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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 657 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Deadpool & Wolverine has become the highest-grossing R-rated film in history. Today on the show, we welcome back its co-writer, producer, and star, Mr. Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan Reynolds: Oh, hi.

John: Welcome back, Ryan.

Ryan: Hi. Very nice to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

John: Last time you were here was early pandemic and it was you and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. We talked about the fourth wall and sort of tapping on that glass. Looking back at the transcript, I think really what happened is we were all so smitten with Phoebe Waller-Bridge that we didn’t really ask you a lot of questions about stuff. We were mostly just staring at Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Ryan: I could just spend the rest of my life just listening to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, just insight, ideas, just like the level of acerbic, gorgeous wit that pours out of that person is pretty special.

John: Yes. She was fantastic. You know What? She’s not here today, so it’s all about you.

Ryan: Well, wow.

Craig: You’re just as pretty. I’m absolutely lost in your beglassed eyes.

Ryan: Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I still got it. God, that’s good.

Craig: Oh, boy, do you have it–

John: I thought we’d talk about your approach to Deadpool, really the character and the franchise as an actor, as a writer, as a producer, and really get into how you get movies made because, Ryan Reynolds, you’re actually really good at getting movies made. Your ability to will something into existence is impressive and I think it started with Deadpool. That’s your first producing credit. The ability to go from an actor who is cast in a movie to a force who makes a movie exist is something I’d really like to talk to you about.

Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about the non-film stuff you do because I think one of the things that I’ve enjoyed seeing you do over the last 10 years is make a bunch of stuff that doesn’t have to be a movie or a TV show, but it’s related to some brand that you control. My gut instinct is that it’s not about money, it’s just about the chance to make a lot of stuff, and I want to talk to you about that.

Ryan: Great. Very exciting.

John: Cool. Let’s go all the way back to Deadpool. When were you first aware of the character? When did that first cross your mind, like, “Oh, Ryan Reynolds. Deadpool. That’s a thing that I should be thinking about?”

Ryan: That’s a good question. I think it was 2004, someone sent me– I believe it was Toby Emmerich, sent me a Deadpool comic. In that comic, I appeared. My name appeared. Somebody asked what Deadpool looks like under the mask, and he said he looks like a cross between a shar pei and Ryan Reynolds. They intentionally left the Y out of my last name, I think for legal reasons or some sort of– I believe it was Joe Kelly who did that particular issue.

That was the first time I became aware of it. I just thought it was really interesting to read about this. Forget about the humor side of it. I thought it was interesting to read about a character who seemed like they were in a low to high-level militarized shame spiral over their life and their circumstances, but also was aware that they were in a comic book, which to me just added this whole other completely bizarre layer. That’s how I got into it. That was my first introduction to it.

Craig: When you read that first, did you have that instinct that this character, with its tone, was– there are things sometimes as writers, we get things, and as actors, I can only imagine this is true as well, where you go, “Oh, not only do I know how to do this. This is actually easy. This is the pitch I hit the hardest. This is going to be fun because there’s no wind resistance here. It’s just naturally in me already.”

Ryan: I mean a little bit. I’ve always loved acknowledging and playing with cultural landscape in many ways. I think that is a trait that you could superimpose onto Deadpool in that world quite easily. I don’t like how– You know when you see a TED Talk and you see, they come out and they go, “Here’s how I did it. Here’s how I knew.”

“Early on, I felt this.” It’s a really slow-motion car accident to self-gratification and giving yourself basically a public pat on the back. I find that frustrating because I don’t believe that anybody– if they do, God bless them. I don’t know that anybody was just like, “I see this as clear as a bell.” It’s so easy to mythologize that “I spent 10 years every day pushing this movie up the hill, trying to get it made because I was the only one who believed in it.”

And that’s just simply not true. I loved it. I thought that there was something really wonderful to do there. At the end of the day, many of us, I can’t speak for all of us, many of us are just fucking winging it. I knew there was something I could do there the whole thing, the whole picture. I didn’t see exactly how it could slot into the modern movie-going experience or even comic book movies. At that point, when I first read it, most comic book movies were quite serious or they’re at least starting to trend that way.

I think Deadpool’s always been unusually benefited by timing. Deadpool 1 was a curiosity. It was a natural underdog. It showed up at a time when it reached a sort of apex level of self-seriousness in that particular– I don’t know. Some people don’t call it a genre, but I do.

Then Deadpool 2 is a fast follow. I’m very, very proud of Deadpool 2, up until this last one, it was my favorite of them. Then, of course, Deadpool and Wolverine, I think, again, very lucky to slot in at the exact right time.

Craig: I believe Deadpool called it a low point.

Ryan: A low point. Yes. The dip. Deadpool called it the dip. Yes. “He’s joining in a low point.” It was really all these little things… It’s luck. I didn’t write Marvel Jesus as a commentary on where the studio was at this exact moment, but it came around at the right time and it was– Yes.

John: Let’s wind back, though, a little bit because the idea of you as a superhero was not unexpected. At the time that Toby Emmerich sent over this Deadpool comic, had you already done Blade Trinity?

Ryan: No. Sorry. I was on set.

John: On Blade Trinity, you were meant to be a supporting character who ended up getting a sort of bigger role as things went along and you had what’s now the classic Ryan Reynolds wit. You were commenting on the situations that you’re experiencing in ways that felt new and fresh and you were the best thing in that movie.

Ryan: Well, I don’t know about that but–

Craig: No. I do know about that. That’s absolutely true. The side note was not only shocked to see Blade in Deadpool & Wolverine, I was shocked to see Blade. That was pretty startling. The history of that, of Blade 3 is out there. Yes. That was pretty eye-opening and a testament, I think, again to, I don’t know, your ability to manifest things. That’s pretty remarkable.

Ryan: I mean come on. What about redemption and culture and storytelling? Redemption is one of the greatest engines, I think, of emotion and storytelling and all kinds of stuff. I felt like that character, in particular, never got that third act, that moment to– particularly, if you think about Wesley Snipes, the guy’s a movie star. He’s just a thousand-billion-watt movie star. And charisma in spades. Yes. I don’t know. I was just grateful he said yes. I wasn’t sure that he would say yes. It was certainly a nerve-wracking phone call, cold calling him out of the blue after 20 years.

He was a dream. He was just an absolute dream. I feel like I get goosebumps even talking about him, seeing him break the frame in the movie, that first moment, and seeing that with thousands of people at Comic-Con who are all seeing it for the first time ever, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything that was that beautiful. I remember thinking how lucky I am to be any part of this, let alone Deadpool. It was just such an amazing moment, not just for me, but for everybody.

Craig: Yes. I love Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan: Oh, come on now.

Craig: No. I do. I do.

Ryan: Welcome to my TED Talk, Craig. This is how I did it.

Craig: I can’t help it. It’s just it’s the Canadian humility. Canadian humility is a special kind. It really is. It’s a beautiful thing.

Ryan: It’s a fine line between the humility and just self-loathing, unabashed self-loathing, unregulated. Yes. Horrible.

Craig: Yes. I know a little bit about that.

Ryan: Yes. Sure. We all do. Right?

Craig: Yes.

Ryan: That’s how we know how to type.

Craig: There you go.

Ryan: Yeah. The whole thing’s been a pretty wild journey, but I don’t want to derail us from– I think you had a question about how sort of at the beginning of it all or–

John: Before it became even conceivable that you were going to do a Deadpool character, because that was a very fringe Marvel character. It wasn’t sort of like the next thing on the plate for them to try to do. I was writing Shazam over at Warner’s.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

John: I remember we had a conversation.

Ryan: I remember. Yes.

John: Yes. I remember having a conversation. It’s like, “Well, we need somebody who feels like a superhero, but is actually funny, can play like a little kid.” “Oh, we should do Ryan Reynolds.” Ryan Reynolds wasn’t a big enough star at that point, which was so incredibly frustrating.

Ryan: Shazam is such a great– it’s big. You get to do all that. I just love that character.

John: Yes. There’s a different universe in which you did that. Instead, you got to play a version of this character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I remember when you were getting ready to go off and do that, and you did all the sword practice, then you went off to Australia, and it was a frustrating experience while you were doing it, but it was a chance to play this character. How do you think about that? You had very little control over that manifestation, but there was a chance to play that character.

Craig: To play a character, named that character.

John: Named that character. Yes. That was roughly related to it.

Craig: Specifically without the one thing that made that character interesting. That was the weirdest thing of all. It’s the most verbal character possible, and they’re like, “What is–?”

Ryan: “We should sew his mouth shut.”

Craig: Yeah.

Ryan: I would say it’s more of like, you could characterize that whole era as observations in a scarcity mindset. This business is so transactional, and particularly for me at that point, it was incredibly transactional. The idea that somebody says, “Hey, you can play this character. If you ever want to have a shot at bringing it to the big screen in the way you want, then you should probably do this.” You think, “Oh, I don’t know. This isn’t quite the way I hoped it would ever be, but I also don’t want some other guy to go do it.” Next thing I know, he’s in a red body condom, and he’s running around and having all the fun, so I said, “Yes.”

At that point, too, I’d been learning a lot, because I’d been on some pretty, I don’t want to say chaotic sets, because immediately, people think like people with attitudes and assholes and all kinds of stuff. But there was a propensity for some of these bigger movies to just have this scary sort of middle think sometimes, and it’s like so many people weighing in with so many different ideas and opinions, and everything gets washed out. Any kind of idea you really had to grow in the story sort of gets strangled and killed early on.

I remember sort of seeing that a lot during that period. X-Men Origins: Wolverine did two things. One, I really saw how hard it is to make these bigger movies with so many different characters and studios and opinions and ideas. The other thing I saw was how– Hugh Jackman left the biggest impression on me on that movie because he was so accessible, so kind, obviously so talented, so charismatic, but everything about him was just the genuine article. He was so authentically unique and that he was– everybody felt seen by him. It was incredible leadership.

You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’ve all been on big movies that are hard to land the plane. I was blown away that somebody could be a movie star on that level and still have so much humanity. It was a nice time for me and my life and my arc to see that kind of person out there in the world. I was grateful for that.

John: You’re both going to be very surprised because I’m going to try a sports metaphor here.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Let’s see how this goes.

Ryan: Whoa. John August. Jesus. Wow.

Craig: Okay. Let’s buckle up everyone here. Here we go.

Ryan: It’s going to be like cricket or something or–

Craig: It’s going to be a hockey ball going through a baseball.

John: I’m going for American football here. This is really a dangerous one for me. I would say that the lead actor in a film, like the number one on the call sheet, ends up being like the quarterback of the team. Everyone sort of looks for the quarterback. They’re not the coach. They’re not the person who’s ultimately calling the shots. They’re not the manager. They don’t own it. They’re not deciding how the whole franchise is going to run, but they’re the person who’s going to set the tone in terms of how we’re going to get this stuff done.

I’ve seen so many movies that have gone better because there was somebody in that lead slot who really got it and sort of could make everyone feel like this is the spirit of how we’re making this movie. And so many productions where it’s all gone south because that number one on the call sheet was just not a good quarterback and people couldn’t look to them for inspiration. So I feel like– You talked about Hugh Jackman, that feels like what he is doing because he’s not generally the person who’s producing the film. He doesn’t have the overall vision for the thing, but he is the right spirit behind it.

Ryan: Yes. I feel like that’s very, very spot-on and astute. I think that what happens more than anything, even just outside of the creative part of it, is that number one on the call sheet that creates a language and a disposition around that movie that will be the experience. It’s a bit of that, Maya Angelou, “Believe in the first time…” That first day or two or that week, exactly how this is going to go.

We’ve all been there, too, where the number one is aptly named. You just kind of, “Ugh,” everything starts to fall apart and you feel this weird toxic thing starts to pour down. Then, the next thing you know, number 52 on the call sheet like having a similar sort of disposition to number one. They’re all seeing the validation of that. Everybody’s seeing like, “Wow. All the energy goes around to the person who’s difficult or hard to work with.”

Maybe that’s a short-term, I don’t know, hit of endorphins for someone. I’m not really sure, but the long-term effects of the movie is always just stifled and shit. Nobody’s able to really say what they’re hoping, how the story could evolve. If you can’t talk to somebody that you’re working with and feel like they’re willing to step outside of whatever agenda they have, I don’t know, you’re dead on arrival. If you’re not dead on arrival, you got really lucky, I think.

Craig: Obviously, you’re number one on the call sheet, and I would imagine all the time now, but certainly, for Deadpool, when you come in there with this knowledge that you’re the Hugh Jackman, essentially, and you have people looking up to you now, even the day players that might murder you, which is hysterical, what do you do?

You were talking about the idea of people, other actors coming to you and talking about how to elevate the story. Or talking about story at all, which, by the way, is so exciting for me to hear, that anyone’s talking about story as opposed to other crap. How do you welcome your cast into that, and how do you set the tone for them?

Ryan: Well, it starts with casting. You got to go cast the people that you know and trust and feel like they’re going to show up for you and show up for them. But running a set that feels safe is hugely important to me, but not for the reasons you might think. It’s a very selfish pursuit because I want everyone to feel amazing and safe and that they can speak up or voice something that concerns them or something that inspires them or just have that idea that this is a collaboration.

Filmmakers shouldn’t just be reserved for a director, a producer, writer, and a star, among a few other names on the poster. Everyone’s making the movie. I would sit at Pinewood and look at these fourth-generation craftspeople building things on those sets. The level of expertise and talent that has been handed down to them and that they’ve also refined and put their shoulder behind and grown is like it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I never get tired of that. I never get tired of working with hyper-competent reliable people.

Whenever I have conversations like this, I think, if you could say one word for the kind of person that I think is capable, not every time, nobody bats a thousand, but is capable of making stories that resonate and stories that really work in culture, it’s conscientious. I know that’s such an unsexy word, but people who are conscientious, I think, just excel. One quick little clue that somebody’s conscientious is the dumbest and simplest one, they’re on time. They show up on time. They feel like they’re literally 30 seconds late, but there’s a bit of a, “Ugh. I let myself down.” I don’t know. I never get tired of that, of working with people who live that way, and it bears incredible fruit when you do that.

John: Yes. So Deadpool is your first producing credit. This is the first time where your name is appearing on it. This is your production that you’re overseeing and to have all these values and hopefully get them to come about, but I want to talk to you about getting Fox to say yes, because there was this idea of doing a Deadpool movie. You shot test footage. You had a script together, but you couldn’t get over the starting line there. What was the conversation about trying to do a Deadpool movie and how did you finally push it into existence?

Ryan: It was right in a– everything crashed into this intersection of Green Lantern and Deadpool. I was really hoping to get a Deadpool movie greenlit, and it just was so slow and just not happening. I think the edict at the studio at that point was that they did want to do it, but they just didn’t want to do it yet. They wanted to service these other X-Men characters, which I understand. It’s easy to tell the story in a binary sense that it was them against me, but I also understand how those things work.

I remember sending emails to Fox saying, “I think I’m going to end up doing this other–“ this goes back to what I said earlier. Every actor, every performer, everyone in our industry, writers, directors, producers, there’s always a little scarcity mindset. We always think, “I’m fucked. I’m never going to do this again.” If I don’t act now…

Green Lantern had come around and I had auditioned for it, I don’t know, four or five times at this point, and it was really getting to the finish line. That was when I was saying, like, “Please, is there any chance that you–“ it was a bit like a romantic comedy at the end. “I won’t walk down the aisle with this person if you just blink twice,” and they didn’t blink twice.

