenes that the off-screen person, you wouldn’t have heard very often.

Drew: Yes, it can make a huge difference, whether those sides are good or just words.

John: Yes. Even if you’re just writing something small for yourself to shoot with people, it’s a good idea to be thinking about, what are the casting sides that are going to help me find the best actors for this? It could just be a weekend short film, it still helps.

Drew: Thanks, Drew Goddard, for bringing that up, and to you for talking more about that.

John: Yes. All right. And thanks, Drew, for putting this episode together.

Drew: Yes. Thanks, John.

Links:

• Our first endings compendium, Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
• A video essay of our farewell scenes discussion with Aline Brosh McKenna
• Episodes 44 – Endings for beginners, 366 – Tying Things Up, 648 – Farewell Scenes, and 392 – The Final Moment
• Dan Harmon story circle
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell, Drew Marquardt and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 728 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What is the basic unit of story? In the outline and treatment phase, it’s probably the beat, whereas in the script is the scene. As film and TV writers, how do we move from beats to scenes? I’d argue it’s perhaps the fundamental skill in our craft.

Today on the show, we welcome back a guest to help us to discuss this transformational process. Drew Goddard is a writer whose credits include Cloverfield, Cabin in the Woods, The Martian, Bad Times at the El Royale, Daredevil, High Potential, and a new film, Project Hail Mary, which is absolutely fantastic, Drew, and I got to say this last week. This is coming out, presumably, in a period of time where the embargo is off, so we can say how good it is. Congratulations. Welcome back, Drew.

Drew Goddard: I’m so happy to be back. Thank you for having me, John.

John: It will not be confusing at all that you are both named Drews, Drew Goddard and Drew Marquardt.

Drew Goddard: We’re interchangeable. All of the Drews, we’re like the board. We can just move one Drew into another Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Were you ever an Andy?

Drew Goddard: I never was an Andy.

Drew Marquardt: All right. Good.

Drew Goddard: That’s right. An Andy, of course, wrote The Martian.

John: Andy Weir, yes.

Drew Goddard: Are you an Andrew or did you start Drew?

Drew Marquardt: I started Drew. I’m full Andrew, but always Drew.

Drew Goddard: Great.

John: It’s always confusing when our business manager will say, “Well, Andrew does a thing.” Like, “Who is Andrew? Who is this person?” There are other times where I’ll be talking to my husband about Drew, and it’s like, “Is that Drew Barrymore? Is that Drew Marquardt? Which Drew is that?” It’s the list of Drews.

Drew Goddard: Again, all interchangeable.

John: All the same. On this podcast, Drew Goddard, I want to talk about this movie, obviously, but writing, your career in general, and we have some listener questions that I think are going to be perfect for you.

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to talk about TV because you grew up in TV. You still do TV. You have one of the recent hit broadcast shows, so I want to talk about the future of television with you.

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

John: We’ll solve it. For listeners who have been longtime subscribers to the podcast, you were on the show in 2015, but it was a bonus episode. It wasn’t part of the main feed. I think we referenced it before. Did we ever rerun the whole episode?

Drew Marquardt: I don’t think we have.

John: Maybe we should do that at some point when we need to.

Drew Goddard: Please don’t. Let’s go with this one.

John: Let’s briefly recap because you grew up in Los Alamos. You had a transformational experience with Olympia Dukakis upon arriving in Los Angeles.

Drew Goddard: That was actually in Santa Fe.

John: Santa Fe, all right.

Drew Goddard: I was a PA on a movie called Scattering Dad With Andy Griffith and Olympia Dukakis, and I almost bled to death on her porch. We don’t have to get into that. We can just breeze past that detail.

John: People should listen to the other episode where we go into further depth on that. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, I remember that you were working on Buffy in a period of creative crisis, and were able to contribute at a meaningful time, which is an experience which is true for myself and a lot of other people. It’s like when things are going great, sometimes it’s hard to get your way in, but you were able to help out in a pinch.

Drew Goddard: I think that’s the case. I think that in TV in particular, there’s a lot of crises. There’s a lot of crises constantly happening. I think I dropped in at a time where it was like I was young. You’re like, “Oh, I’ll stay and work 24 hours a day. This doesn’t seem strange to me. This is what I want to be doing.” I think that that has opened doors for me to learn there’s just no better experience than just doing it.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the just doing it because our main topic I want to get into is beats versus scenes. Let’s talk about, what do you think about with a beat? Because there’s the outlining kind of beat, that sort of unit of story, but there’s also beats within scenes. You’re planning a story. You’re planning an adaptation of The Martian or Project Hail Mary. What is a beat when you’re talking about that level of granularity?

Drew Goddard: By the way, I’m so glad we’re talking about this because this is, not to just jump into Drew’s speeches in the writers room, but you’re going to hear what I talk about a lot because I do believe our job is to make scenes. At the end of the day, the thing that differentiates us as screenwriters are scenes. I see it a lot with young writers is they will come into writers room, and they’ll have beautiful grand ideas about what this needs to be about, what the themes are, all these wonderful things that you want from writers. At some point it will get very quiet, and one of the upper level people go, “Yes, but what’s the scene? What is the scene?”

That’s what we’re here to do, is figure out, how do we shape this scene? Jumping in, I think beats to me are just moments. My process is very much, whether it’s an adaptation or not, I tend to just start with moments that I respond to. It could be big or it could be small. It could be just, “Oh, I like when he said that thing to her.” It could be, “Oh my God, this giant story turn. I’ll put them on a board,” and I’ll just start noting them. Then at a certain point, I’ll go, “I have enough beats,” or just things that I like just to make it simple and go, “Okay, let’s start trying to put scenes together.” Then that takes a while.

Then at a certain point, I’ll go, “I have enough scenes to start thinking about structure.” It builds out. That could take, in the case of something like bad times, years. We’re describing years of my life as I would just put, “Oh, here’s a moment. All right. I don’t have no idea how these things will stitch together, but I like this.” I find myself drawn to this moment over and over.

John: When you’re talking about these moments, they could actually be pretty big. They could be set pieces. They could be sequences rather than scenes. They’re pretty big ideas. These are the big note cards on the board. To achieve the goals of that big note card, it’s a bunch of smaller moments that actually get there. Something that Sorkin talks about is that when there’s an obstacle that forces a new tactic, that’s a beat. Basically, when you see a character make a choice, make a change, do a thing, the story has changed because of this incident, that is a beat.

That’s the granular, smaller version of that. Starting from this big picture of these are the giant tentpole moments, you’re getting the smaller moments that are building up to those bigger things.

Drew Goddard: I love that. He sounds smart.

John: He does sound smart.

Drew Goddard: Sorkin or something?

John: Yes, Aaron Sorkin.

Drew Goddard: Let me jot that down.

John: With two As.

Drew Goddard: Oh, got it.

John: Seems smart. Let’s go back to the writer’s room, though, because this is where you’ll often find beats being discussed. We’re talking about beat sheets also, which is basically the very rough bullet point outline of what’s going to happen in the course of an act or a movie or a script. What are you looking for in a beat? What’s going up on the board? How much are you breaking that? How granular are you trying to get?

Drew Goddard: There’s no right answer. There’s no wrong answer. It’s like you just start shaping. Let me think. There was a Daredevil episode. Here’s a good example of how this starts. The second episode of Daredevil, which is one of the scripts I’m most proud of that I’ve done, on the board, we were just brainstorming ideas. I wrote Matt in dumpster. That’s it. That was the beat. Matt in dumpster. We go, “What is that?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but I like the idea of starting an episode early with our main character nearly beaten to death in a dumpster, and let’s just see.” That beat goes on the board. It’s not a scene yet. We don’t even know what we’re doing here. It’s just, “This sounds interesting.”

