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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/18606).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put in those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 445 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today it’s our very first ever live video Scriptnotes. We have some number of people watching us live on YouTube, each of them wondering, wait, is that what Craig and John actually look like?

**Craig:** No. This is not what we look like.

**John:** No. So we do live shows fairly often, a couple times a year. We do one in Austin generally. We do a holiday show. This is a special occasion so we’re doing one live streaming on the Internet. People aren’t really here to see us. They’re here to see our two very special guests who we’re going to bring out in a moment. We’re also today going to have a game segment. We’re going to have audience questions. So it will be like our normal live show, except I won’t have had 1.5 glasses of wine which is the amount of wine I need basically to do a live show.

**Craig:** And that’s a bummer because you will be 1.5 times less entertaining. I’m just going to be honest.

**John:** Yes. So, this is 10am. We’re recording this on a Saturday in Los Angeles. But people around the world are watching this which is so exciting. So, as we’re talking right now I now see that there are, let’s see, how many people are watching this? 654 people–

**Craig:** We’re on our way to 14,000 which is my – that’s my target, 14,000. Yeah. Seems reasonable. A small arena. That’s how I work.

**John:** So this is free for the world. This is not a fundraiser for anything. This is just a morale raiser. But for Premium subscribers, Craig you don’t know that we’re going to do this. We’re going to do a postmortem after the show, maybe tomorrow we’ll record this, to figure out what we learned and what went well and what went wrong in the process.

**Craig:** Great. I’m sure that under what went wrong I will feature heavily.

**John:** [laughs] It is a weird moment in which we’re all now just broadcasters. Somehow we’re supposed to be doing television, just everyone.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it turns out that broadcasting is not the rare talent that we were all told it was.

**John:** Mm-mm. Anybody can do it in their basement.

**Craig:** Yeah. People would say you’re no brain surgeon or radio broadcaster. Well, we’re all–

**John:** We’re all broadcasters now.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all broadcasters now. It’s not hard. It’s not hard.

**John:** All right. Let us welcome our two very, very special guests. First off can I welcome Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She is an Emmy, Golden Globe-winning writer, and actor, whose credits include Killing Eve and Fleabag. She’s joining us from London. Phoebe Bridge, please turn on your camera and join us on Scriptnotes.

**Phoebe Waller-Bridge:** Hey.

**John:** Phoebe!

**Craig:** There she is.

**Phoebe:** We did it!

**John:** We did it.

**Craig:** She looks just like she does on TV. It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s incredible. Actors are wonderful, beautiful people.

**Phoebe:** I know.

**John:** Phoebe it is so wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much. It’s a fantasy to have you on the show at all, but to have you all the way from London is a special, special treat.

**Phoebe:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Our second guest, Ryan Reynolds is an actor, writer, producer, gin magnate, and somehow a wireless provider. He’s known for such films as Deadpool and The Nines. Ryan Reynolds—

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Ryan Reynolds!

**Ryan:** You forgot some of my awards like MTV Movie Award Best Kiss nominee 1998.

**Craig:** Good year.

**Ryan:** Very good year.

**Craig:** Who won? Who could have possibly beaten you?

**Ryan:** I think Tobey Maguire. Pretty sure it was Tobey Maguire. Hi everybody.

**John:** Ooh.

**Ryan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** It’s nice to have everyone here together, around the world, to talk and do things. And we’re all looking directly at our camera lenses which is something which is a question I want to start off asking the two of you about, because last week on the show we were talking about Clueless. We did a deep dive on Clueless which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And we were talking about how important Cher’s narration was in Clueless because she is talking directly to us as an audience about her experiences and we would not understand the movie without that.

But the two of you are known for looking directly at the lens and talking to the audience and having a relationship with the audience as characters which is so different from most movies. So let’s start with you, Phoebe. As a writer and as a performer how do you make that decision to suddenly start talking directly to the people watching and what’s the decision process in terms of when is the right time to break that seal?

**Phoebe:** Well Fleabag started as a play and it was a one-woman play. So that was all directed to the audience anyway. And I always felt like I wanted the audiences’ experience to be that they feel like they know someone really intimately and then they get sort of betrayed by her halfway through. So it starts off as a sort of mini sort of standup act. And then you realize halfway through that actually there’s sort of more going on. And that by the time you like her and she’s made you laugh she then divulges things to you that you feel uncomfortable about but you feel complicit in that moment. And so bringing that into the TV show sort of felt like a no-brainer.

But then what was hard was that when I was doing the play I was the only person there. It was a lonely experience. And also I was in total – the character in that was completely in control of the narrative. Whereas suddenly in the TV show there’s actual real life things happening around that are also truthful. So I had to kind of shift it so she wasn’t just the only person describing the world. You could see the world. So then it had to become about her – about having fun with it a bit more. So she would tell you someone was going to behave in a certain way and then they don’t. And then she’s actually a bit knocked by that. So lots of little sort of games and stuff that we were playing throughout it.

But overall for me in the TV show it was to create a relationship between Fleabag and the camera that actually changed and evolved itself. So, at the beginning she’s sort of like, “Come in. This is going to be fun, and sexy, and cool, and I’m in total control.” And then by the end of the first season the camera won’t leave when she wants it to. So she’s like, “Oh, fuck, I should never have done that. I should never have let you in.” So sort of made it a central relationship.

**Craig:** Is there any parallel to your actual life now that the camera will not leave you alone? Oh, fuck, why did I do that?

**Phoebe:** I mean, yeah. It cuts quite close to the bone there, Craig.

**Craig:** Good. That’s my job here is to upset. Ryan, say something that I can then make you feel bad about.

**Ryan:** Oh, please, there’s ideas, a whole list alphabetical and chronological that you could probably make me feel bad about.

**John:** But Ryan I was going to say as long as I’ve known you you’ve been trying to make the Deadpool movie. So you were always obsessed with this character and this character in the comic books did break that fourth wall and seemed to be aware that he was in a comic book. But at what stage did it become clear that, oh, in playing this role I will be directly addressing the audience? There’s going to be a relationship between me and the audience that’s different than sort of a normal hero.

**Ryan:** On Deadpool in particular he has a very intimate relationship with the audience. I mean, even by virtue of the fact that Deadpool exists is exclusively because of the Internet and the audience that made it happen after the test footage leaked that we’d made years before. They were the ones that sort of generated the energy that convinced the studio to say, yes, we’ll make this film.

So, it sort of started off that way and I love it. I love how intimate – there’s an intimate relationship there. Deadpool is constantly acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape. And I think in doing that there’s a bit of a nod-nod-wink-wink with the audience. So, it’s always been – it’s just something to be judicious about with us. I find that less is more with it. I mean, by the second movie I think we’d done it about half as much as the first one. But I do love it. I do love a good fourth-wall break.

**Craig:** There’s something about that connection that both of you guys do that I find fascinating in its relationship to comedy particular. Because I do love comedy, you’re both hysterical. Fleabag is wonderfully funny. Deadpool is wonderfully funny. But you are also talking to the man that was crying on a plane at the end of Deadpool 2. Crying. Like a lot. [laughs] And I was crying a lot because I cared.

**Ryan:** The efficacy of alcohol is much more severe on an airplane.

**Craig:** I wasn’t even drinking. I was not drinking. It was just that because you loved her and you got to say goodbye. Anyway, the point is when you are having these conversations with people it seems to me that you are also getting at something that is true underneath comedy in general which is that funny characters at their best are funny because we understand also that they are sad. That in some way there is something profoundly sad about everyone that is being really, really funny.

And I’m curious what you think about that in terms of how you create your particular characters that you’re so well known for and why people connect to them so well, especially when they’re kind of one-on-one.

**Ryan:** Hopefully this will be pithy, but I do think that the key difference is one is obnoxious and then funny to me is usually steeped or filtered through some kind of prism of pain or you’ve earned it in some way, otherwise you’re just spouting obnoxious jokes. So, that’s always the trick. I know certainly for Deadpool it was always a trick to weight the B side of everything or the A side depending on how it’s constructed but with some pathos or some kind of pain. And it’s also what I find most challenging about writing on Deadpool is that we really have to take everything away from this guy in order for him to exist, otherwise he would just be too much. So you have to – for both of those movies – we have to strip everything that he holds dear away in order to create this real estate in which we can sort of create a bit of a playground. So making that guy the underdog by virtue of his face, he’s all sort of scarred up. He looks sort of hideous under the mask. All those kinds of things. Those are all, I think, those are all the key ingredients to allowing this guy to sort of spread his wings and fly and be as funny as possible.

So, that’s the sort of unsexy work that goes into it. But I do think, I just don’t want to forget this, I think the most beautiful use of a fourth wall breakup I’ve ever seen is Phoebe’s in the last season of Fleabag. That goodbye was, uh, it just – it pulled every vital source of oxygen out of my body. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** It’s also, I mean, let’s just buff her up a little bit more here. The moment where Andrew Scott notices the camera was one of the first acts of actual cinematic invention I think I’ve seen ever. Because I think by the time like I came along in 1971 they’d invented everything. We had flashbacks and montages. People had broken the fourth. But that was astonishing. It was so astonishing – it was a brand new way to tell people in an audience she’s in love with him and he’s special and he deserves it because he’s on that – what a brilliant…what a brilliant thing to do.

Why are you so smart? There’s your question.

**Phoebe:** Um…well. I’m going to put it down to, do you ever – I don’t know if you guys have this, but you know sometimes when you slightly dissociate yourself from ideas that you have? Because that one I do – I remember having that idea really early on before I’d even come up with the character of the priest. Thinking, fuck, that is smart. And it happens but it’s like outside of you, so like all the painful stuff happens like when you’re actually trying to make something work or fit together, but there are moments – and literally I was thinking – it was less of “fuck this is smart,” more like “that will be cool.” And it just affected me in a way.

And I thought but what would that mean for her? Because I think like Ryan was saying you’re constantly trying to find a way to throw rocks at your characters and like especially if they’re funny. Because being funny takes a confidence. And also to be able to be relentlessly funny takes an awful lot of effort. And I think if you meet people in real life who are just like constantly on, you know, you think the [unintelligible] so hard underneath and you think why are you working so hard?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Phoebe:** And what are you hiding?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** What happens when you stop? And in some ways that was what the idea when Fleabag began anyway was that she was just the first five minutes of this, like when I first started writing the play was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. And I was getting exhausted. And I was like she is clearly miserable. And then it was finding out what that was.

But I also think there’s g really heroic about people who try and be funny. Because you can die multiple times in a moment and there’s a real risk in it. And so people being really funny in a really heartbreaking situation can feel both heroic or can feel kind of cowardly at the same time. And I think that’s a really fun thing to be able to play with in a moment. And also the moments that the character isn’t funny, or doesn’t crack a joke and actually lets you in a little bit, is a really powerful tool to have.

**Craig:** Right.

**Phoebe:** But I think, yeah, I have to believe that the funniest people in the world are in deep, deep pain. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** Like you say, otherwise it is just endlessly – they just get boring after a while.

**John:** So a question for both Phoebe and Ryan, as you’re doing asides to the camera, as you’re having this direct relationship with the audience, as the writer and as the actor who are you seeing there as the audience? Are you really playing it to the camera operator right behind that? Or are you trying to picture the viewer at home? Who is the person you’re having a relationship with when you’re doing these asides?

**Ryan:** I mean, I typically just right down the barrel. I’m also not, you know, I don’t come from any particular – as you may or not know – school of acting. So I don’t have – person, tennis ball, whatever. [laughs] You know, I can do it. So I don’t need to have that extra feedback in order to kind of pull off the two camera look. It dos help if I enjoy the A-camera operator in the moment because, you know, I feel like you’re sort of delivering it right to him, or her. But that’s, yeah, no, it’s just right down the barrel.

If the camera is too close, though, you can get a little cross-eyed. And I’m naturally cross-eyed, so it’s already an uphill battle.

**John:** Phoebe who is the audience as you’re doing your things?

**Phoebe:** Just the audience. I think I’m the same. I didn’t think of anything too romantic to think about because I don’t know how I’d act that actually, how I’m going to act continuously that there’s another mysterious person that I’m thinking of and trying to communicate that to the audience would feel like a complicated message to get over which is why I think.

So, yeah, I just imagined an audience. And also I felt like the part of it that Fleabag was just desperately trying to keep their attention. So every time looking at the camera was stay with me, I’m here. And then when it changed it would be like, oh, don’t look at me. So sometimes it was a happy welcoming thing, and sometimes it would feel like, you know, an evil eye.

But, yeah, the relationship with my DP who was the camera operator as well was really important, especially when he was like, “Put your face down. You look gross.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Phoebe:** It’s like, “Head up. Head up.” But I really loved in Deadpool 1 as well that really little moment when you just pushed the camera aside and you just give us that little break. And you go, “I don’t think you guys want to see that.” And the fact that he has care for us in it really – because there’s so much bravado and then he’s actually like, “Oh, actually give yourself a break.” I really loved that bit.

**Craig:** Fleabag and the Deadpool movies both have this meta awareness which does not undermine the reality of what they’re doing at all. It kind of oddly enhances it. It’s a common thing I think for people to think when they’re writing something that if you start to break the fourth wall what you’re doing is blowing apart the reality of the situation therefore people will not care about the characters.

So, I’m kind of curious as you guys went through this process, and Ryan I know you were writing on Deadpool 2, as you were writing was this a concern that maybe by doing this too much or in the wrong places that you would undermine what was real and what people would care about, or did you have an innate sense that if it was done in certain ways and certain times it would actually make us connect more to the fake reality of the world you were building?

**Ryan:** I think it’s both. I think it’s a cheat, for me at least. I’m not going to speak for Phoebe or anyone else. But for me it’s a bit of a cheat, you know. I think you want to be very judicious with it and you want to make sure that you’re not overdoing it obviously. But there’s a whole sequence. I remember, I don’t know about you guys, but I find I can spend two days – first off, let me just say this is the perfect [unintelligible] – I hate writing. I just hate it. It’s the worst thing ever.

**Craig:** No, that’s accurate.

**Ryan:** I find that I can get fixated on two lines for like four straight days. I can just be hammering away, fixated on these two when I should just be moving on. And then other days I can put out 20, 30 pages. But I remember there was this one scene in Deadpool which is like a 15-page scene which is already a bit of a no-no in a film—

**Craig:** Slightly.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But it’s a scene where Deadpool has lost the lower half of his body and he has these little child legs growing back. And I loved writing it because as long as you can go in the scene without revealing these child legs to me was very funny. And then we get into some kind of weird cinematic trope where I break the fourth wall and I – oh, we’re talking about time travel that was it, which is also another just horrendous thing to write.

And I remember breaking the fourth wall and saying, “That’s just lazy writing.” So, you know, really that’s a complete cheat because that was lazy writing and we’re forgiven for it to a certain degree by acknowledging that it’s lazy writing. And then kind of carrying on.

But I tend to use it initially as a crutch a lot. And it’s rarely written into the screenplays. I mean, Deadpool we almost never wrote it in. And then Deadpool 2 I think it was written in at one point during an extraordinarily belabored death sequence at the end of the movie. I just did a couple in the script. I wrote, you know, “straight to camera.” But other than that we didn’t, you know.

**Phoebe:** You had decided to do it before filming though? But it wasn’t in the script?

**Ryan:** Oh yes. Oh, 100%. Yes. Breaking the fourth wall. That’s actually not an invention of ours. That’s from the comic books. He’s constantly talking to the reader in the comics. But we did this elaborate death sequence at the end of Deadpool 2 and I was just doing everything – at one point I even did somebody’s award speech from the Golden Globes straight to camera. It was another person’s. Absolutely kitchen sink type stuff.

**Phoebe:** Oh, I can see just that moment right now.

**Ryan:** Right. Just on and on and on and on. But it was, yeah, I do love it. I mean, I do really love that sort of after a while it creates a bit of a trust I think there. And just as long as you don’t overdo it.

**Craig:** You planned for it to happen but you did not plan ahead in terms of actually writing what it was that you were going to say or even when it was going to happen.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** Whereas Phoebe, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and think that you planned it all pretty carefully because you were coming from the stage where obviously you had to perform every night in the same way.

**Phoebe:** Yeah, yeah. And I crumble under the pressure to be able to be spontaneous with the straight to camera. I would lean on the script. In terms of how many times I spoke to the camera that was really scripted. But there were looks that weren’t scripted. I went with abandon with that when we were shooting. And then we just took them all out.

**Craig:** Not all.

**Phoebe:** I was like being all creative. And there’s a cut of the first episode of the second series when I just wanted to see what it looked like when there was just no looks to camera or no talking to camera at all. And my poor editor Gary was sort of like, “Are we really going to do this?” And just to see how it sits without it so you can feel the impact of it again. And we just scripted so far back, because I think it can get irritating because there’s a self-awareness about it and somebody being consistently self-aware all the time is a bit like the same thing as someone making jokes the whole time. But it’s almost like commenting on what’s happening. And so I did put it back quite a lot.

But, god, I really went for it in a few scenes and it’s a shame. It’s a shame.

**Ryan:** You would side eye the camera, though, which was just one of my favorite things that you would do. In an emotional moment there would just be this little side eye glance to the camera. Oh, it was such a great use of it.

**Craig:** I do them sometimes. I try and do them. Like in my house sometimes if something happens—

**Ryan:** Always.

**Craig:** And I screw up. There’s one thing that I always do from the Howard Stern movie Private Parts where he’s gotten his first job at a radio station and he pours Dr. Pepper on a record and he goes [laughs like Howard] and I’ll do that any time I drop something. And now if I screw something up or somebody says something ridiculous I’ll just sometimes look over. I’ll look over to a Fleabag camera and just go…

**Phoebe:** Oh good. Good.

**Craig:** You’ve ruined me.

**John:** Nice. Well, let’s talk about self-awareness because both of you are writing things in which you are going to star. And you’re going to be the principal person we’re going to see on screen. And it must change your relationship to the material and to all your collaborators. So you are the person, you’re the face of this thing, but you have directors, you have producers, you have other actors in the thing. How do you balance, and especially both in production, but when you get to post, how do you balance your relationship as the person who created this thing with the person who is the centerpiece star of it? How do you take in outside feedback to make sure you’re doing the right things? You are the center of this whole project. How do you make sure that it actually makes sense? Who do you turn to and how do you have those conversations?

Ryan, I’ll start with you. Who do you enlist in your circle of trust because the camera is aimed at you and you’re talking directly to the camera, how do you know when you’ve gone too far? How do you know when to rein it back in?

**Ryan:** First off, fuck everyone else’s opinion.

**Craig:** There we go. There it is. I knew it. I knew it.

**Ryan:** Secondly, no. I am so self-loathing. You know, look, this panel of people right here have forgotten more about screenwriting on this call than I’ll ever know.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** I’ll start with that. But I’ll say this, though. I am so self-loathing that there is no part of me that is really precious about more me in anything. I do struggle, you know, this film I did this year called Free Guy, which is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever been a part of, I struggled writing other people in it. Not myself so much, but I did struggle making sure that their voices felt three-dimensional and important. It’s easy to give other people jokes. But, yeah, in the post-production process sitting in there I had no problem. My biggest problem is pulling out too much stuff. You know, I’ll start to – I’ll pull stuff out and the editor or in this case Shawn Levy who I was working with, the director and producer, he would say that you’re taking out exposition at this point. You’re taking out important information that we need to know. Just because you don’t want yourself…

So, yeah, that’s never been a huge problem of mine. But then there’s also – the flip side is I can get a little crazy about certain jokes or beats or things that are for whatever reason super important to me. But, you know, I take feedback in a test audience the same way anyone else takes feedback in a test audience. I can walk away and if there’s a resounding no to something then it’s got to go.

**Craig:** Phoebe, self-loathing also?

**Phoebe:** Yeah, huge amounts of self-loathing. All the way through every part of the process. I lean really heavily on my director, Harry Bradbeer, and my producer, Tony Robbins. Because they are really brutally honest. No matter how much that hurts it’s so valuable. But also there’s sometimes when I, from a performance point of view, I feel there’s so much going on. Sometimes I just wouldn’t know. And feeling like you’re in it when you’re also running it and that kind of stuff is a luxury. I don’t feel very in it all the time as an actor. I don’t actually know if I’ve felt like that to be honest. It’s so bad.

But so I would – I’d just be like is it funny, is it sad? Basically is like the question that would be thrown across the set. Sad enough? And Harry would be like, “Sadder.”

So, I really rely on them. And then I suppose, I can’t remember what the other thing I was going to say. What was the other thing that Ryan said?

**Ryan:** I don’t know. No idea.

**Craig:** He’s not good at writing. And…

**Ryan:** And now, yeah.

**Phoebe:** Oh yeah, he’s a terrible actor. He’s terrible at writing. Really bad at producing.

**Ryan:** I’m OK at some stuff. I’m OK – I can drink like a fish. Yeah.

**John:** Ryan, I think we can help you out because from the very start of Scriptnotes we’ve been trying to offer sort of useful advice. And to steer people away from bad advice that they often get as screenwriters. Because new screenwriters are sort of inundated – they read the books. They go online. They look through all these guides to teaching you how to be a better screenwriter, how to even get started as a screenwriter. So I thought we might play a game the four of us together to figure out sort of like how to sort through the good advice and the bad advice.

So what I did last night is I went online and I Googled “screenwriting mistakes” and I pulled some of the advice I found online about screenwriting mistakes. And I’m going to invite on a contestant to play this game with us.

