Search Results for: beat sheet

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Marquardt: Were you ever an Andy?

Drew Goddard: I never was an Andy.

Drew Marquardt: All right. Good.

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

John: Andy Weir, yes.

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

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

Drew Goddard: Great.

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

Drew Goddard: Again, all interchangeable.

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

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

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

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

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

Drew Marquardt: I don’t think we have.

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: That was actually in Santa Fe.

John: Santa Fe, all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: I love that. He sounds smart.

John: He does sound smart.

Drew Goddard: Sorkin or something?

John: Yes, Aaron Sorkin.

Drew Goddard: Let me jot that down.

John: With two As.

Drew Goddard: Oh, got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Of course. I would love that too.

Drew Goddard: Oh my God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They’re scripting?

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

John: That’s crazy. That’s wild.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: I wish that was true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: All from his point of view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: No, all the way through shooting.

John: Oh, wow, crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: Oh, yes.

John: Oh, yes, you haven’t changed.

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, the roughest approximation, but useful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, not cool.

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

John: Had he told you anything about it before?

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

John: Oh. How that happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: All right. Great.

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

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

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

John: I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They can handle it all by themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, “Let’s nuke the ice caps.”

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

John: They’re used to it.

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

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

Drew Goddard: No.

John: Sandra Hüller’s-

Drew Goddard: Character could do it, but–

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

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

John: Trust, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They’re jazz. Is there–

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

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

John: To paint within the lines here.

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

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

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

John: The intersections.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: I do.

John: Yes, please go. Go for it.

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

John: I haven’t anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: Sounds fantastic. Great.

John: Drew, what do you got for us?

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

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

John: I’ve heard of that, yes.

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

John: Lucia Berlin?

Drew Goddard: Lucia Berlin.

John: Great. Fantastic.

Drew Goddard: Great.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. We’ll give you a Scriptnotes book while you’re here. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram: @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers.

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

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

John: Hooray.

[Outro – by Nick Moore]

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

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

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

John: High Potential was a pilot.

Drew Goddard: Yes.

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, the meat grinder of it all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew Goddard: Yes.

John: That happened to you, too. Yes.

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

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

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

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

John: You’ll get bored, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They did. Thanks, Drew.

Drew Goddard: Thank you.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 687 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we answer listener questions on first films, adaptations, writers groups, and thematic questions on television. In our bonus segment for premium members, we will play a round of Strong Opinions, a new little game we play in the office.

Craig: Oh.
John: Craig, you have Strong Opinions.

Craig: What?

John: You know, strong opinions about mayonnaise.

Craig: It’s a hard opinions about mayonnaise.

John: Ventriloquism.

Craig: Hard opinions about ventriloquism. Ventriloquism is the mayonnaise of entertainment.

John: Yes. We have a list of, honestly, 300 other topics too. We’ll get to-

Craig: Amazing.

John: -most of these. It’s a-

Craig: We’ll run it down.

John: -free little game we’re putting out there in the world.

Craig: Very exciting.

John: Great. First, we have some follow-up. Craig, last week we talked about tariffs, which was a non-starter.

Craig: Yes.

John: This week, the MPA and all the guilds together have sent a very glowing letter to our president saying, hey, we would really love to have some sort of national film production incentive and other esoteric changes to the tax code, which makes it easier to make these things.

Craig: Yes. If there is a way to somehow backdoor in something that’s really great for our film industry, because the president was suggesting something that would literally destroy it within seconds, that I suppose is a net positive. I don’t think there’s been any discussion like this for quite some time.

John: No.

Craig: If there’s one gift this guy has, it’s that he shows up at your party with an enormous amount of dynamite.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s like, instead of blowing that up, maybe we could–

Craig: Here’s something like an uncomfortable topic no one else has discussed. Why don’t we do that instead of you just blowing everything up? Listen, fingers crossed. It would be a tremendous thing for, obviously, the crews here in Los Angeles in particular.

John: That would be great. Second bit of follow-up. Way back in 1999, I wrote a scene in the first Charlie’s Angels in which a bird alights on a windowsill, and Bill Murray interacts with a bird, and it’s overheard. Cameron Diaz recognizes the sound that that bird makes and realizes where Bosley has been kidnapped and taken to.

This scene that I wrote innocently has frustrated birders for 25 years because the bird that she says it is, it’s not the bird we see on screen. It’s not the bird we hear.

Craig: No. Birders are notoriously flexible people about this sort of thing.

John: They are.

Craig: That’s why they got into birding.

John: Yes. [chuckles] They’re like, it’s some kind of bird. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care about specifics. One thing I really respect about birders is they’re like, that’s some kind of bird.

Craig: It has wings. it’s a bird. It’s big.

John: It’s a bird.

Craig: Yes. What kind of bird? A big one.

John: I mean, if you confuse a bat and a bird, then they’re like–

Craig: By the way, I have done that.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: To this day, whenever I see swallows or something, Melissa’s like, “Ooh, swallows.” I’ll go, “No, those are bats.” It makes her insane because she’s a birder.

John: Oh yes. That’s good. Yes. Forrest Wickman is the writer from Slate who was first annoyed by what had happened here. This has already been a podcast episode of Decoder Ring, Willa Paskin’s great show. Now there’s actually an article we can link to, which is a much longer history of and more detailed about the work he did to figure out what went so wrong with my script and all the subsequent scripts.

I didn’t write Pygmy Nuthatch. Pygmy Nuthatch is funnier. I picked a bird that actually made sense. Then over the course of the 16 other writers who worked on Charlie’s Angels, it all drifted away. Then ultimately the bird that they picked for it, you cannot actually film because you’re not allowed to own the bird. They talk to the animal handlers, talks to everybody. It’s just a good lesson in sort of how, quote unquote, “mistakes” in movies happen.

Craig: Sounds like a whole lot of apologizing for some terrible behavior, John. Sounds like you’re making a lot of excuses for a very hurtful thing that you did. That– who’s this guy?

John: Forrest Wickman.

Craig: Is still talking about 20 years later.

John: Yes. When they reached out to me about this, this was almost a year ago-

Craig: Jesus.

John: -I did not remember that there was a bird in Charlie’s Angels. That’s how long ago it’s been.

Craig: I don’t even know what to say. There are a lot of problems in the world. It’s not that we can’t be frivolous, but there has to be some limitation to the frivolity, especially if you’re doing it under the guise of your professional work. I am going to spend a company’s time and money to chase this down. Pygmy Nuthatch is a very funny name.

John: It is a funny name. Ultimately that’s my argument. We can’t quite figure out who wrote Pygmy Nuthatch. It could have been Zak Penn or Susannah Grant or anyone of the other people who worked on this movie.

Craig: They won’t remember either.

John: No, but it’s the funniest name.

Craig: No, it’s very funny. Does he not get that that’s why that happened? [chuckles]

John: He does understand it.

Craig: Oh, he does?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: Also, then why is the Pygmy Nuthatch not the bird depicted there? Why is the bird called not even matching the bird that’s there?

Craig: He doesn’t know how any of this works?

John: Well, now, if you read this article, you’ll understand how Hollywood works.

Craig: Oh, he figured it out.

John: He interviewed everybody. He did the journalist’s job of actually going and figuring out– finding the answers.

Craig: Good. There are serious problems that need to be uncovered. [laughs]

John: There’s also trivial problems. Sometimes the trivial problems are good.

