The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/telling-real-world-stories).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 580 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a How Would This Be a Movie case study. I’ll be talking with screenwriter William Nicholson about his script for Thirteen Lives, following the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. We’ll get into issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view, cultural sensitivity, and what happens when you and the director don’t agree about what kind of movie you’re trying to make. Craig, it’s a really good conversation. I was sorry to not have you there, but sometimes the one-on-one things are better when it’s just one on one.
**Craig:** What I’m hearing is that it was a really good conversation because I wasn’t there.
**John:** It was a good conversation. Also, I saw the movie. I think I was vaguely aware of the actual real-life rescue. You remember that one when it was happening, right?
**Craig:** Of course. I remember when it was happening. I remember Elon Musk doing what he seems to do on a daily basis now, which is say something incredibly stupid, so there was that.
**John:** There was that.
**Craig:** They got the kids out, which was great.
**John:** Yeah, which is great. I knew that the kids got out. We did talk a little bit about knowing the ending of the movie. Before we sit down and watch it, you know the kids get out. The specifics were actually a lot different than I realized or than I heard reported in the moment. It was really a question of point of view. Do you talk about it from the family’s point of view, from the kids inside the cave’s point of view? At what point do you reveal the kids inside the cave are alive? How do you reflect the balance of worldwide attention versus the actual very small, local story on the ground? It was a good conversation about the choices he made but the other choices that could’ve been made.
**Craig:** Nice.
**John:** Nice. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about our non-work goals and aspirations for 2023. We are canonically not a resolution show. We’re not going to promise to do a thing. I always like to think about stuff we’d like to do more of or less of.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Let’s be thinking about that for a Bonus. We’re going to ask Megana too.
**Craig:** As long as we’re asking Megana, then we’ll be fine.
**Megana Rao:** I have to think of something.
**Craig:** Get going, Megana.
**John:** Some follow-up from last week. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We were answering a question about variable frame rates. I said that I was going to watch Avatar right after we record it, and I would be able to tell you what I thought of the variable frame rates. They mostly worked for me. The times that you go into really high frame rate stuff, it tends to be underwater. There’s a lot of underwater. The underwater stuff is amazing and beautiful in the movie. There are other moments where I did notice things were shifting, but it’s also hard to tell, because it’s a 3D movie, so everything’s a little bit weird anyway. I don’t know, if I was watching a 2D movie, I might not have had the same experience with the high frame rate stuff.
**Craig:** How are the glasses these days? Feeling good?
**John:** So much better.
**Craig:** Good.
**John:** The glasses are pretty lightweight. This is my first time wearing them with a mask as well. A little trick for people is that if your glasses start to fog up, just pull your glasses a little bit further away, further down the bridge of your nose, and they won’t fog up so much.
**Craig:** That’s a good tip, or get Lasik.
**John:** I’m talking about the 3D glasses.
**Craig:** Oh, the 3D glasses. You have to wear the 3D glasses. I guess that makes sense. It would fog up. Maybe in a movie like Avatar, the fog might add a little something.
**John:** No, the fog will not add. James Cameron does not want you to have fog on your glasses.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** He will come by and he will wipe off the fog on your glasses.
**Craig:** He does seem like somebody that would more likely just smack the mask off your face.
**John:** Interestingly, he was supposed to come to the Q and A after this, and all the chairs were filled and-
**Craig:** He got COVID.
**John:** He got COVID. He got COVID 20 minutes before. [inaudible 00:03:33] positive test 20 minutes before.
**Craig:** That’s very convenient COVID to get, by the way. There have been times where I’m like, “Come on, COVID.”
**John:** Craig is scratching a little line with a little thin Sharpie there like, “Oh, sorry, can’t go.”
**Craig:** Yeah, “I don’t want to do this thing. Oh, dammit.”
**John:** I really enjoyed the story in Avatar 2. It didn’t feel like three hours. I think what impressed me most is it’d been a long time since I’d seen a 3D movie, because I just didn’t really care about 3D. This was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that didn’t make me go blind at a certain point. There’s something that happens to me in 3D movies where my brain just stops being able to process what I’m seeing. In this, it didn’t happen. I felt like I could see everything [inaudible 00:04:14].
**Craig:** That’s good. There is a diminishing return. Watching 2D stuff, you begin to forget pretty quickly that it’s just a flat thing on a screen. Your mind turns it into 3D basically. Similarly, your mind turns 3D into whatever the 2D version of 3D is. It all just in my mind turns into the same experience, unless they’re doing the tricks, like something flying at your face. Otherwise, meh.
**John:** I think Cameron obviously couldn’t do whatever he wants to do, because it’s all virtually filmed and stuff, so that he could build shots after the fact to work properly to brain in 3D, which is helpful, because so much of the 3D we see these days was really shot to be 2D and then they do it in post.
**Craig:** They do a conversion.
**John:** It’s not the same. Let’s talk to smaller screens. The big news this past couple weeks has been how many shows got chopped off of HBO Max, and things that were already shot, things that were already on the system.
**Craig:** Gulp.
**John:** Old things, they’re gone.
**Craig:** My show’s still there. Yes!
**John:** Craig, are you checking Chernobyl every moment to see whether-
**Craig:** I am not checking Chernobyl every moment, but listen, who knows? I don’t understand it. I legitimately don’t understand it. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like there was some sort of tax benefit to merging companies and then offloading some assets or something like that.
**John:** That one was an example of that, where you could take a big write-off on it and just bury it. It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily going to bury all these things. Patrick Somerville, who came on to talk about Station Eleven, he said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He keeps checking to see if Station Eleven is there. He promises that he will project it on a rock in the Mojave Desert if he has to. These other shows, they’re off HBO Max for right now, but it looks like they’re going to try to put them on some sort of ad-supported system that’s maybe not HBO Max. That could be someplace else. I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s something we haven’t really gotten into a lot on the show. Megana, I think there’s a question we could frame this with.
**Megana:** Andy from Seattle asked, “Once a show gets sold from HBO Max to a free, ad-supported streaming television service, will writers and actors start getting residuals as the property starts making active money?”
**Craig:** They sure will.
**John:** They will. They’ll get some residuals. It’ll just be a different system for it.
**Craig:** Yes, but it will be a better system. We will make more money this way.
**John:** We’ll make more money depending on how it’s set up, because I can imagine two scenarios, which we’ll just set up. First off, HBO could sell it to a place like Pluto or one of the other existing services, in which case there’d be a license fee. That might be good.
**Craig:** There’s always that. That’s the only way we make money off of residuals. HBO made Chernobyl. Let’s say they put Chernobyl on CBS. The only money HBO gets is the licensing money. The ad money goes to CBS. We don’t get any of that. We just get the licensing money that goes to HBO. That’s the gross. Then the producer’s gross is 20% of that, because we lost many, many years ago. Then we get a percentage of the 20%.
What’s interesting is right now if you make something for a streamer, there is no licensing fee ancillary market. The residuals we get are these weird, imputed things that are not necessarily connected to anything real. You and I are old enough where we wrote movies, and then those movies ended up on TBS with ads in them. We would get pretty decent residual checks from the licensing of those movies to TBS. For writers and directors and actors, this could revitalize the dwindling residuals stream. Creatively, as we’ve discussed, it’s a little disconcerting that you can make a show and it just disappears from something like that. I think it’s gotten everybody a little wigged out, and for good reason. I’m curious. Is Station Eleven available on DVD?