You put it on the board, and you think about it. It does start to beg the questions like, “How did he get there? What happens next? Who’s going to find him?” Now we’re starting to shape it. Now we’re starting to start asking questions that connect. “Oh, if somebody finds him, that is going to suggest the scene.” On its core level, this is how we’re building story. Really, when I’m saying, “Yes, but what’s the scene?” What I’m really saying is, “What are the actors going to do?” Because I know, having done this a long time, that’s really what this is about.
We need to figure out what are the actors going to do. You are going to be called to the carpet over and over and over about, “What are the actors going to do here?” You start to just start to build and build things around that very question.

John: It’s, what are the actors going to do? Also, where is the camera? What are we looking at? What is the sequence of events in it? We’re talking about adapting books, but I’ve written many books myself, and those books have beats in them. They don’t have scenes, per se. There’s sections where you’re in one continuous moment of time, and there’s beats that happen within them, but it’s not the same as what a screenwriter does in the sense of there being an actual scene that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which I guess we have to define what a scene is. A scene does have a start and an end.

While it’s something that could change in the editing, it has a point of view on, “This is where we’re coming into it. This is what happens during the middle of it. This is how it exits. It should exit with a different energy than it started.” That’s the crucial fundamental thing. Your writer’s room could come up with a list of, “These are the beats,” but then you still have to transform those beats into actual scenes.

Drew Goddard: Yes. Part of it, and then to make it even more difficult, you need to make the scenes have a relation to each other. Each scene has to inform the next scene. It doesn’t have to, but it’s helpful if it does. I’m glad you brought up the visual part of it, because one of the most important things that happened to me, this was at Buffy and Angel, I turned in an early script. I think my scripts early on were very sparse description. I remember reading things like, “Don’t know, leave that to the director, leave that to the director.” I turn in the script, and Jeff Bell, who was a wonderful writer and very important to my growth, said, “Okay, but where’s the camera in this scene?”

He made me talk about where the camera is. It wasn’t in a way of direct this because we have directors, but it’s like you as the writer, I want you to think about how this is actually happening. Is it important to you in this scene what we’re focusing on? If it is, we’ve got to figure out a way to put that on the page. If it’s not, that’s okay, too. You don’t want to force it. There are places where you want to let the directors play, but if you know, “No, this is a living, breathing organism. We are making a document for 300 people to figure out how to make this show,” and your job is to direct their attention to what matters for you so that they can go be the best versions of themselves as artists. It took me a while to understand that, but I think they all tie together with what you’re talking about.

John: Going from Buffy to Angel and other early TV experiences to working on Daredevil, working on High Potential, how detailed do you like the beat planning to be? Is it a several-page beat sheet? Is it a detailed outline? What do you like before you start writing scripts?

Drew Goddard: Part of this is just my own, what works for me. Part of this is, it started on Buffy, where we would spend, if you have a pie chart of how much time a script takes, you would spend 90% working on the story and getting it, not even the outline, just getting the board to a place where you can defend every moment, and you can tell production, “Here’s what we’re doing.” What it did was it allowed you, when you started writing, to actually be more free, if that makes sense. I think there was this thought, and part of this is TV. Part of this is the grind of every 8 days you need 60 pages.

In order to do that and do that in a way that you can keep that train moving, you have to be very clear about what you’re shooting early. That got deeply instilled. There’s no better training than having to do that 22 times each year, 22 times each year, and then in Lost, you get to Lost, it’s 24 times each year. That’s an insane amount of pages, an insane amount of beats that have to become scenes. That, really, I’ve internalized that almost to a depressing degree, whereas I will work on beat sheets or outlines for years. I will do 50 because the goal for me, I don’t like to do lots of drafts. I think it’s much easier to be ruthless when it’s in beat sheet form.

John: When you don’t have sharp characters saying [crosstalk]–

Drew Goddard: You don’t have characters and you don’t have things that you fall in love, you don’t have these moments that have taken this become living and breathing. I fall in love with these things, and it’s harder for me, but when in beat sheet form, it’s like, “We’re great, we’re done. Let’s cut it, let’s try it. Let’s try this other thing.” I can be much more free creatively, and so I will do, and I force, there’s an amount of time, especially in the feature world, where they’re like, “Just do a draft, just do a draft, and let’s just start this.” I’m like, “Absolutely not.”

To me, the hardest part is we need to get to a place where we all agree what we’re doing so that then I can go be playful. If I try to be too playful too early, we’re going to end up not making something.

John: I absolutely hear that and want to protect that as an idea. I will say, to give the other side of this argument, is that sometimes you do, it’s actually writing scenes that you discover what your story is, and who the characters are. You actually hear all of it together. We had Katie Silverman on the podcast, and she was talking about how before she starts writing something, she will write a bunch of scenes with these characters that don’t have to actually fit into the movie so she knows what they are.

Drew Goddard: I do that too. I love doing that. I used to. Part of that came from TV where the job nobody wanted was, “Oh, you got to write sides. You got to write sides for the actor.”

John: Tell me about side scene for that, for casting.

Drew Goddard: For casting. If we know, and usually you have to start that process before you have a script in TV. What happens is whoever’s writing the script is not going to do the sides. They’ll say it usually gets dumped to a lower-level writer. Like, “Will you go write a three-page scene that will showcase this character in three pages?”

John: “Make sure that we’re getting the tone that we want, what it feels like.”

Drew Goddard: Exactly. Make it hard. Make it really difficult so that you can see it. In the case of almost everything I work on, make it funny and make it break your heart in three pages. Make it over and over. I got dumped on a lot as a lower-level. I grumbled about it at first, and then I started to really love it.

John: Of course. I would love that too.

Drew Goddard: Oh my God.

John: The stakes are weirdly high and low at the same time.

Drew Goddard: Once you start having fun, you can throw crazy shit in there. You’re just like, “Oh my God, a tentacle comes out of nowhere and eats the person,” because you’re never going to shoot it. It’s fun when you’re in the room. All of the bad times in the casting process for that, all of those scenes are delightful because you’re free in a way you’re never free, because you’re like, “We’re never going to shoot this. Let’s just make it fun for the room.”

John: Then the actors are always weirdly disappointed when they get the actual script. They’re like, “Wait, I think I did. I wasn’t even there.”

Drew Goddard: That was Cabin in the Woods, by the way. Cabin in the Woods. If you can imagine how crazy we went in that movie, the sides were 100 times crazier. Then they would come up, Hemsworth would be like, “What about that?” The scenes I was doing, I was so excited for that. Like, “I know we can’t do that part.”

John: It was never going to be part of. It was all, it was bait-and-switch.

Drew Goddard: That’s part of it. No, I preface this by saying there’s no right answer here. I know friends who will do 30 drafts. They will constantly be doing draft after draft and they find it that way.

John: Scott Frank overwrites, and then has to cut back down, and overwrites.

Drew Goddard: To be fair, when I’m doing the beat sheets, outlining, I’m doing a version of that. On Lost, Our outlines ran longer than the scripts, which is really hard to do.

John: That’s crazy. That’s really hard to do.

Drew Goddard: It’s really hard to do because we were still in screenplay format, but without dialogue.

John: They’re scripting?

Drew Goddard: Yes, but to go longer than the script without dialogue is insane.

John: That’s crazy. That’s wild.

Drew Goddard: That’s not something we’re proud of. You would learn be detailed is the point. When I say outline, they’re functioning as drafts.

John: You have this incredibly detailed beat sheet or outline, but there’s still a fundamental skill of going from that to, “This is really what it’s going to feel like.” I guess you’re capturing some of what it feels like in that outline, but it’s the specifics of what the characters are saying, how they’re interacting with stuff, which line comes first. Are your outlines that detailed that it’s essentially a script but in a prosy form?

Drew Goddard: Sometimes or some scenes are. If I know a scene’s really hard or very technical, I don’t want to be doing anything other than having fun when I’m writing. I will do the hard parts. If I’m like, “Oh boy, I don’t understand,” like with Project Hail Mary, the scientific concept, I don’t want to be sitting there trying to write the scene because I hand write everything. I don’t want to be sitting there trying to figure out the science part. Knowing that I’m making outlines for myself, I’m doing the work so that I don’t have to worry about that part. Like, “Oh, I better detail out the beats of this part.”