Craig: I guess.

John: Honestly, the puzzles you’re solving every day are just for your own enjoyment. This is enjoyable for him.

Craig: Yes, but I’m not convincing people to watch me solve– Maybe I should. Maybe I should go on Twitch. There’s a guy named FoggyBrume. I’ve probably talked about FoggyBrume. No? He’s the editor in chief of P&A Magazine, Panda Magazine, which every couple of months has a quite difficult puzzle suite. For the elite people, I think it’s sort of like– it’s medium.

Foggy, every now and then, will go on Twitch and solve a cryptic crossword puzzle by a publication in England called The Listener. The Listener’s cryptic is insanely hard, and people will show– I’ve showed up to watch him do it, and he struggles, and then he does do it. He’s very, very good. Maybe I should– yes, I’m going to start a Twitch channel. Solve Cryptics with Craig.

John: Honestly, we’re going to have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel now. That could be a place where you can solve some [crosstalk]

Craig: Let’s do it. I’m going to do it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: We’re going to teach people cryptics, and we’re going to solve cryptics with Craig.

John: One of your big puzzle friends is a guy named Dave.

Craig: Dave Shuken.

John: Dave Shuken. I met Dave Shuken.

Craig: What?

John: I’m going to tell you this. I met him at Rachel Bloom’s birthday party. Rachel Bloom had a birthday party where she had a spelling bee, and Dave Shuken was the moderator for the spelling bee.

Craig: Dave Shuken seems to be at the hub of many moderated games of intellectual adventure.

John: A bunch of our people we know were there. I finished third.

Craig: Okay.

John: Yes.

Craig: Spelling bee, as in the New York Times spelling?

John: On, no, no. A classic grade school spelling bee.

Craig: Also the thing that Dave Shuken would be excellent at.

John: He was excellent at.

Craig: Dave’s knowledge of everything is startling. Everything.

John: I have to say, adult spelling bee is a good choice for a party theme.

Craig: That’s fun.

John: Yes, it was good.

Craig: Yes, I love that. Third. Who won?

John: Rachel came in second, and I’m blanking on the guy who won first. He’s a director who used to work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Craig: Okay, but that guy.

John: That guy.

Craig: Tip of the hat to him.

John: More follow up. We have one here on 36 Questions, which was a thing I brought up in a previous episode. Maybe you weren’t there, but 36 Questions– Oh, actually, it was in the Leslie Hedland episode that you weren’t here for. This sort of famous list of 36 questions to bring closeness between people. Questions to ask each other, so romantic partners but also just strangers to get to know them. We follow up on this from Kamel in Zimbabwe.

Drew Marquardt: Kamel writes in response to John’s One Cool Thing. “I wanted to make you aware of 36 Questions, the podcast musical with Jonathan Groff and Jessie Shelton. It’s my all-time favorite musical. I don’t want to spell the plot, but they use the 36 questions to follow two characters on an auditory journey.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Jonathan Groff.

Craig: Jonathan Groff. Never bad.

John: Never bad.

Craig: Always good.

John: Always good. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. All right, let’s do a little bit of news here. First off, we have a summer intern. Drew Marquardt, once upon a time, was our summer intern. He’s now our Scriptnotes producer. Our new summer intern is Sam Shapson. Welcome Sam Shapson.

Sam Shapson: Hey, guys. Good to be here.

Craig: Sam Shapson is hard to say thrice quickly.

John: It is. It’s a challenging name.

Craig: Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson. Yes, it’s hard.

John: Yes, you do it.

Craig: It’s hard.

John: One of the things that Sam is working on this summer is getting our Scriptnotes YouTube channel started up. We’ll have longer form episodes of things we’ve done. We’ll bring over your How to Write a Movie episode, which we put up on YouTube. Episode 99, the Psychotherapy for Screenwriters. Sam’s also cutting little short things, which are delightful for YouTube when you just want little blips.

Craig: Amazing. Welcome aboard, Sam. Happy to have you here. Do a good job this summer, you know. It’s crucial. It’s a crucial summer in your life.

Sam: I will try my best.

John: All right. Second bit of news, Craig and I are planning to attend the Austin Film Festival at the end of October.

Craig: Again?

John: Again. Why not? October 23rd through 26th is the screenwriting portion of that. We’ll be there. Drew will be there. We’ll probably have a Highland event there. If you’re thinking about like, what do I want to do? Do I want to go to Austin this year? If that helps sway you in the decision of Austin, great. It’s cheaper to book hotel rooms now than down the road. Just wanted you and people to know that.

Let us get to our questions. We have so many questions to get through. I pulled out two of them as more marquee topics. The first one is from Tyler. Drew, would you read this question from Tyler?

Drew: “I loved your Scriptnotes episode about writing a movie to argue a thesis. How do you adapt that method for television? Specifically, how do you break the show’s thesis into sub-theses that argue the show’s thesis across episodes while serving as theses for complete standalone stories within an episode? Moreover, how does this process differ between miniseries, where you know the whole arc and episode constraint at the outset, and ongoing series where you don’t?”

John: Great.

Craig: That’s a great question.

John: It’s a good question. This is referencing back to something we just talked about, which was your episode on how to write a movie. It was really about arguing a thesis, and so talk to us about what you mean by a thesis.

Craig: It’s a simple argument, some statement about something that people could disagree on or could argue either position for. Your movie is often about a character who believes one side of that argument. By the end of the movie, through the events that you’ve put that person through, they now believe the opposite side of that.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We think of it as a character arc, but a lot of times character arc implies that they just went somewhere, but this is about, okay, everything along the way is getting to that argument. The people they meet show them other possible answers to that argument. They try to maybe dabble believing the other side of the argument. They get punished for it.

They end up in a terrible place where they definitely don’t believe what they used to believe, but they’re not brave enough to believe what they should be believing. Then through some climactic action, they behave in accordance with this new way of thinking, even at great personal risk.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s pretty standard across the board stuff.

John: The kinds of things we’re talking about are also the same space as a central thematic question, the central argument of a thing. It’s basically, what is it that we are grappling with?

What is the idea that we’re grappling with, and how are we creating characters and situations that grapple with this? What you’re speaking about specifically in a movie is that, generally, over the course of the movie, a person will enter with one perspective on this central dramatic question and leave change with a different answer to the same question.

Craig: The opposite answer, often. For television, it’s a bit different. I’ll be honest. I don’t know the answer to one of those questions, which is how do you do this when it’s an ongoing series where there is no planned end? I don’t know because I’ve never worked on a series like that. I know what the end for The Last of Us is, and I’ve always known. That’s different.

John: We’ve had guests on the show who have had to do this, and so I would reach back to some of the really talented showrunners we’ve had in these podcasts with us. They often talk about the blue sky phase at the start of a season, where they’re really talking about, what is it we want to explore this year? Ultimately, they are still wrestling with the same question that the show is fundamentally about, but how are we doing it this year, and what are the ways in which we’re exploring this question this year?

Whether it’s Frasier or The Good Wife, they’re going to be thinking about how it is they’re going to tackle the kinds of questions that their show is tackling in this next year and how they’re going to break that out over the course of the season.

Craig: Yes. it’s probable that people that are on ongoing shows do think just in terms of the season as a movement. There is a beginning, middle, and end to the season. If it is a drama or if it’s a comedy that is episodic, meaning one episode leads into the other story-wise, as opposed to self-contained episodes that don’t, then yes, there’s going to be something that gets pulled through. You’re thinking about a big circle for the season.