**John:** Station Eleven does not have DVDs right now.
**Craig:** How does he have it?
**John:** I think he’s talking about whatever cut he has off of the non-linear editor. His actual tweet was, “If Station Eleven ever disappears, I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave Desert and just play it on a loop projected on a rock forever.”
**Craig:** We’re going to have to download some of these things.
**John:** I’ll check into it. It’s entirely possible that DVDs were cut for that show. So many of these HBO Max shows have no DVDs. There’s no other physical way to see it. That creative fear is huge. Circling back to the issue of residuals, Chernobyl that’s on HBO Max, you’re still getting residuals, but those residuals right now are based on a declining fee per every year that it’s on the service and based on a certain fixed price. It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual success of the show. It’s just basically from the time it was made it just declines in value after that time. Chernobyl could in theory make more money being licensed someplace else and therefore create more residuals for you.
**Craig:** It would. It would. I don’t want people to watch it with ads in it, but yeah, it would. It’s really interesting, because what’s happening, this is again financially not necessarily bad news for artists, creatively potentially bad news, is that streamers are suddenly asking the question that all of the rest of us have been asking for a long time, which is, so wait, how do you make money? I know you sell a subscription, but okay, if they’re subscribing, why do you need to make anything more, or do you need to make this much more, or how much stuff do you need to have there, because where does money come from, because in the old days, if you could convert stuff to ad-supported or home video of any format, there was your reason to make more stuff. There’d be additional revenue streams. If all it is is streaming, that’s it. You’ve basically curtailed your own revenue stream as far as I can tell.
**John:** Your revenue stream is based on the monthly subscribers and the idea that having these vast libraries was going to keep them returning as monthly subscribers.
**Craig:** Sure, but that is the only revenue stream you’ll ever have, whereas in the old days studios would have ticket sales, airplane rentals, home video, and then eventually pay TV, licensing it to HBO and Showtime, and then eventually ad-supported television on TBS. Let’s just presume everything goes to TBS if it still exists.
**John:** A thing I’m always confused about when these announcements are first coming out is… Free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST is the abbreviation you’re going to see for that, it’s the same thing as AVOD, so advertising-based video on demand. The difference is that we usually talk about AVOD for things like The Office. If The Office was showing on NBC, and so you’re watching it there, but then a few weeks later it was showing on nbc.com, that was AVOD, and so where studios would show their own things on their own websites.
What’s different now is of course there are streamers that are doing that [inaudible 00:11:18] TV. There’s existing things like Pluto. There’s probably going to be new things presumably coming out of Warner’s that are going to be a service like that. I think figuring out what the appropriate licensing fee is for HBO Max to be selling it to their own service will be an issue.
**Craig:** That kind of self-dealing has been litigated many, many times before and will continue to be litigated now that it seems to be coming back. Making sweetheart deals with yourself is tricky. You need to sell it for what would be a legally supportable market price. You can’t completely jam people. It will be interesting. I feel like the wheel is turning back in time. We’re heading backwards in time. It’s funny.
Silicon Valley was so behind the explosion of streaming, if you consider Netflix. I consider Netflix to be Silicon Valley-esque. I guess the idea of just the new way of doing things, new media we called it. Meanwhile, what were those companies in Silicon Valley doing? Selling ads on everything. Google is an advertising company. YouTube, which Google owns, is an advertising company. Facebook is an advertising company and so on and so forth. Currently, the aforementioned Elon Musk is flipping out, trying to get more people to advertise on Twitter, because it’s an advertising company. They’ve always been ad-supported, and then somehow we got hoodwinked over here into being like, “No ads. No, we don’t need that. That’s old-school stuff.” I guess if you want to make money, ads.
**John:** Ads.
**Craig:** Ads.
**John:** The answer to the question is, what’s going to happen, hopefully this will be more residuals for the writers involved, but of course, those things actually have to be distributed someplace. I think it’s potentially good news assuming that they actually are putting those things someplace and not just burying them in a hole, which is I think the worry we had originally.
**Craig:** I could be wrong, but it seems like the things that are getting buried in holes are things that had very low viewership numbers. They’re pulling Westworld off of HBO Max. That’s going to land somewhere. That is be on another platform.
**John:** That was the marquee property of HBO two or three years ago.
**Craig:** There’s no question about that. It will be figured out one way or another. I think some of the things that got completely removed were probably… They had said in some article some of the… They mentioned one show. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was animated. Something like only 400 people watched it in a year or something. It was like, okay, I guess-
**John:** There were back-episodes. They had the whole catalog of Sesame Street. There were some episodes of that show that just no one had watched in-
**Craig:** No one had watched.
**John:** Yeah, because who wants to watch a 20-year-old random episode?
**Craig:** It makes me feel good sometimes to watch Sesame Street.
**John:** Nice. Let’s get to our main centerpiece of this episode, which is the conversation I had with Bill Nicholson. This is part of a Writers Guild Foundation event. We’ve done a lot of events for the Writers Guild Foundation over the years. There’s going to be a link in the show notes to the video of this whole Zoom interview we did. William Nicholson, Bill Nicholson, is great. I’ve never had a chance to talk to him before. Credits include Everest, Unbroken, Mandela, Les Mis, Elizabeth, Gladiator, going back many, many, many years, starting out as a playwright. We really got to talk about the whole process of figuring out from someone coming to him with like, “Hey, would you want to do a movie about this cave rescue?” to all the changes and drama along the way, shooting this during the pandemic, and then shooting it for Amazon, which couldn’t release it the way they wanted to release it. A really good conversation and just a really great writer. Enjoy this. Craig and I will be back afterwards for our One Cool Things.
It is my absolute pleasure to be talking to you today, Bill, about Thirteen Lives but also I’d love to talk about screenwriting in general and your career and many other things. Where are we talking to you today from? I see it’s dark there.
**Bill Nicholson:** I’m in South England, in Sussex, in the converted garage where I do all my work in the lovely English countryside.
**John:** Fantastic. Let’s start with Thirteen Lives, because I just watched it last night. I’m really curious how you came into the project, because I remember the story as it was happening in real time. It felt like, okay, obviously there’s going to be a movie coming out of this, but what was your entrance into this as a movie?
**Bill:** Like you, I remember it from when it actually happened. I wouldn’t say I followed every deet, but obviously, I did follow it. It was very moving, and then I forgot about it. Sometime later, as is the way of these things, a producer got in touch with me and said would I be interested in writing the screenplay. I was initially a little reluctant, because I thought maybe it was an oversimple story. Guys go down in a cave, get stuck. It’s all terrible. Then they get out and it’s okay. Of course, they sent me some research. They’d had a lot of research done on it. That amazed me and I realized what a rich tale it was. It moved me in a whole different way actually. I really like writing very emotionally valid and powerful pieces, so I said yes. The simple answer is I got asked.
**John:** That’s great to be asked. I’m not surprised you were asked. If you look at your credits and look at the movies you’ve written and going back to Gladiator and Shadowlands and those things, but more recently, Everest, Unbroken, other true stories, and finding the ways to tell these historical true stories in ways that are compelling. You seem like a very great fit for it. I guess my question is, when they came to approach you to write this, how much did they have? Off and on Scriptnotes podcasts, we get these questions about like, “Oh, what rights do I need to do to tell a true story?” People will see producers jockeying for rights, locking up this person’s life rights or this person’s life rights. As they came to you, what were they coming to you with? They had some original research, but what else?
