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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 685 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, screenplays and stage plays are superficially similar. They both consist of scenes with characters talking to each other, so why do they feel so different and why is it often so challenging to move something from one format to another?

To help us explore these questions, we are joined by writer, director, showrunner, and playwright, Leslye Headland, best known for creating Russian Doll on Netflix along with the accolade on Disney Plus. She wrote and directed Bachelorette, adapted from her own play, and she’s coming off of a Broadway runner for acclaim play, Cult of Love, which I got to see in New York and absolutely loved. I’m so excited, Leslye, to get to talk with you about all these things. Welcome, Leslye Headland.

Leslye Headland: Thank you. What an intro. Gosh, it’s so nice to be here. I didn’t realize you’d seen the play.

John: I saw the play. Here’s how I saw the play. I was in New York because we were doing a new version of Big Fish, and we were there for the rehearsals and the 29-hour reading basically of Big Fish. Andrew Lippa, who is the composer lyricist of Big Fish, is a Tony voter, and so he said, “Oh, hey, I need to go see a bunch of stuff, come with me.” I’m like, “Great. I’ll go do anything you want to see.”

We show up and I’m just talking with them and I literally walk in the theater and I have no idea what the play is or who’s in it. I didn’t even look at the signage to see who was in the show, and so literally I come into the theater and there is this gorgeous set, the prettiest set I’ve ever seen on a stage play. I absolutely loved what I saw on that beautiful set.

Leslye: Oh, yes. The set was designed by John Lee Beatty, who is an absolute legend in terms of set design. I had a really, I would say, clear vision for what the set would look like, that it would have that Fanny and Alexander touch to it. There was a play by Annie Baker called John that took place in a bed and breakfast that was also like just stuffed to the brim with coziness. All of that just directly contrasts the darker content of the plays, and those plays as well as mine.

John: I want to get into that because we’re actually– I want to take a look at the very first page of your play because you actually lay out in the same description what it’s supposed to look like. It’s so different than how we would do it in a screenplay, and it’s so effective on this page, but it’s just a different experience. We’ll get into that, but I also want to talk about– obviously you’ve done film, theater, television. I want to talk about origin stories, because you went from assistant to auteur, which is something that a lot of our listeners are trying to go for. I want to talk about time loops because I love a time loop. You’ve written a bunch of time loops in a Russian Doll, and we have listener questions about music cues and long scripts, which I hope you can help us tackle.

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

John: Then after we’re done with the main show, in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the difference of seeing plays versus seeing movies, because as screenwriters, it’s easy to catch up on movies. We can just watch them anytime we want to watch them, but for plays, it’s such a specific deal. If you can’t actually go see a play– if I didn’t happen to be in New York to see your play, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about how great it was. I want to talk about the differences between seeing plays versus seeing movies and how you keep up as an artist.

Leslye: Oh, I’d love to talk about that. I love working in all those mediums, but they’re all very, very, very different.

John: They are, and so having done a bunch of them, there’s gatekeepers, there’s shibboleths, there’s this a whole sets of systems you have to learn the ropes of, and so there’s things you come into it thinking like, “Oh, I know how to do this thing,” and you realize like, “Ah” that it works so differently. Can we wind it all the way back, though, because I’d love to some backstory on you and how you got started, where you came up from, and when you first decided that writing and making things was for you?

Leslye: Very, very young. I was one of those kids that just wrote, you just started writing. I would read books for– I’d get them from the library, like the Judy Blume, or I ordered a bunch of American Girl doll books, which I absolutely loved. Then I would fill composition books with rip-offs of those. Just doing exactly the same structure.

John: You learn by copying, you learn by imitating other things you see.

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

Leslye: Just beat for beat imitations, but with my own characters, like with the themes and personalities that I found more interesting than the simplistic morality of those types of books.

John: Absolutely.

Leslye: One of the reasons Judy Blume is so great is that there’s this gray out area that she writes about, but very soon I found musical theater. I became completely obsessed with Stephen Sondheim. Nobody could tell me anything that wasn’t Stephen Sondheim. I was introduced to him from the D. A. Pennebaker documentary about the marathon recording of Company. My dad watched it with me. It was on PBS or something.

He was watching it late at night and he said, “Leslye, get in here.” I ran into my parents’ room and he said, “You need to watch this.” I started watching it. He didn’t know what it was, I think he just started seeing it and was like, “This is my girl.” I started watching it. Sondheim is in light all Black. There’s one part where he puts his head in his hands, he’s so depressed at what’s happening. I said, “Who is that?” He said, “That’s the writer.” Suddenly, I was like, that was my basis for what a writer was.

John: You had the opportunity to see this thing that you loved. Oh, you can actually see the face of the person behind the thing and see the hard work and process it took to make that thing?

Leslye: Absolutely.

John: Rather than scaring you away from it, you were like, “Oh, I want to go and do that thing.”

Leslye: Yes. Absolutely wanted to dive in. Jumped into being a drama kid, then I went to Tisch for college for directing and acting a little bit, but not writing. I would write screenplays on my own that were terrible. I would give them to my friends. They would say, “This is terrible,” but I learned so much from directing. Just figuring out how to tell a story visually rather than texturally was exactly what I needed for those four years.

John: Talk to us about the program at Tisch. Was this all directing for the stage? Was it directing for a camera? What was the classes and what things we were learning?

Leslye: It’s a good question. They’re all broken up into different studios, and I was in a studio called Playwrights Horizons. It’s actually not that connected to the off-Broadway theater, but this particular studio, rather than– and they have Strasberg, Adler, the musical theater program. Playwrights was a little jack of all trades. You could study design, you could study directing, you could study acting, you could study, not dance, but Alexander Technique and have all these voice classes and everything. It really was a hodgepodge of information, so you could pick and choose what it was you wanted to focus on.

My main one was directing, and each year you’d do something different. The first year you’re just going to everything. Everything. I did acting classes, I did design classes, I did directing classes. I was not great at any of them, to be quite honest. I did have a couple of spurts of directing that were good that I felt very proud of, but that was it. Then in second year, you stage-managed for the juniors and the seniors. When you became a junior, you did two short plays. You did one in the fall and then you did one in the spring. You did two one-acts. I did The Lesson by Ionesco, and I did Beirut.

Then when you’re a senior, if you’ve made it this far, which a lot of people did not, you do a full length. I did Waiting for Godot because I love that play. It is my heart. It is exactly who I am, and the story that I want to tell influenced me beyond– like Sondheim. I’d say it was like Sondheim and Godot were just the major thing. I got to do that for my senior thesis project. I would say that people at Tisch responded to it, essentially, the same way that people respond my work now, which is, they’re impressed, but they’re also confused by what’s happening. I do think that the style of what I do now absolutely was born out of that production.

John: Let’s talk about that style, because what was it about that? Was it your choices in terms of how characters are presenting themselves on stage? Was it how you’re handling dialogue? Because as we get into Cult of Love, I want to talk about your very specific choices in terms of when characters overlap and when they don’t. What were some things if someone said like, “Oh–“ if they could time travel back and see that production, it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s very Leslye Headland.” What was it about that?

Leslye: Well, it was definitely very choreographed. One of my teachers said that was the most energetic version of Godot I’ve ever seen, because I didn’t have them just standing there. My aha moment for it was Marx brothers. I was just like, “It’s Vaudeville, that’s what this is.” Therefore, it was very choreographed and it was almost a musical, essentially. That Sondheim influence was pushed into it.

We did so many visual gags that were– even Lucky’s speech was this massive, just all of them hanging onto that leash of his and yanking him around. My Lucky was an incredible dancer and a gymnast. He could fall on the ground in just a violent, violent way. My mentor for the project said– When you do a postmortem with all of the teachers and the head of the studio and you get the critique, and some of it was good, some of it was critical, which is normal for what that moment is, but my mentor for it said, “I think you’re one of the darkest people I’ve ever met, but also really stupid things make you laugh.” I do think that what I ended up doing was very messed up characters and situations that then became a big joke. [laughs]

John: Coming from that, you’re graduating from Tisch? This is early 2000s. When are you coming out of Tisch?

Leslye: I graduated in 2003. I immediately started working at Miramax. I actually was working at Miramax while I was in school. I would go to my classes in the morning, I would go to Miramax. I was working in the Archive Department, which means that I was archiving all of the props and costumes and any set pieces for films, so that they could be archived for posterity. Also, all these things were sent out for Oscar campaign so that they could be displayed in places, like the costumes for Chicago, or the props, and the costumes for Gangs of New York. It was that time period, 2002.

Then, 2003, I immediately started working as an assistant. The next thing is that I quit. I had no money. I lived on my friend’s couch in a studio apartment. That’s where I wrote my spec Bachelorette. I worked at Amoeba Records, I worked at Rocket Video. I got a job wherever I could. Then I started writing these plays. There were a bunch of friends from NYU who had started a theater company called IAMA Theatre Company, and they’re still going strong. We just started developing these plays.

I started the Seven Deadly Plays series because I just wanted to challenge myself to write seven plays. That was really the biggest thing, was, “Can I keep writing, and can I keep getting better, and stop thinking about one particular project as being the thing that’s going to make me?” I felt that was really helpful. It was really helpful to develop the plays with actors, to watch them read things, and understand like, “Oh, that’s a really bad scene that I wrote,” because people don’t talk– I just saw two people do it, and it’s absolutely uninteresting, and there’s nothing going on.

I think sometimes when we are in a fishbowl of writing drafts or writing first drafts, it’s almost like your brain is a dangerous neighborhood and you really shouldn’t be hanging out there alone. [laughter] That’s how I– People have got to start reading it. You’ve got to have a reading with some actors. That’s just my advice. I’m sure nobody else does that, but that’s what I do.

John: No, Mike Birbiglia, who’s been on the show a couple of times, always talks about how important those readings are to get people just– the pizza readings just with friends, just to get a sense of, “What does this actually sound like? What does it actually feel like with real people doing it?”

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

John: You created a great situation for yourself, where you set yourself a goal of writing these seven plays. You wrote these seven plays. In the process of writing them, you got to stage them, see what they actually felt like on their feet.

Leslye: Yes. They were all done in little black box theaters. I forgot to say that, when I was an assistant, I was still doing that. I was putting my own money into black box theaters so that I could mount other shows like Adam Rapp and Neil LaBute. When I started writing the plays, again, like the composition books, I just started ripping off other plays. Bachelorette is just a female Hurlyburly. I just was like, “Oh, I can’t believe nobody’s thought of that.”

Each play had its own genre reference, if that makes sense. Cult Of Love is a family drama, which is a staple of plays. There are so many family dramas, but I like to, within that composition book, do my own thing.

John: Let’s talk about Bachelorette. This is one of your Seven Deadly Plays. You were able to write it as a play mounted in a black box theater situation, and then you went in and made the screenplay version of it with the intention of you directing from the very start, or did you think, “This is something I’m going to sell?” What was your intention in going into Bachelorette?

Leslye: I thought I was going to sell. I did not in any shape or form assume that I was going to be directing it. I worked really hard on the screenplay. I got an agent based off of it. I started to do the Water Bottle Tour. That’s what I call it. I don’t know if other people do.

John: Oh, that’s the term of art. We all say that, yes.

Leslye: This, for people who don’t know, it’s where your agent send you out to the executives at different production companies or different studios, and they’ve read your spec and they just get to know you and you guys have a little chat. Over and over again, I got the feedback about the movie that, “This is absolutely the way women talk, but no one wants to watch that.” I thought it would be a good writing sample, and maybe I can get some jobs off of it.

Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, and Jessica Elbaum ended up optioning it just as the play was going up in New York. It was a confluence of this piece that had been– this little tiny play that I didn’t really think was going to do– It was just one of seven. It didn’t seem like the one that was going to go, but then it went up with Second Stage in 2010. Then they optioned it at the same time.

They sent it to a bunch of directors, which is very par for the course. I can’t even remember who we sent it to. We sent it to every human. Everybody passed. It was also the time of– It was actually written before Bridesmaids, but Bridesmaids got made first, so there was this rush of, “Can we beat Bridesmaids? We can’t.” The directors started passing on it because–

John: They were just too much alike.

Leslye: Yes, it was like, “We already saw that. We already did that.” I was at the Gary Sanchez Christmas party with Adam and a bunch of other people. I was just sitting there with Adam chatting, and he said, “We haven’t found a director for Bachelorette.” I said, “I think we’ll find somebody.” He said, “Why don’t you just direct it?” I said, “I think that’s a great idea. I think I should.” Again, just do everything before you’re ready. If you get that opportunity, do not think in your head, “I don’t know how to do that.” Just say yes. Just be like, “Absolutely.”

His reasoning, and we talked about this a little bit, was, “You know these characters more than anybody in the world, and you can work with actors, because that’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven, eight years.” He said, “To me, that’s the most important thing. We can set you up to success with all the other stuff.”

John: I’d love us to transition now. We talked about getting Bachelorette set up, but I want to go back to plays and really focus in on playwriting versus screenwriting, because they look so similar at a glance, but then actually get into how they work and what our expectations are as audiences, they’re really different. In a stage play, the audience is actively participating in the imagination with you.

Leslye: That’s correct.

John: They’re there, they’re game to go. If you show them a desk and say, “This is an office,” this is an office. You have their full attention in ways that you don’t know if you have it with a movie. With a movie, you don’t know if they’re half watching. Here, for those first 5, 10 minutes, they are there, they’re fully invested into what we’re doing, which is great, except that some things are just harder to do on a stage, like that sense of where we are. Creating a sense of place is more challenging. You don’t have close-ups, so you have to make sure that small emotions are going to be able to land if we can’t see a person’s face.

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

John: I’d love to start with, in Cult of Love– Drew, if you could read us this opening scene description of the house where we’re starting. We’ll read this first, and then we’ll get a summary from Leslye about what actually happens here. Drew, help us out with what happens on the page. Page one of Cult Of Love.

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

“Home, the first floor of a farmhouse in Connecticut, 8:30 PM, Christmas Eve. The kitchen, dining area, and living room are all immediately visible. A small door to a washroom, an entryway alcove/mudroom with a coat closet/rack. An upright piano stands near a staircase to the second floor. A red front door with a Christmas wreath leads to a quaint, covered porch area. Snow falls.

The house is decorated for Christmas. This cannot be overstated. The place is literally stuffed to the brim with goodies, evergreens, and cheer. It’s an oppressive display of festivities and middle-class wealth that pushes the limits of taste. There isn’t a surface, seat, or space that isn’t smothered with old books, LPs, plates of sweets, (no real food, though), glasses of wine, wrapped presents, stockings, and garlands of greenery and tinsel.

There are many musical instruments, a spinet piano, banjo, nylon, and steel string guitar, ukulele, steel drum, washboard, djembe, melodica, harmonicas, hand bells, spoons, maracas, and sleigh bells. They are not displayed or specially cared for in any way. They lay among the Christmas decorations and book collections like any other piece of ephemera. When a character picks an instrument up, regardless of size, the audience should always be surprised it was there hiding in plain sight. Notably absent, a television, a sound system. Actually, there’s no visible technology. No one’s holding iPhones, tablets, or computers. They will come out when scripted.”

John: All right, Leslye, five paragraphs here to set up this room that we’re in for the duration of the play. It’s so evocative and so clearly shows you what you’re going to do here, but you, as the screenwriter, Leslye Headland, would never put that in a script. It’s a different thing than what you would do on the page here. Talk us through how you approach the scene description at the start of a play.

Leslye: Well, I think with this play, it was important to be super prescriptive about what that world was going to look like. Like you said, when you came in and you were like, “That’s the most beautiful set I’ve ever seen,” that was the idea, to go through five paragraphs so that it was very clear that this is not open to interpretation.

John: Absolutely. It’s not a metaphor of a family living room. This is actually the space. Your point about, when I walked in the theater, the curtain’s up. We’re seeing this behind a scrim, but we’re seeing the whole set. As the audience, we’re spending more than five paragraphs just looking at the space before any actors come in, and I think, which is also serving us. It’s really establishing this is the place where this story is going to happen, which is great.

Leslye: I also think that there are cues, essentially, that you should follow. One thing that I felt very strongly about with the play was that it didn’t feel too now, that there would be an essence of this could perceivably take place at any time. Putting the technology in there would be disruptive to the fantasy, because that’s really what it is. It’s a fantasy play. It’s not Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s not August: Osage County. It’s in that genre, but it’s not meant to be.

John: It’s in that genre. The audience approaches it with some of the same expectations, and so you have to very quickly establish that it’s not those things, and you doing that through music and other things, but we should say, because most of our listeners won’t have seen this play, we’ve set up this gorgeous set, what’s going to happen here? What’s the short version of Cult Of Love? You don’t have to go through everything, but who is the family that we’re going to meet here?