**Craig:** Hey Paige.

**Paige Feldman:** Hi.

**Phoebe:** Hi Paige!

**John:** Paige, can you introduce yourself?

**Paige:** Hi, I am Paige Feldman. I’m a writer and director. I’m living in Los Angeles. I just signed my first feature deal like on Monday.

**Phoebe:** Yay.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** How about that? We have really – I mean, our listeners are quality.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Paige, this is going to be a game segment. So what I’ve done is I’ve pulled this advice from the Internet but it also introduced some things I just made up myself. And so your job is going to be to figure out what was real bad advice and what is fake bad advice. And so as a new screenwriter this is important stuff for you to figure out.

Now, I should ask you have you ever played on a game show before?

**Paige:** Yes. I was a contestant on Jeopardy! in the teen tournament when I was 16.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Hold on.

**Phoebe:** What?

**Craig:** Where have you been all my life?

**Ryan:** Yeah buddy. Let’s walk that back a second.

**John:** Paige, you have to tell us about this teen tournament. So, how did you do? What were the questions that got you? Tell us.

**Paige:** So, I lost in the first round. Lost on Final Jeopardy!

**John:** What was the answer, what was the question? Let’s see if we can get it. Craig will probably get it. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I’ll try. I’ll try.

**Paige:** In 1859 this man said to Horace Greeley, “I have 15 wives. I know no one who has more.”

**Craig:** Ooh, that was 18-what?

**Paige:** I think it was ’59. I mean, it was in 2001 that I was on the show so this is—

**Phoebe:** Have you got people in your head for the other years, Craig?

**John:** I was going to guess Brigham Young, but I’m not sure.

**Craig:** I was going to guess Joseph Smith, but I don’t think we’re right.

**Ryan:** I was gonna go Joseph Smith.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was the fakest – I was Brigham Smitherson.

**John:** Paige, what is the answer?

**Paige:** It was Brigham Young.

**Craig:** Oh, you got it. Great. You picked the right Mormon.

**Phoebe:** Oh my god.

**Ryan:** John August!

**Paige:** You could have won the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament, John.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Who did you pick out of curiosity, Paige?

**Paige:** I had absolutely no idea because I didn’t know who Horace Greeley was when I was 16. So, I just—

**Ryan:** For shame!

**Paige:** I just chose the only person I knew who had a lot of wives which was Henry VIII, even though I knew he only had six. And I enjoyed myself on the show until I got eliminated and then I got to watch all of my friends do fantastically. So.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I hope that they all paid for it somehow.

**John:** Let’s hope you can do better on this one. I think you probably will do better on this one.

**Craig:** High stakes.

**John:** All right. So let’s start with some really basics. We’ll have Craig start with a first bit of advice. So this will be A, B, and C. Craig, you start.

**Craig:** Basics of formatting. Is it, A, only use Fade in and Fade out at the beginning and of your script?

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Dissolve to is the proper transition to use within the script if needed.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Ryan:** Make sure to underline jokes in your script so that even idiot actors can understand them. Save italics for dramatic moments like when Deadpool remembers his hot dead wife.

**Craig:** I love that moment.

**John:** So, Paige, which is the fake answer there?

**Paige:** I am going to guess it’s C unless Ryan was adlibbing the idiot actors part.

**John:** C is the correct one.

**Phoebe:** She’s good, guys. She’s good.

**John:** She’s good. She’s good.

**Craig:** She’s on it.

**John:** A pro.

**Craig:** She’s on it. We’re going to have to step this up.

**John:** Question two, let’s talk about technique on the page. Phoebe, why don’t you start us off? Is it A…

**Phoebe:** When you’re writing scene description it’s OK to use “we see” as a way to communicate an image or action every now and then.

**John:** Ah, the controversial “we see.” All right, Ryan, B?

**Ryan:** Slug lines should not contain dates or times.

**John:** No dates or times in slug lines. Or is it C, Craig?

**Craig:** Every screenwriter worth his or her salt uses Final Draft.

**John:** Paige, what do you say, A, B, or C?

**Paige:** This one is a little bit tougher but I’m going to guess it’s A because there’s so much like “no one should ever use we see” happening which is silly.

**John:** The correct answer was C. I made it up just so Craig would have to say to use Final Draft.

**Craig:** I’m so angry. I’m so angry for so many reasons. One, Paige, I thought you knew me. You don’t.

**Ryan:** Craig, are you like John where you just charcoal sketch your scripts?

**Craig:** No, no, John goes from legal pads to his own proprietary software. And then at some point I think he ultimately does the formatting within one of his many multiprocessors. Whereas I use a lovely program called Fade In Pro. But I do not like Final Draft. I’m on record.

**Paige:** I just switched to Fade In.

**Craig:** Oh, good for you. Well done. And John has Highland.

**John:** Mostly Craig I wanted you saying that on the air so that they can snip that out and use it.

**Craig:** I know exactly why and I’m not upset, but a little bit.

**John:** Question three. Talk about nuance and detail. Ryan, can you start us off?

**Ryan:** In screenplays detail is poison. Film is a collaborative art form. The director, cinematographer, set designer, makeup artist supervisor, special effects supervisor and so many others will decide the details. Now, your job is to convey the broad stroke image as quickly as possible so the reader can visualize it quickly and move on to the next image they’re supposed to be seeing.

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Whatever you do don’t have your protagonist look to the camera and deliver a devastating line. [laughs]

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** If you character isn’t listening to music and you simply included the song as something to be played over the scene that is not your job.

**John:** Paige, tell us. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** While I would assume that B would be given as advice of someone who wanted to, I’m thinking that it’s probably a little too specific to Phoebe, so I’m going to guess B.

**John:** You are correct. Correct.

**Craig:** So just to be clear, the other ones they’re real things that you’ve read?

**John:** They’re real things. So in the show notes I’ll provide the links to where I took these all from. These are actual articles online. So things about “detail is poison,” that came from an online thing.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to ruin that person’s day, month, year, life.

**John:** All right. Question four. Structure. Oh, structure is a big bugaboo. People have a hard time with structure. Whole books are written about structure. Phoebe, can you start us off with answer A?

**Phoebe:** A, in a properly structured movie the story consists of six basic stages which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. Not only are these turning points always the same, they always occupy the same positions in the story.

**John:** Ooh, or is it B?

**Ryan:** At the exact midpoint of your screenplay your hero must fully commit to her goal.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** Do not indicate where to place the title of the film or where to roll the credits. These notations are superfluous in a speculative script. Such matters are usually decided by the director.

**John:** Paige, tough one here. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** I feel like I’ve heard all of these. I am going to guess – I’m going to go with B.

**John:** It’s a trick question. They were all actual things I pulled out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** So-called experts said all of these things.

**Phoebe:** So my first instinct was correct.

**John:** Your first instinct was correct. We’re going to give you the chime. All right, final question. These are takeaway lessons we can sort of get out of what we’ve learned. Craig, start us off. A?

**Craig:** For a character to be engaging, even likeable, they have to be deeply flawed.

**John:** All right. Or is it B?

**Ryan:** Physical descriptions including race, height, clothing, etc. matter far less than most writers think. Leave the costuming up to the costume designer.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Phoebe:** You may think that there are rules for how a screenplay is supposed to work, but in fact there are merely conventions. And while it’s important you understand the conventions you should use them as a foundation upon which to build your own work, rather than a straightjacket to constrain you because after all isn’t that the point of art?

**John:** Paige, what’s the answer?

**Paige:** I mean, this is about the bad screenwriting advice and C was very good screenwriting advice, so let’s go with C.

**John:** C is correct. Paige, you have won the game. I’m not sure what you won. You got a chance to hang out with us on the Zoom.

**Paige:** That is winning.

**John:** Thank you so much. Good luck with your screenplay. Sorry about Teen Jeopardy! but I hope this made up for it.

**Paige:** Absolutely. It’s better than Teen Jeopardy! Thank you guys so much.

**Ryan:** Well done, Paige.

**Phoebe:** Nice to meet you, Paige.

**John:** Thanks Paige.

**Paige:** Nice to meet you.

**Phoebe:** Killed it.

**John:** Bye.

**Ryan:** Bye-bye.

**Craig:** You know, better than Teen Jeopardy! was all I ever wanted.

**John:** Yeah. It is.

**Ryan:** John, Brigham Young, like just pulling that out.

**John:** That’s Colorado. Growing up in Colorado. So Horace Greeley, there’s Greeley, Colorado is named for Horace Greeley, so I had a sense of the time and place of it all. It’s just sometimes you’re born lucky.

**Phoebe:** Very good.

**John:** I have a specific question for Phoebe and Ryan, because you are the two people who actually have done this. Hosting Saturday Night Live, you both hosted. When you get to the end credit things how do you know which person to hug first? I always stay for the end credits because I want to see the hugs. How do you know which person to hug first? And does one of the cast members come up to your first? Usually it’s the musical guest you sort of huge first. But tell us what is the decision process on who to hug first at the end of Saturday Night Live?

**Ryan:** I aim for hierarchy. I just go for the most powerful person on the stage first. And then work my way down to the audience.

**Craig:** Right. And then through the audience in hierarchy as well?

Ryan. Yes. 100. And then to my family. Through that hierarchy as well. By the end I’m just hugging sperm.

**Phoebe:** I actually got stuck in a non-hug world of pain at the end of mine. Because I was sandwiched between Taylor Swift and Matthew Broderick. And I’d already hugged Taylor earlier. And I’d never even met Matthew. So suddenly when they were like now is the time to fucking touch them I was like, well I turned to Taylor and was like well we’ve done this so I should probably go and do it. It all happened in like split seconds. I should probably go to Matthew and I gave her a look, as she was coming in. So I like—

**John:** Oh no.

**Phoebe:** [Unintelligible] Taylor, turned to Matthew who was already on his way back, had to like claw him back. And then he kind of already gone. Then I turned around and Taylor said to me, “I’ll hug you.” And then we hugged. And then someone actually sent me a gif of the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. None of us will be watching that right after this. In fact I may–

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** I may leave for a moment to watch it. I mean, I need to see it now.

**John:** All right, we have 1,277 people watching the show right now live.

**Craig:** 13,000 fewer than I thought, but OK, go.

**John:** Some of those people have written in with questions already. Megana Rao our producer she’s going to read some of the questions that people have joined us with. Megana, welcome.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** Megana start us off with a question from our listeners/viewers.

**Megana:** OK. We’ve gotten in so many questions. So the first one is from Brady. And he says, “Aside from Beyoncé who inspires us all what’s the most obscure place you’ve pulled creative inspiration from for your projects?” Brady also says, “PS, I love you all.”

**John:** Aw, Brady. We love you, too. Obscure place of inspiration, where you get stuff from?

**Phoebe:** I accidentally, I was a little bit stuck and I just try and pick up like random things when I’m a bit stuck and just have a read, sometimes like three sentences can just get your head out of something. And I picked up a book called Vagina by Wolf that was on the side, it was my friend’s book, and I’d seen it hanging around and I wanted to read it for ages. But I literally opened it at one chapter and I read like five sentences of it and it gave me the idea of the godmother orgasming when she paints, which then rolled into [unintelligible]. This beautiful chapter about how orgasms can connect to your creativity. And so it really helped. So I just dove straight into a vagina.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ve done that, but it hasn’t – I mean, I haven’t gotten any great work out of it. Got to be honest with you. It’s distracting frankly.

**Phoebe:** Uh…

**Ryan:** I usually – I’ll dip into music. I find anthemic synth rock, Phil Collins. I don’t know why. That will just pull me right out of whatever kind of funk I’m in. Yeah, Enya. Stuff you wouldn’t expect. Weird sort of not – unexpected kind of stuff that’s melodic and synthy and, I don’t know. For some reason it shakes me out.

**John:** Cool. Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, this one is for Ryan but I guess you can all speak to it. It came in from another Ryan and he says, “After being in a one-room film like Buried how did that change your relationship with locations in any given–?”

**John:** Yeah. Buried. I enjoyed your film Buried. So in the film Buried you are in a coffin for basically the entire film. How did it change your feeling about sets?

**Ryan:** Well, the funny thing about Buried was it was shot in Barcelona. It takes place in a coffin. And I was like can’t we just shoot this in my fucking living room? Why are we going to Barcelona?

I don’t know if it changed my relationship to sets but it certainly was a lesson in that, because you do think, OK, this thing is a single location, it’s a claustrophobic movie, isolationist kind of film. But actually there were 17 coffins that we shot in. Each one had a different sort of purpose. So it really did require a tremendous amount of engineering and crew and space and that sort of thing.

But, yeah, locations are – my mentality they’re kind of irrelevant. I don’t really think about it like that necessarily. But, yeah, I do remember that. That was a lot of travel for one coffin.

**John:** Phoebe for Fleabag did you write to specific locations? Do you know like this is the coffee shop I want to be using? Do you have places in mind as you’re writing or is that just normal location scouting after you had scripts?

**Phoebe:** Well, a mixture of both I think. There were one or two places I felt I would write to and I felt really connected to. Like there’s a scene in a Quaker Hall in season two and actually Andrew Scott who plays the priest in it and taken – when I was first pitching the idea to him for the show we met up in Soho and we were talking about religion and all sorts of stuff for hours. And then he at the end of it said I want to show you something. And he took me into that Quaker Hall.

And we sat and spoke in there. There was no one else in there. We weren’t breaking the rules. But then I really desperately wanted that location for the real thing, because it was gorgeous, but also it was in the center of London. This felt really good. And also it had that history between us. And we couldn’t get it. And so we got another place somewhere else. And at the last minute that one fell through and the one we loved became available. And so we got to film in there in the end. And it is really joyful I think when you find yourself in locations that you’ve written to. But it’s rare I think that everything falls into place that you can.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, awesome. So Eleanor asks, “As a writer are you ever insecure about using autobiographical elements in your work?” With a follow up from Andy who says, “When you incorporate something that’s vulnerable are you ever surprised when people praise you for that instead of judging you?”

**John:** Great. So incorporating autobiographical elements and sort of the vulnerability that happens with that. I mean, Ryan, you and I can speak to the movie we did, The Nines. That middle character that you play, you play three characters, the middle character is sort of me. And so one of the initial conversations we had to have was sort of like you’re free to take anything you want to take from me. My mannerisms. My whatever. And it was really great and weird to sort of see it being mirrored back. But it worked well together. So, you’re incorporating stuff from the real world.

If it’s a moment that I’m sharing with another writer I will sometimes ask like are you going to use that thing that just happened between us because I want to – I don’t want to take it if you’re going to take it. Phoebe or Ryan, do you encounter that, stuff in your real life that’s maybe becoming part of stuff you’re writing where you have to feel some protective bubble around certain things?

**Phoebe:** Ryan? [laughs]

**Ryan:** I was so excited to hear what you were going to say.

**Craig:** I mean, I was on the edge of my seat.

**Ryan:** Well, I mean, I don’t know about protective. Sometimes something – if something completely wild happens and you have some sort of expectation that we come 90 degrees to and we’re all sort of freaking out about this funny thing that just happened. And I’m amongst a group of people that may or may not be writing screenplays, I might sort of do the same thing John is doing where I might say can I use this because it’s fantastic. I think I could do it justice.

And certainly I don’t write anything autobiographical other than it’s about myself. And I did enjoy playing John with John five feet away from me every scrutinizing moment in his home lo those many years ago. But, no, I look at it more like influence. When I was younger I was in a writer’s circle online. This is about 15 years ago and there was heavyweight writers on this thing. I mean, all over the place. But you could sort of lurk as well. And I was always too nervous to jump in this circle and, you know, write stuff. But I certainly learned so much from the voices. There were so many distinctive voices in these writer’s room. And while trying never to steal from any of them, I did sort of learn about sensibilities and how they can just so be so completely polarized. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Phoebe, do you ever wrestle with the fact that a lot of people think you are Fleabag and Fleabag is you?

**Phoebe:** Yes. But it’s not so much of a wrestle. I just sort of realize that – because it’s not autobiographical but it’s really, really personal. So I think – and I think that question is beautiful about do you feel like people actually reach out a bit, they don’t judge you. They actually are so relieved when they feel that something is honest and truthful. And I think when I was writing stuff before – Fleabag was the moment where I just thought oh fuck it, I’m just going to write this. And I think when you have that feeling sometimes that’s when you kind of – I don’t know if you guys have had that – but when you just go off.

And when I first started writing the series I was writing what I thought a TV show version of Fleabag should be. And I was writing that and I was getting really angry. No one told me to write it like that. No one said it. It was just a part of my brain that said this is what people are going to want. And then I was angrily writing that and I got so angry writing it that I started writing what turned out to be the TV series as like rebelling against myself for writing the sitcom version. And I was like I hate that they’re making me do this. And I’m like this is what I’m really going to do. And then I sent that one off with a real like Fuck You to my producers. And they read it and they were like OK. And then I was like and this is what I really want to make. And they were like, “Well good, because that is so much better. Why are you wasting your time doing that?”

And so it was quite confusing at the beginning trying to write something that sounds and feels like something people would like. But then there’s always an emptiness about that. And then the moment you start writing something that feels really personal and you get a little bit nervous writing it. Or I remember in season two of Fleabag when I was writing the speech. She does the speech like two-thirds of the way through when she’s saying “I just want someone to tell me what to do.” And she just does this whole list of “I just want someone to tell me what to wear, what to eat” and it felt a little bit dangerous writing that as a central female character just going like, “Just tell me what to do.”

And I was writing it going like, oh god, I’m going to get bashed for this. How dare I say that that’s what a woman or anybody secretly wants underneath it all, let alone a kind of heroine of the story? And that was one of the speeches that people have been so responsive to. And that’s a really comforting feeling.

**Craig:** I think the audience is very good at detecting something that is true, as opposed to something that is designed to seem true.

**Phoebe:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so their willingness to forgive things, because we are complicated people. There’s a subtlety there that they just got. I got it when I saw it. I just thought that, oh, this actually – I understood why it was a dangerous thing for her to be saying AKA you to be saying. And I also understood therefore that it was a different thing than you are weak and I do want to be dominated or told what to do. It was really more of this – it was an instinct we all have that is different from our – it’s complicated. I got the complexity. It worked. It worked beautifully. Well done. Good job, Phoebe.

**Phoebe:** Thank you. But it’s funny because when you do something like that you just don’t care how you get judged because you feel like it’s truthful. And then I was just like that is true. And I’m going to stand by that character in that moment.

**Craig:** It usually works.

**Phoebe:** Whereas when you’re being false it’s far more scary. They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out. And they always do. They always do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you want to start us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yes I do. And, look, we’ve done a great job I think of keeping this a light, lovely podcast. We’re not getting all down. But even in the best of times I have some anxiety problems. Just vague medicated anxiety problems. And so I’ve tried all sorts of the cool mediation apps and the things like that. But the thing that generally works the best for me is just good old breathing. Just simple deep breathing does miracles.

But then I start getting in my own Jewie way, I start freaking out that I’m breathing wrong which is the most Jewish thing I can think of. Like am I breathing right? Did I count enough? So I’m trying to remember this. And a couple of years ago and this just got recirculated around a guy named Nathan Pyle made some little animation, some little web animations to help you breathe rhythmically in a nice deep breathing way. And they work so beautifully. And they’re very simple. It’s just like a ball rolls down a little hill. And up the hill. And you can sort of breathe along with them. And they’re wonderful.

And for whatever reason these days I’ve felt the need to do quite a bit more of that. So, if you’re prone to anxiety and you’re prone to those moments where you’re feeling a bit jelly-legged or butterflies in the stomach or just afraid and you feel like a nice little deep breathing session would help will include a link to those because I find it a wonderful tool.

**John:** Excellent. Now, Craig, on a previous show you had talked about Horse Paste which is a version of Codenames that’s online. Megana and the rest of the office we were trying to play that yesterday and it was down. So instead we went – maybe it’s back up now, but instead we played Drawful 2 which is on Jackbox.tv which was actually tremendously fun.

So, it’s a thing that’s probably most designed for playing on AppleTV with people in a room together and you’re drawing on your phone. But it actually works really well over Zoom. And so you can share one person’s screen and then everybody else is drawing on their phones. And so it’s a way to have a party game when you cannot physically be together. So, Jackbox.tv. It’s a game called Drawful 2 if you’re looking for something to play with your family, no matter where your family is, or your friends.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Something out there in the world. Ryan Reynolds, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Ryan:** I have one particular podcast that I’ve been going back to since Christmas. John, I think I sent it to you. It’s Anthropocene Reviewed. It’s John Green, novelist/screenwriter. He has this great podcast. It’s once a month. It’s called The Anthropocene Reviewed. I think it’s the last Thursday of every month. But there’s one particular episode that I revisited right now in these times that we’re living in, like you guys, we’re all needing to take some deep breaths. But it’s basically about Auld Lang Syne, the history of Auld Lang Syne, the song. Auld Lang Syne and where it comes from and its use, because it does actually have a use. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s so beautiful and it’s one of the most beautiful 22 minutes of podcast I think I’ve ever heard in my life. And I think it’s really resonant for right now. So I keep going back to that.

It’s the podcast from I think this last December. John Green. The Anthropocene Reviewed. I highly, highly recommend it.

**John:** Yeah. I listened to that in a train in Japan on your recommendation. It really is a terrific episode.

**Ryan:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** Phoebe, do you have something to recommend for us?

**Phoebe:** I do. It’s a TV show. So it’s not quirky, but I feel so passionate about this TV show that I just have to say. And I don’t know if it’s actually out there. I think it’s being remade. It’s a BBC show called This Country. Do you guys know of it?

**Craig:** This Country?

**Phoebe:** This Country. And it’s a brother and sister, Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper wrote it together. And it’s based on their experiences growing up in the Cotswolds.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve seen much of this. It’s excellent.