**Bill:** You’re completely right. It was a writer’s nightmare. Lots of other projects were in the mix. There was another team that had the rights to the Australian doctor, Harry Harris. We did not have the rights to the Thai kids at all. The Thai government controlled that. The key rights, which are the British divers, those were the ones that my producer had obtained. That was the core of the project. The rest we had to… You know the process. We had to use material that was in the public domain. It’s worrying when you’re [inaudible 00:18:06]. It’s worrying on all sorts of levels. It’s worrying also because I’m dealing with real people’s real lives who are still there, especially the Thai people. I think we had a superb level of research, which fed me absolutely as much as possible. I just did my best to give a fair crack to all of those individuals.
**John:** You say you had research. How much of that was coming to you in written form versus your ability to talk to these divers? What was your ability to reach out and ask specific questions, or did you have to go through levels to get there? What was your connection to these characters?
**Bill:** With the two main divers, I went and visited them and talked to them and subsequently made very good relations with them, was able to check a lot of things with them as I went along. All the rest was [inaudible 00:18:58]. This was in COVID times. A superb researcher had amassed an enormous amount of material, mostly remotely, particularly on all the Thai details. I was supplied with that when I began, because the producer had also produced the documentary, which is called The Rescue. They’d done all the research for that. I was given all of that, and I was able to ask the researcher to ask the researcher to follow up whenever I wanted. I was very well supported.
**John:** One of the fundamental decisions you have to make as a writer is how you’re going to tell the story and when you’re going to start the story and what details are going to be at what point. How early in the process of the conversations with the producers about coming on to do this did you have an approach? Did you have a take for how you were going to tell the story?
**Bill:** Not immediately, but you’re completely right. People think if you have a true story, because you take down what happened. Of course, you sort of do, because you have an obligation to the truth. My job is finding the emotional through line and also the mini emotional stories within the overall one, because nobody is going to watch just to hear another fact. They watch because of what you make them feel about the characters, what the characters want, what the characters fear, and what then happens to them. It really is a kind of crafting of real events to create emotional drama. Of course, there is emotional drama once you’ve got kids threatening with death.
You’ve really got to do a lot more than that. I looked to the material. I drew up a timeline of my own, the peaks and the troughs. I looked at that very early on, because obviously, the producers, when they asked me to do it, they didn’t just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They say, “Tell us what you will do before any contract gets signed.” That’s fair enough.
I give them I suppose my pitch really. I said very early on the obvious thing which anybody tackling this story would say, which is, “We cannot afford to make this be a white savior story, so how are we going to deal with that? We’re going to look at all of the Thai stories. We’re going to look at what they did and the complexities of that and how much we can weave that in.”
I made the decision very early on that this was in a way not the story of the boys. This was partly because I did not have their rights, but it was also partly because they’re stuck. They’re in a cave. You have a choice. Are you going to keep cutting back to them inside the cave getting hungrier and hungrier or not? I said, “My way of doing this is we’re going to see them go in, and then we’re not going to see them again until they’re found.”
**John:** It’s 45 minutes into the film before we see them again. We see, oh, they are actually alive. This is a real open question. Obviously, as an audience who has some knowledge coming into it, we know that they’re alive in there, but everyone on the outside doesn’t. You set up a good expectation that maybe they are going in to find bodies ultimately. They don’t know where they are, how far.
**Bill:** It’s very interesting the way you can tell a story by being able to know the ending and still make it tense. I think it’s because as people watch, they accept that they’re within that moment. One of the reasons that I took the project on actually was because one of the things that really struck me, after the divers found the bodies, there was this ecstasy throughout this enormous camp, real cheers. The boys are there. The boys are alive. That was simultaneously experienced with the divers knowing that the boys are going to die, that there is no way to come out.
I find that sort of crunch very powerful. When I saw that, I go, “Actually, we have got a story here.” Of course, if you can communicate to the viewers sufficiently, this really is an insoluble problem, and then you proceed to find a crazy solution, which against all the odds works, and you have a story.
**John:** Now, let’s talk about decisions of classic characters and themes going through stuff. You have actors we recognize who are doing certain things. Also, what I was really impressed by with the movie, and you talk about making sure that the Thai people in their efforts are centered in this, for a lot of the start of the film and really throughout the film, we’re seeing the rest of the efforts from the Thai perspective. These are competent people who are doing their very best. It feels very documentary in a good way. It feels very matter of fact. You don’t see a lot of speechify. You don’t see people stopping to explain something about Thai culture and history and stuff. It’s very much focused on the moment.
Did you know from the start that you were going to have so many characters and that we as an audience might not even really know their names? I’m thinking about the engineer on top of the mountain who’s trying to divert the water. We recognize him, but we know very little about him. Do you know that from the start, that you’d have this wide array of characters?
**Bill:** Yes, in the sense that I had to place my heroic British divers in this much bigger context. I think the first thing that I thought when I looked into all this story was an enormous number of people volunteered. There was this great mass, like 5,000 people just gave their time or their equipment for nothing. I love that. It runs counter to the kind of story that we’re being told all the time, which is that we live in a competitive world where people will only get off their bottoms for money. I’ve wanted to celebrate that very much, which meant locating as many of these stories as possible.
There are very many stories. You simply don’t have the space. In that sense, you color code the characters so that people recognize them visually rather than knowing their names. You also give them each a little kind of trick so that you can spot how they’re likely to… You can only do that to a very small degree, because you’re juggling so many characters. You talk about it being documentary. Yes, it’s documentary in the sense that it did happen. We’re not grandstanding with it. We’re not trying to make out some sort of opportunity for people to make their own speeches.
I actually think the grand sentiments come over much more powerfully if you throw them away, if they’re not asserted, you ask the audience to find that for themselves. That’s a conscious decision, particularly with the main divers who really led me into this by their own characters. I was picking up from what they told me about themselves, which is, “We don’t do this for money. We’re amateurs. We’re not interested in publicity.” They’ve got a rather delightful… There were so many that got cut out.
When they were first asked to come, Rick, the Viggo Mortensen one, said, “How are we getting there?” John says to him, “They’re giving us business class flights.” Business class, I’ll fly anywhere. I love that. It’s very British, very undercutting heroism and grandiosity. I was working from the characters.
I also think it means that you can feed your actors with a role where they have very few words but a lot of emotional moments. Those emotional moments, they are going to act on. They’re going to be on their face. If you’ve correctly structured the emotional trajectory, the audience knows what they’re thinking and feeling, looking at their face. They don’t need words. That is what screenwriters do. It drives me nuts when people say… Somebody said to me, “Oh, you didn’t have much to do for the first 20 minutes, did you?” I say, “I wrote the damn thing. Every feat is written.”
**John:** Absolutely. What is the camera pointing at, what are we seeing, what are we living.
**Bill:** Exactly. Not just that. Ron and I talked a lot about structuring the dives, because too many dives are boring. Each dive has to have its own character, its own emotional little story. I literally listed them all with the emotions that accompanied them.
**John:** Let’s talk about the emotional trajectory of the Viggo Mortensen character, because he’s the one who I think… I would say your characters don’t protagonate a lot. They’re not going through this classic giant character’s arc where they come in as one thing and leave fully transformed. It’s small and it’s subtle but it’s there. Viggo Mortensen’s character’s probably the easiest one to see that. He’s initially reluctant to necessarily go on this dive, to even join on his trip. Then when he’s there, he’s skeptical a lot along the way. What were the beats you mapped out for yourself? Were they literally in an outlined form? How much were you thinking about how his character progressed over the course of the story? How did you chart that for yourself?
