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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 601 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, in screenwriting we often talk about the hero’s journey, that one-time quest our main character undertakes which transforms them and the world around them. Today on the show, we’re going to think smaller. We’re going to talk about side quests, which in many cases are the lego blocks of our stories. Then we’ll talk about failure and why it’s so important.

Craig: So important.

John: In our bonus segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk about virtual reality, because we are recording this days before the announcement of Apple’s new headset, which feels like the perfect time to document our experience of the world before this new Apple headset debuted, or maybe we’ll look incredibly foolish as time passes.

Craig: We appear to be building a Matrix for ourselves. We’ve got AI. Now we’ve got things we can strap onto our eyeballs to send us into a different world. We’re inventing the Matrix on ourselves.

John: I think we need to next really work on some sort of pod of goo that we can slide into and be stored in racks, and then we’re all set.

Craig: Why wouldn’t we? By the way, that goo did look actually fairly comforting. It seems warm.

John: People aren’t talking enough about it wouldn’t be so bad to be in the Matrix.

Craig: Honestly, what is the problem? What’s the problem? It’s fine.

John: Why are we so scared to admit it? The goo is good.

Craig: We are obviously representatives of Machine City. It’s the weirdest beginning of a podcast we’ve ever had. You know what? You know what? I don’t care, because we’re into our 601, John.

John: 601. We’re into our sixth century of podcasting.

Craig: Yeah, so we can do whatever the goddamn sweet hell we want.

John: Let’s start with some follow-up. We were talking in Episode 599 about how screenwriters, TV writers, people who are pitching shows now often have to present pitch decks, which means that, man, do you have to be a graphic designer? We’ve got two follow-ups here. Drew, do you want to help us out?

Drew Marquardt: Sure. Felicia in Los Angeles writes, “A public library card from any of the LA Metro area public libraries and I’m sure many other cities includes a free premium membership to LinkedIn Learning. LinkedIn Learning has some of the most thorough sets of video lessons available for Adobe products and a vast array of other creative software, and they include downloadable work files. As a graphic designer turned writer myself, I highly suggest anyone even remotely interested to check it out. Plus, I mean, free.”

John: It feels like one of those things that I would try and not actually complete. I think it’s cool that that’s out there. There’s a lot of good video out there in the world talking about how to do these things. Templates are nice. Cool. Thank you for that suggestion. What else you got there for us?

Drew: We have another suggestion from Chris. He says, “I want to recommend a web-based design product called Canva. I have a graphic design background, but I will still sometimes use Canva when I’m feeling stuck. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t know their way around Adobe Creative Suite. Canva provides tons of templates for various projects, including pitch decks, and its drag and drop interface means you only need to bring images and text. There are both free and paid versions. You can’t unlock the features you want most without paying, but it’s still a lot cheaper and faster than learning graphic design and paying for an Adobe subscription.”

John: Great. Another good suggestion there. I will say that for most of the decks I’ve been working, I’ve just been using Keynote, which is the Apple free presentation software stuff, which I know and is good and it works like I expect it to work. People should use whatever tool they like and maybe experiment a little bit.

Craig: I’ve never made a deck. I’m probably at this point never going to. I don’t think a deck is in my future. Basically, at this age, I feel like we can start talking about things we’re going to get away with. I’m going to get away with living my entire life and never making a deck. I’m going to get away with it. I’m getting away with this.

John: I think getting away with things would be another good bonus topic. Drew, let’s note that for our future bonus topic. What are we excited that now we can get away with never learning how to do?

Craig: I’ve got such a list.

John: My daughter, she wants to learn how to drive stick shift, but she could get away with never learning how to drive stick shift. It’s fine.

Craig: Good lord. Of course. There are things I feel like I’m going to get away with, I should’ve done at some point, and I’m just going to get away with it. There’s a movie I’m sure that everyone’s like, “Everyone’s seen that movie,” and I haven’t, and I’m going to get away with it.

John: It’s nice. I’ve faked my way through several meetings pretending that I’ve seen that movie, but I haven’t seen it. I’ve nodded along as people talk about these moments in movies that I’ve never seen.

Craig: The most useful phrase in Hollywood, I will teach it to everybody, is, “I’ve seen it. God, it’s been a long time though. It was so long ago that I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t know who’s in it. I don’t know what it’s about.”

John: Mine is, “I barely remember it, but [crosstalk 00:05:05].”

Craig: “I barely remember it, because you know what? I watch so many movies.” Oh, man. I’ve gotten away with that a lot. I’m getting away with stuff. It’s great.

John: We have more follow-up about spacing out TV episodes. Back in 599 we had our continued discussion about whether it’s best to release all the episodes all at once or space them out one at a time. Luke had some follow-up on this.

Drew: Luke writes about what he calls the spacing effect. He says, “Craig’s observation that TV series released in weekly installments versus all at once tend to feel more memorable is in line with one of the deepest findings in a study of memory, and by deepest I mean not just human memory. We’re talking chimps, bees, sea slugs. Basically, if an animal can remember something, it will remember it longer if it’s been exposed to it according to a spaced-out schedule rather than all at once. This is something that’s been observed in medical residents practicing surgery and also on species of roundworm that has, count them, 302 neurons. We humans have 86 to 100 billion neurons. The spacing effect seems to be emanating from something fundamental happening at the level of individual neurons and how they interact with one another.”

Craig: That’s cool.

John: Craig, you would believe this, because as a person who likes science and medicine, it does make sense that repeatedly training something on something increases the strength of something. It might increase the strength of memory, the ability to recognize a pattern. It makes sense.

Craig: What’s interesting about what Luke is citing here is that it sounds like it’s not even about repetition. It’s simply about spacing it out. If you are going to teach somebody a seven-digit number, what he’s suggesting is that studies say giving the seven digits at once and saying, “Memorize it,” versus giving the seven digits one digit every 30 minutes, that the latter will work better, which makes sense, because the way we convert things to long-term memory is by cycling them over and over in short-term.

There are short-term memories that we, without even realizing it, are processing for long-term memory. Then there are short-term memories that never make it into long-term memory. You can’t think of anything because you don’t know that they happen, which is really weird to think. I’m also completely obsessed with this roundworm with 302 neurons. What a gift to people studying how the brains work. Wow, that’s great.

John: That’s great. I want to bring up a recent example of my exposure to this kind of phenomenon. I watched Jury Duty on Amazon, which I thought was terrific. Everyone loves Jury Duty. If you haven’t seen it, essentially, it’s some of the folks behind The Office. It is supposedly a documentary series following a court case, a jury trial. Everyone else is actors, but one person, he believes he’s on a real jury. It’s just brilliantly done and very, very funny.

The release pattern for that show was there was four episodes at once and then next week they’ll release two more, and then they release the final two episodes, which I thought was a good mix of anticipation, upfront loading so everyone gets to see what the momentum of the show was. I thought it was a smart way to release that show.

Craig: Sometimes it depends on the way your season lays out, because you may think to yourself, “I know that when I get to Episode 4, the ending of Episode 4 is so awesome that people will come back,” but can’t get to that awesome ending without the stuff that happens in 1, 2, and 3, so we need to show everything to everybody. We did a mini version of that with The Last of Us, because we combined what was going to be Episode 1 and 2 into one. We did the, “Here’s two cookies. That second cookie is really good, right? Come back next week. We’ll give you another cookie.”

John: It’s also a luxury of shows that aren’t affixed to having the one-hour length or 30 minutes of length. You can just do what you need them to do. That’s a lovely thing.

Craig: We are a little more affixed at HBO though, because they do still have quite a bit of linear viewing, and so they want us-

John: That supersized first episode, how long was it?

Craig: We were given two allowances. The first one was obviously the main allowance. I think it was 86 minutes or something like that. Then Episode 3, which was the saga of Bill and Frank, we basically were like, “Look, we really love this thing, and it’s 72 minutes, and no one seems to notice.” They were like, “Okay, that’s fine.” Then everything else, 58 minutes 30 seconds maximum.

John: Wow. I didn’t realize you had such restrictions.

Craig: John Oliver probably gets pretty cranky every time his show starts late because some up-his-own-butt auteur like myself is like, “I need another three minutes.” I apologize, John Oliver. You deserve better.

John: Is John Oliver’s show live? It’s not live though.

Craig: No, it’s not live, but because of the linear television 30% of people that watch HBO still get it through cable channel or something, and so there’s a schedule.

John: Wild. This is my favorite bit of follow-up in this episode. This goes all the way back to Episode 536. Craig, I need to refresh your memory about-

Craig: Please.

John: … what happened in this. We had a listener who wrote in, who said she was an actor who was dating a machine learning engineer with a PhD in computer science, “Who fully supports my dream to break into the entertainment industry despite knowing very little about it. He supports me through active listening, making an effort to watch TV and movies together, and paying attention to the industry. He said when we started dating he did not want to watch any of my work until we were further in our relationship. His reasoning is that he didn’t want his opinions, spoken or unspoken, to influence my future career decisions.”

Craig: Yeah, that, I remember that.

John: Now you remember this. You said, “Oh, congratulations, you guys won therapy,” that this sounded amazing, that we were just very happy for her.

Craig: They sounded so well adjusted and thoughtful.

John: Sarah, who wrote in the initial question story here just sent through an update. Drew, can you read the update here?

Drew: Yeah. She says, “A quick update on the story I sent in over a year ago. I’m engaged! It happened on the evening of May 2nd, a familiar date, right? I’m a member of SAG-AFTRA and have followed the writers’ strike closely. When the strike was officially announced, I drove over to Amazon without a second thought and picketed for a few hours. The strike organizers handed out WGA T-shirts to wear while picketing, but I’m not a WGA member, so I didn’t feel comfortable wearing a shirt with the WGA logo on it. However, there was one random box of extra-extra-large We Stand with the WGA T-shirts, so I wore one of those. I’m using an extra-small, so I was essentially wearing a solidarity dress, and I loved it. I wore it all day, to the auto shop, to a friend’s short film premier, and then back home to my boyfriend’s house.

“I started getting ready for bed, but after a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t seen or even heard my boyfriend. I figured he was in his office, but he wasn’t, so I called out for him and started looking around frantically, until I heard a knock at the back window. He was outside in our backyard, and the backyard was lit up with candles and twinkling lights and flowers everywhere. He was smiling bigger than I’ve ever seen him smile. Then it hit me, he was going to propose. I went outside and immediately burst into tears. I mean, dang, he actually really surprised me, and dang, he was all dressed up and looking so handsome. Meanwhile, there I was in my giant solidarity dress and slippers, but I say this with absolute sincerity, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

John: Aw.

Craig: Aw!

John: Aw.

Craig: Aw! That’s lovely. Listen, I’m not surprised, because I remember this question. I remember how I feel like both of us were like, “Good lord, these people are really good, good.” You know when certain people tell you stories or pose a thorny problem, and you listen to them and you’re like, “My god, why aren’t you just good? Why doesn’t your brain work better?” These people, their brains work great. Listen. Two well-brained human beings, I beg the two of you, if you are able to have children together, I beg you to have as many as you can. I’m begging. I’m begging, because we need good. We need good. By the way, if this story happens in Texas, the second he starts knocking at that back window, she just starts shooting.

John: It ends in a tragedy.

Craig: No question. In fact, I’m sure there are at least seven almost-proposals that ended in somebody getting shot.

John: I’m waiting for the headline like, “Promposal ends in tragedy.”

Craig: Of course. When she says, “He actually really surprised me,” that’s what the person who shoots the boyfriend also says. See, this is why America’s terrible. We’re terrible. I’m laughing at something terrible, because I don’t want to cry.