Somebody is going to go on this thing, and they are either going to go from I believe one thing to I believe the opposite, or they’re going to go all the way from I believe one thing to I still believe, and in fact, I believe it no matter what. The episodes themselves are like their own little circle. There’s circles inside of circles inside of circles. Every scene should have somebody changing somehow.

There should be a thesis at the beginning of the scene that gets disrupted through antithesis, and we have a new synthesis, and so on and so on. It’s just circles inside of circles. That’s how you do it.

John: Another distinction I would make is that, in a movie, the central character and the movie are trying to answer the question, at least answer the question for that character in the course of this story. In this series, especially an ongoing series, you’re not looking for the answer. You’re exploring the question, and exploring the question is a valid choice. You don’t have to get to an answer.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s no final answer. There’s no total victory. It’s just how do you wrestle with this question?

Craig: Television does allow you to give people the experience of going somewhere at length. When you go all the way through, at some point, you can see how the end is more about a wistful goodbye than it is about people learning things or concluding. In movies, you really do feel like, when there’s a happy ending, that the ending of the movie is the best and most important day of that person’s life, and everything will be fine from here on out.

John: Series can end, even like ongoing series can end. Six Feet Under has one of the best endings of any series ever. If I had to say what is the central question it’s grappling with, it’s like, how do you live when you’re confronted by death constantly? How do you live knowing that you’re going to die? The final episode, that grapples with that for all those characters in a way that’s thematically satisfying, but each individual episode is also about that.

That’s always the tension within the episode. The Wire, season by season, it’s about the systems we’ve built to help people betraying them, and it changes what that system is each time, but it’s still always grappling with those same questions. Listen, I think, Tyler, you’re asking the right question. It’s exactly the stuff that happens in a room as you’re trying to figure out what that thing is. The shows that aren’t working–

Craig: There’s no big idea there.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. You need one a little bit. It needs to be about something, even if it’s just about one relationship or one family and how it’s being impacted by the choices that people make, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be very involved. each season needs a thing because, when you get to the end of a season, you need to feel like you reached the end of something. There has to be something that concludes.

John: All right. Let’s move on to our second question. This is from Scott, who’s asking about his first feature.

Drew: “I just got my first feature film greenlit to the tune of a few million dollars. It’s a horror movie. I adapted from a book, funded through a private investor, and I’m both thrilled and terrified. What advice do you have for a first-time filmmaker jumping in at this level to avoid royally flubbing this? I’m also curious about setting expectations for the finished film. What should I be thinking about now to ensure the finished film is what I have in my head? Finally, as it moves into the marketplace, are there any insights to avoid getting screwed over?”

John: I hear Scott asking a series of questions. Basically, I hear him asking, how do I emotionally protect myself from what I know is going to be a difficult situation? I hear him asking, how do I make sure I make the best movies and don’t screw things up? I feel like there’s probably some imposter syndrome also embedded in all this as well. First off, congratulations. Great news. Great that you’re able to find money to make this thing. That’s fantastic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: This investor is great, but you need to have somebody who actually knows what the hell they’re doing. You’ll need a line producer, but you also need a person, a producer on board who has made this kind of film at this kind of budget level and sold this kind of film at this kind of budget level, because it’s such a specific thing. I know people who’ve literally fallen into a bunch of money and made a movie and like, “I got to make the movie I wanted to make,” and had no plan for how to put it out there in the world. That is disastrous.

Craig: Scott, I feel your fear, which is completely justified. I have felt it myself. I’ll try and be comforting. Then I’m going to give you the anti-comfort. The comforting part is there are some simple things that you can keep in mind as you go through this. The first is don’t expect that anybody is going to respect you when you start doing this. In fact, quite the opposite. People are very suspicious of first time directors.

The crews just presume that you’re going to suck, and you’re not going to know what you’re doing. You’re going to want to really get a good relationship with your first AD. The first AD is the person that’s going to help you move through your day. They’re going to keep you planned. You’re going to want to have an excellent relationship with your cinematographer because the first AD and the cinematographer pushing and pulling will have the biggest impact on how long your day is and how much you get done that day.

You’re going to want to create a little bit of a bubble for yourself and the actors because they’re the ones who end up on screen. You’re going to want to have a good relationship with the crew, but don’t be overly concerned if the crew doesn’t like the show itself, the movie, that’s not important. What’s important is that you have some sort of vision for it because you’re gathering pieces that you will put together later.

Those things, good stuff. Then keep in mind that there will be politics going on that will swirl around you and try to ignore them as best you can. If somebody gives you constructive criticism about how you can get more out of people or do a better job, listen to it carefully, take it in, be humble, but don’t get caught up in swirling political stuff between actors, between representatives, between the money and the producer, any of that stuff.

Now let me be uncomforting. There is nothing we can tell you that is going to prepare you for this. You are not going to be the same person when you’re finished. You will be smarter. You will know more, and you will be better when you’re finished. This is not good news because it means that you are not going to be the best you can be when you start. This is normal. It’s just normal.

Go in there understanding that you’re going to do your best, but you are going to grow and improve from this experience. You cannot forestall these things. There’s no way to prepare for a lot of it. It’s a little bit like having a baby. You can read a whole lot of books, but when you have the baby, you’re like, oh no. There will be some days, man. There’ll be some days, but it’s okay. Everybody who’s been a successful filmmaker has gone through this.

John: Here’s my pitch. Making a film is a creative heist. Think about it like it’s a heist. It’s like Ocean’s 11. How do you pull off a heist? First off, you have to assemble a team. Assembling that team is crucial. You’ve got to have the right people on board to make this with you. That is, you’ve mentioned it, the first AD. Cinematographer, I think is right up there at the tip top. That is the person you’re going to be sharing you vision for what it is you’re actually seeing on screen.

Your production designer, your editor, your casting director, and ultimately your cast, that is the crew that you’re assembling to pull off this creative heist. Then you’re going to have a plan. You’re going to have a really detailed plan. If everything goes exactly according to plan, you’re going to make the best movie. It’s all going to work perfectly, but it’s not.
That’s why you need to have a crew that you really can trust and smart people for when things don’t go according to plan. Your job is to be able to remember what is actually important. Because you wrote the script, which is great, but that script and reality are not going to match up very, very well. You’re going to have to have situations where, okay, we have lost this location. What do we do?

You’re going to have to be the person who figures out what to do in those situations. That’s by really understanding what those scenes are about. Therefore, if you have to set it someplace else, or if you lose this actor or whatever else, you make it work. Especially filmmaking at this budget level where you don’t have the padding and safeties, that’s the reality.

Craig: You aren’t going to make the movie that you have in your mind right now.

John: No.

Craig: That’s not possible. You will hopefully make a movie that represents enough of what you had in mind and has the essence of what you were looking for. You are going to constantly be wavering back and forth between not wanting to be too precious so that you can solve problems and make your days, but also not wanting to be too much of a good boy syndrome.

John: Obliging is not going to help anybody.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You have to figure out how to wander that middle ground. It’s tough. You may miss a few times. You may go too far one way or the other. AD, cinematographer, start there. Those two people are incredibly important. If you run into people, like a production designer or a costume designer, anybody that you suspect is just there to get paid, and I’m talking about department heads, putting aside the pure crafts like grip and electric, when we’re talking about the creative department heads, if they seem like they don’t care, they’re not right for this. You need people that care. You want them to actually be passionate about this. There’s no way to get through it otherwise.

