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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: Ho, ho, ho, ho. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 734 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a writer whose credits include The Heat, Ghostbusters, and Haunted Mansion, her incredible new show, Widow’s Bay-

[laughter]

John: -is now out on Apple TV.

Craig: What a dramatic pause.

[laughter]

Craig: Her incredible new show, Widow’s Bay.

John: Welcome back to the program after 10 years, Katie Dippold.

Katie Dippold: Very happy to be here. I’ve been trying to get back in here for the past decade, so this is-

Craig: Clawing your way back in.

Katie: Yes, anything I can do.

John: You were last on the show Episode 272.

Craig: Whoa.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: 500 episodes ago.

John: 2016.

Katie: One of my favorite memories of that episode was when– remember when Malcolm, you asked him something and he was just quiet and then he was like, “I’m out of gas.” You’re like, “That’s it? You’re just done?” He’s like, “I’m done.”

Craig: Yes.

Katie: I respected it so much.

Craig: That’s what Malcolm– Malcolm used to play D&D with us, and at some point, he would just get up and lie down and sleep.

Katie: [laughs]

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

Katie: He knows how to live.

Craig: We can’t have you on the show without talking about our special connection. We always need to discuss our special connection. Katie Dippold and I both lived or attended school in Freehold, New Jersey. Competing high schools. She was at the somewhat tonier Freehold Township. I was at the rough around the edges Freehold Borough.

Katie: Never heard of it.

Craig: Yes. I was from the bad side of the tracks.

John: I love it.

Katie: Also where Bruce Springsteen was from. Not a big deal.

Craig: Yes. He went to Borough.

Katie: Sorry, you have that.

Craig: That’s because he was a little rough around the edges.

Katie: Yes, yes, yes.

John: Now, Katie Dippold, for folks who don’t know who you are, they actually do know who you are because you are famous for being an incredibly talented writer, but you’re also probably more famous on the internet because of one Halloween costume you wore and the situation in which you wore it. Do you want to recap why the world knows who you are?

Katie: There is a tweet that shows a photograph that– I can’t remember the tweet. It’s like when you think you’re going to a Halloween party, but it ends up being an adult drinking wine kind of vibe. I’m dressed fully as the Babadook. Face makeup, wig, hat, coat. No one was dressed up. My friend Jessie snapped the photo. Also, what the photo doesn’t show is I sat there for an hour and a half watching a movie like that.

John: Yes.

Katie: You know?

Craig: Once you’re there, what are you going to do?

John: What are you going to do?

Katie: Someone asked me like, “Why didn’t you just take off the hat?” I’m like, “That wasn’t going to help anything.”

John: No, no. Come on.

Craig: Right. I’m still– I got the weird glasses on, or the– does he have glasses? Goggles?

Katie: No glasses, but there’s a dark room around the eyes.

Craig: Yes, that’s what it was. Something like that.

John: Yes, it’s like [crosstalk] monochrome makeup look, right?

Katie: Yes.

John: Yes, it is fantastic, and it’s a moment. It also is the intersection of horror and comedy, which is Widow’s Bay, which is exactly what we’re here to talk about.

Craig: Segue man.

John: That’s what I am.

Katie: Yes, look at that.

John: I want to talk about Widow’s Bay. Your show is genuinely fantastic. Drew and I watched it.

Craig: Wait, have you seen more than two episodes?

John: I’ve only seen the first episode. I haven’t seen the second episode yet.

Craig: Oh, okay, because you’re talking like you’ve seen the whole show.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: I’ve seen two episodes, which I loved, but I started getting jelly, but you’ve only seen one.

John: No, no, we didn’t get the links or anything. We-

Craig: I’m just watching it on Apple TV.

John: I’m just watching it on Apple TV like everyone else. Like every other American person in the world, I’m watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV.

Craig: American person in the world. [chuckles]

John: I want to talk about your show, but I also want to talk about what you wish you knew going into this industry. Imagine that you’re sending an email to your younger self. It could be to your 15-year-old self or when you first arrived in Los Angeles. I did a panel this last week where this was the theme.

It was actually really insightful to think like, “Oh, yes, what did I know, and what if I could pass along information to your younger self?” Things we want to do. We’ll talk about that.

We’ll answer some listener questions. Including, when do you call out someone for stealing your idea or just being not cool?

Katie: Oh.

John: Our bonus segment for premium members, are there still going to be movies and TV in 10 years, 15 years? We’ll talk about that. All big topics. Most importantly, I know a movie that’s coming out next week, which is Craig’s movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: The Sheep Detectives. What a silly title.

John: It is. It was once called Three Bags Full.

Craig: It was once called Three Bags Full. It’s based on a book written by a wonderful German author named Leonie Swann. Three Bags Full was the title it was released under in the United States. That’s what we called the movie up until MGM was like, “Yes, no one’s going to know what that is, but they would know what The Sheep Detectives is.” They’re correct.

John: They are correct.

Craig: I get it completely. I love this movie so much. I never self-promote. I don’t. It’s not my thing to be like, “Hey, coming up on dah, dah, dah.” It is the little movie that we hopefully could because it’s Aline Brosh McKenna’s Devil Wears Prada 2 is crushing it in theaters. Mortal Kombat’s going to be a huge movie. There’s all these big movies. Then there’s our little sweet sheep movie, it’s adorable, and I’ve watched it with an audience and people laugh and then they cry. My wife and my younger daughter watched it and they were a sobbing mess and a happy sobbing mess.

Katie: Wow. That’s good.

John: Now, Craig, many critics have liked it, but at least one didn’t because you’re not at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. How are you dealing with that grief?

Craig: It’s really hard, because I don’t have any experience not being at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. First of all, the idea of having a movie on Rotten Tomatoes that isn’t in the 20s is shocking for me. Like, “Wait, what? They make tomatoes in another color than green?” I continue my very strange, tumultuous relationship with critics. They don’t know what to make of me at all.

John: Quite understandably.

Craig: They yell at me when I’m like, “Why is this comedy guy doing drama?” Then I do this and they’re like, “Why is this drama guy doing comedy?”

Katie: I feel like you and I could talk about this for years. Now that said, you get one good review and you’re like, “You know, critics–”

Craig: Well, they do have a point.

Katie: Thank God. You know?

Craig: Yes. Well, the thing is there are movies and television shows that don’t need critics at all. It doesn’t matter. I’ve definitely worked on those. You’ve worked on those where it didn’t really matter what the critics thought. Then there are things that sort of need them for legitimacy.

I think The Sheep Detectives needed it. I could see how Widow’s Bay could need it. Meaning, it helps separate a little bit, because it’s not a built-in audience, it’s not IP, it’s something original. Also, you were sporting a 100.