John: Let’s bring it back to the joy of this letter, this moment, this photo she included of her in her strike dress.

Craig: It’s adorable.

John: Adorable.

Craig: It really is adorable.

John: So happy for her, for both of them.

Craig: Sarah, congratulations. We don’t know your boyfriend’s name, I don’t believe, but congratulations to him as well. He’s got a good one. Thank you, by the way, for walking the line and supporting the WGA.

John: That’s really nice.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Let’s get to our main topic today. Off and on the podcast we’re talking about a character’s main quest or a protagonist’s main quest. They go off on a journey. They have a want, but they also have a need. They have this existential and fundamental drive, this hope, this hope, this dream, this wish, this fear that is propelling them through the story. In the case of a feature film, it is a onetime journey they’re taking, which will transform them. It’ll transform the world around them.

We’re not going to talk about that right now. We’re going to talk about this character needs to do X in order to Y. We’re going to talk about side quests, which I think are the smaller building blocks of a lot of our stories.

This was brought home to me by the Dungeons and Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves, is chockfull of side quests. It’s silly and fun for that reason. If you haven’t seen that movie, it’s streaming on Paramount Plus. I loved it. There’s a main thing that they’re trying to do. In order to do that main thing, they have to achieve a bunch of little things, which feels so true to DnD, but also felt really right for this movie.

It made me recognize that in most movies, you’re going to see some side quests stacking up there, where there are things that the characters need to do in order to get that next thing done. We haven’t really talked that much about that on the podcast. I figured we would dive in on side quests rather than big main overarching thing.

Craig: It sounds to me like the things that you’re describing may be better called sub-quests, because they’re part of the main quest line, but you have these little mini jobs to do to advance yourself on the main quest line. We need to get the helmet of something. We can’t get the helmet of something until we get the blah blah blah. We need the da da da to get the blah blah blah.

John: We need to find someone in the graveyard who remembers where that thing was buried.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Then we’re going to do all these other things.

Craig: In gaming, traditionally side quests are separate things that are completely off the main quest. For instance, in Dungeons and Dragons the movie, Honor Among Thieves, which is excellent, the barbarian has her own love story that she needs to go conclude with her ex to find piece. That is completely separate and apart from the main quest line, which is to rob the thing. We have side quests and sub-quests. Those two things, they both show up, and they’re both useful. Maybe we can dig into both.

John: Absolutely. A lot of the characteristics apply to both of them. Let’s talk about either of these kind of things in just movies that we’ve worked on where you’ll see them.

In Go, Ronna’s trying to pull off this tiny drug deal, but then she has to sell allergy medicine. She’s thwarted in one area and so therefore has to do another thing to get her back onto the main quest line. We have Adam and Zack. They’ve completed their main thing, but now they’re going to look for Jimmy, this guy they’ve both been sleeping with. That is kind of a side quest, because it’s not crucial to the plot of the story, to their overall fundamental goals, but they need to find this guy. At the end, Claire and Ronna are looking for her keys. That’s the classic like, we need to do this thing in order to drive the car home. Those feel like that kind of thing.

I would say about The Last of Us, really you could argue in that first episode, him agreeing to escort the girl is introduced as a sub-quest or a side quest, because it’s not his main objective at all.

Craig: That would definitely be sub-quest. I don’t think we had any true side quests, like off the beaten path quests, unless you were talking about other characters, but they have their own certain main quests. There is this thing where you have some big goal. In The Last of Us, Joel’s big goal really doesn’t change until he gets to Jackson.

John: His brother, yeah.

Craig: Then it gets expanded. We really did try and stick I guess onto the main quest. Everything does get divided down to these things where you think, okay, this is about going to see my brother, which was an addition. It wasn’t in the game. It was actually one of the reasons… We needed a main quest, essentially.

Dividing it down to small things is incredibly helpful. Before we get into how those side things may look or feel, our capacity for understanding what people do is limited by our own capacity to do things. We have to divide stuff down into steps. There’s no other way to progress. The steps sometimes need to be incredibly mundane so that when you provide a twist and the next little chunk comes along, you can tell the difference. The more you can divide things down into … Because otherwise it’s just one thing over and over and over. Marlin wants to find Nemo, but he’s got to go through little moments.

John: He does. It’s figuring out what those moments are that feel meaningful and have stakes within their smaller context but can also be built back to the bigger thing. In terms of side quests and stakes or sub-quests, you want to call them that, my favorite movie of all time, Aliens, is just chockfull of these little smaller quests. An example is he has to get through the pipe to get to the drop ship to lower it so it can be there on time. That’s his whole separate little thing. He’s off and doing that. Nothing else can work together unless that sub-quest, that side quest succeeds.

Craig: Every piece is necessary, which is exciting, because then you realize, okay, we’re building a plot chain. The weakest link will break the whole thing. As a writer, you’re really forced to ask, do I need this link in the chain, what’s the best way to write it, etc.

John: I [inaudible 00:19:55] out some I think characteristics of the kind of quests that we’re talking about. I’ll start with saying they’re not the hero’s primary goal. They didn’t dream of this quest their entire life. It’s not fundamental to them. It’s more like finding the phone you left in a car, that is a side quest. Not a side quest would be winning an Olympic medal. They’re just completely different scales of things that are not fundamental to the character’s sense of who they are as a person.

Craig: Like I said, we have a certain, I don’t know, ability to think big. Once we establish the big thing, yeah, we need to limit the scope of what we’re doing. Otherwise, there’s just no other way to do it. These little, you can call them mini quests, they concretize the plan. They also reinforce the magic trick that we try and pull early on, which is to suggest to the main character this won’t be hard.

John: Yes, for sure.

Craig: It’s no big deal. Let’s all relax. All we have to do is get to this. In The Hangover it’s like, “Guys, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. Let’s just get in the car and go.” Then a cop car pulls up. Now we have a real problem. Now we have to engage in an actual substantive quest to further this. You want to start with little, simple things like, let’s just get the car.

John: Absolutely. What you’re describing about let’s get the car is it’s specific and it’s well defined. It’s another characteristic of a side quest is that both the characters in the scene and the audience understand what they’re trying to do and what it will look like when it’s achieved. When you’ve done that little thing, you know it’s going to be done. A side quest might be to figure out who really owns that mysterious house. You can envision that’s an achievable thing. We’re going to know an answer to this thing.

What’s not a side quest would be a character coming to terms with their PTSD. That’s not concrete. You can’t define when that journey has ended, has progressed. There’s no end date to that. There’s no closure to it.

Craig: There’s another term that gamers use, and as you know, I am one.

John: You are a gamer.

Craig: I am a gamer. Which is fetch quest. Fetch quests are incredibly common, especially in radiant narrative games. They really boil down to somebody gives you some reason why they really need a thing. I’ll help you and I’ll give you a this, but there’s this one herb that grows in the forest, in the cave, and blah blah blah. Then you go to the forest and the cave. You’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to pick an herb.” You know very damn well there’s going to be something awful in that cave, and you have to kill it. You fetch, fetch fetch fetch.

John: Fetch fetch fetch.

Craig: What’s important about fetch quests is in their errant-like nature, they really do define what we’re talking about in terms of small and concrete and achievable. The most important thing about these little mini quests is that they appear to be incredibly doable, because eventually you realize that all of these things, when we do these sub-quests, they are working to lead the character astray. They are essentially in avoidance. When I say avoidance, I mean in a meta sense.

It’s not like Joel’s avoiding being a father again in the beginning, but he’s concentrating on a battery. That’s a little bit of a denial. At some point you realize you can only concentrate on the battery so much. They don’t even get a battery. By the time he gets to Jackson, his main quest is almost forgotten. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we got there, and Tommy’s fine. Now what do I do?” Now you have to face the real quest. Sometimes the side quests or sub-quests are helping to distract the character.

John: Sure, they’re keeping you busy. You made the point about achievable, and I think that’s incredibly important. They’re achievable in a limited amount of space and time. By time, I mean both real time and screen time, so it’s a beat or a couple beats, but it’s not the whole act.

A side quest would be getting to the convention in time for the speech. It’s whatever the process is that you have to get there and all the obstacles you’re facing, but you make it to the convention center on time. Not a side quest would be getting your college degree.

You can learn something in a side quest. I can totally imagine a side quest where the character has to learn how to canoe, because it’s an important thing for this next phase, but it has to be something you could learn in a limited amount of time or a change you can make in a limited amount of time. It can’t drag on forever, unless the nature of the story you’re telling is like, okay, we’re going to follow this person’s entire life. Then maybe you could have a side quest that takes years. That’s not most movies.

Craig: No. I like the term mini quest.

John: Yeah, mini quest, yeah.

Craig: The mini part is really important.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It just needs to be… Sometimes what you’re doing with these things is watching them actually cycle completely within one scene, where it becomes important for you to do… You’re in a bar, and someone goes, “Oh my god, that’s the person whose keys we need. Go over there and steal their keys.”

John: Perfect.

Craig: Now I’ve got a mini quest. I walk over, and when the guy’s not looking, swipe the keys, come back. I have completed the entire cycle of the mini quest within a scene. You could take a couple of scenes, but by the time you start making a meal of it, it’s more of a thick main quest.

John: It is. I would say that it can’t be trivial. It can’t be like, write your name on this piece of paper. That’s not a mini quest.

Craig: That’s not a quest.

John: It can’t be impossible either. We have to figure out which of these mimes is Albanian, that’s a mini quest. Building a fusion reactor that works, that’s not a mini quest. That’s some epic quest, which is not going to fit in this limited period of time.

Craig: Agreed.

John: Let’s talk about how we use mini quests and how we write them into our stories. To me it’s crucial that it feel necessary and not beamed in. It can’t feel like you’re in a video game. You’ve got to be really careful about that. It can’t feel like it’s just a fetch quest, that there’s a clear problem to solve, but it’s a problem that the characters want to solve.

If possible, try to have your hero state the objective rather than being told the objective or having someone else assign them a thing. If the hero says, “Okay, if I can do X, will you do Y?” then they are assigning themselves the quest, rather than someone else coming in there and telling them what to do.

Craig: In my example of the keys, I just instinctively had somebody say, “Oh my god, look. Go get those keys,” rather than somebody going, “Oh my god, look. I’m going to go get those keys.” You’re right. There is something strange. You need to receive the job. I never thought about that, but yeah, you need to receive the job.

John: Need to receive the job. If your hero can be the person assigning the job, it’s going to feel better in most cases, than having someone else tell them to do it. Obviously, there’s going to be genre conventions where 007 is being told by M what to do, but then of course along the way he’s making his own choices about how to proceed. That’s the genre convention.

Craig: I think it’s important that your hero receives assignments. Of course, once the flywheel begins to turn, then the hero, like you said, has an enormous amount of agency. At the very beginning of Mission Impossible or James Bond, the action hero receives a mission.

John: A mission could come from an ally. It could come from an enemy. It could come from somebody. It’s often, for many genres, a way things start. We’re talking about things that feel like action movies or feel like they are stakes-driven stories in that context, but what I want to stress is that these little mini quests really can apply to a lot of different genres.

Even in a relationship genre or a rom-com or other things, you’re going to find moments where you’re going to want to throw up obstacles in your character’s way, and your character getting around those obstacles is its own mini quest. Just always make sure you’re thinking about, in this block of 10 pages, is there a clear obstacle for my hero to face, and if not, what can I be doing here to give them some challenges? That can be its own little, small story, this own little, small victory or failure that will keep the story propelled forward.