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

Leslye: This is about a family, upper middle class family in Connecticut, who all come home to celebrate Christmas. It’s parents, four grown children, and their partners. They all are essentially exploring and voicing and venting all of these pent-up frustrations in history that they have with each other, which is pretty normal for a family play.

What I would say is that the thing that makes it set apart is that there is no plot. No one is trying to do anything. There isn’t a thing that any one character is trying to achieve. The action of the play is the disillusionment of both the family, or the disintegration, sorry, also disillusionment, but the disintegration of the family as a unit, as a beautiful idea into the reality of how a family breaks apart eventually and gets completely decimated.

The idea behind the play is that you watch that, but instead of watching the story of that, because there is no plot, that you yourself insert the plot of your own family. Therefore, the catharsis comes, hopefully, at the end of the play because you have been watching your family, not my family, or the play’s family. That was the intention of the show. I don’t know if I answered your question.

John: Oh, absolutely. We’re going to see on stage this family go through these dynamics. As an audience member who went in literally knowing not what play I was going to see, that’s what I was pulling out of it.

It’s interesting to say that there’s just no plot, because you’re overstating that a bit. People do want things. There are goals. Characters have motivations. There’s things they’re trying to get to, but there’s not a protagonist who comes through to the end and things are really transformed. It’s not the last Christmas they’re ever going to be at this house. There’s no establishment of that, but it’s all the little small things, the little small tensions that are ripping at the seams of this very perfect situation that you have established.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the big inspirations for the play, and one of my biggest influences, beyond who surpassed Sondheim, is John Cassavetes. Cassavetes once said about Shadows, his first movie, that he was very interested in characters who had problems that were overtaken by other problems. That’s what I wanted to achieve, a lot of my work, for sure, but specifically with Cult Of Love.

That’s really where the overlapping dialogue comes in. It’s meant to evoke a Cassavetes indie film, where you can’t quite latch on to one character as the good guy or the bad guy. You’re dropped into an ecosystem where you have to decide, “Am I going to align myself with this character or this character?” That’s where all of that came from.

John: Actually, before we even get to this description of the set, there’s a description in the script about how dialogue works. Drew, could you read this for us

Drew: “A note about overlapping dialogue. When dual dialogue is indicated, regardless of parenthetical or stage directions, the dialogue starts simultaneously. After indicated dual dialogue, the cue for the next line is the word scripted as the last spoken. Overlapping dialogue is denoted by slashes.”

John: Incredibly prescriptive here. Greta Gerwig was on the podcast a couple of years ago, and she was talking about Little Women. She does the same thing with slashes when she wants lines to stack up the right ways, but you’re making it really clear. If there’s two columns side by side, simultaneously, those are exactly happening at the same time, the other overlapping, which in features we’re more likely to just say as a parenthetical overlapping to indicate where things are. You’re saying, no, this is the word where things are supposed to start overlapping, which works really well in your play, but also feels like you got to rehearse to that place. It’s not a very natural thing for actors to get to.

Leslye: No, it is absolutely not. It’s a magic trick, for sure. Initially, you’re like, “Oh, this is super messy.” Then it continues and you really get the sense of the musicality of it. That kind of goes back to Godot. It’s essentially the way I staged it was a musical. That’s what Cult Of Love’s overlapping dialogue is.

It is meant to suck you in as a “realistic way that people speak.” There are certain sections, especially large arguments, that do need to happen, boom, boom, boom, right at the right time. It was difficult to explain that to the actors, that you do need to rehearse it in a natural way. You do need to say to each other certain lines, and you have to find the real, genuine objective, or super objective, or however the actor works. The issue is that once you’ve learned it, it has to be done in the way that it is written perfectly.

For example, Zach Quinto, who’s playing the character of Mark, there is this argument that happens. He has, in the clear, a bunch of moms. It’s like, blah, blah, blah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. That was difficult to explain to him that it should be in the same cadence, each mom, but, of course, for actors, that’s a little unnatural. I’ve had to give that note to actors very often, that this is not real. Your intentions and your pathos has to be real, but the way you speak is not.

John: If you watch any sitcom, you recognize that there’s a reality within the world of that’s sitcom, but it’s not the way actual people would really do things. When you’re stacked up, when you’re clear how you’re doing stuff, how you’re selling the lines, it is specific and it’s different on a stage than it would be on film. You would try to literally just film this play as it is. It would probably feel weird. It wouldn’t feel quite natural to the format.

Leslye: That’s correct. I think that you’d have to move it into the Uncut Gems world if you were going to do this, where the sound design becomes a fill in for dialogue that is happening off screen so that it feels a little unusual and a wall of sound of dialogue, or like Little Women, you’d have to figure out some way of doing it, but in a way that was parsed out and easier to follow, I think.

John: I want to take a look at four pages here at the start of Act Two. We’ll put a link to these in the show notes. Thank you for providing these.

Leslye: Of course, yes.

John: We’re 60 pages into the script, and we’ve now gotten to scene two. Scene one is very long, and we’re getting into a shorter one, which is–

Leslye: The scene one is about 40 minutes and then you start this.

John: We’re now into this new space. Time has passed, but we’re on the same set and everything is progressing here. I think it’s just a good way of looking at what’s happening with our dual dialogue, simultaneous dialogue. Then I think on the second of these pages, we have–

Leslye: [chuckles] This is such a funny session.

John: For folks who are listening while they’re driving their car, talk us through what’s happening in the start of this scene here.

Leslye: Johnny, who is the third out of four of the children, has arrived very, very late.

John: Yes, it was Waiting for Godot for a while, but he actually does show up.

Leslye: Yes, Waiting for Godot. Exactly. Everyone’s waiting for this guy. He shows up in a very eventful way by playing this huge song, this countdown song with everybody and joins everybody together after this fractured first scene. He’s standing and holding court at the top of scene two. He’s telling a story or attempting to tell a story about when he was younger, that he went to a chess tournament, and that he placed 51st out of a thousand, and how impressive that was and what essentially beautiful memory it was for him.

At the same time, he’s just doing that sibling thing, where he wants to tell a story and no one’s listening and correcting him and jumping in, moving into different spaces. The kids start quoting things to each other. They start doing little inside jokes and he gets sidetracked by all of that. I don’t think it’s in these pages, but there is a point as this moves on where he goes, “I’m telling a story about me. Can I tell a story about me?” Evie, his sister goes, “I don’t know. Can you?” [chuckles]

It just reminded me so much of those conversations at Christmas where everyone’s not sitting there talking about big things. They’re sitting there talking about things that are basically stupid and– not stupid, but they’re essentially superficial and it’s the subtext. There’s just the idea that he’s trying to tell this story about how special he is, but everyone is pushing down how special he is.

John: It works so well on the stage, but I’m trying now to imagine, try to do this scene with a camera, try to do this scene on film, and you run into some real issues. You have a lot of characters to try to service. Basically, who’s in the frame? Who’s off the frame? Who are we actually looking at? How is the camera directing our attention versus the person who’s speaking at the moment.

As an audience watching it on a stage, we can see the whole thing at once and we can pick an actor to focus on and see what they’re doing. You get a sense of everything. Cameras, by their nature, are going to limit us down to looking at one thing. Somebody’s going to be on camera and somebody’s going to be off camera for their lines is just a very different thing. I don’t know if you’re ever planning on adapting Cult of Love into a movie.

Leslye: I am, yes.

John: It’ll be terrific, but obviously you’re facing these real challenges and looking at how there’s times where we have eight characters on stage. You have a lot of people in scenes.

Leslye: I think actually in this scene there are 10 people on stage.

John: Crazy. It’s just really different challenges. Our expectation of how long we can be in a scene is much longer on the stage than it is in a movie. These scenes would be– it’s possible you could find a way to play this all in real time, but our expectation as audiences is like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to cut to something else. We’ve got to get out of this space when we’re in these things.” These are all of those things you’re thinking through.

Leslye: Dinner table scenes are a nightmare. They do become so static and you have to jump the line 34 times or something like that. However, yes, I do think it’s possible. I think that the Bear episode did it rather well. I think that the first episode of the second season of Fleabag also did it really well.

I guess what I would say is that it really would be about your editor. It would really be about having a lot of options for him or her to whittle it down into something that was as exciting. I agree, I think this would either have to be massively choreographed, like one take things that everybody is doing now, like The Studio and Adolescence. You’d either have to do that.

John: We talked about that on the podcast recently, just that how thrilling they can be, but also how baked in all your choices are and how– it’s the opposite of what you’re describing with theater, having a bunch of choices. You’re just basically taking all the choices away. Maybe that’s the closest to the experience of being in a theater, is that theater is all one continuous take. It’s just you’re in one continuous moment the whole time. Maybe that’s the experience you want to get out of this.

Leslye: I would just argue, I don’t know how immersive one take things are. I don’t know. Certainly, there are many people who watch Adolescence, for example, which is an excellent show. There are many people who watch that and probably don’t notice that it’s all in one shot. I don’t know. I’ve said this before, but in theater, the audience is wondering what’s happening now, and in film or television, they’re wondering what’s going to happen next.

John: Oh, wow.

Leslye: Yes. I think your point is that it’s impossible to drop in that immediacy and the ecosystem and all of that stuff. I would agree that adapting Bachelorette meant that it had to have a plot, because Bachelorette is plotless. Again, you’re right, the characters care about things and they’re pushing towards something and they all have arcs and they all have actions that have consequences, but Bachelorette, the film, had to be about fixing her wedding dress, the bride’s wedding dress. That had to be the thing that kicked them out of the room and into New York City. Otherwise, the audience would, I think, pretty quickly tune out in a way.

John: Yes, they rebel. I think audiences in a film or a TV episode come in with an expectation that early on, you’re going to establish what the goal is, like, “What is the contractor signing with me that we will pay this thing off by the end?”

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

John: It’s just a different relationship you have with the audience. They really have clear expectations.

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

John: One of the promises you made with the audience early on in Russian Doll was that you would pay off the answer to what was actually happening with these time loops because Russian Doll, the concept is she keeps repeating the same moments, and no matter what happens, disaster befalls her at the end. I was doing a little research and I found your explanation of the time loops at the end. I was wondering if you could synopsize down what it was you were trying to make sure the audience got out of the metaphor you’re using with the orange about what the time loops were and what was really going on.

Leslye: Wait, what did I say? [chuckles] What did you see? Who knows?

John: Near the end of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne’s character picks a rotten orange at the market and explains these time loops are evidence that there actually is a solution to this, because it’s rotten on the outside, but the reality is still on the inside. Do you remember that as–

Leslye: Yes. No, no, no. I remember, I just wasn’t sure what I said about it six years [laughs] It’s like, I’m sure I said something very smart then. Well, in Russian Doll, I just think it’s really helpful if anyone is looking to dissect that first season. I would just say the way we started was with the character. We did not start with, “Here’s how we’re going to circle the drain.” It had to be somebody who was struggling with her own mortality, but in a way where she’s not talking about it, if that makes sense.

I just wanted to write a show about a woman that was going through an existential problem rather than a tactile problem, like, “Who do I marry? What job do I take? Oh, I’m being chased by this guy. I’ve got to solve the case.” It just felt like what female protagonists are truly just based in, “I’m having an existential crisis about my own mortality and whether or not the choices that I have made up until this moment are adding up to anything worthwhile.”

I think what then happened, if I’m remembering correctly, it was how do you externalize that? That really for me came from the Seven Deadly Plays. How do you externalize and physicalize envy? That’s a thing that happens in your mind. How do you put it into an active space? The circling of the drain for Nadia, which, if you haven’t watched the show, it is Groundhog Day. In addition to being Groundhog Day, each loop gives you an evidence of things, like you said, disappearing.

It’s not just, I’m going through the same day, it’s, I’m dying continually, and each time I die, something is taken away from me, some aspect of it. We did plan out, if I’m remembering correctly, it was animals go at this time, fruits, vegetables, and flowers go at this time. Other people start disappearing here. It was the shell, really, of the real– It was like a medicine that you’re trying to get somebody to take. If you put it in a gel cap, it’s easier to take down. I think that the premise of that was essentially a gel cap for–

John: What you’re describing in terms of needing to physicalize the problem, the crisis is a thing we’re always wrestling with as screenwriters, stage writers, is that there’s this feeling you have about the world or how reality is functioning, and you need to find some concrete way to put a handle on it so you can actually move it around and talk about it in front of things.

In the case of the Russian Doll scene, she’s picking up an orange, and she’s describing what this actually really means.
Without that, then you’re just having a conversation about an abstract, philosophical thing, and there’s no doorknob to open the door. It’s just like you’re pushing against it and there’s no way to get it to open up, and there’s no way to have a conversation or to see anything change about the issue you’re grappling with.

Leslye: Listen, I don’t mean to devalue that container within the story, but the way we talked about it in the writer’s room, of course, there was the temptation, to be like, “Oh, the reason this is happening is X. The reason that this happens is, I don’t know. There’s some sort of–”

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

Leslye: Yes. There’s some sort of thing. I think Severance and Lost are a really good example of this. Puzzle box shows, they ask the question, what’s really going on? Who is pulling the strings and et cetera, et cetera. I just didn’t find that super interesting. I thought that the time travel movies that I found really interesting were, of course, Groundhog Day, which is totally based on morality. It’s absolutely the universe just teaching him a lesson. And Back to the Future, which, of course it has Doc and the time machine and got to get back and all of that, but truthfully, the reason he’s there is to get his parents together and to learn the lessons that he learns. It really isn’t like, “Why is he disappearing? Let’s go find out.” We get it, he’s disappearing because he’s being erased from existence because his parents aren’t going to get together.

We don’t need to know why this happened then, and this thing, it’s like very quickly in Back to the Future II, the alternate 1985, they just explain it really quickly. I am obsessed with Back to the Future. It’s a perfect movie as far as I’m concerned. I think Robert Zemeckis was just, just cooking so hard in that movie. He explains time travel in 90 seconds. In this day and age, that would be three scenes of explaining time travel. It’s all one shot. It’s just Doc coming into this thing, or actually it’s overs for that, but there are other times where he– oh my God, sorry, I’m going to go on a tangent about Zemeckis and how he blocks actors and then how his camera moves work, but I’m not going to do that.

I just think that those types of time travel are just more interesting to me. I felt that the orange moment that you’re talking about really just, again, metaphorically meant that even as you don’t change, the world keeps going. You can either let go or be dragged, kind of thing. She was just going to keep dying until she acknowledged the more, again, moral psychological issues, which is the little girl at the end of episode seven represents an inner child and a love that needs to be given to herself that never was by the world around her.

As the world closes in and threatens her in this very intense way of– threatens her mortality, at the same time, she is confronted with the fact that the rest of the world or that timeline will continue to go without her. Did that answer your question?

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

John: I wanted to get back to something you said about the writer’s room, that it’s not that you weren’t curious about what was going on, but you didn’t want to establish that as being the central question because if it’s a show about what’s actually really happening, then that’s what the audience is going to be expecting an answer for. They may not be paying it as close attention to the things you actually want them to focus on, which is her growth and what she’s actually looking for, and what she’s actually needing to achieve. I think by not foregrounding that question, you also let the audience follow you to places where you actually really want to take them. That’s a good insight.

Leslye: I think a really good way of describing it and coming down into the central question of the first season was we don’t want the audience to be asking what’s going on. We want the audience asking, “How is she going to get out?”

John: Exactly.

Leslye: That’s the interesting question. I think that as much as I enjoy watching Lost and Severance, which I do by the way, the going into this space of there’s really a cult that’s pulling the strings or running this thing, and there’s really a– Alice and Janie had two kids. It just feels like answering the question or attempting to answer the question of what’s really going on was just not the intention of that story of Nadia.

John: We have two questions from listeners to answer, which I think you’re uniquely well-suited to answer. Drew, can you help us out with Liz’s question?

Drew: Sure. Liz writes, I’m a professional classical musician working on a pilot set in the classical music world.

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

Drew: [laughs] I have several action sequences that I’ve choreographed specifically to a given piece of music. For instance, this punch has to land right on beat 3 of measure 14. Should I be including these details in the script itself, or would they be notes for a director and/or editor later down the line?

John: I think you’re a perfect person for this because not only do you care about Zachary Quinto saying mom the same way at the right cadence, but we haven’t really talked about Cult of Love is not a musical, but it’s the most music I’ve ever heard in a play. It is a very musical family that plays instruments and sings live the whole time. What’s your instinct for Liz here with her music cues?