John: I’m helping out with a movie that shoots this fall. Seeing the director assemble her team has just been so inspiring because she has such a specific, unique, singular vision. She will meet with 15 people, and I’ll be the 16th person, like that’s the one, and she’s right.

Craig: Yes, that’s nice.

John: Yes. [laughs] It’s also a luxury of being able to shoot in town and just having choices like that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The last thing, Craig said you can read as much as you want to read about it, what would be probably helpful for you, Scott, right now, is to read accounts of filmmakers who’ve done something recently and who did things at your budget level and what they learned, what they would have done differently. Read those interviews or if there are longer form books or just stuff because that’s the stuff– you’re entering into a very specific kind of filmmaking and to understand how that works is going to really serve you.

Craig: I think there’s a book called My First Time.

John: Oh yes, there is a book.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a collection of interviews with directors about their first time directing. I remember reading it thinking, this is great. The whole point of the book, it was pitched like, okay, if you read this, then you could avoid the mistakes that all these great directors made. No, you can’t.

John: No, you make your own mistakes.

Craig: You’re going to make your own mistakes. You’ll be too worried about making their mistakes, and it’ll be too artificial and weird. You got to go be yourself.

John: You also recognize that all these people made these mistakes, and they’re now fantastic directors.

Craig: Exactly, and so you’re just going to have to experience this, and it’s going to be a wild ride. I will say, once you do it, and you come out the other end, you will look at movies and television in a much different and vastly more forgiving way.

John: Yes. I will remember when I was making The Nines and leading up to The Nines, before I brought on my cinematographer, I got way too obsessed with cameras, and then I realized I should not be thinking about the camera at all. It’s out of my purview. I should let the cinematographer decide what she wants to do for this. I gave her my poetic descriptions of what I’m going for, but let them decide this.

Craig: Ksenia Sereda, who’s our cinematographer on The Last of Us, before the second season, she was so excited. She’s like, “Okay, so I’m getting these special lenses that are going to be made for this season with this cool thing going on.” She tried to explain it to me, and I didn’t understand it. She goes, “But don’t worry, I’m going to run– I’m going to shoot a bunch of tests. I’m going to show you all these different things, and you’ll see the differences.”

I’m like, “Great.” Then she showed them all to me, and I was like, “These all look great. Which one is the one that you want?” She’s like, “This one.” I’m like, “Okie dokie,” because I don’t need to know. She was like, “Look” because it’s like, okay, the test footage is just some light bulbs turning up in a room. She’s like, “These will be great for these scenes and here’s why.” I was like, “Okay, I trust you on that stuff.”

When makeup people are like, here’s how we’re going to approach this, I’m like, great, because I don’t do that. You do need to trust your people. They will come to you with a million questions. Be prepared to answer four million questions a day.

John: That’s the reason why I didn’t want to direct for a while. It was just like, oh, they’re going to ask me a thousand questions a day, I won’t have the answers. Then I was like, oh no, I do have the answers.

Craig: You will. In fact, what’s frustrating is sometimes you’re like, I thought that was obvious from this. Okay, let me explain what I want to [mumbles] Of course, everybody who works on The Last of Us knows that I love meetings where the question that was asked 14 times gets asked the 15th time.

John: I think podcast listeners are very [unintelligible 00:25:27] [crosstalk]

Craig: Oh, yes. You know what? I get it. I get it. I get it. Yes, I answer it.

John: All right. Our next listener question comes from Selfish in Seattle.

Craig: Great name.

Drew: Selfish writes, “I belong to a six-member writer’s group. We meet regularly. Everyone in the group has been in the business longer than I have, and I’ve learned a lot, so I appreciate being invited to join. Here’s the issue. I have a proactive manager who makes lots of introductions for me. Anytime I share that I’m having a general with this person or that person reading my script, the other members pounce on me for the person’s contact information so they can reach out to them about some project of their own.

When I say I don’t feel right about sharing someone’s contact information without their permission, the other members assure me that, in this industry, contacts are considered community property and basically make me feel like a selfish person. Am I? What is the protocol when it comes to sharing hard-won contacts versus keeping them to myself?”

Craig: John, why are we putting our phone numbers on the podcast?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It’s community property.

John: It’s community property.

Craig: Yes, it’s community property.

John: Before we answer this question, I do want to say that, at some point back when I was working as an assistant, someone called or texted me and said, “I have Tom Cruise’s phone number.” I’m like, yes, it’s weird that you have Tom Cruise’s phone number, but it’s not actually useful. I disagree with the premise of this writer’s group, like having that contact information is going to somehow fundamentally change what they’re doing.

Craig: They are not one contact away. I think the thing that I want to actually put my finger on there, Selfish in Seattle, is why you’re saying these things in the first place at all. This, to me, feels like writer’s group bragging. Like, “Oh, hey, oh my God, good news, everybody.” You’re proud of it, maybe, and it’s just driving them crazy and then they’re bothering you. Just don’t talk about it.

You know what? Here’s the thing, if any of those general meetings turns into a specific meeting, turns into a sale, if you want to talk about how you sold a script, that seems reasonable.

John: Yes, you should take everybody out for drinks.

Craig: Yes, but a general meeting?

John: Yes. Drew, you are a member of a writer’s group or two. What’s your instinct here? Would you say that you had a specific meeting about a specific project in a writer’s group? Maybe we just don’t know how these groups work, but.

Drew: I would say most of them start off with people talking about where they are with the project. If you’re like, oh, I had a meeting, and it feels like you’re moving forward, I think there’s a natural sort of space for that. Most of the time, people are encouraging, and I’ve never heard anyone ask or solicit contact information about stuff.

Craig: Then that’s why you’re okay saying, yes, I had a general meeting with so and so because no one’s going, great, what’s their phone number? If you’re in a group where people are like, give me your stuff, then just stop showing off your stuff. Take your watch off before you walk in the room.

John: Yes, that feels right. Let’s move on to John, who is stuck in the mailroom.

Drew: John writes, “I’ve been at a studio mailroom for three years, and it’s been great, but it’s also been impossible to get out. I’ve learned that there is a non-official policy of not promoting from within. As much as I’ve networked there, there’s only so much that can be done without being overly pushy. The worst part is that I’m not exactly gaining too many skills that other entry-level jobs are looking for, which makes it harder to find something.

I know it’s hard for everyone right now, but what do you guys think are the best ways people can break out from entry-level in the current environment where such a thing seems impossible?”

John: Let’s define our terms here a bit. Mailroom is like the classic, like you are a runner. You’re literally sorting stuff. It sounds like John is not on a desk for somebody.

Craig: No.

John: It’s not that first step as an assistant. It’s like a pre-assistant level. Three years is a long time to be in that spot.

Craig: What is a mailroom now? Because it used to be people would get scripts and contracts and things.

John: Photocopy a bunch of stuff.

Craig: Then they would show up in a mailroom, and they would be sorted. Then the mailroom people would wheel a little basket around through the hallways, delivering the mail to desks. What is it now?

John: Drew and Sam, can you talk us through what a mailroom is right now? Do you have a good sense of what a studio mailroom, which is where John certainly is?

Craig: In the era of the PDF.