If I know the emotional point of the scene, that’s enough. Then I’ll get real simple. Like, “Oh, this is what he’s going through, this is what–” Because I know that will be fun to write, and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s really for me. By the way, we should talk, part of this is an outline for me to write as the writer. Then there’s also the part that you need to do to convince everyone to let you do this. Those are two separate things. I’m looking at it both ways. In that case, what I just described, I probably wouldn’t put all the scientific stuff in there.

If I’m doing this to get people to sign off, whether it’s our directors, whether it’s the studio, whether it’s our producers, in that case, I’m just saying, “Here’s what the story is. Let’s just walk you through the basics of the story. Here’s the point of the scene,” if that makes sense.

John: It does. It’s helping me understand something I’ve never really gotten about TV writing, and TV writing with rooms for especially network is, you do all this work to create these incredibly-detailed outlines and sheets, and then you get approvals on those, and then someone goes off to draft. It seems like going off to draft, it’s a short process and surprisingly simple. I always think, “Oh, well, to often write a draft, I must take three weeks.” It’s like, no, actually, if it was a really detailed outline, it could be incredibly quick because you know exactly what’s in there.

Drew Goddard: I wish that was true.

John: You wish that were true. Okay, yes.

Drew Goddard: Every writer that’s gone through this is mad at you for saying that right now, because, invariably, you then get it off the board, you get the outline, and then you’re sitting with that blank screen or page in front of you, and you’re like, “Oh, God, none of this works. None of this works? What was I thinking?”

John: When none of it works, is it the stuff within the scenes that’s not working or is it the flow from scene to scene to scene, or both?

Drew Goddard: Or both, or just like you start to question your own existential reason for writing this script. That happens a lot where you’re like, “Why did we think this was a good idea as a group?” Sometimes you need just the emotional support. That’s the other reason writer’s rooms are helpful of like, “No, no, no, no. We all know what it feels like to panic,” because that’s the other problem. I would get anything for reads. I think the average, Buffy was four days. Same with Lost, four days. Again, not a good way to do this. I’m not suggesting this.

One of the nice things about how we’ve moved the model from 24 episodes to 8 or 10 is you do have more time. It is the grind of being so far behind, but there’s benefits of that part, too, because you also go, “Oh, I can’t second guess it. Let’s just go.” The beats are not so much dialogue-based. As you know, dialogue’s also really hard in which you want to do it well. Then if you get into that stuff, you’re trying to shape it. No stage is easy. There’s never an easy part of the process.

John: Now, as a showrunner, you’ve had situations where you’ve figured out a whole episode on the board, you’ve transferred that down into a written document, you’ve assigned it off to a writer, and then that writer is struggling, or that writer’s having a hard time doing it. What is the conversation with that writer who’s having a hard time going from, “This works as an outline,” to, “This is working as a script,” what do you do?

Drew Goddard: I start from a place of compassion because I’ve been in that writer’s shoes. I just have the amount of times I was having a nervous breakdown. I remember early some of my showrunners saying things like, “It’s okay. You might wipe out. It’s okay. That’s why we do it this way. We do it this way so if you wipe out, we are all clear on the story, too.” Whoever’s the show writer is, “I’m clear on this too.” It takes the pressure off of, this doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s not going to be perfect. In fact, there’s things that we thought we wanted that you are going to write, and by you writing them, we’re going to realize, “Oh, that’s wrong.”

John: It wasn’t necessarily their bad execution, it wasn’t a good one.

Drew Goddard: It was like, “Oh, this is what it is.” I think it’s important for writers to hear that. I do think that the fear of failure is one of the great things that stops us in our tracks and can really paralyze us as writers. By the way, as artists, with actors, too, with any of the artists, is why when I’m directing, I want to take fear of failure off the board. In fact, say, “Failure is actually a wonderful part of the process. If we’re not screwing something up, it means we’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough, we’re not trying to.” I think especially when you’re early and you haven’t worked with people before, it’s really important to let them know, “It’s okay. It’s not going to be perfect. This is really hard, what we’re doing, and we are going to get there. We’re all safety nets for each other.”

John: Advice to a staff writer who, for the first time, is taking this document and turning it into the script, how faithful should you try to be to what that was? Is it your own discovery process? When do you need to check in with the show runner if it’s something that maybe it’s not working? Or do you just try it and deliver it? What’s the best way to do it?

Drew Goddard: I think the important thing is before you go to draft, start developing the skill of trying to figure out what’s important to the show runner. Every show runner’s different, and it’s not always clear, because you also have passionate people in a writer’s room who have their own points of view of what’s important. The show runner’s the person that’s going to have to arbitrate all of this. You really want to get a sense of, “Oh, this scene is really important to the showrunner. The show runner, she’s pitched this exact line of dialogue every single time we’ve talked about this. “That line, I better put in.” “This place, she’s adrift. Let me play around here.”

That’s what you’re looking for, you’re listening in. If you’re unclear, talk to the show runner. Say, “I’m not sure about this.” Hopefully, your show runner will be able to talk through this a little bit.

John: All of this is built around the classic broadcast model where the writers were employed in a room during this entire time, and therefore have a lot more exposure to the show runner now that we’re getting onto shows that will have a 10-week development room, and then maybe another 10 weeks to actually do the thing. There’s less time around that writer to get that stuff. That must be a real challenge for getting a sense of what the showrunner wants, and needs, and how the whole thing is going to fit together and work.

Drew Goddard: It’s not ideal. It’s not. It falls upon showrunners to carve it out and do what best they can to get as much time with the writers as possible. It’s a struggle we’re all going through, but it’s crucial. It’s crucial.

John: How do you as a showrunner decide which of the writers in the room is the right person to do a given episode? Is it the one that you see that they spark most closely to, that they do it, or is it just, it’s now we’re rotating through, and it’s now this person’s turn?

Drew Goddard: It’s a little of all of the above and every show’s a little different. Part of the reason I got so much experience so quickly at Buffy is they went in the order of seniority. There’s a reason for that, is that then the seniority leaves to do an episode so that they can come back when it’s time for the younger writers in the room to be there. It cycles. What happened at Buffy was suddenly everyone either had to go off on script or had babies. Suddenly, it was just me by myself. It was like, “Oh, come to set, work with the showrunners on set, and just learn how to do this because there’s nobody else. Everyone’s gone.” I don’t know that that was ideal.

Part of it is weirdly the math of, “Well, if that person’s off on script, who’s in breaking the story? Who’s figuring that part out?” Which is in the back of your head as a showrunner, because you know as a showrunner, you’re going to get pulled 100 directions, and you need to know who’s in the room because some people are really good. It just comes with experience, frankly, at breaking story. You don’t want to abandon the younger writers in there. You can find what makes the most sense, and there’s no right or wrong answer.

John: There are, classically, some shows that they have writers on staff and they are never in a room together. They work on everything separately. There’s different ways that different shows work, and you have to understand what your show is. We’ve been talking a lot about TV, but I want to talk about features. Beats and features are just as crucial, and yet there’s not a room. It’s just you. Can we talk about The Martian, because we actually have pages from The Martian. Just available for us here. We’re looking at pages 12 through 14 of The Martian.

What’s happened in this section is the rocket has taken off without our hero, without Matt Damon. He’s announced that Mark Watney is dead. The Earth has announced that Mark Watney is dead. Then we’re back on Mars and we find that, oh, Mark Watney is not dead. He was just passed out, and is needed to go back to the base. He realizes he’s alone on Mars. Can you talk to me about your experience of reading this sequence in Andy Weir’s book? Let’s talk about what the beats were in the book. Then we can look at specifically how you’re implementing this, where the camera is in trying to tell the story.

In the book, I read Project Hail Mary, but I did not read The Martian. Is it a third person? Is it as a neutral POV on the thing, or is it all from his point of view?

Drew Goddard: All from his point of view.

John: This is very different. Even though it’s a very close third person to the movie, it’s a different experience. Tell me about reading it in the book, and then how we got here.