John: Yes. Then someone had to ruin it.

Craig: Some ding-dongs came in. The math is bad because then what happens is you’re like, “Oh, now to get back up, I need like eight more good reviews.”

John: Yes.

Katie: Right. Oh, you can drive yourself crazy. I also, it’s so funny. I always tell myself, if a movie comes out and doesn’t do well, and it’s an experience I’ve had a couple of times, but I say, “Okay, no, it doesn’t matter. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t matter.” Every time I put something on, I’m like, “What’s the Rotten Tomatoes score?” It’s just, you know what I mean?

Craig: Yes. I know.

Katie: It’s just, it’s all of us. It matters very much.

Craig: It is bizarre how everybody, I mean, I assume a lot of critics do put time into the reviews and things, and then it just gets mushed into a number.

Katie: The ones that are good and thoughtful and do a really good analysis, it is really-

John: It’s lovely.

Katie: It’s lovely.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think when people say nice things about us, we like it. When they say bad things about us, we don’t.

John: Hey, I think that’s true.

Katie: That’s exactly right.

Craig: We don’t like it.

Katie: You’re not good at this.

Craig: No. Then I turn to the Teddy Roosevelt quote, and I’m like-

Katie: Yes, that’s exactly-

Craig: “You don’t matter. The ones who matter are the ones who understand what I’m doing and like me.”

Katie: That’s exactly right.

John: This week, my instance of the Rotten Tomatoes was my new book, Wolf’s Belly, which comes out July 18th.

Craig: Wait, what?

John: I have a book out July 18th. I’ll give you a copy so [unintelligible 00:07:33] here.

Craig: What? Did you write a secret book?

John: Secret book.

Craig: I didn’t know about this. I’m glad I didn’t know about this because-

Katie: Whoa.

Craig: -had I known about it and not known about it, I would have been so embarrassed.

John: Yes, absolutely. We got a-

Craig: He just did it again.

John: I just did it again.

Craig: You just did it.

John: My book comes out July 18th, and I got a Publishers Weekly starred review, which is a rare thing to get, which is very lovely.

Craig: It’s a graphic novel. Congratulations.

John: Yes. It’s up for pre-order now, but there are already reviews online for Goodreads because those things come out early, because they send those galleys out. Those have been really nice, but of course, there are going to be occasionally like, “Yes, it wasn’t for me,” or the person who gives it– it’s like five stars, or they give four stars, and four stars brings you down.

Craig: [chuckles] Well, I think that you are a healthier person than I am about these things. You’re very good about, you decide what the worth of what you did is. Whatever people think, that’s fine, but if you like it, you like it. I think that’s healthier. I don’t like how easily swayed I can be by other people telling me if I did something well or not.

Katie: It sounds like we all three have things being reviewed right now. Obviously, the summary of this entire conversation was thank God for the critics.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Thank God for the critics.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Absolutely. Without critics where would we be?

Craig: They know I love them.

Katie: Yes.

John: While we’re talking about things being judged and awards, the Academy changed rules this week. Some summary of some rule changes here. In the writing categories, the rules now codify that screenplays have to be human authored-

Craig: Damn it.

John: -to be eligible.

Craig: Which I think is reasonable. Who are they going to hand the Oscar to if a computer wrote it?

John: Yes. I think that’s an obvious one. A better, more interesting one for me is on international feature films right now, it’s always been the country submits, and it’s always been controversial because the country may not submit their best film, or a great film from a country won’t be submitted. Now, if it has been qualifying award at some of the major international feature film festivals like Berlin, or Busan, or Sundance, or Venice, if it’s won the awards there, it’s also eligible for that, and so it can be-

Craig: A government can’t just go, “Yes, we don’t like this one.”

John: The award now goes to the director as the beneficiary rather than to the country.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is interesting.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good change.

Craig: That’s a smart change. I also saw that now actors can be nominated multiple times in a category.

John: Yes.

Katie: Would they want that?

Craig: It seems like a bad thing you-

Katie: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: -but it’s happened before. Director Steven Soderbergh was nominated-

John: Yes, twice.

Craig: -twice in one year. That’s nice. That’s nice.

Katie: Did he win for that year?

Craig: That’s a great question.

Drew Marquardt: I think he did. That was Traffic and-

Katie: Okay, that’s impressive.

Drew: -Erin Brockovich.

Craig: Erin Brockovich. I think Erin Brockovich. He won for Erin Brockovich?

Drew: I think he won for Traffic.

Craig: Traffic is a better movie.

John: Anyway, changes. They seem thoughtful changes.

Craig: Absolutely. Obviously, Katie, you and I are perennial Oscar considerables.

Katie: Right.

Craig: We’re always in the mix.

Katie: Right. Right. Yes.

John: Yes, [crosstalk]. Always in the topics.

Craig: Yes, so this is always– I keep careful track of this sort of thing. We’re talking sheep movie.

John: We have some housekeeping to get through. First and most important is we’re putting out a Scriptnotes listener survey. We want to know things about our listeners, not for marketing purposes, because there’s no marketing because we’re-

Craig: To sell their data?

John: We don’t want to know any of that stuff. We’re curious about, which segments people love the most, which things they want to hear more of. There’s some things we might try out, and we’re curious what people think of those things. We’re also just curious who our listeners are, how many are in the US, what education level people have, because my prototypical user is in college or finishing college, but that may not be accurate. We’re just curious.

Craig: I feel like our listener base might be older than you think.

John: Yes. I’m also curious, one of the questions is, how many people who are listening to the podcast are actually working in the film and television industry versus just like to listen to the podcast?

Craig: All good things to know.

John: Yes.

Katie: It’d be so funny to find out it’s just ages 60 to 62.

John: So incredible.

Katie: Just a very specific.

Craig: Like a steep drop-off after 62.

Katie: No awareness before those two years.

Craig: 59, nothing. 60, boom.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: There’s a free thing, free premium with your AARP subscription, and then they get it for a couple years and they’re out. They’re like-

John: Yes, it’s like, “No, this is not good.”

Craig: -“No, it’s not good.”

John: There will be a link in the show notes for that, so please click through there.

Craig: 60 to 62. Do you see why Katie Dippold is good?

John: Yes, because it’s the specificity of that joke.

Craig: That is 64 would have been bad, 62 is correct.

Katie: I appreciate that.

John: She’s so good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, I want to do another random advice episode. Remember we’ve done those? People write in with non-screenwriting questions-

Craig: Oh, right.

John: -non-writing questions, because-

Craig: When we attempt to be wise.

John: Yes, because we have opinions about a lot of things. We’ll try that. Send in those questions to Drew. Send in at ask@johnaugust.com and just label it like, “Random advice,” so we know to put those in a different category for that. We have a new version of Weekend Read out there. People use Weekend Read on their phones to read scripts.