Craig: Absolutely. You can also, as an exercise, contemplate doing the opposite of that, which is to say you know your hero has to do something really big. Maybe they don’t know it’s really big yet. Neither do we in the audience. Maybe what we think is it’s something small. Once they walk in, they’re like, “Oh, this is not at all what I expected.” You can disguise big things as mini quest until surprise.

John: Absolutely. The same filmmakers who made Dungeons and Dragons also made Game Night, which I think is built out of little mini quests that become giant, epic, big things. It’s a way to think of escalation as a fun corollary to this.

Craig: Can I ask, why does anybody pay to go to school when they can just listen to this podcast? Maybe that comes off as arrogant. I’m just saying, even if we’re only right 30% of the time, that’s still 200 episodes, 200 hours of correctness, for free, or whatever it costs, 5 bucks. I’m just saying.

John: I’m just saying. Craig, yesterday I was out at the picket line at Warner’s, and this guy introduced himself. He’s a little bit sheepish. He’s Canadian. He said, “Oh, I just wanted to say that I really love Scriptnotes. It’s taught me everything I know about stuff. I’ve listened to every episode.” He had ridden his motorcycle down from Canada just to join the picket lines and-

Craig: Whoa.

John: … meet some of the writers he’d always heard about. It was great. Colin, thank you for introducing yourself.

Craig: Aw.

John: It’s lovely.

Craig: I’ve had quite a few people, when I’m walking around in an oval in front of Paramount, come up to me and say they love the show, and they’re young.

John: They’re young.

Craig: They’re young. Sometimes I forget that I’m old as eff. I still feel like, oh, you’re 28 and I’m 28, and we’re just saying nice things to each other. Then I realize, oh, I’m like their dad. Nonetheless, it’s very nice. Also, I have to say, the energy on the picket line has been fantastic. I was in front of Universal the other day. I think it was Wednesday. They had a video game themed picket, and so I was up there with Merle Dandridge, who plays Marlene in the show, and Halley Gross, who co-wrote the second game at Naughty Dog. We had a great time. The spirits, everybody’s spirits are quite high, I have to say, because what are we in, four weeks now?

John: It’s the start of our fifth week as we record this now.

Craig: Fifth week, yeah. Positive energy on the picket line. I like to see it.

John: It really is nice. Next topic I wanted to get into was just the importance of failure.

Craig: That’s the worst thing right after we talk about the picket line. We’re like, “Speaking of the WGA strike-”

John: “Speaking of the WGA-”

Craig: “… failure.”

John: Basically, in the show notes I want to put a link to four articles that Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, had pulled up in a recent newsletter. I really liked them, because it was different people talking about how important it was to try things that you know you might fail at, and to embrace that as part of the process, because I think so often, we are not willing to think about our work the same way that athletes think about their work or that scientists think about their work. It’s that failure teaches you something.

Part of that may be because the work we do takes so fricking long that it feels like, “Oh my god, I’ve wasted four months working on this script that doesn’t work.” Jesus, that’s terrible. Some of these articles also point to the importance of letting yourself fail faster and learning from that.

Craig: Unfortunately, sometimes our failures do take quite a long time. You could even look at the progress of your own life as decades of failure to get to maybe where you eventually were going to go.

We unfortunately have the burden of being entertainers. We are saying to people, “We deserve your attention,” which is the most obnoxious thing you could ever say. If you walk into a party, and you’re like, “Everyone, shut up. Turn around, face me, and listen to me talk now for 90 minutes,” that better be a good talk. When it’s not, people get really angry, and they’re mean. They write a thousand reviews and comments on Reddit and so on and so forth.

Our failures therefore are not only public but linked with shame. We are essentially being shamed by critics, the audience, for our failure. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s not like people are going to stop. We do have to at least be aware that that’s part of it, so that when it happens, hopefully people take it better than I’ve taken it.

John: Going back to my athlete analogy, in most sports you are either going to win the game or you’re going to lose the game.

Craig: Find me one sport-

John: I guess soccer you play to a draw.

Craig: I guess that’s true. I guess that’s true.

John: Aha!

Craig: Hockey also has ties, so fair.

John: While you can be a little bit down at your losses, I think every athlete has to acknowledge that, oh, that’s right, I’m going to lose games, and that I should not feel tremendous shame for losing games. What you can feel shame is making mistakes that are playing poorly, not recognizing things you should have seen, and learning from those things. You’re not taking every one of those losses as an abject failure.

That’s a thing that is harder for writers to do, part because we don’t have such clear metrics for success and failure. When we do look for, like, oh, did that movie open or tank, we may apply that to ourselves, which is not really fair, because that’s not our work. It’s the end result of a thousand other decisions.

Craig: You’re right. We don’t have the benefit of, we talked about mini quests, mini work. Athletes in a sense do a lot of mini work because there are so many games. No one goes to a Yankee game, sees them lose one game, loses their mind. It’s not the end of the world. There’s 162 of them. They get to do this a lot. We don’t. We pop our heads up once every year or two or three or four. It’s just one game. We just get the one game. If we lose, we lose.

It’s rough, because this is actually a fascinating topic. We are not ever encouraged by the business to consider failure as part of the process. The business joins in with the shaming process. Failure is not accepted. It is simply a sign to someone else. When things fail, everyone starts pointing fingers. Certainly, everyone points fingers at the writer. They point fingers at each other. They try and disown it. There is no culture in Hollywood as embracing failure as part of learning. It just simply doesn’t exist.

John: I think it’s because of the public nature of it, because you think about development and everything else as being research and development, R and D. Other companies, tech companies, would do R and D. They’re going to try a bunch of things. They’re going to know that most of those things aren’t going to work, but they’re private. They don’t have to be presented to the world, whereas for us, a lot of our stuff is out there in the world. You can see whether it sinks or fails.

I guess our development projects, the things that don’t move forward, sometimes maybe we should be a little bit more sanguine about the fact, like, “Yep, that didn’t work. It didn’t shoot. It didn’t all come together,” and maybe be okay with that. I think especially some newer writers, they’ll go through one or two bad experiences with development and feel like, “Okay, I can’t do this. I’m a failure. I cannot make a thing happen,” whereas Craig or I, who’ve had, god, 20 projects that haven’t moved forward, recognize it’s just the batting average.

Craig: Some of my projects I wish hadn’t moved forward, because sometimes you’re like, “They’re not going to make this, right? There’s no way they’re going to make this.”

John: They do.

Craig: “What?” I completely agree. It can kneecap you when it comes along, because as I said, again, nobody is going to put their arm around you and say, “Listen, pal,” like a coach, “Hey, everybody’s been in a slump, kid. You’ll get out of it. It won’t last forever. It’s going to stink while it’s happening. You’re going to have to relax. Stop beating yourself up, because that’s just going to make it worse and extend it.” Nobody does that here. They don’t put their arm around you. They kick you with their boot. Everyone screams at you and then closes all the doors and windows. Of course you’re going to sit out there going, “This is terrible.”

Don’t let the judgment factor of the business, critics, audience, Twitter, don’t let the judgment factor eliminate the other thing that’s actually real. The real thing is you learned something. It may have been a tough lesson. Who knows? You’re better now than you were. Inevitably, if you fail, that means when you start your next thing, you are better than you were before the failure. We never think of it that way.

John: The crash and burn of my TV show, DC, I definitely learned a lot from. I would say recognizing all the things that I did wrong that contributed to it was painful for a time but also made me resolve to, if I ever decide I want to do television again, I want to know what the hell I’m doing before I ever start going in there. I’m going to set up systems to shore up my weaknesses and really figure out how to both make a great TV show and not destroy my life. I would not have had that insight if I hadn’t gone through the disastrous experience of making that show.

Craig: Sometimes I look back, and a little bit like when you look back at some of the dumb ass things you said to someone when you were a teenager, to try and get someone to kiss you or whatever. You ever just go on a date and blow it completely? Sometimes I think about those things now. They happened when I was 17. It’s weird. It’s these weird shame echoes. Then again, what I also know, as a number of movies have shown, if you can go back in town as yourself as a kid, you’re so much better with the people that you’re, you’re attracted to. You’re so much smoother. You know what to say, what to not say. You’ve learned. All your failures taught you, but they hurt. The lessons are painful.

John: Both of our daughters are graduating or have just graduated from high school. One of the commencement speakers at my daughter’s graduation was a student talking about when they had just started in junior high, they were obsessed with Corgis. Their whole personality was talking about Corgis and facts about Corgis, and everything was Corgis.

Craig: Oh, boy.

John: Interjecting Corgi facts into conversations.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: They think back about it, they just feel so cringe about it. They went through some other mental health crises and came out of it embracing that Corgi-loving 7th grader and recognizing that they needed to have a radical softness for who they were and who they are right now. It makes embracing the parts of your history that are not the happiest easier, just that sense then, like, oh, this is all part of the journey that got me to here, and I’m going to love all those people and not try to banish them to the dark recesses of history. It was a very smart, very good graduation speech.

Craig: That is fantastic and speaks to this weird phenomenon where we are … We both raised children. I’m going to guess that when your daughter was younger, and let’s say there was a party or something, and some kid did something wrong, you were like, “Okay, come on. You’re cool. Just don’t do that.” Your kid does something wrong, you’re like, “Get over here.” You’re harder on your kid than other children, because I don’t know.

Then the same thing is true for ourselves. We’re harder on ourselves. Somebody else does something I’ve done and then is like, “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed.” I’m immediately like, “Listen, no. It’s over. Forget it. It’s gone. I’ve forgotten it. Nobody cares.”

John: I think that’s entirely true. Also, I think it’s tougher in this age of the internet being forever that the annoying thing you were 10 years ago is still searchable and Google-able, and that’s unfair.

Craig: If it’s a large-scale thing, absolutely. At any point, somebody can Google my life and go, “Ha ha, look, your movie here did blah.” There’s nothing to do about it. They still do it. They’re like, “Don’t feel good about yourself.” Literally, sometimes that’s what … These people are like, “Are you feeling good about yourself today?”

John: “Let me tell you why you shouldn’t.”

Craig: “Here’s some data.”

John: “Let me offer some.” Craig, let’s do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Uh-oh.

John: Uh-oh.

Craig: Go ahead.

John: I have two, so you’ll have some time to think of one.

Craig: Whew.

John: Whew. I have two very closely related ones. I wanted to read this book, For Profit: A History of Corporations, by William Magnuson, because people had talked about it, and it sounded great. It is great. It’s really looking at the history of corporations going all the way back to Ancient Rome and how they were fundamental, important building blocks for Western civilization overall. It’s how you form societies that can do things that one individual can’t do, both because of the ability to pull capital together, but also to go beyond the lifetime of any one person. Just a very smart book.

I wanted to read this book. This is the kind of book I would normally read on my Kindle, but I’m feeling a little bit eh about supporting the Amazon ecosystem, and so for this book, I wanted to read it some other way. I got myself the Kobo Libra 2, which is a different e-ink reader.

Craig: Nice.

John: It’s actually terrific. Click through the little link there, Craig, and see.

Craig: I’m looking at it.

John: It’s really smartly designed. It’s not symmetrical. One edge is a little bit wider. It has a little lip on it so you can hold it easier in one hand. It has physical buttons for flipping pages. The screen is super, super sharp. It’s good for taking notes and highlighting. I just really am enjoying this. It was also nice to be able to buy books outside of the Amazon ecosystem. You can load them in through anywhere. I’m enjoying it. If you are a person who is considering replacing a Kindle, if you like e-ink readers, but you’re thinking, “I want to get a new Kindle,” maybe look at this first and see if it might be a better fit for you.