**Phoebe:** It is so good. And it gets right under your skin. And it is so funny and so witty. And it’s a kind of documentary style but their performances are so, so detailed and so extraordinary. And I was grief-stricken when it ended. And they’re not going to make another one. They’ve made three series. But I think Paul Feig is remaking it in America. But catch theirs before because it has so much heart. It is so funny. And it is a really accurate depiction I think of the Cotswolds life for teenagers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if it’s watchable here unless you’re—

**Phoebe:** Well find a way.

**Ryan:** In that case just go with CSI: Miami.

**Craig:** It’s a similar show.

**John:** One or the other.

**Craig:** If you use a VPN and you can fake where then I think you can probably watch the BBC.

**Phoebe:** Maybe you can buy it on iTunes? I don’t know. Maybe there’s–

**Craig:** It’s possibly purchased. Obviously you’d want to ideally purchase it if you can. It’s extraordinary. And it’s one of those shows where I started to feel like I was starting to learn a little bit about Britain. I was starting to learn a little bit about people.

**Phoebe:** Yeah. And it’s not a side of it you see very often.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not. And it was fantastic.

**Phoebe:** What do you feel like you learned from it?

**Craig:** Well there is actually this fascinating connection, because now I’ve spent a bunch of time in the UK, and I’ve started to become closer to this fascinating connection between people in Britain and people in the United States. I mean, growing up I used to think that British people were, you know, quite British and quite posh and everything was wonderful. And then we were just a bunch of rooting, tooting Yosemite Sams just shooting in the air.

And as it turns out I guess there’s a huge swath of rural America that matches up quite nicely in a weird way with Northern England and some parts of Southern England. And it’s just the accents are wildly different. Wildly. But the general deal is not wildly different. And I was shocked at why I was shocked. Because it’s where everybody came from.

**Phoebe:** Of course. Of course. It’s the same everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s literally the same. And we did spend, you know, for Chernobyl we had, I don’t know, probably of our cast I think 90% was UK and of that 90% probably 50% were Northern England. And, I mean, and this isn’t to say that I didn’t love everybody from London, but the folks from Northern England are awesome, and Scotland are awesome. I mean, it was just – I had the best time. They just felt like home in a weird way. They felt American and so I love that show because there was a weird camaraderie in the clumsiness and the brokenness but beauty of our people together. I thought it was great.

**Phoebe:** Aw, that’s lovely.

**John:** That is our show. So, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, who I get to see. Hi, thanks Megana.

**Phoebe:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box for helping us out. Our outro is by John Spurney. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Phoebe, you’re not on Twitter. You’re so smart.

**Craig:** So smart.

**Phoebe:** So scared. So scared.

**Craig:** And then tell us what dummies thing is. What is it? @Vancity?

**Ryan:** @VancityReynolds.

**John:** Excellent.

**Ryan:** Ryan Reynolds was taken.

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

**Ryan:** True story.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments including the postmortem on this episode.

**Craig:** All that money. Oh, so much money coming into John.

**Phoebe:** Still on air. Still on air.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thank you so much for being our very first ever video guests. This was remarkable. Thank you so, so much. Thank you to everybody who watched. I’m supposed to tell you because we’re on YouTube that you have to push that like button and subscribe.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. Smash it.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Ryan:** Smash button. Yeah.

**John:** I don’t care. Don’t subscribe if you don’t want to subscribe. But thank you both very, very much for being on the show. It really means a lot that you came on board.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. You’re the best.

**Phoebe:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Have a great one.

**Ryan:** Lovely. It was a pleasure.

**John:** Bye guys.

**Phoebe:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is 25 hours later. Craig how was that live show for you?

**Craig:** Well, I mean I thought it was deeply enjoyable. First of all, it worked, so thank you because you did everything. You and Megana and your crew put the whole thing together. I thought it worked kind of flawlessly, from my point of view at least, because we could see them. There were a couple of moments where there was a little bit of video lag, but honestly in today’s day and age for there to be not a ton of that is lovely. And we were able to have a great conversation. It seemed like a lot of people watched it.

**John:** So we had a bunch of viewers. We had simultaneously like while we were recording it the peak number of viewers was 1,315. Overall, so we’re recording this on Sunday, there were 10,559 views to the video so far.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So a normal episode of Scriptnotes gets about 40,000 or more people listening to it over the course of the week. So it was good to have for our first ever video thing it felt really good that we got that many people watching. And the report back from the folks who I had moderating the comments was that everyone was lovely and positive and they didn’t need to ban anybody or put anybody on time out. Everyone was great in the comments section.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a weird thing. That our expectation is that adults will behave like little nursery school kids and need time outs. But unfortunately that’s kind of the way the world works.

**John:** So I want to talk a little bit about the technical side of this for folks who might want to try to do something like this at home. The four of us and our guests were speaking in Zoom. And so Zoom is a privacy and security for nightmare for a lot of reasons, but it also works really well. And so the fact that Phoebe was all the way in London and our latency was not bad at all that’s credit to Zoom. So despite all the scary things you read about Zoom are probably true, but they actually do work really well.

So we were all talking in Zoom and then if you use the Zoom webinar feature which is about $40 a month you can pipe that through to YouTube Live. And so that was my choice to not have our normal viewers watching us in Zoom which was possible. I pushed it all to YouTube Live just because that way no one can Zoom bomb us because we were safely behind a wall. That was the instinct behind that.

It went OK. I would say that Megana and I and you actually at one point were in little test screens where we were seeing to make sure that it all worked right and every time we did that it started a new YouTube Live session. And so people would join us and then finally when we actually got the real thing going it could happen.

But I wanted there to be an ability to sort of pause the YouTube streaming so that we could actually talk to Ryan and Phoebe before we went on camera and there really wasn’t a good way to do that.

**Craig:** Well, it still worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** And I thought you did a great job.

**John:** Aw, thank you. Thank you. And I thought it was a good conversation and they were just lovely, smart people. They had never met before and they felt like, you know, they should have met.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I can’t be the only who was just watching them and listening to them talk and thinking, yeah, I could see these two guys in a movie doing something together.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. It feels like a decent team up.

**John:** I don’t remember if Ryan was texting me this or tweeting me, but back when he had watched Fleabag he was like, “Oh my god, I hope she will put me into a movie or a TV show at some point.” He was so impressed by her way back when in the day. And she’s just great. It was lovely to have them together.

I don’t think Scriptnotes is overall going to pivot to video. I don’t think we’re going to be a regular television show.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** But how are you feeling about doing more of these?

**Craig:** I’m fine with it. I mean, I don’t get nervous about any of this stuff. I don’t mind it. As long as there’s no expectation of people getting all dressed up and things. But there seems to be a fairly robust environment of podcasts that are now also video casts where it’s like there’s a camera stuck in a recording booth so you’re looking at a guy talking into a microphone.

Personally, look, I find the whole thing bizarre in the sense that any – I’m excited that people listen to our podcast. As you know, I’m endlessly amused and shocked that anyone listens at all. And then the thought that people would watch something also seems kind of crazy. If they want to, I guess. Yeah.

Look, I’m a bigger fan of our actual live shows because there are people there and you can feel a room and warmth and an audience. It’s a very experience. So I’m on the ends of the spectrum. I like a nice quiet just you and me. We’re out on our couples date alone. No one can bother us. Or, we’re at a big party.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that when you and I are just recording the show by ourselves there will be times where we’ll get into tangents or we’ll get on a thing. It’s like, you know what, let’s cut all of that out and pretend we never had that conversation. And in a live show or live stream we really can’t do that. I was mindful that I had to watch myself a little bit more because everyone was listening to us live as it was happening. So there’s something comforting about when it’s just us on tape because you and I both have the ability to cut anything out.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m so generally oblivious. I mean, it’s a rare thing for me to go, oh god, why did I? Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. And I do every now and again and I say, “Hey John, can we cut that out?” But every now and then it would occur to me that we were live, but you know the nice thing is when you’re doing this with two very accomplished actors they’re so calm, even if they tell you later that they were not calm at all, but at least in the moment they appear so calm that you can’t help but mirror their general demeanor.

**John:** Now we may want to talk about this in the real episode that we’ll record for this next week, but we’re recording this on Sunday where all of Twitter is abuzz about the New York Times Maldives story. So we should maybe have a quick moment because this was actually part of my morning was this conversation about like, oh, is this going to be a movie? And of course it’s going to be a movie.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, writes itself basically. Actually the problem is it’s so obviously a movie that you almost don’t even want to see it because you’ve seen it. Like I’ve seen it in my head. But then again, if somebody does a really good version of a great formula picture then it can be wonderful. I mean, I’ve already put my own little spin on it which is that a couple gets married. It’s not like an arranged marriage or anything, but there was pressure from everybody because they were perfect for each other and they kind of bought into it and they got married. And they both realized individually and separately like minutes after they said “I do” that this was a huge mistake. But the honeymoon is already booked and so they decide I’m going to tell my partner on the honeymoon that this was a mistake and it has to end. And they’re both thinking it. And then they get there and then they both say it to each other and they’re both hurt. And then seconds later they’re told they cannot leave.

**John:** Absolutely. So that’s easy good approach. I’m not dying to see that movie honestly.

**Craig:** I don’t want to see any of them. [laughs]

**John:** I was texting with Ryan this morning about this saying like, hey, this could be a movie. And he was like, yeah, my executive assistant just sent this to me. And he’s like do you want to do it, we could do it together. And I’m like give me a second for my morning coffee to wear off and then I’ll get back to you. And I ultimately – I “passed” on it, not that it was ever offered to me, but to me it was like there are – I can think of 20 writers who could do a great version of this story, or at least could do this movie. And if 20 other writers could do this and do a bang up job on it like there’s no reason for me to be chasing this movie.

What I do think is interesting about a possibility for this is in some ways it feels like a play. Because it is contained.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s within a single space. Except that it’s the Maldives so you don’t want it on a stage. You actually want it beautiful shot everywhere. You want it to feel like you’re on location or some sort of Lucas Film Mandalorian where you create the Maldives through the magic of video screens. So, it wants to be a movie just because it’s going to be gorgeous and beautiful, but it is essentially a chamber drama or chamber comedy between these people.

Something that people have been bringing up on Twitter which I think is a good point is that it can feel like Beauty and the Beast where everyone else who works at that resort are kind of like–

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** These animated things. And that is potentially really problematic.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** To not have their perspective on what’s actually going on there.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** I think the opportunity would be to do sort of a Wes Anderson kind of thing. They’re trying to keep this couple here because they actually – as long as this couple is here they don’t have to go through quarantine. There’s like a whole process. So they’ll do whatever they can to sort of keep this couple together.

**Craig:** I like that. That’s fun. So, then it’s really like the company said, OK, well, we’re going to fire you as soon as the last guest is removed. But if there is a single guest there, of course, you have to stay because that’s our policy. And so they cannot let those – and those people really want to leave but they can’t let them leave. The problem is then the quarantine aspect gets a little mushy.

**John:** It does. So, there’s problems. I think the other opportunity in terms of that central couple is that the way you can chart an entire marriage in this very hot box environment is potentially great. All the progress when you can’t actually leave this person sort of what happens. It can be a microcosm of a marriage within this small period of time.

But someone else can write it. I’m not going to write it.

**Craig:** I agree. And sometimes I think when everybody looks at something and goes, oh my god, that is so a movie. What they’re really saying is oh my god that reminds me of a lot of movies I’ve seen.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What was the movie that Dana Fox worked on? Couples Retreat.

**John:** Couples Retreat. Yeah. The one where she’s in a resort in the Maldives and she’s just crying and trying to figure out a way to print pages.

**Craig:** It was actually Bora Bora in French Polynesia. And that’s a movie is Dana Fox writing that movie in Bora Bora. But that movie is very much couples in paradise except that it’s contrasted with the trouble inside their relationship and all that. So, you know, makes sense. Yeah, I can see – there’s all sorts of–

**John:** Couples Retreat meets Contagion is basically the pitch on that.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And this is almost now we’re starting to put our finger on what the problem with Hollywood is is that that requires zero effort. So there’s an entire merchant class of producers who do nothing but sort of just go, neh, heh, and then someone else goes, meh, and then they have to go find writers. It’s like it’s not necessarily a thing. It’s just because it sounds like stuff you’ve already seen. But that’s kind of a blemish isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, isn’t that partly why you just don’t want to do it? Because it just feels like what new thing can you say with that kind of high concept? Yeah.

**John:** There’s a couple projects that I’m writing right now and what I will say about them is that they are things for which I am incredibly passionate about doing and I feel like, yeah, I’m the right person to do it. So that’s why ultimately I was like you know what let one of the other 20 writers who would be great at this pursue this project and I’m going to try to chase less in this next decade.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what I’m perfect for.

**John:** You’re perfect for The Last of Us.

**Craig:** You know what? I do love it. I love it. God, I love it. And weirdly also a pandemic just happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is the strangest of things. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, one last question for you. What is happening in Russia and are they just completely concealing the actual numbers? Is it actually just horrible there and we’re just not hearing about it?

**Craig:** Well, you won’t until you will. But certainly in the initial days of sort of Russian reporting on COVID if you looked at the maps of the world and you start to see where the cases were every now and then on the map there would be this little white spot on their color chart. And that indicated there was no COVID there whatsoever. And Russia was this enormous white spot. See, there was no COVID there according to them. In fact, there was. Of course there was.

What was happening was they were simply failing to classify it. Not failing, deciding, determining under pressure to not classify pneumonia cases as COVID. That is akin to just sort of saying, oh yeah, there’s been a lot of pneumonia, like weird cystic pneumonia and it’s not because of AIDS. It’s just pneumonia. But it is because of AIDS. Because we know that. So, that’s what they were doing.

And then they’ve stopped because it got out of control. So there is sort of – suddenly Putin starts doing things. I think because he started to realize how bad this could be.

It is remarkable that the same delusion has landed on the doorstep of very similarly minded political people. And it’s not about – I wouldn’t say that it’s about being strong men per se. But there is this group of political leaders that are men who feel like they don’t need to take no guff from the experts. And that it’s the damned expert elites who are ruining everything and just good old fashioned common sense like back in the old days, John Wayne types, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and of course the uber Vlad Putin, all of them have the same responses which is, oh, boloney. I’m not crying over some flu. That’s what the French do. Well, the French didn’t really do it well enough either. Well, now they’re crying. So he’s finally now, or at least over the last two days, he started to shut down Russian businesses and places where people can gather and so on and so forth.

They are not in good shape. They’re in bad shape. This is not an economically healthy country. Their “democracy” is incredibly fragile. They have had a number of political convulsions that Putin has successfully knocked back. But it’s things like these that cause real problems.

I don’t know how bad it’s going to get over there. Obviously I never wish ill will on anyone. Certainly no one wants to see a bad leader suffer by his citizens dying. But I do suspect that it’s going to be quite bad over there.

**John:** Well, it strikes me that looking back to the Chernobyl age, you know, at least then there was a central planning sort of authority. It felt like they bungled, they lied, they did bad stuff, but they actually could sort of muster their forces and do massive things. I don’t know that Russia today can do that. So, that is the challenge. You have all the problems with none of the actual solutions.

**Craig:** Well, there was a strange kind of spirit in the Soviet Union. They were obviously more than happy to deny reality and to make decisions that cost lives and to lie to the rest of the world. But once they understood the enormity of something they were capable of reaching back into this interesting collective Soviet spirit of fighting. So World War II the Soviets I think something like 40 million–

**John:** The meat grinder of, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, 40 million casualties, military and civilian combined from World War II. That’s a five-year, six-year stretch. That’s insane. We don’t understand what that means here. We have no sense of it. They do. And that was after World War I and the Revolution. So, they have a certain kind of spirit.

Over here what we’ve done is fragmented ourselves into 50 fiefdoms. We have a central leader that doesn’t lead. And our John Wayne go-it-on-your-own spirit is currently being tested in the sorest way by a little clump of RNA surrounded by a lipid layer.

**John:** Yeah. It is not a great time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. But to bring us back to a happier note, thinking back, the postmortem on our show, and the possibility of a Maldives movie, I do think Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing and starring in that couples movie could be ideal. I could picture them together. They are beautiful. They are funny. That is the movie we need right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’ll watch anything with those two. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** Craig will watch a livestream of a podcast with them in it. That’s how much he enjoys the two of them.

**Craig:** I watched it as we were doing it. First of all, you’ve been friends with Ryan forever. And that was my first time meeting him. And he really, like I said on the show, his reputation is just sterling. I mean, it’s a rare thing when you hear somebody just say, oh yeah. And it’s not that every Canadian has that reputation, by the way. Don’t get fooled. There are some bad Canadians out there. Not many. There are some.

But he’s just terrific.

**John:** So I’ll put this in the real follow up show notes, but for folks who might be curious about it Ryan texted me afterwards to say that he kept meaning to talk about the original fourth wall-breaking movie. It was Mary MacLane’s 1918 silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me. And so if you look up the Wikipedia entry it’s actually fascinating. So it’s a lost film. There’s no prints of it left. So there’s only reports about what actually happens in the film. But it is a silent film where the writer-director star, this woman who actually kind of looks a lot like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, does turn to camera and speak directly to camera and acknowledge sort of what’s happening.

So that was sort of the first – apparently the first time in cinematic history where that fourth wall was broken.

**Craig:** Men Who Have Made Love to Me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So she would turn to the camera and then–

**John:** And then title card.

**Craig:** Title card.

**John:** So, I mean, she’s a pioneer.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, first of all like what a cool proto feminist thing that in 1918–

**John:** What a great title.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s like I’ve had sex. [laughs] I like it.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for a fun show and we’ll do one of these again sometime.

**Craig:** Awesome John. Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Watch the episode here – Scriptnotes Live: Episode 445](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRV5O0ZSNc0)
* [Deadpool](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431045/) and [Deadpool 2](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5463162/)
* [Fleabag](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01KW5IIJM/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s1) and the [play](https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/phoebe-waller-bridges-fleabag-play-to-stream-_90860.html) to release soon!
* Huge thank you to [Phoebe Waller Bridge](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3564817/) and [Ryan Reynolds](https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds)!
* [Breathing Cartoons](https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1139676955316559872) by Nathan Pyle
* [Anthropocene Reviewed: Auld Lang Syne](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/episodes/anthropocene-reviewed-auld-lang-syne)
* [This Country](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6583806/), now on [Hulu in the US](https://www.hulu.com/series/f3e3f7ed-134f-411d-9dc8-e8048b2d6b7e)
* [Free Guy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6264654/)
* [Drawful on Jackbox Games](https://www.jackboxgames.com/drawful/)
* Bonus How Would This Be A Movie, [Couple Stranded in Maldives](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html)
* [Men Who Have Made Love to Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Who_Have_Made_Love_to_Me)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/445standardv3.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 404 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off this week, but he will be back next week. Luckily I have somebody really remarkable to talk with about things. This is Charlie Brooker, the creator-writer-executive producer of the remarkable anthology series Black Mirror, the most recent installments of which dropped on Netflix this past week. Charlie Brooker, welcome to the show.

Craig Brooker: Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John: I want to talk to you about so many things about the individual series, individual episodes, bigger questions such as what is television, what is reality. So…

Charlie: Yeah. I might not have answers to all of those things. I’ll try.

John: I’ll give you about 30 seconds. I’m going to plug the live show one last time.

Charlie: OK.

John: So be thinking.

Charlie: 30 seconds. Right.

John: Our next live show is this Thursday, June 13, and the Ace Hotel. It’s a benefit for Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney, the showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, Kourtney Kang of Fresh Off the Boat.

Oh my god, we have too many guests. I don’t know how we’ll fit all that in, but it’s going to be a remarkable show. So come see us this Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. They released some more tickets so you can still get a seat if you would like to see that live show.

If you’re there at the live show there are going to be some games, there’s going to be giveaways, there’s going to be cool stuff that you can only encounter at the show. So, please come out and support a great charity, Hollywood Heart. Craig and I will be together on stage. Craig’s head will be immense from the success of Chernobyl. But, you know, he has still graciously agreed to participate in this live show.

Charlie: He’s lowering himself. You see, he’s lowering himself to take part.

John: So someone on Twitter this last week asked, “Have you and Craig ever had successes at the same time?” Because Craig has Chernobyl and I have Aladdin. And I said, no, not that I’m aware of. And so I think we’re going to become insufferable.

Charlie: You can’t call each other out on it.

John: No.

Charlie: Because you’d both be right.

John: So it’s going to be a really interesting live show. So there could be some fireworks.

Charlie: But you’re not going to listen to anyone. You’ll just be monsters. You’ll be like Godzilla.

John: Craig’s rider for just this live show has been crazy. It’s been months of negotiation. But I think we finally got through most of it. We’ll try.

Charlie Brooker, welcome to Los Angeles. People by your accident might guess that you do not live in America.

Charlie: No, I don’t.

John: I did not know anything about you or your show until I was on a live show for Slate Culture Gabfest with Craig. We did a little crossover episode. And Natasha Lyonne as her sort of endorsement, her One Cool Thing essentially, said you have to watch this series Black Mirror and I didn’t know what it was. I wrote it down and I started watching it immediately. It is a remarkable program. And I would have assumed that you had done nothing before that, but then I checked your credits and you’ve done a tremendous amount. You have credits all the way back to ’99.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: And most of them seem like comedy things that are related to cultural moments. Rewind your–

Charlie: That’s fair enough. I mean, I’ve had an odd kind of accidental career. I started out I was a cartoonist at one point when I was a teenager. Then I became a video games reviewer. Then I started doing a website that had sort of topical – it was extremely vicious satire of television on it. And that led me to get work. Simultaneously I started working for a topical comedy show in the UK. And I got a gig writing TV reviews for The Guardian.