Leslye: I think you have to put them in the script. You just have to. The director and the editor will make their own decisions. Not in a bad way, but once the script is turned over to the process of production, mentioning the song in the action line versus this is where it lands in the first movement or whatever, I think that you have to do it. Now, the caveat of that is do your best to streamline it.

If the action is happening on a particular sequence, like you’re referencing– I don’t know if you’re referencing a track, you can say, “It’s Beethoven’s whatever by such and such and this album,” and then your action lines should be really sick because I do think people will be intimidated by that. That’s the caveat is that I do think that executives or producers may read that and go, “Oh gosh, this is so prescriptive,” but there will be somebody that reads it and thinks, “God, I believe in this vision. This is cool.” I think you’d rather that than somebody taking it over.

John: I agree. I haven’t read Todd Field’s script for Tár, but I have to believe that he’s specifically mentioning exactly what piece that she’s conducted because it’s essential to that story.

Leslye: Oh, absolutely. I haven’t read it either, but he must have done that. I wonder if the Bernstein movie too did that.

John: I suspect it did. I think Liz could also try, and this is the thing I ended up doing for the Big Fish musical script, because we had to send it around to some people who wouldn’t know the actual tracks that were previously recorded is you can now in Highland and other apps probably too, include links that actually link out, so the PDF will link to something like a track you have on Dropbox or someplace else, or Spotify.

I wouldn’t do that for everything, but for something where you absolutely need people to hear the real music that goes with it, it’s an option there. Specifically, from a piece of classical music, you can put the full name of the thing in there, the odds that someone’s going to find that are very, very low. If you need to hear a specific thing, I’d put a link in there.

Leslye: Oh, a link is a great idea. A link would be really good to listen while that’s happening. The only other thing I would say is maybe think outside the box about how to write it. Meaning if you write music and can read music, the reader will not, but if you wrote it like a musical where instead of dialogue, the action lines are underneath each thing, at least, one, it would look pretty, and two, I think people might be really intrigued by that. It might also be a terrible suggestion, but I think if this is really important to you, try to think outside the box in terms of how to present it.

John: Absolutely. Just the way stage musicals, they have both the script and they have the score that has the stage directions and dialogue in it too. Providing a supplemental piece of material there, it could just be surprising for people in ways that’s interesting. A question here from Richard.

Drew: “What’s the longest draft you’d send to a friend for notes? Is there a sliding scale of pain or rather page count that you’d be willing to inflict on a best friend? What about a friend or a writer’s group? Of course, I know never to send a professional contact like a rapper producer, a bloated 140-page draft.”

John: Leslie, what’s your end stage? Do you send long stuff to people to read? When do you like to show people stuff and and how early in the process will you show it?

Leslye: You’re right, love. It’s like 90 to 100. I do think that for a first draft, anywhere between 100 and 150 is okay because you can say in a caveat, it’s too long, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that I think I’m curious about what you think I should cut. I know it’s too long, but I don’t know where to make these changes. 120, if you consider one page as a minute, that’s two hours. That’s a decent script. I write pretty short scripts, and I keep an eye on the page count for sure, but then you asked something else, John, was it about the first drafts?

John: Yes, how early in the process do you like to share what you’re writing with people, and who are the trusted people you love to read early stuff?

Leslye: I would say very close to the first draft, I will do a reading with actors, pretty close. I would make sure stuff that was really wonky, I’d be like, “Mm.” What’s fun about that is that because all of my friends are actors, I don’t want to have anything embarrassing there. Anything that I feel like that would be stupid, I’ll take that out, and it forces me to be a little bit better at my job. I try to get a reading as soon as humanly possible.

They also have good feedback. I have to say, the actors will have really good feedback. If they’re trusted people, they won’t be like, “I just don’t get it.” They’ll say, “I really loved this part. I didn’t really understand this scene. Is it supposed to be this or that?” Getting the direction from them. Then, yes, once I do that, of course, I will send it to either a trusted friend or I have a manager that I really love, Michael Sugar. I will send him stuff as soon as I can.

John: A question for you. Is it ever awkward that you’re having friends who are actors read through stuff, but they may not be the people you actually want to be in the project itself? Does that ever become an issue?

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

Leslye: That’s a good question. When I was working with IAMA and we did readings, because it was an actor-based company, it was unspoken or explicit that the people reading those lines would be the actors that would eventually do the show, for sure. When I do more casual readings, especially if screenplays, just to be super blunt, we will try to get the most famous person that we can, [laughs] who’s right for the part, but the financing will be based on the profile of the number one and number two on the call sheet.

I think a lot of actors that I know who are brilliant theater actors understand that that’s how the world works. It becomes more difficult when actors have done the production of the play, and then the play gets moved to a different medium. That’s different.

John: All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing this week is Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions. I think I’ve heard about these before, but I saw an article in the New York Times about it, and then I went through and actually found the original study. Aron was a psychotherapist, I think, who was really focused on how people connect and what are the ways to get people to draw closer connections, and so would put together strangers and have them talk through this list of 36 questions that escalate as they go along.

You do reveal a lot about yourself in the course of them. Some of the sample questions are, number seven, do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? Number eight, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. The partner being the person you’re talking with. Number 30 is, when did you last cry in front of another person or by yourself? Number 33, if you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone, and why haven’t you told them yet?

There’s 36 of these, and actually in the study that we’ll link to, there’s also a whole bunch more questions there. They’re good icebreakers for human beings, but they’re also really great questions for characters to be chewing over. I think if you have characters who you’re trying to get inside this character and you are just doing some free writing, having your characters answer some of these questions would be a great way to get some insight into what’s happening inside their head, these people who don’t fully exist in your brains yet. Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions.

Leslye: My God. Should we answer them right now?

John: You did Russian Doll, so do you have a secret hunch about how you will die, Leslye Headland?

Leslye: I’ve always thought cancer. It’s how most of us go. My dad had Alzheimer’s. He died, and he was very young, he was 64, so it’s something that I would never want to have happen to me. I hope not that. The last time I cried in front of somebody was last night. [laughs] That’s an easy answer.

John: The last time I cried in front of somebody was, it wasn’t full-on crying, but it was misty, a couple of weeks ago on Survivor. There was a heartbreaking moment, and so that made me misty. Drew’s smiling. He knows what it was, I think. Exactly what it was.

Leslye: Oh my God.

John: A young woman with autism who had a meltdown, and then a guy on another tribe knew what was going on and got permission to intervene and talk her down. Then she told everybody what her situation was, and it was really well done. It was very heartwarming.

Leslye: Oh, my God.

John: Leslye, do you have something to share for us as a one cool thing?

Leslye: In classic fashion, I’d love to do two things. [chuckles]

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

Leslye: Just breaking the rules already. I just read Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I just had never read it.

John: I’ve never read it.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s short, you can finish it in a day probably, or a couple of days if you’re busy. It’s a real handbook. It really tells you, “This is the script stage, this is pre-production. Here are all my experiences with The Verdict and Orient Express. Here’s how I behave on set, this is how I do takes. This is who this person is, and this is who this person is.” I wish I’d read it before I made my first movie. I think that it’s a real– it’s not, I guess, instructions, but handbook, I think, is better.

Then, again, I’m just now reading Alexander Mackendrick’s On Film-making, which is much more of a textbook. It’s harder to get through, but it’s really, really cool and asks many, many questions about specifically how to create a narrative that is in the medium of film. Like I was saying, plays, you’re wondering what’s happening now, films, you’re wondering what’s happening next. He defines drama as anticipation mixed with uncertainty. He’s always pushing. He has a great way to do outlines in there, but it is more like reading a textbook. You have to get through a chapter and then put it down.

John: My very first film class ever was at Stanford. We had filmmaking textbooks, and I just remember being so technical in a very sort of like, “Here’s how the film moves through the gate, and also, here’s how we tell a story at the same time.” There’s a very specific era of those things, which is you were learning a whole new craft, and it was all new. I think we’re now in a place where we treat those as separate disciplines, and we don’t really think about the technical requirements of movie making at the same time we’re thinking of the storytelling goals of filmmaking.

Leslye: I agree.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email that 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 and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslye Headland, such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes.

Leslye: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for asking me, John. I’m really honored, which is a goofy old word, but it really was lovely to be here, and I feel like I’m in really awesome company. Thank you.

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, for our bonus segment, I would love to talk about how you keep up with what’s going on for plays the way we do on movies. For movies, like when I was going through Stark program at USC, the expectation was that you would see basically all the new releases that came out each week. We would have the variety top 60 movies, and every week, I could just check through and see, “Okay, I’ve seen 40 out of 60 of those movies.” I would just see stuff every weekend to keep up on stuff.

As a screenwriter, you can do that. You can always go back and watch things on video for stuff that you missed. For plays, it’s harder because plays, if it’s not being staged someplace, you can’t see a play. If someone wants to be a playwright and they want to see what’s going on, it feels like it’s more challenging. Leslye, can you talk us through your ability to see plays coming up and how you’re balancing that now?

Leslye: That’s a great question. First of all, the community that I’m in it’s medium-sized. It’s very close-knit. What happens is, everybody goes to see plays. Everybody sees different plays. You get together and you do a kiki. You go, “Glengarry is absolute a mess. You don’t need to go, you don’t need to see it. Then, Deep Blue Sound, you got to go. Oh my gosh, it was incredible.” You get a sense of where you’re supposed to point your boat, I guess. If you’re looking for an old play that you can’t– definitely reading it, it’s tougher, but meaning, if you’re used to reading screenplays, you have to move your head into a different space to read them. They are super enjoyable.

John: Reading old plays, I obviously read a lot of screenplays, but the screenplay form is designed to evoke the experience of watching a movie, and it’s like all the action scene description is there to give you that space. In plays, reading plays, I have a hard time just staying in the moment, and sometimes, if they’re great, then I can click in, but I do find it hard to get the experience of what it would feel like to watch that play by reading the text.

Leslye: This is really annoying, but Shakespeare is a really good read. He didn’t have a big production because they were just doing shit at the Globe, whatever, all the time. His dialogue– actually, he does it through dialogue. He’s like, as this person is entering, and then there’s the exposition, and then there’s also what somebody should be doing, they’re saying something like, bad version is, “Lord, I pray to you,” or something, and it’s like, “Get on your knees, you’re praying.” It’s just your brain, or not, but your brain starts to go, “Well, this person’s saying something, and therefore, I can imagine it.” Where, like you said, the stage directions and then just dialogue, is tough. It’s tough to read.

John: Yes, it is tough. You and your friends get together, you kiki, you talk about the things that you’ve seen. There’s also a very limited window to see those things, because they’re going to be up for a couple weeks, and then they’re gone, and I was lucky to see your play while it was still there. Now, I want to send people to see it, but they can’t-

Leslye: They can’t.

John: -because it’s not there to see anymore. There’s also the pressure to see the shows of friends, people are in things, so you’re going to see those things, even if they’re not your taste to see.

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

John: Talk to us about previews versus the final thing. If you go to something in previews, do you hold back some judgment because you know that it’s an early draft? How do you feel about previews?

Leslye: In previews, you’re pretty much there with the script, or at least for me. I’m pretty much there with the script. I don’t feel like once we’re in previews, there’s certainly– some people totally rewrite the ending of the play. That’s definitely something that does happen in previews, but my experience has always been, “Oh, this is– oh, I got to tweak this, I still don’t understand it.”

With Cult, it was like, “Oh, these overlaps aren’t working. Let me uncouple them, let me do this,” but I consider previews to be rehearsal with an audience. I know the actors don’t feel that way, I know that once the show– and then you freeze the show. You have a couple performances, and then you freeze it, and that’s when press comes. I don’t know, I see that time period that way, and I don’t think the actors do. I think they go like, “Oh my God, I’m up here, and I’ve got to give this performance,” but that’s not my experience. That’s not how I think about it. [chuckles]

John: The other thing that’s different about plays versus movies is that the movie is the same movie every night, and the play is a different experience.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

John: Small things change, which is great, and which I loved with the Big Fish musical. You’d see, oh, this is how it’s working this time, or that joke killed last night, and why did it not work tonight? It’s just something about the atmosphere, it makes it so different. It also means that my experience of going to the show on Thursday might not be the same show that somebody saw on Friday, and you can’t know why. That’s also one of the challenging things. It’s just, you literally have to be there.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the things I had to say to most of the cast of Cult of Love was ignore the laughs, the best you can. Not ignore them, but don’t rely on them as a temperature taker, because in my work, people laugh at bizarre things. I don’t set up jokes the way that Seinfeld does. Obviously, it’s not a sitcom, but my characters just say things, and then an audience can just take it in and decide whether it’s funny or not.

It’s very important that they understand that. In previews and then in performances, people– when you saw the show, I can guarantee you that wherever people laughed was not the same where they laughed in a different performance. Some are hard jokes, definitely for sure, like when Evie yells at the preacher, everyone’s like, “Ha, ha, ha. She’s screaming at him,” but there was a night Mark and Johnny, these brothers are talking, and Mark says, “Basically, I don’t want to live anymore.” Johnny says, “Well, you’re not going to kill yourself.” Mark says, “How do you know?” Johnny says, “Because I tried.” I’m not kidding, one night, that got a laugh.

John: Yikes.

Leslye: In my work, I don’t see that as a bad thing. When Evie says, “Death is expensive,” which, by the way, I stole from Streetcar, and he was there, but people started laughing. They were just like– that is a very serious moment when she’s talking to them, and they start laughing. I just don’t– there are a couple times where I feel like that’s bad, and things have to adjust in order because it is very much supposed to be a serious moment.

I went on a little bit, but that was the barometer in terms of when you’re saying previews are different. Each night, there were laughs where it was like, “Oh, my God, you guys are sick people,” in the audience. Why would you laugh at that?

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

Leslye: I love when people walk out. Whoever I’m sitting with, when people leave, I turn to them, and I’m like, “They got to go, they got to get out of here. They can’t take it. They can’t take the realness.” I am obsessed because if somebody stands up and leaves in the middle of a scene, they are making a statement, and I think that’s gorgeous. If somebody walks out of a movie, it’s like, “Everybody walks out of a movie,” and also you’re not seeing it.

I also love when things go wrong. Oh, I love when somebody drops– and I think the audience loves it, too. When somebody drops a prop, because it just reminds you this is happening in real life. These people are not these characters. They’re people who have voluntarily gotten up here to do this.

John: This last year, we went and saw the ABBA show in London, which is phenomenal.

Leslye: Phenomenal.

John: It creates the illusion that you’re watching real people, but, of course, it is all on rails. Yes, there’s a live band off to the side, but they’re not going to drop a prop. They’re not going to knock over a microphone stand.

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

John: I don’t want theater to just be a bunch of perfectly moving robots. It’s the sense that a real thing is happening in front of you that makes it so thrilling.

Leslye: Oh, I love it. I have to say, in wrapping this up, I really love theater, probably, and I’ve worked in those three mediums, and I hope to start moving into YouTube. I’m kidding.

Although that’s where we’re headed. We’re headed to an OnlyFans distribution. I always say that on mic. If you want to know what distribution is going to look like in 10 years, just see what porn is doing right now.

John: Absolutely. Leslye, you’ll be a hell of a content creator, or whatever.

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Leslye: Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

John: Awesome.

Links:

• Leslye Headland
• Cult of Love – selected pages
• Bachelorette the play and the movie
• Fanny and Alexander
• John by Annie Baker
• Original Cast Album: Company
• Stephen Sondheim
• Waiting for Godot
• John Cassavetes
• Tár screenplay by Todd Field
• Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions
• Eva discloses her autism on Survivor
• Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
• On Filmmaking by Alexander McKendick
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Today on the show, how do you approach the second season of the acclaimed TV show you created? It’s a question asked by roughly 1% of our listening audience, and yet the answer is surprisingly relevant to anyone dealing with the pressures of expectation and reality.

Craig: It’s relevant to 66% of the people right now on this podcast.

John: Which is so odd to have you both here. We will also answer listener questions about transitioning from journalism to screenwriting and what to do when you realize that someone else is making something with the same premise.

To help us do all this, we have a very special guest. Tony Gilroy is the writer and director of movies such as Michael Clayton, Duplicity, The Bourne Legacy. He also wrote The Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum, Devil’s Advocate, Rogue One, and, of course, The Cutting Edge with D.B. Sweeney. Most relevant to today’s episode, Tony is also the creator and showrunner of Andor, which starts its second season on April 22nd. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Tony Gilroy.

Tony Gilroy: It is a pleasure to be here. It really is. I’ve been listening, so it’s nice to be someplace where you’ve visited.