Craig: It looks great. The product looks great. The website is really stupid. It starts with, here’s the product. It looks terrific. They have lots of images and information. Then as you scroll down, they just start showing people doing yoga and poking at it. These are the weirdest …

John: It’s not a great website. I bought this off the website. It showed up in perfect form. The box itself, all the packaging was flawless.

Craig: I would get this thing. I had one of the early Amazon versions. I ultimately never used it, because I don’t know, there was something about the iPad that just made it simpler, but now I’m wondering.

John: I had never liked reading books on an iPad. iPad for me is for playing Hearthstone and for web browsing, but for actually sitting down with a book … I also like, with a Kindle or e-ink reader, I never read in bed when I’m at home, but if I’m traveling, I will often read in bed and just tuck in there sideways and read a book. It’s nice.

Craig: Early on, you have to just read it like a regular book. You need it to be in light.

John: These are all back-lit now.

Craig: They’re back-lit.

John: They have very gentle back-lighting.

Craig: You can read it in the dark?

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: You can read it in the dark. I’m going to get one of these things.

John: It’s really good.

Craig: Kobo Libra 2. I’m going to get it, and I’m going to do yoga and eat granola while I’m poking at it.

John: It’s the whole new Craig lifestyle that we’re excited to see.

Craig: My One Cool Thing is a movie. You rarely hear that from me, because most of the time, I’m going to movies that everybody else is going to. I’m not unearthing gems. There’s a movie I saw that I think most people haven’t seen and should. It’s beautiful. It’s called Nine Days. It is written and directed by a man named Edson Oda, fascinating guy who is Japanese but Brazilian, grew up in Brazil. I think Portuguese is his primary language.

It’s a somewhat surreal story. I won’t give away too much about what’s going, other than to say that Winston Duke, who everybody knows from Marvel movies and other things, fantastic actor, just holds down the center of this thing, but also Zazie Beetz just does incredible work. The cast is amazing. Bill Skarsgård is in there, and Tony Hale. Mostly, it’s just so creative and beautifully written and beautifully filmed. It is not too long. It’s entertaining and quite beautiful. Check it out, if you would. I have no idea. I’m sure it’s streaming on a thing. Yes, it’s streaming on a thing. Nine Days by Edson Oda.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson. Outro this week-

Craig: Lamberson.

John: … comes from Daniel Green.

Craig: Wait, hold on. I got to stop you there, John, in mid boilerplate, because Halley Lamberson is here with us. When I heard that her name was Halley Lamberson, what did I need to do?

John: Anagram.

Craig: Anagram. I had to anagram it. There’s so many anagrams to choose from. I’m going to go real quickly with the anagram that is only two words, which I think is wonderful, which is amenably hollers.

John: Sure. I like amenably hollers, because they’re calling you over.

Craig: In a nice, welcoming way. Amenably hollers.

John: Come on in. That’s Halley Lamberson.

Craig: It’s better than menorah syllable.

John: No, I don’t like that at all.

Craig: Back to boilerplate.

John: Back to boilerplate. Our outro is by Daniel Green, who, Craig, you remember Daniel Green. He accompanied you as-

Craig: Of course.

John: … you were singing on Broadway.

Craig: Daniel is a wonderfully talented man.

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on VR. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, we’re recording this on a Friday. On Monday, Apple is supposed to be announcing their new headset. We know not that much about it, but it’ll be a headset. It’ll be from Apple. People will be curious about it. I’m curious what your experience has been so far with VR, with goggles, with all this world. How much have you done?

Craig: I’ve done a small but focused amount. I learned things about it and myself, at least in its current implementation. I think I have the Quest 2.

John: Quest 2 is the Facebook product, right?

Craig: Unfortunately, yeah, it is the Facebook product.

John: Meta.

Craig: I’m excited to have a not-Facebook product.

John: What do you use it to do? How often are you actually putting it on your face?

Craig: I haven’t put it on my head in probably two years. When I first got it, I was really interested in playing. They had a Room VR game from the folks that make the Room games. It was wonderful. It was just magical. I love those kinds of games. They implemented it beautifully. The movement system is really smart. Instead of moving and your head bobbing, which as you move through space, notoriously makes people sick, in this version there were some hotspots you can aim at and go, “I want to go there,” and then it would just pop you over. You were always essentially standing and then turning and looking around, but not moving. That was great. There was another game I played. Some of it really was beautiful. Then I didn’t care and stopped using it.

John: Similar experience for me. I don’t own any of the headsets. Ryan Nelson, who used to work for me, and then went on to work for a company that mostly does VR, he’s been over to the office a couple times, and he would set up in the garage, with the proper sensors for blocking out the space, and would demo some of the things that he loved. They are incredibly impressive demos. Things like a Google Earth that you can fly into any place and then fly back out, other games that were Portal-like things. Really smartly done, and yet at the end of the sessions, I didn’t feel like I really want one of these for myself, because I felt like I’m not going to end up using it. It never brought me through to this moment.

I’ve also done some VR things that have been specific to a location or to an exhibit. I did this Banksy VR thing, which was pretty well done. For that one, you’re on stools, but then you have the headsets on. You’re going through this space that is showing Banksy things in situ, really where they would be in the world. That was cool. It was good use of that technology.

I don’t think those are the things that are going to be the future of VR. I’m really curious what Monday’s announcement will be, because it feels like there’s some more practical day-to-day use of this tool that could be what we’re seeing next.

Craig: I’m really curious about the form factor, because one of the things about VR is that any external stimulus that counteracts or disrupts the nature of your experience in this virtual space ultimately diminishes the verisimilitude of it. You get constant feedback from your head. There is this big, chunky thing on your head, and you know it. It has weight. It’s sort of squeezey. It moves around or shifts a little bit. It takes you out of things. Now, if there’s a form factor where you’re wearing it but it disappears on you, in terms of sensation, that will be a game-changer. It seems like not a big deal. I think it is a big deal. I haven’t seen anybody talking about it. I’m sure I’m not the first person to mention it though.

John: I’m curious to what degree this is a you sit in your chair with this on thing versus you move through a space, because I think some of the problems and frustrations and my motion sickness from VR has been I am moving through space now, doing this thing. If I am sitting in a chair, and this is filling in my visual field, and it’s a mega-sized monitor that I can do things on, I can see that being really useful for certain things and there being tasks for which that is especially well suited. I don’t know if that’s going to be the focus of this thing. I’m curious.

Craig: I think there will always be motion sickness issues if your body is not moving but your brain is moving and your eyes are moving.

John: Exactly.

Craig: That’s it. That’s why. That’s where the barfing happens. I don’t know how they’re going to get around that, unless they just tailor the experience to not moving like that. Of course, some people do want to experience the visual and audio sensation of being in a wingsuit. I’m not going to barf all over my floor to be in a wingsuit. Some people I think probably don’t. Some people just naturally can do it. God bless them if they can. VR is going to have to bet over the puke gap, which is a real thing.

John: One thing I do think is fascinating is Apple products and other electronics as well have done a much better job integrating with each other. If you have your iPad set up next to your Mac, you can just move your cursor over onto the iPad and back, which seems like witchcraft. Even last night, my husband, Mike, had his French group over. Everyone was there in person, except for the instructor, who’s on the Mac on Zoom. The sound wasn’t good. He’s looking for, “Oh, should I add an external mic?” It turned out you could actually just use your iPhone as the mic and just put that out there, and so it could be the separate audio device for things, which just worked great. It’s only because these devices know each other.

Craig: They talk to each other. Have you done the thing where you copy something from your iPad and then paste it?

John: Totally.

Craig: I don’t know how that works. That’s great.

John: All behind the scenes. It’s really, really smart and nice.

Craig: Thanks, Apple.

John: That’s my hope is that whatever these goggles are, they’re not trying to be a closed system that doesn’t fit in with the other stuff, because that’s death.

Craig: It will be the opposite. It will be the most integrated thing ever. No question. That’s what Apple does.

John: We’ll hope. Craig, thanks for the chat.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Do Your Worst, Or You Might Never Do Your Best by Bridget Webber
• Why You Need to Fail TED Talk by Derek Sivers
• Artists must be allowed to make bad work by Austin Kleon
• The Museum of Failure
• For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson
• Kobo Libra 2
• Nine Days on IMDb
• 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 Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Daniel Green (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/600-mcquarrie-returns).

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 600 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Truffles, cloves, saffron in cooking. There are some ingredients that are so flavorful that they must be portioned carefully, deliberately, lest they overwhelm the senses. So too it is podcast visitors. A guest who appears too frequently loses their impact, their novelty. One cannot be shook if one is already shaking.

One such guest is writer/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who’s appeared just twice on Scriptnotes, and only on centennial episodes. After deliberation, Craig and I have decided to invite him back here today to mark our 600th episode. Joining us from London, I believe, Chris McQuarrie.

**Chris McQuarrie:** Yes, London, and congratulations on Episode 600.

**Craig:** I don’t know, is it congratulations or some sort of pity to be called for here?

**Chris:** Condolences. Condolences.

**Craig:** This is just… Good lord. Here we are. Nothing ever changes. We’re back with McQuarrie. With McQuarrie.

**Chris:** So sorry.

**John:** So sorry.

**Chris:** So sorry.

**John:** We recently put up a best of episode where we talked through, Chris, your two previous appearances. Just in case someone has no idea who you are, you are the writer and director of the Mission Impossible movies, Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher. Your credits are long and wonderful. You’re also a good foil for Craig Mazin, which is why I’m so delighted to see you here on this podcast.

**Chris:** That’s what I’m here for. It’s to spar with Craig and stay sharp.

**Craig:** McQuarrie and I have been in the same fake fight for, I don’t know, 20 years. I don’t know how long it’s been. You will not find two men who love each other more and agree on less.

**Chris:** That’s an interesting take on our relationship.

**Craig:** Thank you. See, he’s about to disagree with me, and that’s fine.

**Chris:** Perspective is a funny thing.

**Craig:** All I can say is that it is an honor to know him. It is a pleasure and a joy. He is, I think you’ve nailed it, John, one of those flavors that you really need to be careful with. You said truffles, cloves, saffron. I would’ve gone with more of one of those fermented fish sauces.

**John:** Thai fish sauce, sure.

**Craig:** Something like a very dense-

**Chris:** Curry.

**Craig:** A durian, for instance, a fruit that many people think is delicious and others think smells like puke. That’s okay. Those are all okay analogies for the great Chris McQuarrie.

**Chris:** I can’t understand why anybody thinks we have a beef, Craig.

**Craig:** I love this man so much.

**Chris:** We hide it so well.

**John:** It’s going to be very hard to keep the conversation on the guardrails. I thought we might try to talk about teams and groups, because Chris, a lot of your movies have a central protagonist, but they also have a big group of people who are working together to do a thing. I’d love to talk about group dynamics within feature films and stories with multiple hero characters. I’d love to tackle this provocative quote about knockoffs and the way that Hollywood just makes cheap imitations of things that were good. Then in our bonus segment for Premium members, let’s talk movie theaters, because Chris, you care a lot about the movie theater experience.

**Chris:** Very much.

**John:** I’d love to know where in 2023 we’re at. If you had your dream of a way to see a big opening weekend movie, what kind of screen are you looking for, what kind of sound system are you looking for? There are so many things being thrown at me with this is better than that. What should we actually be looking for? I feel like you’re a person who can tell us.