So most of the stuff that I’d done until about 2008, in fact everything I’d done until 2008 was comedy. So all the TV stuff I’d done was comedy. And in the UK I sometimes present shows. So I do a show intermittently now that’s kind of Daily Show esque, I guess you’d call it, which was called Screen Wipe. It was about TV. Then we did News Wipe, which was about the news. Started doing annual 2016 Wipe or whatever you’d call it.

And then I sort of developed a parallel career I guess, 2008 we did a show called Dead Set which was like a zombie series. It’s kind of like a prototype Black Mirror in a way in that it’s an absurd premise that we then play straight. So a zombie apocalypse happens and the only people who survive are the participants in a series of Big Brother that’s going out in the UK. And they’re 10 people who have been chosen to not get on.

So, yeah, and then myself and Annabel Jones who is my sort of co-conspirator on all of this stuff, we were asked would you like to do something us. And we’d always been a fan of shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected. I don’t know if you’ve got that over here.

John: No.

Charlie: It’s like Roald Dahl short stories. Really creepy. And Hammer House of Horror was another show, don’t know if you ever saw. And the show we came up with was Black Mirror and we that was in 2011. At the same time as we were doing Black Mirror we were also doing a show called A Touch of Cloth, it’s like Naked Gun. So polar opposite stuff.

So in the UK I guess up until 2008, 2011, I was mainly known for doing comedy stuff.

John: So talk to me about that initial conversation about the idea of Black Mirror. Going in they say how about an anthology series. What is the discussion that leads to the specific idea for Black Mirror and what does it look like in those meetings? What are you describing to them?

Charlie: Well, initially it was slightly different in that it was – there wasn’t going to be a focus on technology so much. It’s become sort of shorthand for that in a way. It was very much just going to be an update on Twilight Zone style stories. I’d read a biography of Rod Sterling. I felt that at the time those kind of things were missing from television. And when I was growing up – I didn’t see The Twilight Zone until I was a teenager, but the BBC used to put on really strange one-off controversial, thought-provoking, high-concept plays that would always generate a lot of controversy and often be quite horrifying.

And I felt that that sort of thing at the time was slightly missing on television. And then when they rebooted Dr. Who, which was about 2006 or so, I thought well maybe – because that’s almost an anthology show.

John: It is. Yeah.

Charlie: I thought well maybe there’d be an appetite for this. So that was what we – originally the pitch was it was going to be eight half hours. I was only supposed to write like two of them or something. And it said, I think originally it definitely mentioned technology might be one of the themes, but the idea was just to look at shows like The Twilight Zone and where they would be doing an episode about McCarthyism or something like that we’d be doing terrorism say.

And then because we were only doing three we ended up – the technological stories seemed to be the most interesting ones. Although actually I’d written a whole completely different episode first which we were about to start shooting that, again, didn’t have any technological element to it at all. It was incredibly earnest. And then a new head of Channel 4, the Channel that put it out in the UK, a new head of Channel 4 came in and she did not like this script. I have to say probably in retrospect she was right. They were going to pull the plug on it and if this wasn’t going ahead basically the whole show wasn’t going ahead.

So, there was some panic going on on our part. So I had a meeting with her where my job was to try and persuade her that this was a good idea, that this very earnest episode we were doing about the Iraq War was well worth her time. And if she wasn’t going to go for it, in my back pocket I had the idea for the national anthem episode which is the one with the prime minister and the pig. And I thought well if she doesn’t go for this I might as well pitch that because what have I got to lose.

John: Absolutely. Something versus nothing.

Charlie: Exactly. So, I ended up pitching that and luckily for me she laughed. Her first question was does it have to be a pig.

John: That’s a classic development note question. Does it have to be a pig?

Charlie: [laughs] Well, and we went through all the different things it could be there in the meeting. At one point I think I suggested a wheel of cheese or a frozen chicken. And then we went, no, a pig is probably best.

John: It has to be a pig.

Charlie: Yeah. And I went off and wrote the first ten pages or so, just to try and persuade her. And it was a parody of 24 that I was basically writing. And luckily for us she went for it. So, I mean, that episode is obviously one of our most divisive ones and I think in the UK it’s received slightly differently than it is say here, because I was known for doing fairly unusual comedy stuff.

John: Absolutely. So people could see the joke of it played differently there than it does here.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: But I want to get back to this idea of you talk about Twilight Zone, we had Tales from the Dark Side which sounds like a similar kind of thing, generally they’re self-contained stories that ask a question and there’s always a fantastical element or big sci-fi element that lets you focus on differently. In your case it’s technology and it’s a what-if on technology but a generally a very near technology. Things that are almost possible today. And how early in the process of these first three episodes of this first season – so the first three episodes are The National Anthem, which is the one with the pig, Fifteen Million Merits which is the prison-ish situation, and The Entire History of You. So those last two are much more clearly near future technology things. How soon did you know that that was the unifying theme?

Charlie: I guess it was, so Fifteen Million Merits had been written but so had this other earnest episode. As soon as that one was – the one that we were going to do was sort of scrapped, The National Anthem I realized there was a sort of drumbeat of social media going throughout it. And I thought, well hang on a minute, and we’d already been speaking to Jesse Armstrong who wrote The Entire History of You which was the third one. And so we realized well all three of these are about technology. And then we realized that, well, really we can use technology in the same way that The Twilight Zone would use the supernatural to tell a story. We can have fantastical things happening. And a lot of the technology we show is impossible, but because of the era we’re living in you kind of go along with it. As long as it looks grounded enough, and it looks like it functions the way you imagine it should, you kind of go with it. So, I think it was then. And then once we’d done that first – I think it must have been by the time we were finishing Entire History of You I thought well this is the way forward for the rest of the season.

It’s strange though, because then looking at the second season one of the episodes there is White Bear which – it looks like it’s a comment saying aren’t people on phones zombies. It’s a zombie movie with people filming things. So I think that was – sometimes we like to remind ourselves it’s not a sci-fi show basically. On the show itself we can lose sight of that.

John: Let’s talk about, as you’re figuring out an episode, because with an anthology show like this where each show is about a thing, are you starting with what the one-hour of entertainment is going to be about? Is it the idea or is it the character? Because ultimately the character has to drive that thing. But in this anthology that is so idea-driven you have to be able to sell that idea. So where was the push and pull between those two?

Charlie: Yeah. And that’s something that I think I got better at now. There’s certainly – when we’ve done weaker episodes it’s because the story is dictating what happens. It really depends. So sometimes – sometimes the story idea comes about from as you were saying a what-if, some crazy scenario that you imagined. You think, OK, that’s interesting. The different ways that could play out, I’m immediately interested in that. Other times it really depends – something like San Junipero which was – actually I’m going to rewind a bit. Actually Be Right Back was probably – Be Right Back was an interesting one.

So Be Right Back which is in season two, and I think it’s – I feel it’s one that’s slightly unjustly overlooked as an episode. It’s one of my favorites. And Owen Harris directed it who also did San Junipero. And that had stemmed from an experience I’d had that was in the ‘90s a former flat mate and friend of mine had died. And then it was one of the first times that somebody I knew had passed away. And then a couple of years after that, if you remember at the time when cell phones had limited memory and you could only store like a set number of phone numbers in there.

John: Oh, of course, yeah.

Charlie: And I was trying to make room for a new phone number in my phone which meant I had to delete old ones. And I scrolled through and I saw the name of this friend of mine and thought I can’t delete that. Even though it’s just a number I literally can’t ring that ever again. And there was something very strange – unexpected and strange about that moment. And so I knew I wanted to do a story that sort of spoke to that strange connection you can feel with – a very impersonal piece of technology can throw up something, an incredibly personal moment.

John: So I want to clarify that. So that leads to an idea that can be the premise of an episode, but it’s really an emotional spark. It’s like I have an emotional connection to this thing that I know is not the actual person. It’s just all of my memories is embodied in this slot in the phone.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s a little souvenir. It’s like one of the few reminders I had of this person. I didn’t have photos of this person. That was the one thing I had. And I was suddenly struck by it.

And then as is often the case, I think, with our episodes what happens is you’ve got an idea like that or really not an idea just a feeling, you’ve got that, and then I got really interested in the world of sort of psychics and mediums who purport to be putting people in place with their loved ones who’ve passed on. And these two ideas sort of glommed together and I was sitting up late one night. We’d just had our first baby. And I was doing the sort of night shift, which incidentally was weirdly a brilliant motivator because I knew I could only work in short bursts.

John: So many writers I’ve talked to say productivity actually soared because they knew they only had little windows of time.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s like Pomodoro technique or something that screams at you. And you can’t go outside. You can’t go anywhere. You’ve got nothing else to do. And I was on Twitter or something like that and I just saw updates from people scrolling past and I was just struck by what if I was the last person on earth, all these people were dead, and these messages were being generated by some kind of AI. And then you sort of remember these other ideas you had and you go, OK, I’m starting to see a story here.

Now, at that point I thought, so then you sort of end up creating the characters. I’m not sure the process by which I sort of thought who would find this the most upsetting possibly, if there was something that could generate text based on someone’s personality. Who would find that most upsetting? And the answer was a sort of recently bereaved widow who is expecting a baby, sort of my port of call, and so I think this is a very rambling answer I’m giving here.

John: I like it though.

Charlie: And that’s an odd one, because that episode I didn’t – at that stage in doing the show I hadn’t learned to plan things either. So I would write scripts as I went along.

John: You were just doing it by feel.

Charlie: Yeah. Just. Which meant that I ended up making all sorts of errors.

John: What’s an example of an error you would make by doing it that way?

Charlie: Ooh, in the original National Anthem there was a whole subplot involving the government picking up anyone who had ever been on some sort of terror watch list and trying to beat a confession out of them that tonally went – I was trying to play for comedy. It was like somebody gets beaten to death in an interrogation room and it–

John: Did it shoot?

Charlie: No. No it didn’t. So there was one scene in National Anthem as well that tonally, there’s a porn star he meets in National Anthem, there’s a guy they rope in to try and perform this act. There’s a moment when the two of them, the prime minister and the porn star meet in the corridor in the original script, and the porn star gives him the only good advice he gets all day long about how to deal with what’s about to happen. And we dropped it because just tonally it was very much at odds – but sometimes, White Bear I completely – White Bear is a good example of something where I totally messed it up. I wrote the whole – that was the next episode.

Now it’s one of my favorites because it’s got a really horrific twist and it’s a bit – I was trying to channel things like the Wicker Man and like there’s a short Spanish film called, I think it’s Spanish, called La Cabina. Have you ever seen that?

John: No, I don’t know La Cabina.

Charlie: Look it up. I won’t tell you anything about it except it’s about a guy and a phone booth. That’s all I’m going to say. It’s about 15 minutes. I was trying to channel that sort of thing. And I originally wrote that script three times. We were about to shoot it. I had written this thing, I had this notion about if you’ve seen White Bear there’s a story they tell the main character in it about–

John: About what’s actually going on.

Charlie: About what’s going on. And they say there’s a symbol appeared on all the TVs and everyone is behaving like zombies effectively. In the original script that was–

John: The actual premise.

Charlie: That was the actual premise. There was just this mysterious symbol appeared that made 30% of the population act like psychopaths and 30% act like bystanders. And 30% were the quarry. And I wrote it – it was very confused. But we had to shoot it because we were running out of time. We were literally scouting locations we were trying to work out, because I’d written in all these complicated locations, and we were based on a sort of former maybe US Air Force base in the UK. And we were looking for places to shoot the locations that were mentioned in the script. And one of them, it said it was a shop, but we couldn’t find a shop, but we could find this gas station.

And the location guy, we were looking around, and he said well you’ll have to film this way because there’s a fence around this whole place. So we can’t ever see in that direction. And I thought well a fence around the whole, that’s actually – oh, hang on a minute. And suddenly had a much more interesting idea. And just went off and rewrote the whole thing. Like just threw it away and rewrote the whole thing in like two days or something.

We had a director on board already, so we had to say to him, Carl Tibbetts, I had to say to him, sorry, I’ve totally rewritten the entire script. And luckily he was – but that happened because, and I’m in two minds about that. That happened because I hadn’t been doing any planning, I’d just been trying to write this story from a slightly confused premise. And then because I was forced into a corner suddenly I was in a position where literally I saw this fence around the thing and suddenly I sort of had a eureka moment and realized I could sort of dig myself out of the hole. You can’t dig yourself out of a hole, can you?

John: Well, you can dig a different hole to–

Charlie: You could dig some stairs?

John: Yes, you could use your shovel to maybe dig your way up to something.

Charlie: Yes.

John: That’s probably. You dug yourself out of it in a way.

Charlie: I dug myself, I stood on the shovel.

John: What it sounds like though is you’re trying to both plan for what you’re going to need, but also be flexible for better ideas as they come up.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: And so you were ready to be lucky. If you had felt confident about the episode that you’d written you probably would have ignored the fence and stuck with what you had.

Charlie: Yes. Definitely.

John: Because you allowed yourself to feel some insecurity you could say, oh, OK, there’s a better idea. There’s a way of containing this. Because I mean what you’re describing sounds like a completely different episode. Because I love White Bear. I think it is great. And it relies on that twist at the end about what’s really going on. And it sounds like if you hadn’t planned for the episode to be one way that twist never would have come.

Charlie: Absolutely. And that was why, I mean, I just knew it was – it was like sort of realizing at the altar you had married the wrong person or something. This was happening and I knew it wasn’t right. And everyone basically knew the script wasn’t right. And then so suddenly to have had this moment was such a relief, but it was also terrifying. And then on the next episode of that season, which was the Waldo Moment one, that’s where I really ran out of time. And I was kind of not happy with my finished script. I think there were lots of good ideas in it but I didn’t – weirdly it should have been a separate thing. It should have been like a separate miniseries or something like that. I should have had more time to develop.

John: Absolutely. It didn’t feel like it wanted to be in one hour of time.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: And let’s talk about that though because the format of an anthology series is about an hour long for episodes, although you’ve gone past those boundaries now. You have to set up your premise very quickly, or at least your world-building premise. Like this is what is possible in this universe of this episode. And people have a general expectation about what kinds of things can happen in a given episode, but there’s a pretty wide range.

You need to establish your characters very, very quickly. And you though have to decide at what point do you let the audience know what the episode is about. And that feels like a fundamental choice you’re making pretty early in the process or not?

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, White Bear was a good example of something where I guess in a way, I haven’t really thought about it, but because I had a story that I then was going to throw out but was going to use as the fiction they tell her within the episode, it meant that I had to sort of cover story that I could tell the viewer for about 75% of the running time. And then in a strange way, once you know what it is you’re hiding and you’ve worked out how long you’re going to hide it, it curiously makes some things easier because it actually limits your range of options. It sort of forces your hands on all sorts of decisions I guess. Which I hadn’t really thought about.

I mean, I found the stress of doing White Bear, it nearly falling apart and then me feeling like I hadn’t really done a good enough job with the Waldo Moment meant that when we did the Christmas one and that one I planned like meticulously. And that was interesting because that was another story where there was this big sort of reveal. We knew there was going to be a big reveal. Once you know that it sort of means you can spend, yes, and I’m always slightly worried that the audience is going to get there first. That they will – San Junipero, I thought people were going to get that in the first instance, like when they first – there’s a moment early on where Mackenzie as Yorkie is trying on different outfits. And it looks like a sort of a montage that you’d see in a John Hughes movie or something like that. Owen who directed that as well is a huge John Hughes fan and wanted to sort of channel all these things.

And in the script what it’s saying is that she – at one point it says she sort of magically changes outfits. And look. And Girlfriend in a Coma is playing on the radio at one point. And I thought everyone is going to immediately twig what is going on here. And I was pleasantly surprised when people didn’t. Although that’s again something – the other thing I guess I’ve learned is that I think that the most important draft in a way of the script is the edit. So myself and Annabel spend a lot of time in the edit and it never ceases to amaze me how much you can continue to tweak and change – you can rescue things that haven’t worked and you can bring in new things you didn’t notice yourself. And when you’re playing – when you’re revealing something that’s also crucial because that’s how you – you’re trying to gauge at what point people are going to understand exactly what’s going on.

White Bear actually there’s little flashbacks in that as well which I thought, oh, people are going to guess this.

John: And they don’t.

Charlie: And they don’t.

John: So White Bear is an example of sort of a two-stage reveal. First that the world is not what she thinks it is, and that we think we have good insight into who this character is or sort of that we’re seeing it through her eyes. And she’s a trustworthy narrator to some degree but there’s more going on. Shut Up and Dance is again that sort of same situation where we think we understand the premise quite early on that he’s being compelled to do these things and we don’t realize that there’s more to him than we sort of knew at the start. And looking back it’s like, oh, that is what that first scene was and we don’t know that’s why he was chosen.

Charlie: That was another one that changed actually. So Shut Up and Dance originally, so there’s like Kenny who is the young kid and Hector who is the older guy who he meets, and originally there was a reveal that Hector who Kenny – they’re both being blackmailed. For people who haven’t seen the episode they’re both being blackmailed by anonymous hackers. And originally the reveal was that Hector had been waiting for an underage prostitute in the room. And so the story was he’s sort of guiding Kenny along and he’s forcing Kenny into doing the more unpleasant aspects of this sort of horrible game they’ve been sent on.

And I came to the end of the script and we’re like it just doesn’t – you sort of know he’s a bastard from the first time he turns up and that’s not very interesting. Well, what if Kenny has got that secret then? That’s more interesting. And, oh OK, we care about him from the first time we see him. Then you can go back and you can go, well OK, what’s a good way of making us care about Kenny. Well, we’ll show him doing something that seems kind. So in just about the first scene you see him handing – a little girl has left her toy behind and he goes and hands it to her. And of course on the second watch that takes on a very sort of sinister – it’s actually Annabel’s daughter.

John: Oh no.

Charlie: Well no one wanted to put their own kids forward for that. [Unintelligible] She won’t mind me saying that. Her kids are all – they’re in lots of the episodes actually. And so afterwards you realize so that I realized was the beauty of knowing what the ending was. I’m so amateur. I realized that it’s helpful to know what the ending is when you’re writing the bit at the start. Because you can start kind of doing all of that stuff.

John: But everyone listening to this episode would assume though that you start at the ending. Like a mystery story where you sort of start with the ending and work your way forward. It doesn’t sound like that really is the process for you.

Charlie: Sometimes it is. Sometimes – I mean, when I get very excited about and episode, when it works at its best is when I sort of see what the end scene is. And sometimes then when you’re writing it that changes. San Junipero, good example where originally I did write a sort of story treatment for that. And, again, originally, I should say these things in order. So originally I’d written a short story treatment and it was a man and a woman. And the reveal was, oh, they’re old people. That was sort of the extent of it. And it ended at the point one of them meets the other one in real life and sees that they’re paraplegic. That was the ending.

And then I was sort of thinking, well, isn’t this more interesting – and they were going to get married in it, but isn’t this more interesting if they’re getting married – if we make it a same sex couple they can get married in 1987 which wasn’t possible in 1987 and that in itself is sort of more interesting. I started writing the script from this sort of rough outline I’ve got. And when I got to the point where they meet in real life in the script I thought, oh, I’ll keep going then. I don’t want it to stop here. I wonder what happens when they do get married then. So I sort of just kept going.

So from that point on it was much more – that was me sort of feeling my way along to the end. And then what that meant was, and I never used to believe it when people would say, “Oh, I started writing a scene and the characters just did this and I didn’t know where it…” I used to think you liar. And but that’s what happened. There’s a scene where Kelly and Yorkie have a kind of confrontation and you find out what is going on and what’s Kelly’s deal basically. And why she doesn’t really want to put roots down in San Junipero. A backstory with a husband and daughter. And that kind of just came out – and I don’t think that really changed at any point. And it was sort of like, you know, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the episode.

So, that was a good combination I guess of the two approaches, sort of planning it, thinking I knew where the ending was going. And then I went for a run in the middle of it, because like any basically dying mammal I now have to do exercise just to stay breathing. And I was going running and Spotify was on. And I was listening to ‘80s music because the thing was set in the ‘80s. And Heaven is a Place on Earth came on.

John: Perfect.

Charlie: And I was like, oh, that describes, and I liked the rye joke that they’re in a server basically on earth. And then I was immediately worried that we weren’t going to be able to clear it. And so I came back and wrote the ending really quickly. And so the whole script was one of the fastest ones I’ve written. It’s Sod’s Law that it’s turned out to be one of the most popular. It’s typical.

John: Now, after that season you went on – so season four had USS Callister, Metalhead, Black Museum. USS Callister sort of stands alone as just a great science fiction – it’s a remarkable episode.

Charlie: Oh, thank you.

John: Congratulations on it. But talk to us about the genesis of that because it’s obviously a very clear appreciation and reaction to a certain kind of Star Trek type TV show and, again, you established the premise really early on and yet our central character who seems like our point of entry ends up becoming the villain of the story. How does that develop as you’re working through story on that?

Charlie: That was, I can remember very clearly the genesis for – the whole story came about, we were shooting an episode for season three called Play Test and we were on the set and they were setting up for a scene involving special effects which we hadn’t used many of. And I said wouldn’t it be good, now that we’ve got this sort of tool, we can use special effects, why don’t we just do a space episode. That’s quite often how we think our way into episodes is how can – because we’re sort of almost – it helps oddly for me to imagine what’s the Black Mirror version of a space opera basically.