Drew: I know friends who’ve worked in mailrooms, and they still refer to it as a mailroom, but I don’t know what they’re doing.

Craig: [laughs] Do you want to ask them? You just have no clue what they’re doing.

Drew: They usually get on a desk pretty quick, it seems like. You’re a floater. If someone’s out, you jump on the desk.

Craig: I see, floater. Got it. Okay, so a floater is somebody that fills in for assistance when they’re out sick or whatever, because they know the system of the place. Let’s get to the heart of the question. The heart of the question is, if you’ve been doing an entry-level position for three years, and nothing has shifted in that time, and there is no path forward to progression that’s provided for you, you need to go.

John: Yes.

Craig: What they’re saying to you is, we’ll let you work here in whatever this putative mailroom is for a while, but we’re not going to give you anything else. It’s a dead end. To me, it’s the definition of a dead end. To start with, maybe give them one last chance by going to the supervisor and saying, listen, when people come to work in the mailroom, presumably it’s so that they can go somewhere. Can you just let me know? Is that going to be happening within the next, I don’t know, six months to a year? Let’s just be honest.

If it’s not, if no one’s interested, if it doesn’t seem like a good fit, then I should probably look around for something else. I’ll go to a different mailroom. Maybe that mailroom, people will be like, oh yes, we do think there’s a future for this guy.

John: First, I’ll ask our listeners who are currently working in a mailroom or have very recently worked in a studio or an agency mailroom, can you tell us what your actual daily job is like? We clearly don’t understand what the mailroom actually means right now. If we are giving John wrong advice about to get out of there, but I don’t think you’re going to tell us that. I think you’re going to tell us like John should have left it a year ago or two years ago.

Craig: Yes. Three years is a long time for no movement when you’re on the bottom rung. Middle rung, sure. Bottom, no.

John: Our next one is an audio question.

Craig: Oh, okay.

Naomi: I’m a 17-year-old from Southern California, and I’m graduating high school next year. I’ve been really passionate about pursuing directing and screenwriting for a really long time. Now that I’m getting closer to actually entering the industry, I’m trying to figure out the best ways to prepare myself and get experience. It seems like everybody has a different opinion on what someone my age should and shouldn’t be doing in order to make it in film.

Of course, the industry is in a wild state at the moment. I’m trying to sort through the noise and find some stable ground to build up from. I’ve been researching, watching movies, taking cinema classes at community college, learning to edit and practicing photo and video with my own new camera. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it. I need to start making connections, working more on my own scripts and videos and getting internships once I’m 18 in addition to anything else I may be missing.

Based on your experience, how can I do this all efficiently and effectively? How should I approach the changing film industry as a beginner? I’m trying to make it my goal to learn from other people’s experiences and be proactive about my own decisions. I’d also love to know what changes you would or wouldn’t make looking back on your own career.

John: Great. This is Naomi.

Craig: Naomi, wow. What a well put together question. Great poise. It’s sort of related a little bit to the prior question. Even though Naomi’s just starting out, she hasn’t graduated high school yet, it’s all in front of her. Her question is not that different from the fellow who said, hey, somebody put up a couple of million dollars for me to make a movie. Both people are saying, can you help me not fall down pits and avoid the fire traps and take a safe route? The answer is not really because everybody’s path is different because everybody is different.

The people that are telling you, hey, the way in is this or this, anybody that’s being really prescriptive, anybody that’s being really rigid about what you should or shouldn’t do is wrong because the way John started is different than the way I started. It’s different than the way all of us, all of our friends, everybody seemed to start in a different way.

First things first is to acknowledge that your ambition and your intelligence are your best assets at this point. You have no experience, but you’ll get some. I love that you’re taking classes, and you’re learning editing. That’s amazing. My advice has always been to find a job. I don’t care how peripheral it is to the entertainment business. As long as it is sort of vaguely connected to the entertainment business, get a job, get paid.

Now you’re young, so it’s going to be difficult, but there are some internships you can apply to. The Television Academy is a wonderful intern– I am a graduate of the Television Academy internship program. We don’t talk about that enough. It’s a wonderful thing. Apply to lots of things. You’re in Southern California. That’s good. Find yourself a place that is within an hour drive of the place that you’re going to end up working at, and then just start doing what you do and learning and absorbing and listening.

You are very young. You can’t vote yet. You’re really young. It doesn’t feel like you are, but you are. The next four years you will be a very different and I suspect even more accomplished person than you are right now.

John: Let’s talk about those next four years because Naomi didn’t mention college at all.

Craig: Community college.

John: Well, she’s taking classes.

Craig: Right. Summer classes.

John: I think you should go to college. I think you should go to college, not necessarily to learn filmmaking, but just to learn the kinds of things you’ll learn over the next four years between the ages of 18 and 22, which are crucial growing things, and to hang out with other people who are hopefully going to do the kinds of things you want to do. A film program is helpful because you’re with a bunch of kids who are also making movies, and you get to spend your time making movies, which is great. If it’s not that, like any sort of basic four-year degree, I think it’s probably the right idea. Don’t go to a crazy debt for it.

Craig: Yes. Community colleges are great.

John: Yes. If you’re in Southern California and if you’re as smart as you sort of sound like you are, if you can get into a UC or any California college, right.

Craig: Those are tough. Whatever you can do, I agree with John, what you can, for instance, at pretty reasonable costs, especially if it’s a community college, you can study literature, you can read great books. Nothing is better for you than reading. Reading the great stories and the people that wrote them and figuring out what they were trying to do and how they did it, all those things.

Think of it as a turbocharged version of whatever your English class has been in high school. That’s a good thing to do if you want to be a storyteller. While you’re in college, yes, if you can, sure, you can get a job. Get a job.

John: Get a job.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes. Listen, you hopefully don’t need to make a lot of money so you can do the kinds of runnery things or the shadowing and just visiting sets will be really good for you. I’m also thinking about like, you’re a writer as well as a director, thinking about what movies you actually want to make.

One of the things that always impressed me about Lena Dunham when I met her, which was right after college, was she was already making movies, but she was making movies about her life, people in her age. She wasn’t trying to make The Godfather.

She was trying to make things that were specific to her. I think, Naomi, if there’s a specific story that is yours to tell that a 17-year-old in Southern California can tell that, a 30-year-old can’t tell, that’s what’s going to be interesting and fascinating, and people are going to want to meet you because of that.

Craig: Keep yourself open to the idea that you don’t yet know actually what it is that you want to do or will be good at doing. I did not show up in Hollywood looking to be a writer. I didn’t. A lot of people say, I want to be a writer and director. They don’t necessarily know what that is yet because they haven’t done it. Sometimes people who want to be a writer and director start taking editing classes and realize they’re great at editing.

Great editors are worth their weight in gold. Some people end up being camera people. Some people end up being in advertising. Everybody finds something, but just keep yourself open because you don’t want to show up sort of locked off to the possibilities because you don’t know what they are yet.

John: No, exactly. Next up, let’s answer a question from Charlie.

Drew: Charlie writes, “I’ve recently been hired to write a screenplay and, yes, it’s becoming all the nightmare scenarios you guys have described a thousand times. The director and producer are in a cold war over ideas and both have dug their heels in. I am more closely aligned with the producer’s vision, but the director has threatened to quit. For the moment, he’s won. He’s been given carte blanche to move forward and is unwilling to collaborate on any points he previously argued.