Craig: That is startling and disturbing. Well, it’s very flattering. Tony Gilroy, for those of you who follow screenwriting, needs no introduction even though John gave him one. If you’re a casual listener, let me explain. We’ve got one of the all-time great first-ballot hall of famers here with us today.

John: Weirdly, Tony, your name has come up so much recently on the show because after our Moneyball episode with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, she mentioned running into you, which was great. Then a couple of weeks ago, Christina Hodson was on. We were talking through action sequences. We went through a great action sequence of yours from The Bourne Identity, which was so much fun to see and to see how you were doing things on the page, which is different than how Craig or I or other folks would do things on the page. It’s great to have you. You’ve been on our mind, so to have you on our show is just a delight.

Tony: I listened to that episode yesterday to prep for today. I thought she did an amazing– she just covered all of it. It was very well-played. It’s very instructive. That episode was really terrific.

John: Yes, so Craig will never listen to that episode. Craig, Christina was really smart.

Craig: I will. You don’t know that.

Tony: You have a lot to learn. There’s things to learn.

Craig: I think with this recommendation, this might go to the top of my list. Christina is fantastic, plus superb accent. It always helps.

John: It’s just the best. Love it. Love it to death. Tony, we’re here on the occasion of Andor starting its second season. Every listener needs to go back and watch Andor Season 1 immediately. Pause the podcast and go back and watch it. Maybe they’re in their car and they can’t. Could you give us the logline and set us up Andor within the universe of Star Wars for folks who aren’t familiar with what Andor is and why it’s so awesome?

Tony: I’m going to skip the awesome part. The simple setup is it’s the five-year prequel of a character, Cassian Andor, who’s in Rogue One. In Rogue One, he will sacrifice himself at the end in a very heroic, messianic way. This is the five years that leads him into the first scene of Rogue One, which is a slightly odd concept. When we meet him in Rogue One, the character in Rogue One is an all-singing, all-dancing spy warrior. There’s nothing he can’t do.

The concept of the show is to take him from a point five years earlier where he is a cynical, disinterested, self-preservationalist, the kind of guy in his town that people don’t want to see coming down the street, to take him from the lowest possible point, and have him become– In the first season, the first season is really about his stations of the cross on the way to becoming a revolutionary. It’s the revolutionary education of someone from a very outside point of view. We take him, in the first season, just to the point where he will join at the end. This second season is about the next four years as he activates that involvement.

John: Now, that’s centering it on your protagonist, the guy who’s changing, but you don’t limit the POV just to him. There’s other plot lines and things that are being set up, which leads to the bigger question of, what is the show really about? To you, what is the show? What are you actually trying to explore in the course of the show?

Tony: The show, for me, is the opportunity with the largest possible canvas and the largest possible cast and the most resources you can possibly imagine to tell the story of a revolution and to try to tell the story about what happens to a great variety of people and a great variety of social stratus and on both sides of the fence. What happens to ordinary people as revolution just explodes around them and washes over their life?

As people become absorbed into history and the pressures that that places on everyone, to my mind, it’s an all-encompassing opportunity to deal with things I’ve been thinking about my whole life and behavior I’ve been thinking about my whole life and challenges I’ve been thinking about my whole life. I have a chorus. I have a choir, 10 or 15 characters that are really identifiable that we’re carrying through. Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s character, is this messianic character surfing through the center of that. But as you suggested, it would be a disservice to say that it’s really just about this one guy. It is a broad survey of what happens to people when the shit comes down.

Craig: I’m not going to get into the absolute trap of trying to rate Star Wars stuff because I like my life to the extent that I have one, but I think that Andor does feel apart. It is completely integrated into the story of Star Wars, the history of Star Wars, that narrative, that world, that tone, but it does feel set apart because it’s so– [chuckles] I’m just going to get in trouble. I don’t care. It’s so good. It’s really just of a quality that feels different.

My question. This is really a process/psychology question because I know I’m struggling with this myself right now. You’re about to unleash Season 2 upon the world. There is a Season 3 coming. When you finished Season 1, which was so complete and accomplished, did you think to yourself, “Well, how the fuck am I going to do that again?” How do you face the blank, I don’t even call it the blank page, the blank mind, knowing there is so much work to be done to do another season, another season, another season when you’ve just run a marathon and won it?

Tony: The great crise for us was during the filming of Season 1. Our show was really salvaged as probably other shows were as well by COVID. COVID really saved our show. I started this process either out of ignorance or vainglory or just blithe indifference, whatever. I had no clue whatsoever what I was getting into. I threw together a five-day writers’ room. Things were in process. I won’t go through the whole thing, but I was in London. I was going to be directing three episodes in the spring.

I was prepping them. I was casting them. I was half-assed watching the other scripts come in and going, “Well, I got to go do some other work here.” Had we proceeded on that schedule, it would have been a trade story disaster. It really would have been an epic disaster. COVID came in and everything slowed down and stopped and reset. I reoriented my job on the show. I decided not to direct. I realized where the priorities were.

As we began to crawl back into the process and Disney was one of the first places to start that and Sanne Wohlenberg, who you know well, was so great producer from Chernobyl and we share a lot of things from Chernobyl, but she just was determined. As we started that roll-in, there was time to get our footing and for me to figure out what I needed to be doing and how to make the show potentially what I really hoped it would be. We were on the hook. We had promised that we were going to do five seasons of this show. It was going to be one season per year.

Talk about delusional. It seems so, but that’s what we committed to. We got up in Scotland. Diego and I were up there. This was post-COVID after I went through my quarantine and got back over there and up in Scotland with him. I was just looking into the next black hole as was he because he’s got to marry into Rogue One and it’s 10 years earlier. This is taking 17 years to make the first season. We really knew that we were in trouble.

I literally remember the conversation where we just sat down in the backyard in Pitlochry at this hotel with a scotch and just said, “We’re so fucked. We’re just so totally fucked. What are we going to do?” I don’t want to make this the longest answer ever.

Craig: Go for it.

Tony: The answer was mystically already in front of us. Our show was organized around blocks of three, which is this European system that we– You go for any system. You’re looking for systems that’ll help you-

Craig: Survive.

Tony: – organize things. Yes, survive really, survive really. These blocks of three, a director will do a block of three and three and three and three. We’re doing four blocks of three and that’s what we were doing for the first season. It was like, “Oh, my God. We have four years to cover. Look at this. We have four blocks.” I remember going back to the room and going, “What if I did a year per block? What could I do and would Disney go for that? Would that appeal to them? What would Kathy say? How would we do it?” That was a crucible moment where we really figured out what to do.

John: Tony, can you describe what you mean by blocks? As I watched the first season, it does really feel like this is a movie, this is an arc, and then there’s another one, and there’s another one. Is that what you’re describing?

Tony: A block is three episodes. A director can come in and do three episodes. We do treat them like films. The prep time is probably longer than most films because our demands on the show, which is something we can talk about, are so many extraordinary, extra credit things that you would never think about in any other project. The prep, the building, the editorial team, the whole project is on blocks of these three. In both seasons, it is physically possible for a director to come in and do the very first block and the last block. That would be the only way you’d be able to do the workflow.

John: That’s great. One of the things I really admired about Andor is if we reached a new environment, we’d have a sense like, “Okay, we’re going to be here for a moment.” The prison sequence of the first season is so incredible. I think because you’re doing it as a block, logistically, you’re able to build out these incredible sets and create this space, but also create story elements and create characters who are going to be so important for that sequence.

We also have a sense of, “We will move past them at the end.” It made so much sense. It seems so obvious, but what you’re describing is it wasn’t at all obvious as you were starting the process. You really probably were thinking episode by episode and it wasn’t until you got to this idea of blocks that it became feasible to tell the story the right way.

Tony: No, but Season 1 was built around that system.

John: Okay, great.

Tony: We did build around the blocks. Our very weird writers’ room thing that we did and we can talk about that if you want to. The very weird thing that we did, each writer took a block. Again, you get a chunk. You get a movie. You get these three. Season 1 almost fits that. There’s an anomalous seventh episode, which is an interesting little sidebar. It’s just we weren’t Calvinist about it in the first season. In the second season, because we are jumping a year each time, as writers, it’s a fascinating concept. The idea is we come back, it’s a year later.

Then the idea became refined as I started to sketch it. I’m like, “Oh, my God. You know what I’m going to do? I’m not going to come back and stay a month or dick around and do this thing. We’re going to come back. When we come back, we’re coming back for three days each time.” We just drop the needle on three days and then we drop a year and come back for three days. There’s this abyss of negative space that’s in between. Then my desire, my goal, what we went for is to not have any exposition whatsoever. None of the Chekhovian, “No, John, I haven’t seen you since then.”

[laughter]

Craig: “As you know…”

Tony: None of that. “As you know. As, of course, you remember, when last we spoke,” none of that. What’s the most badass drop we can do and get away with it? This second season adheres very rigorously to the four-movie concept. The show will be released that way as well. They’re going to release them three per week for a month.

Craig: Which I love. It’s amazing that we’re still coming up with new ways to do this.

Tony: I know.

Craig: I’m just thrilled that any movement towards not dumping everything at once to me is a huge victory. I’m curious. This will lead in a little bit to some consideration about your writers’ room and how that works, but showrunning, which is something that you hadn’t been doing. You had been writing movies. You had been writing and directing movies, which is like showrunning a thing.

Showrunning a television show like this, of this size, is somewhat of an elastic job. People do it differently. I myself go crazy. I wonder how you do it. I’m curious how you handle your attention. Where do you hyper-focus? Where do you delegate? How do you keep your hand on the tiller of quality control over the course of this beast because a production like this is an absolute beast?

Tony: Look, you’re absolutely right. I think people are constantly striving for a formula for how to do this. They haven’t even figured out the formula how to make people’s deals on this shit yet, right? Anybody who tells you, “Oh, well, this is how everyone’s doing it,” is lying to you. It is absolutely the Wild West.

I didn’t know what to do. My only experience had been I spent two years on House of Cards as a consultant. I really didn’t go to the room. I went there a couple of times. I was really there as a backup asshole at the end to give notes.

Really, that was my function, to be the final horrible critic of what was there.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Tony: I’d gone to the room and I’d seen it. I certainly had a lot of friends who were doing it. We evolved into– what’s the most graceful way of saying it? We evolved into a system that was a writing system. I never once, for five years straight, have ever, ever, ever stopped writing. I’d never ever, ever had a break, not a single day ever. The writing started in the conception, in the very first conversations with Lucas and Kathy and Disney and everything and tiptoeing into how this might be and what I could get away with and how far we could push it, and should I do this? All that advanced work.

Luke Hull was my next collaborator, the great production designer of Chernobyl, who Sanne Wohlenberg brought over, the great 14-year-old Mozart production designer. I began collaborating with Luke and building Ferrix and building these places and starting to design and getting some sort of handle on what we could afford and what was manageable and what would the scale of the show be.

There’s a writing process with him. I write the first three episodes. I have 100 pages of what I think might be a season. Then I brought in Beau Willimon and my brother Dan. Stephen Schiff was ill in London, so he couldn’t come, but he’d pick up an episode off the notes. Beau and Danny and I go to a room for five days in New York with Luke Hull in presence, with the production designer there who’s already been my co-writer through a whole bunch of stuff in the design sense. The producer is there.

We have lines to Lucasfilm about what we can do and what we can afford. We have this absolutely knock-down, drag-out, accelerated five-day story conference where we beat out the story as crazy as we possibly can and fill in the gaps, all the gaps that I don’t have, and then divvy up who gets the assignments.

Those guys go off and they make drafts. They solve problems. They brought ideas in the room. They make drafts. They do rewrites. We do stuff. They’re always an approximation, right? It’s just such an approximation because those scripts are not going to be done. Well, because of COVID, they’re not going to be shot for 18 months.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s a lovely luxury there.

Tony: Right? There you go. They’re writing and then they go away. Then when COVID happens, all I do nonstop literally every day is write. Our system on the show, I always hear people say, “Oh, well, you have a writer on the set.” Never ever, ever, ever had a writer on the set. Our whole principle is to have the scripts be so prepped, so perfect, have so many meetings and so many design discussions and everything so completely taken care of.

I’ll do the first page turn. I’ll do the first HOD page turn. I’ll run that one. The second one, I’ll scramble. The third one, the final one, is the AD and the director taking over the show. The best version of that is I don’t ever have to say anything. I’ll have a Sunday night phone call with every director before the week’s shooting to go over anything that’s missing or any questions that we have.

Craig: That’s a great idea.

Tony: I want everything so perfect in every moment of tempo and design and everything. Everything’s been tucked away that these people can go to set every day and swing. The TV director thing, that’s a whole other podcast. As a director and as a first final-cut director and as a protective director, the idea of having me or somebody else watch over, I want them to know exactly what they’re supposed to get, what the protein is every day, what we’re going for, but I want them to swing when they go to work.

Our system was developed around that, a very scientific, “Let’s get a perfect set of drawings.” To a level, I would never take a movie. I’ve never taken a movie that far. This is hundreds of people, but so detailed. That’s what we evolved into. It’s a writing system. I wrote from the very first memos to Lucasfilm straight through. We finished November 5th to the final ADR and working with my brother, Johnny, when we’re doing all the final cuts and all the stuff because we get to finish up the show in a way. I don’t finish until the final ADR mix session. I’m writing every single day.

Craig: It sounds like you’re writing through until the point where you have finally finished the scripts. At which point, you now go, and you probably were already doing this anyway, to begin editing because you were now receiving director’s cuts in. Now, you start editing those and you start working on the visual effects. The job never ends, but it sounds like you’ve got a system where the materials that are coming in, it sounds like you’ve got a system where there aren’t too many bad surprises.

Tony: We shot 1,500 pages of script, right? We only lost one scene in the entire thing that we didn’t use for the cut. We only ever re-shot anything, which was the first sequence in the very first episode. Essentially, we re-shot it because we wanted to give the directors the balls to swing away. They were too afraid to swing. It’s like, “Dude, you got to go for it, man. I don’t need coverage. I need a movie here, man.” That’s the only time we ever did it.

Obviously, we had problem-solving complications and all kinds of workarounds because of the strike and different things like that. It is the most maximal, imaginative, immersive thing that I lived in for five years because when I say “writing,” I’m not just talking about the dialogue or the scenes. I’m not just talking about all the memos that I have to write to explain everything that I want or fight for what I need or all those things.

I’m also talking about all the dizzying, really almost hard-to-comprehend amount of design work that has to go into the show. There’s places where I will delegate. Obviously, to the directors. I delegate on the day. Every now and then, the phone would ring at 4:30 in the morning and I’d have to do something, but very, very rarely. Mostly, it’s me getting up at six o’clock in the morning and going through dailies from yesterday and being astonished at how cool these directors are blocking. “Holy shit, look what they did. How did they know how to–“ because they don’t have to worry about the script when they get to the set.

John: Now, Tony, this is your first time doing a second season of a TV show, but all three of us have done sequels. We’ve done movie sequels where we worked on one movie and then we had to come back and do the next one. We have the knowledge of like, we know what the thing is. We can make a plan for the second one. In my experience, you can have a plan for it, but that plan will go awry.

You’re dealing with a bunch of other expectations around it. Because it’s the second time through, expectations are higher and different. What were you able to take from, for example, the Bourne movies from that and bring it to this? Just like, what has been your experience of sequels overall? What are the things that you’ve learned that work well when you’re trying to do the next installment of a franchise versus that’s just not going to be relevant because you’re trying to make a new movie each time?

Tony: I think it’s easier. The first time when I went to do Supremacy, I was shocked that I didn’t have to introduce the character. I was like, “Oh, my God. All the work that you do to have people really understand this person that you’re talking about as quickly and as elegantly as possible, all that’s done.” I think it’s a huge advantage in a way. To the larger question, I think this maybe goes to what you’re saying and maybe the cherry on the top of the previous answer.

I’m no kid. I did a lot of things over the last few decades and a lot of experience of things. I found there were so many days every week where I was using absolutely everything I knew in all aspects of my life. I’m talking about all the ambassadorial things that one does as a showrunner. I’m talking about all of the, “Should I be Ho Chi Minh today or Napoleon?”

[laughter]

Is it time to write that memo? Is it everything from the most molecular scene-writing tweaks to the most maximal decisions about, “Oh, my God. We can’t afford to pay for this entire episode. What are we going to do?” and everything in between? It’s been a decompression process to come off of it, I must say.

Craig: Yes, I go through the same thing. I wonder if you’ve had this existential thought because I have, because you’ve been doing it longer. John and I have been doing it, I think, if anybody is a young person, for a long time.