**Bill:** That’s kind of fairly simple really, because he starts out not wanting to go, doesn’t like kids, as he says. He gets there. He’s pissed off, because we then have all the beats about the local Thai divers don’t rate them, which is fun to have that. They’re old guys [inaudible 00:28:12] which gives him something to resent. Eventually, they do get allowed to dive, and it goes wrong. They pull out the pumping guy, and it all goes wrong. Then they’re stuck, and he wants to go home. I got that beat.
All the time, you’ve got John beside him, acting as the antagonist, his protagonist in a way, saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to stay.” John, who knows, and I like this, John knows that Rick really wants to save the boys even though Rick says he doesn’t. That helps me a lot. I can write those little moments.
Of course, the big beat with Rick is that they find the kids, and he’s depressed. He goes down instead of out. Then you’ve got the interesting question of… This I had to argue out with both John and Rick, who had the idea to use anesthetics. I got it wrong the first time round, because it worked in my structure to have John suggest it. The real Rick said to me, because we’d shown them the script. This is no secret to them, of course. I always do that, by the way.
When I’m dealing with real, live people, I will say, “You can see anything I’m writing at any time.” Of course. It’s their life. I said to them originally, “You’re going to find this really peculiar, because I’m going to invent two characters, Rick and John. I have to.” They were really good about that. They got it. Then lots of stuff I just made it. They said, “That’s fine.” He did say, “That was my idea.” I restructured that beat.
Then you bring in the next group of divers. In the cut version, they come very abruptly. I wrote several scenes that introduced them, but it’s a long movie. Something has to go. You have the relationship with the incoming divers, which again reflects on Rick, because Jason is the one who thinks Rick’s a little bit [inaudible 00:30:19]. You then realize Rick is the leader. He has gone along with this idea. The failure will be his failure. We’re now emotionally engaged on his behalf, not just the boys’. That then takes you through the various beats of finding semi-failure along the way, until the moment when they’re sitting in a group and they’re just laughing. You can feel the release of the nervous tension and at the moments when he’s resisted contact with the families. I had so many moments I could track. There he is hugging families or being hugged I should say, because he doesn’t know how to do it.
It’s a gift really to just track all this. I did give him a little speech, which is not in the film, right at the end when they’re in their minibus and they’re going back to the airport. He’s saying, “You know what? This is something that should not have worked. This is like a one in a thousand chance that it worked, but it did work. You know what [inaudible 00:31:18] make a movie out of it, and everybody else think it’s easy.” I rather like that, but no, it didn’t come to pass.
**John:** The movie probably wanted to be over before they would’ve had a chance for that moment. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s in the movie and the dialog that’s not in the movie, because they both help in form. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s not in the movie, because there’s not a lot of talking. We have our characters mostly doing the work that they’re there to do.
There’s this misconception obviously that the screenwriter just writes the dialog and the director does everything else, but it sounds like if I’m reading the script, I get a very good sense of what those characters are, what’s going through those characters’ heads, even as they are silently observing, moving their way through the cave, stopping to get abreast.
I’m thinking back to Colin Farrell’s character half freaking out because his kid has woken up. There’s all those moments. Those were all scripted. I think it’s crucial that we remind people that those moments are in the script from the start.
**Bill:** That’s right. You’re right. If you were to see one of the drafts towards the end, you’d get a lot more dialog. It’s not so much more dialog, because there are several scenes, basically dialog scenes. This always happens to me. I guess I overwrite. I’m always writing dialog scenes which I think really help to get us sympathetic with the characters. They’re too long, and in the end the whole thing goes. The people along the way read them. Your point is correct. That feeds into their understanding. The director reads them.
I have no complaints about what is cut out. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve had the embarrassing experience of writing scenes that seem to me to be vital, having them cut out, and realizing they weren’t necessary. Each time, I think, “When am I going to learn? When am I going to write the 90-page script that they shoot instead of the 120-page script?” I don’t know why I don’t learn, but that’s the process. I’ve worked with some actors.
A million years ago, I wrote a film called First Knight with Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Sean Connery sat me down in his hotel room in London with a scene, and he said, “Look, I want to go through the scene with you. I’ll do my lines. You do the other person’s lines.” I did the other person’s lines. I would do the line, and Sean went, “Ah.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” He never spoke a word. It all made perfectly good sense. He said, “Would you mind if we just [inaudible 00:34:01].” Maybe you have to start with more and hone it down.
You are dependent on the actors, because once you start dispensing with the words, you’ve structured it so that the audience knows what the actor is likely to be feeling, but the actor has got to deliver that without the acting. In my opinion, acting has become so sophisticated now. Actors are so extraordinary, film actors. You can see what they’re thinking. I can think of moments like the little scene where Harry Harris is being asked to use his skills [inaudible 00:34:46]. He’s saying no, and the other two, Rick and John, are disagreeing on how to deal with him. There aren’t many words, but that little trio, you can see what each one is thinking right the way through. There’s a couple of shots at the end that are just faces saying nothing. That’s also very skilled directing, of course.
**John:** It is. There’s a moment in Worst Person in the World, a film from last year, where a woman makes a fundamental life decision, and we see it completely on her face. It was the screenwriting that got us from her leaving a party to standing at that place and being able to think. The natural instinct would be for her to say something to someone to make sure we understood that, and yet the power of a camera and a really talented face, we can see all that information. It’s a great lesson to learn.
Let’s circle back to you say you overwrite and you need to learn how to write the 90-page version of a thing. Also, it’s just recognizing that the process of making stories is always going to be too much. There’s going to be a process of discovery there, so giving yourself permission to overwrite there a bit and recognizing and hopefully having good collaborators who will see, “Yes, there may be too much here, but we need all this too-much-ness in order to find the movie that we’re also going to want to make.”
**Bill:** I would definitely agree with that, yeah.
**John:** Let’s talk about your relationship with Ron Howard. At what point did he come into the process? Was he there from the start or only after you had a draft? What was his involvement in the film?
**Bill:** He was not there from the start. It was pretty much completely written. What happened was the producer, PJ, hired me. At that point, he had an arrangement with another director, a very good director. I worked on it with that director. I did I guess speed drafts. We kind of ran into a problem of how we saw the movie between me and the director. I have huge respect for the directors that I work with. I tried very hard to deliver the kind of tone that he was looking for, but it ran counter to my instincts. I argued it very strongly with him, but he was very clear what he wanted. There came a point when I said to PJ, “I have to leave the project. You must get another writer who’s in sync with your director.” They had a big think about it. The director had a big think about it. To his enormous credit, he said, “Look,” because PJ and Gabi Tana, the other producer kind of liked my take.
He said, “Look, I’ll withdraw. It’s not a problem.” He withdrew. I then proceeded with my version, which was, to put it very, very simply, more emotional. He was much more action and repression, which is a great way to go. I’m a very warmhearted person. We proceeded in my version. I did several drafts until both the producers were thinking, “This is good. We will shop it.” They then took it to their agents in LA. That is when it went to an agent, and that’s when Ron picked it up. Ron then came in, and I then worked with Ron for several more drafts.
**John:** We both had the experience of an existing draft and a director comes on board. It’s both a conversation with the director about what movie they see versus the movie that you wrote and what they need. You’re trying to explain what your intentions were with things. They’re trying to explain what they think they actually need from a movie. What guidance can you give to a writer listening to those conversations with the director? How do you approach that in a way that both sides benefit?