Drew Goddard: At least I should say, this part is all from the first part, because then it does shift as we start getting back to Earth. When I look at it, it’s funny because this was the original opening to the movie. If you look at it, what I’m trying to do is start, and this is the way the book starts, which is a guy wakes up, injured on Mars, which I always thought was delightful.

I was like, “Oh, this is a wonderful way to begin a movie,” right? If you look at this, what I’m trying to do here is find the moments, okay, he’s going to wake up, and slowly but surely, you’re trying to look at the beats of the scene. He looks down, he sees a jagged length of antenna in his abdomen, right? We’re telling a story, we’re building the mystery of what the hell happened to this guy, right? At a certain point, I realized I need some context for this, which made the previous scene necessary. I was like, “Oh, it’s too much, I’m throwing too much.”

What I need to know, the sentence that I need to, which is the end of the first scene is, “But Mark Watney is dead,” I need the audience to know that the man they’re about to meet, the world thinks is dead. I think that’s really important to this next part, because then you’re building this sort of mystery of what the hell happened, but also, I try to be emotion first and foremost, right?

I want the audience to understand just how lonely this man’s about to become, because, it’s one thing to survive on the planet, it’s another thing that the world doesn’t know you’re alive yet. I feel like that was a crucial part of this movie.

John: You had to backfill and to get up to like, well, how do you actually get to that press conference? They actually need to see the sequence, so we need to spend tens of millions of dollars for this whole sequence of the escape from Mars and why he’s left.

Drew Goddard: What we did, that sequence was in the middle of the movie. That sequence was in the middle.

John: You’re saying that this sequence was originally in the middle of the movie in your early drafts or in early things you handed into people?

Drew Goddard: No, all the way through shooting.

John: Oh, wow, crazy.

Drew Goddard: All the way through shooting, including the first couple cuts. This sequence was in the middle of the movie. The sequence that showed what happened to Mark before was in the middle of the movie, and it was delightful. There was a building of like, “Oh, I want to see what happened.” “Oh, we’re finally going to show you what happened,” and it worked. Then Ridley at some point calls me and he says, “You’re going to hate this.” Because we had talked about this a lot. He’s like, “Can I just show you a cut of the movie where we moved that before?”

He was really nice because he wasn’t sure himself. It wasn’t like he was demanding. He was like, “Well, you just watch. Let’s just watch and see.” I was grumbling thinking this is not going to work for all these reasons. It’s going to ruin all this beautiful tension I have created. Then we watched it and I was like, “Oh, it’s better. It’s just better.” You just felt it. You’re like, “Oh, I like this.”

John: By the way, the reveal of things later on, of course, the movies, is what you end up doing in Project Hail Mary so successfully. The whole movie is built around that, which is not the mystery engine of this. The mystery engine of Hail Mary is, why is he there by himself in space? Getting to that point is built up throughout the whole course of the movie. This was a one-off.

Drew Goddard: It’s a good lesson of nothing ever really dies. If I can’t do something in one place, it’ll work its way back in. If I really want to try something like that, and we definitely found our places in Hail Mary.

John: Yes. The writing and the sequence is great. The reason why I picked this is because there’s essentially no dialogue. It’s a great way to show like, “Oh, scenes are not just dialogue. Scenes are what characters are doing, the obstacles, the challenges, and how they move past, the choices that they make.” We are seeing him wake up on the surface of Mars, realize that this piece of antenna is piercing his spacesuit, getting back to the airlock into the base, trying to treat his wound, and realizing, “Oh, crap, I am alone,” and then we smash cut to the title, The Martian.

Drew Goddard: It means a lot. You say that it’s fun looking at this, because I do take scenes seriously when there’s no dialogue in them. I really feel like that’s one of the things that separates good from great in screenplays because nobody wants to read blocks of texts. There’s something in your brain, especially in a screenplay form, that you’re used to how quickly it moves. I work, even just looking at this now, which I haven’t looked at in 10 years.

John: It’s well done. There’s a reason why you should have gotten an Oscar nomination for it, and you did.

Drew Goddard: Bless you, John. If people are trying to learn, without even reading the words, you can sit back and look at the page and see, “Oh, there’s dense words in certain parts, we’re taking space,” and those words are, “Here’s the character’s name, here’s the thing the person’s going through.” I’m using italics sparsely.

John: You’re using italics, though, just to show what the internal mental state is. The thing that we could see as an audience, we could register that on his face, but you need to stick it there on the page that as a reader, we get it.

Drew Goddard: If you look, what I’m trying to do is actually make the reader complicit in this. I’m trying to make the reader the main character. These are the main character’s thoughts when I’m going into italics that are, in some cases, that are putting you in his place, which I find is very effective, especially if you’re trying to get people on board doing this. Something that, long sequences without dialogue, it really helps to have a point of view.

John: Things like, on page 13, in parentheses, this is not exactly going to be easy to watch. Yes, and that’s true. Again, you’re complicit, you’re saying, “We’re going to get through this together,” and there’s a point of view and a purpose. Drew Goddard, are you still a double-spacer?

Drew Goddard: Oh, yes.

John: Oh, yes, you haven’t changed.

Drew Goddard: Oh, I will, until the day I die. How much do you want to hear my rant?

John: Tell me your rant, because I was a double-spacer, I switched back, but tell me your argument for maintaining double-spaces. In the light of all rationality.

Drew Goddard: Great. I will be happy to go down as well.

John: Let’s start with the screenplay form. The screenplay form is ridiculous. Take a moment and realize that the screenplay form is something that was designed because of typewriters, and how quickly that we could use typewriters, and how quickly you do revision pages. One of the nice benefits of the form that came to be is that, in general, one page equals about a minute of screen time.

John: Yes, the roughest approximation, but useful.

Drew Goddard: It’s crazy how close it comes. In most scripts, you’re not that far off. Now, each page might be way off, but in the aggregate–

John: Most scripts are about 120 pages or about 2 hours long.

Drew Goddard: Yes, and I’ve found that shocking, because I’ve written wildly different forms of scripts, whether it’s straight comedy, or hardcore action, or whatever it is, end up at the same place, which I find incredibly useful. I find it incredibly useful to understand when you’re getting into the budgeting phase, when you’re getting into the directing phase, when you’re getting into time management phase, it’s really helpful to know how long this scene is going to be. For me, why are we changing this? It’s arbitrarily because people don’t text that way. Yes, people don’t write in Courier.

Also, I’m a believer that the negative space on a page is almost as important as the positive space on a page. I believe that if the goal is to be helping your reader through an artistic experience, the negative space on a page is a wonderful weapon at your disposal. Why would you want to crush that weapon? Why would you? Let it flow. I understand we’ll all knife fight. I also understand I’m probably the last person on the hill. If you want to see Drew lose his mind, there was points that we could talk about Hail Mary. There was parts when Chris and Phil would write, our directors would write scenes, and single-spacer, and you would look at it, and they would put the single spaces in the middle, which is the worst defense. At the very least, if you’re going to force it–

John: If you’re going to rewrite me, you should at least double-space it.

Drew Goddard: Or make it all single-spaced, and I will be ashamed. To jump back and forth is the most egregious in a script. To read a script that you’re doing both, we should all be shot.

John: There have been cases where I’ve come in to do cabinetry work in a script where basically I’m not changing, but I’m just doing some certain scenes, and I will try to match the style of whatever was there, including double-spacing or just the difference between double dash and dot, dot, dot. I will do what the thing is just so it actually reads like the thing. That said, if I’m doing a page one rewrite on thing, I’m searching for double spaces and breaking them down to one space because that’s just where I’m at now.

Drew Goddard: I respect that. I do the same, by the way. You and I do a lot of script doctoring. I want to be respectful, but I will start by talking to the writer and saying, “Are you sure? Because if you don’t feel strongly, let’s try it this other way. If you feel strongly, we will go with your version.”