Tony: I think we’re contemporary.

Craig: We’ve all been doing it for a long time. When you work in features, as you and I and John did for so long, you do get used to a little bit of the, “Well, you work on a thing and it’s maybe a year or if you’re making it two.” This show that you’re making and the show that I’m making will devour, what? A decade, a decade and a half of your life, of your rapidly dwindling life. I wonder, sometimes I turn to my first AD and I say, “When I’m not looking and when I don’t expect it, please hit me in the back of the head with a hammer as hard as you can.”

[laughter]

I don’t know how else to get off of this. Like you said, the dizzying move from molecular to macro at times is exhausting, but I love it. I do feel sometimes a little bit of an ache that there’s something– Well, whatever my Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Whenever your next Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Do you feel that or are you like, “Screw it. This is a beautiful thing”?

Tony: No, I spent the first year even when I was in London pre-COVID, I began to have just the worst buyer’s remorse. Epic every morning, “What have I done? I’ve fucked my life. I shouldn’t have done this.” Now, I’ve committed. All these people are here. This is horrible. When COVID came, I thought like, “You know what? Thank God. That will kill the show. Thank God.” I was very, very unhappy when the phone calls started coming. Then I was like, “Well, I’m not coming back to London to die for this show.” Then they were like, “Well, I’m not going to direct anymore.” It’s two speeds.

Number one, you have your pride of work. That never goes away. I think anybody who gets onto this podcast is probably in that category of obsessive human being. You’re just going to do the best you can all the time, but it was with horrible, horrible doubt. It really wasn’t until we started shooting and stuff started coming in and it started to pull together. My brother Johnny really came in and was really seeing stuff. I was like, “Well, this is going to be good.” My feelings changed as we did the first season. I’m only doing two, though, Craig. It’s five and a half years for me. I did do Rogue, but that was in the past.

Craig: You’re not only doing two. I don’t believe that.

Tony: I’m only doing two. We’re done. No, it’s a closed circle.

Craig: This is it? It’s over?

Tony: Yes, no, it’s a novel. Yes, because we’re taking him to the final scene that walks him into Rogue One.

Craig: In Season 2, yes.

Tony: Yes, literally, we’re walking him and I will say that is–

Craig: You found a way to get out.

[laughter]

Tony: Not only that, I think it let us stay sane. It let Diego and I stay sane and the people involved. It let Disney stay sane because there’s no secret there. The streaming model and economics changed right in the middle of our show, which could have been cataclysmic.

Craig: You’re in a victory lap now then.

Tony: Yes, but knowing the ending, always knowing the ending, made everything much more. It’s a freeing thing. It’s a liberating thing to know where the end of the road is.

Craig: Well, I know where the end of my road is. It’s just way the fuck down.

[laughter]

Tony: Well, I don’t know what to tell you.

Craig: I don’t know what to tell me either.

Tony: No, I’ve been out. I wrote another script over the summer, so I’m trying to get out.

Craig: Screw you, Gilroy. [laughs]

Tony: No, I’m out.

Craig: All right. Well, that’s a good answer and that’s encouraging. I like how happy you look right now. We’re looking at each other on Zoom. You look delighted. Just check in with me about five years from now. I hopefully will have that same, “I did it,” look on my face.

John: Yes, we’re an audio podcast. If we ever released a video episode, you could see Craig, the realization. They’re like, “Oh, Tony Gilroy’s done? That’s a choice I could have made?” You can see it recalculating everything he did.

Tony: I know. He’s shrinking there.

Craig: That was just my rage building up. That’s what that looks like. [laughter]

I love working on the show, but my God, the marathon aspect of it, at times, it’s incredible. Congratulations for making it to the end of the finish line.

John: Is there a way that we could manufacture a COVID?

Craig: Oh God, Jon, what are you saying?

Tony: Dude, I think they did that. They tried that.

John: Craig’s show actually has it built in. Is there a way that we can build in those times and the stuff because that was so crucial for you to be able to make it the first season?

Craig: Yes, I’m curious because you had the benefit of that forced break in Season 1. Now, in Season 2, as you were working on it, there was a forced break, but you couldn’t work during it because it was the Writers Guild strike.

Tony: Yes, but that was a different–

Craig: You were in a different spot.

Tony: The irony of that was that if you had asked me at any point during that year, “What’s going to be the most epic moment of your year,” I would have said, “Without any labor issues on the horizon whatsoever, I could have told you in September.” Oh, my God. Around March or April, I’m going to finish the final rewrite on the final script. That’s my timeline. I’m ahead of the production. I don’t want to minimize the work that Danny and Beau and Tom Bissell and Stephen– they make the rough-housing that we can cast and build and budget and everything.

My work to finish it and to get there and to tweak it all out and to get it off this desk, I was looking, “Oh, my God. Around March, the way I’m going, that’s where I’m going to finish.” I literally finished the final page turn about six days before the strike. It rhymed with that just by accident. The problems with the strike were production problems and it’s a whole different shit. It didn’t help me out.

Craig: It didn’t really help anyone out, I think, other than-

Tony: No, it didn’t help me out.

Craig: -the membership as a whole, which I guess was the point.

Tony: I’ll tell you one thing it did and this is interesting. What it did do is I was not allowed to see the show for six months.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Tony: They kept going. I had only seen one cut of one rough cut of the episode. In September, when the strike was over, my brother John came to New York and brought me all 12 episodes in extremely rough form, but all 12.

John: That’s amazing.

Tony: With temp crap and all the IOUs and temp music and sloppy shitty all over the place but 12. I was extremely nervous. I spent two days and I watched them. I had the experience that one always speaks about in an editing room. On every movie I’ve ever been on, there comes a moment where you go, “God, I’d pay $50,000 if I could see my movie for the first time.”

Craig: Right.

Tony: I got to watch all 12 episodes on a run with the freshest eyes and smart fresh eyes that you could possibly ever have. I generated, I don’t know, 100 pages of notes, but they were notes that were like I had developed a new way of thinking about things in a way where I’m really into the calories that the audience spends on information. I’m really sophisticatedly into that.

Craig: Describe that concept a little bit for us.

Tony: If the audience is worried about any bump in the road over here or if that’s confusing when they come in or something that she said takes my energy away and the audience is missing the protein that I have in the middle of there that I want to be there, I want to smooth that down or get rid of it. I was so much more in tune with that in a way that I never would be holistically before.

I think I generated, I don’t know, hundreds of pages of ADR and all kinds of– it was a superpower to go back to London a week later. I think we had the most exciting two weeks that I’ve almost had on the show, getting back to London after that cut and going– all four cutting rooms, all four directors, and just going like, “Okay. This is what I do here. This is this and this isn’t working. Let’s do this,” and like, man, people, it was so much.

Craig: Those are fun. Those are the fun weeks.

Tony: Yes, and so the strike in that sense maybe had a positive effect. Boy, I wouldn’t want to do it that way again.

[laughter]

Craig: Once is enough.

John: It’s like asking it to be severed. There was two Tonys and like, “No, it’s appealing,” but also, clearly, you see the damage there.

Tony: It was so much heartache for Sanne and the people in production. The work that they did was just heroic and my brother. Not to be repeated, but, again, you’re always trying to make an advantage out of something that’s a crise, right?

John: A crise is a crisis. It’s the second time you used that word.

Tony: Yes, a crisis, yes.

Craig: It’s a French crisis.

Tony: That’s the word I’m going to use. That’s the word you’re going to–

John: In your bonus segment, you’ll get more on a crise.

Craig: Yes, he’s already found the word for his word.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Craig, I’m taking from this. Calories, protein. Twice you mentioned protein, the protein of a scene. Love that. That’s so important because like everything else, lovely, makes things taste better, but the protein is the actual substance that you’re trying to make sure.

Tony: Why are we here? Why are we here?

Craig: We talk about writing sometimes like it’s a little bit like the way magicians practice the art of deception and distraction. If they are looking at the hand you don’t want them looking at, you need to figure out how to get them to not look at the hand you don’t want them looking at. You want them over here. Those little bumps, the tiniest bump is too much of a bump. I love that you talk about that.

Tony: Really, in my later career, I’m vastly more conscious of my relationship with the audience than I ever was before. Not in a pandering way but in a communicative way.

Craig: Yes, I love that.

John: The real trick of the writing that we do is we have to simultaneously know everything that’s going to happen and divorce ourselves of all memory. We have to both be the creator and the audience simultaneously. It’s every word on the page and every frame is that split.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Let’s go to some listener questions. First one here is an audio question. Drew, help us out. You can place this question from Jason in Canada.

Jason: “Back in 2021, I wrote and directed my first short, a ridiculous sci-fi comedy titled, I’m Not a Robot, about a man who, after failing a CAPTCHA test trying to log onto a website, faces an existential crisis when he thinks he might actually be a robot. If the title and premise sound familiar, it’s because Victoria Warmerdam just won the Oscar for Best Short Film for her, I’m Not a Robot.”

“It was funny hearing from friends and colleagues joking that my film was nominated for an Oscar, but this got me thinking how interesting it is that two writers, an ocean apart, came up with and created such similar short films within a few months of each other. Maybe that’s a sign that the idea was in the zeitgeist or that the idea wasn’t that original, but either way, it is cool that another writer felt like an existential crisis triggered by the mundane task of clicking on images of bicycles to prove their humanity was a story worth sharing, and even cooler to see Victoria recognized for her incredible work.”

“As Craig has said before, and apologies for paraphrasing, but it’s less about the idea and more about the execution. Victoria certainly executed at the highest level. With that in mind, I still feel oddly validated. My first no-budget film did not win an Oscar, not even close, and I had nothing to do with Victoria’s Oscar win. At the same time, I wrote something that felt true to me and another writer felt that way too. I was curious if, as writers, you’ve ever experienced something similar where you saw one of your ideas or stories brought to life by another writer. If so, did any interesting similarities or differences stand out? Your friend in the North, Jason.”

Craig: I love our friend in the North. That’s so nice.

Tony: Painful, painful, painful, painful. Yes, many times, many times. It’s the one reason why one should avoid the idea that you’re better off isolating yourself away from entertainment news and staying on top of the industry and keeping your ear to the ground, and if you live in New York or you live in London, you live away, making sure that you have an agent that has their ear to the ground.

I’ve had several, many things shot out from under me when I’ve realized someone else was doing it or there was something that was close. It’s really painful when you go deep. It’s really painful when you go all the way through and find out that you’ve been treading the same territory. You have a remarkably generous attitude about it. I’m hopeful that you’re a complete human being and there are some other painful conversations about it.

Craig: Oh yes, I’m sure.

John: There was a journey of acceptance to get there, I hope.

Craig: Jason can feel pain.

Tony: It sounds a little valium to me.

Craig: Well, I think you’ve probably had the experience a few more times than Jason has. There is something, I think, at least nice to say, “Listen, I’m just starting out. I’m aspiring.” At least the thing that I thought would be interesting conceptually turns out to be interesting conceptually to somebody, which is– It’s funny. This was in the zeitgeist because I remember that Ron Funches, who was a fantastic standup, did a joke about this very thing where he said, “They keep on asking me if I’m a robot and they make me enter a series of numbers and letters,” which seems like the sort of thing a robot would be really good at.

[laughter]

Tony: Oh man, this hurts. This question hurts. PTSD.

Craig: All right. Well, Jason, you’ve triggered Tony Gilroy, so another feather in your cap.

John: For me, that example was this movie, Monsterpocalypse, I wrote for DreamWorks. Tim Burton was attached to direct it. I turned it in and they’re like, “Oh wow, we really love this. Oh wait, there’s a movie called Pacific Rim and it seems like it has a similar premise.” They found that Pacific Rim is like, “Oh Jesus, it’s the same movie.” It really is. It’s just way too close. It was a Dante’s Peak versus Volcano situation where it’s just like they didn’t want to be the second movie. I’m like, “I get it.”

Craig: They did those, though. They did both of those.

John: They did those and it didn’t help.

Craig: They did Bug’s Life and Antz.

John: They did, yes. Sometimes they will do both things and sometimes it works out.

Craig: Sometimes they’re like, “Screw it. Let’s just do it.”

John: They decided not to do mine and it’s like, “Okay.” I wish I were as immediately accepting as Jason was, but it’s tough.

Craig: Jason is just clearly far better balanced than the three of us.

John: Hey, Craig, I do want to hold on to this example for the next time we see a story in the news about like, “Oh, this person stole my script or stole my idea.” Come on. It’s the same title, the same idea.

Craig: You know what? Great point. I love Jason for, A, being an incredibly positive person, which is really cool, but B, not going anywhere near the whole, “They stole my thing.”

Tony, John and I are obsessed with the following concept that if there were justice or, I don’t know, some really good journalistic standards in the entertainment reporting business, you would never hear a story about somebody filing a lawsuit saying someone stole their thing. You would only hear if they won. That meant you would never hear anything because they never win. I’m not saying that people don’t occasionally infringe. I’m sure infringement occurs, but I just love that Jason didn’t go down that path.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off.

Craig: Of course, you’ve been ripped off. You’re really good.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off. I’m not going to get into it, but Danny and I really early in our career got ripped off.

Craig: Did you sue?

Tony: No, we were advised by an agent because we didn’t really have an agent. We were hip-pocketed at that point. They said, “Look, you could do this. You might get over on this and these people might put you to work even, but you guys look like you might be around for a while and this might not be the best thing to do.”

Craig: There you go. “You guys look like you might be around for a while.” I guess, listen, I got ripped off too in the beginning of my career. It happened and it hurt, but then people said to me, “This is not your last at-bat. Just eat this one. Get back out there. You’ll be fine.” It’s not fun. Anyway, I appreciate that Jason didn’t go down that road.

John: Drew, another question here.

Drew Marquardt: This next one comes from Anonymous. “Could being a film critic or film journalist affect your chances of working as a screenwriter? As someone currently looking for work and with a background in journalism, I personally really enjoy writing about film and I feel like it could be a great avenue for me as a young person starting to build a career, but I’m afraid of costing myself future opportunities by being granted a film critic. Perhaps it makes me look bad or someone doesn’t like something I said about their work. Is that a real concern?”

Craig: Stephen Schiff.

Tony: Look, a good script’s a good script. If you’re lucky enough to write one, someone’s going to pick up on it.

Craig: Could not agree more.

Tony: Everything else is a moot point. Nobody gives a shit.

Craig: You could absolutely destroy someone’s mom’s movie. If you write a good script three years later, they’ll buy it.

Tony: They’ll put their mom in it.

Craig: Stephen Schiff was the chief film critic for The Atlantic, I want to say?

Tony: Vanity Fair.

Craig: A really big film critic and then one day said, “I think I’m just going to try doing this,” and has been doing it at a very high level ever since. As much as film critics can make me nuts, I’m on record with that one, no, as long as you’re not a complete jerk. If your persona as a critic is jerk or if you go down the Armond White, “I just like disagreeing with everybody,” maybe then, maybe. I agree with Tony. Write a good script and all is forgiven.

John: I would also say that there’s a difference between being the critic who is reviewing every movie that comes out this week and trashing them or giving the thumbs up and the thumbs down and being the person who writes very smartly about movies and the overall trends in movies or things you notice about who can pull out themes among different directors and different films.

That’s the kind of thing which is elevating the art of film criticism and making us think about film. That’s a different thing than just trashing the new thing each week and saying how bad the most recent Disney adaptation is. That’s not doing you any favors. If people are googling your name to see that kind of stuff, that ain’t going to help you. If you’re writing really smartly about film like Stephen Schiff, that’s fantastic.

Tony: Then wait for your first review.

John: Nothing will help you out more there.

Craig: That’s when you-

Tony: Karma.

Craig: -fucked around and you found out [laughs] because, good Lord, that hurts.

John: I will say there have been some cases where I’ve seen a person who does film criticism who then goes off and makes a movie and it’s just terrible. It’s always fun to see like, “Oh, you know what? Criticizing a thing and actually making a thing are very different skills.”

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I love that. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Today, it’s something that I mentioned on the podcast before in passing, but I wanted to drill down a little bit into it because I use it literally every day now. It’s called Startpage. I don’t know about you, guys. I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google for a long time because the company that says don’t be evil has become evil. The problem is the other search engines just aren’t very good or they’re slow, but Google is giving me the AI slop all the time.

Startpage is a company that’s run out of the Netherlands. They aren’t their own search engine. What they do is they take your search query and they run it through Google or Bing if you prefer. They don’t save your search information and they strip away all the trackers. Google doesn’t know who you are. They don’t save any of your stuff. You get to Google without becoming a product of Google. It’s just as fast, just as good, and no annoying AI slop. The last thing you might want to google with actual Google is Startpage. Install it–

John: It’s actually just startpage.com.