John: Sure.

Charlie: So, we knew we wanted to do an episode set in space and I’d also – somewhere along the lines been thinking what if you had – this is a horrible story – have you heard of Josef Fritzl? Do you know Josef Fritzl?

John: I don’t know who it is.

Charlie: He was this horrible man who kept a family in a dungeon. There was a guy in America who kept women in a dungeon. And so there was a sort of well what if you had someone who is a tyrant but they’re wielding ultimate power over a bunch of people who are copies of real people. And so those two ideas sort of glommed together and you think, OK, you could do – immediately there was something appealing about the idea of a world in which you have the captain of a spaceship who you think is the hero and then you realize none of this is real and he’s a madman effectively. Within this world he’s a horrific tyrant.

And then you think well why is he a tyrant in this world and then it’s like, oh, OK, he’s kind of – he’s enacting his grudged from his daily life where he feels powerless. And it’s office coworkers. And immediately there there’s a sort of comic gulf between the two worlds. That was an interesting example of, again, the first draft of that actually didn’t have the 1960s element in it. And I was thinking it would be fun if it had something else. I think it came about from an idea like well what should the spaceship look like. And I was like I’d love it if we did a Black Mirror episode that opened and it looked like Star Trek from the ‘60s. That would really confuse people. And then you think actually that’s quite interesting.

John: And appropriate.

Charlie: It’s a great look and also the power dynamics within there that now look dated, even though Star Trek was an incredibly progressive show, Kirk is going around the universe sort of trying to romance green women half the time. So, yeah, so that added an extra element. When we came to the – the original script that we shot, it was much clearer early on that Daly, there was something wrong with him. And I remember this was one of the times we got a note back from Netflix on the first sort of loose cut they saw where – so very early on Daly is in the office Nanette Cole comes in and they meet and he clearly – he’s delighted that somebody is being nice to him and seems to admire him.

And then Walton played by Jimmi Simpson comes in and sort of whisks her off and he’s very slick. And you see Daly looking sort of jealous. Now originally it was written in that you see his fist clenches. And Netflix said I don’t know that you need that actually. It’s really more interesting if you don’t know how you feel about him. And we cut it out and immediately it was much more interesting because it meant that the reveal that, oh, this guy is a bastard came just a few minutes later. You see him walk it onto the deck of the ship and grab Walton by the throat. And you realize he’s a monster.

So that’s a good example of something where losing something that I thought was a clever bit of a foreshadowing delayed the reveal to such a degree that it just had a lot more power I think for people. Because you really – people sympathize with him at the start because he seems – we also cut some dialogue, there was a bit where Michaela Cole’s character is talking to Cristin, who is Nanette, and she says, “Oh, Daly is a bit of a creep basically.” And we toned that – we cut – again, there was something in there that made it more apparent. She was like he’s creepy. She went into more detail. And again it gave too much away.

That was really good fun writing that episode as well because it meant we got to do all the stuff that we thought we could never do in Black Mirror. So it ends in a sort of chase through an asteroid belt towards a wormhole. All of that was just really good fun.

John: So let’s talk about, many of these episodes, I’m thinking of USS Callister, fresh example, is there’s a bit of magic hand-waving. You have to accept this is part of the world. And that’s true also in features. Like most features are based on sort of a premise concept that you have to accept that this is a thing that we’re going to say is legitimate in this. And so in the case of USS Callister it’s not only can he build these virtual worlds but he can just off a piece of DNA recreate the entire person.

Charlie: Yes.

John: So that doesn’t actually make sense and yet it is so fundamental to the premise that you are willing to accept it.

Charlie: Well that’s a very good point actually. Because we did spend, again, I’d forgotten this. This is one of those where you repress a memory. I’d forgotten that we spent a long time in the original draft, it was co-written with Will Bridges. And we spent a lot of time trying to explain why when Nanette wakes up on the ship she has all her memories in place. If she’s a clone she wouldn’t know anything.

And actually so in the original draft there’s a whole bit of business that involves – there’s a piece of technology from Season One/Episode Three, Entire History of You, the Grain, that records all your memories. So what we had, we had a whole explanation of that. Everyone has these memory grains and Daly has hacked her memory grain and he’s uploaded. And it was like well why would he do that? What’s the point? And also why do we have to establish that?

And I knew some people would go, “Well that doesn’t make sense.” There’s a line in it where somebody starts explaining, I think that Dudani starts explaining why they’ve got their memories intact. And Michaela Coel’s character just tells him to shut up.

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie: And you kind of get away with it. I remember when we did Dead Set, the director of that was a guy called Yann Demange, and he used to wave away bits – I sometimes get very caught up on the logic of things. And he’d go, “It’s a movie moment. It’s a movie moment. It doesn’t matter. It’s a movie moment.” And he was right. I spent days arguing that it wouldn’t rain in San Junipero. Days. Because Owen wanted to shoot a scene in the rain and I was like, no, no, it wouldn’t – why would they make it rain. It’s paradise. Why would they make it rain? And he was like, “No one cares about that. It will look lovely.”

John: Yes.

Charlie: And he was right.

John: Rain can be nice. It can rain in paradise. One of the strange things about Black Mirror is that you’re writing about culture that is constantly changing and because you have become – because your shows have entered the cultural conversation people say like, “Oh, this is such a Black Mirror moment.” What does it feel like to be reflecting culture that you’re also changing? And to what degree are you aware that, you know, like these three episodes that are dropping right now, they’re going to enter the cultural conversation and change thoughts on that.

Are you mindful of that now in your success with the series?

Charlie: You can’t not be, I guess, to an extent. But you have to try. I mean, I just find that a terrifying thought. There’s something about that that’s absolutely terrifying. Because also it means that you’re – we generally try to give away very little about our episodes in advance because we want them to be a surprise. But we also know that, yeah, and I suppose also with an anthology where you’re – one of the things that, you know, we became known for was doing incredibly brutal endings and wiping all hope from the universe for a moment. Which I love doing every now and then. And sometimes we kind of almost deliberately overdo it, like Crocodile was a deliberate – well that’s a whole story actually.

So, you’re aware that – there’s a large subset of people who are coming to your show who want that. They want that horrible sort of feeling. But if you give it to them every time you’re not doing your job, I think, of the anthology show – of our anthology show we’re trying to be as varied in tone as we can within the… – I wanted to do an Airplane style episode.

John: Great.

Charlie: And I was talked out of it. I was talked out of it. I’m still not sure. I vacillate on that. I’m not sure whether it was a good idea or a terrible one. I really wanted to do one. I’ll have to do it under some other guise.

So there’s a weight of expectation I guess and I think – I mean, it’s very flattering when people go this is a bit like Black Mirror. Oh, that thing they’re doing in China, that’s quite Black Mirror. Oh, have you seen the news? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror. It’s flattering, it’s free publicity. It’s also terrifying as a mammal. It’s just frightening to think that the worst case scenarios that we’ve often been describing that those are reminding people of things they’re seeing in everyday life.

It’s something we don’t tend to – Annabel and I, we never really know whether the show has that much impact because we’re so busy. Because it takes so much time basically. Because they’re all – they’ve all got individual directors and individual casts. And a lot of the crew is completely different. We literally don’t really often get to go out and speak to people. [laughs] So it’s quite jarring when, I think last time I came to the US I was at immigration. They said what are you doing here. And I said I’m doing a thing, I’m doing a show. And they said what is it, and I said Black Mirror, and they’re like, “Oh!” And they called someone else over and said this is the guy who does Black Mirror. That’s really surprising and frightening because you think I’m going to just inevitably at one point going to let these people down.

I am now resigned to the fact that because we try – I think because we try to make the episodes as idiosyncratic as possible, when people inevitably compile their lists of which ones are their favorites you get some which are always near the top, but generally speaking I’ve read people hating on episodes that other people have loved. So you know that you’re never going to please everybody. And I think that’s sort of – hopefully that means we’re doing our job. Or at least failing in the right way.

John: I mean, you’re kind of unique in the realm of showrunners, and we’ve had many showrunners on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna, Benioff and Weiss, Damon Lindelof, who have been running these long time shows that have these huge fan bases who are invested in characters who they’ve seen over the course of years. And you don’t have that baggage. Every episode is its own thing and starting its own moment. So you don’t get the benefit of returning characters who can do stuff where you don’t have to set them up from scratch every time. But you get the freedom from expectation. A very limited set of expectations placed on any given installment of Black Mirror.

And I want to talk about Bandersnatch in relation to that because it’s billed as a Black Mirror experiment, a thing. Was it originally going to be a normal episode? When was the decision to make it its own event moment thing?

Charlie: Well originally it was part of season five. So we actually shot, so the season that we’ve just – they don’t like you to say dropped apparently. I was about to say dropped. No, no, no, it’s fine. I mean, I say dropped all the time. They say, “Don’t say dropped.” But I don’t think they gave me another word to say.

John: OK.

Charlie: So, what? Appeared?

John: Launched? No. Season five…debuted?

Charlie: Slithered? Slithered out?

John: Yeah.

Charlie: So Striking Vipers which is the first of the three, we’d already shot that. Smithereens had been written and there was some overlap with the filming of that with Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch was always going to be interactive and that was an idea that – so Netflix had said to us, I think we were over for some season four stuff, and they said we’d like you to do an interactive story.

John: Oh, great.

Charlie: And they showed us how this tech worked. And me and Annabel both nodded and were very polite and said that looks great. And then we left the room and went no flipping way are we doing that because it’s going to be a gimmick. We don’t want to do it. And then a few weeks later we were having a – so the way it works – so I generally write all the scripts but I’m always working with Annabel, bouncing ideas off her. We have a healthy disrespect for each other, so she will not be shy about telling me that she thinks an idea stinks.

And so we have a sort of back and forth conversation. And during one of those conversations I had – I wanted to do another episode set in the past. And I wanted to do something about vintage computer games. That was–

John: Because that’s your background as well.

Charlie: Yeah. And so there’s a lot of real nostalgia for me in Bandersnatch. And then I had this idea which was, oh well, what if you’re controlling – it was about somebody starts receiving messages from their computer. And then I remembered the interactive thing they’d just shown us. And I was like well what if that’s you and then so he becomes aware that you’re there. Oh, that’s interesting.

And also, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. Sorry. Because there’s a thing about interactive stories that’s just interesting generally. So that was it. Then we went back to Netflix and said, OK, we’ve got an idea. Originally it was much more simple. And then I started – so in trying to work out how to literally just write the story outline for this, I started out literally we were in the office and we had a whiteboard and I started with the flow chart. And then you quickly go on. I need a bigger whiteboard because I’ve run out of room. And then it was like, OK, there’s some software that does a flowchart for me. Maybe. No, actually, I need it to track what’s going on and remember what’s going on. And Netflix were also saying please test as many different things as you can.

So, then somebody said you should use Twine which is this interactive fiction software. And I looked at it and I thought I don’t have the time to learn that. That just looks complicated. It’s like html basically. And I used to do a bit of html stuff years ago.

John: But then you have to mark which characters are there and if there are any items that would carry through.

Charlie: Yeah. But what was useful, I ended up going back to Twine because it worked like flowchart software. So you’d make a cell and you’d type something in it and then it would automatically do the sort of piles that joined up. And as I did that it got fun. Planning it got fun. And it kept growing out into – so it kept expanding sort of length ways and width ways. And then suddenly you’d sort of think oh I can add a whole branch where this happens. And before you know it, you’ve of course fractionally it all expands out. So I did that. And then what I think what we realized I think was that it’s useful – if you’re doing an interactive story I think it was – what we stumbled across that I think was useful was because the main character of Stefan is separate, he understands that these commands are being given to him. It’s not like something where you’re just telling him what to do and he just does it. Because it’s hard to keep him consistent if you do that.

So I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 which I think is a very, very good open world game. It’s great. There’s a scene in it early on where you go and sort of have a conversation with one of your lost loves. And it was like quite well done. He has a conversation with this ex love of his on the doorstep and it’s quite poignant. And the turns away, gets on his horse. And then I accidentally like ran into a pig and then thought, oh, I’ll get off. I think the pig ran at me. So I shot the pig, sort of by accident. And then like somebody came running after me. And I thought what sort of character is this guy now? Murders a pig on the doorstep of his lost love. He’s a psychopath.

Whereas when there’s some sort of narrative distance it means that no matter how successful people found Bandersnatch or didn’t, it meant that hopefully Stefan was always a troubled young man reacting to a problem. And so he would start to resist what you were telling him to do.

So that was interesting. And then I learned a lot – there was one big thing that we had to cut out, and it’s incredibly hard to cut things out of an interactive story. That was the other thing I discovered. So originally the whole thing was structured a bit more like an escape room. So there was a central puzzle that you had to work out, which we have a bit of it down one branch. There’s a bit to do with the phone number. The psychiatrist’s phone number.

It was originally structured so you would always come to a point where he was trying to remember a phone number and he couldn’t remember it. And the idea was that the first time you encountered this you’re like well how am I supposed to know what the phone number. I can’t possibly. And so you’d get frustrated and it would sort of loop you back. And then by the time you’d failed in two different ways you’d realize that these recaps it was showing you–

John: Had new information.

Charlie: Were telling you the number. We had to massively simplify it because people just did not – I mean, we shot it. But people just did not understand what was going on.

John: Well ultimately you’re making a show about a guy developing a video game and the end product is sort of like the video game. It has to be tested and played like a video game to see whether people can actually get it. It’s not normally audience testing. It’s literally like can you – and people aren’t necessarily expecting a puzzle.

Charlie: No. They’re not expecting a puzzle, although weirdly – well, we did get some feedback afterwards. People did understand, one thing which was terrifying was that it was appearing quickly that people couldn’t remember a number. It was a five-digit number they were given and they couldn’t remember it for more than like 15 seconds. That was one of the first big boulders in the road we discovered.

Then we had a problem with translation. Because I hadn’t really thought that through. The numbers were buried in dialogue. So there were numbers like two which were just it’s two, what, but obviously when you translate that around the suddenly you can’t do it. So that was a problem. And you can’t predict what – people did understand that it was a puzzle and it was interesting that they said that people appreciated the fact that there was a puzzle involved and they enjoyed that. That was something they came back and said they enjoyed. But they also found it quite confusing and baffling.

So I don’t think that’s something we quite nailed.

John: You couldn’t cross that gap.

Charlie: Yeah. And another thing was there were some things – there was one branch of it, this is one thing that frustrates me about it. There’s one branch of it where we completely break the fourth wall and you can tell the main character that you’re watching him on Netflix.

John: I really liked that moment. It’s absurd and also–

Charlie: It’s ridiculous.

John: And it makes you feel like, OK, I’m aware that there’s a comedy happening here.

Charlie: Exactly. Well, that’s the comedy. Totally upends it and it turns it into a comedy. The thing that I can’t quite – originally that was not accessible on your first go through. And then we were sort of concerned – it was one of these things where we were concerned that people would just get down to a more normal real world ending so to speak, certainly a less fourth wall breaking ending, and would miss that. And that was probably a bit of insecurity on our part to make that accessible from the start. But what that meant was that when it came to that point and it gives you two options, frustratingly slightly more people pick the Netflix branch because they didn’t quite understand what the other one was. It was like a symbol.

And so I think for some people that meant that their first experience of getting to a sort of fairly meaty ending broke the fourth wall and therefore sort of possibly undermined the drama of everything else in a way. So I’m not sure – I’m in sort of two minds about that. It was also a lot of business to do with dreams. Like you have to – where he goes through the mirror and stuff. There was such a logistical nightmare going on. Yeah.

And we ended up having to cut a couple of endings out because we just – it was just getting unwieldy.

John: Do you get data back showing which paths people took most?

Charlie: Yes. We had a whole sort of postmortem debrief they did where they showed us – or we don’t get numbers, of which I’m delighted about because there’s just such relief. But they did tell us – the one that really stuck in my head was when it comes to why the chopping up the body or burying the body it was exactly the same percentage split as Brexit in the UK. It was 52 to 48. Which surprised me actually because I thought most people would not want to – it was 48% wanted to chop the body up and I thought that would be much lower than that because that seemed such a gruesome option.

But generally speaking most of the sort of percentages were kind of roughly where we thought they would land. There were a couple of exceptions. There was a certain amount of stuff we could tweak because the whole thing was obviously weird because having done – just to rewind a bit – having done the story outline in Twine I then started – I realized that I couldn’t find tools that did this, that let you write screenplays in this interactive way. I just couldn’t find something that did that.

So, we ended up realizing, OK, what we need to do is assign a sort of number to each of these cells, at 1A, 2B, and so then I used Scrivener to create this confetti of individual little scenes. Wrote those up. And then had to export those into something else. Paste them back into Twine. So there was this convoluted route we went to. Because we had to get to a point where we had a script that you could read and it would say if you want to do this turn to page such and such.

And also you could read on an iPad and literally click on it and it would take you there, which sort of made life a lot easier for actors. But because the tools weren’t there it was one of those things where you end up with about five different applications open. Then Netflix built a tool for the edit which then managed to import – they imported my Twine thing directly into the edit which made life a lot easier. But it would crash. There would be things where it would be like, oh no, Colin is alive. He’s meant to be dead.

John: Yeah. Your episode crashed Netflix probably. The entire system probably.

Charlie: The outline crashed. The outline would crash. There was this whole thing where Colin Whitman can jump off a balcony and if he does he’s dead for the rest of the story. And sometimes he would just pop up again and we were like what’s going on?

John: What’s happened?

Charlie: Which was quite in character for him actually. That was why I kept adding more Colin Whitman. As soon as we knew we had Will Poulter I kept adding more and more Colin Whitman as well because he’s great.

John: We have questions from listeners and I picked a few that I thought might be good for you. Chelsea from London asks…

Charlie: I’ve come all this way to hear from somebody from London. And they’re called Chelsea.

John: “I watched Searching the other night, a film that’s basically all social media, and towards the end I found it was asking too much of me in terms of suspending disbelief. As writers, how can you tell when you’re asking too much regarding the suspension of disbelief? Obviously genre plays a large role in this, but for a film set in the real world how do you know where to draw the line?”

Suspension of disbelief. So, within your shows you are establishing the fundamental premise of sort of like what happens in this world. But do you struggle with suspension of disbelief in your episodes?

Charlie: You’ve cited a couple of examples. There’s a good example in USS Callister where we sort of hope you’ll just go with it. Striking Vipers, the new one, there’s a whole thing that they can do in this game that they shouldn’t really be able to do. But we just think you’ll go with it. So sometimes you just sort of gauge it that way.

I haven’t seen Searching so I don’t know specifically what it is. I often find that with the depiction of computers still a lot of the time in movies or TV they are shown doing things they can’t possibly do in the present day. And that’s often quite frustrating.

I think we do spend a lot of time kind of on product design as well to try and make it look like all the technology is just very functional, like quite sleek. A lot of the time we’re sort of trying to remove technology from the backgrounds as well. So there will only be a couple of little devices. And hopefully that makes it feel more grounded.

And there’s also generally that rule that you can withstand one fantastical thing happening.

John: Exactly.

Charlie: As long as that’s – I think as long as people enjoy that enough. That’s the other thing. As long as people enjoy that enough they’ll go with it. And if two impossible things happen. That’s the famous Speed example. The bus jumping in Speed where you don’t really believe it could do that.

John: No.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: So you get that fundamental suspension of disbelief that is part of the premise. And so I think your episodes tend to do that. It sounds like what Chelsea is reacting to is choices that characters have made or twists that are revealed that she’s not believing the characters are really doing that thing.

Charlie: Right.

John: It didn’t feel real to the rest of the world that she’d set up.

Charlie: I mean, well that is a trickier one. Because that is – and that’s just done to how authentically you think the character is reacting. I mean, in Black Mirror really quite often, and this is something that sort of depresses me when I look back at it, we’ve got in our episode somebody – it starts out somebody slowly realizes they’re in a trap. They start struggling. It gets worse. The end.

John: Yeah. [laughs] There’s a premise!

Charlie: So in a way we often don’t let them escape which is one of the reasons why hopefully people go with it. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it is just as long as you feel that the characters are reacting authentically to the moment then you will go with it. And in terms of the concepts, again, as long as you’re only trying to do one crazy thing at a time, again, people will hopefully go along with that.

It’s a difficult one though because, yeah, that is a tricky one. I mean, we’re lucky as well in a way that we don’t often I guess, because our stories are shorter, we can kind of burn all the characters up and the scenario up really quickly before the logic would strain it too much.

John: Well also the universes that you’re creating and because they’re only a single episode we can assume that this technology exists and we are seeing it in the context of this one story. And we don’t have to worry about like, wait, if you could do that your entire universe would be very different. I look at Westworld and Westworld is a show that has to grapple with that because there is technology that exists in Westworld and you’re like would it really be used in this way?

Charlie: Right.

John: And so if it is used in this way, what does the world outside of Westworld look like? And that’s what they’re dealing with in the third season of Westworld.

Charlie: See, now I deliberately haven’t watched Westworld because I’ll get crippling professional jealousy. I tend to avoid things that I think might be – and the number of times we’ve gone, “Oh, it would be great to do a Black Mirror western. Oh, hang on, Westworld exists.”

So another good example I guess, so Be Right Back. Actually so Be Right Back is a good example I guess of something where when writing it I was aware that – so it starts off she starts communicating via email, a messaging app, with her deceased husband. Then it sort of escalates and she’s talking to a synthesized version of him on the phone. Then he says would you like to meet me. And at this point I thought people are not going to go along with this. That there’s a sort of android version that shows up.