John: That’s great. Let’s talk about Project Hail Mary because it’s just fantastic. Andy Weir has written a new novel. At what point does it cross your transom? When do you start having the conversation like, “Hey, maybe Drew Goddard should adopt this movie since he did such a great job the last time?”

Drew Goddard: Andy and I have stayed in contact just in life since The Martian, but that’s 10 years ago now, right? I actually remember the date because it was so clear. It was April Fool’s Day, so April 1st, 2020. Two weeks after the pandemic shut everything down, world sky is falling. We are in full.

John: It’s not clear that civilization will survive.

Drew Goddard: It really feels that way. Andy texts me and goes, “I don’t know how you’re doing, but I did just finish a new novel. Do you want to read it?” I’m like, “Andy, I’m trying to find groceries right now. No.” He’s like, “Come on.” I’m like, “Of course, I do want to read it.” I also was like, “Are you messing with me on April Fool’s Day because that’s not–”

John: Yes, not cool.

Drew Goddard: He was like, “No, it’s lovely. I’m really proud of it. Would you read it?”

John: Had he told you anything about it before?

Drew Goddard: No. He probably would have if I’d pressed, but I tend to not press writers when they’re in the middle of writing unless they want to open up. I’d love to, but I also know give it space to be nurtured. I didn’t know anything. I prefer that, especially if it’s something that I may want to work on. It’s better so I can have a clean experience. Then he said, “Ryan Gosling is already attached.”

John: Oh. How that happened?

Drew Goddard: Andy’s at CAA. I think CAA sort of put it together. Those are the two pieces I knew.

John: He’s ideal casting. Also, it’s a weird situation to come in with just that piece.

Drew Goddard: Luckily, yes. If it’s in the list of weird situations, that’s a weird situation you want, right? Great. I was also insanely busy with other things. I thought, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to just life-wise, I’m not going to be able to do this,” which I gently tried to tell him because I knew, I’m like, “If you’ve got Ryan Gosling, you guys are going to go. You’re going to be shooting soon, and I’m not the person to be shooting soon right now just because of life.” He said, “We’re going to wait. If you do it, we’ll wait.” He was very sweet about that.

I said, “Well, don’t do that. I’m not going to let you do that.” He said, “Well, will you just read it?” Then I read it. When I’m reading something that I might do, I don’t know if you’re this way, John, I’m constantly looking for ways out.

John: 100%. Absolutely. Oh, this is there, yes.

Drew Goddard: I’m looking all the reasons to not do this, because I know, especially if it’s people I’ve worked with that I don’t want to let down. I’m like, “I want to do a good job for you,” so I’m looking for all the ways I’m about to do a bad job for them. I’m reading it and talking myself out of it, trying to be like, because quite honestly, this book is a screenwriter’s nightmare. It’s a screenwriter’s nightmare, and we’re going to get to that in a second.

John: I read the book well before I saw your movie. I was reading and thinking like, “Oh, Drew easily has this.” Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s not impossible. The reason why I want to talk about beats versus scenes is because the beats of the book are the beats of the movie. It’s just like the challenge is how do you actually implement them, and the fundamental decisions you’re making in terms of how close you’re sticking to his POV, and how to get out of his head. I’m sure as you were reading that, you were thinking like, “This is all inside his mind.”

Drew Goddard: It’s all inside his mind. Then when you finally– All right, let me tell you, I disagree with you passionately that it’s going to be easy.

John: All right. Great.

Drew Goddard: I also knew everyone else that this to me all the time. “It’s going to be so easy for you it’s like The Martian.” I’m like, “It’s not. The Martian–” It’s surfacely like The Martian, but where it becomes wildly different, you have a disaster movie where the threat, the disaster is microbial, so I have to get into microbiology to help an audience.

John: You have a lot of good text from the book that can be incorporated into his drylands figuring out what’s going on.

Drew Goddard: Yes, but you try to make it visually interesting.

John: I’m sorry.

Drew Goddard: Try to do that part. Yes, try to shape it. Okay, that’s step one. Step two, most of it takes place in a narrator’s head who does not know what’s going on. Not only do you not have someone to talk to, he actually doesn’t know what’s going on, which is challenging.

John: Yes, but fundamentally, there’s a second character.

Drew Goddard: Great. I’m glad you brought up that second character. That second character is a rock who speaks in whale songs. He speaks only in whale songs, and he’s a rock, and he’s delightful. Don’t get me wrong. You realize these are challenges when going back to scenes. You’re like, I have an actor.

John: Every crisis is an opportunity. I’m sorry. I’m going to sell you on adapting this book.

Drew Goddard: It’s true. I said yes for the reasons that you’re saying, but I also knew this is going to be way harder than everyone realizes, because when you read it, it moves, but once you sit and go, “Wait, what’s the scene? What is the scene?”

John: “What is the scene?” That is the challenge.

Drew Goddard: That’s where you go, “Oh my God, I’m screwed.”

John: Yes. You had to make fundamental decisions. Reading the book and then watching the movie, a lot of the choices he made were the choices that I also saw in my head, but the actual nature of the ship itself is much different because you needed to create physical spaces that would enable you to have individual scenes and moments in development, and to get out of just his head so he can have physical challenges to get through to demonstrate what the emotional, intellectual puzzle he’s trying to face is.

Drew Goddard: Yes, exactly. Part of this is also your job is not just, I got to make a scene that Ryan Gosling wants to act in. I need to make a scene that my directors are going to want to direct. I need to make a scene that the production designer is going to want to design. [crosstalk] That’s in a good way. That forces you to go, “Okay, let’s think about the room. Let’s think about the space that we’re in. Let’s actually be in this.”

John: Yes, the spaces are bigger than I would have expected them to be, which is completely appropriate.

Drew Goddard: To be fair, that’s the directors, also like, that’s Chris and Phil, because what you’re describing is expensive. I’m like, “I’m not handing you something that’s going to drive the budget through the roof.” They’re like, “We got that covered. We’re going to drive the budget through the roof.”

John: They can handle it all by themselves.

Drew Goddard: Then, to their credit, I watched the movie, and I’m like, “I have no idea how human beings made this.” It is a stunning [unintelligible 00:40:34] production design. It is unbelievable. It was scary. What we’re really describing is my own fear of myself failing. Going back to fear of failure, I didn’t want to fail for Andy. I didn’t want to fail for Andy above all else.

John: You read the book, you have all your excuses for why you’re not going to do it, and then how did the yes come–

Drew Goddard: No. Two-thirds of the way through the book, something happens that made me sit up. I don’t want to spoil it for people, but you will know it. You will know because it will be the thing that you have not seen done yet. At least, we can compare notes later. I don’t remember it happening. I sat up and went, “Oh my God.” There’s four or five of those things in the movie. There’s one in particular that made me go, “Oh, all of the hardships that we are describing actually is set up for the thing that happens.” All of the reasons that I’m complaining as I’m reading this book, I go, “Oh my God, this is what’s going to make this movie transcend,” from my point of view.

A couple of things I do when I finish the book like that, that I’m actually thinking of doing, I quickly write down the 5 or 10 beats that I think that I love more than anything, that are the things. I write them down. I put them in giant font on my wall before I speak to anyone because I know at some point, all of these things are going to come under siege, all of them. Also, not just the outside world, not just people working on the film, not just executives, not just– also by me because you do start to second-guess everything in the course of making a movie. I kept looking at that.

One of those things that I describe is on that wall, which we don’t have to get into that part, but there’s a lot of fights about that. There’s a lot of fights. Anything that’s bold and different, I promise you somebody wanted to cut along the way. You have to remember, “Oh, but when I first read it, that’s why I wanted to do it.”

John: Watching the movie, you can say it’s long, but it’s really this full length. It does the whole thing, and it’s an entire experience. Luckily, I think we’ve become more appreciative of long movies that work really well. They don’t feel long because it’s always exciting and always invigorating. The Marvel movies, to some degree, are probably part of the reason why we’ve been trained to take longer movies, which is great.