I am fighting such a bad urge. I want to just stop trying. I want to just write the bad script so he can see for himself. I’m tired of trying to control my emotions. I feel like throwing in the towel and just writing the expository dialogue and unresolved story threads. But won’t that reflect so poorly on me? Isn’t it my job to be the adult in the room and do everything I can to guide this to the best possible place? How do I come out of this crap smelling like roses?

John: Wrong question to end with. There’s no roses here. Basically, how do you get through this situation with your vision as intact as possible and also a movie? I think these would be noble goals.

Craig: Isn’t this horrible? isn’t this embarrassing to directors? I hope that directors listen to this. I’m sure there are directors who listen to it. You and I are directors. We’re both in the DGA. This isn’t chauvinism. This is just a fact. It should be humiliating to directors to hear that somebody that is one of them behaves like this. It’s embarrassing. Just because there is this weird leverage of, well, we got a director and we can’t lose the director, to behave like this.

By the way, if the director is a writer, then why aren’t they writing it? If they’re not a writer, why don’t they shut up? Because they signed on to do a script, did they not? I’m just saying, directors, don’t be this person. Just don’t do it.

In a circumstance like this, I think it would be fair to go to the producer and say, listen, I don’t know how to do the things that this person wants me to do. I don’t know how to write them. I don’t think anybody would know how to write them.

Maybe he can write them. Maybe you should have him write it. I think we all know that it would be bad. The movie would be bad. Maybe do let him quit. Maybe let him quit. There is a point where you can’t just willingly– if you write the bad thing, you’re like, here, I did everything you said, look how bad it is, 98% chance he’ll be like, no.

John: No, it’s great.

Craig: It’s finally fixed. [laughs] I love this house with no doors and five chimneys that are sideways. I think you need to have a long talk with the producer. I would include your representative in this to say, let’s be serious. You cannot last forever biting your tongue. You can’t last forever being overly diplomatic. You can’t last forever trying to solve problems you shouldn’t be solving because they shouldn’t be there at all. At some point, it’s fair for everybody to go, “This is not what we want to do. It would be bad.”

John: I agree with that approach. I think another approach would be to continue to engage with the director. This may be a director who just needs to constantly talk through all the ideas and is not actually necessarily asking or expecting you to deliver the thing but basically needs to talk through all their bad ideas.

Craig: They did say that the director’s not willing to compromise or discuss.

John: Yes. If they need to see something, an alternative can be, never give them screenplay material, but you can sort of do a little beat sheet that puts down on paper for what these beats would be, what their vision would be, and why it wouldn’t work so you can actually show them. I understand Charlie’s instinct to just write the pages and say, “Look, this doesn’t work,” but the minute you’ve delivered anything that looks like a screenplay, you’re dead.

Craig: Yes. You can’t do that.

John: If you were to write down something that’s basically just bullet points, then you can have a thing that you can talk through and you can actually just look at like, “This is what we’re describing here, and this is why I think it’s not working, but I did listen to you and then you could see like, this is me showing you what this actually looks like.”

Craig: Why are we so concerned about these directors and their feelings? See, I listened to you. Nobody’s listening to us. No one. Why does this matter so much? I just don’t understand. I’ve never understood it. The emotional fragility of directors is such a problem in our business. I love the directors I work with, so many of them, but I have also worked with a lot of directors in the course of my career. As of you, so many of them have been remarkable and so many of them have just been so fragile, and everybody has to contort themselves to make sure that they feel good and that they aren’t hurt and that they are danced around and catered to.

John: Same could happen with movie stars too.

Craig: The movie star is a movie star. That’s the thing. Look, Tom Cruise is a movie star. There are certain kinds of movies that if Tom Cruise is in, people are going to show up. That’s money, right? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this director is not that.

John: This is not Ridley Scott.

Craig: There are about 12 directors maybe in the world that matter and really probably only 3 when it comes to names, 3 maybe in terms of box office. I guess this is where I would suggest that there’s a long talk to be had with the producer, especially since the producer and you see eye to eye, and the producer’s going to be the one left holding the bag of this thing when all’s said and done.

There has to be adults having this discussion, and I do think you have to be willing to say, all right, I’ve gone as far as I can go. I matter too. I’m writing the script, the thing that says what everything is, all the things that happen, all the things that are going to be, what are they wearing, what are they saying, where are they standing, all of it. All of it, so yes, I think I matter too. I think my opinions matter too. They should matter at least as much as the opinions of this director, and maybe the director’s not right for this because they don’t seem to like the script very much.

John: Yes. Producers suffer from loss aversion, and I think they’re going to feel like, “Oh, if I lose this director, then everything is falling apart again,” but I agree it’s the right approach.

Craig: I’m going to quote the poster from Pet Sematary, the old one with Fred Gwynne: “Sometimes dead is better.” I believe that in my heart. I have seen this so many times. You just go, “Oof, we worked so hard, so hard to make sure this thing never lost a pulse, but it should have, because look at what we ended up with.” You just won’t survive, and no one will ever give you any credit for it. They just won’t.

John: We’re going to try two more questions. This is a longer one. Robert is asking about adaptations.

Drew: Robert writes, “The Netflix show The Residence is credited as an adaptation of the book of the same name. The series is a murder mystery alternatingly set behind the scenes at the White House with zany detective Uzo Aduba and a congressional hearing. Here’s the catch. The book is a nonfiction oral history style tell-all of what it’s like working at the White House. No zany detective, no C-SPAN, and no murder mystery. I have a hard time seeing how the book is anything more than a well-worn reference. I understand if it was thanked or otherwise footnoted in the credits, but how is this an adaptation?”

Craig: Okay, let me explain. This is a technical thing. It’s not a creative thing. An adaptation occurs when you as a writer in the WGA are assigned literary material at the beginning of your work. Now, there are two kinds of material you can be assigned. You can be assigned what’s called non-story literary material, newspaper articles about some crime or maybe a very non-fictional account. You can be assigned literary material of a story nature, which is almost all of it, which includes even songs that have little stories in them, and that’s why it’s an adaptation.

There are things that happen with the credits. If it is material that’s largely non-story, but the point is, nobody is getting this adapted from or based on the blah blah blah, because somebody decided it was. It’s legal.

John: Yes. I don’t know the whole provenance of this show, but my guess is that this book, The Residence, sold to Shonda’s company at Netflix to do an adaptation. Great. We have this thing. Ooh, we need characters and we need a plot. We need the whole reason. We have all this sort of background information, but we don’t have anything more.

Craig: There’s probably some material in the book that you can see, you can pull storylines out, so there are plotlines or storylines, settings, types of characters and things, and then you expand from there. For adaptations, typically there isn’t a story credit, but in cases where the story of the adaptation is markedly different or original to the source material or the source material wasn’t very story-oriented in the first place, you might get a story credit or screen story by for movies at least, but it is entirely a function of what the contract says when you sign it. It’s all listed, and they are required by the WGA to list all of the source material.

John: I’d be curious in case of some of the toy adaptations, Lego or other things like that, to what degree was it considered to be any story material other than just the name?

Craig: For the case of Lego, we could always ask Chris and Phil. My suspicion is they were not assigned any literary material because there is none. There is a toy, but there are no words to the toy. There’s no story to the toy per se. It’s just bricks. If there were certain toys that they did have storylines with, there would be something written. It’s all about getting assigned written material generally where that comes into play.

John: I suspect Barbie had written material, but I don’t know.