**Bill:** The first thing is you have to not be defensive as a writer. We writers have a very tough time, because we are not in control. That is the reality. If you want to be in control, be a writer-director, which I have also done. You are not in control. The director is going to have to make this damn movie. It’s no good, you demanding the director executes your vision. He’s going to execute his or her vision. Don’t be defensive. What you do is when the director says, “I think they need more of this or less of this,” what you’ve got to think is, why is he saying that? What’s happening here? Is there a valid point here? If there is, how can I enact it in a way that fits my vision? I’ve had some bad ones, but mostly they’ve been good. My experience has been that it improves when you do this.
I always tell people, and this applies to development as well, if you get notes, don’t obey the note. If the note says, “We think the dog should jump over the cliff,” don’t say, “Okay, I will write it.” Say to yourself, “Why did they say that? Haven’t I got a better way of giving them what they want?” because you will have, because you’ll understand the whole thing. They’re probably looking just at that beat. That’s the problem you have with some directors. Some directors aren’t good at overall structure. I’m talking now about really emotional storytelling. They’re good at a scene. They know that they can make a scene work. They can make that scene work when the guy comes in and we don’t even know what he’s seeing and he’s incredibly scared.
[inaudible 00:40:23] how that impacts down the road. What you have to do is say, “Okay, they want an emotional high point, which I have not delivered. I’ve got to find a way to deliver it, and then they’ll be happy at that point.” If you have a problem, I have had this with some extremely famous directors who have said, “I think there should be a scene like this here.” I’ve said to the team, “That will make no sense. That will wreck the whole flow.” They’ve said, “The boss has asked for it. You’ve got to do it.” I then do it. In my experience, always those the projects that don’t get made, because the director hasn’t understood what the story is, but the director is too powerful. There are too many directors, unfortunately, who never get anybody telling them boo. It’s just extraordinary to me.
I’ve said to the team, “Just tell him it doesn’t work.” They said, “You don’t do that. He’s our boss, literally our boss in every way.” [inaudible 00:41:25]. Mostly, you should be able to collaborate with the director in such a way that the director feels really safe with you as a writer, that the director can say, “I want more here and less here,” and you go, “Yes, fantastic, let’s do this. We’ll find the way together.” That is really exciting.
I have to say, with Ron, he was extremely respectful. I think he had taken on a highly developed script. It had been through many processes. His attack, it was a combination. It was very process-driven. He really wanted to understand how he was going to film the process and what impact that would have. A lot of his changes related to that. Other changes were he wanted more of a particular element. For example, he wanted more of the guy called the water guy, Thanet, who is up on the mountain diverting the water. Let me think. What else was there?
We did talk quite a lot. We played around quite a lot with changing some of my structure. We talked, and I was willing to, but in the end, we stuck with it. He will say that the last time we were on a giant Zoom together to talk about this at this stage, he said that the thing about the screenplay he received was that the structure was there already. He didn’t have to really mess with that too much. He’s a very nice guy.
**John:** He’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects. He’s lovely.
**Bill:** He’s just amazing. I just wanted him to be able to do what he needed to do. Then the other thing that happened was he started shooting it, and I was not present on the shoot. I was in Australia. He was on the phone to me or on the email to me quite a lot, saying basically for budget reasons, we can no longer do this scene or that scene, “Find a way to write the beat that happens there somewhere else in another way,” or, “Could you please add it in to the existing scene?” There was quite a lot of that, which I was of course completely willing to do. I think you need to be in that sense a kind of craftsman who is there. “We’re now sailing the ship and it’s leaking. Please could you plug that gap?”
**John:** Absolutely circling back to this, in the first time you’re talking with the director or really anyone else in the project, a friend always reminds me that as the screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. You see the whole thing there. You have everything that’s on the page, but you also have a whole movie in your head. Sometimes those initial conversations are really just aligning what movies is the director seeing in their head and trying to find the overlaps there and fix the things that aren’t overlapping quite right.
In those conversations, it varies director to director for me, but sometimes you are spending three days talking about the color of the paint on the walls, but that’s really the process for just trying to align your visions for what things really look like and what’s important to them or what’s important to you. You never know what it’s going to be as you start the process.
**Bill:** I don’t get into those sorts of conversations. I’m happy for him to paint the walls whatever color he wants really. What I want to know… I say I want to know. I don’t have any power over this person. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I would like to know that the director sees the same movie as me, but to be honest, I never know until it’s done, until it’s actually being shot, because people do the oddest things.
**John:** bill, you’ve made your living as a playwright and as a film writer and director. Do you have any experience running television shows or doing any of the series where the writer would be more in control, the writer would be telling the director what to do? Have you had that experience?
**Bill:** Not in the modern form. I’m doing a Netflix TV series right now, writing it. You’re right, it is very, very different in power terms. Back in the day, when I was working with BBC, I did I think four TV movies. The interesting thing about the BBC and television then is my name was the name that was in the newspapers, to the rage of the directors. It was William Nicholson’s latest. I really of course liked that.
I really disliked the filmed by thing, where directors act as if they’re created the whole thing. I’ve softened over the years. I used to be quite militant about this. I’ve done two movies myself as a director/writer. That has taught me to respect directors very, very highly. I do realize I need them. I just wish that the world out there understood what screenwriters do. I don’t know why this hasn’t got through. We need a movement like Cahiers du Cinema, which elevated the directors. We need a movement.
Maybe you’re right. Actually, it’s happening. It’s happening in TV. The people who create the great TV series are the writers. Our day is coming. That’s fantastic. You get astonishing things like Succession, which I don’t know who’s the hero of that, whether it’s Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Prebble, or whoever, I don’t quite know what’s going on, but somebody is doing something completely brilliant there. They’re also superbly directed, I have to say. Again, let’s all try not to quarrel over who gets the credit and be grateful if we can together do something good, because most things don’t quite work.
**John:** Circling back to Thirteen Lives, so much of the film is in Thai. It’s in a very specific Northern Thai dialect. I’m guessing you don’t speak it. At what point in the process did you need to think about how much of the film was going to be in Thai versus how much was going to be in English and what the balance was going to be. Did you need to interact with any of those language experts or did that process come later down?
**Bill:** It came much later. I knew all along that a large part would be in Thai. That was all part of respect for the people we were filming and not turning it into an outsider attack. I write it all in English, and it goes on the page in bold italics, meaning translate this please. The team making it under Ron then bring in Thai translators, but not just Thai translators, Thai filmmakers who are also Thai, who tell me about the culture. Back comes the message. You have this scene where this Thai Navy Seal speaks to his boss, his captain, in a quite strong way. They would never do that. That does not happen. We have total respect for authority people. You’ve just [inaudible 00:48:20] I change it. I just simply rewrote. That happened quite a bit.
I had a whole lot to do with the governor here, who had actually a very interesting story. I originally made him a rather ironic, wry guy, who was constantly saying, “They’ve set me up for the fall here.” There’s a little bit of it in the movie, but I had quite a lot more. I was told he would not speak of his superiors in this way. Even though he thinks it, even though it’s true, he just wouldn’t, so out it went.
**John:** Probably both choices about how that character would respond but also what the movie wants to do. The movie is so focused on the question of will we be able to get the boys out, anything that feels like it’s not to that point is going to be on the chopping block. It’s hard for it to last in the film. You made choices about how much we’re seeing or are aware of these characters’ personal lives before they get involved. Basically, the moment anybody shows up Thailand, we’re never seeing their homelands again.
Basically, we’re only going to stay near the caves here in Thailand. Talk to us about decisions to show Colin Ferrell’s home life and what you were trying to do there, the few glimpses we had outside of Thailand. Were there more scenes? What were your decisions about showing their life before they get to Thailand?