Craig: There you go. Go to startpage.com and it’s been a delight.

John: Craig, I was trying it out because I saw it here in the show notes and I think it looks great. I really agree with it and I want to try to use it. One frustration I have is that in Safari and other browsers, you can set your default search engine. You can just type in the bar to get a thing. Right now, you can’t set startpage.com as the default search engine.

Craig: You can.

John: Okay, so tell me how you’re doing it.

Craig: Well, I’m using Chrome, so that may be the part of it is that I’m not using Safari. In Chrome, I think there is an extension or something that allows that to happen.

John: Okay, but it’s certainly worth considering because I really do think it’s a better way to do stuff. Tony, what do you have for us for One Cool Thing?

Tony: Can I name a podcast without getting in trouble?

Craig: Are you kidding me?

John: 100%, we love it.

Tony: It’s not a competitive one. My salvation for the last year and a half has been, I think, the greatest podcast I’ve ever heard. It’s called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by a guy named Andrew Hickey. There was an article about it in The New Yorker last year. I can’t remember who wrote it. It wasn’t Adam Gopnik. It was somebody else, but it was an appreciation of this. It said, basically, this is the equivalent of one man trying to write the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. He’s only up to 170. He just dropped 177 this morning.

I literally got a new one this morning. I don’t know if he’ll possibly survive to finish it. I cannot recommend this enough. If you’re into music, I was turned onto it. I started listening to ’60s stuff that I was really interested in and British Invasion and different things. I worked through that and then I chipped away at some other things. Finally, I was like, “I’m just going to go back to the very beginning and start at the beginning and go all the way through.” It has been a place of great safety and curiosity.

Craig: Love it.

Tony: That’s my recommend. He always says at the end, “If you like this podcast, please recommend it because word of mouth is the most important communicator.” This is my appreciation of Andrew Hickey. It’s on Patreon, but it’s on Spotify. It’s fantastic.

Craig: Awesome.

John: That’s great. Andrew Hickey did the thing, which we cautioned against, which is you’re starting your premise like, “I’m going to do 500 episodes of this thing,” and then you’ve boxed yourself in there. Maybe he’ll find some block format just to get through that.

Craig: We should have done that because we would have been done years ago, John.

Tony: I’m just going to say one thing, guys. I’m going to tell you one thing. If you ever listen to this, you’ll clearly understand that he has to put a lot more into it than you guys are doing.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s not just two people chatting on microphones.

Craig: What we did put into this, John did 99.3% of.

John: Andrew, yes, it’s that. My one cool thing is like Craig’s. It’s a utility I find super, super helpful. Basically, you’re surfing the internet. You’re buying stuff and there’s a site, an article that you want to hold on to. You want to set a bookmark for it. You could save it in your browser, but then you’re never going to actually find that again. You have to find some place to store that thing.

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been using a service called Pinboard, which is a bookmarking service. You save the link and you put a little tag on it, so if I remember if it’s how it would be a movie or a one cool thing. Pinboard is clearly near the end of its life. It has not been updated for a long time. I knew it’s going to just fall apart at some point. I have 4,000 bookmarks saved someplace.

I was considering rolling my own because I’m a masochist, but then I found a service called Raindrop, which is actually really good. It’s raindrop.io and it’s just a bookmarking service. You click a button. There’s a little browser extension and it saves it. You put a little note for it, put a tag on it. Then you can always just search it and find it, which is really good. What I like about it is it has a native app for iPad and for iPhone.

If you’re looking on your phone, you tap the little share sheet and you just save it to Raindrop and it’s there. If you’re looking for a way to hold onto your bookmarks and organize them in a way that you’ll actually find stuff again, I recommend it.

It’s good and it’s a paid service. You’re paying for this to get the premium stuff. I like paid services because then they’re going to stick around because they have an incentive to stick around. Raindrop.io if you’re looking for a bookmarker.

Craig: It’s an actual business model in tech.

John: Yes, that’s where I think it’s like when you don’t pay for a thing, it tends to break and fall apart because people abandon it.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our show this week is by Spencer Lackey. It’s an homage to The Last of Us, Craig.

Craig: Oh, I got to listen to this one.

John: Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the description, but also in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week and to pay the talented folks who put it together. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on which words we wish existed in English. Tony, Craig, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations to both of you on your new seasons. I’m so excited to watch it.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

Tony: Really gassed. Really happy to be here. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? We have a question here from Jean-Philippe.

Drew: Jean-Philippe writes, “I’m a Québécois screenwriter and I needed to share how incredibly envious I am of screenwriters who write in English specifically because of two precious golden verbs, “to gasp” and “to scoff.” These beautifully concise words simply have no practical equivalent in French, yet they’re extremely useful in a screenplay as they’re a way to describe elements of nonverbal communication that are very common. What are the words that you find most useful for screenwriting and what thing do you wish there was an English word for? To all the screenwriters who work in English, be grateful for your great language.”

Craig: You don’t hear that from a French speaker too often, I got to go say. Thank you for that, Jean-Philippe.

John: As we’ve talked about on the show before, English does have just a huge vocabulary because of the way it accumulated words from French and then German and all this stuff and all of that smooshed together. We got duplications of things and we are very sound-rich, so it’s very easy for us to import words and make them work. The obvious example is “schadenfreude,” which is such a useful term that we just borrow the German word. We can say it in English because we can say any word in English, which is so useful.

I was at breakfast this morning and I realized, so you’re eating food at a restaurant and you’re enjoying it and then there’s a moment, a tipping point where it’s like, “Get this plate away from me. I don’t want this plate in front of me. I want it to go away.” There feels like there should be a word for that and there’s not a word for that. I want there to be a word for that term. Can you guys think of anything to describe that? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Craig: Oh sure. Sure, yes, it’s like food repulsion.

John: Yes, it’s like a disgust, but it’s a tipping from like, “This is delicious to–”

Tony: Yes, we should have a word for that. You’re absolutely right.

John: I was looking and Spanish has a verb, “empalagar,” which is to become overwhelmed and sickened by something that was enjoyable, but it’s really relating to something that’s too sweet and too-

Craig: Like cloying or–

John: -cloying. Then French has “écoulement,” which is also that disgust or aversion. It’s a little bit more than nausea, but it doesn’t really refer to that, the tipping point.

Craig: Yes, you’re talking about when something flips its polarity from love to hate.

John: Yes.

Craig: The Germans surely have a word for this.

Tony: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance.

Craig: Grossbundance. I like grossbundance.

John: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance, yes. It’s that fork-drop moment where it’s like you just can’t take it anymore. I want that word to exist. If our listeners have good suggestions for it, what are you guys thinking? Are there words you long for in other languages or things you feel like should be encapsulated in a word that just don’t exist in a word?

Tony: I’ve used the word because it gets it done, but I wish there was another word for “gobsmacked.” It’s a good word and it’s effective. Every time you type it, you’re like, “I wish there was something else for gobsmacked.” Total incredulity. I seem to find so many characters in my shows are-

Craig: Gobsmacked.

Tony: -massive quantities of incredulity. I wish there were more words like Eskimo words for snow for the feeling of not being able to believe exactly what’s– and not going, “What the fuck,” either. I’ve done that too.

Craig: Jaw drop?

Tony: Yes, I know.

Craig: Drop jaw. Yes, that’s a tough one.

Tony: They’re all a little mundane.

Craig: That’s absolutely true. It’s funny, the thing that I yearn for the most isn’t actually a different word. It’s a different punctuation mark. There has to be something between a period and an exclamation point because, to quote our friend Christopher McQuarrie, every time you put an exclamation point in a script, you’ve failed.

[laughter]

Craig: I know. Tony’s like, “That’s every fucking page.” We rarely want someone yelling. I’m actually curious. This is a side note because, Tony, you wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which I’m obsessed with. There are sections where Al Pacino fully yells paragraphs. I’m curious if those were exclamation-pointed or if he just took off on his own. He might have taken off on his own there. [chuckles]

Tony: Yes, I think it was a collaborative. Those were all done. They were all written for Al and rehearsed at the apartment. There were 20 other ones that we didn’t do. I think it was an era of exclamation points.

Craig: I wish there were something that said emphasis, but it wasn’t more than a period, which feels like just meh, but not quite an exclamation point.

Tony: You know what I don’t like, though? I don’t like when they take a transcript of your interview and then they add exclamation points where you never meant it to be.

John: Oh, God.

Tony: You’re like, “I’m not a–” Really? Did I sound like that?

John: You did not.

Tony: No.

Craig: No, none of us sound like exclamation-pointy people.

Tony: What? How did you decide to put that there?

Craig: Well, here’s a word that I wish I had and maybe there is a good German word for this. We always look to the Germans for these words. That is a simple thing to put in parentheses that says, basically, the thing that I’m about to say now, I believe the opposite of. Now, you could say “lying,” but lying doesn’t give you the full picture of, “Did you kill her?” “Absolutely not.” Lying is not enough. Full denial, complete lying, but then you’re giving it away. There’s no evocative nature for framing something as a particularly good lie because I love when characters lie.

John: That’s great. I think what we’re distinguishing in between is there’s the words that would be so helpful to have in scene description or in parenthetical versus seeing the words people are actually going to hear in dialogue. Those could be different things. In dialogue, through performance and through shading, we can get the meaning across. Sometimes you just really desperately want that thing that encapsulates the idea so clearly and it’s hard to find.

I was googling around to see what other words people were longing for. I found two words that got mentioned a lot. First is “toska” in Russian, which is a soul-deep ache, a vague, restless yearning that can’t be named or satisfied. Nabokov said, “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska.” I get that. You know what that’s like, but maybe you don’t really know what that’s like unless you’re Russian.

Craig: Russians really do know what that’s like. They’re born with that.

Tony: Duende is like that. Duende, the Spanish word “duende.” A lot of people wrote about duende. I think Hemingway wrote about the lack of duende. The word that you’re just describing, the words that take on a whole– because people have tried to think, they bring their own luggage with them. They bring this extra sparkle. Maybe we should leave them as they are and use them. I’ve used duende.

Craig: Why not? We took “ennui,” which is the bored version of duende. Let’s take it.

John: Yes, absolutely. We took schadenfreude. The other word that was brought up, which I thought was great, is “cafuné.” It’s a Brazilian-Portuguese word for the act of running your fingers through someone’s hair out of love. It’s not the verb. It’s the noun version of it. It’s like, “Yes, that’s really nice.” In English, we can convey that with a lot of words to actually do that. It’s not just running the fingers through someone’s hair. It’s specifically why you’re doing that and it’s a good image. It’s a powerful word.

Craig: John, you and I love it when our spouses run their hands through our hair.

John: Absolutely. Our baldpates, yes.

Craig: It’s sort of shyness.

Tony: I wasn’t going there.

Craig: You buff us a little bit. [laughs]

Tony: I was not going there.

Craig: Listen, Tony, you’ve got a lovely head of hair. We’d like to congratulate you on that.

Tony: Yes, I know. I wasn’t going there.

[laughter]

John: All right. Referencing back to Jean-Philippe’s question, I think we agree that, yes, English does have an abundance of words, but we could always use a few more. If people have good suggestions for the words that we’re lacking, email us. Let us know and we’ll put those in follow-up.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Tony, thank you for sticking around and talking through some words that we wish existed. A pleasure.

Tony: It’s a gas to be in the tribal community. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Tony Gilroy
• Here’s a recap of Andor Season 1!
• Andor Season 2: Trailer 1 | Trailer 2 | Special Look
• Episode 680 – Writing Action Set Pieces with Christina Hodson
• I’m Not a Robot short by Victoria Warmerdam
• I’m Not a Robot short by Jason Speir
• Stephen Schiff
• Startpage
• A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
• Raindrop
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

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

Today on the show, how do you honor a genre while still pushing at its boundaries? Our guest today is Robert Eggers, a writer and director whose movies include The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and most recently, Nosferatu. Welcome Robert.

Robert Eggers: Thanks for having me.

John: Reading through those credits, this is going to be your first movie that doesn’t have a ‘the’ in front of it, at least that I’ve noticed. There’s no ‘the’ in Nosferatu. You’re breaking new ground here. You’ve left off the definite article.

Robert: Yes. It was very intimidating. Maybe The Vampyre would have been more appropriate.

John: I want to talk through Nosferatu, I want to talk through the genre, your other films, but I also want to get into your POV as a writer versus a POV as a director and where you’re at as you’re putting scenes together. Also, I want to try to answer a couple of listener questions we have about historical detail, feeling stupid, and whether writers make bad romantic partners because you’ve just made a gothic romance. We want to talk about that.

In our bonus topic for premium members, let’s talk about cycling because that is the thing that you do in your off time that I don’t think I’ve had anyone on the podcast talk about before. I want to talk about cycling, how you got into it, and what role it fills in your life. Let’s dig right into it.

Robert, give us some backstory on how you came to be a writer and director. You grew up in New England. Where did you start with storytelling and with movies?

Robert: Avid movie watcher like a good American kid growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and watched ungodly amounts of television, which was also perfectly acceptable back then. I did theater growing up, acting in theater and my mom had a kid’s theater company. We were also involved in building the sets and doing the costumes. There were parents who were more skilled in these things, but everyone was involved. My dad was also a Shakespeare professor. Even though I lived in rural New Hampshire, I had the opportunity to see things that a lot of people didn’t get to see and occasionally going to Boston to see a play or go to the ballet or the art museum or whatever.

Of course, cinematically, I was still into more mainstream things to some degree. Then talking about Nosferatu, that was a film that I saw when I was young around nine, and it made a very large impression on me. Max Schreck’s performance, of course, but also the atmosphere of the film because it’s not the beautiful restored versions that you can even watch on YouTube that are color tinted and have– You can watch it with the original German inner titles with subtitles if you want, but this was very degraded and you couldn’t see Max Schreck’s bald cap, you couldn’t see the grease paint on his eyebrows. It felt like a vampire. It felt real. The atmosphere of that and the reality of that was really inspiring as a kid.

Also, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later, the fact that Murnau, his collaborators, and the screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, turned Stoker’s novel into a simple fairy tale compared to, the Bela Lugosi version that I was familiar with that was based the Balderston Dean stage play, which is pretty stodgy and so as the Tod Browning movie, if we’re honest, after Transylvania, this was crazy for me.

I grew up doing tons of theater. When I was 17, I had the opportunity to do a senior-directed play. Me and my friend, Ashley Kelly Tata, who’s now a theater and opera director, we co-directed Nosferatu on stage. I had been doing also some theater with a theater called the Edwin Booth. The artistic director was a gentleman named Edward Langlois, who is the only person who is doing interesting stuff. He wasn’t doing My Fair Lady, he was doing The Duchess of Malfi.

I invited him to see it, but he saw that play and asked if we would want to do a more professional version of it at his theater, and that put me on this trajectory. It cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director, that I wanted to tell the stories that I was interested in, and it also made Nosferatu something that would always be part of my identity as someone who’s trying to make creative work for better or for worse.

John: I want to go back to that high school Nosferatu. Can you describe what that was? Was it one act, was it two acts? What was the texture we’re working off of? What was that play you did?

Robert: It was mostly based on the Murnau film. Of course, the version that I had was, as far as I understand, an English translation of French intertitles. That would have been the version that Henri Langlois screened in Paris at his theater. The Ellen/Mina character was called Nina, but most everyone else had their Dracula names. It was weird, but we didn’t know it was weird at the time. We drew on that and also some things from the novel.

The Coppola film had also been something that I watched a ton, and there was definitely some inspiration from that. It was a silent film on stage. We were wearing black and white makeup and costumes and black and white sets and wigs and acting in a very stylized expressionist way. There were super titles above the proscenium that would say the text and there was music playing the whole time.

John: What’s the success? You were doing this as a high school student. Did you feel like, “Oh, this was the accomplishment I set out to make.”? What did you learn while you were doing it?

Robert: It definitely felt like we had hit on something pretty cool. In this very humble environment, it was a successful production standing room only, blah, blah, blah. Good reviews from the local newspaper. It was a very satisfying, formative experience for sure. I have very fond memories of all of us doing each other’s makeup and gluing sideburns and mustaches on people and all that.

John: You’ve done stuff on the stage and you’ve grew up with stage because of your parents and so you had a chance to see that thing, and then you were adapting a cinematic work for the stage and trying to pull the ideas of cinema to the stage, the title cards and all this stuff. When did you start becoming interested in how do we do an actual cinematic language? When did you start thinking about, I want to pick up a camera and shoot a film and learn editing? What was that transition?