Craig: Maybe. Maybe.

John: Let’s answer one last question. This is from D, who’s writing about Scriptnotes T-shirts.

Drew: “Will you bring back orange T-shirts? Sadly, I outgrew my original orange T-shirt or it shrank. [laughter] In my opinion, guys seem to prefer black, blue, olive, or gray shirts, but we women would like more choices than just the white T with the typewriter. Help a sister out.”

Craig: Let’s help a sister out.

John: Help a sister out.

Craig: Why not?

John: We’ll add some orange T-shirts.

Craig: I love the orange T-shirts. Not big sellers, or?

John: Our original T-shirt was the orange T-shirt, very Scriptnotes orange. I just don’t end up wearing it that much.

Craig: Right, but you’re not a woman.

John: I’m not Dee.

Craig: Sisters want the orange shirt.

John: We are listening-

Craig: [laughs]

John: -and we are providing a T-shirt in orange for D.

Craig: Look at you. Look at you. See that? Look how we’re growing.

John: We are growing. We’re growing.

Craig: We’re growing, but actually, also, I like the orange shirt.

John: Thank you, Drew, for reading all these questions.

Craig: Yes, great job.

John: Thank you to all our listeners who sent in these great questions. We got through a lot of them. We didn’t get through all of them, so we’ll save some for sure for a future time.

Craig: For next time.

John: It’s time for One Cool Things. My one cool thing is something I’ve been using the last this six weeks or so. There’s actually two different programs. I’m going to talk about the newer one that I’ve been using called Aqua. It’s a voice dictation software. Craig, you probably remember like back in the day, there was Dragon dictation. There are ways you could talk instead of type into your computer. We had to train them. It was fussy. You had to do everything sort of exactly just right.

Somehow this last year, it just got incredibly, insanely good, so you can talk full speed, and it does a very good job of not only understanding what you’re saying but figuring out the context of what you’re saying and putting periods in appropriate places. It just got crazy better, like much better than the dictation on your phone.

Craig: Yes, which is not good.

John: Which is not good.

Craig: They’ll be buying this shortly.

John: For my trip to Jordan and Egypt, I handwrote my journal. After going to see places, I would handwrite sort of what I was doing. I didn’t open my laptop the entire time I was there, and so I had this handwritten journal, but it wasn’t actually all that useful because I can read my handwriting for about three days, but then it’s just like sort of indecipherable.

Craig: Then it has to go to the mail room.

John: The mail room has to handle it.

Craig: It’s paper.

John: I wanted a digital copy of it, so I was like, “Oh, God. I’m going to have to type this all.” It’s like, “No, I’m actually just going to dictate it,” and so I would just like dictate a lot. I could just go through paragraphs at a time.

It’s just really good. If you’ve not tried computer-based dictation software recently– originally, I was using superwhisper, which is also very good. Aqua seems a little bit better. It just figures out context behind things. I was naming temples in Egypt and it was spelling them properly.

Craig: Spelling them correctly?

John: Try it out. They’re free trials, and then it’s a subscription if you decide to keep using it.

Craig: Fantastic. That’s for cross-platform, or?

John: I know it’s on the Mac. I think there’s probably a Windows equivalent support. Again, dictation software is one of those things that was so important for accessibility for people who couldn’t type and so I typed. It’s just great that these tools, which were originally designed for people with these things, are now so useful for all of us.

Someone’s going to write in about this, so let me acknowledge this. There are privacy concerns with any tool that is basically taking the audio, sending it to the internet, and sending it back very quickly.

Craig: It could keep your stuff.

John: It could keep your stuff.

Craig: Have you looked at the–

John: I looked at the terms of service. They’re saying they’re not keeping your stuff, but do you trust them? At a certain point, I was like, “No,” but do I trust Dropbox, which has all my stuff? Do I trust anything?

Craig: Weirdly, I do trust Dropbox. I don’t know why I trust Dropbox.

John: I’ve just sort of given up. For mission-critical stuff or things that are truly secret, if I was Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy writing on Westworld or something, maybe I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it, but for what I’m doing, I just think it’s really good.

Craig: All right. Good to know. I’m also going to go down the tech road here. I finally experienced something in VR that made me go, “Oh yes, this is going to work.”

John: Oh great. What was it?

Craig: I use the Quest 3, which is from [sighs] Meta, stupidest name and evil. I was so excited because the Fireproof Games, which is the company that makes The Room games for iOS, has pivoted away into VR, which was bumming me out, but they did make a Room game for VR that was pretty darn good. It didn’t make me think like, [mumbles].

They have a game out now called Ghost Town. It is astonishing. It’s a good game, but also, it’s astonishing. For the first time, I was like, “I think I’m somewhere else.” I got close to the wall and was just looking at the texture of the drywall, and I’m like, “Yes, we’re here. It’s happening.” If they can do that now, 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be remarkable how similar it is to the actual visual experience. The next step then would be to add smells and texture and wind ruffling, but honestly, even if you don’t–

John: A direct brain interface at some point.

Craig: It was astonishing, and it’s really well done.

John: Remind us of the name of that.

Craig: Ghost Town.

John: Ghost Town, and it’s available on the Quest. Do you know if it’s available on Vision Pro or any other things?

Craig: I think it’s across all the VR platforms, I believe.

John: I have a Vision Pro. I might try that.

Craig: It should. I think so. I hope so, because it’s also just a really good game, but boy. There’s a little tutorial section, it’s like the first little setting, and I was like, “Eh, it’s pretty good.” [unintelligible 00:52:09] like, “Huh.” Then I got to the next bit, and I was like, “What?” Then it just kept getting better. It’s really something else.

John: This was months ago, but what if the Marvel series did a thing for the Vision Pro, did like, basically, an episode that’s sort of inside the Vision Pro? Remarkably well done, just incredibly effective use of the tools and technology. I’d have no idea how much it would cost. It must cost so much money, but the market for it is like, “Did 50,000 people see that?”

Craig: Right, exactly. That’s the thing.

John: The chicken-egg problem of it is a big thing.

Craig: This was the first time where I was like, “Yes, this is going to happen.” It’s been a while. We’ve had these headsets for a while now.

John: Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

Craig: I don’t know.

John: -with help from Sam Shapson.

Craig: No.

John: It is edited by Matthew Choleli.

Craig: If you say so.

John: Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links for things about writing.

We have T-shirts, even orange T-shirts, and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. [music] You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Strong Opinions. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, Strong Opinions is a game that we sort of came up with in the office. Nima, who you know, our coder– we love Nima. Nima has a strong opinion about everything. The thing is, you can’t predict what it would be, like pickles, “Ah, pickles are the worst,” or, “Pickles are the best.” You just don’t know, but you know he’s going to have a very strong opinion.

Craig: He’s going to have a hard opinion on every possible yes/no.

John: One day in Slack, I just made a list of 15 things and I had us all vote on, what do we think Nima thinks about each of these things? Then we went through it and [unintelligible 00:54:39], so I built it out into a little bit of a game now called Strong Opinions. It’s a good kind of game for– if you are having a game night, it’s like sort of the first like warmup kind of game.

Craig: Little icebreaker?

John: Yes, a little icebreaker. Let’s do a new game here. We’re going to play.

Craig: This is exciting.

John: Drew will play with us. Here, we’ll do three rounds, and we’ll go start. We’ll start with Craig, so it’s your turn. You just got microwave ovens. Now, Drew and I have to decide what Craig thinks of microwave ovens.