**Bill:** No, there were not more scenes. I knew that I wanted to just tell you enough about them to give you some anchor for how they were going to make their emotional journey and then just show you enough at the end to remind you where they’re come from and what it means. They’re two different stories, obviously. With Rick, Viggo Mortensen, he lives alone in this chaotic, machine-filled space. You would kind of sense that the guy’s asocial just from the images of him. Also, there was quite a bit of dialog there when he’s talking on the phone to John.
With John, with Colin Ferrell, all I needed to do was show that he’s divorced and he’s got a kid. Obviously, he’s going to identify the kids in the cave with his cave. I don’t need to say that. You just plant that, and that’s there.
In the early versions, there was another thread. They had a kind of office, the British Cave Rescue Council. There was a woman there who fed information back all the time. We did think whether to have her in England, but I really decided no, this is one of those stories where you need to maintain the pressure cooker, get them into the pressure cooker and keep them there. That was a very conscious decision, which is why I didn’t want to go into the home life of any of any of the Thai characters once the pressure had begun. I think it’s sort of like Aristotelian unities. It’s a unity of time and place, and they’re up against the clock, and just hold it there. Don’t play games. Don’t do cutting around with time. Give us a sense of the passage of time.
**John:** [inaudible 00:51:29] your theater background, it did feel like once you created the space of the camp outside the cave, that was your main set. That’s where everything has to happen within the space and within this place and time, which I guess helps answer the question of your decisions about which of the Thai parents we were going to follow, which ones we were going to identify and have some ongoing relationship with. You pick one mother, one father who we come back to more often and we [inaudible 00:51:55] which kid is —
**Bill:** And a boy. The boy, I made him up. That didn’t happen [crosstalk 00:52:00].
**John:** The smallest boy, yeah.
**Bill:** The smallest boy did happen.
**John:** That’s right, the boy [crosstalk 00:52:05].
**Bill:** The one who doesn’t go into the cave and who was out there. I wanted one boy who represented [inaudible 00:52:11]. That didn’t actually happen. They all went into the cave. The smallest boy, that was a real thing, because I had that in the research. Obviously, the mother is a competent mother, the father is a competent father, etc. All their names are changed.
**John:** Let’s talk about structure overall, because you have a time structure, which is very natural for day one, day two, and seeing the progression. With each day, there’s a change that has happened. Sometimes it’s the weather. The way that the weather is a huge villain in the course of the stories is really interesting. You also have the decision to overlay the map and show where things were and how far deep we are into things. Was that a decision that was made on a script level or does that come later on in the filmmaking process, the literal, how deep we are into the cave system structure.
**Bill:** That was not me. That was in the cutting room, in the final stages. That was Ron and his team doing that in the final stages, looking at it and saying, “It is really important that people know how far in we are.” In the longer version of the script, I’d incorporated that information in the dialog and things like that. That didn’t survive. I thought it was really good.
**John:** I think it’s a really smart choice.
**Bill:** It was really smart. In a kind of clever way, there was more information you could take in, but it didn’t matter. You got a visual sense. That was not me.
**John:** I think it’s another thing taken probably from some of the great documentaries of the last 10 years in that sense of as you see somebody climbing a peak in Yellowstone or a peak in Yosemite, seeing how far up they are, and it was just the right choice to give us that sense of-
**Bill:** It’s a very interesting challenge. How much does the audience realize? How much have they picked up? How much do they know? What do they need turning? On the whole, you’ve got to be ahead of your audience. If they’re left saying, “We’re underwater. I have no clue where I am,” which of course is the case. How could they? What we did was, and this was in the script, I characterize stages along the journey. I said, “This will be the stalactite one. This will be Chamber 3. This will be the T-Junction.” The T-Junction was what they called it and Pattaya Beach was what they called it. I gave a description of each stage so that when they built the sets, they would look a little bit different and would give us a bit of a sense that we’re not just always in a bath. We did think about that ahead of time.
**John:** You said you’ve written the script. You’re heading into production. Obviously, casting has happened. Was there a table reading? Was there any chance for everyone to get around tables to read this together? It doesn’t seem like it would have been necessary for this, but was there some sort of [inaudible 00:55:01]?
**Bill:** I simply don’t know, because it all happened in Australia, and I wasn’t there. They all had to fly out and go into quarantine for two weeks, and then they were in their bubble. I would say about this table read, which I’ve had on every film, I absolutely hate them.
**John:** Tell me why.
**John:** There’s a couple of reasons. For some reason, the person who reads the directions is the third AD, and he can’t read. That sounds like an illiterate monotone, which is awful, and I’m dying. I learned after a bit to say, “Let me read the directions, and I’ll put some [inaudible 00:55:37].” The second reason is the actors find it very, very difficult to know whether they’re performing or not. On the whole, they don’t want to perform. They don’t want to perform, because why would they? It’s a weird set of circumstances. The confident ones don’t want to perform because, “Why should I?” The un-confident ones think that they’ll perform and be found wanting. People will say, “Why did you cast him?” The whole thing is awful for everybody. I’ve come out of every reading thinking it is a disaster.
I wasn’t present at the readthrough of Gladiator. I was involved in the project. It was such a disaster that they practically pulled the whole thing. That’s when I came on board. I think they’re terrible, these readings. They do have a function, because I almost think you should get a whole team of completely different people to do the reading. The tech people, they need to know a little bit what this thing feels like. The actors, it’s hard.
**John:** I will make a mild case for the opposing view. I’ve had table readings that have gone as badly as Gladiator’s table read, where it’s just like, wow. Everything you’re saying about an actor choosing not to perform, the risk of performing, definitely been there, seen it. My argument for them is that it makes it clear that all the actors that have at least read the whole script once, because so often, actors, they’re reading, they’re focused on their part. It’s a chance to say, “Oh, you know what? This scene actually pertains to the scene before this scene.” It’s the whole thing feeling together chronologically for once, because movies are going to be shot out of sequence and it’s going to be hard to tell what things are where. For one moment, everyone was together.
The other thing, if anyone’s listening and this is helpful, I will tend to do, if there is going to be a table reading, I will make a special version of the script that is just for the reading, that greatly cuts down the scene description so it’s just getting you right into the dialog there, and it’s all clear. If we’re going to summarize things, everyone’s looking at the same page. I hear you there.
**Bill:** That is very smart. I think you’re quite right. The table reading should be treated as a kind of performance in its own right and thought about and almost directed. Each of the actors could be told, “Don’t worry about it. Just do it clearly. That’s all. You don’t need to emote if you don’t want to.” I have been at readings. When Shadowlands was done as a reading, it was amazingly successful, and it made everybody feel this is going to work. I just wish that happened every time.
**John:** My movie Go had a great table reading, and some other ones haven’t. Of course, in theater, the idea of a reading is actually super common, and those are ways you get financing and get to the next level. Everyone understands that it is a form of a performance there, but with movies it’s a special thing. Really, you have to ask yourself, who should be in the room for that? Is it just for the filmmakers and the actors? Do producers need to be in there? Do financiers need to be in there?
**Bill:** I really like your idea of having a special text for the reading, because that’s great, because you want to maintain the pace. I’ve sat there while somebody reads through a whole page of directions in a [crosstalk 00:58:53] tone where it needs to be tightened, performed, and move on so that we can get the feeling of it. I hadn’t thought of that. If it ever happens to me again… It’s quite a lot of work though, isn’t it, doing your own-
**John:** For you or for me, maybe it’s two hours of time to take and cut it down. If it saves a lot of drama down the road, I’ll do it.