I went and did that and then, somehow, some way I was able to– I had already shot the test footage for Deadpool and after Green Lantern and all that debacle, and you think, “How am I ever going to pull out of this?” The test footage ended up on the internet, and boy, that’s what got it greenlit, only because that was the first time I really saw the power of how social media can persuade an entire studio to say yes to something like that.

Craig: It’s not surprising to me that they were– I have this saying that there’s a million ways to say no and only one way to say yes in Hollywood, and the only way to say yes is money, and everything else is no, including soon, or not yet, thinking about it, all is no.

It’s not surprising to me because Hollywood, particularly Hollywood over the last, I would say, 20 years, has become terrified of anything new and obsessed with anything that is established. Deadpool was a comic book, but it wasn’t a comic book that most people knew. The only way it would work is if it were a rated R, which superhero movies are not, ever.

Ryan: No.

Craig: The humor violated all of the self-important, self-serious storytelling principles that were powering not only the resurgence of the superhero genre but movies itself. The entire industry had now become lifted by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That was what every– other studios lost God knows how much, trying to make other cinematic–

Everyone lost their fucking minds. You are saying, “I would like to do one of those things, except it’s R, and it’s fucked. It is dirty. It is so dirty I get pegged in it.” That’s how dirty it is. I talk to the screen. I violate every single principle of what would get you to say yes. The reason they said yes is because they never really had to say yes. They got a freebie. They got the audience to tell them, “No. No. No. We got it. We’re good. Go ahead. Go ahead. Give it to us,” which is incredible.

I think the reason other people don’t try to repeat that is because they can’t, because if you leak test footage, there’s a 99% chance it’s going to be shredded apart. That particular footage got right to the heart of something that people didn’t know they needed. That’s what I think what I love about this character and this– fuck the word franchise, this series of movies the most, is that it was satisfying something in me that I didn’t know I wanted. You guys do this so well. I want to ask you about this, specifically from a writing point of view, how to satisfy the basic needs of redemption stories, love stories about, in this case, what it means to have significance and matter in your life.

Fairly heavy things. Again, I’ve said it on this show many times, I cried at the end of Deadpool 2. And somehow, work those into this mesh of both plot that makes sense, by the way, which is more than I could say for most superhero movies, and this insane tone. How do you marry those things that seem, at least to me, to be initially incompatible?

Ryan: That’s a lot to unpack.

Craig: Yes. Start at the beginning.

Ryan: Let me start with one thing that just popped into my head, which is that, yes, there’s a lot of cinematic universes and all that stuff. I don’t think that any of these movies that we know and love right now exist in the way that we know and love them. I’m not saying everyone has to know and love them. Without Blade, I know that’s a weird thing to pivot back to, but Blade, in 1998, I think Stephen Norrington’s Blade beget, obviously, that becoming a franchise. It was rated R. They did all these things first, and they don’t typically get a ton of credit for it. I mean it was the first–

I think you even saw “Bullet Time,” which is actually something that actually really started a couple of decades before in various iterations. In Blade, used in pop culture in that way, and it was mind-blowing. Then Matrix, of course, really refined it and made it what it is.

That sort of gave way to the X-Men Universe. The X-Men Universe gave way to the MCU. Then all these things sort of happened. You just said something I thought that was very interesting, which is that when people get to witness or feel something that they love but just maybe didn’t know they loved, or for me, it’s seeing Wesley Snipes in Deadpool & Wolverine break that frame, I feel like some people missed him and were clear about it. I think some people missed him desperately but didn’t know they did until that moment. That’s the greatest– that just takes me out at the knees every time.

I love storytelling like that, but then, also, to sort of talk about studios saying, yes. Well, okay. We get to make this. We’ll say yes to this even though we didn’t really have to say yes to this. We got this backdoor insurance plan. They still didn’t really believe in it. I’m not trying to romanticize it or anything, but the budget was $58 million for Deadpool 1, which sounds hefty and should be plenty to do anything. No. It was brutal.

But you said one other thing, which I thought was interesting, is that it was a character that people didn’t really know. I saw those two things as actually, or at least I came to see those things. I want to be careful because I hate that sort of, “I saw it this way.” But I came to see that truly all the greatest lessons I ever learned were on that movie. Necessity is the mother of invention. Too much time and too much money really will annihilate creativity in a lot of ways.

The fact that we had so little forced us to– I remember Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and I, who we broke the story for Deadpool 1 at a lunch at the Chateau Marmont in LA, in one lunch, setting the entire story, and it never changed. Then we had to sort of change some of the set pieces from this huge action set pieces to like a sequence in Deadpool 1, which is 12 bullets, which is Deadpool has 12 bullets, there’s 30 bad guys on the road, so he yells out, “I only have 12 bullets, so you’re going to have to share.”

We have to find this way to get through all that stuff. Suddenly, the audience is hooked into the idea. Deadpool, who breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience often, has already let them know that Fox is fucking cheap, and they’re never going to give us even a remotely close to a normal budget, even of their worst X-Men movies.

We have to make do. It really allows authorship for the audience, too. They feel like they’re a part of something. They feel separate from the studio. It’s like the same reason when you make a commercial. It’s like if you– audiences are smart. If you let them know, and they freely admit that they’re watching a commercial to sell a product, they will jump into that story, and they will share that story much sooner than if you’re trying to be sneaky and manipulate them and make them cry and do all this other stuff. Then at the end of it, a Tide pod show up in the middle of your screen, and the logo, it’s a little harder.

I was lucky that they felt like they were on board with this pretty early on. That was where I really fell in love with marketing, because it was– when you asked early, you said that they didn’t know who the character was. Rather than give away all the assets in commercials and trailers and stuff, we really did our best to hide everything and just start writing marketing spots. I stole the suit and I kept it with me. I still have it downstairs.

We just started shooting stuff and really trying to get the audience to be a little bit more fluent with the character, the tone, and the vibe, without actually showing them chunks of the movie. That was just a lesson that has never stopped giving. You guys have all both worked on massive projects and massive movies, and you know that at the end of the day, you don’t– there’s never enough time and there’s never enough money no matter what it is that you’re doing.

We all think asymmetrically, though, when our back is against the wall. We are experiencing enormous constraint, and that’s when just the best possible shit happens, and it happens over and over and over again, and it’s something I will never get tired of.

John: Jesse David Fox wrote a good book this past year on comedy, and he came on the podcast, we talked about it, but he actually had a note about Deadpool, and he says that “Deadpool is a bouffon, a classic French figure who connects to their audience, not through radical vulnerability, like a clown, but by mocking the audience members and the work they’ve come to see.”

It’s that sense of like you are watching a movie, and we’re all watching a movie, and you’re able to make fun of the people who are sponsoring this movie and enjoy the process of picking apart this thing that we’re in. The other thing which is so strange about Deadpool that I want to talk to you about is, since you’re wearing the mask most of the time, and it really covers your whole face, it’s not like Batman where it’s just the cowl and you can see the rest of it. We can’t see your reactions. You had to, as an actor, I want to talk about sort of the physicality you have to bring to it in order to play an emotion that you would otherwise play on your face. Then how did that also impact the writing? How did it impact scenes that you were doing since we cannot see your face?

Ryan: Okay. First off, I would disagree with the first thing you said. I don’t feel like Deadpool mocks the audience and the people paying for it. I believe, and perhaps I’m defensive of it, but I believe that Deadpool, I believe it is clown work.

All of it is clown work. Your hands, the way everything moves, this may be something that actually limits my ability to perform, but I’m very camera-aware. I can look and watch the assistant cameraman put a lens on, I can see what size the lens is from far away, I know exactly where he is right now, I don’t need to ask him where if it’s a cowboy, if it’s here or here, and I use the space.

If you ever watch like every prima painting with Tony Zhou, there’s one particular special he does on Buster Keaton called The Art of the Gag. The Art of the Gag is like basically, to me, is a college course that runs four minutes long. It’s just so– I’ve always loved this about Buster Keaton is that his physicality, how he tells a story with every square inch of his body and every square inch of the frame and how we hold that static frame. It can always be a bit of a tricky conversation because you want–

Obviously, you want your DP who’s forgotten more about photography in the last hour than I will ever know, but I want him to feel completely free and know what to do. I also love a static frame. I really don’t want to move the camera, just leave it there because I believe things are funnier in a static frame. We feel less like the camera’s telling us what to feel or what to move.

Craig: Bless you for this. Bless you for this. Static and wide.

Ryan: Right? It’s just the go. I don’t–

Craig: Throw a 27 on and, yes, just let me go. Comedy, that’s comedy. The camera shouldn’t be in the way. I completely agree.

Ryan: Yes, and a long, long lens either. If we’re going to go close, I don’t want that either. I don’t want this movement that’s like– a little bit is okay. I get a little crazy about that and try to tell the story. Then the mask, I find so much more freeing than being unmasked. Of course, Deadpool, when he takes his mask off, he has another mask underneath, which is a prosthetic makeup job.

The mask has always been very subtly animated by Wētā. In every one of the movies, we do it this way. I’ll give you an example for the last movie, where Shawn Levy and I would be sitting in the edit room and say, “Okay. That’s like in the movie. We’re going to lock that. We know that.” Whereas we’re locking reels toward the end.

I will then take my camera phone, film my face saying every line in that sequence as it appears on camera and send it directly to Wētā in New Zealand. They will come back with the mask, just subtly animate. That helps a little bit, gives us a little bit extra, but you don’t need it. The movie works just as well sometimes without even that. When we test it, the reactions are without them.

Craig: It is an amazing thing that just to tie it back to writing again, that the way the character is written to be so verbal, the blank mask in front doesn’t– You’re right. It actually not only does it not get in the way. I think in a way it helps in the way that a static frame helps. It takes some of the other stuff away and lets you just listen to the words.

As writers, this is very exciting because sometimes, when we’re making things, I’ll see someone perform something that I wrote and I think, “Oh, you said it right, but your face was doing another thing. Let’s go again.” There’s something about removing all of those things. I talked to with Pedro Pascal about this in The Mandalorian. It was like a weird freeing thing to just talk. I think it helps Deadpool specifically because he is so verbal.

Ryan: Also just to touch on the writing part of it, which I know is really why we’re here. I tend to– and people think I’m an improv guy, which I am a little bit, but I write everything. I write all my alts. I have sometimes up to 20 alts for one joke. I’ll throw, “Here’s five alts for Hugh, here’s 10 alts for you, here’s 2 alts for you, or even three.” I love that part of it. It’s not improv.

In terms of the writing, because Deadpool only works if there’s something about it that is anchored in emotion. It’s easy to forget the emotional part of those movies, but it always has to be anchored in something tragic and awful or something generally not as existential except for the last one.

For me, to express micro facial expressions, I have to use my voice, which is weird. I need to tell the audience a story and I need to– it’s almost like how a pitcher can put real junk on a ball. You have to just– it’s this very tiny, tiny little adjustment, but it makes all the difference in the world. I love that. I love that challenge. It’s something that you never ever finish. I’ve never walked away from one of those movies. Even just when we locked, when Shawn and I locked this movie, I’ve never been so depressed. That last reel locked and all the possibility was gone and that was it. That was three years. There it goes. Yes. It’s always a tough moment, but I love the challenge of it. I’m addicted to it.

John: I want to talk to you about alts and ADR with the mask on. You have the ability– you could change lines at any point. How much does stuff tend to move from what you shot on the set versus what’s in the film that we see? Related question, you say you might have 10 or 20 alts for a line. Where are you keeping those? Are those in the main script or do you just have a separate sheet that goes with the scene and say, “Hey. These are the alts”?

Ryan: My notes section. Yes.

John: All right. Notes on your phone?

Ryan: Notes and then I put them in script, too. Maybe I’m just a little type A. I don’t like the page count getting out of control. I don’t like the– as much as I try to, we try to do the– What’s it called? The command D where you get dialogue that’s side by side and stuff.

Craig: Dual dialogue.

Ryan: Dual dialogue. Sorry. Yes. I do a lot of that [chuckles] because I also love it when people talk over each other. It feels real and fun. I’m always shocked when that’s met with resistance, which it is sometimes people are like, “Well, no. You have to– My line, your line.” I’m like, “Yes, but not that– it’s like old school. I speak, you speak.” You’re like, Howard Hawks– Everyone was speaking. I’m pretty sure the gaffer was yelling in the middle of the take. I love that.

The alts are generally hidden in my phone and I sometimes don’t get to all of them. Then it’s just fun. You live with something in the edit for months and then you go, “Well, you open the bin up again. What’s over there?” You’re just like, “Oh, that’s so fun.” Then you put it in and it’s– everybody feels reinvigorated again.

Then you asked me about, oh, the amount of ADR. There is some less than you would imagine. Things don’t land at– for some reason they did work better when they were just happened on the day. Then I will do a lot of ADR though and change certain things to accommodate exposition or something you might’ve missed. Boy, the mask is incredibly handy for that.

Then there’s a ton of stuff that happens from pre-production into production and then certainly in post where you both know this better than anybody, but you try to not just listen to your script and your shot list and you try to listen to the movie. If you listen to it, it yells at you, and it tells you all these different things.

If you have an ability and it’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Shawn Levy, working with him, is he’s obviously an incredible storyteller who can do it in all kinds of different genres, but he’s great at pivoting and I love to pivot. I love to do it in a way that is responsible and adherent to the budget and our clock and our schedule. It doesn’t feel like a runaway train in any way, shape, or form. That touches a little bit on what we were talking about earlier where I was on some chaotic large sets and I never wanted to be on one of those or author a set like that.

Showing up with a complete draft is super important to me. I know a lot of comic book movies get where they’re like, “We don’t have a script yet, but we’re going to start shooting. We’ll figure it out. We’re going to shoot plates after every shot and we’ll–” That to me is just like a throat– I have a forest of ulcers in my stomach. I just don’t– I cannot do that. I come with like contingency plans, all kinds of stuff. If we don’t get this actor, we don’t get that, we can go this way, this way. A lot of different drafts, tons of writing, but I love it.

Craig: That’s producing. You’re also describing how producorial you are. Lindsay Doran said that the primary job of a producer is to protect the intention of the screenplay and all the other producers laugh at her. “Oh, no. It’s to–“ I don’t know, accrue wealth like dragons and sit on it. I think she’s right. It sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing, which is making sure that within the reality that you have, which is money and time and people, that you can protect the intentions of the screenplay up until the point you’ve gathered all the footage, at which point now that’s the screenplay, protect the intention of that, move those pieces around as they want to make them sing–

Ryan: And knowing what’s important. I think it’s like if you can create a moat around what’s really important in the movie, everything else seems to work out. The thing both Shawn and I are most proud of in this whole movie isn’t the box office necessarily. We had a day and a half of reshoots in the whole movie. I’m so proud of that. I just feel like I want all the– it goes back to like my– when I was young and just the shittiest student on earth. I never got an A or a gold star. This is like one thing with Marvel where I was like, “Well, Dad, Are you proud of me, Dad? I did the thing.” It’s so sad and pathetic, but I’m really proud of that, that part on time, on budget, and a day and a half of reshoots. It’s like, yes, just feel like Shawn and I both landed the plane exactly how they were hoping.