You get all of the book in there. As I was watching through it, it’s like, “Oh, what did they actually cut?” The cuts are so smart and so surgical. They’re generally things that a reader of a book who has all the time in the world and all the pages in the world can sort of like, “Oh, that’s an interesting thing about how we paved the deserts of the Sahara.” It doesn’t affect the stakes of the movie that we’re watching. That was good, and it was crucial. There’s reasons to go back to Earth, and there’s reasons not to go back to Earth. You basically chose not to go back to Earth when we didn’t need to anymore.

Drew Goddard: Having done this a lot, the thing that every time I’m working with a new novelist, I have to gently say, “Page count-wise, I have room for about 5% of your novel.” We all have to make peace with that and figure out what are we going to use? You know going in that you’re going to have to do some brutal cuts that are going to hurt. If you love the book like I love the book, it’s going to hurt me more than anyone.

One of the things on that list of 10, at one point—and we’ll just talk about it because it’s not in the movie—was they make a decision to nuke the polar ice caps. It’s wonderful. I loved it, and I thought it was the one thing on the list that’s not in the movie because we all were like, “Let’s try to–” but when you went to what is the scene for that, there’s no version of seeing that quickly. If you want to do it correctly, you have to set up what is the problem, what are we trying to solve, why is this the correct solution. You can’t just say, “And then we nuke the polar ice caps.”

John: In a 10-episode series, it absolutely makes sense. In a three-hour movie, it does not make sense at all.

Drew Goddard: It’s an [unintelligible 00:44:26] end sell. It was a late cut. Even after we had shot it, we were still trying to be like, “Can we try? Let’s try. Let’s mock it up.”

John: Yes, “Let’s nuke the ice caps.”

Drew Goddard: This is a credit to Chris and Phil, our directors. They are not afraid of anything. They were like, “Oh, we’ve already shot a full movie. Great. We can still nuke–” They’ve been right. It’s been wonderful working with them because they come from animation.

John: They’re used to it.

Drew Goddard: They’re like, “If the idea is good, we’re going to figure it out.” There’s something thrilling about that. We tried, but part of it, it’s the scene. You couldn’t figure out what the scene was that could do efficiently.

John: Who’s POV are you in? Ryland doesn’t really make sense for it.

Drew Goddard: No.

John: Sandra Hüller’s-

Drew Goddard: Character could do it, but–

John: -could do it, but what I like about what you do in the movie is that her character exists for how she interacts with Ryan Gosling’s character. That’s the relationship.

Drew Goddard: When you’re setting out to adapt something, you’re going to make a ton of cuts. You need a defining principle. I, very quickly, not that this is deep, but it’s important to say it. You’re like, this movie is about Grace and Rocky. That’s what this movie is about. Every scene needs to be in service, even if neither of those characters are in it. It’s on the B side, on the space side. Then it’s about Stratt and Grace on the A side. That triangle is telling the same story. It comes together. Do you understand?

John: Trust, yes.

Drew Goddard: Yes. Sacrifice and what this means, and what the bigger purpose of life is. When you think about it like that, it’s like, “Oh, yes, every scene is on theme between that.” When you start to divert from theme, it ends up on that cutting room floor.

John: Yes. You’ve decided to say yes. What is your internal process for coming up with an outline? Are you sharing that with anybody else? Is that just yours? What was that process for you?

Drew Goddard: Before I say yes, I like to come up with a very simple beat cheat of like, “Okay, do I think there’s a movie here that I can see?” Even if I don’t have the answers, is there enough that I go, “Okay, I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I want people to know, okay, it’s going to be hard, but we’re going to figure it–” I’ll do a very rough beat cheat only for myself before I even engage. It’s very, like, “In this 30 pages, this happens. In this 30 pages, this happens. In this 30–” It sort of [unintelligible 00:46:40]. It’s not thought through. It’s more what happens every 15 quite often.

John: If it was a road trip, what it is you’re going to stop at on the way?

Drew Goddard: What’s great about Andy is he does have a wonderful sense of structure. He really does. It’s one of the things I respond to so strongly in his writing. There is an inherent structure in what he does.

John: Cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger, which is what pulls you through the book so quickly.

Drew Goddard: Exactly. It makes all of the problems we were just talking about easier because you know, “Okay, we can build to these things.” I do that. Then at that point, Chris and Phil were on to direct. Chris and Phil, we’ve been friends for two decades now. We’ve had parallel careers. We both started in TV. They were doing Jump Street when I was doing Cabin in the Woods. We have always been fans of each other and trying to find things to do. That was thrilling, but I also knew our processes could not be more different. They are very much when we’re talking about–

John: They’re jazz. Is there–

Drew Goddard: They are. It comes from animation, and it works really well for them. Whereas it’s not measured twice, cut once; it’s measured 20 times, cut once. They’re, “Why are we measuring? Let’s just cut, cut, cut. We’ll just keep packing away and building something.” I was kind of excited because I knew it was important to try a different process. It was important for me as an artist, when I respect the other artists, to say, “Oh, let’s give this a try. Let’s see how this works.” I think they probably felt the same. I knew, “We need to talk about this now. We need to talk about what this is because we have very different process.”

What I said to them was, “I don’t want my process to stop you from your process. I think the way to do that is let me hyper-focus on structure. If I hyper-focus on structure so that we know this is when this needs to happen, this is the rough structure of the movie, and we can agree on it, you guys can go crazy. You guys can have so much fun.”

John: To paint within the lines here.

Drew Goddard: Yes, “Have fun. I want that, but let’s start with structure.” Those conversations were crucial because then, as I’m doing outline after outline, the goal is to say, “Let’s find a structure that we can be playful inside of.” That is what’s on the screen. We’ve moved scenes around here and there, but if you look at the big arcs of the things, it’s like we have not deviated that much from the initial outlines.

John: Yes. The movie is funny and funny in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, given the stakes of everything that’s happening. That’s because I think you have both a very strong backbone for everything and then a lot of moments for the natural comedy that comes up that I’m sure some of it was scripted, but some of it was just finding in the moments that can absolutely play.

Drew Goddard: Without question. I’ve learned from doing comedy and drama,-

John: The intersections.

Drew Goddard: -if the scene does not have a dramatic reason to exist, it’s okay. You can sometimes have diversions that are purely comedic, but it’s really helpful if they have a reason to do both.

John: Going back to the beat and scene description, it’s like that beat that it just has a bunch of funny banter; it’s not really a beat. It’s not a thing that happens. Nothing changed over the course of it. It’s very unlikely it’s going to first survive the outline stage, but then actually survive the edit. Because it can go away, so therefore it will go away.

Drew Goddard: Especially on something like Hail Mary, where screen time is a premium. You’re constantly having to look at, “I need to do exposition in this scene, I need to do emotional growth in this scene, I need to drive the story forward, I need to explain what the hell’s happening with the science.” You can’t do each one of those scenes on their own. All of the scenes have to be doing a version of that, for the most part.

You realize what starts to happen as we got into it is Drew became the internal clock of, “Do we have the page count?” which I try not to do, but at a certain point, you’re like, “It’s going to really hurt us later in the editing room if we don’t have a structure here.”

John: Congratulations again on the movie. It’s just so, so good.

Drew Goddard: It’s a joy to talk to you, John. It really is. Thank you for having me.

John: We have a listener question here, I think might be really good from Carlos.

Drew Marquardt: “I’m currently working on a pilot. I’ve organized a schedule that requires me to write a specific number of scenes per day, two to three tops, in order to meet the deadline. However, I find it hard to give my brain a rest in between writing sit-downs. Sometimes after an hour or two of writing, I find myself too mentally drained to start the next scene, even though I know what happens in it. Do you have any advice on activities that could help disconnect and recharge the brain battery effectively?”

Drew Goddard: I do.

John: Yes, please go. Go for it.

Drew Goddard: This is a great question. When Twin Peaks: The Return came out, there’s an eighth episode that’s all in black and white, and it’s exquisite. Have you seen it?

John: I haven’t anything.