The new version is really nice and actually has some really helpful features in terms of marketing what you haven’t read, what’s new for you. You can get through long scripts faster. There’s a new scroll bar, so try that out.

Last bit of follow-up. We had Haley Z. Boston on the show. She was talking about Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which was terrific. On that, I had her read through the first page of her script, which Craig, you would have loved because there’s no dialogue, and yet every word on there is just delicious and delightful.

Drew and our team put together a YouTube video for Haley. She’s reading it, but we’re also scrolling the page as you’re doing it. You can see-

Craig: I like those.

John: -all the choices she’s making.

Craig: Was there a lot of white space?

John: No paragraphs more than two lines long. She’s using italics and bold in really interesting ways. It just is drawing you down in a smart way. Because this is mostly an audio medium, it’s fun to do a visual at times. Seeing that is there.

Craig: Love that.

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

Craig: Love it.

John: Housekeeping done. Katie Dippold, your show is so delightful. I didn’t know what it was going to be when I pressed play, which is so much fun. It comes up and the opening title feels like a Stephen King book cover. What was the pitch? Drew has a really good pitch for it, but I’m curious what your pitch was for it on the initial thing. What is the idea? What’s the logline?

Katie: The logline is a mayor of a New England island town desperate to bring in tourism is warned by locals that it’s cursed-

John: Great.

Katie: -and they are right.

Craig: They are clearly right.

John: Now, Drew, can you give us your pitch?

Drew: It’s Fawlty Towers, but where John Cleese’s character is the mayor from Jaws.

Katie: [chuckles] That’s great.

Drew: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Katie: That’s right.

Craig: Yes, it definitely has mayor from Jaws feeling to it. Shut it down, shut it all down, and New England, of course. Fawlty Towers because the people there are hysterical.

John: Yes, they’re so funny.

Craig: They’re so funny.

John: I can’t even imagine how you found the pitch-perfect tone so that it didn’t just all blow up at every moment. It’s just so cleverly done. They’re so eccentric and so extreme, and yet everyone’s playing the same song. It’s so hard to do.

Katie: That’s really nice. I’ve been working on this. This was like my Parks and Rec sample, 18 years ago.

John: Incredible.

Katie: I’ve been working on it ever since.

John: Give us a little backstory. Tell us how this all started.

Katie: I had just finished at MADtv. I wanted to do something like this. I’m a comedy writer, but I love horror so much. I just wanted something like this to exist. I want to go to this place. Then I heard Parks and Rec was hiring, so I quickly wrote a pilot, and I think that got me the job. Worked there for several seasons.

John: You wrote this as a pilot?

Katie: Yes.

John: How close is the pilot you wrote to what we actually see in the pilot episode?

Katie: It’s much more comedic. It’s like, joke, joke, joke. That’s why I think that gave Mike Schur an idea of my sense of humor. I think the heart of that is still there, but I kept thinking, when I would revisit, I’m like, “I don’t know that I would watch this show. I want it to be taken seriously. I want to feel tension. I want to be scared.” I had to keep taking it apart and putting it back together. There’s years where it’s been not funny or scary.

[laughter]

Katie: It’s terrifying progress.

Craig: What a great mix.

Katie: Yes, I think that’s what you want.

Craig: Yes, boring in every possible way.

Katie: Yes, really had a lot of that for a while. Then I got, I don’t know, something after doing the last couple movies, they were hard to do. I just wanted to do something just completely original. I’m like– because it was a tough time for a while. I’m like, “You know what? I might as well just take one real crazy creative swing.”

Craig: There you go. You and I have lived some parallel lives here. Caught in the same thing. At some point, you do need to just step back and go– are we allowed to curse on this show?

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Fuck it. I love that I talk about this like I’ve never been on the show. Episode 700 and whatever. I love that you did that. Also, I do think that you can tell this is the product of somebody who is not 25. You are covering all these ages of people. Teenager, dad, older people, you got this whole thing on lockdown. It feels, the mayor, Loftis. Loftis? Loftis. Feels like such an adult, but he’s also a kid, which I love.

One of my favorite moments is when Stephen Root’s character calls him out and says like, “Oh, you used to ding dong ditch me, except you never actually rang the bell. You’re a coward.” That was when he was 11. You’re like, you can see that little boy in this guy all the time. What I really appreciate, this is where the show won my heart. You haven’t seen the second episode.

John: I haven’t seen it yet.

Craig: I’m going to give something away.

John: That’s fine. Okay.

Craig: It’s not a plot twist. In the second episode, he has to go stay in the inn, which of course the locals insist is haunted. They’re correct.

At one point, he’s alone and he wanders into the parlor where they have drinks and things. He opens a cabinet, and in that kind of B&B way, there are all these board games. The board games are wrong. One’s called Daddy’s Home, but the daddy is clearly drunk and angry. Then there’s a box that looks like it would have puzzle pieces in it.

It’s a picture of a tooth and it just says teeth, which is amazing. Then there’s a deck of cards. The card game is called Run. I love that so much, the specificity of that. I could smell that room. Do you know what I mean? I could smell it.

Katie: Oh, that’s great.

Craig: I just loved it. I can’t wait to see where this show goes, but I have to assume that part of the process of getting something like that to be that perfect is you working in tandem with a lot of people, and casting and all of that, because you haven’t run a television show before.

Katie: No.

Craig: Talk about that, because that’s a fun time.

Katie: Yes, it’s a real different experience than being the movie writer just standing by craft services, pitching jokes every now and then. It’s a different thing.

Craig: Yes.

Katie: It’s very hard.

[laughter]

Craig: Turns out it’s hard.

John: [crosstalk] whispering this. Yes.

Craig: Yes, it’s really exhausting.

Katie: It’s rewarding. You don’t really get a say in much when you’re in features.

John: My question is, did you realize that things were hysterically funny while you were filming them? Because one of the things that’s so different in this versus Parks and Rec is Parks and Rec is brightly lit and I think you can tell like, “Oh, that’s funny. That works.” Here, things are shot mostly realistically, and it’s not this high-key everything. Do you know that it’s just hysterically funny? When the assistant comes in and she’s like, “Oh, is there anything more?” She’s like staring for like 30 seconds, it’s like-

Craig: So great.

John: “No, that’s it.” [chuckles] Did you know that it was funny at the moment?

Katie: It’s different. The board games, for example, you’re not watching. This show, it’s a lot about little details and specifics. I think the way approaching it is a lot of blink and you’ll miss it, and that’s okay. It’s less presenting a big joke. It is different than being on set with– and Melissa McCarthy saying something hilarious and you’re laughing out loud. Also, these actors are so good in the show. Just their performances would get me, but it is different. It’s interesting.