Craig: Well, it worked and it’s great. I texted Shawn. I actually saw it last night because we wrapped on Friday. That was my life. Then my reward was going to see your movie and Melissa and I just sat there howling. We weren’t in a packed theater. Sometimes, when you go see a comedy and you’re like, “Oh, there’s not that many people because it’s a weird time of day and it’s four weekends later or whatever.” It’s not as– It was totally funny. I didn’t care. I was laughing my ass off.

Ryan: Shawn is such an inherently optimistic person and I love that about him. If there’s one thing that he and I both try to put in everything that we’ve done is just an absence of cynicism and really that feeling of like really just trying to throw the best possible fastball of joy we can muster. He’s so good at that. I felt like I found the dance partner I’ve waited for my whole life.

Craig: Well, that’s amazing.

John: I’d love to talk about the Marvel of it all because the first two Deadpool movies are made for Fox. Fox had its own sort of offshoot of the Marvel Universe and then Disney buys Fox. It was a question of like, “Well, what the hell happens to Deadpool?” You can’t imagine Disney making a Deadpool movie.
When did those conversations started? I remember you and I chatting about like, “Oh, Feige wants to do a thing, but I don’t know if it’s going to work.” How did that actually all come about? When was the sit down and say like, “Okay. I’m going to do this movie and here’s the idea for doing this movie.” How did that all come to pass?

Ryan: Boy, it was the slowest-moving train ever. Disney bought Fox and then there was obviously a period of limbo after that. With some speed, I was sitting in Kevin’s office though at Marvel and talking. I had a pitch for him. It was a Deadpool & Wolverine movie and it was the Roshomon story that I had been working on with Scott Frank.

Kevin just didn’t see it. He was just like– Now I think I know more, which is that there was a lot of different licensing issues that were really challenging at the time that nobody really wanted to say out loud. So he just summarily said, “Look, that’s never going to happen. Logan’s dead. Let’s move on.” I had a way to do it that didn’t disrupt that timeline, but didn’t matter. I had a lot of meetings with Kevin. Kevin is like the– I’ve never met anyone as genial, kind, nice, engaged, just really genuinely warm and wonderful human being. You could sit in his office for an hour and a half. You could walk out to the lot at Disney, and you’d be like, “That was the best meeting ever.” Then you get halfway to your car and you’re like, “Nothing happened. Wait. Nothing. There’s no directive. Wait. What’s happening? What am I supposed to–? I thought–?” It was a weird thing.

Then finally it just eventually found its footing. I’m a very lazy writer. I don’t like writing. I’m not you guys. It’s much more of a gift I think that you guys can just sit down and crank something out. It takes me a while to get into that rhythm where it’s actually productive. I tend to– I’m not a good enough writer to just bang through something quickly. I can lose days on one paragraph, and then I can suddenly get 20 pages out in a day, it’s just like you just– it’s such an awe– I don’t know how– One day, I went– I don’t want to bore because you guys have probably covered this in many, I guess–

Craig: Oh, we’ve bored everyone.

Ryan: –I would love to hear more about that. I want to know what your tricks are because I have those moments where I just– everyone’s like, “No. You got to move on. You move through. You just–“ and I can’t.

Craig: Ryan, we’re never giving you our tricks because you have nearly everything. You want the one last thing that we have. We’re never– Never. Never.

Ryan: I don’t blame you. I’m pseudo-retired now anyway so that’s fine. It’s fine. I’m done. I cranked out quite a few little treatments and different things. At one point, one of my favorites was just– I did a short before Deadpool 2 called No Good Deed, which I thought was fun, just wrote this little short shot at– with Dave Leitch. It was amazing. Loved doing it. I wanted to write another short now that Disney bought Deadpool and I basically–

It was just Deadpool in a room interrogating this old, old man. We don’t know who he is but we slowly come to realize that he’s the hunter who shot Bambi, Bambi’s mom. We keep going. You think like any minute of Deadpool’s just going to take this guy’s life in the most grotesque way. By the end, you just realize that Deadpool’s just a huge fan. Remember having that wonderful call with Alan Bergman and Ellen Horn just saying like, “No. We don’t mess with Bambi.”

Craig: That’s great.

Ryan: I was like, “Okay. Good. No problem. I got it loud and clear.” The fun story would be that working with Disney and Marvel throughout this was insanity and tested the limits of taste and all kinds of stuff for them and for us. It was the opposite. Once we actually locked into it, they were awesome.

John: Things like the TVA, your movie wouldn’t make sense if there weren’t the multiple universes and the Timeline Variance Authority, all that stuff, which is established in the Loki TV series. You needed to know about that. Is that a thing where they came to you like this is a framework for how this could fit in?

Ryan: Yes. They gave us a bunch of different avenues. I knew I wanted to do a movie that touched on and commented on and played with the multiverse because I knew that was the only way I could have Wolverine/Logan in the movie without disrupting or hurting the legacy and the, I think, the beauty that Mangold, Michael Green and Scott Frank had created on Logan.

It was really this idea that you have an anchor being, that anchor being is dead. Deadpool, obviously, as diluted as he is, thinks the anchor being was him. He’s fine. But then, of course, we find out it’s Logan. That to me was a way of respecting everything that they did while still having our fun by starting the whole movie off in an action sequence using only his bones as weapons.

Craig: Well that’s a really interesting lesson about– that I would probably push into the world of parody where you are taking something that you love and respect. Then gently making fun of it because you love and respect it. It also lets the audience know that you’re not fucking around. There was something about that opening sequence where it was like, “Hey, look. This guy died but like always, they didn’t really die because this is the young and the restless.” It just goes on forever, some multiverse. Starting with that I thought was a great way to establish tone.

John: Yes. Close the chapter, too.

Craig: Yes. To respect it, acknowledge it, and then definitively say– I thought it was really important to definitively say, “Hey, guys, that’s not the wolverine in this movie.” That one’s okay. Your experience of that movie not changed because we’re not dealing with that. That guy died. Man, what a great way to start. I just thought it was so smart.

Ryan: Set to Bye Bye Bye, too, which is just– the words of that I just love, that was the real motivation to use it. It was just like, “Bye-bye.” Goodbye.

Craig: Yes. Goodbye.

Ryan: That’s done. Now let’s move on to this other thing.

Craig: It’s so done. In fact, just in case you were wondering if we were going to take this skeleton because Marvel does this all the time and put it in the reanimated juice. You did literally just shredded apart and used it to kill people. The finality of that and the– like I said, the respect. It’s a weird thing to say, “Oh, digging up a character’s dead body and shredding it apart and using it to kill people is a sign of respect.” It clearly was.

Ryan: Oh, man. We are reverent of everything that– If you meet a couple and they’re just exceedingly cordial to each other and polite. You’re like, “Oh, what’s wrong there?” They take, you bust each other’s shops a little bit, then you’re like, “Oh, okay. Now I believe. You guys do like each other.”

John: Well, the other set of bones you’re dealing with in this movie is the bones of the Fox-Marvel movies. They said the whole legacy of all those movies that came before, which weren’t dismissed, but were not treasured at the moment. That the actual end credits really go back through a celebration of what those movies were. Of course, the Chris Evans joke that we were assuming that this one character is actually the character he played before. How early in the pitch process were you talking about this celebration of the forgotten Fox characters?

Ryan: Pretty early. Chris Evans was Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s idea. It was just genius and never changed and that was set in stone from the jump but I really wanted to steer away from the MCU. “Here’s all the new toys in the MCU. Instead can we find a way to eulogize this whole world?”

So much of what ended up in the movie was based in what was actually happening, which was that Disney bought Fox. They said, we want Deadpool. We don’t want anyone else. No one. They can all get fucked and we’ll figure them all out later. I felt like, “Well, hold on. You can keep your MCU. I want my friends. I want my blind owl. I want Vanessa and a Colossus and all these other– I want them.” It was really tricky. Again, I think it might’ve been a rights licensing thing when I look back at it.

I really struggled with that. That actually ended up becoming the impetus for the entire story. It became an allegory for Disney buying Fox was what the TVA was. “We’re going to prune your universe but we only want you because you’re special for some reason and we don’t want anybody else.” It was so fun to just– again, that necessity is mother invention thing, just use what’s actually coming at you and find inspiration in that. That’s what pushed the whole story forward. Then this idea that both myself, Shawn Levy and Hugh Jackman, all three of us, our entire careers we owe to 20th Century Fox.

That’s where these things happen again. There’s no master plan. You’re like, “Well, let’s plop…” In the void, there’s relics everywhere. There’s just shit all over the place, Easter eggs, all kinds of stuff. What if we put the huge 20th Century Fox logo and it’s sticking out of the ground in the back?

John: A Planet of the Apes reference?

Ryan: Yes. That pushed us toward more of this larger eulogy of this world and these characters that are a bygone era and tipping our hat to them and saying goodbye to them in a way that you just normally couldn’t in any other kind of movie. Then even the end legacy reel that plays to the Green Day song at the very end was like– I was sitting at Petersham Gardens, someplace in London on an off day shooting, and I heard that song, and then it just–

I had already been thinking like, “I need to find a way to pay off the logo that’s in the ground.” Otherwise, it’s just going to look a sight gag for the movie, and I want it to mean something and it didn’t. This is just probably the worst way to be writing a screenplay or a story, but you’re sitting there hearing that song, it’s like, “I wonder if we could get the rights to all the different performers and people who had brick by brick built that universe?” Having Chris Evans morph into flame, and then reappear as Michael B. Jordan’s Human Torch and then have that wonderful jump from James McAvoy to Patrick Stewart and back. It was really fun. We had that cut and put together maybe five days after that. We were–

John: That’s great.

Ryan: That was just as we were coming back from the strike where that happened.

John: Now, Ryan Reynolds, you’re very good at making movies. There’s other people who are good at making movies. No one is better than you are at promoting a movie. I want to just wrap up this Deadpool segment by talking about the months-long promotional push you did for Deadpool.

It was just remarkable. It wasn’t just a world tour. We’ve seen other performers do that but you actually just– you made the promotion of the movie and event in and of itself. How early were you thinking about that? How much was it a plan that was codified versus you just figuring out on the go what the next thing is to do?

Ryan: So much of all of our jobs is listening. You listen to culture. The water cooler is digital, so you’re sitting around it, and trying to gather what you can gather. Two things that, maybe this never happened, but we wanted a less is more approach. Disney has one of the most sophisticated promotional mechanisms and systems that can just perforate any part of the world at any time. That was wild to witness and learn from.

Everything we were trying to orchestrate at Maximum Effort, which is the company that does the production and marketing, was a bit of a love letter to the same thing that made me so nervous in the screenwriting. Again, I’m one of several writers on this movie, but the thing that I was most nervous about was making sure that Hugh and Wolverine were taken care of. I always thought if we fail that, even in the slightest misstep, we’re fucked. Once we got that on the screen in a way that we felt moving and honest, then the marketing came around with that too.

A lot of the pieces were directed at Wolverine and how special this moment is for him to be here. Also, there’s a line in the movie where I say to him right at the end, I say, “I’ve waited a long time for this, team-up.” He looks back at me and I say, “You were the best, Wolverine.” It’s not even Wade Wilson talking to me, it’s me talking to Hugh. I have waited a long time for this, team-up. You will not find a bigger Hugh Jackman champion and fan than me. He’s a person, but also a performer. You guys must have had this a million times in your life, where you write something for someone you idolize and adore, and then you see them take that and make it so much better than what you put on the page. At least for me, what was on the page.

There’s a speech that’s a bit sort of mirrors the movie, most of the things I make have some element of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles in them and John Candy. There’s little Easter eggs everywhere in the movie. I’m holding the Canadian Mounted book in all three of the movies. There’s a speech in the van where he just tears that pool in the asshole. It just goes in this monologue. Hugh thought it was hilarious because in that one scene, he had more lines than any other Wolverine movie he’d ever done.

To watch him perform that, and there’s a moment in this screen direction at the bottom of that scene, where it’s like, “a flicker of regret may or may not have glanced across his eyes, but if it was there, it was gone before we even registered it.” To see him do that with his eyes, where I’m two feet away, it was so far beyond what I could have done as a performer in that moment. I just got to be a fan, and Deadpool is, of course, quiet for the first time ever and just shuts the hell up, and then finally says, “I’m going to fight you because it’s the only thing you can.” Now our roles are completely reversed. He’s the merc with a mouth, I’m the one who wants to fight.

The marketing was always in service of that feeling. I just felt it was so auspicious that he’s here in this suit and we have this unique opportunity in this moment to come together and have this experience. Much of the marketing was based on that. The fun that I have with Hugh in real life is the fun that I have with Hugh in a promo tour, except we don’t bust each other’s balls as much in real life as we do out there. We’re more like two elderly ladies staring at the sunset trying to eat a sandwich, talking about our feelings and our hopes and our worries. I have a genuine love, and he has a genuine love for me. I’m happy to be able to say, and that’s what we put on display really because it was the easiest thing and most honest thing.

Craig: It was fully on display. There’s this idea that you should do the things in your movie that only your movie can do.

Ryan: Wow, I love that.

Craig: Again, I stole that from Lindsey Durand. This is the greatest.

Ryan: So great.

Craig: I think that that holds true for marketing as well, that you should sell the things that only you can sell. Otherwise, it’s just what everybody else has. What you guys have is both the unique aspect of Deadpool, his mouth, his comedy, rated R, and breaking the fourth wall. In here, it was also the relationship. As I talk about relationships on the show all the time, I don’t believe that characters exist without them. I think characters are defined by their relationships. That relationship is so wonderful, and you had it, and I think in this sense, it stops being selling. It is more like sharing.

When you have something that you love, that works, that is something only you have, then you’re just sharing it with people. Like you said earlier, it’s almost like you’re not pretending that it’s marketing.

Ryan: No, but they know. People are smart.

Craig: They’re smart.

Ryan: Yes, they know right away. Hugh and I just feel like maybe it’s not a good, I don’t know, but we were just like, let’s just go be us. Let’s go be how we are. Some of it was really, we talked about our vulnerabilities and some of the marketing. It wasn’t even marketing, it was just interviews, but then the marketing stuff would be a little bit more thoughtful in terms of like, how do we represent the movie best, not just us? It was multi-tiered and I thought really interesting.

Anytime you do want to be in such a full-throated global way, which is not often, I can’t remember the last time I did all of those countries and travel all the way around the world. It’s just pre-COVID, you did it once in a while, but even then, not that much, but you just learn so much. I just learned so much about how that world works and these machines. I learned so much from watching Disney and how they operate. Nobody does it better. It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and go, “The movie made a billion whatever,” and all that kind stuff, but I don’t know that we could have done that at many other studios. They’re just really good at what they do, really creative, smart people.

Actually, a lot of the marketing people are from Fox. They’re the ones that we had on Deadpool 1 and 2. A lot of the same folks, so it’s nice to have that familiarity in the shorthand.

Craig: 20th Century Fox, one of the great brands of all time. Kept alive by Deadpool.

Ryan: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: It’s incredible.