Craig: Got you.

John: All right. If we’re playing this in person, you have a Heck Yeah or a Nope card. Heck Yeah is a testament to–

Craig: Loving something.

John: Yes, and it’s a reference to Megan McDonnell, our Scriptnotes producer, who says, “Heck yeah,” so that spirit, or “Nope.”

Craig: All right. Would I theoretically have to write this down so you would trust me?

John: Yes.

Craig: But just trust me.

John: We’ll just trust you here

Craig: It’s the honor system.

John: Drew, why don’t you go first? Craig and microwave ovens.

Drew: I think it’s a nope.

John: I think it’s also a nope.

Craig: Heck yeah.

Drew: Really?

John: You’re heck yeah? Okay.

Craig: I use a microwave almost every day. I love a microwave oven. There are things that microwaves do so well. I had a breakfast burrito this very morning. It was a frozen breakfast burrito.

John: Where is your microwave oven? Because I’m picturing your kitchen.

Craig: It’s buried in the cabinetry to the left of the refrigerator. It’s sleek. I looked on the directions and it was like, “If you want to make this in an oven, it’s 19 hours. If you want to put it in an air fryer, it’s a million years, or it’s one minute and 30 seconds in the microwave.” I was like, “I’m going to go with microwave.”

John: Two of our D&D friends do not have microwave ovens.

Craig: It’s crazy.

John: I was astonished by this.

Craig: Crazy. No, I’m going to heck yeah microwave ovens.

John: All right. Drew, your topic is tiki bars. I actually know this about Drew. Craig, do you think Drew is a fan or an anti-fan of tiki bars?

Craig: I’m going to say that it’s a heck yeah because who has a hard no on that? How many times have you experienced one?

John: I’m actually a hard no on tiki bars.

Craig: I’ve never been to one.

John: Yes. But I know that Drew is a fan of tiki bars.

Craig: Okay, I got it right.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Heck yeah.

John: All right.

Craig: That’s so strange. Where– I don’t even want to know. The only one I know is the tiki room in Disneyland.

John: All right, mine is composting. What do I, John August, think about composting?

Drew: It’s a heck yeah.

Craig: It has to be a heck yeah. He’s so green.

John: I’m actually going to be a nope.

Craig: Ah, what?

John: This is surprising, but because we actually tried composting and it was such a disaster.

Craig: Why?

John: We got one of these cones that you throw all your compost bits in and it becomes overrun with ants and other bugs and stuff, and so I would shudder every time I needed to do it. Now we have the green bin and we throw stuff out there, but honestly, Mike is more often the person who’s emptying the compost into the green bins.

Craig: So you are composting.

John: Yes, but I don’t like it.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like you have a hard opinion on it one way or the other. Nobody likes composting.

John: Yes, I’m not anti-concept of it. I just don’t like the process of composting.

Craig: Alright, interesting. I thought you would’ve been more enthusiastic about composting.

John: All right, going back to Craig. What do we think Craig thinks about pineapple on pizza? Okay. Drew, you’re up.

Drew: Oof.

Craig: Everybody has a hard opinion about that, I think.

Drew: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’m going to say nope.

Craig: Nope is correct. I’m from Staten Island. Do not dare violate a pizza with that nonsense.

John: Yes, and one of the tricky things that comes up with this game sometimes is like, “Well, am I thinking just for myself or for other people?” Bird-watching came up and like, I don’t believe in bird-watching, but also, I’m not opposed to other people bird-watching. If Julia Turner wants to bird-watch, I support that for her.

Craig: Or Melissa.

John: Yes, but I don’t–

Craig: I make fun of it all the time because it’s stupid.

John: All right, Drew’s is, well, how does Drew feel about artificial Christmas trees?

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. It’s funny that you brought up the– for me, because I love an artificial Christmas tree myself, but I think that Drew is a nope on that.

John: I think Drew is also a no on artificial Christmas trees.

Drew: I think I’m a nope now, but I was a heck yeah for a very long time.

Craig: But you’ve converted to nope.

Drew: I’ve converted to nope just in this last year because I have been informed of like the microplastics that these trees end up sort of becoming, and then [unintelligible 00:58:35].

Craig: By the way, nope converts are the hardest nopes of them all. Everyone knows that.

John: Yes, absolutely. They once believed it and now they’re– no, that’s fair enough.

Craig: Yes, now they’re just like, now they need you to know. Making me feel guilty.

John: What do I think about flavored sparkling water?

Craig: Nope.

Drew: I think John is largely a nope.

Craig: I’m a nope.

John: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: I was trying to remember if you drink like-

John: Yes, LaCroixs I do. I’m not like the Topo Chico fan that you are or used to be.

Craig: Topo Chico’s not flavored, though.

John: It’s not flavored, but like the idea of sparkling water as a thing-

Craig: Yes, I love the sparkling. I like the hit.

Drew: John only likes one flavor of sparkling water.

Craig: What is it?

John: I like the Pamplemousse [unintelligible 00:59:07].

Craig: Pamplemousse.

John: I was at your house. I was at your house and from your refrigerator, I pulled a Peach-Pear.

Craig: Melissa loves that.

John: Oh my God. It had like a texture to it that I just did not enjoy. Water should not have a texture, but it created something.

Craig: Oh sorry, we keep old milk in those. I should’ve mentioned. That’s where we put our compost. [laughter]

John: It was a very meaty water, so.

Drew: Gross.

John: Whoa. What does Craig think of tuna salad?

Drew: Nope.

John: No, it has mayonnaise in it. Absolutely nope.

Craig: No, of course not. Also, the way that they’ve abused the word salad, this perfectly fine word. [laughter] Just, oh, it’s salad, or it’s something that isn’t salad that we put this snot on top of. God.

John: What does Drew think about Christina Aguilera?

Craig: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’ll say heck yeah also.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Yes, because she’s great.

John: Talented.

Drew: Very talented.

Craig: An amazing singer.

John: Yes.

Drew: Yes.

John: What do I think about podcasts on YouTube?

Craig: Well, you just said that you’re putting us on YouTube, although you’re not putting us as a podcast on YouTube, per se. I’m going to go with nope because I think John is– he likes the proper podcast delivery systems, so I’m going to say nope.

Drew: I’m also going to say nope because I feel like this is watching people talk, and I feel like that’s not up John’s alley.

John: Yes, I’m going to be a nope on that, too, and I feel like it’s absolutely fine to make videos of people doing stuff, but it’s fine to have a talk show kind of thing, but I think it’s no longer a podcast. I think a podcast is about an individual listening to a thing, and a visual podcast at a certain point just becomes a talk show.

Craig: Just a tiny talk show. I mean, I’m okay with when they put the audio podcast on YouTube because some people do listen. Then it’s fine.

John: That’s time. That was it.

Craig: Great, well that was a fun game. I learned a lot.

John: If you wanted to play this for yourselves, it’s just johnaugust.com/strong-opinions.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes for it.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks, Sam.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

• Scriptnotes on YouTube!
• Strong Opinions game
• Hollywood Unions letter to President Trump
• The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch by Forrest Wickman
• Foggy Brume on Twitch
• 36 Questions, the podcast musical
• Austin Film Festival
• My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film
• Orange T-shirts are back!
• Aqua voice dictation software
• Ghost Town by Fireproof Games
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.