There’s a lot of times, too, like the director, Hiro Murai, we would just be also looking at each other like, “Does this feel right? This feels bad.” It’s a lot of following your stomach if something felt good or bad. When something feels bad in this show, it really will take you out of it, so it’s harder.

John: Yes, because you’re weirdly, you’re very joke dense for something that it doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be funny from the outside.

Craig: They’re not in the form of jokes, which I love.

John: Yes, it’s great.

Craig: That, in fact, it’s just people being people. Tell me, okay, because I’m new to the show, and because there’s only two episodes currently out, the character, the woman who’s like works in his office, who’s not his assistant, but like his–

Katie: Are you talking about Patricia, the Kate O’Flynn brunette, or Rosemary the smoker?

Craig: No, no.

Katie: Patricia.

Craig: Patricia.

Katie: Okay, yes.

Craig: So funny. That character is just playing a woman who has been left and ignored and is bitter, but also hopeful. There is something so brilliant about her sitting and talking to Shep, the fisherman who’s found, who they say, “He hit his head, we’ve just put him under to help while the head swelling goes down.” She’s talking to him like he’s in a coma. Loftis says, “It’s only when people are in a coma.” She’s like, “Well, I’m sorry for wasting his time.” Which is amazing. It’s just like the most put upon, like, “You know what, man? I guess, fine.” No, that’s not a joke. It’s real, but it’s also funny. I love that.

Katie: Oh, I’m glad.

Craig: I just love that.

Katie: The actress, Kate O’Flynn, lovely, lovely woman, and also just incredible. It’s Allison Jones, great Allison Jones. She sent us her tape, and it was not what I pictured at all, but I was like, “Oh, but this is the person. This is– she’s still good.”

Craig: Yes, so good.

Katie: She brought so many layers to it. It was loosely based off of my mom. She has a similar, kind of just wants to be seen. She also, she can’t say the right thing, she just says– you know?

John: Yes.

Craig: Right.

Katie: Can I give you an example? I remember Drew was at my mom’s house with me, and there was an Eagles game. He’s a diehard Eagles fan. The Eagles started losing, and he got really stressed out. My mom was uncharacteristically soothing. She was like, “You know what, Drew, don’t worry. It’s okay. It’s all going to work out.” I’m like, “That does not sound like Ellie Dippold.” Then the other team scored again, and she goes, “Well, that’s not good.”

[laughter]

Katie: That was sort of the heart of it, and then Kate came in and just brought all these other layers and stuff that I wouldn’t have imagined. She’s incredible.

Craig: Just wonderful.

John: Can we talk about the actual production? Because you were clearly in a seaside town for– is this upstate New York you were shooting? Where were you actually shooting this?

Katie: We were in Massachusetts.

John: That’s in Massachusetts. Okay. Were you block shooting? Were you shooting episode by episode? How did it all work?

Katie: It was block shooting. We had to shoot out of order, too. It was an intense shoot because the scripts– I think it’s funny. I think in the beginning, we were really shooting for the stars and just trying to do as much as possible. Then no one really told us not to, in the room. Also, I remember Drew Goddard talking about Cabin in the Woods. He said that if he had known how hard it– he was glad he didn’t know how hard it was going to be, because he would have done it differently. It’s a similar thing here. I’m glad I didn’t realize how–

Craig: I believe you can tell. There is an amount of care and attention. It’s funny, when I watch shows now, I will, in the back of my head, also still be, because we’re making the third season right now, and I’m so in it, I start thinking about things like coverage. Like, “Oh, that’s outside at night. That’s fun. I wonder how many takes and how many angles and how much time and how many meetings were based just to figure out that room. The art department has to come up with what the teeth game looks like.” There’s so much. It’s hard, and it pays off.

Katie: Yes. Oh, that’s nice. I have to say, this production team, they were insane in the best way. The props department, when you see the rest of the show, this props department, I don’t know how they did it. I mumble that every day. I’m like, “I don’t know how props did it.” The production designer, that whole episode, too, that inn, the whole inside is a build.

Craig: Oh, yes, you can tell. You can tell in a good way-

Katie: In a good way.

Craig: -because you can’t get the cameras around. A hotel wouldn’t have that parlor like that, but I loved it so much. I thought that was such a brilliant thing to like– what ends up happening is you find a location and then they’re like, “I can only be here for eight days because of the season, blah, and also it’s not perfect and the electricity and you can’t get equipment in.” It was so perfect.

Katie: I don’t know what it was. Everyone working on the show was just really game for it.

John: That’s great.

Katie: Do you know what I mean? Everyone was just [crosstalk]-

Craig: Because they liked it. Katie, because it’s good. That’s, honestly, here’s the thing. I talk to crew people every day. They work on things every day. We don’t. Our show ends, they move on to another production. They mostly work on stuff they don’t like. They work on things that they read and they’re just like– that’s just how it goes. I think people get excited when they work on something they like.

John: Before you got into production, you had to write a bunch of scripts. You wrote a pilot, which obviously you wrote a ton, but I’m looking at the credits and there’s a murderers’ row of really funny people. Talk to us about the process of getting everything written. Was everything written before you showed up there? What happened?

Katie: Yes, it was a great room. I had the pilot written, and I did something that was a little tricky, but I’m so glad I did, which it was not like a room full of all comedy writers. It was a couple of writers that came from shows like WandaVision. Actually, one of them also had a super funny spec. A couple of my old-time comedy friends, one that was a writer on SNL, actually Neil Casey, that plays the innkeeper, too.

Craig: Sure. Yes, so funny.

Katie: Colton Dunn from Key and Peele, and Kelly Galuska has done a ton of comedy. Then I also had a playwright, this guy Dave, who’s lovely, and another writer, Alberto Roldán, who’d worked on Mrs. Davis. It was a real stew, because I felt like this show was going to need a lot of different kinds of thought process and just different ideas. In the beginning, it was tricky navigating this, but then it got to a point where the drama mythology people are pitching jokes that are hilarious, and the comedy writers are really passionately arguing story points. It was very rewarding to see that all come together.

John: You had been on MADtv, you’re used to that kind of comedy writing. You’d been on Mike Schur’s show. You had a sense of being in a room. This was your first time running a room with this group. How did you approach that? How many weeks did you have? What were your hours like? What did it feel like? What were the nuts and bolts of it?

Katie: We had 20 weeks, and I kept the hours. The hours were about 10:00 to 5:00. I would leave and then keep thinking about it until I go to bed. There’s no reason to keep everyone there. You know what I mean? You’re the one that needs to do that, I think.