And there were two things that helped. One was the story was deliberately set in the middle of nowhere. So they were in an isolated farmhouse. She was on her own. So you’re not thinking does somebody down the road have one of these? And there’s a scene we cut out. There’s a woman who originally recommends this to her. And originally there was a scene where you see Martha phoning this woman up and going why did you do this. And you see that this woman is in bed with a robot of her own. I think we actually shot that and we cut it out.

So, we isolated them so you’re not thinking too much about the outside world. And so hopefully those logical questions don’t come into it.

John: That’s Westworld as well. Westworld is on a ranch.

Charlie: Yeah. The other thing we weirdly lent into the absurdity there, so when she gets this thing it literally comes sort of packaged up like a rubber man. And she puts it in a bathtub and drops nutrients into the water. And meanwhile she’s got Donald Gleason in her ear telling her how weird this is and weirdly acknowledging that it’s weird and it’s crazy.

John: You’re hanging a lantern on it to make it clear that this show is acknowledging that this is an odd moment.

Charlie: So you’re not sitting there going, well, come on, this wouldn’t happen. Because somebody onscreen is saying that. Saying isn’t this strange? So, I think hopefully, yeah, those are two tricks we got away with there. We quite often tend to isolate our characters generally because it means you’re not considering the whole of society.

Jesse’s original script for Entire History of You had loads of really great extra details about the world in which everyone is recording everything all the time. But it was just too much. Stuff for a whole movie or a series in its own right.

John: Brett asks, “As a musician transitioning to a writing career I’ve been wondering given the power of streaming in both music and film is this the best time or the worst time to get a foot in the door?”

So we are clearly in a really strange, interesting time. This is also a moment where I can ask, “What is television?”

Charlie: Yeah. I don’t know. I really don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what constitutes. I mean, if I look at, obviously Bandersnatch, what is that? I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of a game. It’s sort of a film. It’s not on a gaming platform.

John: But it could be. I mean–

Charlie: It could be.

John: If it weren’t filmed, if it were done all just with CG characters then it literally would feel like a game.

Charlie: The number of times I was like it would be so much easier to do, when we were filming it, would have been so much easier. Yeah, I don’t know. And then things like, so Roma I watched at home, because I’ve got two young kids, really busy doing the show all the time. Never get to go out to go to the cinema. So I watched Roma at home and I had such limited windows in which to watch it. I watched it over three nights in sittings, divided up, like it was a series I was binge-watching, which I was perfectly happy to do. Which makes me a huge philistine.

So like we don’t even know quite what, like Black Mirror is an anthology show, but then sometimes we do standalone one-offs. I think we’ll probably do more of that sort of thing as well in the future. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know. I know we got some stick for when we did San Junipero it was like 61 minutes long and it got entered into the Best TV Movie category. And I know that annoyed some people. But tough luck.

I mean, I was delighted that we won, but I sort of thought, well, hopefully that means if we can be entered in that category and then people liked it enough to vote for it, well, you should get extra points shouldn’t you for taking up less of people’s time in this day and age? Like the shorter the better.

Something like Russian Doll, I really loved Russian Doll.

John: Oh my god, l loved those episodes were so short.

Charlie: 30 minutes long.

John: Going back to Natasha Lyonne again.

Charlie: And, well I met her the other night because I went to a Russian Doll event and I told her my favorite thing to say to people who I admire their work, and it’s true, I said I liked Russian Doll so much it made me angry.

John: Oh, me too.

Charlie: I was furious that I hadn’t thought of this show and I hadn’t written this show. And obviously there were certain things that it had in common with Bandersnatch. It was brilliant. And it was short. Don’t you wish sometimes you could sort things by length? Make life easier.

Sorry. So the question–

John: The question is–

Charlie: Is it the best time or the worst time? I would say it’s surly one of the best times.

John: I think it’s one of the best times, too.

Charlie: Because there’s so much. I mean, there’s a sort of probably unsustainable mountain of stuff being made that that means by just logic would dictate that there’s a need for more stuff. The machine needs more coal being shoved into it. So, it’s a pretty good time to do that. And also I guess technology is at the point – the thing that sort of changed my whole career, so he talks about transitioning from one career into another. So I was a video games reviewer. And I did sort of comic strips. And I felt I was in a sort of ghetto. And I wanted to be doing TV comedy and things like that. And the way – and this was like 1998 – and the way I managed to make that jump was by doing this small little website that was sort of I guess uniquely mine. It was a small thing I was doing on a deadline that meant people were noticing it. And now the technology exists for you to make – you only get two chances to make your own stuff in your career. One is at the very beginning and then sort of near the end.

John: Yes. You’re either a nobody or JJ Abrams.

Charlie: Exactly. So you might as well, so you have the means to produce stuff. Write a script. Make a short film. Just do anything that is uniquely yours. And then hopefully people can see it. The problem is of course you’re up against everyone else who is doing the same thing. That’s the downside.

John: Absolutely. The firehose problem is that there’s so much content it’s hard to pull those things out. So there’s at least three series that I have sort of backed up, like I really want to watch those things because I know they’re fantastic. I just have only the same 24 hours.

Charlie: It’s like being air traffic control, isn’t it? These things are taxiing round and round and round. Well, I mean, even something like Game of Thrones which is like the most – was it the most popular show in the world? Still, you know, I watched it all. Most of the people I know haven’t seen it. It’s the most popular show in the world. This is the only period in history when – I was watching a reality show not that long ago in the UK and one of the contestants his job was described as TV Presenter and Barman. And I thought this is the only period in history where those two – that’s two valid careers that one person can have. Because there’s so much content around.

John: I think the other reason why this is the best time is that with the globalization of things your show and any show is available everywhere to the culture at once. And so when I was in Scandinavia doing Arlo Finch press I was talking to one of my publishers and she said, “Oh, what are you watching?” And I said there’s a few things I really want to watch. Haunting Hill House. And she’s like, “I love that.” And it had just dropped. Sorry, we can’t say dropped anymore.

Charlie: Oh, you can say dropped. No. Say dropped.

John: It had debuted worldwide. So she was watching it in her own language. I was watching it in English. And we could have this conversation in ways that never happened before. So that globalization of things is a unique moment now.

Charlie: And you can watch – so I binged watch – I mean they’ve given a terrible title in English, Money Heist. Have you seen Money Heist? It’s called La Casa de Papel which I guess translates as the House of Paper, or something. So that’s probably too close to House of Cards. I guess that’s why they changed it to Money Heist. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But it’s incredibly addictive. It’s basically 24, it’s Spanish though. It’s 24 about one bank heist.

John: Great.

Charlie: I mean, it knows it’s ridiculous. It gets so ridiculous. And it’s something that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across if it hadn’t been for streaming platforms. Yeah. And that’s one of the most popular shows in the world I think outside of the US and Britain. It’s amazing.

We never thought Black Mirror would travel, because it seemed so idiosyncratic to us. But it’s very odd when they drop it. I’m going to say drop it. When they drop it. Drop it. What are they going to do? Delete it? They’re not going to delete it now. It’s too late.

When they drop it on the service it is a really weird sensation that you start getting feedback from around the world in a sort of wave as it goes through time zones.

John: So one thing I do want to point out that’s different though is Netflix, let’s hope it goes on for 100 years, but likely it won’t. And so at some point the episodes that you’ve made will exist somewhere? So traditionally there’s been a way to find old episodes of things and you can find those things, or a movie exists. We talked before about movies used to be on DVDs so you could at least like always find a movie. Sometimes you can’t find a movie. Something like the Bandersnatch episode without a server to run it on it doesn’t exist as a thing people can enjoy.

Charlie: But then someone will build a 2019 Netflix emulator. Emulation. I’ve got massively into emulation which is probably apparent from Bandersnatch. So hopefully the emulator – the emulation community will save the day.

John: Well, we’re already in a simulation.

Charlie: We are.

John: There will be emulation within the simulation.

Charlie: Yeah.

John: It stacks nicely.

Charlie: Which is something–

John: Turtles all the way down.

Charlie: We wanted to do that in the episode, have a bit in it where he’s playing a simple game and you actually – like a Frogger type game. But we didn’t have time.

John: I get that. It’s time for our One Cool Things though.

Charlie: OK.

John: My One Cool Thing, so I was back in Colorado this last week which is why Craig was hosting by himself. And we’re listening to Colorado Public Radio and there’s a voice and I’m like wait that’s me. And it was the only time in my life I’ve encountered my voice twin. I’m used to hearing my voice on the podcast. And this person sounded exactly like me. And so I listened enough so I could find out what his name was. His name is Matthew Zalkind. He is a cellist living is Colorado. And it was just a really odd moment for me because I almost only get recognized for my voice. I’ll be out at a Trader Joe’s paying for something and I’ll say something and they’re like, “Oh wait, you’re John August.”

Charlie: Right.

John: It’s almost entirely by my voice. So it was so odd for me to be hearing someone else’s voice. I could give this person a script and he could read it and be like, oh, well that’s John. If I do get hit by a bus Craig could just bring this person on to do my job.

Charlie: Well, and presumably the technology to do that anyway is five seconds away if it’s not already.

John: Oh clearly.

Charlie: I think it’s partly in existence. So it’s nice that you’ve discovered that voice just before the tidal wave.

John: And going back to some of your previous episodes, I think I brought this up on the show before is that I’ve taken all of the text from Scriptnotes, because we have transcripts for all of the episodes and broken them down into Craig and John, everything we’ve said separately. Run through a Markov chain generator. So I do have a little bot that can generate Craig sentences and John sentences and have them talking to each other. So at some point there will just be–

Charlie: Auto-generated–

John: Of Scriptnotes. We’ll have one episode that is just generated dialogue for me and Craig talking about things.

Charlie: It will be like, there’s a short Roald Dahl story about that. About an automatic writing machine. Because he was writing it in the ‘70s or something, it’s got literally foot pedals. He steps on a pedal to make it a bit more erotic and accidentally steps too far and stuff. So it’ll be like that. You’ll be able to just generate it constantly like 24-hour, an unending loop. What if it’s better?

John: What if it’s better? I mean, what is reality? Going back to your first episode of this new season which is the question of like who is the real person and what is reality if you know somebody only in a virtual way.

Charlie: And does it matter? If it’s as compelling as they’re finding it in that episode, yeah. Sometimes when we do stories like that it’s like I am no clearer on really – I don’t know that you always need to know the answer to the question you’re raising in a story, because I think it can be hopefully interesting if you literally do not know the answer to what’s going on entirely in that episode. I think that in terms of what that means is as confusing for me as it is for the characters I think. Maybe that’s just a weakness on my part and I should have just worked it out properly. Oh, you never know.

John: We’ll see. Craig could tell you because Craig wrote Chernobyl and he knows the answers to all–

Charlie: He does. But I have got to watch that. Literally everyone is telling me to watch that. And then I spoke to my wife last night and she was like, “I want to watch Chernobyl.” I’m like, all right. Yeah.

John: You’ll get home. You’ll watch it.

Charlie: Well, the government will make me watch it at this rate. It will be issued to me by the government. I have to wait. There’s an odd sensation. I have to wait. So I can’t start watching it now until I get home and watch it with my wife. We have to watch a nuclear meltdown together or my life won’t be worth living. And I’ll have to wait. I’m going to save that up. I’m going to save the Chernobyl disaster up to make my life better.

John: Charlie, what’s your One Cool Thing?

Charlie: My One Cool Thing is a game called Baba is You.

John: Baba is You.

Charlie: Baba is You. You can get it on the Nintendo Switch and I think from Steam and probably on other things. It’s a puzzle game and a logic game the likes of which is almost impossible to describe, but it basically involved – you’re a little white like a gerbil or a rabbit, I don’t know quite what you are in it. But you’re Baba. And you scurry around and you can push – how can I explain this? There are blocks of rules, so Baba is You could be one rule. Door is Shut would be one.

Now, you can shove the word shut out of the way and you can put You in its space and then you are the door.

John: Oh, fantastic.

Charlie: If you see what I mean. And so from that sort of – it’s quite a mind-bending premise in itself. And then it spins out these incredibly clever and mind-mangling puzzles. And my 7-year-old is obsessed with video games and I played it with him and had one of those incredibly humiliating moments where I was – because you can sit there sort of your brain sweating for hours as you try and solve one of these things. And we had one of those things where I was insistent that I knew the answer and I was trying to do something. And he eventually wrestled the joy pad from me and solved it in 10 seconds because that’s the future.

Just that. I’m obsolete. All of us becoming obsolete. But it’s brilliant.

John: Great. Baba is You.

Charlie: Baba is You.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mackey Landy. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. I believe you are on Twitter. Do you want people to reach you on Twitter?

Charlie: Well, they can. I don’t often – I generally use it now for shameless promotion and then I don’t look often.

John: But that’s how I reached you.

Charlie: That’s how we met. See, I sometimes use it. It’s for DM’ing. But I tend to skulk I think is the word. Skulking. Yeah. Because I figured it was bad for productivity and general mental well-being.

John: I think that’s often likely the case. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs so we can Markov chains so that Craig and I can be talking in perpetuity for all time.

Some folks do recaps of the show and discussion on the screenwriting Sub-Reddit. So check us out there. Tell us what you think of the Charlie Brooker episode. I keep trying to drop your R.

Charlie: I constantly get that in America. Constantly I’m Booker. Everywhere I go. Is there a famous Booker here?

John: Well there’s Cory Booker. He’s running for–

Charlie: I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?

John: He’s running for President.

Charlie: How would I have heard of him? I’m from Britain. I’ve heard of Trump.

John: Oh my god.

Charlie: Of course I’ve heard of Trump. I had a proper argument with an Uber driver the other day because I got in the car, here, and he said, “Well they’re really rolling out the red carpet for Trump back in your country aren’t they?” And I said, no, people hate him. People hate him in London. And there was immediately an argument. Anyway. How did I get into that?

John: Because you have an R.

Charlie: Yes. There’s an R. And also I would like to make the case for like quite often I see people writing quite accurate parodies of Black Mirror where it’s my accent going, “What if, what if your mum run on batteries? What if you could 3D print an egg? Some British dude saying what-if.” And I think that is accurate, but I find it disturbing that Americans call the show Black Mir-Or. It’s not Black Meer. That sounds like a place. Black Meer sounds like a place. Blackmere. It’s Black Mirror.

But how do you say Mirror in–?

John: Mirror.

Charlie: You said it properly. Why do people keep saying Black Meer?

John: Because we live in slightly different countries and languages are constantly evolving.

Charlie: I feel churlish now. I feel like I’ve really – yeah, sorry. [laughs]

John: Well you’re coming from a land that often does glottal stops instead of syllables.

Charlie: We just can’t talk properly in my country.

John: That’s fine.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide to hear which episodes our listeners liked most.

Come to the live show. The live show is this Thursday at the Ace Hotel. Amazing people will be there. Also, I think by the time this new episode comes out Highland 2.5 will have shipped which has revision mode in it which is remarkable, so it’s what I’ve used to write all my stuff recently. You can have stars in the margins. You can use it for writing your next Twine episode.

Charlie: Yeah. I like the sound of that.

John: I’m going to send you a beta right now.

Charlie: OK.

John: Charlie Brooker, thank you very much for being on the show.

Charlie: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/logic-and-gimmickry).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 309 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we will be standing at the whiteboard to look at how story logic in our scripts may function. And then we’ll sit down to tackle some scenes and look at a few tricks to keep them interesting. And if we have time we may even answer a few more listener questions.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** Sound good Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think everything you just said sounded fantastic. No notes, John. No notes.

**John:** No notes. Fantastic. I love those. Before we even get started, yesterday as we were recording this the Emmy nominations came out. And I want to rant just for like maybe two minutes about Emmy nominations.

**Craig:** Go.

**John:** Not about any person who was nominated or not nominated, but the whole idea of snubs. I am so frustrated with the concept of snubs, that people who did not get nominations should feel especially bad or weird. That we need to single out the shows that did not get nominated. I find it incredibly frustrating. And I don’t know, how do you feel about that, Craig? You don’t care about awards at all, do you?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t, but you are touching a certain nerve here. And that’s — it’s not enough to say here are a bunch of people that have put their hearts and souls into making things. And when I say a bunch of people, I mean everybody that made something that year. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to pit them all together, make them compete, pick five of the best ones, then make them compete on television. And then one of them wins. It’s not enough for that. Apparently, also then you have to talk about who you said — no — you don’t get it. I’m snubbing you. No.

And now obviously no one is really actively snubbing anyone, but it’s just the media. Yuck.

**John:** Yes. So the problem I have with snubbing is like snubbing implies intention. That you deliberately did not invite someone to the party. A conscious choice was made. But, of course, a group of people all voting independently cannot make a conscious choice as one body. They can simply choose certain shows, but they cannot deliberately exclude somebody.

And so when I see intention applied to any group of voters, I find it incredibly frustrating because all people have is their own individual things. So the whole idea of snubs just drives me just really bonkers. If you’re going to make a list of other great shows that didn’t get nominations, I guess that’s fine. Because if you’re trying to single out that The Leftovers is a brilliant show, fantastic. But if you want to make us feel about The Leftovers, or feel like The Leftovers was less good because it didn’t get on that list, I’m angry with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think this is really just a manufactured story to sell clicks. That’s all. I mean, the whole thing, look, award shows of course exist to sell advertising. They don’t exist to actually award people. I mean, if you wanted to award people you would just do it I suppose. But primarily this is a business and they’re selling ads and they’re making money off of a show.

The secondary predatory business of making money selling ads off of things that talk about the thing that makes money from selling ads, that’s the industry that creates the snub. And people click, oh, because you know, ooh, someone in Hollywood got a snub. First of all, snub is a great word. Love that word. Just the sound of it is lovely. Snub.

**John:** It is nice.

**Craig:** Snub.

**John:** So that’s my bit of frustration. Let’s get to our actual real show. Some follow up. Our live show is coming up super, super soon and we have another guest to announce. Liz Meriwether. She is the creator and showrunner of New Girl on Fox which is entering its final season. She will be joining me, and Craig, and Megan Amram on July 25 in Hollywood. There are still some tickets left as we’re recording this. I don’t know. I need to check in with the Writers Guild Foundation to see how many are left. But if you would like to come join us, you should come join us in Hollywood for that special night.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So July 25, 8pm. Come there and see us. Talk with these two incredibly talented writers about sort of whatever. We don’t have an agenda yet.

**Craig:** No, but I will say that Liz is fantastic. Obviously I’ve already talked about Megan, my cousin. But Liz is great. You shouldn’t miss this, honestly. This is great. And it doesn’t matter if you write features or you write television. These are just two very smart people who are going to have I think tremendous insight on what’s going on. You know, I like the fact that we’re getting younger guests, also. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with bring Larry Kasdan on every now and again, but younger writers, they’re plugged in. They know what’s up.

**John:** Well, I mean, Liz Meriwether is younger than we are, but she’s also been running an incredibly popular TV show on Fox for five season now, six seasons now. So, she knows more than we do about things. And that’s my favorite kind of guest is someone who knows much more about something than I do.

**Craig:** 100%. Otherwise it’s just the two of us sitting in judgment.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s also good. But it’s not as exciting.

**Craig:** I kind of like those. Actually, those are my favorite episodes. [laughs] Yeah. I like those.

**John:** All right, so our first main topic today is about story logic. And this came up this week because so I just got back from Paris. I’ve been super jet-lagged. I’m over most of my jetlag. But this past week I went to a book signing for my friend. Julie Buxbaum has a new book out. It just came this last week, called What to Say Next. And she did a reading at the Grove, at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove. And it was my first time going to one of those events. It was cool to see how that all works.

And I was talking with another author there who was describing her new book and it’s a middle grade title. And she was wrestling with the mystery, she said. And she was talking about sort of the story logic. And we’ve been focused so much on character and motivation and other things in recent episodes, I thought we might step back a little bit and talk about the things that actually are just kind of plot. It’s the way in which pieces of information get out there and sort of how the overall shape of the plot and story work, which is sort of not always exactly driven by what the characters are doing. It’s sort of decisions that the author is making way ahead of time.

And that can be just puzzle work. It can actually a very different kind of process than sort of the writing on the page. So, today I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics and specifically one thing that I find incredibly frustrating and I think if we can focus on it you can often solve a lot of your story problems this way. Which is the difference between coincidence, correlation, and causation. The three Cs. And how you can use them to your best benefit in your stories.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be good. I mean, I will take a little something you said there and expand on it slightly. When you say it requires a slightly different way of thinking, I think it requires a completely different way of thinking. I mean, there’s this creative work that we do that’s rooted in a certain empathy. We create a human being in our minds. We must empathize with them, walk in their shoes, see the world through their eyes. Imagine how they react to the things that we throw at them.

It’s very emotional and it’s very empathetic. A lot of times we think of that as the creative meat of what we do. But then there is this other stuff that’s math. Story logic and the creation of the hardware of a plot is math. And it is a puzzle and it is a different part of your brain. I think it’s one of the reasons why so many people want to do what we do and yet so few ultimately get there. Because you can’t just be good at one of these things. You have to be good at all of them. And if you can’t quite get your hand around how to machine a plot, you end with a mess. And it is strangely the first thing that people will pick on when they walk out of a movie or they turn off a television episode. They say, “Why did that even have to happen? Couldn’t that person just have talked to the other person and then the show wouldn’t have happened?”

They notice it every time.