Ryan: How funny, though, that like that was the one that came and helped. Disney, they’re not exactly having a bad year, but it’s just nice to see movie theaters fill up. It’s nice to see drive-ins fill up. It’s like a wild to see that sort of– I read an article a long time ago that talked about the in-theater experience as collective effervescence, and it stayed with me forever. It’s almost like a drug you just can’t find anywhere else, where we’re all having the same experience at the exact same moment. There’s some endorphin hit that people get from that, that communal experience that stays with them and really elevates all of their vitals. I always love that idea that we’re in a movie theater all together and we all have this great experience.

Craig: It’s like a good mob. It’s a happy mob.

Ryan: Yes, but everyone’s so fucking divided, too. You go into a movie theater and like, I don’t care what color shirt you’re wearing. I don’t care about your politics, any of that stuff. It’s like sports and films, and those kinds of collective effervescent moments are those, to me, are like the only real glimpses into what’s left of our humanity.

It’s nice to feel like we can have this thing where we’re all having this great moment, and we all can agree on this thing right now. It’s pretty special.

John: As we’re wrapping up talking about marketing, I want to bring us back to that number one on the call sheet thing. Because so often in marketing, you’re sending out the star, you’re sending out the number one on the call sheet to go and promote the movie. Yet it’s so tough, if they’re not actually invested in the movie, if they can’t talk about the actual making the movie that you can, it’s just such a challenge to go on a late night show and they’re supposed to be talking about themselves and the movie, and be selling. It’s this weird thing we ask our stars to do is to both be an incredible actor, but who’s also an incredible marketer. It’s this weird thing we’re requiring of our top talent, is that they not only be Meryl Streep, but they also be a salesperson.

Ryan: I think it’s probably we ask more than that even. You also need to be an expert on whatever social issue we bring up in this moment. You need to be able to speak eloquently and empathetically about this thing. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. I don’t know how some people do it. I’m always scared of interviews, anything, even this, 20 minutes before my stomach was flipping upside down.

Craig: Really?

Ryan: Yes. Craig he’s vile, he just snacks on others pain.

Craig: Here we go.

Ryan: Yes, right.

Craig: Destroying the myth.

Ryan: You can’t feel unless you’re hurting.

John: The final draft episode where he destroyed final draft and the Ryan Reynolds one where he just ripped Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan: Those are the ones, those are the ones we love. The idea that you people have to wear all these different hats and stuff, it is tricky, and I don’t know how. I’ve had a very different experience with fame than I know some people that I know and work with. It was an aggregate for me, it was very slow and it wasn’t like some overnight thing. I don’t know how a young actress or a young actor who’s funny just suddenly, and then– for actresses, much more so. I don’t know, that is a very, very tricky and hard landscape to navigate on any level.

John: This past week with Chappell Roan coming out and saying, “Listen, these are the boundaries I’m setting with my fame and how I want people to approach me.” It’s so interesting to me to see a young star recognizing, this is the thing that’s going to happen next and this is how I want it to happen, and we’ll see what comes next.

Ryan: I love that self-awareness exists, but there’s also a pretty clear road map. You can see the field ahead and where some of the pitfalls are, but it takes a lot of, I think, a great deal of self-examination to be able to speak about it like that.

Craig: Probably, being of a different generation, I just feel like there’s something about a generation that grew up with this stuff, understanding how to use it to define themselves, set boundaries, and talk about the boundaries. Now the boundaries are a discussion.

For me, happily, I only have to go through this press convulsion once every two years, basically. I just go into like a Walter Cronkite kind of space. I think my job is to be informational and non-objectionable. It’s basically my job to try and survive this without saying something that becomes a headline.

Ryan: Let me ask you this, though. One thing I will say that definitely differentiates us is that I can go to a press tour, and I can go do sometimes 40 interviews a day. But you could lay awake at night and go, oh man, I had that brain fart moment where I said that thing that I shouldn’t have said, and I wonder if that’s going to ruin me? We ask a lot of people on those things. You think, I’ve done that dozens of times, and I know everyone I know in this industry has also experienced that dozens of times, and it’s terrible.

Craig: It’s Russian roulette. I only have to pull the trigger every now and again. Actors are pulling the trigger constantly because, as I’ve said many times to my wife, when we go to these events, like red carpets and premieres and stuff, no one cares about me, this is all for the actors. We go to the Emmy Awards, this is not for me, it’s all for the actors. They’re selling ads on the backs of the actors who are famous, who people want to see.

And so you’re right. Those interviews are so much more high stakes. You have to be an A-plus student every single time. They’ll try and get you, and it is pretty amazing. You, in particular, you’re genuinely nice. It’s Canadian. Why am I saying you’re special?

Ryan: It doesn’t matter if I’m genuinely nice. It doesn’t matter. This business, you have to understand it does this. I have a question for you two that I’m dying to ask, if you’ll humor me, and I know I’m supposed to be the interviewee. A lot of times, I do a ton of writing on a movie like this. People would love to emphasize my contribution to that, more so than my fellow career screenwriters, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, certainly Zeb Wells, Sean did his fair share as well. How do you guys find that? I find that screenwriting in Hollywood is a pretty thankless experience. A lot of writers I know feel like it is such a deeply underappreciated craft that without it, obviously, just fuck all of an industry, but how does that sit with you guys? You can cut this out because it’s your show, but when you’re lying awake at night, are you thinking like, fuck me? Why is that? Why does that happen? Why is the director celebrated so much or the star celebrated so much whereas it’s–?

John: I’ll start by just talking about Charlie’s Angels. Charlie’s Angels is a movie where I came in there, I muscled it into being at up to a certain point, but ultimately, you’re marketing that movie off of the stars, off the vibe, off the feeling of it all. So I can feel really good about my contribution to it, but I recognize that it’s not my thing. To contrast that with something like Big Fish, I wrote the whole thing. That’s all my story. Tim Burton directed it and there’s stars in it, but it feels much more like my thing.

I think it’s recognizing that there’s going to be stuff that is fully yours, that you can feel an ownership over, and there’s going to be things where you are there to service a greater need, a greater product that’s beyond that.

Listen, can it suck sometimes to be a bit invisible as a screenwriter? Yes, but is it great sometimes to be invisible as a screenwriter? Absolutely. I can dodge some of the stuff that’s coming my way and I don’t have to be worried about everything I say or do because it’s not my responsibility to go out there and promote the thing. The work is the work. It’s not me as the personality.

Ryan: You’re also the one who’s alone in the room in the dark doing this thing that no one else does. Everyone else gets to be out in the light together collaborating and popping off.

It’s just such a difficult job. I guess I’m also curious, how does it work with television? Which is, I think, sometimes more of a writer’s medium. Does television feel, for you guys, more rewarding than in the wake of something being successful than necessarily like a film?

John: Craig is nodding there, yeah.

Craig: It’s not even close.

Ryan: Chernobyl is a different for you, right? That’s a totally different–?

Craig: My job was no different in a sense. I’d been working in movies for, I don’t know, 20 years and I had gone to a place where I was intimately involved in the creation of the script, of course, because I’m writing it. Then also working with the studio to who should direct it? Who should star in it? Okay, now it got shot, how do we edit it? Can you help with editing? Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? Then no one can know, that was part of the deal of screenwriting and features is, hey, listen, no one can know.

I had conversations where somebody called me and said, “You need to tell them this, but they can’t know that you knew before they knew, so you have to figure it out.”

Ryan: Oh, my God.

Craig: Part of your job as a screenwriter and features is to be a second class citizen on purpose, to be intentionally a second class citizen, to eat it, so that directors and actors feel good. Now in television-

Ryan: Jesus Christ.

Craig: That’s just the fact.

Ryan: What are we doing?

Craig: I don’t know. I honestly don’t know because then I went to television and they were like, “Here, we make a golden idol of you, and pray to it every morning. I’m like, I think that’s probably a little too far because — the show runner.

In television, everybody sort of looks to me as the guy. In features, everybody said, “Just make sure that you never get perceived as the guy, that’s the most important thing.” I don’t understand it. I don’t think it makes any sense. Yes, of course, television is more rewarding because who wouldn’t want the golden idol? As opposed to get in the back room and just work in quiet.

Ryan: Coming from sitcom, it was like they were the gods. Getting that writer’s circle, the huddle was my favorite thing in the world. I learned so much just watching these guys hit the ball back and forth.

Craig: It’s weird in features, for some reason, everybody will say, “Well, you know it’s all about the script.” But the screenwriter, is nothing to them.

Ryan: It’s emergency harvestable organs.

Craig: Yes, and it’s just, if we don’t like what this one did, get us another one. In fact, even if we did like what this one did, get us another one. It’ll make us feel better.

Ryan: Or, how dare they ask for their value in this negotiation?

Craig: Exactly.

Ryan: I see that all the time.

Craig: All the time. Then the director is afforded an amount of leeway that is so shocking because as screenwriters in features, we are noted to death, and then a director comes along and says, “Oh, by the way, I want this to be a musical.” They’re like, “Oh, my God.”

Ryan: Oh, God, no, no.

Craig: “Yes, go for it. You’re the director.” I’m like, “What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?” The fact that in features, a writer and a director that work closely together, that love each other and care about each other, that’s where magic happens.

Ryan: I agree.

Craig: I loved working with Todd Phillips. You loved working with Sean Levy. John, I’m sure you loved working with Tim Burton. There are these little covalent atomic structures that occur. When that happens as a feature writer, who gives a shit who gets the credit? It doesn’t matter who gets the credit. You just want to do something that you can go, oh, that was fucking good.

Ryan: Also, that applies to every department. If everyone feels like they’re authoring something, their contribution is, I know it’s a cliché to say, but you just see, everybody just puts out the best work they could possibly put out. It’s also just a joy along the way. Even the fucking studio. The idea that you go, we have this notion that all the way back, if you read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, or any of that kind of stuff, where everything’s, “Fuck the studio. We’re going to do it our way.” Well, they’re kinda paying for the whole thing, they’re the road you’re using to tell this entire– and I found that it’s like to collaborate in a way that, doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything. Collaboration, though, in its spirit, will get you so much farther than obstinance and trying to headbutt everyone into your way or the highway.

Craig: It’s too hard. It’s too hard to make things anyway. To make things while you’re in a fight with someone is nearly impossible. I need to have a good relationship with the people that I make something for at HBO. I have to.

Ryan: Me too, or I lose the whole magic, too. It’s dead.

Craig: It collapses because also, I wake up in a terrible shame cloud and when any kind of mommy or daddy figure disapproves of me, I begin to wither.

Ryan: So do I. We all do, and then it goes away.

Craig: I don’t know. Not John. I really, honestly, I think-

John: Oh, no. I want mom and dad to be proud of me, too. I’m a grade grubber at heart as well. I want that praise, that affection.

Craig: Good.

John: You go through this business enough, you know not to necessarily expect to, and so you have to find other ways to make yourself feel happy, even if that’s not for a day.

Ryan: See, right there, that kind of wisdom right there.

Craig: Which I don’t have access to, though.

Ryan: No, not even. That’s the the most. I grew more in that one sentence than I have in months.

John: Let’s do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Sure.

John: My One Cool Thing is The Onion. The Onion is, of course, the legendary newspaper, the parody, just the smartest weekly bunch of headlines and stories that are just so ingenious. I remember getting the physical copy, but also getting The Onion books and just devouring them. Of course, all online media went through a huge ups and downs over the last couple years. They’ve now been sold to these people who actually seem really smart and good, who are doing a great job with it.

It’s a $99 a year physical print subscription you can get to support The Onion. I’m going to point to an article by Nilay Patel writing for The Verge, where he talks with these people, Ben Collins and Danielle Strle, who are the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion, about the little details of how do you buy a publication and how do you get stuff moved over, technically? How do you change the website to make it all make sense? These people seem super, super smart. I’m really optimistic that they’re going to have something great come out of this that’s preserving, really, the spirit of The Onion for the next, 20 years or more, hopefully.

Ryan: The Onion’s so daring, too. You see a headline from The Onion, you’re like, Jesus, you really want to? They went, yes, send.

John: There was an Onion story about you guys just, I think, two weeks ago that was actually just pitch perfect. It was savage but in a way I think you’ll really respect. If I can find it, I’ll text it to you.

Ryan: Please send it to me. I don’t mind. I’ve had a few. I’ve been having my knees taken out by The Onion. I feel like it’s an honor, too. That’s actually one of my versions of legacy media now. That is a legacy proper.

Craig, you got one, or how does this work? I forget.

Craig: Yes, sure, I’ll be quick with mine. It’s sort of in celebration of you, but also of the last year of my life. I want to tip my hat to British Columbia and to the City of Vancouver for being my home, my playground, and my creative space for so long. Listen, none of us dream of going to Hollywood to then get on a plane to go to Vancouver, right? Or Australia, or Budapest, or London. We come here because, look, it’s this lot and it has all the big boxes and we can shoot in those, and then we go. It doesn’t work like that.

The fact is because of money stuff, which I don’t understand, they’ve explained tax rebates to me so many times and my brain just shuts down, but I can’t, right? Then the question is, where do you go, and where will home be? Vancouver’s just a fantastic city. Both the city and the province were incredibly welcoming to us. They let us do things they didn’t ever let anybody else do. I’m very thankful and grateful to that city for being my home and professionally, for letting us make an insane television series there. It was a joy. Yaletown, that was my spot. I love Yaletown. That was my jam.

Ryan: Great walking city.

Craig: Amazing.

Ryan: I’ve spoken with my wife dozens of times over the last 10 years about finding some way for us all to move there again. It’s just the best. It is the absolutely best.

Craig: It really is beautiful. So many of our crew, of course, were from B.C. I’d do a speech when we rapped. I don’t know, when you rapped Deadpool, do you do a speech to the crew and everything?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. I get real nervous about those things, though. I get real terrified, but I do, yes. I push through it and say something, yes, of course.

Craig: I don’t mind public speaking, but I cried so hard. I’ve just been crying lately. That’s my thing now in my 50s. I guess all the tears that I didn’t allow out of my face until I was 45, they’re there. Now they have to come out and wrap speeches.

Ryan: That’s why you’re going to see 100.

Craig: That’s a blubbering 100, that’s what I want. I just want to be mostly tears. Tears and a little bit of skin.

Ryan: I want like a Norman Lear kind of sunset.

Craig: Oh God, wouldn’t that be something?

Ryan: Sharp as a tack.

Craig: Oh yes.

Ryan: He’s funny.

Craig: You’ve got the hat. Everybody knows you.

John: Oh yes, everyone loves you.

Craig: You stay you, and then one day, the light switch goes off.

Ryan: It still looks like Norman Lear. It’s just like 100 years are great.

Craig: Exactly. Nothing changed. He got a little smaller. He probably lost an inch. That was it. Anyway, what about you, Ryan? You have one cool thing for us?

Ryan: Crematoriums, actually. Weirdly.

Craig: No.

Ryan: My one cool thing, I’m going to do two because I’m a selfish prick, but the first one’s super fast, Tony Zhou. I brought him up earlier. Tony Zhao’s interesting. He just sort of isolates one. I think he’s a film editor. Last name Z-H-O-U, I believe is how it’s spelled. I think I’m getting that right. Really smart, insightful, bite-sized peaks into filmmaking. The main thing for me is tangential, but I think appropriate, is TCM, is Turner Classic Movies.

Craig: Oh yes.