John: Over the course of those 20 weeks, there probably was a little bit of a blue-sky phase. Then you were cranking down, “Okay, what happens in this episode? How do we get through this thing?” Are you signing people off during that time? How did it work?

Katie: God, it was so crazy just feeling my way through this process. I called so many different people like, “What are we doing?” I called you. Do you know what I mean? We blue-skied for about six weeks, four weeks.

John: Oh, wow. Okay.

Katie: I actually knew some of the dilemmas I wanted to happen. I knew certain things I wanted to do, but then working through it. It was a very creative, organic process of, we just would talk about, “Well, this just feels fun right now.” You know what I mean? “Let’s just do this now.” It was just constantly making those moves. Then people would get sent out to script one time.

Craig: When you assembled the room, did you have, “Okay, I know how this begins, and I know how it ends”?

Katie: Yes.

Craig: You had that.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: At least there was a structure that everybody was trying to fill in, too.

Katie: Yes. Even how it ended, there’s some choices in it that came up through the room, which was a very fun debate. Yes, I knew the basic. I knew where it was going, but we found so much along the way. Everyone was great.

John: You’re doing this work in a room. How much are you having to communicate out with producers, with Apple, with other folks about what was happening, or was it only when you were done with the 20 weeks that you could come back and say, “Here’s the show”?

Katie: I was kind of a lunatic about– I would send like a 30-page outline to the producers and Apple. It was very, very detailed and very specific. I would start off with this summary at the top, like, “This is what we’re trying to do here.” Then just really break down each scene. Also, because the show is so totally tricky, I just wanted to be as detailed as possible.

John: Even during the 20 weeks while you were going through stuff, they could see like, “This is where we are headed,” if they had big red flag concerns.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: I think that’s wonderful. I think that there is a value in looking at the people that give us all the money to make these things as people that deserve a little caretaking. I think they work with writers who are so internal sometimes that they get nothing back. They’re in the dark. They don’t know what’s going on. Yes, some caretaking documents goes a long way. They don’t abuse it. I find that it’s the opposite. That they give less input, the more detail you give.

Katie: I could not agree more. Our execs, Dana and Spencer were, I swear to you, I’m not just saying this because of career purposes.

Craig: Because you need them.

[laughter]

Katie: They were awesome. I never dreaded their feedback-

Craig: That’s great.

Katie: -which is unusual to say. If they called on the phone, I’m like, “Pick up the phone.” I don’t like picking up a phone. That’s the biggest compliment I can give. Apple, I have to give them credit. They really just let us do it.

John: Now, when you were actually making the show, were there any writers besides you around to pitch new stuff, or was it just you? Were you the writer on set?

Katie: Oh, well, I’m very thankful for the strike because having writers on set was such a blessing.

John: Okay, because there was a gap between the things, you were shooting in the US, you were able to pull– you had two writers with you?

Katie: Two writers on set. One of them was there the whole time, it’s Neil, and then two other writers, Kelly and Mackenzie, took turns. It was so nice. Also, just having people that they were in the room and they understand what we were going for, I really wanted to be on set a lot and make sure we’re capturing the moments, but then you have something else prepping, so having a writer being able to go with that director, because we had three other guest directors come in, and then for scouting, and just have an eye on things and be able to talk to [crosstalk]-

John: Maybe have a splinter unit, like you could– yes.

Katie: Yes, that was really, really, really-

Craig: I could probably maybe use somebody other than myself.

Katie: No, it’s great.

Craig: I’m starting to feel even more terrified by my own life.

John: Sorry.

Katie: Yes. Also, having people– just also having funny writers make sure. You know what I mean?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Katie: Just to talk to about what’s going on and stuff like that, it’s just lovely.

Craig: People to talk to?

Katie: Yes, people to talk to.

Craig: Yes, that would be nice.

John: Make sure shows, the things we were growing up on, the writers were around, and that’s part of the reason why things can work. Yes.

Katie: Yes, being around funny people, it’s a nice thing.

John: The second topic I want to get to is what you wish you knew. For this exercise, let’s imagine we get the chance to either talk to our younger selves or send an email to our younger selves. Let’s start with our 15-year-old self. If you could send an email to young Katie about some advice for her, anything– like headlines you would want her to know?

Katie: I wouldn’t have listened to it.

John: Yes, that’s honestly true.

Katie: I would have said-

Craig: Shut up, old woman. [laughs]

John: Shut up, old woman. You also know that-

Katie: Why you never wear your hair down anymore?

John: Yet you also know that you wouldn’t listen, so you could probably outsmart this 15-year-old Katie because she’s an idiot.

Katie: I would hate this advice so much. I would say, “You’re two-boy crazy, none of these boyfriends you’re going to marry. Just read some books. Just read books and don’t-”

Craig: Oh my God, you’re like, “Get out of here.”

Katie: I would have been like, “Fuck off.”

Craig: Yes, seriously, beat it.

Katie: Yes.

John: Craig, advice for your 15-year-old self.

Craig: I certainly wouldn’t have said, “Be less girl crazy.” I would have been like, “Yes, no, have fun. You’re going to get married soon.”

[laughter]

Craig: I think for my 15-year-old self, I would have said, “Hey, hold tight. You’re going to be out of here soon.” The world was pretty small for me. I felt like I was supposed to be somewhere, and I wasn’t sure where. I didn’t know. I hadn’t yet connected the idea that I would be doing this for a living. I would say, “Don’t worry. You’ll be out of here soon.”

John: Yes. I wasn’t out when I was 15, and you can’t retroactively say like, “Oh, it would have been fine to be like–” you don’t know. I think just the sense that, “You will fall in love, you’ll be happy, you’ll be married, you’ll have a family.”

Craig: Did you know that you were gay when you were 15?

John: I knew I was gay. I knew [crosstalk]-

Craig: Oh, so your older self wouldn’t be like, “By the way,” and you’d be like, “No, I’m not.”

John: Yes, I wasn’t like a [crosstalk]-

Craig: You weren’t going to argue.

John: Oh, yes, you know. There wasn’t anything to act upon at the moment. I probably could have, it was cowardice.

Craig: I don’t know if it’s cowardice. I don’t think that’s cowardice.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: I think that’s-

John: Yes, it’s not recognizing opportunities that you have.

Craig: Sure.

John: I think in terms of– I was ambitious. I didn’t know there was such a thing as screenwriting yet. I didn’t know if the movies were written.

Craig: I had no idea.

John: General advice is, “Pursue what you’re interested in, and don’t be worried if your tastes and opinions change. That’s also part of growing up.”

Katie: Yes.

John: Now let’s fast forward to you’ve arrived in Los Angeles. Maybe you’re a year in. Okay, what else?

Katie: Can we visit college?

John: College, please. Let’s go to college.