**John:** There’s a TV trope called Refrigerator Logic, which is as you step away from a movie and you’re getting something out of your refrigerator you’re like, wait, why did that happen? Like there’s things that sometimes will glide past you when you’re actually seeing the story up on the screen. And then later on you’re like, wait, that did not actually make sense. And so let’s talk about how those things can actually make sense.

And what you’re describing really is the different between — we talked about that metaphor about being on the train. And so as the writer, you’re responsible for like what you’re seeing out the windows, but you’re also responsible for being way up high and seeing where the train track is going. So as you’re laying out where that train track is going, you have choices about what branches and what decisions the story will make. And I was thinking back to a post I did ten years ago on the blog called the Perils of Coincidence. And that came after I watched Spider Man 3.

And Spider Man 3 is not a great movie. And there were some significant issues of coincidence where a bunch of things just had to happen in exactly a certain way. People had to be there at the same moment when this other thing was happening in ways that felt really, really unlikely. And so in that post I sort of broke through these are the coincidences. Here are some maybe ways they could have gotten out of those coincidences. Because when you see coincidences, you can always imagine at the outline phase. Like if they were turning in the treatment for that story there were a bunch of words like “at the same time, accidentally, luckily, unfortunately, meanwhile.” Those are all really signals that something is going on where it’s convenient for these things to happen but they’re not actually causing the other things to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You always get I think one coincidence in a story that can be kind of fundamental. And so a fundamental coincidence to me is like, well, in Spider Man it’s Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider. Anyone else could have been bit by that radioactive spider, but then it wouldn’t be Spider Man. So the audience will always give you that one sort of fundamental coincidence.

In Die Hard, John McClane happens to be in the tower when the bad guys take over.

**Craig:** Where his wife is. Yeah.

**John:** Where his wife is. Yes. But they’ve already established that he’s there because his wife is there, so that all makes sense. If his wife happened to be in the same building, that would be too many coincidences. But it made sense because they were all kind of bundled together in one thing. You wouldn’t have the movie if you didn’t have that kind of fundamental coincidence.

And usually that movie will spend its fundamental coincidence very early in the first act. Like page 10, page 20, page 30 at the latest. It’s interesting watching the new Spider Man, which I won’t spoil, but they use their fundamental coincidence incredibly late in the story. And it was surprising but I think actually really effective. So when you see the movie you’ll say like, oh, wow, OK. And because the rest of the movie works so well they’re able to spend that coincidence quite late in the story and that was exciting.

**Craig:** The notion of coincidence and making things convenient is correct and it is connecting to the convenience of the writer. I think this is why people find it dissatisfying. It’s cheating. I mean, we want to watch these things unfold in a way that is surprising and fascinating to us, but after we are surprised we go, oh, OK, that was — that feels good. I like that this happened. I understand why it happened. It makes sense. I just didn’t see it coming. That’s the fun part.

With straight up coincidence, what the audience feels is you wanted to do a thing, or you needed to do a thing, so you just jammed it in. We don’t mind that first big coincidence because we understand that it is necessary for us to enjoy a thing. I mean, really the first coincidence of any movie is that we have shown up to see it. That’s — you know, so we’re OK with like, OK, we showed up to see your movie. You go ahead and do a thing.

But then the joy of the story is that there aren’t these things that are happening that just cheat. Because what’s the point then? We in our lives do not recognize the drama around us and the things that concern us as deriving largely from coincidence, even though I think strangely it’s probably true that most of the crazy things that happen in our lives are the result of coincidence. But the things that we’re mostly interested in, the passionate affair, the decision to steal, falling in love — these things feel volitional to us and they feel like they are arising naturally from the circumstances around us.

So those are the dramas that we like. We’re not so interested in stories where someone is walking down the street and a piano falls on them. It’s shocking, but there’s not drama to that. It’s just like, oh, how odd.

**John:** Yeah. It is. It’s surprising. And, oh, he happened to be there at that moment when the piano fell on him. And in real life sometimes the piano does just fall on a random person. But usually when we see an unexpected event or really any event, we expect there to be a cause. We expect there to be a relationship between these two events happening that is either causal, like one caused the other. It is correlated, like some outside force caused both events to happen. Or if neither of those things make sense, then it truly is coincidence. I think in the real world we tend to ascribe causal relationships to things that often are coincidence and that’s a real problem.

But in movie logic terms, these are our universes. And so we shouldn’t have to rely on coincidence for most of the work of our stories. So, if we’re not going for coincidence, we’re looking for causality. We’re looking for A causes B. Ideally, something we’ve seen already in the story has caused this effect. And now we’re in this situation and whatever the characters are doing in the situation, ideally your lead characters, not just the villains, whatever they’re doing is causing the next thing.

We talk about actions and consequences. Causality is about consequences. It’s about what this chain of events is leading to next. And how our characters are responding to that and changing their own circumstances.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that part of the danger of what we do, the negative impact of what we do, is that we make such a big deal about very dramatic, very extreme events being caused, being purposeful. There are no coincidences, right? In life, almost all these things I think are coincidental. And then we try and put causation — every conspiracy theory that you see out there in some way or another is attempting to make sense of what may be coincidental. Sometimes there are conspiracies. We seem to be currently in the middle of one. But largely, no.

But in movies and TV, well, hey, what can we do? This is what we crave is this sense of causation. And when you think about movies — The Godfather is an incredibly complicated movie in that it’s got dozens of characters, and a lot of moving pieces in the machinery of the plot. A lot of hardware there. But everything is caused. And it all starts with a very simple thing. Someone shows up and says, “I have a business proposition.” It’s not even a coincidence. “You’re a business man. I have a business proposition.” And the Godfather says, no, I’m not interested.

And from that begins a series of caused events. And it is so satisfying to watch. Someone makes a choice. If you don’t give me what I want, I will do this. I did it. I just saw what you did. I’m now going to do this to stop you. And so on and so on. And it builds, and builds, and builds. Everything is caused. And I think it’s important when people are laying out their plots, they at least start from a place of everything — everything that happens here will be caused. Everything.

There are ways to fudge it here and there. But I think that’s probably the best ambition you can have for the machinery of your plot.

**John:** And one of the dangers here is you can fall into a trap of thinking like, oh, this is mechanical. This is a Rube Goldberg device where like once you set this ball rolling down the ramp everything will happen. In some ways that is accurate. But you want it to feel like all the characters are making individual choices that are leading to the next thing. So you don’t want just one series of events kicks off and the characters are just, again, we go back to this metaphor of being on rails. They’re just being dragged through the movie.

It needs to feel like they have volition, that they have the chance to make their own choices. But the choices they make will cause the next set of circumstances. And that can be really tricky to do.

So let’s talk about how you do that. So if I’m standing next to this writer who is working on the mystery of her story, what is some advice that we can give her to tackling the mystery of her story? Well, I would say that if you have the luxury of having a TV writing staff, that’s largely what they’re there for. So, when you see a TV room together, you know, sometimes yes they’re pitching jokes, they’re pitching storylines, they’re pitching ways to get through a scene. But a lot of what they’re doing is figuring out how are we going to get from this, to this, to this, to this. Like what are the natural causes and effects of these things.

**Craig:** Now, if you’re on your own, as I typically am — in fact, as I have always been — I think a general best principle is to start thinking about how you want to end. Because if you don’t know how you end, the danger that you will begin creating this bizarro plot to get from point A to where you eventually end up is high. If you know where you’re going to end, you can machine your plot. And remember, the point of machining the plot is not to be obvious, but rather the opposite. To be surprising. The surprises are not random. They are not derived from coincidence. They are carefully constructed. They are paying off in a satisfying way what you’ve set up.

You can’t really do that well if you don’t know where you end. So I think if you have your ending, you can create that causal chain with interesting reversals and surprises and twists and back and forths so that everything feels sort of meaningful. It is also important if you find yourself laying out your plot and suddenly there are a lot of, well, bends in the pipe. You know, a lot of strange things where you’re going, well, I got to do this so I can do that. Stop. Always stop. You may think you can get away with it. It’s just going to get worse and worse. It’s going to become byzantine.

Sometimes what happens is we fall in love with the notion that something is going to happen. And the problem is what’s come right before that something that we want to happen isn’t leading directly to the something we want to happen. So what do we do? We jam it in. We create a coincidence. Or even worse, we put in a bunch of scenes in between those things so that it will kind of get there naturally, but now there’s bloat.

Sometimes you kind of have to cut the throat of the thing that you really, really, really wanted to do because it’s not laying in properly. It may be able to happen later, but it may be the wrong thing. Your story will want things to happen naturally and then you are going to want things. And you kind of have to get your ego out of it a little bit and let your stories’ wants take precedence over yours.

Because I’ll tell you this. This the last chance you have to be clean. Outside the gate are the barbarians. That’s a little uncharitable to the people that are trying to help us make our movies. But I will tell you, for instance, Identity Thief, after I wrote my second draft, or even my first, there was a note — and it wasn’t really a note. It was sort of an order. “We want more villains.” And I don’t know why. To this day, I’m not really sure why.

And, you know, I did my very best to say that’s not — I don’t think we should. And the response back was, “Do it.” And so I did it. And it created so many coincidenty poor plotty mechanics. That stuff just — and you know, look, happily I don’t think anybody goes to a movie like that for the exciting villain plots, and yet it hurts every movie. Every movie. When there’s obvious bends and kinks because something that doesn’t belong has been put there. And nobody quite has a sense of what does and doesn’t belong to a movie that has not yet been shot than the writer does. I wish people would listen a little more carefully when the writer says that doesn’t belong.

It’s one of our Spidey senses.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about what the actual process might be for you’re the writer working by him or herself and you’re trying to figure out these plot mechanics, the story logic, before you start doing your draft ideally. So, different writers have different approaches. Some make a simple outline. Some use index cards. Some will write out a treatment.

What I would say though is no matter what your process is, if you’re describing it to somebody — basically if someone is looking at the cards with you, or if you are sharing your outline with somebody, watch out for when you’re saying these phrases that signal, OK, there’s something convenient happening here. That it’s not necessarily natural to what should be happening in the story. So when you find yourself saying “at the same time, meanwhile,” which means that you’re cutting away to something else, or “just then,” those situations — they’re unlikely and you can’t have so many unlikely things in your script.

You’re going to be running into problems if you’re saying those kind of phrases a lot.

One of the other things to really be mindful of, and I think this is partly what happened with what you described in Identity Thief is sometimes there’s mechanics happening in the story that won’t be immediately obvious to the reader and therefore the audience. Like there’s behind the scenes stuff that’s happening. And one of the real challenges for writers is all that hidden machinery has to make sense, even though it won’t surface till later on.

So, what the villain was doing those three weeks, or like why that person showed up at that point. Maybe you have a reason for why they got there. Maybe you’ll even be able to say the reason why they got there. But the minute they sort of showed up there or something happened that was not visible to the audience, that’s going to be a surprise. And figuring out how you’re going to balance what the audience knows versus what the audience is going to find out later on can be really tricky.

And so whenever I have stories that aren’t just one main trajectory that can be a lot of my planning work is figuring out how do I make it clear to the audience. Like these people were doing these things in the background. You just didn’t see them. But here we are now and the characters are doing these things now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just continuing the Identity Thief case, there was one villain — I know, that’s crazy, right? I wrote one villain. What? Anyway, and very early on, in fact, the first time we meet Melissa McCarthy’s character, she’s on the phone with that villain and he’s upset. And she’s lying to him. And then later on when she and Jason Bateman’s character finally confronted each other and he’s kind of got her where he thinks he wants her, the bad guy shows up. It’s natural. She lied. We know she lied. He never got what she said she would send him. And he’s here. That makes sense. Meh. You know.

**John:** Well, in doing that, that initial conversation, you set the expectation that we would meet him and that he would show up. And you’re paying off that expectation. So that does not feel surprising to an audience. And it feels like, OK, this is a thing I expected to have happen. I’m happy that it’s now happening. I’m a smart person because I expected it to happen and therefore it is happening.

**Craig:** It was caused.

**John:** Yes, it was completely caused. It was not just a random fluke.

And even movies that I think are really good, like this most recent Wonder Woman movie, there will be some coincidences in there. And that’s OK. And if the movie is working really well you don’t notice it so much. A coincidence in the new Wonder Woman movie, which is not really spoiler at all, there’s a moment in the story where Diana first uses her bracers and sends off the shock wave. And like, wow, she has sort of supernatural powers.

She heads off and then like literally two minutes later while she’s standing on the cliff, Steve Trevor’s plane comes crashing down. Why did that happen at the same moment? Well, because it was convenient. There was nothing about her doing the bracers that caused his plane to fall. It just happened to happen at the same moment.

We go with it because it’s sort of the mythology and it feels OK and appropriate, but it is a big coincidence that it’s happened at the same moments. They literally coincided in ways that weren’t natural.

**Craig:** Exactly. And, look, when you’re writing, that may be where you end up. But it’s always worth in a moment like that to say am I avoiding a problem or am I avoiding a gift? Can this thing that just happened cause that thing? Wouldn’t that be satisfying? Now, it may not work. You may not be able to make sense of it. Or if you try, it may cause other problems and a ripple effect. And then you abandon it. But try. You know, I think sometimes what happens is these things happen, they emerge, and we get scared and try and run away from them when we should be running toward them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Every problem is an opportunity. So take advantage of those opportunities as they come up. All right, let’s go step away from our whiteboards and go into our actual scenes. And you had a suggestion for the topic of gimmickry and the creative little tricks you can sometimes apply to keep scenes interesting. Take it away.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a little dangerous to be talking about this, because I always worry that people are going to go wee and start throwing ketchup all over their food. But these things can be great. I was thinking about it because I’ve been watching Fargo, the television series, and I should mention that one of the things that Fargo does that’s interesting is they make a little bit of a religion of coincidence. You can get away with a lot of coincidence if your show basically says around here coincidence happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to make things worse. Sometimes it happens to make things better. But that’s kind of the world we live in. We live in coincidence world.

You know, Tarantino lives in coincidence world.

**John:** Absolutely. He just happens to be crossing the street and getting hit by the car.

**Craig:** Exactly. And we’re like, yup, that’s what happens in Pulp Fiction world. That makes sense. Totally.

So, gimmickry. Sometimes you find yourself writing a scene and the general conventional way of laying things out feels a little meh. Feels a little boring. I don’t mean to equate conventional to boring, because sometimes conventional is the absolute best way to tell a scene and it is fascinating. But there are times when you’re going to want to, I don’t know, throw a little glitter on.

So, I just thought of a few of these things that we can do and at least by codifying them we know that we have these tools in our belt. And the first one is kind of radical — I mean, I guess they’re all radical in a way. Change the arrow of time. And we generally think of time as moving forward and it is linear, but of course we have seen lots of movies and lots of TV shows where things move out of order. Sometimes they move backwards. Sometimes we see something that should have happened before the thing we just saw happening after the thing we saw. But we get it.

Do you remember how in Out of Sight he did that interesting — Soderbergh and Scott Frank did that interesting trick of editing and scene design where you had Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney falling in love but we found out about it out of its time in the movie. It was just fascinating the way it worked.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You just got to be careful when you do it. It needs to be purposeful. It needs to evoke something. You can jump time in little steps. You can also jump time in big steps. You can have, you know, a scene where two people are talking at a place and then one of them turns around and it’s 20 years earlier and now they’re children talking in that place. You can do these things. You just obviously have to have a reason why.

**John:** Absolutely. And as the screenwriter, you need to make it clear on the page what you’re doing. Because some of these effects will be really obvious in the film, but will be really hard to see on the page unless you’re upfront with the reader about like this is what’s happening. And you don’t have to explain why you’re doing it, but you have to explain like what it’s going to look like and feel like if you were watching the movie. That you’re acknowledging that you’re jumping this thing. Because when you’re just reading 12-point Courier it’s easy to sort of miss and get confused by these sort of sleights of hand.

**Craig:** Yeah. Similarly, if you change the arrow time, you can kind of change the nature of space by splitting the screen. When we think of split screens, I guess what immediately comes to mind are just bad sitcom split screen kind of jokes where one person is talking on a phone and the other one is also on the phone. And it’s a split screen. Wah wah.

But split screens I actually think can be incredibly valuable when you’re trying to create tension. So, I’ll go back to Tarantino, again. Because, by the way, Tarantino the most — he goes bananas with these gimmicks and he uses them so well. There’s a moment in Kill Bill where we see that Uma Thurman is in a coma and also we see Darryl Hannah’s character coming down the hallway with a syringe to kill her. And he splits the screen. And there’s something beautiful about watching a demon essentially stalking down a hallway. And then at the same time watching this completely helpless human being. And the tension just rises because what he’s telling us is there’s no chance she’s going to open that door and our hero won’t be in the bed. She’s going to be in the bed. You see her, right there.

You can also split the screen where you see the same thing happening from two different angles at the same time, which is a fascinating thing, because in one angle somebody is walking out of a car and they’re walking into a store and they’re quite happy. In the other angle, just because of the nature of the camera, we see that someone is watching them. And they don’t know.

It is the sort of thing that I think screenwriters should be thinking more about because when we don’t there is a danger that the director will. And I don’t mean to say that like directors are bad at it. They’re not. But if the gimmick is only directorial, it will feel more gimmicky. When it is connected to an emotion or a feeling or a purpose, which is our domain when we are writing these things, I think it can be terrific.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing using these tricks to really enhance or underline the emotion or the story point you’re trying to get there. So it is better for the gimmick. The gimmick is just not there on top of what you’re otherwise seeing. It’s not a conventional scene with a gimmick applied to it. It is a scene that is better and unique because of the gimmick. And once you see it with a gimmick, it would be hard to imagine that scene without that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when some people watch these movies, I think critics fall into this trap a lot. I don’t mean reviewers. I mean analyzers of film. They will tend to see these things as style. They will tend to see them as visual style. But when we connect to them, it’s not because they’re visually stylistic. It’s not the aesthetics. It’s what it tells us about the people involved and how it makes us feel. It is actually again an extension of character. And an extension of the empathetic connection that we have with the people on screen.

There’s another thing that happens quite a bit and I think when we watch it we don’t realize how radical it is. And that’s just bending or even breaking reality itself. Sometimes somebody should just talk to a dead person. You can have a scene where somebody is just sitting in their bed and they say out loud to the ceiling, “Oh, Edith, I wish you were here. What should I do? I don’t know what to do. I’m lost without you.” Boring.

Or maybe Edith is just there. The beginning of The Iron Lady did this beautifully. Meryl Streep plays an aging Margaret Thatcher. And when we meet her she’s talking to her husband, played by Jim Broadbent, and the two of them are having the most mundane typical breakfast conversation. And she’s telling him, “You’re putting too much butter on your toast.” I mean, you have no idea that he’s actually dead. He’s not there. He’s not there. And then you realize, oh, he’s not there. Wonderful.

You can also bend reality by just freezing the entire world except for one person. And, of course, there’s the typical breaking the fourth wall, which is always a trickier proposition. But I guess my point is you have the ability to do things that are beyond the pale of what we experience in our everyday lives in terms of reality. And you just have to make sure that there’s an in and an out. And that once we get out of it, we know we’re out of it.

That’s the key. You can surprise people. You don’t have to tell them you’re going into it. You just have to let them know that it happened and now you’re out.

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s the kind of thing which you probably try to do relatively early in your film so you get a sense of like this is the kind of thing that happen in your movie. Because if you do it quite late, then it feels like, wait, you’ve broken the rules you’ve set. There’s a social contract you’ve signed with the audience and now you’ve broken that contract.

And always be mindful of, you know, you are defining your characters and their actions on the page, but you’re also defining the character of the movie. And so the kinds of choices you’re making in terms of the gimmickry, the stylistic choices you’re making, that’s the character of the movie. That’s what your movie feels like.

And so as long as it’s consistent with what the movie feels like, you know, the way that Tarantino movies feel consistent with a Tarantino world, it’s going to be — it’s going to feel right. It’s going to feel like something that can happen in your world.

But if you’re completely straight drama and then suddenly you try to pull this thing at page 80, I think the audience is going to rebel and quite understandably for your not following the basic rules you seem to have set for yourself.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, every time you do this, you are breaking the tone one way or another. In 500 Days of Summer, everyone slips into a musical number. That is a gimmick. And believe me, I don’t use gimmick as a pejorative. I use it as what it is. It’s an exciting, dazzling way of attracting people’s attention. We know, OK, this is the kind of movie where that can happen.

So later when they break reality, again, and show us two simultaneous evenings, expectations versus reality, we understand that can happen here. And it’s all right. Similarly when we watch Kill Bill, the fact that suddenly the movie switches into animation, acceptable. There are also moments sometimes where the break in the tone is OK because the movie is silly. There’s not a lot of gimmickry, filmic gimmicky in a movie like say Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which is one of my favorite movies. I mean, it’s broad. It’s very broad. It’s very silly. It’s wonderful. He doesn’t really mess around with reality too much. But then it does.

Then there’s a sequence that turns into a silent movie, into a silent film, which is hysterical and amazing. But you have to be aware of what John is saying here, those of you at home. Your story has to be able to survive this. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Gimmickry is amazing because it frees you. It gives you like these — like we used to have the box of crayons. I had the box of 16 crayons and someone showed up and they’re like, “I have the box of 64 crayons. I have seven more blues than you do.” OK. Well, gimmicks, those are the extra blues and the extra reds. It’s the big box of crayons. They tend to make us feel more creative. When you read them in scripts, they tend to make the read feel maybe more sophisticated or ambitious. But even then, that is kind of a gimmick. Because it only is ambitious and creative and advanced when it works.

So, do it if it makes something better. Don’t if it doesn’t. Just know that you can.