**Chris:** Oh, good. That’s all good stuff to talk about.

**John:** Hooray. Let’s start with this provocative quote. I did this interview for Vox about AI and the WGA’s AI proposals. In the article that Alissa Wilkinson wrote up, she had a quote that I thought was actually really smart. She says, “I don’t expect the tools to ever turn out something as good as what a real human writer can achieve. I don’t think AI’s going to be able to write Everything Everywhere All at Once or Tar or Succession. At best, it will be an okay imitation of things that humans have already written. Here’s the thing. Cheap imitations of good things are what power the entertainment industry.” Craig, I see some nodding. How do you respond to that quote?

**Craig:** I think there’s every reason to think that’s true, because first of all, history proves that it’s true. People don’t mind it. I think sometimes we think that what we’re seeing here is that people are stupid and suckers. They’re not stupid and suckers. They just sometimes like comforting things, and they like things that are repeated. If you have to wait five years for the next installment of something that kicked something off and made it wonderful, and in between there are acceptable substitutes, people will go for that.

The other area that I think we need to keep an eye on is programming for children, because programming for children is literally intentionally built around repetition. It’s how children learn. There are plenty of shows. On YouTube there are these videos that mostly come out of China. They’re just these super crappy animations that seem as if they’re currently being done by AI, by early AI. I can’t imagine people did them. Those things can be churned out ad nauseam. Yes, I think the concern is less that AI is going to innovate something beautiful and more that AI will replace a little bit of the secondary industry of imitation.

**John:** Chris, we’ve talked to you on a program before. You talked about your career and how you came out of the gate hot. Then there was a time where you’d find yourself doing projects that you realize these were not the things I should be doing and deliberately pivoted to, what are the actual movies that make me excited to go into work and to dedicate my life to making these films. How do you feel about this idea that the industry relies on a lot of not amazing things to fill up the space, and writers are going to be doing those jobs, and yet you individually might make the decision not to participate in that system?

**Chris:** The first part of the question, just generating content. We live in an era in which everything is just about generating the largest amount of content. If streamers are all racing to build libraries and develop subscriber bases, you’re also seeing that very same industry realizing that they can’t rely on that the way that they wanted to. We’re right now at a moment where you feel all the studios are pivoting back to an idea, that they’re suddenly starting to realize they actually need movie stars and haven’t been cultivating them. On the one hand, it’s terrifying, because we’re looking at AI.

The industry can always be counted on to convince themselves that there is a new way to game the system, and that new way invariably implodes. The number of times we as a group have lived through somebody thinking they could do it faster, cheaper, better, they figured out the thing that’s going to change the industry, going all the way back to 3D and how everything was going to be 3D. When digital cameras became the thing, digital cameras were going to replace film. There was a moment where film was really on the verge of extinction, and everybody said that digital was going to make it cheaper, and it didn’t. It didn’t democratize anything. Now you just hire more people to operate digital cameras.

Ultimately, what I have faith in is that there will always be room for, for lack of a better word, handmade, quality storytelling, for the people that are motivated to do it and the people that demand to do it. That’s never going to be the studio. I do not mean to say this in a derogating way. Their whole thing is about risk mitigation, on time, on budget, trying to make things profitable, and so they’re always going to gravitate towards what appears on paper to be the saner, more fiscally responsible thing. We all know from our individual experience, that’s actually not how movies turn out. That’s not how they get made. It’s never how the process goes. It isn’t a predictable process. It’s not a quantifiable process.

You’ll see there’s going to be a push toward that, towards using AI to get rid of the one thing they’ve been trying to get rid of forever, other than the movie star, has been the writer. They would love it if they could do it without us. They would absolutely love it.

I’m always amazed when people who would rather not have me there can’t just do what I do. We as writers, for us it’s second nature to sit down and actually write something in script form. It’s astonishing to watch someone who does not do that for a living have a very clear idea of what they want and actually be paralyzed when they sit down to do it. They actually couldn’t write a single sentence. It’s like some sort of mental block. I think there are people looking at it now and saying AI is going to liberate them of that mental block.

The thing that AI is never going to deliver is empathy and taste. It can imitate it, but it’s not going to deliver empathy, and it’s not going to deliver taste. If you don’t have empathy through your audience, if you can’t be the audience, and some part of you can’t step outside of yourself and be the person in the theater or at home in front of the TV receiving what it is you’re communicating, you’re not going to tell a story that’s going to affect somebody emotionally, at least in the short term with what I understand about AI. I’ll probably be eating my words in six months when AI begins teaching itself.

**Craig:** By the end of this week.

**Chris:** If you look at all the years and years and years of all these different screenwriting seminars, all the humans that have been trying to teach this craft to other humans, you can teach people about rules and techniques, you can show them movies that have worked, you can express to someone how you create, you can’t teach them empathy. The one essential ingredient to being an effective storyteller, I’ve never seen anybody even bring it up as a critical element of telling story, let alone how do you teach somebody that in a series of afternoon lectures?

**Craig:** There are unteachables. I think we’ve always agreed on that, that there are things that you can instruct, but then there’s whatever, however talent is defined. I think one of the cornerstones of talent, you’re right, is empathy. It is possible that what we may be looking at at best, and it’s hard to say because we don’t know, but let’s just say at best, for the foreseeable future, AI can’t do any better than being a very mediocre screenwriter. There are a lot of very mediocre screenwriters working. In fact, there are very few that aren’t very mediocre.

**Chris:** There’s the rub.

**Craig:** There is the rub. In a legitimate way, what we’re talking about is saying, hey, if there’s a choice between hiring a mediocre human and a mediocre computer, I really think we should be hiring the human. That is what we’re trying to get at.

**Chris:** I’m going to be the business side. I’ll play the devil’s advocate. If I’m going to hire a mediocre human or if I’m going to hire a mediocre machine, I’m going to hire the machine, because it’s going to get it done faster.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**Chris:** It’s going to deliver it. What we all know is that first and foremost they need a document. What I like to say all the time is a script is as good or bad as it needs to be on the day you hand it in. If they need that script, and they have a start date, and the start date is Monday, and you get it to them on Friday, you’re going to get the greatest review of a screenplay you’ve ever handed anybody. We love it. It’s fantastic. You’ve solved it. We have some notes, but we’ll figure them out as we go. If there’s no actor attached and no director attached and you wrote Casablanca, it would go into development hell, simply because-

**Craig:** There’s time.

**Chris:** There’s time. AI will feed very nicely into that. Then it will generate a 120-page document with dialog and formatting and locations and they can budget that.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I have to say I still… Yes, absolutely. There are times where they want scripts to budget, and then you say it’s not ready, and they say, “Literally our job is to hand somebody a budget tomorrow. Please give me a thing that I can budget,” which is fine.

It does strike me that even with the consolidation and the conglomeration of these companies that the media business and being a corporation that creates television shows and movies is not the best way to make a gazillion dollars. Jeff Bezos didn’t become a billionaire because of Amazon studios. Apple didn’t become larger than most nations because of Apple Plus. These companies are far bigger than that. If you want to make a lot of money as an individual, man, these hedge funds apparently do quite well.

I still feel like the management in Hollywood, even at the highest levels, on some basic level still also love good stuff. They’re proud of it. They like winning awards. They like being part of culture. They like changing things. They love that. I think on some level they know that involves the human touch, but-

**Chris:** They like one thing more.

**Craig:** Money I assume.

**Chris:** Control.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing about control.

**Chris:** It’s all about priorities.

**Craig:** I will disagree with you on this. There are places that… I work at a place where control is not a priority for them at all. It’s not. What’s a priority for them is that the work is good. That is a priority for them. I salute HBO for that. Obviously, there are lots of places that differ in that.

What I think this quote is getting to is that there is this large chunk of the business, we used to call them programmers, and I wrote on a lot of them, where it was like, the point of this isn’t to be good or special. The point of this is we need this kind of movie doing these following things, hitting this kind of tone for this audience. Go. The fact of the matter is, I believe I have written things that probably AI could have done, will be able to do decently.

**John:** Let’s make a case for the mediocre writer versus the mediocre AI, because in both cases they’ve been trained on a corpus of text, which is all the stuff that came before them. It’s the film student who watched all of the other movies and is just trying to replicate the thing it saw, because the AI’s literally fed all of that popular culture. The best it can do, the best it can reasonably be expected to do, is about middle grade. It can actually make the choice. It can make decisions about what is better and what’s worse.

That may be the saving grace of the mediocre writer is that the mediocre writer still has, to get back to Chris’s thing, still has empathy and taste, still actually understands what is good and what is not good, and may still be aiming for better, even if it doesn’t actually know how to achieve that. It actually has empathy. It knows what it’s like. Going back to a Big Fish or something, knows what it’s like to lose a parent. You actually can have that experience, which an AI can never have. It knows what it’s like to physically be in a body. The AI might be able to come up with a bunch of words that approximate that experience, but it has no real understanding.

Finally, that AI is a chat bot maybe, but you can’t really talk back to it. So much of our job as screenwriters is not just doing what they tell us, but intuiting the note behind the note, intuiting what actually you need to do to get it beyond this next step, how to get it through this development executive to their boss, how to get that director on board. That’s not a thing that an AI is going to understand how to do. It’s not going to be able to think that many levels ahead. I think there’s still a job for a human being there.

I think my concern is that, whereas it used to be us pushing words around, that made us a screenwriter, it might be the person who is writing those prompts and having to deal with all the people that is doing the job of screenwriter. That’s where I think we might get replaced is that it’s we’re the person pushing the buttons but we’re not the real writer, we’re not the person stringing the words together.

**Chris:** Writers have had to, I think, disillusion themselves of certain beliefs, which I think AI is going to push them to have to accept even sooner. There is a lot of dogma around being a screenwriter and what a screenwriter’s role is and also what screenwriters want to do. We talked about this the last time that we all spoke. Actually, you and I spoke. Craig wasn’t there, because he was busy doing other things.

I think the future belongs to the writer-producer. You need to be somebody who not only writes the material but then can be there to help to execute and supervise and deliver that material. You’ve got to get out of the mindset of, I write a screenplay and hand it to other people, and they make the movie the way I think that movies should be made. You have to get away from that. That future has never been a rich one. I really believe that that future is doomed. Now you’re having to compete with a machine.

Whether you write the script or the machinery writes it for the studio executive who cannot write and does not want to hire another writer or doesn’t have the time, it’ll all evolve from, yeah, I would like to hire a writer, but it’ll take me three weeks to make that person’s deal. Then that person will go off, and they have a contractual number of weeks before they have to deliver a draft, etc, etc, etc. I have to deliver this in such and such, in 48 hours, because we have this window and this person is available only for these times. There will be a series of honest compromises that lead to this becoming a necessity and a necessary evil. That’s how I see it.

The writer who’s standing on the other side of it, the person who’s going to be making a living, is the person who’s there’s to fix what the AI broke and then be able to actually carry and deliver it and execute it. You’re always going to need a human being to put the stuff together, the same way AI right now, whatever it’s doing, it needs people. It needs to manipulate, maneuver human beings in the real world to actually pull levers and push buttons.

I don’t know if you read this article about how this AI learned how to lie. In order to bypass a captcha code, it went to some website. I can’t remember the name of it.

**John:** Mechanical Turk or something like that, where it hired, or Fiver.

**Chris:** Yes, it hired a person to get past the captcha for them. That’s the world we’re headed towards.

**Craig:** I think you’re probably underestimating the probability that AI will begin to instruct other AI. You may also be underestimating the probability that we are AI. That’s a topic for-

**Chris:** We don’t know that this conversation is real. None of us are sitting in the same room.

**Craig:** Also define real. I think that in a weird way with all of the cloud around this and how much confusion and possibility there is, it seems to me that it is incumbent upon the labor movement in Hollywood to come to an incredibly simple term, which is only humans write stuff. Man, they’re going to scream about it, but I don’t know how else you get around this.