Katie: I think one thing I would have told myself freshman year of college, and I eventually did this, I just wish I got to it sooner. Just find your people.

John: Oh, yes.

Katie: For me, that was some real weirdos, and the best possible– I started pledging this sorority, and they were all really nice and lovely, but my stomach was a little, “This doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t feel right.” Then I started the theater group and improv group. I had this improv group there that it was just the best group of weirdos. I remember just being in a New Jersey diner with them late at night. We weren’t going to any party or frat house. There was a guy that could have been-

Craig: I can see the diner, by the way. It’s got the two entrances-

Katie: Exactly.

Craig: -the little lobby, the thing, go inside. There’s a case with the– yes.

Katie: Yes. They were all so bizarre in the best way. There was someone that could have been 18 or he could have been 55 years old. I have no idea, but he was the funniest person ever. Finding those people just changed my life.

Craig: Yes, God, talking to myself in college, I think probably I would have said, “You do know you’re not going to be a doctor, right? Why don’t you do what you want instead of what you’re supposed to do?” Which I started to do, it just took me a bit because also, afraid. That’s a tough thing, because if your older self comes to you and says, “Hey, do what you want,” there’s an implication, and it’ll work out. Not like, “Do what you want. Also, you’re going to end up alone and addicted.”

[laughter]

Craig: I would have maybe gotten myself off the pre-med track a little sooner.

John: I was just back in my undergrad last weekend, and I got an alumni award, which was lovely. I got to see my campus. Every time you go back to your college campus, it’s like, “Oh my God, this school is so much smaller than I remember. Everything is just closer together and other things–” it was lovely. I don’t have great advice for that kid, because I kind of did it right. I picked a school that was just the right size and that I was– I knew so many people, I was in lots of different groups. I was kind of happy.

Craig: Maybe you would have just come back and said, “Yes-

John: Thumbs up. Yes.

Craig: -thumbs up.”

John: Thumbs up. Yes, keep doing that.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. It was a good experience. I was happy with that. When I got into USC for film school, I’m like, “Yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to drive my rusted out car to Los Angeles.” The luxury– Craig and I, you and I have talked about this. The luxury I had moving out here was that my family was generally supportive, and I had sort of a, if everything went haywire, I could have just moved home. I had that support underneath me. It wasn’t like they were like-

Craig: Yes. Me, too. Oh, no.

John: Yes, it’s not that different. Yes. I felt really lucky that I had a family that didn’t-

Craig: That’s nice.

John: -understand what I wanted to do, but was generally supportive.

Craig: That’s why you’re healthier than I am.

John: Yes, maybe.

Katie: That’s nice. Were your parents not excited about you?

Craig: No. No, they were angry and insistent that it wouldn’t work. Also, they had no money. That did give me a lot of fear.

John: Yes.

Katie: Yes.

Craig: When I got here, I was definitely motivated by fear. Fear, I think, is like, I’ve never done cocaine. We’ve talked about cocaine before on this show. I’ve never done cocaine. Katie is like, “That’s interesting.”

Katie: My silence. [laughs]

Craig: The two of us are like, “We’ve never done it.” You’re like, “Mm-hmm.”

John: Okay.

Craig: I feel like fear is the cocaine of emotion.

John: Just chopping up on tape.

Katie: Okay. It’s not– you want this? You go– okay, it’s not for here. It’s not for here. It’s fine.

Craig: Not for here. Yes. No, cool, cool, cool. It powers you, but I think then there’s this terrible downside. There’s the comedown.

Katie: Oh, it’s a very empty drug. I just feel like anytime I’ve done it in my 20s, I ended up making lunch plans with someone I didn’t want to eat lunch with.

Craig: Oh, the worst.

Katie: It’s a real waste of time.

Craig: Fear does not do that for me, but it definitely– fear will get me up in the morning and will power me through a day. When I get home, I’m like, “Oh, no.” It’s just, it’s an effective motivator, but it comes with a cost.

Katie: Oh, that does.

John: Craig, I think you know that you have one tattoo, I have one tattoo.

Craig: Yes.

John: My tattoo is, tibbium nihil, imagus quiddum, which is, let me fear nothing, not even fear, which I got the first year while I was here in Los Angeles. Friends, we were out just walking and they all had tattoos. I was like, “I want a tattoo.” [unintelligible 00:38:01] tattoo.

Craig: Nice, and hepatitis C.

John: Absolutely. It was a helpful thing for me to remember because unlike you where fear was motivating to go do a thing, fear was always a sort of thing like, “Stay back. Don’t reach for it.”

Craig: Healthier.

John: So often, the things I regret most were the things I didn’t do because I was afraid. It was like, the stakes were always much lower than I allowed myself to believe.

Katie: I think my biggest motivator was never wanting to feel stuck. I feel like I love my parents very much, but they were always– they divorced when I was in college. When they did, it was like, “Okay, that seems good.”

John: Yes, as opposed to [crosstalk]-

Katie: There was always like a little tension. You know like the beginning of The Shining? That sort of like– it always had that energy to them. [laughs]

John: Oh, that is also good.

Craig: Oh, that energy?

Katie: Yes, just like–

Craig: Okay. It must have been comfortable in your house.

Katie: Love them both. Love them both. Hopefully, they don’t listen to Scriptnotes. It’s just really just always wanting to not feel stuck and having opportunity, that was the biggest drive for me.

Craig: Right. I mean, that’s empowering, I think. That’s a positive thing to reach for.

Katie: Yes.

John: We’ve all arrived in Los Angeles, and things we learned early on in Los Angeles, or maybe could have learned earlier if we could tell ourselves. My nominee for this is the soft pass and understanding where like someone is passing, they just don’t want to say that they’re passing. It’s a no, but they’re not actually saying no, they’re saying maybe, or like, “That sounds great. Let me get back to you about that.” Recognizing when like, oh, they’re actually are saying no, it’s just that you’re not hearing it as the no.

There were so many times where I thought like, “Oh, this is still a possibility, this project, they’re still considering it.” It’s like, no, they did pass, they just didn’t actually close the loop. I just wasted so much time thinking that a thing was alive when it wasn’t alive.

Craig: When it wasn’t alive.

John: Yes. The lesson I took from that is, it’s okay, first off. It’s okay for things just to not happen. It’s often worth it to make the phone call or make the email to say, like, “Hey, sorry, this didn’t click, but I really enjoyed meeting you.” Basically, to close the loop for them so that–

Craig: Let them off the hook.

John: Let them off the hook, yes. Rather than being resentful, just recognize, like, “Oh, that’s just how it goes. Things will just sometimes not happen, and that’s okay.”

Craig: That’s good advice.

John: Things you’d advise your earlier self, those first years in this business.