Robert: Eventually, I’m directing off off off off Broadway Theater in New York with my friends. As I felt at the time, I don’t know how I would feel about it if I watched it now, but at the time I felt we did a pretty good job of Othello, also well-reviewed, but nobody saw it. Then we did street theater because we felt like people have to fucking see it if we do street theater. That was cool, but it was also– We were working out of a dirt floor basement and it was extremely humble.

I thought, “Clearly cinema’s the way to go.” I half seriously, just trying things, took some Shakespeare plays that I knew well and adapted them to screenplays as an exercise. Then eventually, I made a short film of Hansel and Gretel that somehow is on YouTube. I don’t know how the hell it got on there, but it’s absolutely terrible. It got into one film festival and on the bus ride home from the Boston Underground Film Festival, I thought, “I really have to make something that is not terrible.”

Then I started working on this short that became an adaptation of the Tell-Tale Heart and Jarin Blaschke, my cinematographer, and Louise Ford, my editor for the rest of my career thus far, were on that. That was a very formative experience. Also, basically, I was making my living doing set and costume design for the stage at this time because I had always done it myself in New York. I enjoyed it and had a knack for it. That was how I was making my living.

This also, aside from being a calling card as a director, helped me break into doing art department, wardrobe and film and television, non-union commercials, and stuff like that. It also helped me make a living. Sometimes I’d have a great job. Sometimes I would be a set carpenter or I was sewing curtains. In between all these things, I was writing and wrote a bunch of screenplays that were all dark and fairy tale adjacent, but not in an identifiable genre and thus not commercial enough to finance. The Witch was me trying to be more commercial, but being true to myself.

John: Let’s go back to Tell-Tale Heart because we’ll put a link in the show notes to it. It’s great. It’s really good. It’s a very strong short, and I think we’re often talking about on the podcast is people are waiting for permission to do the thing that they want to do. It looks like with Tell-Tale Heart, you made the short film that you could with the resources you had, and the skills you had, and the group that you had assembled around you were able to make something that was what you wanted to make, as opposed to Hansel and Gretel. This was a true representation of what your aims were.

Watching it now, it’s like, “Oh, that feels like Robert Eggers.” That feels like all the calling cards of what you’re going to be doing down the road. It has that style. How many days is that? What did you have? What was your big basket of stuff you could put into this thing? There’s costumes, there’s sets, there’s a sense of production value that’s way beyond what you might expect from just a short film. Tell me about putting together the Tell-Tale Heart.

Robert: I’ve been saving up my money, and at that time, I was waiting tables and then asked friends and family if they would help chip in. It was also before the big financial crisis, so we were able to get donations from people. This was before Kickstarter and all that thing. We did lots of fundraising events to try to get some money. We had some money to work with, but we found an abandoned house, which, shockingly, in my hometown.

It was a very rural town, and someone in the more wealthy town of Portsmouth in the 19th century decided to build their wife an amazing house out in Lee, New Hampshire. Then, I don’t know, something happened. The family lost their money or whatever. It had been sitting there rotting. Only the kitchen had electricity, and the walls still were horsehair and plaster. It was just like a good old-fashioned haunted house.

Ed Langlois, the artistic director of the Edwin Booth, he came in to help with the costumes and the production design, and we were in there in the freezing fucking cold decorating this abandoned house. We drove up to Maine to get some fabric that was fire and water-damaged, that we could get a super-heavy discount, but get massive bolts of it. Because we wanted it to look like shit, it was perfect. We got to use that, and I rented some costume pieces from a costume rental house in New York that I’d been working with on stage stuff. Then we had a few things built and some top hats made by someone on Etsy.

John: You were driving all of these decisions yourself. You were producing this yourself, in addition to having written and directed it.

Robert: I had producers as well, Mike Neal and Maura Anderson. Of course, the big decisions of how this is going to work is coming from-

John: The hustle was you.

Robert: The big creative decisions were me. There was plenty of hustle for everyone. Ed actually– I sent him the script and asked if he wanted to work on it. He said it was very nicely written, but it was just fucking Masterpiece Theater, and he wasn’t really interested in it. He said there was nothing exciting about it as finely written as it was. At the time– I don’t know how we’re going to get to the rest of my career if we take this long about the Tell-Tale Heart, but it’s fine with me. Basically, I had wanted this dying painter who was in his 90s to play the old man, and then I realized that in this horrible location in February, he was probably going to die.

John: That’d be a lot to kill the man in the Tell-Tale Heart.

Robert: It would be stupid to have someone in a bunch of prosthetic makeup. It would be better, I thought to myself, on the Chinatown bus, if it was a fucking doll. Then I thought, “Maybe that’s actually really cool if it’s a puppet and there’s something death-like about it the whole time. It could be really interesting.” I shared that idea with Ed and then he said, “Now that’s cool. Now I want in to this.” Then, my friend, Chelsea Carter, who I worked at the same restaurant with, she was working at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in New York. I did the sculpt of the face, but then she built the puppet.

John: Great. What I hear in your story is that you’re running into obstacles and you’re just figuring out, “What resources do I have? Who do I know? What other thing could I do that makes this thing possible to do?” You weren’t taking no for an answer. You weren’t taking in the fact that this guy was going to die if you tried to do it. You’re like, “That is a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity to do something different and something weird and something special and unique to our movie.” It’s the stuff that’s specific to your approach that makes it exciting for people. It’s what gets people to sign on. We’re going to do something that’s different. It’s not just a plus-one version of an existing thing that we could’ve done anywhere else.

Robert: Not fucking Masterpiece Theater.

John: Exactly. I want to talk to you. This guy was complimenting your writing. When did you first read a screenplay? You’ve obviously grown up reading a lot of plays, but when did you first read a screenplay, like this is a plan for making a movie? Do you remember what the first script was you read for a movie?

Robert: That’s a great question. I really don’t know. Certainly, I read a lot of screenplays. I don’t read a lot now, but in my 20s and early 30s, I read a lot of screenplays.

John: Having read through Nosferatu, I think you actually like screenplays. There’s some writers I’ve talked to-

Robert: Yes, I do.

John: -who clearly the writing script is only just so that they can actually make the movie, but they actually don’t like the screenplay form itself. You actually seem to sit in there and enjoy it. It doesn’t seem like a burden to you. Is that fair?

Robert: Yes. Definitely, I like what a screenplay can offer.

John: Here’s your initial description of Thomas in Nosferatu. “She looks across the room. Thomas Hutter, mid-20s, is tying his cravat before a small mirror. He’s very invested in tying it well. His back is to her. He’s handsome, if not pretty. Kind, determined eyes. He seems unaware of the darkness in the world. Their middle-class bedroom is cute with brand-new aspirational furnishing. This is to help disguise his overall shabbiness.”

There’s a lot there in that paragraph. It’s meant for the reader. There’s things in there that will be helpful to everyone else in the other departments, but it’s there to give you a sense of what it’s going to feel like to be watching this movie. That’s great to see on the page. Your script is full of that.

Robert: I think that in my films, I’m trying to create, a tremendous amount of atmosphere. If you don’t feel that in the script, then it’s hard to believe that it’s going to get there on screen, Also, I think that I wrote that because that’s what seemed right to me, and it was telling a lot about the situation. I think sometimes, consciously, when I’m describing characters, especially secondary or tertiary characters, I want to give them a good description, also so the actors are like, “Okay, I can see who this might be, and I might be interested in playing this role,” instead of just leaving them high and dry.

John: Absolutely. Another thing I noticed looking through your scripts is that you uppercase characters’ names a lot. If a paragraph starts with a character’s name, it’s almost always uppercased. It’s not a shot list, but paragraph by paragraph, you can feel like, oh, this is a shot, this is a shot. You definitely can see what the camera’s going to be looking at based on your paragraphs, which is great and works really well for you.

My question, though, is, as you’re writing a scene, let’s say you’re writing this initial scene between where we’re meeting Thomas and Ellen in this room, are you, as the writer, sitting in the room with the characters, watching them go about their things, or are you sitting back and watching in the frame in the proscenium? Where do you, Robert Eggers, fit in that world?

Robert: It depends scene to scene and screenplay to screenplay. I think very often I’ll start out, usually, I want the beginning to be very clearly shot listed in my mind as I’m writing it, whether I describe it as shots or just in prose without describing what the shots are. I think that as I get deeper into the story and there’s problems that I need to solve, then it just becomes the worst fucking TV coverage to just tell the story. Then I have to work on making it classy later.

The most recent script that I wrote, however, 80%, this is a shot, this is a shot. I’m saying like, “It’s a shot, we cut to this.” I just wanted to write a script like that for whatever reason. You know what I mean?

John: Going back to your experience in theater, though, because of course theater doesn’t have shots, it doesn’t have cuts. In theater, you’re in a space with characters. As you’re writing a piece for theater, you might be thinking about the blocking and where people are, but you’re really about what is the reality within a scene because there’s people in a space and you’re just with those people in a space.

I’m talking about street theater. You don’t even control sometimes the environment, you don’t even control the POV on things. I’m just curious, with Nosferatu, when you’re in those moments, how often were you thinking about, this is what the camera’s seeing versus this is the reality of being in a space with those characters?

Robert: I would say it was mostly about being in the reality of the space with Nosferatu. Then there’s a final step of writing that is the shot listing and the storyboarding with Jiren, where oftentimes we’re actually like reorganizing the beats so that it will flow better cinematically. I will very often rewrite the scene to match how we’ve simplified it or found the essence of it.

John: That’s great. When is the shot-listing process most helpful for you? Is it way in pre-production? Is it closer to the day of shooting? What makes sense for you?

Robert: Now, anyway, we’re storyboarding the whole damn thing. We don’t really finish until a little bit into the shoot, but in a perfect world, it would all be done well in advance in prep. With Nosferatu, Jiren and I moved to Prague much earlier than anyone else. We’re in my kitchen, in my apartment, planning the shots, hoping to get– We got a head start, but we were still a couple of weeks into production, still storyboarding.

John: How much of Nosferatu was storyboarded? Obviously, there’s going to be big sequences where you’re going to have visual effects, you’re going to have to put stuff in the background of things where you would need to storyboard it. For dialogue scenes, were you drawing those out?

Robert: Some of the dialogue scenes were shot-listed instead of storyboarded. If we had it our way, we would have storyboarded every single thing. We did storyboard the vast majority of the film. We just simply ran out of time. For some of the dialogue scenes, we shot-listed instead.

John: Who gets the storyboards? I know the Coen brothers, for example, will share with the actors, “Here are the boards for what we’re going to shoot today, the scenes we’re shooting today.” What are the edges of who sees storyboards for you?

Robert: Everybody.

John: Talk to us about the journey for Nosferatu, the movie, because you had intended to make this earlier on in your career, and it sounds like other things came before it. Was this always the first movie you wanted to make? Where did this fall in the– If I were talking to Robert in his early 20s, would he said that this is his next movie? When did the idea of the Nosferatu movie happen?

Robert: It was after The Witch. Talked a little bit about it, then I started developing a medieval knight movie called The Knight.

John: See? Another ‘the’ movie.

Robert: Yes. Basically, I was just so naive about Hollywood, and we worked for almost a year on it, not really realizing that myself and the studio were on parallel courses making two different movies, which was nobody’s fault but my own naivete. When I realized that that’s what was going on, I said, “Look, let’s push pause on this, and why don’t we do Nosferatu? I’m telling you right now, it’s a more commercial version of The Witch. We know what that is. Let’s go for it.”

Ultimately, I’m really, really, really glad that it didn’t work because I’ve grown a lot as a person and a filmmaker. I’m much more fluid with my collaborators. We’re further extensions of each other, and it’s easier for us to get our collective vision out of our brains and onto the screen the way we see it. I don’t think it would have been accomplished at the level that it’s at, whether that’s good or bad, had it been made back then.

John: Did you write a Nosferatu script back then?

Robert: I did, and it hasn’t really changed much since then. There was a lot more exposition when I had left it, and so it was mainly getting rid of exposition and tweaking things back and forth for budget and historical accuracy, both in the minutiae of German stuff and in the folklore. Ultimately, that first good draft is the same film.

John: It sounds like you knew what you needed to do as a writer, but as a director, you don’t think you were ready to make the movie you were able to make now?

Robert: Completely, yes. It was interesting. In the process of writing it, I wrote a novella, which I’ve never done before or since, but because this was an adaptation of a piece that’s important to so many people, myself included, I needed to find a way to get ownership of the world and the characters, and writing this overly long novella, that was filled with things that I knew would never be in the movie, helped me tremendously.

John: Let’s talk about genre in the bigger sense, and the genre, whatever you want to put this into, whether it’s gothic horror or how you perceive the movie. Nosferatu is a story that existed before, but you’re making your own version of it. What was the balancing act between staying true to what had come before versus putting your own stamp on things?

Robert: Obviously, it’s a question of taste, and it is subjective. I tried to run it on a parallel course and have all of my choices be some kind of extension of things that came from the Murnau film. One of the first things I did is open up Lotte Eisner’s biography of Murnau and the Galeene screenplay in the back of that, read that, go through it, check out Murnau’s notes carefully, and really try to understand where that team was coming from creatively and understand that Albin Grau, the producer, was an occultist, practicing occultist. I don’t know that he actually believed in folk vampires, but he almost certainly believed in astral vampires as a reality.

John: What is an astral vampire? You have to tell us about that.

Robert: People who can, or potentially elemental spirits who can send their astral bodies psychically to drain people of energy and stuff like that.

John: Sort of what we see Orlok doing at the very start, the sense of this mystical figure that comes to Ellen.

Robert: Yes. You try to understand all that stuff, great. It was always striking to me that Ellen becomes the heroine by the end of the film. I thought, “This is taking the inspiration from the original and running with it. What if it’s her movie? What if we see it through her eyes? Perhaps there is the ability for the film to have more emotional and psychological depth this way.”

In the original film, she’s called a somnambulist, and sleepwalkers in the 19th century were believed to be able to see into another realm. That became entirely inspirational into, first of all, understanding the Murnau film a little better, but then also understanding who this character could be. As much as I love Max Schreck’s iconic makeup design, and so does planet Earth, what is that thing? It certainly isn’t actually a vampire, anyway, as folklore would have it. I wanted the vampire to be scary.

Obviously, with my interest, I turned back to folklore and the early Balkan and Slavic folklore. These folk vampires were ambulating corpses that looked more like a cinematic zombie. That seemed very exciting to me. Then the question is, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? Then I go from there. He still has Max Schreck’s fingernails. He still has a bit of Max Schreck’s profile and hunch to take a nod back to the original, and because he is in this putrid state, he is a bit of a monster the way Max Schreck’s vampire is a monster.

John: I think we’re used to modern vampires being romantic figures in the classically sexual sense. We’re used to the Byronic vampire who’s charming, who comes in, and this is a more old-school, just actually terrifying monstrosity of a character who’s coming in here. While there’s still a sexual element to him, he’s this ancient old guy. He’s not Robert Pattinson, he’s a timeless demonic force.

Robert: Yes. A big, angry erection with a mustache. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the tropes of gothic romance and tell me if there’s other genres you feel this fits into. When I think of gothic romance, I think of that ruin and decay, which you definitely see in your movie. You see the darkness, the suffocating. I always think about suffocating collars, those Victorian collars that are choking people, that sense of doomed romance that there’s fate. It’s a sense of permeating evil that is specific and different from, a Cthulian or a Lovecraftian kind of darkness or horror. It’s something primal but also understandable by humans.

There’s something mortal and physical about it that just feels so specific. What were the things as you were writing and then as you were thinking about production design, that you needed to call in there to make sure that we were feeling this world of gothic horror?

Robert: The thing that struck me is that this is a demon lover story, and there’s plenty of that in Victorian fiction. Wuthering Heights was something that I turned to pretty quickly in the writing process to explore Ellen and Orlok’s relationship dynamics. Something that I had all my heads of department read was The Fall of the House of Usher, which I’m sure they’ve all read before multiple times. I don’t think there’s ever been anything better as far as the description of gothic atmosphere.

There are so many little things, but never turning off the fog machine is a big help, I’ll say that. Look, the production design is very clear about what it’s doing, and the desaturated color palette is very clear about what it’s doing, but something that was also just essential and was really the only thing that focus features was a little bit like, “Please God, no,” they were so supportive, but I insisted on only shooting when it was gloomy to keep that heavy atmosphere. Also, when you finally see the sun after two hours of not seeing it, it has more of an impact.