**Bill:** Do you read directions yourself?
**John:** No. We’ll find somebody who’s actually a talented actor who’s not in the production to do it.
**Bill:** Good. Good.
**John:** My friend Dan Ethridge is fantastic at that, so I will draft him whenever possible.
**Bill:** You’ve thought about this much more than me. You’re smart.
**John:** During production, obviously this is happen in Australia. At most, you’re having a phone call or Zoom with Ron, so you’re not super involved in that. At any point doing post, do you come back in? Do you take a look?
**Bill:** Yes.
**John:** Was there anything for you to do?
**Bill:** Yeah. This is entirely at Ron’s discretion. He’s a nice guy, and he’s also a smart guy. It was cut in London. He said would I please come in, see the first assembly, talk about it. We talked together. I came in and saw the shorter version, and we talked about that a lot. I wouldn’t say that I did anything tremendously significant, but I was certainly there watching it and talking about it with him.
**John:** Great.
**Bill:** I was incredibly grateful for that. A lot of directors are frightened of writers, because they know the writer knows more than them what’s supposed to be there. They don’t want the writer on set. They don’t want the writer in the cutting room. They didn’t want the writer getting too much credit. Ron is not like that.
**John:** That’s terrific. This movie came out theatrically limited but then also on streaming. Did you have a chance to see this with an audience?
**Bill:** Not really. As you know, MGM, who financed it, got bought by Amazon after we finished the movie. It didn’t get the screen life that we would’ve liked. I’m old-fashioned. I like cinemas. I like theaters. They did put on a… This was in London. There was a premier in LA, which I didn’t go to. I was obviously invited, but I chose not to make the journey. There was a good screening in London. We were in France. We got the train back for that evening, and the train was delayed three hours in the Channel Tunnel, to my fury, so I actually missed about half.
**John:** Oh, no.
**Bill:** We got into the theater. I haven’t seen it much with an audience. Now it’s seen as a streaming event, and people see it separately. I’ve got this odd feeling. I don’t really know how people have responded to it.
**John:** I watched it again. I watched it last night at home, streaming it. My instinct though is that there’s going to be some big cheers when the first kid is brought on the stretcher up through the pulley system. That was a really emotional moment for me is seeing that the kids are getting out but also that everyone is there pushing the sled out together. I feel like that’s the moment where you’re going to get some cheers in the audience. I’m frustrated that you didn’t get a chance to hear those cheers, because I feel like it’s going to be a great sound. Bill, can you talk to us about what’s next? Are there any things that you’re working on that we can discuss?
**Bill:** I’m always a little bit shy, for the simple reason that I never know they’re actually going to get made.
**John:** Same.
**Bill:** That’s the life we lead. I’m doing a cinema movie. It’s with a very good director right now. It seems to be going a bit slowly. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I’m waiting for my next instructions on that. I mentioned I’m doing a TV series for Netflix, which is about the crypto scam. It was a podcast actually called The Missing Crypto Queen-
**John:** Great.
**Bill:** … about a Bulgarian woman who created a crypto coin. It’s a wonderful story.
**John:** I think we actually maybe discussed that on our podcast in terms of How Would This Be a Movie. I’m excited that you’re doing that, because she’s a really flamboyant character if I remember correctly.
**Bill:** Exactly. It’s wonderful. It’s all about why do people believe what they believe, which is central to our current experience everywhere, politics everywhere. I’m just doing the first two episodes of that. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. I’m also doing a small British movie about a guy, which is a true story again. You see, these are all true stories. I don’t like adapting novels. I don’t do it, because somebody else has [inaudible 01:03:41] the characters and invented the story.
Real life is a complete mess, so it needs people like me to come in and turn it into craft, something out of that. That’s what I like doing. I’m doing a small movie about a person who goes mad. The fun of it is, it’s kind of implying that madness is a choice, which actually serves a purpose. He thinks he’s a secret agent saving the planet. He ends up being sent to hospital and given heavy drugs and so on. You realize that being a secret agent saving the planet beats his real life. You kind of get why a guy would do that. Essentially, it’s dealing with the fact that all of us are prone to picking up clues around us and creating a narrative of our life that enables us to feel good about ourselves.
**John:** Absolutely. You are the story you’re telling about yourself.
**Bill:** Yeah. I’m doing that. There’s a couple of other longer-term projects. Those are three that are actually on my desk right now.
**John:** That’s amazing. Bill, an absolute pleasure talking with you and meeting you here. Congratulations on the film. I’m really excited to see these next projects as well. A delight. Thank you so much.
**Bill:** It’s a great pleasure for me as well, talking to somebody who gets these things, a fellow. I love it. Thank you so much.
**John:** Thank you.
**Bill:** Bye-bye.
**John:** Have a great night. Bye.
**Bill:** Bye-bye.
**John:** Craig, we are back in this moment. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two TV shows to recommend to you and to our listenership. First is Andor, which everyone says it’s by far the best Star Wars series. It’s just phenomenal. It’s just really, really good. Craig, I was thinking about you as I was watching it, because there was this scene, I think in the maybe second or third episode, where the Empire, or what will become the Empire, is having this board meeting, just planning meeting. It’s in this big white room. It’s just so smartly done. It’s everything you always talk about how you admire the Empire for its efficiency and for its organization. I thought of you. If I could find the clip snippet of it, I want to send it to you, because you will just love that when you get a chance to watch it.
**Craig:** Obviously, I always root for the Empire. I’m just so confused after all these movies. How do they keep losing? It just doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone so scared of them? All they do is lose.
**John:** I’ll say that the whole premise of Andor is basically how does the revolution start, how does the rebellion start. It’s really smartly done. It’s no surprise. It’s coming from Tony Gilroy, who’s a great writer and is running this show. Just so, so smart. Everyone tells you to watch Andor. I’m just the 19,000th person to tell you to watch Andor, because really, it’s worth it.
The other thing is Fleishman is in Trouble, which I don’t hear people talking as much about. So good. As I recognize the names going past, Susannah Grant, who is of course fantastic, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote the book and she wrote almost all the episodes of the series. It’s so smartly done. The POV storytelling on it is really, really great. Fleishman is in Trouble, another great thing to watch. That is on Hulu in the United States.
**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is an article. It is in Wired. I don’t know if you’re going to need a subscription or not. Maybe Wired does a couple of free articles a month. This one is called Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira. It’s a really interesting story about this class of workers called digital nomads, who work entirely virtually, and so can work anywhere, but they’re alone. These are a lot of people who don’t have families, etc, so they’re stuck alone in their homes. They want to go places. They can go anywhere.
This Portuguese island basically on the southern coast of Madeira created what they call a digital nomad land. It’s basically like we built some homes and some work areas for you, communal work areas. You can come here, live here, and you’ll have a community, instead of being alone. Theoretically, this would also be great for the actual island itself and the people who live there, because it would help the economy. It doesn’t work exactly the way they were thinking, but it’s really interesting, because I never considered this is a new way of building a community. All of our legacy communities are built around decisions that were made god knows when, based on there’s a lake nearby or there’s a river or whatever.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** This is like, “Ah, it seems like a good spot to put a bunch of people with laptops,” so a new way of creating communities. Check out Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira in Wired.
**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week and our show for this year. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** Again.
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Still.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Michael Lane. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segment. Reminder to use the promo code. What is the promo code, Craig?