**Chris:** I know how to get around it. They’ll make up a human. There’ll be somebody out there. There’ll be a well-known writer who you’ll find out 10 years later-

**Craig:** Was fronting for AI?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:20:41].

**Chris:** Yeah, a front. It’ll be a front. By the way, I promise you-

**Craig:** That’s okay.

**Chris:** … there are writers out there who would take 10% of the salary to be the front, to represent an AI and say, “Yeah, that’s who I am.”

**Craig:** How is that already not a show on the air? Let’s go. Let’s go, McQuarrie. The front.

**Chris:** The front.

**Craig:** The front.

**John:** Going all the way back to The Blacklist, where there’s someone up there who’s pretending to be the writer of records. I want to stipulate that the conversation we’re having right now is about the kinds of film and television that we’re making and seeing right now, and so the stuff that we’re writing, that we’re creating, we’re producing. It’s entirely possible that AI could come up with some other kind of entertainment that’s generating itself, that is unique and different and compelling, might replace or displace what it is that we’re doing. That’s a threat not just to us as writers but to the entire film and television industry as we know it right now. That’s not a thing I think we’re qualified to get in the way of. That feels like a bigger governmental action.

I want us to circle back to this notion of Hollywood is built on mediocre stuff. What I like about it is that it’s a recognition that many of us aspire to make the one-of-a-kind, great, unique things. The bulk of what’s on television, the bulk of what is in our theaters every week isn’t even trying to be this great piece of art. It is programmers. There’s nothing wrong with that.

**Craig:** We learn that way. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t written something like that. I know there are some people. By and large, folks like us who have been around for a long time and have worked across the media and have rewritten and written and done originals and all the rest of it, all of us have worked on some of those things for sure. There is no shame in it whatsoever.

Also, again, like I said, it’s how we learn. If the AI is learning, so are we. If you take away the opportunity for humans to be mediocre, they will never get to be great. Even though theoretically McQuarrie was great out the door, what’s been going on is he’s been Benjamin Buttoning talent-wise.

**Chris:** Craig Mazin, everybody. Craig Mazin, dear, dear, dear, sweet friend, Craig Mazin. There is an expression Tom and I talk about all the time, which is educated into stupidity. We learn a lot of very bad habits. We spend a lot of our formative years writing to get past certain people in that chain. You have to write things that feel like a movie to them, even though they don’t actually understand what a shootable document is versus a readable document. We develop a lot of bad habits out of a sheer need for survival.

That is a big part of what feeds into the mediocrity machine is a lot of writers are educated to be mediocre by servicing low-level executives, producers who have had one big credit and now suddenly have all of this authority. You have to get by them. They’re just gatekeepers. Politically they might know how to get a script made, but they don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of telling you what to write so that it’s actually a shootable movie.

When that’s the objective, when the objective is a go movie versus a good movie, you’re always going to get that. Quality is not a standard option. It’s a factory add-on. It’s like, do I want the Blaupunkt stereo or do I want the standard AM/FM radio that they have in the car. Someone in the chain has to demand that this thing be good.

When you’re talking about an assembly line that is about we need it now and we need it at this budget, it’s not that they don’t want quality. Quality is simply not the number one priority. It can’t be, because quality is a nuisance. It’s an absolute burden. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s exhausting. The number of times that you want to just get to what I remember Ed Zwick referred to as the great fuck it. When it’s good enough and you don’t want to do it anymore, you have to have the power and the will, the resources, the credibility, to confront the narrative over and over and over again until it’s good.

When you reach a certain level… When Craig sent me Chernobyl, and I read Chernobyl, and I read the first two episodes and I called him and I said, “This is the most shootable hundred-and-some pages I have ever read.” I can’t understand how Craig Mazin wrote it.

**Craig:** Neither can I.

**Chris:** I said, “What is it?” I asked you in all seriousness. I said, “Where did this come from?” You said, “I finally figured out what I was doing.” You’d been at it for 20 years. I’ve been at it for close to 30 years before I was working on Top Gun: Maverick and saying, “Oh, I actually know what the priorities are now. I actually understand how to structure these things in a way that is instinctive rather than mandated.” You can accelerate that process. You can get through that a lot faster. That involved unlearning 30 years of really shitty habits that have been imposed upon me.

That’s the disadvantage of the writers who are starting out now is they’re swimming upstream against a much stronger current, having to learn the nuts and bolts and the ins and outs of the craft and to get to a place where the complexity becomes simplicity. The headwind that they’re going into now is, “I don’t need you to write the garbage. I don’t need you to do your apprenticeship. I’ve got a machine that can do your apprenticeship.”

I really believe that there needs to be a deconstruction and an education for the writers who are coming, about understanding what’s the priority, what’s the priority of story, how do these things really work, and get people past what I perceive as the absurdity of everybody young starts out thinking they want to make Apocalypse Now in 2001. They want to make all of their heroes’ movies without ever stopping to realize that all of their heroes started out making elevated genre fare and actually knew how to make and had apprenticeships where they just made movies. That’s the key to survival I think is learning how to make nuts and bolts entertainment and arrive at the place where you can then decide, okay, now I’m going to do one for me, where it used to be-

**Craig:** What was Jim Cameron’s first movie? Piranha?

**Chris:** Piranha 2.

**John:** Piranha 2, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, Piranha 2.

**Chris:** Piranha 2.

**Craig:** Didn’t even get to write Piranha 1.

**Chris:** Look, it’s the three guys I’ll use all the time. One made a gangster movie, one made a monster movie, one made a space monster movie. Coppola made The Godfather, Spielberg made Jaws, and Ridley Scott made Alien. They all made elevated genre movies. No one can see my air quotes. They were all artists. They were all auteurs. These are absurd terms that I think create an air of conceit. They were all great filmmakers in their own right, who had to make genre movies if they wanted their shot. If you wanted to make Apocalypse Now, you had to make The Godfather. Some part of Coppola really believed he was slumming when he made-

**Craig:** The Godfather was a pulp novel. It was kind of a trashy novel. When the book came out, it wasn’t like people were like, “Oh my god, this is the equivalent of Lord Jim.”

**Chris:** Killers of the Flower Moon.

**Craig:** It was a sexy book where people were shooting each other.

**Chris:** Jaws is a summer beach novel. Alien was a script by Dan O’Bannon, as pulpy as pulpy science fiction gets. Yet when you look at those films, they’re some of their most powerful and enduring movies. They’re also great cinema by just about anybody’s estimation. They’re movies you can go to and watch again and again and again and again. Machines couldn’t make them.

What’s happened is that a wedge has been driven. It was countersunk and pounded through the industry in the ’70s, in the beginning of the ’70s new wave and the idea of the auteur filmmaker that separated art and entertainment. You either make art or you make entertainment. You are an auteur or you are a shooter or you are a journeyman. I’m still trying to understand what that word means. As opposed to looking at it to say the real art for me, the real craft, what is cinema to me, are the movies that strive to walk the center line between art and entertainment.

You’re trying to pull art closer to entertainment and entertainment closer to art. You’re trying to make a film that engages and enriches the audience. That’s the really fine line. That’s the zone that it’s going to take AI a long, long time to get to.

It’s the zone that writers nowadays are almost engineered to avoid, in pursuit of one of two things. You’re either making mass entertainment for an audience, not the audience, you’re making mass entertainment for the Marvels of the world, the DCs of world, the Disneys of the world, which is all great, or you’re making art for the Academy, for a couple of thousand people, most of whom vote without actually watching every single movie that they’re voting for.

Filmmakers are essentially asked early in their career to make a decision. Are you going to be an artist, are you going to make movies for the Academy, or are you going to be an entertainer? Are you going to be a sellout and go make mass entertainment for those guys? I look at it and say why can’t the objective be Jaws, Aliens, shit, Avatar.

Look at Cameron. He is in a class utterly by himself. He’s the only guy out there understanding if I want to make movies on this big canvas, I need to make movies that everybody’s going to come see. He makes mass entertainment. He’s not ashamed of it. Occasionally, his mass entertainment gets nominated for awards. You don’t see James Cameron courting awards. You see James Cameron like, “I’m out to make mass entertainment. I’m out to reach the widest audience possible.”

It just so happens that his big mass entertainment movies like Avatar have a huge environmental message to them. They’re actually not just junk content. They actually contain big environmental messages about awareness of the world around you. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I don’t see what there is to be allergic about. That’s where I feel like the future of the industry needs to be leaning when we talk about cinema and movies for the big screen.

What Marvel’s doing and what Marvel is I think experiencing right now, they’ve reached a saturation. They’ve isolated their audience. They’ve created a massive, massive, massive audience, but it’s also self-contained. It’s a bubble. They’re not making movies for everybody. They’re making movies for fans of the ever more internal Marvel universe. That’s finite, whereas Cameron can call it like Babe Ruth and say, “My movie’s going to make two and a half billion dollars.” He doesn’t have a massive Marvel universe behind it to do it. There’s huge opportunity there. People have to get over themselves and actually strive for that.

**John:** Chris, what I hear you saying is that in features we have certain filmmakers can prioritize quality over everything else. There’s that classic pick two. You can choose good, fast, or cheap. They’re able to choose good, because they actually have the track record that they can do that. They have started in having to balance those things better when they were making cheaper genre pictures. Now Cameron can spend a billion dollars making a movie, and he has that. On the TV side, we still have brands like HBO, for which quality is their delimiter. HBO has a brand value that is great. You know that a show on HBO is going to have a certain quality. You may like it, or you may not like it.

**Chris:** Quality is their brand.

**John:** Quality is their brand. Do we have on the feature side, quality is our brand? A24 to some degree. They’re always innovative movie. I don’t know they’re always the highest quality. They have a certain point of view. I don’t know. I wonder if we could have basically a film studio that quality is our brand.

**Chris:** Pixar understood. You look at first tier of movies that came out, and that’s what they were dedicated to. Is it sustainable? Is it all good things must end, and there was a very specific group of people shepherding it, it was the objective that everybody wanted? How long can you maintain that, and how finite that group of people is that come with all that education, and are they able to educate other people up into those ranks and to keep that stuff going?

Yes, A24, Working Title, there are certain brands when you look at it and go, “Oh, those, they make those good movies.” There’s a bigger thing at play. I’m looking at Craig right now sitting with the Hollywood Hills behind him. Somewhere behind Craig is the Cinerama dome, which is sitting empty and boarded up. What’s not happening with the A24s of the world and the Working Titles of the world is they’re not making movies that pack cinemas and feed into the health of my other definition of cinema, which is a place you go to watch movies with other people and have a shared experience, which is not only what I think is a really important human thing to do, also it enriches the experience of watching a movie. A horror movie is never as good at home as it is, or certain horror movies, never as good as watching with a crowd of people. Comedies are never as good as watching with a crowd of people and feeding into that.

There are movies that I consider deposits and withdrawals. If you’re making a movie with the intention of drawing the largest possible audience to the cinema, and not an audience, but the audience, you’re making a deposit. You’re actually feeding into that system, and you’re helping that system thrive. If you’re making a movie because how you want critics to feel about you or your film or the awards that you hope to get, and you can convince yourself all you want that the awards that I’m getting are actually good, they’re advertising the film, etc, etc, you’re just admitting that it’s all about money anyway. If you’re making movies for awards and things like that, you’re making a withdrawal.