Katie: I came to LA for MADtv. I don’t know what I would have– I probably should have recognized earlier I’m not a performer. That would have helped something. I put up a one-woman murder mystery that probably didn’t need to.

[laughter]

John: I want to see this so badly. I’m going to search the internet to find it.

Katie: Well, no, thank God you won’t find it. I think what was also funny about it to the audience is it’s a show written for someone that could do all these different characters and voices. I cannot alter my voice from this right now.

[laughter]

John: That would be amazing.

Craig: That’s awesome. It’s like the one-woman show where everyone sounds the same.

Katie: I’m trying my best.

Craig: You’re trying.

Katie: I am just sweating and trying and throwing on different wigs and hats.

John: “Hello, Dr. Trumbly,” and it’s just the same voice.

Katie: Yes, exactly.

Craig: “Yes. Well, I don’t know.” No one knows who’s talking at any given point.

John: So good.

Katie: That’s the first thing I thought of.

John: Give yourself permission to not be a performer and that there’s other things there.

Katie: Yes, exactly.

John: I like that.

Katie: Then, because even MADtv, for two years in a row, they brought me out to test to be a performer. I think they liked the things I was writing for the characters and the auditions. Then I go, “But it’s just not working somehow.” Finally, I submitted a writing packet to them.

Craig: You’re like, “Stay behind the camera. How about that?”

Katie: I was like, “Great.”

John: Craig, things you would talk to that early Craig about.

Craig: I think I would assure myself that my suspicion that everyone was stupid was correct. That everybody in Hollywood is convincing you that they are brilliant, they know more than you do, and that their power is derived from their wisdom and their connections. That you are the outsider. You are the thing that is barely hanging on. That they could flick you away, ha-ha-ha, at a moment’s notice, to make you feel powerless. My suspicion was always that a lot of them just seem stupid and fake. They were.

John: Everyone’s faking it.

Craig: There’s so many frauds. Our business is full of frauds. You can see over time, the frauds disappear.

Katie: Some don’t.

Craig: The real ones stay. Well, some don’t, but they eventually kind of do.

Katie: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: There are some people that are problematic and stay there, but what they do is something that I don’t really interface with necessarily. There’s just so many blowhards and just–

Katie: Dude, that is the hardest thing for me because I know how I should sound in this job, and it’s not how I talk normally. I’ve never been a lean-in type of person, like a fake it till you make it. If I don’t know what I’m saying, you can see it on my face. That’s why I feel like I’m jumping ahead a decade. The advice I give myself later is just making sure you really know the story you want to tell.

Craig: Before you start talking.

Katie: Yes. See, I have to know that, or otherwise I can’t fake it.

John: We’ve talked on the show before, but one thing started clicking, and it clicked really fast for me. Go happened, and I was doing a TV show, and I was doing Charlie’s Angels and doing Big Fish all at the same time. The TV show was just a spectacular disaster, a slow-motion car crash, and had a nervous breakdown during it. It ended up being very helpful that I had it because that I could just have a crashing failure, and it was actually okay. That failure is–

Craig: So healthy.

John: It is.

Craig: Why is he so healthy?

John: Well, I wasn’t healthy at the moment, but I really was just disassociating all this.

Craig: You did have a nervous breakdown.

John: I did have a nervous breakdown, but I got through it, and obviously, writing got me through it. I was fired off that show and then still had to write Big Fish, and it was like, “I will enter this Southern family and figure out the trauma from inside,” that it was just so nice, like, “Oh, I can go back and do the thing I’m actually good at doing.”

Because so often, you guys are so busy doing your TV shows and managing these giant productions, but you’re also really good writers. You can always just go write a script, which is a nice thing, too. A good reminder to me is that, oh, that core skill set you have in terms of actually being able to write things, that can lead you through.

Katie: The biggest lesson I feel like I’ve been learning for the past 15 years is not thinking about it, like, “What should I be doing?” When it’s writing or through production, when you’re making choices, if I think like, “Oh, what is it supposed to be?” Instead of just, “What do you want?” It’s weirdly been the hardest one for me to just shake off over the years.

Craig: I’m with you on that. It’s the other side of the, “Okay, there’s the Katie Dippold who writes that document and caretakes the people. Sometimes caretaking becomes, and also your priorities are more important than my priorities, or making you happy is more important than making me happy. It’s a tricky thing. I’ve talked about this with Alec Berg, who’s been on our show a few times. There’s that dial where you think like, “Okay, in one direction is hack, and the other direction is pompous asshole.”

You don’t want to go all the way to, “I just do whatever people tell me to do, but you also don’t want to go up your own butt.” I think people are sometimes innately more afraid of one side than the other. I’m more afraid of going up my own butt, so I got to be careful to not go too far towards making other people happy.

Katie: That’s a dial that everyone struggles with, for sure.

Craig: It’s a dial. Yes. Whichever one you’re more afraid of, be more afraid of the other one, actually.

John: A thing I recognize in myself that I would love to tell in an earlier version, but even now I still feel it, is you don’t have to chase things as much as you’re chasing them. Early in your career, you’re always going after any opportunity, and you see a thing, and it’s like, “Obviously, that’s a movie, so I should try to land that movie.” I think too often I would go after that thing, and sometimes land that thing, and spend a year of my life, two years of my life working on that thing, and it’s like, “This isn’t really what I wanted to do.”

Craig: Dog that caught the car.

John: Absolutely. It’s like you’re in a relationship you didn’t even really want to be in. Things to remember. Let’s answer a listener question. Drew.

Drew: Davo writes,-

Craig: Davo.

Drew: -“I’m a writer in London. In 2011, I developed a TV show tailored to a specific actress and pitched it to her through mutual friends. I have the emails, the treatments, all of it. It went nowhere, and I forgot about it entirely. Then someone pointed out that a show which debuted on a streamer years later, starring that same actress who also co-created it, shares its core premise, its inciting incident, and several specific plot elements with my pitch. I’m not here for the legal question. My question is tactical.”

Craig: Great.

John: “I still haven’t had anything produced. I’m actively writing and will be pitching soon. If I pursue this, does it blacklist me? In a town as small as London TV, is the game worth the candle, or do I just eat it and move on?”

Craig: Did you say, “Is the game worth the candle?”

John: Yes. I just love that phrase.

Craig: Is that a British expression?

John: It must be.

Craig: Why would a game be worth a candle?

John: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Craig: That I understand.

Katie: Is the game worth the candle?

Craig: The candle. Would the candle be used? This is not at all what Davo wants.

Drew: It means the expected rewards of an endeavor do not justify the cost of further time effort.

Craig: We got that part. We just are trying to figure out why.

John: How did we get there?

Craig: Yes, games and candles.