**Craig:** Onion.
**John:** Promo code onion to save $10 on your annual subscription, but only through January 15th, so do that.
**Craig:** Onion. Onion. Onion.
**John:** Onion. Onion. Onion. Stick around after the credits, because we’ll be discussing our non-writing aspirations for 2023. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun year.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Thanks, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, I sprung this on you. We didn’t have time to prepare any sort of plans for 2023, but not work, because obviously you’re going to have a very busy work 2023. Maybe I’ll start with some of mine, and you can think of what some of yours are going to be for 2023. I’m excited to be DM’ing again. It looks like we’re going to finish up the campaign that you’ve been so generously hosting for the last three years.
**Craig:** It’s a long one.
**John:** It’s a long one.
**Megana:** Wow.
**John:** When you finish up, we’ve discussed in the group, I’m going to try to run a much, much shorter, not going to go three years, kind of campaign. I’m excited to get back into that and look at who our group is. We have a large group, but not everyone can come every time, so trying to plan for things that will work will if people are just gone, so their tokens aren’t just sitting there idly, that we can actually do things every week with the people that we have on hand.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2023.
**Craig:** I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to just play again. I guess that’s not really an aspiration. It’s going to happen. It’s an inevitability.
**John:** It’s going to happen. We’re going to finish. We’re going to finish the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and then we’ll do something new.
**Craig:** Yes, we will. When it comes to non-writing aspirations, I don’t really have specific ones, or at least none that are tied to a new year. I have an ongoing project, which is to catastrophize less, take deep breaths, put anxiety in its proper perspective, and remind myself… Am I allowed to curse in this Bonus Segment?
**John:** Sure.
**Craig:** Everything will be fucking okay. That’s great.
**John:** [crosstalk 01:11:27].
**Craig:** That’s what I’m working on. Megana, I feel like you and I are very similar in this regard.
**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.
**Craig:** Tell me, what do you do, or first of all, is that part of your non-writing aspiration for 2023? If it is, how do you go about it?
**Megana:** I think it is. I am also trying to stretch more in 2023 because I’m getting older.
**Craig:** That’s nice. Yeah, you are.
**Megana:** I am. I think that getting myself to a place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out,” and moving my body in some way is always incredibly helpful. That is a new tactic I’m taking for 2023.
**Craig:** I like it, stretching.
**Megana:** Instead of just panicking alone in my room.
**Craig:** Right, and tightening up in a little stress ball.
**John:** Stretching also one of the things that you can do while you’re doing something else. You can stretch while you’re watching TV. Increasingly, I will just not sit on the couch. I will sit on the floor and try to stretch while watching Andor or Fleishman is in Trouble, because I can still fully enjoy the show, but I’m also hopefully getting my hamstrings a little less messed up.
**Megana:** I have a standing desk, but if we’re being honest, I don’t stand at it very often.
**Craig:** You mean your sitting desk? That’s your sitting desk, Megana.
**Megana:** Now it’s going to be my stretching desk. It’s going to be my stretching and less panic desk.
**Craig:** I like that.
**Megana:** Do you have a standing desk?
**Craig:** I do. Like you, it’s really… Look. Here’s the deal. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do. I know what I might do. Part of everything is also just giving myself a break.
**Megana:** You deserve it.
**Craig:** I do a lot. You know what? I don’t want to use the standing desk. Screw it. I don’t want to.
**John:** If listeners are looking for things to help them think about their year and they want to try a book, a book that actually was genuinely useful for me was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which really talks about how the best way to change your habits and get rid of some bad habits and start some good habits is just make them unavoidable. It’s literally like putting your running shoes by the door so you’re going to be tripping over them if you don’t do it. It’s making sure you’re setting yourself up for success. If people are looking for a book or something to read over the holidays, to make them think better about what they want to do in the new year, how to get that achieved, that’d be a good bet, Atomic Habits.
**Craig:** If your New Year’s resolutions or aspirations are to read less and sit more, I just want you to know I’m your patron saint.
**John:** We’re going to support that. Craig, a thing I’m going to try to not do in 2023 is recreate Twitter. I’m not going to try to, because obviously, Twitter is going to… It’s not dead, but it’s not going to be the same thing it was. If it’s around six months from now, six years from now, it’s still not going to be as useful to me as it used to be. I’m not going to try to find the new Twitter. I just don’t think that’s going to be a goal. I’m going to find other ways to encounter the ideas in people that I used to encounter and stumble across on Twitter. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be. I can still miss the things that were great about it. I’m not going to try to look for the next version of it.
**Craig:** Which is totally fine. I think you probably won’t have to try too hard. I think that there are people right now salivating and rubbing their hands together, going, “We sense a vacuum.” That said, Twitter never really made money. I don’t know if anybody necessarily… They’re not going to want to recreate Twitter either, but they’re going to make something. Something’s coming. You remember the fantastic opening credit sequence for Silicon Valley?
**John:** Oh yeah. Great. The constantly churning, 3D, top-down view of all these companies building up and exploding.
**Craig:** Exactly. They would change it over the seasons to reflect other implosions and new risings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know change is afoot. It just doesn’t stop. The churn doesn’t stop. Something new is going to come along that’s going to take over our lives soon enough.
**John:** What it has started doing more of as Twitter’s been declining is just going back to my RSS readers, the blogs I follow and stuff like that. That was actually really good technology. RSS is what’s actually powering podcasts like Scriptnotes to let new episodes come out there. People can use that for posts as well. I’m going to try to do a little bit more blogging on johnaugust.com. The thoughts that I used to try to cut down to 280 characters to fit on Twitter, I will expend a few minutes to make a longer blog post.
**Megana:** Nice.
**Craig:** Been a lot of that going on.
**John:** Craig, thank you for a very good 2022. I’m so excited to be doing more Scriptnotes with you in 2023.
**Craig:** Oh wait, we’re still doing this? Oh my god.
**Megana:** Wait, Craig, was that your answer for your resolution?
**John:** Catastrophize less?
**Megana:** Catastrophize less?
**Craig:** Yeah. What did you think it should be?
**Megana:** No, I think that that’s great. I also think that you deserve more vacation in 2023.
**Craig:** Aw, that’s very sweet. I don’t love vacations. I know I’m supposed to.
**John:** Maybe a different definition of vacation. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a beach someplace. It could just be like, Craig, for the next week you just get to play all of the video games.
**Craig:** I do love that.
**John:** I think we both wish a little more of that for you.
**Craig:** Thank you. You guys are very sweet. I wish you guys to have a wonderful and happy new year, no matter what it brings for us, which will be fascinating, no doubt.
**John:** It will be a fascinating year, I’m sure.
**Craig:** We will, as always, look back on this and go, “Aw, you guys didn’t know. You didn’t that the space weasels were coming.”
**John:** So naïve we were.
**Craig:** From the Planet Weasel. Yeah, they’re coming. We didn’t know. Until they do come, let’s have some fun.
**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Megana.
**Megana:** Thanks, John.
**Craig:** Thank you guys.
**John:** Bye.
**Craig:** Bye.
Links:
* [William Nicholson](https://www.williamnicholson.com/) on [IMdB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0629933/)
* [Watch the conversation between John and William here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ22OXQEyos)
* [Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!](https://www.wgfoundation.org/blog/category/FYC)
* [Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Welcome to Digital Nomadland](https://www.wired.com/story/digital-nomad-village-madeira-portugal/) by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
* [Fleischman Is In Trouble](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fleishman-is-in-trouble) on Hulu
* [Andor](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Lane ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/580standard.mp3).