Ryan: I recently got to be a guest programmer on it. It meant a lot to me. I’ve watched Turner Classic Movies for nearly two decades. It’s always on when I’m home, sometimes it’s on mute. I like it for so many reasons, but I think it is some, even by osmosis, helped me tell stories. I know that there are probably many people listening to this going like, the dick joke Deadpool guy, and TCM that doesn’t exactly, but TCM has been my happy place forever. I cannot recommend it enough for storytellers, for creatives, for people who just want their nervous system to slow down a little bit.

I adore it as a resource, and I find it to be incredibly restorative, and I can’t say enough good about it. I have absolutely no, I don’t know why I have to say this, but financial connection to it. I have nothing to do with this, except I’m just a huge, huge fan, and I feel like it is a living, breathing museum for this industry. They have so much to tell about how stories are told throughout the last 100 years, and I’m incredibly grateful to Turner Classic Movies.
That’s my thing that I would recommend for young and old alike.

Also, it’s great gossip. Modern gossip, it can be a little toxic, it’s ugh, it feels a little icky. Once you start getting into it, you’ll be sitting there, you’ll start Googling all these stars, and all these heavyweight studio chiefs, and all kinds of– To me, it’s much less corrosive gossip because it’s sometimes 80, 90 years ago, but you go down all these rabbit holes that I think are really fascinating. TCM is my jam.

John: That’s excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Engelhardt. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnautos.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnautos.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts, hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record, and all the non-movie stuff that Ryan does. Ryan Reynolds, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Ryan: Thank you for having me, guys. That was an honor. Thank you for that. Really appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Alright Ryan Reynolds, traditionally movie stars, top of the sheet there, they would stump for brands. You’d see Beyonce and Britney Spears for Pepsi. In your career, I’ll see you with a watch ad in a magazine, which is a very classic thing, that a big famous movie star does. You are really known for the stuff that you promote, that you own a piece of it. Brands that are partially under your control, so Aviation Gin, Wrestling Football Club, Mint Mobile. I want to talk to you about why, because–

Craig: Why?

John: My gut is that the instinct is not money. The instinct is you get to make a bunch of stuff whenever you want to for these things, and you get to shoot stuff all the time.

Ryan: Yes, partly. I do love building things. I love, you guys know this, but I think it needs to be said, is that I do not do anything unilaterally. I have a partner, George Dewey. He and I met on Deadpool 1. He was in charge of digital marketing. He and I just hit it off, and that was where we got the most bang for our buck, was George and I just going off, writing, playing, and making stuff. Then, I let it be said that I do not own Aviation Gin anymore. It is sold. I don’t own Mint Mobile. That is also sold. I am the co-chairman and co-owner of Wrexham A.F.C. still, and I hopefully will be that, until I’m very, very old and just sub-Norman Lear age.

I love storytelling. I love bite-sized storytelling. I sometimes call it fast-vertizing, these sorts of ideas that you can move at the speed of culture, and you can’t do that in any other medium, other than advertising and marketing. For me, it’s really fun, and a lot of times we make ads for companies we have nothing to do with at all. We’ll go to them and say, “Hey, there’s this thing we’re thinking of,” and it’s mostly just to get it financed, so we don’t lose money on it. Then we can make something cool and fun, and make an impact in culture.

Craig: Part of this, in listening to you, it seems like part of this is a way for you to exercise the compulsion. I call it the compulsion on my end of like, here’s what I do. I can’t exactly explain why except that I’m compelled to do it. We are, unfortunately, restrained from our compulsions by finance, scheduling, theaters, licensing, all the crap that keeps us from doing what we do. Sounds like you’ve found a way to keep doing what you do quickly. It’s like little meals, small meals instead of the big banquet.

Ryan: Yes. It’s the most fun sandbox you’ll ever get to play in, I think, because it’s also not really precious. I talk to a lot of companies just about marketing in ideas and how to approach these things sometimes. The one thing I find that is the common denominator with massive companies who are like, how do we hit it hard and fast like this? Generally, they make marketing campaigns that are nine months out. It is overthought, there’s an overspend, everybody’s overstimulated halfway through. Nobody can make rhyme or reason out of any of the original objectives. I’m always like, just suck. They’re fucking ads. No one cares. If your ad sucks, it’s not going to go down in history as like the Ishtar of Pepsi. Just have fun, play, don’t worry about it. Go, let it be disposable and let it be temporary. In doing that, you can spark a bit of fun.

I think about it, but I’m compelled to do much less now. People think I do. I did at one point, I was just doing way too much all the time. My kids, my youngest is one and a half and my oldest is nine. I can’t do that kind of stuff the way I used to. Really, I’d rather do two things really, really well, than five things really well, but be a shitty dad. I can do two things really well and still be a comprehensive father and still walk my kids to school each day, and read them a story at night and make sure that they see me so much, they’re horrendously sick of me.

Craig: I’m a big fan of the genre of comedies where it’s a dad and he’s a shitty dad, and he has to learn a lesson to not be a shitty dad. While he’s making that movie, the actor is being a shitty dad.

Ryan: Oh my God. Right. I was recently thinking about this because my kids and I, we have this thing. My nine-year-old loves ‘80s movies. She just adores, she loves watching ’80s movies. We ran through the gamut, we saw them all. Then I said, “Well, let’s watch, what do you want to watch?” We saw Liar Liar up there. That’s a great classic shitty dad. I thought it’s still to this day, just a brilliant concept. Jim Carrey at the height of Jim, who’s just so great.

I think we talked about this earlier in the main podcast, but being camera aware, man, that guy is camera aware. It’s crazy because even when you watch him early, like in the Mask and stuff, this is all 1994, I think he did, Ace Ventura, The Mask, one other huge, Dumb and Dumber, I think. All of those in one year came out. It’s the weirdest thing to think about, but I was always shocked at how camera aware he was. Shitty dad, his son thinks his dad’s job is a liar, he’s a lawyer.

Just such a fun, fun ride. I don’t want to be the shitty dad while playing a shitty dad, and something.

Craig: While playing a shitty dad and then learning the lesson about not being a shitty dad, missing your kids play. You can being a scene about missing your kids.

Ryan: Don’t get me wrong, I’ve plenty of moments where I’m pretty convinced I’m a shitty dad. Don’t worry, but I think it’s the long game. The long game is that I’m trying to always be a better dad, as is my wife.

Craig: I think we’re all dads here. When a dad starts talking about worrying about being a shitty dad, that’s how you know they’re fine. That’s how you know.

Ryan: You’re right, exactly. John, knowing John’s daughter, I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk about it–

John: Oh yeah.

Ryan: But Amy, just being at that age, 18 now?

John: 19.

Ryan: Oh my God. In my head, Amy’s like up to my middle of my leg, and I’m shooting a movie at John’s house called The Nines. In my head, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that this young woman is in college.

John: No, it’s crazy. One thing I want to us to talk about to in terms of the shooting marketing videos and your ability to do that, it’s almost like you’re sorry at live, and you just get to make sketches like all the time. There’s less of an expectation that everything has to be precious. The fact that you’re doing it suddenly and quickly, and you’re not asking permission, just gives you a freedom.

So I looked at all the promotion you were able to do for Deadpool on this movie, you wouldn’t have the facility to do that if you hadn’t been making a zillion videos for the last six years.

Ryan: We have a little SWAT team that’s basically a maximum effort there, you can mobilize them. They’ll be, well, we could be shooting something. We’ve had situations where something will happen in culture and we’re shooting like 10 hours later, and that’s it. I don’t take that for granted. I also don’t think a normal marketing company should expect that of themselves either. That doesn’t happen all the time, but we’ve done that before and it is no different than SNL. There’s no difference. It’s the same thing.

You’re just playing around with something that people are talking about, and you’re taking a brand and allowing, and if you execute it right, now people are talking about the brand as opposed to just the thing. It’s a cheat code, kind of, but it is no different than sketch comedy. It’s exactly what it is.

John: My favorite one of those spots you did was the one where it was a promotion, I think for a flat screen TV, Aviation Gin and Deadpool at the same time. In some way, you were–

Ryan: Oh, it was a Netflix movie. I remember, it was the Turducken ad. It was basically three things in one. Like people sometimes will ask, “How do you guys do all this?” We all conveniently forget the fact that I have a platform. It’s not fair. I can blast it out to a hundred million plus people across these number of different social media platforms, and create an audience right away. When you’re doing an ad that, and yes, great. You did it fast, you do it in 10 hours, and it’s written well, all that stuff, but you’re still kind of born halfway between third base and home.

Craig: Yes, but I will say, there are other people that have that platform and they just put pictures of their food. Do you know what I mean? The bottom line is you can do it, you can do the thing that most people can’t. It is dark room alone stuff, or it’s dark room with another person stuff, but it’s making things. That is a huge separator. There are folks like you who can do that, and then there are a lot of great, great people with a hundred million followers who are waiting for someone to give them something to do. You don’t wait, maximum effort. It’s so impressive.

I’m very close with Rob McElhenney. We talk about you all the time. He’s so seethingly jealous of you.

Ryan: Oh my God.

Craig: But you guys are such a great combo because you both have that same thing. Neither one of you will ever want to wait.

Ryan: No.

Craig: You are driving it forward. Rob is the most.

Ryan: I learned a lot from him, though. That’s where he’s an all-American Philly guy. That sort of aggression that comes from that, I’m not going to hold back, versus my polite, like, okay, let’s just be careful, I’m walking on eggshells. He’s helped me integrate some of that, which is a great asset to have because he’s very forthright.

Rob is one of the smart one, Wrexham AFC, that is Rob’s– that doesn’t happen without Rob. That is not me lying awake at night going, “Here’s a totally outside the box idea.” That is Rob calling me and going, “I’ve got an idea that’s crazy.” Me, really grab it onto his coattails and off we went, and I’m not diminishing my contribution. I love it as a storyteller, it’s been heaven. I’ve had so much fun in that playing with that kind thing, but Rob, the guy’s just a genius. He’s just brilliant.

Craig: Like you, he just made something happen. He made something happen with Sonny, he makes things happen with Wrexham and you. To me, that’s the fun of it. It’s not so much, I don’t drink gin, so it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the gin. I also, soccer is boring, but to me–

Ryan: Wow, Craig.

Craig: It is, but not the show. The show is great. The show is amazing because narrative.

Ryan: Because Field of Dreams isn’t a movie about fucking baseball.

Craig: Correct, it’s about fathers and sons.

Ryan: It’s always about something else.

Craig: Yes, Wrexham is about the people of Wrexham, renewal, revival, rejuvenation, and redemption. All of that stuff is great, and it happens because you make it. That’s so impressive to me. There are a lot of people who do what you do, who have a hundred million followers, a whole lot of money, great house, and they just wait and you don’t. To me, that’s the most impressive thing.

Ryan: Oh, thank you.

John: Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes again.

Craig: Thank you, Ryan.

John: It’s great to see you.

Ryan: Guys, that time went by way too fast. That’s crazy. It’s like an hour and 45 minutes.

Craig: Holy shit. Jesus.

John: It’s a long one. It’s worth it. Good conversation.

Craig: Impressing stuff.

Links:

• Ryan Reynolds on Instagram, TikTok and X
• Deadpool & Wolverine
• He’s So Annoying by Jesse David Fox for Vulture
• Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag by Every Frame a Painting
• TCM – Turner Classic Movies
• Ryan Reynolds Guest Programmer | TCM via YouTube
• How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral by Nilay Patel for The Verge
• Vancouver, BC
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Englehard (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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 656 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you create a film genre? If you’re a filmmaker, perhaps your work inspires others to copy or remix those elements until the resulting movies feel like their own genre or subgenre. I’d argue that’s how we get slasher movies, for example. While there were definitely antecedents, we probably wouldn’t have the slasher subgenre without John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. That’s not the only way you can create a film genre. If you’re a journalist or movie critic, perhaps you notice a common thread connecting a bunch of existing films and give it a name, like a scientist discovering a new taxonomy.

That’s the case with a microgenre we’re going to discuss today. I’m happy to have its originator as our guest. Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner operator of ReadMax, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His writing has appeared in various publications with the word New York in the title, including New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, all put together there. He’s also the former editor of some defunct websites, including Gawker and Select All. Welcome to the show, Max.

Max Read: Thanks for having me.

John: As we were discussing on email, you’ve actually been mentioned on the podcast before, correct?

Max: Yes. I have a lot of friends who subscribe and they never ever text me after my newsletter goes out. Then lo and behold, I was on John August’s podcast and all of a sudden I got a lot of texts about my newsletter.

John: What were we talking about? Was this about–

Max: There was a Harper’s piece about the future of labor in Hollywood, I guess, in particular screenwriter labor. It was a riff that I’d been thinking about for a while about YouTube, TikTok, online influencers, a lot of which is my beat as a journalist, thinking about those people as competitors to what we do and thinking about one of the problems that we face as unionized writers is the fact that there’s this huge non-union workforce who are doing remarkably similar jobs to us, similar jobs to actors and directors as well. I gave it a goofy headline that didn’t live up to the promise of the headline. It’s something that has been on my mind for a long time now as a journalist, as a person online, as a person who consumes a lot of crap online, but also as a member of WGA and somebody who is a little nervous about the future of Hollywood right now.

John: Talk to us about why you’re a member of WGA. Is it for feature and TV work or is it because through the Writers Guild East and how that has organized some labor under the journalism?

Max: I am a member through TV writing, though it’s funny you ask that question. I was at Gawker between 2010 and 2015. WGAE organized Gawker while I was there. Then the week I left, the week after I left, they were finally certified. I was never actually a member of WGAE at Gawker. A few years later, I sold a show with a friend of mine based on our time at Gawker as it happened. That was what jumped me into the WGAE.

John: I love that you say jumped into it. Like it is just a mafia thing.

Max: There really weren’t enough initiation rituals in the end.

John: Totally. We have on the show to talk about halogencore, which is this micro genre you brought up. That’s something we’ll get into in a second. While you’re here, I also would like to talk about journalism and the overlap with what we do in film and TV writing, because those are blurry boundaries now. Actually how one makes a living in journalism these days, because it feels like a transition is happening there that’s going to be familiar to anybody working in television, for example.

Because once upon a time, you were a staff writer on Cheers, and that was your entire job for all your year, was doing that. Now it’s about assembling a bunch of jobs over the course of a year. It’s about making your year, earning enough money to actually stay in this business. That feels very much like what so many writers working in other parts of the media are doing these days.

Max: Like you say, I’ve had a number of jobs over the 15 or so years that I’ve been a journalist. My career has both been very traditional and very unorthodox. I got my start working at Gawker as a blogger at a time when that was still a pretty new thing to be doing. Then I went and worked at New York Magazine for five years. That was a fantastic education on how a magazine is made. Some of my favorite things I’ve ever written and worked on came out in that time. Then I left New York to pursue screenwriting, and then also to start this newsletter that we’ve been talking about.

The newsletter is probably the newest of job that I’ve been doing. I’m essentially a columnist. I write two newsletters a week. I’m also the publisher. I have to keep track of subscribers and think about how I’m gaining subscribers and keep track of my numbers and think about all these things. For me personally, I like it a lot. I like the independence. In some ways, it’s motivating to be my own boss in all these ways. It’s not for everybody. I would hate to see a world where this is the only way that journalists are getting work.