John: Can we talk about night? Night is one of those really challenging things to visualize on film. Basically, there’s no one perfect way to do it, and everyone has to make different choices. My first movie, Go, was almost entirely night exteriors, and it killed me. I realized as a writer, “Oh, night,” and then you’re actually out having to shoot night, like, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing possible.”

I think what you don’t really appreciate until you actually have to aim a camera at something in the night is like, wait, how are we seeing this thing? Our eyes are not the same as what the camera’s going to see. What were the choices you made for night in this versus Northman versus The Witch in terms of how we’re visualizing night and where the light is coming from? How much is it subjective to the characters? What are some of the choices you’re making and having conversations with your collaborators about night?

Robert: With all of the films, the lighting is a very sculpted version of what light is supposed to be actually doing. All of the light sources, if it’s candlelit, it’s coming from candles. If it’s lamplight, it’s coming from a lamp, if it’s moonlight coming from a window. You can better believe that there’s no movie lights, no Kino Flos no nothing, just lights coming from the window with the tremendous amount of bounces and frames and shit all over the place.

That’s the approach, and it can become– With The Northman, some of those really wide expanses at night were very challenging to shoot. Shooting the rather lovely lit crossroads in Nosferatu was a little simpler because Jiren just had a strip of light that he needed to get his helium balloons over.

But something odd that we did on The Northman and honed on this, but it seems to confuse a lot of audience members, so maybe it is not the best choice, is basically, we don’t photograph any of the color red. It’s virtually a black-and-white image that you’re seeing, which is how mammals’ eyes work at night.

We know the color of our sneakers and the color of a tree, so we imagine seeing it, even though it’s not there, so maybe because we’re imagining it there, maybe it should be there, but we decided to not have it. I think it is very beautiful, but sometimes– I don’t know how many times people come up to me after screenings and ask me, “What does it mean when it’s black and white?” I’m like, “It means that it’s moonlight.”

John: Really, I would challenge any listener, next time you’re outside at night, outside of the city, when you’re actually just out in the middle of the woods at night, recognize how you’re not seeing color, you actually are seeing basically black and white. You don’t think about it because it’s not top of your mind, but you really cannot tell colors apart. It’s just how our eyes work. I think we’ve been conditioned by so many other movies that are basically sneaking lights in places to give you a sense of, oh, this is what night looks like. That it’s not truly what night is.

There’s both the aesthetic concern, but it’s also the real practical concern. If you are a production that has a lot of night exterior shooting, that’s going to have a huge impact on your crew and your ability to get work done. It’s a challenge, and so making smart choices is important.

Robert: I’ve definitely also– The next thing that I’m likely shooting has so many nights, so whatever, but I find that shooting nights as I get older has become a lot harder.

John: Oh, yes. You have a kid now, and so you recognize, “Oh, sleep is good.” Sleep is an important aspect for folks. Again, every production is going to make its own choices, but if I were to make a TV show that had a lot of night shooting, I would, from the very start, think about what are the choices we’re going to make that are going to look best on a screen and keep us alive while we’re doing it because that just feels important.

Robert: As I’ve learned about how Jiren works, now, when I’m writing something, I’m talking early on, like, “Do we think, with the vibe of this, we’re going to want fast film or not?” Like, “Okay, oh, we want to use slow film.” I got to think about the light sources at night because I don’t want to have to have a whole bunch of fucking lights in this particular scene. What am I going to–“ You know what I mean? It’s nice to have those conversations as I’m writing now so that I can be not putting myself in a place I don’t want to be when I’m on set.

John: For the right genre of movie, I watch Survivor, the CBS TV series, and their nighttime stuff, now they just shoot with infrared cameras. It’s such a weird, cool look. It’s like, for the right production, that might be a look to take, but you’re going to have to make that make sense within your whole world of stuff.

We have a couple of listener questions that I want to get to, if we can. This first one here is from Lisa about detail. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew Marquardt: Lisa writes, “I’m in the midst of a historical fiction book where the author has taken pains to get the slang, dress, and other details right, but somehow it’s too obviously worked in. It calls attention to itself too much. It feels a bit like the author is showing off their work and not organic to the story. For screenwriters, how much is too much? When does one’s effort at getting things right become distracting, and any guidance?”

John: All right. A good question about historical accuracy and details and what you need to put there versus feeling like it’s been shoved in. Robert, your script has a lot of period details, and I never felt they were shoved in, but did you have any sense of, I need to put this in there or I need to back off?

Robert: I think that once you establish a location or the persona of a character or whatever and it’s very clear, unless there’s a major change or a major new addition, you don’t need to harp on it so much. As you get further into the script, you can also dial back, Again, if there’s been a big energetic scene, and then the movie takes a pause and then there’s a funeral where the pacing’s going to be slower, then you can add some details about the funeral shit because the pacing’s going to be slower.

Generally, as the thing develops, you don’t need to write it’s a wooden door with iron, blah, blah, blah because you fucking can expect that by now, I think that’s definitely a big part of it. I haven’t read what you’re reading and sometimes people just have bad taste, but I think that once you’ve established it, people now know.

John: One thing I hear you saying is that the speed on the page should match the expected speed of the actual story you’re watching on screen. I always describe like screenplays should make you feel like you’re sitting in the audience watching this movie and the really good screenplays I’ve read, I forget after a couple of years, “Wait, did I watch that movie or did it just read the script?” They can really evoke the experience of sitting in that theater.

These details can matter. Robert, you describe a character blowing the pounce off something and that’s just not the way we would say that in American English. Yet it feels completely appropriate to the period of time that you’re putting this in here that your characters aren’t speaking in German yet they feel like, okay, we’re in this historic time where– I believe that we’re in Germany as we’re doing this.

Robert: Also, the inclusion of that was because you needed a beat change anyway. You might have just wrote pause, which also could have worked, but because we needed a beat change, it was like a way to work in a period detail that also keeps the momentum of the scene going in the right way, hopefully.

John: That’s great. Let’s try Emil in Norway.

Drew: Emil writes, “I’m a film student in Trondheim, Norway, and started this fall. It’s been a lot of learning, which is great, but also overwhelming at times. My question is, if you’ve ever felt stupid during your career, what did you do? I felt stupid a lot this semester Not all the time, but those moments stick with me. So it feels worse than it probably is. I struggle to get my ideas out the way I imagined them, and I worry more about not seeming stupid than I’d like. I try to tell myself that knowing you don’t know the answer is supposed to make you smart, but honestly, that feels more like wishful thinking than fact. Any advice?”

Robert: I think once you have a lot more experience, it’s a lot easier to say like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” Than when you don’t have a lot of experience. I would just say, watch a million movies, read a million books, listen to all kinds of music, check out paintings, and just absorb stuff. I went to drama school and that is it. My wife has a PhD in clinical psychology, and I, definitely, when I was hanging out with her friends, felt like a fucking idiot. I was like, “I need to read some more books.”

Certainly, in the process of making movies, you do make mistakes and you do not know everything, but I think you just have to go for it and put one foot in front of the other, and then you learn more. I think, though, that one of the cool things about being a director, it’s also sometimes frustrating and does make you feel dumb, is that you are almost always, if you’re not Ridley Scott, the least experienced person on set. Because everyone’s making many movies a year, and if you’re lucky, you’re making one every two or three years, and that’s if you’re lucky. You literally have to listen to everyone around you who knows more than you do, but also know when is it the time to reinvent the wheel.

Now, it’s interesting to me sometimes when I talk to screenwriters who aren’t showrunners and aren’t on set very much or even sometimes people in post-production who have incredibly illustrious careers but don’t know how movies are really made. Also, maybe it doesn’t matter if screenwriting’s your thing.

John: Going back to your story on Hansel and Gretel, you watched this film at the film festival, and you could have said, “Oh, I’m an idiot, I should stop this. This wasn’t very good,” and instead you said, “No, no, no, I want to make something much better than that.”

Robert: And look, I knew the movie didn’t work when we wrapped the shoot. I said, “Cut,” and I was like, “We don’t have it. We’re going to edit it, and it’s not actually going to really work, but I have to keep going because I have to learn.”

John: What Emil’s describing is imposter syndrome. He feels like he’s not up to the level of everybody else in his program, maybe. Remember, he only has introspection to himself, so he knows that he feels stupid, but he doesn’t know that everyone else may feel stupid too, or they may be just as stupid, but they’re just not projecting it. So listen, give yourself some grace. Know that you don’t know everything.

It’s also exciting to be a newcomer at something. I love going to do new things that I’m not good at because it just also reminds me of what it feels like to be young and be trying things. If I’m doing a Broadway show for the first time, or I’m doing a different animation for the first time, I love being the guy who doesn’t know how this stuff works, because then I can find out. There’s the opportunity to try new stuff. Emil, you’re great. Just keep working. Let’s try one more question here from A.D.S.

Drew: A.D.S. writes, “Do writers make bad long-term romantic partners? We spend a lot of time alone. We like sitting and watching movies and TV a lot. We’re largely unsuited for gainful employment. Even when we’re not working, we’re still working, interacting with friends and family, but always turning over a stubborn plot point in our heads, always listening for a line or idea we can steal. What types of personalities make good partners for writers? How important is it, reading and liking your work, your favorite genre, jokes, violence, comic books? Do opposites attract? Should you pursue love outside the business? If so, whatever are you going to talk about?”

Robert: [laughs] John? I don’t know why this is– Sjón, who co-wrote The Northman with me in a lot of other scripts that haven’t been made yet, he and his wife, Elsa, have a lovely relationship, and she’s an opera singer. They have things they have in common, they have things that they don’t, and it’s cool. My wife’s a clinical psychologist, same thing. She reads really intense, heavy literature, which I enjoy talking with her about and haven’t read, but it’s inspiring to me.

Then she watches shitty reality TV, which I can’t stand. She’s happy to come and go to watch a bunch of Bergman movies but doesn’t want to sit through a bunch of Hammer Horror movies, and that’s fine.

John: My husband is a super smart, very organized MBA. We have lots of areas that intersect, but we’re not the same person, and we have very different interests and things. I think that can be good, and whether you’re with a person who’s another writer, I have friends who both parts of the couple are writers, and it works great, and another couple of friends who split apart because they did overlap too much.

There’s no one perfect answer. I would say just your choice of profession and what you like to do for a living, it’s important, but it’s not the most important thing in a romantic partner. It’s like, does that person give you energy, give you joy, make you feel like more of yourself? Then that’s the right romantic partner for you. If not, then they’re probably not the right romantic partner and it doesn’t have very much to do with their profession.

Robert: You’re good at answering these questions in a holistic way. I’m very impressed. Anyway– [laughs]

John: Thank you. We’ve been doing this for a while, so it’s always nice to see things. The reason why I tend to focus on early parts of careers is that most of our listeners are in the early parts of their careers, and so that’s something they can relate to more because you can talk about, how do you deal with a studio marketing team for this stuff? It’s like, “Oh, those are problems that people will get to later on down the road.”

Robert: I had the absolute pleasure of being able to call Alfonso Cuaron every once in a while. Pleasure and privilege. I remember I was asking him about some lighting question on The Witch, and he was like, “What you need is you need this pyramid of LEDs that you program and all this shit,” and I was just like, “We’ve got $3.5 million. I don’t know what the fuck is–”

John: Absolutely. This isn’t Gravity here. That’s great.

This is the time of the program where we do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a video I watched this last week. It’s by Max Miller, he’s a guy who does historical foodstuff. He finds old historical recipes and he recreates them, things that would actually be very appropriate for some of your historical movies, like Nosferatu and stuff, what would they actually have been eating? In this case, he made school cafeteria pizza from the ’80s and ’90s. Robert, you probably remember this, remember this steam tray pizza?

Robert: Oh yes. I’m sure it’s illegal now.

John: He found the actual USDA recipe for it, basically how you’re supposed to make it. This liquid crust you use, which seems impossible, but it is a very convincing recreation of the original sheet pan pizza, and it made me nostalgic for it, because it was terrible, and yet I was always so excited for pizza day. A very good YouTube video on cafeteria pizza and how to make cafeteria pizza. Robert, did you have something to share with our listeners, something to recommend?

Robert: I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job of thinking of something to recommend while I’ve been yapping away. It’s gotten some more attention lately, but I really liked Magnus von Horn’s, The Girl with the Needle. I would encourage people to check that out.

John: Fantastic. I haven’t seen it yet. Girl with the Needle is animation or is it live-action? I’m trying to remember what this movie is.

Robert: It’s live-action. Magnus is Swedish, I believe, and he lives in Poland, and the film takes place after World War I in Denmark. It was shot mostly in Poland in some really gritty, excellent locations. It’s a very cool, unique script. It’s actually based on real events. Of course, because I’m recommending it, it’s very dark, but some of the acting is just really tremendous and really nuanced.

We all know very well the feeling of when we’re reading a novel, or reading anything, really, and the author has been able to articulate something that we have semi-understood, but never been able to say. I think when actors are at the top of their craft and the story and the script and the directors are all doing their job, the acting can do the same thing where it expresses an emotional state, another state that is something that is so true that we maybe have never seen on screen before. I think that there’s a few moments that reach that level in this film.

John: That’s great. I will race to see that.

That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week from Zoe Black, and edited by Matthew Chilelli Our outro this week is by Guy Fee. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting.

There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on cycling. Robert Eggers, it’s an absolute pleasure talking with you about Nosferatu and all things moviemaking.

Robert: It was fun. When you were wrapping up the show, I thought, “Oh, this is so lucky. I don’t have to talk about cycling.” [laughs]

John: Now we do.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s talk about cycling. I asked you in the pre-show thing, what does no one ever ask you about? What other things do you like to do? Tell us about cycling. Is cycling a thing you’ve done your whole life? What is cycling to you?

Robert: It’s basically my only hobby that is not directed towards my work. I used to do it competitively as a teenager and was super obsessed with it, but then as I got more into theater and music, I stopped. I also stopped hanging out with that friend group, which– Then during COVID, I was like, “Maybe I’ll get a bike,” because I was living in New Hampshire for a little while. I got a mountain bike instead of just a bike to ride around town, and then I just became totally obsessed with it again.

I have to say, it’s changed my life to be doing it super seriously now. In fact, the more that I ride and the more active I am, the more that I’m actually more efficient in my writing. I’m at my desk less and writing more and writing better because, to sound really dopey, I’m healthier. I think mountain biking is awesome because I can’t think about anything but that or you’re going to die. Then road biking is more meditative.

John: Tell me, how do you plan for it and fit it into your day to make sure it is prioritized? How do you make sure it doesn’t get knocked to the bottom every time?

Robert: It’s tough. Certainly, like we were doing press, we’re doing this tour and I was on the spin bike in the hotel gym, which sucks. There’s a popular app called Zwift where you can virtually ride, which makes it slightly less painful.

John: When you say virtually ride, it’s showing you the scenery as if–

Robert: Yes. You’re a person on a bike. You have a little avatar and you’re actually riding with other people who are riding all over the world. You’re riding through– You can, whatever, be in Southeast Asia or be in Yorkshire or whatever.

John: For a couple of years, I did Peloton. In addition to classes, they also had the virtual things where you can go out and do stuff. I stopped Peloton post-pandemic when I could really run more full-time. I run half marathons and that’s been great, but I do have to really plan and prioritize for that time because if I don’t, it just falls away and then I can’t do it.

Robert: It’s not easy and certainly in production, it barely happens. That’s just a fucker.

John: I had a director who did a pilot for me years ago and was adamant that like, “No, no, the exercise always happens.” Basically, he’ll be at the hotel gym at 4:00 in the morning because he has to do that. If he doesn’t do that, his things fall apart. I get that and also I’m not sure I could get myself to that place where I would always put that in as a priority.

Robert: Again, at the risk of boring people to death, I do need a lot of sleep. I think that if I was also doing that during production, I would be burning the candle at both ends too extremely. I save it for the weekend.

John: I need my sleep too, so I hear that. How do you protect that? If you’re in production, there’s always 19 more questions you could answer and at a certain point, you just draw a line, you turn off your phone.

Robert: Yes, I do, but I think, unfortunately, and I’d love to get to– Look, my shoots are generous compared to what a lot of people get and I’m very aware of that, but it is a time when your life is ruined. That’s just how it is, but you’re doing what you love and so you give yourself to that. I couldn’t ask for anything more.

John: Robert, it’s been great talking with you.

Robert: Same.

Links:

• Robert Eggers
• Nosferatu | Screenplay
• Robert Eggers’ shorts Hansel and Gretel and The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Girl with the Needle
• Making School Cafeteria Pizza from the 1980s & ‘90s
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Guy Fee (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week from Zoe Black, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.