**John:** Absolutely. The bigger box of crayons will not make you a better artist. They will just let you do some things that you couldn’t otherwise do easily. And that’s important. That can be useful. And I think by limiting ourselves to the simplest things, sometimes you’re able to tell simple, and true, and very strong stories. There’s a reason why you may want to not use the gimmicks, not use the full set of tools that you could use.

But, there’s certainly circumstances where you want to try to do those. And I think those are great. And quite a few of my films have used some of those fancy crayons. Like my first movie Go. It restarts time twice. There’s scenes that you see from multiple perspectives. You ultimately recognize that there’s quite a bit more going on than you first thought. And that’s great.

My movie, The Nines, is sort of nothing but a bunch of crayons melting all over the screen. And it’s very deliberately playing with your expectations of what is the difference between these actors and these characters. And is there any real underlying reality behind all this. It breaks its tone. There are musical numbers. There’s reality stuff happening in there. Melissa McCarthy is playing herself. It’s a very different set of expectations than you would normally have going into a movie.

But that’s not the only way to tell a story. And I don’t try to apply as many effects as I can to every movie. Like you have to be very judicious and see what is right for the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** And I think you’ll know. That’s the thing. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction. There’s a feeling, oh yes, you know, this feels so much better than just the usual way. You know, I remember Todd Phillips and I were like struggling with how to do a flashback. Like, oh, here’s a flashback scene. I was like, yeah, well, I don’t know. And then the notion that in Alan’s mind they’re all children and to do it with children, that’s a gimmick. But it made so much sense and suddenly it was a joy to write. It was exciting. You know?

And I feel like, OK, if we are chaining our hands to the keyboard and going, OK, here we go, blah, blah, blah, then it’s probably going to be a similar experience for the audience. When you get excited and it just flows, then you know you’ve got the right gimmick. But again, word of caution, most of the time it will be flowing and feeling great with no gimmicks at all.

**John:** 100% agree. All right, Craig, let’s try to answer one or two of these questions in our mailbox.

**Craig:** Let’s try, you know. Let’s try.

**John:** We have audio, so let’s first listen to Kate from Phoenix, Arizona, who wrote in with a question.

Kate: My question is about interviewing experts to create more realistic stories. The script that I’m writing deals with a crime and the legal consequences. Although I have a respectable working knowledge of these procedures for a lay person, I can tell it’s not enough. I need to find a cop and a lawyer to interview to get the details right. I found some people online who are more than willing to consult for a sizeable fee. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but my wallet does. Do you have advice for finding and interviewing experts? Once I find them, is it customary to have them read the script and point things out? Or ask about procedures piecemeal?

Also, for a Murphy’s Law type of situation, if I change story elements based on what they say, can they claim some kind of story credit? That’s sort of the point of asking in the first place, to change the story and make it better. And I’m not opposed to giving credit if it were fair, but I would prefer not to share the story credits if I can help it.

Are there measures I should take to protect the intellectual property of my own work?

**John:** Well, that’s a great question. I don’t have perfect answers for Kate, so I’m going to preface this by saying I bet some of our listeners have good resources they might point Kate towards in terms of finding the cop and a lawyer who she could talk to.

But I can offer some general guidance which is, no, you should not be paying anybody. And, no, they should not be trying to take story credit. What you’re doing is just asking people about their jobs. And you’re asking them how they do their work and asking them some theoretical questions. That’s not story credit. You’re nowhere near that. So, anybody you’re talking to who would want to try to get that from you is not the right person for you to talk to. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. There’s not going to be any payment here. I’m doing a project right now that has a lot of research involved. It’s more research than I’ve ever done for anything in my life. And I’ve talked to all sorts of people. But I specifically had to talk to a cop when I was working on Identity Thief, because I wanted to find out how does this all work, and how do you go through your job and deal with this stuff. If you call, I think if you just call, Kate, you say you’re from Phoenix. Call Phoenix PD up and just say, “Listen, I’m a writer. I’d love to sit down and interview an officer or a detective. Would you have somebody willing to talk with me for a half an hour? I just have questions for a story I’m writing.”

I would be shocked if no one said yes. Everybody wants to talk about their job. Everybody wants somebody to get it right. I think people are interested in being a part of something like that. I don’t think there’s any issue with credit because they’re not writing anything. They’re talking to you and you’re taking notes.

You certainly can give them an assurance that you’re not going to use their name. That you’re not going to use anything that’s identifiable to them. And if you are recording the conversation, that the recording will not be played back for anybody other than yourself. That it’s only for research purposes. But I think by and large if you just ask, same thing with law. If there’s an area of law. I mean, you must know somebody that knows somebody that has a lawyer. Have that person ask their lawyer. Who would be a good lawyer who might want to talk to you about this? Somebody sooner or later is just going to say, “I’ll do it,” because people generally want to help.

**John:** They do. So I think Kate’s social network is probably bigger than she realizes. So if she just goes on Facebook, throws it out there like, hey, I’m looking for any cop or any lawyer, does anybody know somebody? Somebody will know somebody who knows somebody who is going to be willing to talk with you about this.

Before I left for Paris, I was in an Uber. I was actually headed to Kelly Marcel’s house. And our Uber driver was from a country who was exactly the right person I needed to talk to about this project I was writing. And so I just started up a conversation with him and said like, hey, this is really crazy but would it be OK if I called you and asked you more questions about the country you’re from and when you came to the US. And he said, of course, that would be fine.

And so you will bump into people in your real life who are going to be helpful and will get you through that kind of thing. I was also years ago I was in upstate Maine doing research for this other project that never got made. And I was staying at this little hotel and whenever I would meet somebody new I was like, I would ask them about their job and I’d say like, hey, do you know anybody else who has lived here since 1970? Did you know any people who are old timers here? Because I’m trying to find out information. And so over the course of three or four days I was able to talk to ten different people about sort of what Maine was like in the 1970s. And it was great. It was fantastic. And it didn’t matter that I had credits or didn’t have credits. They were just like, well, somebody wants to know, I’m happy to talk to you about it.

So, you will find somebody who has the information you need. And if your listeners have other good suggestions for first places that Kate should look, we welcome them.

**Craig:** I talked to a detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department when I was doing research for Identity Thief. And he was describing how they work and how you deal with law enforcement when you catch them. And how you have to deal with it as a victim. And he was great. And when it was over, and I was leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, what happens to the thief at the end?” And I said, well, I haven’t written it yet. I’m just in the research phase here. But I think she’s going to go to jail. And he said, “She should die.” [laughs]

And I said, what? And he goes, “She should die. These people are terrible.” And I thought, you know, I guess if you deal with the consequences of identity theft every day, day in and day out, and deal with the victims of it day in and day out, that’s probably how you would feel. That makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** So, useful advice for real world, but probably not useful advice for someone writing a comedy about an identity thief.

**Craig:** By the way, also, something to keep in mind, Kate. Reality is fantastic until it is not helpful. And then it is not fantastic. Especially if you’re doing something that is essentially a fictional dramatization of things that needs to be informed by reality. You know, use what helps.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s do one more question. This is Jason from Los Angeles.

Jason: I’ve been living in LA for eight years and I just haven’t been able to break into the business the way I want to. I write consistently. I rewrite. I get notes from trusted friends. I rewrite some more. I’ve made short films. I’ve gotten into a few festivals. I recently posted a script to the Black List. And while all of these things have absolutely helped me to develop and hone my craft, they haven’t opened any industry doors for me.

I’m 33 years old. I’m married. So, jumping into something like an unpaid internship at a production company or spending five years in a mailroom doesn’t seem feasible for me. Which is why I’m considering doing something both of you have often opposed, and even more often with great umbrage. I’m considering going to a writing consultant. So, what I’m not considering doing is going to some online “guru” who has 12 tips for this and eight surefire techniques for that. No. What I’m talking about is basically a teacher. Someone who is all over YouTube. I’ve seen their ideas. I’ve seen them talk about their ideas. And they’re sound. They sound legit. It’s someone who has video testimonials on their website from current writers who are currently working in the business who are staffed on TV shows.

And I’m considering this for the same reason someone might consider hiring a tutor. This is a person outside my circle of friends who owes me nothing, knows their stuff, and best of all can give me notes face-to-face that can help me improve my script. I’ve looked into the cost and one year of meetings would run me about $3,500. Now, that’s not nothing, but it’s also not my life savings.

At this point in my life, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of money to try something new that can help me get where I want to go. Because what I’m doing right now hasn’t.

So, John, Craig, please tell me: am I crazy?

**John:** Craig, is Jason crazy?

**Craig:** No. He’s not crazy at all. He’s not crazy in the slightest. That’s why the industry of people that take money from folks like him is thriving and well, because they’re not preying on the insane. They’re preying on the sane and they’re preying on people who are scared and to some extent desperate. And I understand it. I mean, Jason has been at this for a while now it sounds like.

And he has a life. He’s created a life for himself. I assume he has a day job. Somehow he’s paying the bills. I completely agree that when you’re 33 years old and you have this life that you set up for yourself, starting in a mailroom or an unpaid internship doesn’t make any sense, and also it’s not necessary to be a writer or a director. It’s necessary if you want to be an agent or studio executive, I suppose.

So, no, Jason, you’re not crazy at all. But I’m glad that you did this — I’m glad you recorded this question because you get to listen to yourself back now. And I want to ask you — who do you sound like? Because to me, I’m concerned that you sound like the guy that’s about to lose money. And the reason why is you’re grasping at straws and I think you know you’re grasping at straws here. It’s not impossible that spending money on some outside help like this might help you improve your script. I think it’s highly unlikely it will help improve your script to the point where suddenly all those doors that have been firmly shut will fling open.

I don’t think it kind of works like that. I am concerned that after all this time it may just be that you don’t write or direct the sorts of things that the rooms you want to be in welcome. You may be a different kind of writer or director. It’s also possible that you’re not supposed to be doing this at all. I have no fear saying that. I know it is upsetting to hear and it’s particularly upsetting if next week you sign on and sell your movie and make a billion dollars and win an Oscar. Then I look like a dumb-dumb.

And I know that that’s the dream. So, I guess my advice to you would be this: think twice. $3,500 isn’t your life savings. It’s also $3,500. Think about who is asking you for that money and why they want it. Think about the nature of Hollywood. Think about predators and prey. And ask yourself if this is what’s right and best for you.

Generally speaking, as you know, I think it’s not. But, I also am aware that when I say these things, they are of no great assistance to somebody that’s trying to get one of those doors open.

John, what do you think?

**John:** Yeah. What I like about Jason, he already is thinking twice. In deciding to write into us and record his question, he is thinking twice. And he’s recognizing all of the sort of pitfalls ahead of him. So, he’s sort of done a lot of our work for us. And he’s further along in the process then somebody who says like, oh, maybe I’m going to start writing a script and I’ll hire this consultant.

So, I’m trying to step back and think about if I had $3,500 and I wanted to spend that $3,500 to improve my writing, what might I do? Well, I might take a class. I might take a UCLA Extension class. I might do something else that would sort of get me in a place where I’m around other people who are writing, who can help me focus in on what I’m doing. And so by that structure, I can’t say it’s the worst use of your money.

But I don’t know anything about this person he’s really going to. He says this person has YouTube videos, has a track record. I guess. Before I would give this person any of my money, I would want to know who has been using this person and what would they actually say. And the good thing about the Internet these days is you will find somebody who has had an experience with this person, positive or negative. Find out what that experience actually was. Because I don’t want you spending your money on just some charlatan who promises things.

I know that early in my career I was lucky to have some people who would read every draft of my stuff and would give me notes and I genuinely did get better doing that. Some of them were teachers. Others were producers who were trying to get my work on the screen. And I did get better. And so while I wasn’t paying them directly, or I was paying them indirectly through the university, it did help.

So, this could help you. I’m just concerned that it’s not the right person. I’m worried that you’re going to be writing in a year from now saying like, “Oh you know what guys? I spent that $3,500 and it was not the right choice. And I’m not any closer to what I want to be doing.”

**Craig:** Well, there is another negative outcome here. I mean, Jason mentioned that the person has testimonials on their advertising, and of course they do. The question isn’t whether or not people enjoyed working with this particular consultant. The question is whether or not this consultant got them their ultimate goal, which was to sell their screenplay or be employed to write another screenplay. And that’s not just sell it to some marginal player. There are a lot of those. But sell it to the kind of company you want to be in business with. Right Jason?

What these people do necessarily requires them to be good to you. When I say good to you, I mean, warm and fuzzy and encouraging because they want you to come back and keep paying them. They are actually less reliable, I think, then your friends in that regard. They will tell you, “Listen, this script has tremendous promise. You have tremendous promise. You can make this great. And you can get everything you want. Work with me. I will get you there.”

They will say that probably no matter what because that’s what’s going to make them the most money. And there are people who after a year or two will say, “I’m going to — I will gladly give you a testimonial because you’ve made my script better and you make me feel good in a world and business that otherwise makes me feel terrible.”

But $3,500 is a lot of money for that. And that ultimately really isn’t going to get you what you want. So, be careful of that praise. And be careful of that encouragement. They probably won’t say to you, “Hmm, I read it. This is no good. And I can’t help you with it. I don’t want your money.” You know?

The whole business is soaking in a certain kind of conflict of interest.

**John:** Yeah. It occurs to me listening to Jason’s question is that I feel like over the course of our 309 episodes we haven’t done a great job of introducing listeners to people who were sort of similarly positioned to Jason who made it. And there are some. And I’m thinking of a friend now who I can’t believe I’ve not had on the podcast who in his middle 30s, late 30, sort of finally got it started and finally got staffed on a TV show and is now running his own show.

It does happen. And because it’s rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And I want to have him on the show to talk about sort of what he did and sort of the choices he made. And what he would do differently. Because he might have better advice for Jason than you or I would because we started at such a different time.

So, in hearing Jason’s question I’m recognizing that there’s probably a group of our steady listeners who we’ve never really directly addressed with how it can work. We’ve always sort of given them negative advice in a way. Like, you know, don’t do these things rather than like these are the things that actually work for people. So, that’s going to be a goal to get my friend on the show in the next couple of weeks.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. Because, you know, we do want to help. Obviously we want to help, because we’re trying to help people who are writing. And we’re trying to help them write better. And happily we don’t take — well, John takes their money hand over fist. I don’t get anything. But we don’t have much in the way of saying, “And we also want to help you get that job.”

We keep hitting this thing of write a great script, you’ll get the job. But, there are some practicals. It would be great to hear from somebody who has gone through it, especially somebody who is older than the typical right out of college “here I am, I want to be a writer.”

I will say that Jason sounds incredibly nice. He just sounds like a good guy and that makes me nervous. I’m nervous because sometimes it’s the good ones that end up getting fleeced the hardest.

So, you know what, Jason, talk to your wife. She knows you better than anybody. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. You say to her — I got to think of a good name for Jason’s wife. I’m going to go with Marissa. “Marissa,” so close to my wife’s name. Anyway. “Marissa, tell me something because I don’t trust myself on this issue. Does this sound like a good idea? Should I do this? Should I not do this? Give it to me straight. I know that you love me either way.”

I hope that’s true about Marissa

**John:** Yeah, you never know. Never assume how other people’s marriages work.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right. Like he may call in next week and say, “Well, I’m divorced now. I asked her. And apparently that was the only excuse she needed to just pack her stuff up and, yeah. So…and now I have half of that $3,500.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, community property. California state law.

**Craig:** Ruining lives one podcast listener at a time.

**John:** Let’s move on and go to our One Cool Things before we wreck anymore havoc in the world.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is the bus. Which bus? Well, really any bus. But my whole year in Paris, one of my revelations was that as a tourist I was always taking the Metro to get from place to place, because Paris has a Metro, so why are you not taking the trains.

What was so great about this last year is the busses are actually fantastic. And I was always sort of scared to take the busses because I didn’t quite know where they were going, or how to use them, or how it would all work. The huge advantage, the huge change, is that Google Maps now has all of the busses in the map directions. So if you are someplace, you want to get someplace, Google Maps will tell you get on this bus, it’ll take you to the place. And it was fantastic. And the busses in Paris were great. And so convenient. And while I was on my bus I could do my Duolingo and it was a great experience.

So, coming back to Los Angeles I vowed, you know what, I’m going to start taking the bus more often.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So this last week I took the bus to Beverly Hills. It was fantastic. And Google Maps worked just as well. And so the busses in Los Angeles are not bad at all. And people are always kind of afraid of the busses and they shouldn’t be. They were the same as the busses in Paris. It got me where I needed to go. It was easy and delightful. It was cheaper because I didn’t have to park my car in Beverly Hills. So, just try the bus. It sounds so simple and obvious because obviously I grew up taking the bus in Boulder. But a bus in the big city can be really great. And if people took the bus more often, I think they would be surprised.

**Craig:** It’s true that the thing that keeps me from the bus is just general fear of where the hell I’m going. Because these busses pull up and I just don’t know the bus system well enough. Like in New York, I’m here in New York right now, that’s why this microphone sounds weird, I take the subway all the time. I take the subway everywhere I can take it. And it’s really clear. I know exactly where it’s going. And they’ve got letters on them. And they never change. And that’s that with those.

And then the busses come and they have these letters and numbers. And I just get confused. I get confused.

**John:** You know who does know? Your phone knows. Your phones knows everything. And so Google Maps, you punch it in, it will tell you exactly when that bus is coming, when to get on it. It’s great and convenient. And also because you’re not underground you don’t lose service, so you can actually do things on your phone. It’s great.

So I would just recommend people try the bus. If you haven’t tried the bus in years, take a bus sometime this month and see what it’s like.

**Craig:** Following this podcast, bus murders, up by 30%.

**John:** Ha-ha. Always the best.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s face it: our listeners are easy marks. Well, I’ll continue with the transportation theme of One Cool Thing. Hyperloop One.

**John:** I saw that. They tested.

**Craig:** And it was successful. It worked. Now, they were testing — was essentially like a chassis, like a little sled. It wasn’t the full car where you can put people. And it wasn’t at full speed either. They talk about being able to go up to 700 miles per hour. In this case, the test I think was just 70 miles per hour. But it worked. They have a tube. It’s a vacuum. And they got maglev. And it shot down the track and it worked.

So, at least you’ve got this first theory into practice mode and I got to say the way that people are jumping on board with this thing, it feels like it’s going to happen. It legitimately does not feel like bunk.

You know, look, obviously I know that what do they call them, Super Trains? What do they call the — bullet trains? Bullet trains are real. I know they’re real. I’ve ridden on a bullet train. But when California said we’re going to spend billions of dollars to make a bullet train I thought no you’re not. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to spend billions of dollars, but we’re not going to have a bullet train. And we don’t.

We have spent billions of dollars. There’s no bullet train. This thing feels like it’s going to happen. And if they can put it together, they’re saying you can get on board in Los Angeles and be in San Francisco within I think 50 minutes.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And that’s 50 minutes without going to an airport and getting in the line. It’s just hope on a tube and you’re there.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll hope. Yeah. I mean, we’re in a weird time when we have all these amazing things that can be happening even while the world seems to be falling apart. So, it’s going to be a real race to see which future we end up in.

**Craig:** I do believe the world is essentially separated into two tribes at this point. Builders and tearers-down. And builders, the one advantage that builders have is that they’re ingenious. And the one advantage that tearers-down have is they are indiscriminate. They’ll just tear — if it’s standing down, they’ll tear it down. They don’t care.

**John:** Yeah. Just swing that crow bar and you can just knock things down.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. They’ve certainly got inertia on their side, don’t they?

**John:** They do. Gravity works. They have all the stored energy in there. They can just make things fall.

**Craig:** Exactly. And what’s the — entropy. They have entropy. Inevitably, the tearers-down win.

**John:** Well, in the end everything becomes dust. But it’s just how cool things can be before they all become dust.

**Craig:** Before the universe ends in heat death. 100%. Yep.

**John:** As we wrap up, I will remind people that the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is available. It’s the first 300 episodes of the show, plus all the bonus episodes. People recommend which things you should check out. So, if you’re new to the show and you want to dig into the back catalog that is a great place to start.

You can listen to those episodes on the new USB drives. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those USB drives. They are lovely and sturdy.

And that’s our show. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

**Craig:** Of course.

**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 like the ones we answered today. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts. Look for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a review.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And next week, same time zone.

**John:** Oh, so nice.

**Craig:** So nice. See you then.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/) for the July 25th Scriptnotes Live Homecoming Show, with guests [Liz Meriwether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Meriwether), [Megan Amram](https://twitter.com/meganamram) and more!
* [Julie Buxbaum’s What to Say Next](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553535684/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Fridge logic](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) on TV Tropes
* John on [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* The [Fargo TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(TV_series)) makes a religion of coincidence
* Gimmickry used in Kill Bill with [split screens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWI4G9PB31c) and [animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQM0klOXck8), in (500) Days of Summer with [musical numbers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJoIaXZ0rw) and [alternate timelines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fL94BTrFhs), when [talking to the dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7xeK76cwA0) in Iron Lady, when Love and Death [becomes a silent film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEETZTs795U&t=0m48s), and when [flashbacks become childhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLk9y0RZSGo) in The Hangover 2
* [Go](https://www.amazon.com/Go-Katie-Holmes/dp/B008Y6YKEE/) and [The Nines](https://www.amazon.com/Nines-Ryan-Reynolds/dp/B00164LTUO/) on Amazon Video
* [The LA Metro System](https://www.metro.net)
* [Hyperloop One](https://hyperloop-one.com/) and its [successful first test](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15958224/hyperloop-one-first-full-system-test-devloop)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_309.mp3).