If you’re not making it to drive the most number of people into the cinema, you’re benefiting from it more than the system is benefiting from it. That’s okay. That’s totally okay to do that. Know that that’s what you’re doing. When you’re making a movie for a streamer, and you’re releasing it in theaters for the requisite number of weeks so that it is eligible for an award, you’re not really paying back into the system. You’re not really here in the name of cinema. You’re there for how the cinema benefits you and not how you benefit the cinema. I don’t look at it that way. My partner doesn’t look at it that way. We look at it like that’s a whole hungry mechanism that desperately needs to be fed, and we make movies for that machine so that machine is there.

**John:** Top Gun: Maverick I think is indicative of that. Top Gun: Maverick was a film that critics loved, audiences loved, theaters loved, that the industry wanted that movie to succeed and was so happy it succeeded, because it was a good movie to see on a big screen with a big audience, and it did great too. The movie could’ve made the exact same amount of money and not had the impact if it hadn’t felt like it was the right moment.

**Chris:** Very early on we said this can’t be a cash grab and that no one will come if it is. When I came on board, the script that I was handed was a lot of fan service, a lot of rehashing of scenes from the original movie. We definitely hit those beats, but we hit those beats in a way that they were echoes of the past and not, oh, let’s just recreate that scene. Do you remember when they made the sequel to Airplane and they just regurgitated the scenes from the original so you got to see them again?

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** That worked in the day when you actually didn’t have home video and you had to wait three years to see that film.

**Craig:** Just to defend them, the sequel was not made my Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker.

**Chris:** Of course. Of course.

**Craig:** They get very upset if anyone thinks that they made that movie.

**Chris:** I’m not talking about whoever made it. I’m just talking about the end result. We knew very, very early on there was an expectation around it that it’s Tom and it’s Top Gun, they’re going to come. Tom was the first guy to say, “No, they’re not. They are not going to come. They are looking at this with suspicion. They’re looking at this as though this is a cash grab, and we have to do everything we can to convince them that this is actually an event that they have to come and see.”

The money that Top Gun made, a surprising amount of it was from repeat viewing, multiple viewings of people coming back to see it over and over and over again. That’s a metric that you don’t see charted a lot is how many of these movies that are making a billion dollars are making a billion dollars because people are going to see them the way we went to see ET and the way we went to see Star Wars over and over and over again in the cinema. What Top Gun is is proof that you can do that. It’s proof that if you make a movie that is that much of an emotional experience…

I read some critique of the movie that said, “Oh, it just feels like every moment in the movie is engineered for the maximum emotional effect.” Yeah. That’s the point. What are you talking about? Isn’t that what you do? Yes, I want you to be completely emotionally engaged in it the entire time. We would sit there and watch it and step back from it and look at it objectively and say, “Now I’m in the audience. How do I feel about this? Why is this not working for me? Why am I watching somebody have an experience rather than having an experience with that protagonist?” People are starved for it. Top Gun demonstrated that they were starved for it. They demonstrated that they don’t reject sincerity and earnestness and optimism. They actually came. They showed up for it, and they enjoyed it.

Top Gun changed the way I will approach every movie I make after Mission Impossible. I had started making Mission before Top Gun came out. Now looking at the experience of Top Gun, the first thing I would start with… With Mission you start with what are the big set pieces and what are the big stunts, what’s going to make this different from all the other Mission Impossibles.

Every movie I start with now is, what do I want the audience to feel when they’re walking out of the theater. What’s the feeling I want them to carry away from it. If the feeling is anything other than I feel great about myself and I want to see that again, why are you making it? You’re making it for yourself and not for-

**Craig:** Hold on. I agree with you completely that the… Certainly how I approach things is what is this… The question I ask is, why should this exist, which is a little different than your question, but it’s related. Why should this exist? The related question to that is, and if it ought to exist, clearly that involves the audience. They need to feel something.

**Chris:** Anything can exist. I want to be very, very clear.

**Craig:** No, why should this exist?

**Chris:** It’s who are you making it for? Ultimately, who is your audience?

**Craig:** I’m simply saying I don’t think feeling good about ourselves is the only feeling that is a valid one to chase with an audience. Sometimes you can get pretty far with people feel sad. I think feeling sad is a strong feeling. I think mourning, I think coming to grips with mortality. There are difficult things we can feel walking out that are very valid. I think where I agree with you is I want them to feel them.

**Chris:** You can feel rewarded and satisfied with those feelings, or you can feel punished and worn out and exhausted and demoralized, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Or provoked. Or provoked.

**Chris:** Or provoked, which a lot of filmmakers seem to embrace as something admirable, that the audience is an obstacle. The audience is a thing that is to be tolerated.

**Craig:** I don’t see it as an either or. I see it as simply, yes, getting an audience to feel something and putting their feelings first is… I completely agree with you. I generally speaking do enjoy movies that make me feel good at the end. Sometimes I like those, and sometimes I like movies that don’t.

**Chris:** I want to be very clear. If you’re going to make a movie that cost $30 million, those concerns are not as big. If you want to make a movie that costs $150, $170, $200 million, my advice to you is everybody should leave the theater feeling really great. It’s all proportionate to who the audience is for that film. If a movie’s got to make that formula of, say, three times what it costs to break even, James Cameron understood there was a certain point at which he realized I’m all in, and everybody on the planet has to love this movie.

**Craig:** Sure. Then there’s The Dark Knight. Then there’s where it’s a massive hit.

**Chris:** How much did The Dark Knight cost versus how much did The Dark Knight make? Chris Nolan is a very, very smart, frugal filmmaker. He understands marketing and how to target his movies. He understood who his audience was. He didn’t indulge in that movie. He didn’t go over budget. He didn’t make a movie [crosstalk 00:43:22].

**Craig:** I’m not suggesting that he did any of those things. I’m simply saying that there are very high-budget, popular hit films that carry through in pop culture and are beloved by people where you don’t walk out feeling warm and fuzzy. That’s all I’m saying.

**Chris:** Yes, I understand.

**Craig:** Usual Suspects was a fantastic film written by this kid from New Jersey, that made me feel terrible at the end but also satisfied.

**John:** Satisfied is a thing.

**Chris:** Satisfied is the word.

**John:** Terrible, great, satisfied is the word.

**Chris:** I’m not talking about warm and fuzzy. I’m not talking about warm and fuzzy. I am saying that if you’re going to make a movie past a certain budget, that’s the way.

**Craig:** I think people should always be satisfied.

**Chris:** Satisfied, absolutely.

**John:** There’s a different metric here. We’re talking about $30 million versus $300 million for a budget. Also, what are you asking of the audience to go and experience your movie? If it’s something that they were going to flip channels to… There’s movies that I’ll watch on a plane, but I’m not going to actually go to the theater to watch. If you’re trying to make a movie that you need to get people to go from their home to a theater, to buy a ticket, to sit in that seat, you’re making a big ask. I think it’s fair that they should have big expectations for what they’re going to get out of that and how they’re going to feel at the end of that. You want to make sure that they are feeling a big feeling from the end of that, which may not need to be the same situation on a made-for-streaming that they’re watching at home. I think there are different expectations there.

**Chris:** In that instance, a streaming movie, plain and simple, it doesn’t have to face an opening weekend. It doesn’t have to compete with anything. Actually, the metric by which a viewing is even measured is not the same. Somebody watches it for a few minutes, turns it off, or turns it on and turns off their TV and goes to bed, and it’s still running in the background and counts as a view. That’s very different than people coming out of their homes and paying money to go and sit and watch that movie. It doesn’t have to confront the same-

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Chris:** … obstacles to whatever a definition of success is, which is great. We talked about this the last time. I am hopeful that the streaming world becomes the test bed, becomes the place where filmmakers can cut their teeth, in an environment where their risk is lower. Their career risk is lower. Their tolerance for failure is much higher. Their budgets are a little more constrained.

It’s the farm system that gets people to the place where they can make bigger movies in cinemas, because that’s the thing that I don’t see. There’s not a mechanism that develops people to the level that most directors are working at now on those big, giant movies. It’s one thing to demand quality and to say I want it to be this thing in the middle. It’s the other thing to actually know how to do that and to prepare and to understand that part of what you have to build into that is, I’m not going to hit a bullet with a bullet straight out of the gate. I’m going to be re-shooting. I’m going to be. I have to build that into it. It’s a very complicated process by which you arrive.

Cameron, look how long it took him to make that movie, in order to make it the box office success that it was, to justify the budget that went into making that movie. Every day he was out there and the movie was getting bigger, the movie had to be that much better. It’s an absolutely terrifying way to work.

**John:** I promised that we would talk about group dynamics. Let’s put that aside for a moment because I actually want to circle back to something you said quite early on in the conversation, which is that Hollywood has decided not to have movie stars. We’ve let our movie star system fall apart. Is this a solvable problem? Why is it a problem? Chris McQuarrie, can you make your case for movie stars?

**Chris:** There are two things that having movie stars would require. One, the studios have to want movie stars. Two, stars have to want to be stars. There are a lot of actors who have the capacity to be giant stars. They are defined by their choices. They’re not leaning into the kind of material that, and the kind of filmmaking that would make them stars. Being a star is a level of commitment. It’s a level of awareness. You have to really control your destiny. You have to really understand filmmaking. You can’t just entrust that to other people. Stars have to want to be stars.

The system, again, the award-driven system that tells you you either win Oscars or wear a cape, there’s not a thing in the middle that’s leaning towards encouraging people to be more traditional movie stars. There’s not an incentive to be Clark Gable. There’s not an incentive to be Marilyn Monroe, and yet the business needs those. People want those icons.

You see people time and again arrive in a place where you’re thinking this person’s really going to pop, this person’s really going to take off, this person’s going to be a big star, and then you watch their subsequent choices. It’s not that there was something in the water in the ‘40s that isn’t there now. There was a different system that cultivated those people and that groomed them to be stars, and then the stars themselves understood this is what I need to do to protect my brand and to put myself forward. Humphrey Bogart was a very, very smart filmmaker. Clark Gable was a very smart filmmaker. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas were giant movie stars. They were also very, very, very smart about how to make themselves stars and to keep themselves stars.

**John:** Craig, how do we get there? How do we get movie stars back, or do we get movie stars back?

**Craig:** Movie stars are enormously helpful to center our culture, because the culture that we create is about human beings. It’s about the human condition, whether it’s a comedy or a drama. We identify with certain humans because of a kind of magic they have.

Tom Hanks is a human being that hundreds of millions of human beings connect to, even though he doesn’t know them. There is something in his eyes. There is something about the way his mind works and connects to his face and his eyes and his voice.

The problem that we have is that we have cheapened fame. The fame is useless now. Everyone’s famous. Fame doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. Fifteen minutes? Everyone’s famous for the rest of their lives. That’s my turn on Warhol. Everyone is now famous forever, because everybody is everywhere, seeing each other. It’s harder and harder to find the signal amidst the noise. It really is. Hollywood tries really hard. There are examples where they try to make people stars. They work on it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

**Chris:** Choices.

**Craig:** There are people who still emerge from all of this mess. The person that comes to mind is Zendaya. Zendaya’s a star. Zendaya’s going to be a star for the rest of my life. She will be a star for the rest of my children’s lives. That’s how that’s going to be. You can just see it. She’s a star. It’s still possible. When we find people like that, it’s important. Timothee Chalamet is a star. That’s just the way it is. We used to grow a lot more of them. It’s just hard now. It’s hard to figure out who is a star and who just has a whole lot of followers.