Unfortunately, it has not been a good few years since the pandemic. In particular, jobs at newspapers and magazines have just been hemorrhaging. It feels like basically everybody these days works for either the Times or one of the big Condé Nast publications, which it’s good that I can be making money doing this newsletter but it doesn’t feel good. I don’t have a good sense of what the next 10 years look like either.

John: I definitely want to dig into that. We’ll take care of some news and follow up first, but then we’ll get to halogencore. Then we’ll get into what it’s like to make it living as an independent writer. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d like to talk with you about the acceleration of time and events that we’re going through right now, because it feels like the last eight weeks, something broke and everything is now just happening faster than it’s ever happened before.

I know you’re a person every year who does a recap of what happened over the course of the previous year. I fear for you because it just feels like so much has happened so quickly that as you’re bringing down the months, like January and February and March might look normal. Then just the length and volume of what’s happened in the last period just seems unfathomable. I’d love to get into this sense of the acceleration of time with you.

Max: In some ways, it’s very good. If your job is working off the news, the more material, the better. There was a time when August was just absolutely dead as a month to do it. Now it’s like, “Oh, there’s always something to write about every week.” I don’t have to spend all weekend worrying about what my column’s going to be like the next year. It’s also it’s exhausting. It is a really good way to bring yourself out.
For a long time, I’ve said to myself, I don’t want to be a weekly columnist, I need to work on longer projects or whatever. I also just think, personally there’s just something about my metabolism, my processing metabolism, that really helps to just when stuff is happening to be able to take it, put something on the page, work out how I feel about it in writing, think it through, and then be able to move on instead of– The writing actually helps the sense of being buried under all this stuff.

Look, if you’re reading a lot of things, you’re getting a lot of ideas. If you’re also doing fiction at the same time that you’re doing nonfiction, you’re just constantly getting stuff that might work or might not work for something you’re doing in the future. If you can’t sort that out well, then maybe that’s a bad thing. I think it can be nice to know that you’ve got this big, I don’t know what people have, a bookmarks folder, or just a document where they’re pasting links or whatever, it is that people are doing to just know next time you’re stuck, you’ve got something you can go scroll through to remember everything that happened in July that might be useful to you.

John: Let me make a note, because I do want to get back to how you organize all the stuff that comes in and how you think about that stuff. First off, though, we have a little bit of news here. Highland, which is the screenwriting and general purpose writing app that my company makes, has an amazing new version that’s out in beta now. I’ve been using this version of it for some 18 months or so. Now you can too. It’s really good. It’s for the Mac, it’s for iPad and iPhone. Drew, you’ve been using it?

Drew: Yes. I love it. It’s so clean, and it’s gorgeous, and it’s fast. I’m excited for people to try it.

John: Over the summer, Drew had to do some work in Final Draft because I was working on a project where he had to deliver some Final Draft files as well. That was brutal to transition to Final Draft after that.

Drew: It hurt to go back.

John: Anyway, if you would like to beta test this, we’ll put a link in the show notes for how you sign up for that. It’s not going to be a very long beta. It’s only a couple weeks before we get this out into the world, hopefully. We’d love to have some more people out there testing it. Max, what do you write in? The columns you’re doing, what has Read Max written in?

Max: This is a sin for most journalists, but I write directly into the CMS, the content management system that the blog publishes to. For a long time, you were never supposed to do that because there was no way to save things on the web. If it crashed, you would lose the whole post. I have to say, I write on Substack as the platform I write for, and they have created what, as far as I’m concerned, is the best CMS I’ve ever used in all my years working in these things. It auto-saves. I never feel uncomfortable. It’s a little like when you’re writing a screenplay, you like to have it formatted as it’s going to be in the end. It’s much easier to do that. I like being able to see how it’s going to look on the page as I’m writing it. When I do longer magazine features, I go in Google Docs, partly just because the sharing is the easiest way to do it, and commenting is really easy for editors. My editors always take it out of Google Docs and put it in Microsoft Word. I just have version of this everywhere, basically.

John: No, it’s brutal. We’re testing this one and see if there’s stuff in Highland that you like. Other follow-up here, Drew, back in episode 582, we were talking about this playwright who wanted to move into screenwriting, and we had someone write back with some extra advice for that.

Drew: Yeah, Laura wrote, “As a playwright turned TV writer and feature writer myself, I wanted to offer some advice to Bethany. It sounds to me like her impulse to put people in a room and let things explode comes from an exposure to a lot of single-set, single-room plays, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, August Osage County, et cetera. I highly recommend she does some deep study on films that essentially do the same thing to see how she can begin to adapt from one medium into another. Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are great places to start. Leo Grande feels the most like a stage play, two characters, one location, except for the final scene, with time passing in between each scene. Shiva Baby is a great example of how to chuck a bunch of people into the same shared space and keep things propulsive because the protagonist is trapped in a house with her antagonists.”

John: I was also thinking about My Dinner with Andre is it another classic film where there’s a bunch of people in one space doing one thing. Those are all great examples. As I thought more about this initial question, see it feels like Bethany is struggling not so much with keeping people in one location, but understanding how to jump forward in time and that it’s really about the ability to cut forward in time and to eliminate those moments in between stuff that is the power of film, the ability to cut. It’s really understanding how cutting works and how things can move forward.

Some of these movies that Laura was mentioning here have examples of that where you’re in one location but you’re jumping forward in time. I think you just need to be more comfortable with the form of not having characters walk in and say their thing than exit, but rather the movie itself is telling its story through cutting and through time. She’s just going to have to experiment with that and just write some things that necessitate cutting.

Also had some follow-up on Hallmark movies. We talked a little bit about like Hallmark Christmas movies. Craig had wondered aloud how many Hallmark Christmas movies there were. Stephen Follows, who’s the guy who does all the data analysis of film and stuff, has done other projects with us before. Stephen Follows wrote this great blog post about just how many Hallmark Christmas movies there are and really detailed into the tropes and the expectations of a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Drew: In his blog post, Stephen Follows says he found a total of 307 Hallmark Christmas movies with production reaching an average of 30 a year over the past few years.

John: He included some great charts to talk through how much the production of these movies has grown over the years. 30 in a genre per year is crazy that there’s 30 of these being made each year. He listed the genres within them. Obviously romance is very high for these Christmas movies. Most of them come out in November and December, which also makes sense. If you’re curious about holiday movies on Hallmark, this is the definitive source, the definitive article, I think, for the data behind this. 180 degrees, I think, not as opposite as you can get from a Hallmark Christmas movie is this genre that Max Read has described in, I think originally on your Letterboxd, but then became a blog post. Can you tell us about what Halogencore is? Try to define this genre for us.

Max: If you don’t mind, I can just read a little bit.

John: Sure, go for it.

Max: I’ll just read a short thing that I wrote, partly just me trying to list out what I liked about these movies.

“Halogencore movies are stories of corporate intrigue and malfeasance told from the point of view of characters on the outside of the inside, low-level apparatchiks, functionaries, subordinates, and middle managers, navigating crisis from the periphery of real power. They usually take place over a short timeframe, day or a night or a weekend, and against a ticking clock. They are not stories of lasting change, stunning revelation, or dramatic reversals of fortune. They’re stories of beaten-down people acquiescing to or negotiating compromise with power. The victory of a happy ending in a Halogencore movie is not that power has been toppled, but that our compromised hero has managed to survive inside the machine without being crushed. As the name suggests, Halogencore movies feature lots of fluorescent lighting and nighttime city shots. The action is largely office-bound.”

John: At this moment, I’d love to actually play a clip from Margin Call. Margin Call is one of the ones you identify. Let’s take a listen to this moment from Margin Call, which I think actually does hit a lot of these beats. I think you’ll recognize it once we play it.

[plays a clip from the movie Margin Call]

John: Max, that to me feels like what you’re describing here. You have a bunch of folks who work for this investment firm. One of them has discovered something that is highly amiss, but they’re not classic outsiders coming into a space and having to learn about a space. They were already part of the system and they’re discovering a new flaw. They’re discovering a new way that the world is broken. Is that a fair description?

Max: Yes. And you’ll notice they don’t quite know what’s going on themselves yet. They’re ahead of you, the audience, but they themselves are still behind somebody else who’s not on screen. Their first action when they uncover whatever secret or whatever revelation they’ve just found is they have to call their bosses. It’s not like a, “Let’s go get this published.” It’s not like whatever. It’s like the subordinates have to find the guy, the middle manager has to call the middle manager above him. Margin Call is a movie that’s great with working through hierarchy and establishing and demonstrating hierarchies in that way. The music does a lot there. It’s a great music cue, but you can feel the tension mounting just through the dialogue in that scene without really ever learning. If you’ve never seen Margin Call, it’s about banks, but if you didn’t know that, you don’t need to know what they’re talking about or what’s happening to understand just through what they’re saying to each other how serious everything that’s happening is.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about some of the other films in the genre because if it was just Margin Call, it’s like, oh Margin Call is a one-off. It’s an example of this thing, but it’s not a genre until there’s many films that can be categorized with it. Talk to us about the other things you identify as being, oh, this feels like halogencore.

Max: To me, the big one is Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton, in some ways, this was me attempting to define movies that are like Michael Clayton because it’s just one of my favorite movies. Michael Clayton is similarly, again, it’s about a lawyer who’s on the outside of his own law firm. At one point, his brother says to him, all the lawyers think you’re a cop, all the cops think you’re a lawyer. He’s in this liminal identity space. He’s working against time to find his mentor. It’s all in offices. There’s the similar droney music making you feel anxious the whole time.

I actually didn’t write this out, the set of observations out till I’d seen The Assistant, which is a relatively recent movie where Julia Garner plays the assistant to an unseen and unnamed, but very clearly Harvey Weinstein-based movie producer. The movie is about the office environment under a tyrant like that, where everybody knows something bad has happened or is happening and nobody is able to talk about it or do anything about it. Again, it has the same sense of like, you the audience are a little bit behind the characters. They do this in a really enjoyable feeling. You don’t quite know what’s going on.

Part of the reason it works is that the characters themselves are also a little bit behind. They themselves don’t quite know the depth of wrongdoing or exactly what’s happening. They’re trying to figure it out themselves, but also to figure it out without getting in trouble. They’re not crusading. To me, that’s three that really hit the mark. There’s a bunch of others that have a similar, let’s call it a vibe. There’s earlier movies, movies that were made– Shattered Glass, it’s a great movie about the New Republic and Stephen Glass, who is famously identified as having fabricated a bunch of stories.
Syriana is a total favorite of mine, is a Stephen Gaghan movie about– It’s a little like Traffic. It’s all these interconnected stories about geopolitics, extremely depressing movie, just unbelievably politically bleak movie, but similarly has a lot of these– Jeffrey Wright plays a high-powered corporate lawyer who suddenly steps into the world of oil money and political assassination and realizes how much more insane everything has gotten than he understood.

Even a more recent movie, High Flying Bird, the Steven Soderbergh movie, which is a very different arena. It’s not banks. It’s not oil. It’s about an NBA agent who’s trying to break the owner’s cartel in the NBA. It’s a little more fun than these other ones, I suppose, but it has the same rhythms because a lot of people are on the phone all the time, they’re having these secret meetings. You’re constantly catching up to the action as it happens.

I could keep going on, there’s another movie that I want to really recommend, because I don’t think many people have seen it, called Azor, which is, to me, one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It’s a Swiss-Argentinian movie, Swiss director, set in Argentina about a Swiss banker who comes over to Argentina during the Dirty War, under the military junta, and is looking for his partner, who’s disappeared. He spends the whole movie in these shadowy meetings with these very scary Argentinian fascists and military apparatchiks, trying to uncover what’s happened amidst this world where kids are disappearing, students are disappearing all the time.

He’s recognizing and uncovering, and unlike what you might expect from a Hollywood movie, it’s not about, “I’m going to uncover this, bring everybody to justice.” It’s, “I’m going to uncover this and then cover it right back up because I didn’t really want to know in the first place and I just need to get my own thing and get out of here.” Those are some good ones. There’s a Letterboxd list, there’s my newsletter, people are welcome to come suggest ones to me, too, if they’ve got them.

John: Let’s talk about the common elements we’re seeing here, because there’s structural elements. We talked about how these tend to be stories that have a protagonist who’s already part of that world. I love that you say they’re on the outside of the inside. They’re already part of the system, but they don’t know quite how the whole system works, but they’re ahead of us as the audience is. But really, the vibe is what’s crucial. The vibe, you say anxiety, you say dread, paranoia, this pessimism, this sense of a crushing doom. In this setup, I was talking about slasher films, and in a weird way, there is an aspect of a slasher. It’s not about bringing down the system, it’s just about surviving.

It’s just being the person who actually emerges at the end, and there’s not a sense that you’re going to topple this regime, you’re just trying to get through it. I think back to the end of Michael Clayton, and we do see Michael Clayton, the George Clooney character, be able to get a victory over Tilda Swinton’s character, but then as he’s in his cab ride leaving, he recognizes he didn’t really do all that much. It’s not like the problem of the movie is fully solved, it’s just he got through this one situation, he got through this one moment.

Max: Yes. One really obvious antecedent to these is paranoia thrillers of the ‘70s. Three Days of the Condor is a really classic one that has– What’s the final line? Something like, “But are they going to print it?” He’s got all his documents, he’s taken into the Times. What’s one of the things that’s interesting to me about this is that, as we’ve been saying, there’s not a do-gooder figure. It’s really rare that there’s a crusading — It’s not Pelican brief. There’s not a Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington crusading to uncover something. It doesn’t have like a journalist at the center.

It’s guys who work at law firms or at banks or in big glass offices who are forced to compromise whatever small measure of integrity they have left. That’s the vibe of that, like you say, of that pessimism and bleakness is, to me, all about that sense that you can’t do anything. You can save yourself, maybe. That’s maybe the best thing you can do. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is get out of there.

John: The relationship between these movies and the paranoid thrillers, which tended to focus on investigators or on journalists is really interesting because in the journalism thrillers, it tends to be, we have our crusading journalists going in and looking for answers. The point of view is from the journalist. Look at Spotlight, which is a movie that feels like it’s close to this in some ways, except that they are an outsider looking into a system. In those, the POV tends to be, in my estimation, fairly well locked to the characters investigating. But as I think to Margin Call, or I think to Michael Clayton, the movie is willing to switch POVs and show us things that our central protagonist does not know yet.

We’re able to cut to Tilda Swinton’s POV and see how she’s freaking out in the restroom stall. In Margin Call, we’re able to cut to Kevin Spacey’s character trying to get his way out of the situation. We as an audience have information that at times even our protagonist doesn’t have. I think that leads to this overall greater sense of dread, the same way in a horror film, where sometimes we’re cutting to the killer’s point of view and we know where the killer is in relationship to our hero who’s trying to hide or succeed or get away from the killer.

Max: Margin Call does something I think is absolutely brilliant, which is it hides– It’s about the Lehman Brothers crash in ’08. You know what’s going on. It effectively hides the actual mechanics of the secret and the problem. You focus is almost entirely on internal personal dynamics at the bank and fear and frustration and paranoia until the bank’s CEO arrives with an unbelievably great cameo by Jeremy Irons, just being the most Jeremy Irons he possibly can be. And he’s the guy who’s like, “Can somebody please explain to me what the fuck is going on as though I were a dog or a small child?”