Drew Goddard: It’s exquisite. I highly recommend it. It’s so bonkers that it made me go, “Whatever David Lynch does, I want to see what he does,” and I started doing meditation. It’s the thing that made me go, “Let me try meditation. Let me see–” I’m not super new-agey, but I was like, “Let me understand how this works.” What works for me is it calms the nervous system. It does exactly the thing that you’re describing, Carlos, which is how do you turn your brain off for a second? The other thing that works is walks. I’m a big fan of walks.

John: Yes, I was going to say walk would be the right choice.

Drew Goddard: Put the pen down, stop writing, just take a walk, and build that into your process because what will happen is those things will become the reward for the writing. Both of those things really help me.

John: Great. Yes. Walks, showers, anything to get you out of your–

Drew Goddard: Showers. I mean showers, especially in the age of smartphones. They were always important. I know this Aaron Sorkin of which you speak; he also talks a lot about showers, and there’s a reason, because it’s forcing you to be bored. That’s the other thing you’re looking for, is: it’s so hard to be bored right now in our world, and you have to force yourself to find ways to do it.

John: The other thing to remember is just like Carlos says, after two hours of writing, I sort of came to the next thing. It’s like, “Yes, because you were working really, really hard. If you were digging a ditch for two hours, you would know that you had to take a break. Your muscles would tell you you have to take a break. Your brain is telling you have to take a break.” Yes, it’s the right instinct to go do something else.

Drew Goddard: It’s a thing I don’t think people who are not writers understand, that it is grueling. There is a fatigue that sets in. By the time I’m finished with any script, I do feel like I’ve run a marathon, I do. I always talk about those videos of runners whose legs stop working just as they’re getting to the finish line. That is how I feel when I get to the end of every single script.

John: Yes, for sure. Let’s try this question from James:

Drew Marquardt: “My friend Simon and I had the same idea for a movie and decided to team up and write it. Because we have jobs, it took us two years to write the first draft. After Simon went through some personal issues as well as losing some interest in the project, we agreed that I take control of the rewrite. I was happy about that, as I thought we’d struggle to have a succinct tone and voice as a pair anyway.

I’m aware that legally this script will always be written by James and Simon, and I’ve no intention of cutting him out of anything, but by the time I will have finished the rewrite, I’ll have probably rewritten 95% of the screenplay. When we start entering competitions or shopping it around, how can I position myself as the writer who has really made it what it is, even though the characters and story were a 50-50 effort?

It’s not about money; I just want to be recognized as the person who’s put the extra hours in to get the screenplay where it is.”

John: Wow. It’s a group project, and somebody did most of the work in a group project. That’s the reality of it, and that it’s probably always going to be true. There’s never a partnership that is equal 50-50. This was not a good partnership. You probably should not write another thing with this person.”

Drew Goddard: I think that’s right. To answer your question, if you really want the credit, you need to write something else on your own if that’s what you’re seeking. Even in the best of times, it’s probably not going to happen, nor should it.

John: All right. It is time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is Kalina, K-A-L-I-N-A, which is the last name of Noah Kalina, who is a photographer in upstate New York; he mostly does landscapes. He has this series called Kalina on YouTube, which is a bunch of video wallpapers of just video from upstate New York, forests, mostly, that are so amazing and meditative and just quiet and wonderful. You should watch them on the biggest screen you can.

If you have the YouTube TV app for your Apple TV or whatever, put them on a big screen and just watch them there. They’re, I think, better than the Apple screensavers because they are, lots of times you’re in a forest, and you’re just watching him walk around taking photos, but it’s just one still shot. You hear the forest. It is great. Sometimes it’s snow, sometimes it’s rain.

Drew Goddard: Wait, say it again. That sounds fantastic.

John: Kalina, K-A-L-I-N-A. Noah also has a newsletter that’s great, also. You may have actually seen him once before because he was one of those first photographers who was taking a photo of himself every day, and it stacked up. You can see going from 20s to 50 or whatever, and just what time does to a person. His nature photography is incredible, and to have it as video is just an absolute gift. Just free on YouTube. Often, we’ll be watching a show and then when we’re done watching a show, when we’re not quite ready to go to bed, he pops that up on the TV. It’s delightful.

Drew Goddard: Sounds fantastic. Great.

John: Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew Goddard: I think teachers have been on my mind because this movie is about teachers saving the world. My mom’s a teacher. She’s been teaching for 50-plus years. I love teachers. I would not be where I am without teachers. Since we’re talking about screenwriting, the most important thing that happened to me in my career is that I arrived at the University of Colorado at the exact same time that Lucia Berlin, the author, showed up to start teaching. We found each other. She was the person who believed in me, and she was the person that said, “I’m going to spend the next three years with you. We’re going to do this together.”

She was doing it with lots of other students, too, but we really had a connection. She changed me as an artist and as a person. I think because this is on my mind, I’ve been rereading her short stories. I cannot recommend them more highly. I think especially if you like the sort of stuff I do, which is big in genre, it’s not that, and yet you will see the influence. A good place to start, her short stories got repackaged around 2015, and she finally exploded. She’s been dead for a while, so she didn’t get to see this. It would delight her. Start with any of them, quite frankly, but A Manual for Cleaning Women.

John: I’ve heard of that, yes.

Drew Goddard: It’s exquisite. I can’t recommend it more highly.

John: Lucia Berlin?

Drew Goddard: Lucia Berlin.

John: Great. Fantastic.

Drew Goddard: Great.

John: 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 the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. We’ll give you a Scriptnotes book while you’re here. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram: @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find 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 our premium subscribers.

You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes, including Drew Goddard’s back episode, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on television. Drew Goddard, an absolute pleasure chatting with you about film and TV and your incredible movie.

Drew Goddard: John, it has been an absolute pleasure. I hope we get to do it again.

John: Hooray.

[Outro – by Nick Moore]

John: All right. Drew Goddard, we’ve talked about some television over the course of this thing, but mostly about putting stuff up on boards and figuring that out. I want to talk more about TV overall, because in addition to everything else you’ve done, you adapted a French series into High Potential, which is one of the few breakout broadcast shows over the past few years. How optimistic are you about TV in general? How do you feel about TV at this moment? What’s possible? What’s good? What are you seeing?

Drew Goddard: I suppose I’m perpetually optimistic, even knowing there are dark skies above us, if that makes sense. I remember, and part of this is just coming from New Mexico, coming from a small town, not understanding the business at all. When I got here in the late ’90s, everyone was saying, “Oh, it’s a terrible time. It’s a terrible time. It’s not like it used to be.” I was like, “But I just got here. We work in Hollywood.

There’s elephants walking down this set. What are you talking about? Let’s go and enjoy this.” I think that’s always stuck with me. I do think every time period has challenges, and we are definitely in a time period of challenges, but also, what are we supposed to do? Give up? Let’s keep making stuff. Right now, they want to make it, so let’s start shooting. That tends to be my approach of, “Can we shoot something? Let’s go shoot something.”

John: High Potential was a pilot.

Drew Goddard: Yes.

John: It’s a very classical model because you think, “Oh, you just go straight to series and stuff like that,” but you wrote a pilot, they shot a pilot, and we had friends in common who worked on the show originally, so yes.

Drew Goddard: Look, I think I’m a contrarian by nature. When I first got out here, the only thing people were making was CSIs and versions of that. I was like, “No, I want to go work with Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams. J.J., he’s only doing this alias thing. Nobody really wants it because there’s serialization, and we hate serialization here in Hollywood. I was like, “Yes, but I want to write that. That sounds fun,” and that guided my career.

Then what happened was suddenly everything swung. TV became an eight-episode series that probably have been three episodes that we’ve just stretched out. I like episodes. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. Even when something is highly serialized. When I think back on the television that has moved me, I think in terms of episodes. Like, it’s Jose Chung’s From Outer Space in The X-Files. It’s every episode of The Sopranos, if we’re being honest. We could just go down the list. It’s The Body from Buffy. I love episodes.