**John:** For sure. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. Chris, I see you with an object in your hands. What is this One Cool Thing you want to share with us?

**Chris:** It’s called the Anker 3-in-1 Cube. This is my favorite new little gadget. It’s a great travel gadget. It’s a great desktop gadget. It charges an iPhone. It charges your earbuds. It’s got this little pop-out thing that charges your Apple Watch with the fast charging standard.

**John:** Nice.

**Chris:** It’s all three in one, all in this nice little cube that actually folds up with one little click, goes in your bag, or just sits nicely on your desk and takes up very little space. It’s my favorite gadget. I love it.

**Craig:** That’s A-N-K-E-R I’m presuming.

**Chris:** A-N-K-E-R, Anker [AYN-kr] or Anker [AHN-kr]. When you go on Amazon, they’re an electronics powerhouse.

**Craig:** They make a lot of USB hubs and things.

**Chris:** Yes, hubs and batteries and things like that. I have to say I’m always suspicious of those brands that exist only on the internet. I have to say I have a lot of their products. They’re actually very good. This is my very favorite one of them.

**Craig:** Look at this free ad for Anker. Unbelievable.

**Chris:** Free ad for Anker. You noticed I’m wearing the Anker T-shirt and baseball cap, and my car has an Anker skin on it.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Craig, what is your free ad for?

**Craig:** My free ad is for something that I honestly think is magic. I don’t understand how this works. Are you familiar with goodrx.com?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** I don’t understand it, but I think I know what it does.

**Craig:** Here’s this insanity. If you are getting a prescription medication and for some reason your insurance doesn’t cover it, either because the med isn’t covered by your insurance or let’s say in the case of where I ran into this, I had a prescription that I was getting locally at the Rite Aid, but then my doctor was like, “Okay, let’s actually go through Express Meds,” which is our long-term medication thing through the WGA.

While I’m waiting for them to ship it, there’s a week where I need to get it refilled, but Rite Aid was like, “Sorry, they’ve already done it that way. We can’t do it this way on your insurance. However, why don’t you just go to goodrx.com?” I was like, “I don’t want to buy it from another company.” They’re like, “No, just go to goodrx.com, type in the drug you want.” Then it says, okay, where would you like to get this medicine from? One of the things is Rite Aid. They have CVS. They have Walgreens. They have everybody. I click on Rite Aid, and this little coupon comes up. I show it to them. They type the number in. They’re like, “Okay, so instead of being $5,973, it’s $12, also without insurance.” Without insurance.

Now, how is this working? I do not know, and I also am on the verge of not caring, because it does. It’s startling. If you have a prescription and it’s not covered by your insurance, goodrx.com apparently figures it out anyway.

**John:** They’re giving you some sort of a coupon, rebate code thing. It’s putting it in some group plan. It’s doing behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

**Craig:** Shenanigans.

**John:** Great. Shenanigans. Our whole health system is shenanigans. Chris McQuarrie’s laughing there because he’s in the UK.

**Chris:** It’s the way you went, “Shenanigans.”

**Craig:** It is shenanigans.

**Chris:** The answer is shenanigans.

**Craig:** Shenanigans. You know what? I love it. Great. Whatever it is.

**Chris:** It’s a scientific explanation.

**Craig:** If I open the door of the goodrx.com company and the inside is filled with nothing but leprechauns, I’m just going to close the door, back away, and drive away. That’s fine. I don’t care how it’s working. All I know is, what the hell is that? Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** There’s my free ad.

**John:** My free ad is for Signal, which people are listening to this saying, “You’re just now discovering Signal?” Signal is the messaging app. It’s known as being encrypted, which is great. Love it. It’s actually much better for… We had these group email threads that were getting endless and long and terrible. It’s all people who need to talk about one thing. It was these emails that were going back and forth. It was a disaster. We wisely moved over to Signal. There’s just a channel on Signal, which we’re all in this group chat. It’s so much better of an experience. If you are stuck in a group email or a group text situation, try Signal for it, because it honestly has been so much better of an experience going through this. It’s simpler than setting up a new Slack instance. It’s free. It’s been just a great experience. Signal I would recommend if you are in a group conversation situation.

**Chris:** I got rid of WhatsApp and only use Signal. It’s actually great. Signal’s the best one, most secure too.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We’re coming up with this Episode 600 T-shirt, so stay tuned for that. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the movie theater experience. Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much for coming back on our program.

**Craig:** Thank you, Chris.

**Chris:** My pleasure. We’ll do team dynamics in a hundred episodes.

**John:** Love it. Perfect.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Chris McQuarrie, let’s say you’re making some giant movie that’s coming out, perhaps in a summer at some point. If I have my choice of theaters and theater experiences to go to, what do you think is the best, current in the United States at least, that I could go see a film like the one you might want to make?

**Chris:** It’s a very tricky question. The great leveler for me is Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. Sound is a huge component for me. I consider sound and music to be a full third of the experience. I think your sound design and your score are actually more important than any dialog in the movie. Dolby Atmos is the way to do it. Dolby Vision is truly amazing.

**John:** What is Dolby Vision?

**Chris:** Dolby Vision is the Dolby projection system, these laser projectors that are super high-definition laser projectors, which are one of the things you’ll experience when you go to a lot of your movie theaters. There’s foot-lamberts, I believe it is, the brightness in the bulb. Most projectors that you’re seeing, the bulbs are either not replaced frequently enough, they’re not properly maintained. A lot of times, when you’re going to the movie theater, you’re watching what should be, I think it’s at 11 foot-lamberts, you’re watching it at 9 or 8 or even less than that. Dolby Vision, its standard is 14, I think. I should not be giving you all the technical on it, only that it is extremely bright, clear image. The blacks are very, very black and very defined.

A great demonstration I saw of it, you sit in this theater and you watch them project black onto the screen. The black is actually very, very, very dark gray, because how can you get black if you’re projecting onto the screen? Dolby Vision can project proper black onto the screen. When you see it, the difference is quite startling. You get an incredibly rich image, and you get incredibly immersive sound. It’s to me in an all around. Dolby Vision, it can be in different sized auditoriums. For me, if I was going to build a theater in my home and had all the money in the world, I’d build a Dolby Vision.

**Craig:** You got close. I don’t know what you’re waiting for. I agree completely.

**Chris:** You’d be tragically surprised.

**Craig:** Is someone spending money in your house or something? I don’t know.

**Chris:** When you spend five years making a movie instead of two and a half-

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, there is that. I agree with Chris McQuarrie. Take that to the bank, my friends.

**Chris:** What?

**Craig:** Take that to the bank.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yes, that is absolutely correct. The future of projection is lasers, without a doubt. This problem of dim bulbs, as I’ve been saying for a long time, is brutal. Even without Dolby Surround and all that stuff, sound when we were kids was still pretty impressive because of the number of speakers and the size of speakers in a large auditorium situation. Sound has obviously gotten really, really good. Even at home, we can get really, really good sound. The projection on a large screen is difficult for people to have at home. I’m putting aside the communal experience watching a movie. The visual aspect, if it is a Dolby visual, it is a dramatic improvement.

Also, let us take a moment. If you do watch things at home and you’re making your own theater, let us take a moment to talk about something that is near and dear to both my heart and Mr. McQuarrie’s heart and any rational human being’s heart, which is to turn off your fucking motion smoothing. Get your remote out and turn that shit off. Go into the settings. It’s in advanced settings. Anything that’s called smoothing, motion, anything with the word smooth or motion, turn off. Turn it off. It’s crap.

**Chris:** Turn it off.

**Craig:** Crap.

**Chris:** It’s video interpolation.

**Craig:** It’s awful. Awful.

**Chris:** It’s terrible. It’s terrible. Whole generations of audiences are being conditioned to watch-

**Craig:** Crap.

**Chris:** … what Rian Johnson described as liquid diarrhea.

**Craig:** I saw a trailer. I think I was showing somebody the trailer for Chernobyl before it had come out. I was in his house. I just Apple TV’ed it over to his television to watch it. I turned it off within three seconds. I’m like, “Nope. You’ve got motion smoothing on.”

**Chris:** Can’t watch it that way.

**Craig:** It made me feel horrible. It made me feel like I had screwed up so terribly by creating Days of Our Lives – Chernobyl. It just looked so awful. Turn that shit off. That aside, theater-wise, Dolby. Dolby visual.

**John:** Chris, I remember when THX came out. It was an accreditation system, basically making sure that the theater itself actually met certain standards. I remember a THX guy came to one of our classes at USC and said, “If you have a choice of where to sit in a theater, you should sit about two thirds of the way back and in the center, because that’s basically where the filmmaker probably was situated as they were mixing the film.” Is that still an accurate way of thinking about, given your druthers, where a person might want to choose to sit?

**Chris:** I can tell you that when I go to test movies, I end up in the back of the theater most often. It’s the only time I sit in the back of the theater. It’s truly horrible back there, no matter how good the auditorium is, because you’re in the surrounds. You’re not in the center five one. You’re not in that center channel. They’re fairly well balanced. If you’re in the center, anywhere between the front and the middle of the auditorium generally, I don’t sit that far back.

When I’m mixing the movie and our mixing stage, the thing we’re constantly reminding ourselves of is that you will never see the movie or hear the movie as good as the filmmakers do on their state-of-the-art mixing stage. We actually have settings whereby, because we know that there are going to be projectors with a shitty bulb, if you have a scene that’s dark, we’ll deliberately dim it, to look at it and say, is there going to be any detail when you’re watching this in a shitty theater that hasn’t been updated in 12 years, because they don’t make enough money? We’ll deaden the sound. We’ll do stuff like that.

That’s why those things are really important. That’s why when you see Dolby Atmos, you know you are getting a quality, standardized, and probably fairly recently updated system. If you do that, Dolby Atmos is pretty immersive, regardless of where you’re sitting in the theater. It’s different from theater to theater. It’s hard to say definitively.

**John:** My final question for you, Chris, is, Nicole Kidman in the AMC ad talks about sound you can feel. As you are mixing sound, are you only thinking about the actual sound that you’re able to project, or is there something about… Some of these theaters now actually have special extra vibrational things. Is that something you now consider with the kind of movies you’re making?

**Chris:** You will hear more and more a term, PLF, premium large format. Premium large format, there is IMAX, there’s Dolby Vision, there’s 4DX, which is what you’re talking about where it has the shaky seats, and there’s one called ScreenX, which is now they have screens on the side of the theater.

**John:** Our Koreatown theater has that, which is really cool.

**Chris:** When I first heard about it, I thought, what? Then I saw. Like 3D, it’s something where it can be done right, or the movie suits it or the movie doesn’t. Sometimes the transfer really works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on how much time and work and effort they put into it. Yes, sound you could feel, absolutely. Even if I’m doing something that’s not 4DX or ScreenX, the mixes I like are mixes that you can feel. There are elements in Dead Reckoning, for instance, that you primarily feel. You’ll never experience them on home video the way that you will in a theater. You’ll hear it in home video, but in a theater you’ll actually physically feel it. It’s actually something we’ve done with a malevolent force. In our movie, we created a sound element that is as much physical as it is audible.

**John:** Awesome. Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Chris.

**Chris:** Thank you.

Links:

* Chris McQuarrie on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/christophermcquarrie)
* [The looming threat of AI to Hollywood, and why it should matter to you](https://www.vox.com/culture/23700519/writers-strike-ai-2023-wga) by Alissa Wilkinson for Vox
* [Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe](https://www.anker.com/products/y1811?variant=42206465327254)
* [Signal](https://signal.org/en/)
* [GoodRx](https://www.goodrx.com/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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