It both works really well because finally the audience is clued in, and they’re clued in a great, natural and organic way. We get the explanation from Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto about exactly what’s been happening. But it’s also thematically great because you finally see that, even the guy at the very center, even the inside of the inside, doesn’t really know what’s happening. Everybody is out on a limb. Everybody is piecing together information as it comes in. Everybody’s fearing for their own ass. Everybody is trying to get out. To me, that’s the best scene in the movie. It’s a boardroom scene. It just works really well. It just nails exactly what’s happening.

John: Let’s look at other movies that are doing similar things, but sometimes funnier or sometimes just in a different way. We talk about financial shenanigans, The Big Short, of course, is a great look at the collapse of this housing bubble and how everything goes awry. We have those moments where we need to explain to a character on screen, but also to the audience, what’s really happening here. I think the difference is that while some of our characters are complicit in what’s happening here, there’s not that same sense of dread to it. We know that a calamity is coming, but there’s not that sense of impending doom.

Another example would be Moneyball. Moneyball is very insider. You have characters who know things that the audience doesn’t know. They recognize how complicated the situation is. Yet the movie ultimately lets itself have more fun than it’s not just all dread the whole time. There are moments of real tension and suspense. That’s not the overall goal of the story.

Max: It’s funny because there’s a bunch of techniques. Moneyball, for example, looks– It’s got that Soderbergh digital camera washed out look and the post-rock soundtrack to give you a little bit of that feeling. But it subverts the expectations of that in a nice way, that it’s funny and it’s a little inspiring, even if it’s ambiguously inspiring. It’s not like the A’s won the World Series. I like a movie like that, that can magpie pick things that create certain expectations in the audience and then subvert them a little. Soderbergh is, to me, a huge influence on this general genre, probably because of his use of digital cinematography. Early traffic is probably an early version of this. He loves his really intricate screenplays that are hiding all kinds of things from all kinds of characters.

But probably his most halogencore movie is actually The Informant with Matt Damon, which is a great, very funny and probably underseen movie that takes all the halogencore ideas and tropes and then just plays it like a straight comedy. It’s a really interesting exercise in what you can do when you set up a set of expectations and then just tweak one of your knobs a little bit. You’re like, “What if we accept that this is actually quite funny and we make it and we just play that up a little bit?”

John: As we were listening to the clip from Margin Call, I was also thinking about Glengarry Glen Ross in the sense of the overlapping dialogue, the sense of characters never fully completing a thought, but they’re recognizing they’re building on top of each other. There’s a sense of power that’s created by ideas not being fully expressed, but recognition that this motion is happening. Or The Insider, which is another great story, identified as being a proto-halogencore, because it has a journalist at the center of it, it’s not quite the same situation as being trapped inside the space with these characters, but those are all aspects of that.

Going back to Soderbergh, I think you’re right to nail his digital cinematography, but it’s also it’s pulling a documentary aesthetic into a classic narrative space. He didn’t end up directing Moneyball, but Moneyball is often shot like a documentary. It’s shot and has that aspect that you feel like you’re wandering into conversations that were already happening. Even the scouts are talking around the table, it feels like, “Oh, this could have just been an actual real thing that they just set up some cameras and shot.” I think you get that in a lot of these movies where it feels like the camera happened to find these characters having this conversation, which is an aesthetic on that.

Max: Pretty true to most of these. The immediacy, I think, is really important because, to me the ticking clock is one of the most important things of movies like this, that there is a deadline that people are working against and that creates all the urgency and the camera wobbling and turning corners, that Wiseman documentary, it’s like very Frederick Wiseman, like just a guy with a camera wandering around the high-powered lawyer’s office for some reason. It heightens that sense. There’s no stately compositions or anything. It’s just like, we got a snippet of this conversation. It mimics the idea that you might overhear something at the office and realize that– The Assistant is particularly good at this, because so much of that is she hears things going on behind the closed door and your acid reflux starts to activate because you’re feeling just as stressed as she is.

John: We’re talking about feature films. Feature films obviously are a story with a beginning and an end in a short period of time, which feel like they’re crucial aspects to the structure of the halogencore movies. They’re not necessarily in real time, but they’re at a compressed period of time. Yet, I see some of these aesthetics also being done in series television. If you look at Succession, I think there’s an aspect of this dread happening in many individual episodes of Succession. I think Severance has aspects of this too, where there is this sense of crushing dread and characters who are the part of it, but they don’t see the whole picture. They’re touching a piece of the elephant, but they don’t know what the whole elephant is. Even though we’re talking about something that is a film or genre, aspects of that can absolutely apply to series television as well.

Max: We joked about proto-halogencore, about movies that are maybe a little too early to be considered the genre but are obviously like serious influences. A few that come to mind are actually ‘70s and ‘80s BBC television series, which are limited series. It’s in this ambiguous space between endlessly serial and the TV. The original BBC, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is very– John le Carre as a novelist and all the movies that have been based on his novels are also very important, I think to– Nobody’s better at cultivating that sense of rot on the inside than John le Carre.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there’s a great series called Edge of Darkness from the ‘80s about a detective, it’s a nuclear paranoia, a detective looking for his daughter, that have a lot of these things. It’s like 1980s England in the minds of filmmakers of the time was one of the bleakest places imaginable. They nailed it, I suppose. Those are great examples of ways to, even if you don’t necessarily have a ticking clock to draw out these threads of bleakness, of paranoia, of despair, of just mopping up a mess that is never really going to be fully clean.

John: I want to close this up by talking about the actual practical takeaways from this, because it’s one thing to identify a genre, but it’s actually can be useful for people who want to make movies, because it’s hard to say, “I want to make a movie like Michael Clayton. I want to make a movie like this.” Once you identify it’s in this space, and so you don’t necessarily need to use the term halogencore, but once you can identify multiple examples of this thing, and what is the aesthetic, what is the choice that you’re going for, that’s really, really useful.

If you’re setting out to write a project that is in this space or you have written a project that is in this space, to be able to talk about how it fits into the overall landscape is really useful. I do hope, and I think it’s a plausible hope, that some folks are out there writing films that could fall into this genre. Just by having this conversation and by giving a word for it might make it a little bit easier for them to find the financing, find the champions for the project, because they see like, “Oh, I get what this is.” This is not a one-time unique thing.

Max: I’ve taken generals and tried to explain this concept to executives, and there’s a lot of executives who love these movies. They’re great movies. Who doesn’t love Michael Clayton? The more we can spread the gospel of halogencore, the easier it’ll be to sit down across from somebody and say, “I’m writing a halogencore movie.” I would like to watch more of these personally. I would like to get more made. So I hope that’s true.

John: Talk to me about halogencore as a title. I’ll confess that it took me a beat to figure out what it was that you were going for, because halogen, to me, I think of my dorm room that had the torch here, halogen light, that always, word was going to set the whole room on fire. There’s that light aesthetic. I see what you’re going for there.

Max: This is the problem with doing this as a one-off letterbox list before it became a running theme on my– If I had thought it was going to come back, I would have sat on it a little bit longer. I didn’t let my New York Magazine packaging instincts really take over.

I do think we talked about this documentary, the washed-out digital, like Michael Mann and Soderbergh, early digital cinema pioneers, the documentary aesthetic, that feels so important. Just trying to communicate that idea of the establishing shot of so many of these movies is a huge tower in the city at night, and one floor or one office is lit up. You’re in for a good ride if that’s the establishing shot for your movie. That was what I wanted to get at, was that halogencore. That’s what I’m looking for when I start my movie.

John: Great. Let’s transition to talking about the– Oh, what is the New York Magazine package for it? You have to have an image for it. Let’s talk a little bit more about journalism and what your history has been, writing for other people and writing for yourself now, because most of the folks who are listening to this podcast are probably writing for themselves. As a screenwriter, I’ve always been writing for myself, going from job to job to job. More classically, as a journalist, you were employed at a publication. You were there exclusively for a time. That’s not the reality now. Can you just quickly chart through how you got started and what the trajectory has been for you?

Max: I had a normal start. I was an intern at the Daily Beast back when Tina Brown ran it. I met a woman named Maureen O’Connor, a great journalist who had gone to Gawker. She was working nighttime. I wanted to leave Daily Beast. She said, “Come take my night shift.” So I spent a year doing 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM. That was the entrance. Once I had that job and could demonstrate that I could do it, I was able to advance in Gawker and then get this job at New York Magazine. I love both experiences, but in terms of working for people, Gawker was a much more independent place, and I think prepared me for my current, much more independent job in a lot of ways.

We had editors but not at every moment was every single thing cleared. Certainly, very few things, until the later stages, were deeply read through or crossed out. We were mostly writing 200, 300 words. A lot of the training there was activation energy to find things, come up with an angle, write them fast, whereas New York Mag, in general, especially on the print side, was a much more collaborative thoughtful place. It was still a little bit helter-skelter because we were putting out a magazine every two weeks, but you’d have a month, two months, three months of lead time. Oftentimes, you’d spend a lot of time reporting. You’re in meetings with your editor. You’re in meetings with the art department. I really loved that. I love that collaborative work.

A good TV room can be very similar where you just have a lot of people with a lot of great ideas, able to bounce off one another to really craft something that feels like it’s the best possible version of what it can be. Now my job is like, I don’t even have coworkers. I’m here at home. The closest thing I have to coworkers is a bunch of group chats that I just am constantly hitting every day that function as the slack room of my coworkers. It’s a challenge in some ways.

I have a three-year-old, and it’s been really useful to have a very flexible schedule when I have a toddler. That, to me, is the best thing about working by myself with no real obligations. It is hard. I find this when I’m trying to write spec scripts or whatever, that it can be really hard. Everybody who’s listened to the podcast knows how hard it can be to force yourself to work when there’s no stick and maybe no carrot either. You’re just like, “I got to go put some words on the page.”

But the structure of, I obligate to my subscriber, I am obligated to produce one post or two posts a week to my subscribers, is really useful to just keep my brain moving, keep the wheels greased, so to speak. But Journalism is so volatile right now. I hope the newsletter process can sustain itself and people will keep wanting to pay for years to come. I feel like I may have to jump back into the office world sometime soon, or who knows.

John: Talk to me about making your year, making your month, because you’re publishing through Substack. For that, you have a certain number of subscribers and the subscribers are paying you a certain amount per month. You can expect how much to get in, which is our premium members to Scriptnotes, they are paying us five bucks a month, and that is income that we can count on, which is great, it helps stabilize things. That’s not the only thing you do. You can also write pieces for existing magazines if you want to, you can do special things. What do you find is the balance there, and how much are you pursuing just writing for yourself versus outside work?

Max: I’m trying to do a couple feature, like magazine features a year. It depends a lot on the work itself. If I get a freelance offer that I am passionate about, that I know I can complete quite quickly, then I will usually say yes, just because why not? It’s not going to take a lot of my time. But I find that a long, full-length magazine feature really takes it out of me. Whether or not I was doing the newsletter, it requires a lot of work. Despite producing two newsletters a week, I am a pretty slow writer, and I don’t want to be tearing my hair out. It’s good, I think, to challenge yourself. It’s good for me to challenge myself and make sure that I have some end of year or end of quarter, or whatever it is, goal.
I’m going to finish this piece, I’m going to finish this script, I’m going to do this. But I don’t like the system changes every six months. It’s like some months it’s really nice to have, Monday is the day I work on this project, and then Tuesday I do the newsletter, and then Wednesday is the whatever. That just isn’t going to work. Especially because when you’re doing the newsletter, if something happens in the world that you have a quick response to, you have to listen to that, that’s the best, quickest, easiest way that you’re going to get a newsletter out that week. You might think Monday is my script day but then news drops that you’re like, “I have a 1,600 word idea about that I can just bang out right now,” and now Monday’s not your script day anymore, so I hope Tuesday can be your script day or Friday or whatever it is. It’s hard. If somebody out there has figured out a solution to this, please let me know. It’s a matter of picking projects that I don’t dread working on in the end of the day.

I shouldn’t say this. I hope my manager’s not listening. If I have a pilot spec that I’m working on, and it’s taking me a lot longer than it should, it might be because I don’t actually want to do this pilot spec. That I had this idea and it– maybe it’s just time to throw it in the can and say, let’s find something that I actually will want to work on after my kid goes to bed or that I’ll want to work on in the middle of the day or after lunch or whatever. It’s the hardest thing about being a writer, I think.

John: For the Scriptnotes book, I was just editing the chapter with Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Like you, is a writer who works both in journalism, doing celebrity profiles, but also writes her own stuff, or writes her own books, and now runs her own TV shows. She talks about sort of the challenge of figuring out like, how am I spending my time right now? What is the best use of my– thing to do right now? Unlike you, she’s a very fast writer, so she can do all these things at once, but it is that juggling act.

One thing you mentioned is that you have group chats with other writers and that that becomes, essentially, your Slack channel, your newsroom. It’s the people around you. But I do notice that there’s an ecosystem within these writers who are doing Substacks and doing other things that I feel like you’re also always in communication with each other. I think I probably first found you because Today in Tabs have linked out to an article that you had done.

There’s also like the Noahpinions and the Tyler Cowens. There is this web of independent people writing stuff that does feed on itself and sort of supports itself. Do you actively try to sustain that or is that just a thing that naturally comes up?

Max: That’s a good question. We used to call that the blogosphere when they were blogs.

John: Sure. Back in the day, yes.

Max: From a business perspective, it’s hugely important. Actually, if I’m just separating out the creative process part of it, I get new subscribers like you because these other people link to me, so I need that as a growth plan. From a stuff perspective, I presume that I could. It probably wouldn’t be great if my newsletter every week was just something I came up with completely off the top of my head.

This dialogue with other writers, the ability to hear what they’re saying and respond to it, I think not only gives me– means that I’m doing a little bit less work every week in terms of ideating, to use a horrible neologism, but also that I’m responding to things out there in the world that are actually happening. It brings in new readers, and I actually think readers enjoy it.

One of the weirdest and funniest things about my job as a newsletter writer is that, a lot of ways, what I do is I’m like a YouTuber for Gen-Xers and elder Millennials. It’s as much about me and the way I think about things and my personality and my preferences as it is about the specific topics under review or my arguments or whatever else. That makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m just at the very early end of a generation that is comfortable with being a social media influencer.
I think you have to make a little bit of peace with the fact that this is how people get to know you. This is how they follow you and why they follow you. When I have an article, I have 40,000 people on my list who will go read it because I say, “Here’s an article I read.” If I were to write a book or what– any other project that I want people to get to, I now have this audience.

Part of that is just they know me. They know how I think about things, they know what kinds of things I like. I don’t like to do super personal — I’m not really a personal writer, I like to give my son and my wife a little bit of privacy, but it’s the sense that I have a particular way of thinking about things and people like to read me think through things in that way that I think is the kind of thing. Just to connect it back to your first question, I think that’s true of a lot of these writers.

There’s these sort of personalities who are like, I don’t always agree what Tyler Cowen says, but I think he’s somebody who– he gives me a valuable perspective from that particular kind of person he is and the expertise he has or whatever, and I want to read him because it allows me to set my own, to think about how I feel about something. The more people there are in that kind of network or ecosystem the more fertile and fruitful it can be.