I was like, “Wait, hang on. We’ve over-corrected here.” There’s something about this art form that I like. I do like broadcast. I don’t like the part of broadcast that makes it impossible to see your family.

John: Yes, the meat grinder of it all.

Drew Goddard: I thought, “Oh, I can create this as a concept.” The French version—I’m always looking to say no. We talked about this—when I saw it, I was like, “Oh, this feels special. This feels like a voice that is needed right now. A single mom speaking truth to power feels like something that we need right now. Maybe I can help Trojan horse it.”

John: Well, it’s also a very clear engine, which is basically, every week, it is a case of the week kind of thing with a different protagonist at the center of it. It feels very doable. Also, let’s talk about the sustainability of it. You wrote it, and there was a star attached who was like, “I need to stay in Los Angeles.” It’s designed for a star who’s going to stay in Los Angeles, a show that would shoot in Los Angeles. Those feel like fundamentally good choices.

Drew Goddard: I realized this before our studio and network, which is the main character’s a mom. That suggests a certain age range. They want somebody who’s a known quantity. In that age range, asking somebody to then go drop everything and move to Budapest or wherever the tax break is right now, it’s not going to happen when you’re trying to do this many episodes. Our only hope of finding a name is to say, “I can get you home to your kids. I can make your life good.”

I said, “We’re looking for two places, New York and Los Angeles. You guys need to come to peace with that because you’re going to hope we can find some actress that will be like, ‘Sure, I’ll move to Toronto.’ It’s not going to happen. It’s just not.” That’s what we said to Kaitlin Olson. She was like, “I don’t want to do this.” I’m like, “I understand. I get why you don’t want to do this, but let’s talk about how we can do this in a way that actually will be delightful to your life,” because that’s how it used to be.

That was Buffy. We shot here. We shot [unintelligible 01:03:29] here. We shot all of my first shows until Lost, which you couldn’t shoot here. There is a joy and an efficiency to being here that I don’t think the studios fully understand. I was like, “This is a show that lends itself to the processes of the days of old. I actually want to shoot a pilot because you learn a lot from shooting a pilot. I actually want to do these things.” There was a reason we did these things. It wasn’t arbitrary. It gave you opportunity to make the best product possible. Not everything needs it, but this one did.

I’m glad to hear you talk about story engine because I think that is the single biggest mistake young writers make. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read pilots that are very good pilots that I read, and I go, “There’s no story engine here. What you’re really writing is a longer feature.” That’s fine. I know there’s lots of wonderful six-episode shows that have been wonderful. If that’s what you want to do, fantastic. I’m always like, “Don’t tell me what Episode 1 is. I need to know what Episode 50 is.” Not in the plot of Episode 50, but where are we? I’ve been a person that’s had to sit in those rooms and go, “How are we ever going to get to this?” You realize the importance of where is the story coming from.

John: There’s a project I’m working on where I wrote, it’s a very premise-y pilot. It’s starting up the things, but then when you actually have the conversations with buyers, you have to say, “This is Episode 2,” because you have to explain, “This is what you expect to happen over the course of a normal episode.” That’s fine. Lost is a premise pilot. You have to explain, “Episode 2 is crucial for this is the kind of thing that happens in a normal episode of Lost.”

Drew Goddard: I believe that Episode twos are the hardest episodes. You can look at most shows. I’m in awe when people do Episode twos well. If you can look at Breaking Bad as a phenomenal Episode 2, they’re really hard to do for the exact reason that you’re talking about. They usually derail everything, if we’re being honest, for a while. In most shows, you learn, “We got to spend extra time on Episode 2.”

John: Yes. It’s always so fun to see, like, the set completely changed from Episode 1 to Episode 2, because I didn’t actually figure out–

Drew Goddard: Yes.

John: That happened to you, too. Yes.

Drew Goddard: We shot in Vancouver, and then we’re here, and so it changed.

John: Tell me about High Potential. You wanted to do this adaptation of this French show. You wrote the pilot, but you didn’t direct it, and you weren’t going to be a showrunner there. How do you make the decision to, like, “Okay, I want this to exist, but I don’t want this to become my life”? Is that really what–

Drew Goddard: That factors into it. That’s part of the equation, but it’s not the only equation. I also really like collaboration. You can look at my career. I am not a person that’s just secretly always wanted to direct, and bitter about it. There’s times I really want to direct. There’s stories that I feel like I’m the best person to direct, and then there’s times where I’m like, “I am not the best person,” and it’s delightful to work with other people. I enjoy that tremendously. I think that’s hard for people to understand, where I go, “No, no, I enjoy being this screenwriter. Right now, I enjoy that part and let you be the director, and I can support you.”

In the case of High Potential, I was like, “Oh, no, Alethea should direct this.” Alethea directed our pilot. She’s better than me at this. For this project, she is better at this. The same goes with showrunner, I knew very quickly, “This show, I’m going to try to start deconstructing the show.” I will start to get bored.

John: You’ll get bored, yes.

Drew Goddard: On a plot level, on a character level, I will start to be like, “And all of these characters by episode 18, they’re going to end up dead, and that’s not what we should do here. I don’t think that’s–“

John: Because you have meta-exploration of what it means to be a procedural showrunner.

Drew Goddard: I don’t want that. I actually think that it’s going to require a resolve of a different time, and part of that resolve is saying, “Drew shouldn’t be the person doing this.” I can be helpful with all of the other parts, but I don’t need to be. It’s fun. It’s fun to not be the showrunner. I’ve done that too, and I enjoy that, too. Every project has its own; it’s like you’re building a combination of what’s the best thing, and I’m lucky that I get to choose.

John: There are more pilot shooting this year than last year, and there’s also longer episode orders coming through, which seems like a promising development. I don’t know that we’re going to get more series to happen, but if we can get more episodes, it’s not just more work, but it’s also just more sustainable.

Drew Goddard: I hope, and this is going to sound cynical. I don’t mean it as cynical, but what I hope is studios are going to remember that this is wildly profitable. I think part of the problem with four/six-episode seasons is it was hard for studios to make profit on that. I don’t care. Studios meant to be clear, I don’t care. I care in the sense that if it’s profitable, they’re going to let us keep making more stuff, and they’re going to let me hire more people, and we’re going to get to do this. These things build on each other. I think we over-corrected as an industry as we were trying to get people to sign up for Screamers. That’s stopped, and now you’re remembering, “Oh, no, the longer this goes, the more profit there is,” and I think that’s helpful for all of us.

John: What recent series have gotten you most excited? What series are you watching that you didn’t create that you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s a show”?

Drew Goddard: Again, I’m not saying anything that we don’t know, but Succession, I thought, is the show that I go back to. I’ve been rereading the scripts and looking what Jesse and his writing staff did, and I’m in awe of the writing. If you really want to study writing, study Jesse’s scripts. Jesse is really operating at a level right now that I find very profound. Even though obviously showered with Emmys, I still don’t know that people realize how much he’s writing about at the time, and seeing that move forward. It’s good when I’m looking at the scripts and wanting to reread the scripts. That’s the one.

John: Over the weekend, I was having a conversation with somebody who knew a lot of stuff behind the scenes at HBO and was saying that for years, HBO was looking like, “What is our next Six Feet Under? What is our family drama that actually has an engine to it, so it’s a family, but stuff,” and that was Succession. It took a long time for them to find their new Six Feet Under, which became Succession, which was, again, an even bigger hit.

Drew Goddard: It’s one of those, “Not try this at home.” I don’t know how you would ever pitch it. I don’t know how you would ever figure out what Episode 2 is of that show. All of the rules went out the window, and yet, in hindsight, it all makes sense, right? When you look at it episode by episode, I’m like, how did human beings pull this off?

John: They did. Thanks, Drew.

Drew Goddard: Thank you.

Links:

• Project Hail Mary | Trailer
• Drew Goddard on IMDb
• The Martian screenplay
• Twin Peaks: The Return – Part 8
• Noah Kalina on YouTube and Substack
• A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.