John: You’re making your living through the Substack and yet that’s not the only place you express your ideas. There’s this aspect of like we’re expected to do multiple things at once or sort of have multi-media presences at once. I was a blogger, so my johnaugust.com was a blog and for many years it was a blog. The whole reason we started the podcast was that a blog is just a monologue. It’s just me having a conversation with myself.
There were comments on the blog for a while and there was that sense that people were reading it and there was some feedback there. It wasn’t until there was a podcast that it could actually be a conversation and people could engage and dig in on a topic. The overlap between what we do on this podcast and what I do on the blog versus an influencer or a YouTuber is really interesting. It’s a generational shift.

I would say that one of the real advantages, though, to doing it as a print is it’s easy for me to go back and look through your old posts on Halogencore. I could see what you’ve written on Halogencore before and YouTube would be almost impossible for me to go back and assemble like what all that stuff was before. It’s just a real advantage to print. One of the reasons why we’ve had transcripts of the podcast since the very beginning is because it makes it simple for us to actually go back and find what was there and what the history was.

Have we talked about this topic before? What did we say then? How has our thinking changed? That’s just a huge advantage to writing stuff down versus a YouTube video or even tweets. I sometimes see and Tyler Cowen will often link out to things that I think are going to be blog posts were actually just a thread of like seven tweets. Well, is that an article? What is that? Do you ever struggle with the idea of like, is this something that should be a newsletter or should this be a tweet?

Max: Well, I quit Twitter. I quit Twitter in 20– like during–

John: Yes, I noticed you’re not on there.

Max: No.

John: You’re not really on threads either so you–

Max: No. One thing I can say for Substack is, once I had– once I recognized that I could make money from my tossed-off thoughts, as long as I expanded them to 600, 800, 1,200 words, I’ve– there’s no looking back. I was like really active on Twitter when I was at Gawker and New York Magazine. In a lot of ways, I owe a lot of my career to Twitter. I don’t think I would have been able to start this newsletter without the audience I’d already built up on Twitter.

At some point, it became clear that I just, like many people, did not really have a healthy relationship to it, spent too much time on it. I would find myself, before going to bed, looking at my phone and getting furious at somebody I didn’t even know. It’s like, what a waste of my energy and time. I quit and around the same time I started the Substack. I wasn’t really thinking of the Substack as a replacement for Twitter but now that I know that I can put out to an audience that really wants to receive it, my thoughts, and I will probably get money for doing so, it has helped nip in the bud–
In addition to the fact that the Musk takeover has scattered everything that was special about Twitter to the winds, and Threads and Bluesky haven’t quite hit the mass or the whatever it is that allows them to replace it. To answer your question, this is something that I think I learned really well at Gawker, is that if something occupies your mind for a certain amount of time, for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, it actually probably is worth writing about.

Maybe you don’t have anything more to say about it in a sentence, but I bet you could squeeze a paragraph or two out of it. You can have multiple items in your newsletter. You could do blogs where you just do a short thing every time. We used to have this joke, Slack is a workplace chat app There was a rule- It wasn’t a Gawker rule, it was for Deadspin, the sports blog. -there’s a certain number of Slack messages, if 10 Slack messages about a single topic went by, somebody had to write about it for the site.

If it was interesting enough for 10 messages, then it needs to go on a site. Don’t hem and haw, don’t think about it. If you’re a writer, almost– you’re almost guaranteed to be overthinking this kind of thing all the time, just go for it.

John: The reason this episode is this is because I posted a link in Slack to Drew saying like, “Hey, this is a really interesting article,” and I realized, as I post, it’s like, “Oh, you should probably have him on to talk about Halogencore.” It does circle all back around. I want to wrap this up by talking about, you are also a person who wants to write film and television.

You have a manager, you have that as an aspiration as well. How do you think about balancing what you want to do there versus what your– what is your day job, at a day job you actually really like which is running the Substack, because there’s an opportunity cost to doing all the 600, 800,000 words on a topic because that’s time you’re not writing a script.

Max: Yeah. The newsletters only two years old. I haven’t been in a room while I’ve been doing it. So far, it’s been like a, “Well, that’ll be a good problem to have whenever I have it.” For me, the real balance is the having a family and a social life and all these other things. If I had no other obligations, I could easily be in a room all day or do punch-ups on a script or whatever, and then write the newsletter at night, but I want to spend time with my son and my wife, and I want to go out and have dinner and all these other things.

To be brutally honest, right now, the way TV writing in particular is looking in Hollywood, it feels like I should be concentrating my energy on the guaranteed income I make from the newsletter versus the sort of possibility that I might be one of the 10 TV writers getting work this year. Part of the thing I was saying before about passion, the passion stuff, is I hadn’t written fiction, until I started writing this show with my friend back in 2018, I hadn’t written fiction since high school, basically, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I’d forgotten how those muscles worked and how much I enjoyed being able to exercise that part of me. And so in some ways it’s like, I’m having ideas throughout the day- It’s similar to what we were just talking about, -I’m having ideas throughout the day, so why not?

Even if it’s a slim chance that this thing’s going to get made, or it’s going to get me in the right room or whatever it is, why not, therapeutically, just for the hobby sake, do that? But again, as we keep saying, the balance is impossible to figure out. There’ll be weeks where it’s like I won’t do anything on the newsletter, but I will get 40 or 50 pages out on a script that I’m interested in.

Then there are months where I’m like, it’s just a newsletter every week and maybe a magazine feature. I haven’t opened final draft, it’s just the moldering on my desktop somewhere.

John: Maybe not opening a final draft is the right choice, we need to get you writing in Highland instead.

Max: Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe that’s what I need.

John: That is the secret. That’s what’s going to change everything for you. Everyone was listening to the moment that his whole life changed.

All right, let’s get to our one cool things. I have two one cool things this week. First is an article by Sarah Schaefer about leaving Los Angeles. I guess it’s actually a blog post. Maybe it’s even a Substack post.

Sarah Schaefer has been on the show before. She is super smart. She’s a comedy writer, and she writes in this post about her decision to leave Los Angeles, basically. That Los Angeles was so expensive that she decided to move with her husband to Virginia and why she decided to do that. Also, the weird way that you have to talk about like, I’m not giving up on my writing career, it’s just I’m moving to Virginia, but that’s not a change from that.

The question of, what are you doing right now in a time when, especially in TV writing, it’s so tough, that maybe we should stop asking, “What are you working on,” and instead be asking, “Where are you? Like, “What’s happening in your life?” It is a Substack. I look at the URL, it is a Substack, so another Substacker to follow.

Second one cool thing was, I went to the show, Mike Birbiglia had the show in Los Angeles at Largo, invited me to. It was Mike Birbiglia and a bunch of other really incredible standup comedians.

The final act was this guy Billy Strings who I’d never heard of before. He’s a Bluegrass performer. I would never have guessed that I liked Bluegrass. This guy was just remarkably talented and just the fastest picking playing I’d ever seen. Really good song craft, so it’s a thing you probably don’t know that you would enjoy, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to this video so you can see a sense of what this is like. Let me play a little clip for you right now just to get a sense of what this sounds like so you’ll, hopefully, click through to the video.

[music]
I ain’t slept in seven days, haven’t ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn
This life of sin (life of sin) has got me in (got me in)
Well it’s got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie
[music]

John: If that’s at all intriguing, click through the video and take a listen to Billy Strings. Max, what have you got for us?

Max: I just read a book that I am trying to push on everybody. I’m a big sci-fi guy, and the book is called In Ascension. It’s by a guy named Martin McInnes. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but I haven’t seen it get a ton of attention or reviews. If you’re a sci-fi guy like me, it’s sort of a– it’s a little bit Jeff VanderMeer, it’s a little bit Ted Chiang. It’s even a little bit Carl Sagan, but it’s also its own thing.
It’s about a Dutch biologist who first investigates a mysterious crevice at the bottom of the ocean and then is sent into space to investigate a mysterious object on the outer edges of space. I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to give it away, but there’s also– it’s just a beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully structured, beautifully composed story. I can’t wait to read more by McInnes, and I highly recommend this one.

John: That sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.
That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the acceleration of time.

If you’d like to sign up for the Highland beta, there’s a link in the show notes for that. Click through to that, and you can take a look at the next version of Highland. Max Read, thank you for coming on the show to talk to us about Halogencore and journalism and other writing topics.

Max: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

John: If you would like to read more from Max, you should go to his Substack. It is maxread.substack.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, too, but you will find him writing twice a week about all sorts of topics on the future.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, in our bonus segment, we are recording this on the Friday after the Democratic National Convention. Kamala Harris has just received the nomination of the Democrats to run for president. This caps off a month of her being the candidate, which is just crazy. It’s crazy how much has happened this summer, and it feels like things are only happening faster and faster. Max, as a person who has to– takes it upon yourself- You don’t have to do this. -but you’ve taken it upon yourself to recap the events of the year each year, man, it’s going to be a very long block for this summer. It’s just so much has happened.

Max: As a journalist, this is actually what you want. I can’t take my journalist hat off here. Just there’s more stuff to write about, more stuff to talk about, more grist for the content mill. It is going to take me a long time to sort through everything. At the end of the year, I do these– I call them the year in weird and stupid futures, and I try to round up everything that’s like a harbinger of our very weird and stupid present, let’s be honest, but also future. My bookmarks folder is already basically full. I’m going to have to be deleting stuff rather than searching it out at the end.

John: I want to talk about how you organize your stuff. You say a bookmarks folder. Is it literally just in Safari you have a folder of all the bookmarks for things? How are you organizing things?

Max: It’s like MTV Cribs, and you walk into my room, and it’s like such a mess it feels so embarrassing. Right now, I’m using a product called Aboard, which is made by a friend of mine named Paul Ford, who’s a great writer and programmer. Aboard is a bookmarking service that creates little cards with images and links, and you can put notes, and you can tag them, and you can sort them and whatever you want.

It’s a really useful way for me to just be saving snippets of things that I might use for future articles. I’m working on a piece about generated AI slop right now, and I’m tagging stuff that I find so that I can save it for later. I’m tagging weird futures things. I see a link to a musician I want to listen to or a book I want to read, I’ll throw it in there too. It’s just a bucket for everything.

I’m using a browser called Arc that I really like. It’s got a really great tab system where you can separate– you can save tabs, and you can separate them out and do sort of things. Some stuff is getting saved in the Arc tab system-

John: Yes, it’s dangerous.

Max: -and but some stuff’s getting saved in the board, and I’m going to lose a lot of stuff, I’m sure. It feels very clean because everything’s designed so well.

John: I’m using Pinboard for all these sort of things that come up. I see something, I make a pin, and it goes to Pinboard, which is like a very bare bones. It’s been around for 20 years. It holds together.

Max: Yes, well, so I was a longtime Pinboard user, and I switched to a board because I wanted to support Paul, and I just have been sort of stuck in it, but I love Pinboard too. It’s just very straightforward, easy, to the point. I think I still pay for mine because I’ve got eight years of Pinboard links to look back upon.

John: Absolutely. As you think about all of the links that are now being put into Pinboard or a board, it does just feel crazy. There are moments in time when it feels like, oh my gosh, I’m actually in a part of a story. I remember, obviously, the 2016 election, the moment like, oh shit, like I could feel that everything has changed around me. Start of the pandemic felt like that as well. This summer, Craig and I were recording this podcast when Trump got shot.

Trump got shot. It’s so weird that a presidential candidate was a attempted assassination, and his ear got bloodied, and could have died, like inches away, he could have died, and we barely remember that as actually even happening this summer. Just so much has happened so quickly. The other thing I would say is that I feel like the advent of ChatGPT and just the realization like, oh shit, like AI is like much better and faster than we ever had anticipated, accelerated the sense too that we are– that line between like here’s where we are now, and that’s the future, instead of like, oh, we’ve jumped into the future, and we really weren’t quite ready for it.

Max: Yeah. I think about this sometimes just as a journalist. We live in a relatively fragmented media environment. It’s not like there are three networks that we all sit down in front of every night to help us sort of memorialize things that happened. Which means that if it was, obviously, if it was 50 years ago, we probably would still be hearing about the Trump assassination attempt because that– we would have our agendas set by three networks and five major metropolitan papers.

Now, novelty is such a premium in this kind of environment where you’re getting your news from whoever and whenever and wherever. For the worst, usually, not for the better. Novelty is such a premium that the collective boredom of the internet sets in so much earlier on everything. It’s like hard to grapple with, kind of. One of the funniest things we noticed at Gawker when I was there is that we could do incredible traffic with a rubric we called remember when, and we would just we would just lift tabloid stories from maybe 10 years earlier.

Some of this is sort of urban legend stuff, like remember when Tim Allen was busted for doing cocaine. I mean, that’s not an urban legend, but it is a story that everybody knows, but not everybody knows it online. There’s this funny thing where not only is everything happening and being forgotten all at once, everything is also being remembered all at once right now, too.
The remember when thing is now you go on TikTok and there’s TikToks constantly of Zoomers describing the first World Trade Center bombing or other things, other ‘90s news stories that were part of my childhood that I remember relatively well, but the Zoomers have never heard of and are now sort of breathlessly telling each other about. A total flattening of time in this very funny way.

John: Yes. Obviously, there’s going to be peaks and valleys and things will probably normalize to some degree, things will slow down a little bit, probably, and yet we’re racing up to an election. September, normally is– like you said in the setup here, August is usually a very slow month. No one deliberately does anything in August because people are gone and there’s sort of nothing happens in August. People are on vacation.

Now, suddenly, things are happening. It’s not just in the US. UK calls for snap elections and suddenly they have a new person in charge of the UK. Macron calls for elections in France and suddenly, like three weeks later, they’re voting, and they have new people in power. I think as it became clear that, after Biden’s disastrous debate, everyone’s like, well, we can’t actually do something that’s dramatic and swap out the candidate because it takes years to do that stuff and there’s the whole expectations.

I would point to Europe and say like, yes, but like Europe just does it. We can suddenly just do it. The result of this DNC process was just a reminder like, oh yes, we can actually do things quickly when we need to. So many of our systems are there because of just inertia and because we’ve always done it that way, but it doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it much faster if we needed to do it much faster.

Max: This is the sort of acceleration of time, like increases itself, right?

John: Yes.

Max: When that you can accelerate it, you’re like, well, let’s just keep on doing that, maybe.

John: Yes, let’s go faster and faster and break things and see, sort of see what happens there. It sets a weird expectation. If nothing happens in a week, it’s going to feel like, wait, no big thing happened? Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck filed for divorce this past week, and I would have totally missed it except that it showed up on one little thing, but like it was the perfect time to announce that you are separating because like, who can pay attention to that?

Max: I know. Really, if you’re a crisis PR person, and your first advice isn’t, “Don’t do anything,” then you’re not good at your job. Whenever a bad thing happens just ignore it and see if it goes away, because it probably will.

John: Yes, it probably will. Yeah, that is the cycle these days. Max, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about time and the acceleration of time and Halogencore. An absolute delight getting to know you.

Max: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, John.

John: Cool. Thanks.

Links:

• Beta test the new Highland – sign up here!
• Max Read’s newsletter READ MAX
• Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
• How many Hallmark Christmas movies are there?! by Stephen Follows
• The Read Max ‘Halogencore’ Guide
• Max Read’s Halogencore list on Letterboxd
• Where Are You Now? by Sara Schaefer
• Billy Strings – Dust in a Baggie
• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Brown (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.