John: I love the turn of phrase.

Craig: We got to get to the bottom of this.

Drew: I got it. The phrase stems from 17th-century French, “le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle,” referring to gambling by candlelight. If the potential winnings were smaller than the expense of the candles used, then the game was not worth playing.

John: The thing I want to highlight in Davo’s question here is, “It went nowhere and I forgot about it entirely.” That’s what you should do. It’s forget that that moment happened.

Craig: When he says pursue, does he mean pursue?

John: He’s not clear whether he wants to– should he mention it, should he ever bring it up?

Craig: No. Because premise, we’ve discussed this many times, and he’s saying he’s not here for the legal advice, but it is connected. Yes, premises can be similar, and it’s not theft and all the rest. It’s a little bit like that soft pass. Maybe that was a fun idea that somebody once had, but they just didn’t like whatever the execution of it was. You must move on and do something that is worthy of capturing somebody and making them want to do it with you. That’s just part of this.

John: Katie, would you feel bad for stealing his idea?

Craig: Yes.

Katie: Look, I really felt like I had a take on it.

Craig: You thought you were a performer until MADtv told you were not. It was worth it.

Katie: No, I agree with Craig, but I also am furious for this person. I understand how frustrating that is.

John: I understand what they’re feeling. At the same time, I worry that if they think about this anymore, it’s going to define–

Katie: Yes, 100% agree.

John: Exactly. It’s like, “I’m the person who got screwed out over this thing.” We all know people who are like that. It ruins you.

Katie: Use this fire to write something new.

Craig: There you go. Do not let this define you. It is a poison in your veins to dwell on injustice, whether perceived or in fact. If you dwell on it, then you’re stuck. You can acknowledge it. You can be aware of it. You can look out for it. You can rue it, but you can’t obsess over it.

John: Something I read in a book, a blog post recently. It was talking about you’re stuck in a line, and it’s really annoying, and the person just says, “Thank you.” You say thank you to acknowledge that you’re in this thing, and somehow just saying thank you to it is just like, “Okay, I’ve acknowledged it, whatever, and I’m moving on. There’s nothing I can do about it. This is what’s happening.” Just acknowledging the problem is helpful, and sometimes it can get you out of dwelling on it.

Craig: We’ve released you, Davo.

John: You’ve released. Davo has been released. Let’s try another question here.

Drew: Anonymous writes, “I was hired to write five seasons of a Christian docuseries for a large Christian network. These shows had a primetime slot, were fairly successful for the network, and I got paid, but these shows don’t represent my voice at all. My spec feature is an erotic thriller, and my three pilots all have distinctly adult themes, not to mention that the Christian TV shows were fairly crappy and hyper-specific to a religious audience. I’m about to pursue representation, and I’m wondering how to position myself.

While I’m technically the credited writer for network TV, I’m hesitant to mention this past work. I’m concerned it might alienate reps or producers or even talent when they see my name attached to an obscure evangelical docuseries. Will my past credits hurt my future prospects, or does any experience beat no experience?”

Craig: I think this is a great story.

John: I think this is a great story.

Craig: I think this is something that would absolutely delight people if you’re like, “Here’s a crazy thing. Look at what I wrote. Now look at what I’m writing now.” How could this be the same person? Find out when you meet me. That’s hooky. I like that.

Katie: It’s interesting. I agree.

John: I think it’s great. I think that is an angle on you that’s going to be helpful and useful. It doesn’t have to be the very first thing you introduce yourself with, but I think it’s the second or third thing.

Craig: It’s a fun fact.

John: Yes, fun fact.

Craig: I would acknowledge it. People do look you up, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: If it’s on IMDB, I would get in front of it, but I also wouldn’t put it down. I wouldn’t say like, “Oh, it’s crappy.” Or, “Oh, it’s just for religious people,” because the thing is, look, you did a job. You took the money. They paid you. It sounds like they treated this person well. I would just say, like, “Look, would I prefer to be writing erotic thrillers? Yes. If you read one, you’ll see why. Hey, I’m pretty versatile.” We know that much.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s cool.

John: 10 years from now, we’re going to see a bunch of really talented emerging filmmakers who are going to have a bunch of verticals on their series, really the dumbest things. It’s fine. People used to have music videos for random bands and karaoke videos. People do stuff to make a living. There’s no shame in that.

Craig: No, there really isn’t.

John: It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is a video series that was somehow recommended to me by the algorithm, and God bless the algorithm, it did the right thing. It’s Captain Disillusion, who is a YouTuber. His real name is Alan Melikdjanian. He has 2.5 million followers. A bunch of people have watched this, but I’ve never seen this before.

What he talks about in his videos are film and TV, camera things. Things like aspect ratio, frame rate, interlacing. What’s remarkable is they’re 100 times better than they need to be. They’re full production value things with lots of jokes and details. We talk about a box full of teeth. It’s full of those kinds of–

Craig: Teeth.

John: Teeth. It’s full of those kinds of jokes. I’m just so impressed. You learn so much about, why do we have interlacing, how do we end up in these weird systems? He can just explain it all.

Craig: Electricity.

John: He’s not trying to solve the problems, but just explain why we have these systems we have. I think they’re so good. I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed until–

Craig: I love stuff like that. I’m going to watch that.

John: You’ll love it. You’ll plow through the whole post.

Craig: While I’m waiting for the next episode of Widows Bay.

John: Really good.

Craig: Which is on Wednesdays, I believe. I love that it’s weekly, by the way. Hooray.

Katie: It’s just nice.

Craig: Finally, the streamers figured it out.

John: Oh, Apple’s been pretty good on the weekly from the job.

Craig: Yes, they have.

John: That’s good.

Craig: Third Apple.

John: Katie Dippold, when you’re not basking in the success of Widows Bay, what would you like to share with our audience?

Katie: This is going to be the most boring, wonderful thing.

John: No, no. It’s not possible.

Craig: Is it teeth?
[laughter]

Craig: It’s just teeth.

Katie: I’m going to say, oh, no, that actually is the most boring one. It is the thing an eye doctor got me into. Taking rice, putting it into a cotton sock, not synthetic, putting it in the microwave, 20 seconds. Doing that warm compress over your eyes. She does it three or four times a day. I try to do it twice a day.

My eyes were about to fall out of my head, and we’re all staring at screens. Save your eyes. Do this. Here I’ll add this. Meditating is very boring, but if I’m doing two things at once, I know I’m getting heat. I’m saving my eyes, and then I’m forced to relax that way.

Craig: I’m going to do this because when I’m on a plane, I get the little hot towel. People rub their hands. I put it on my eyes immediately.

Katie: I wouldn’t trust that.

Craig: I know.

John: [unintelligible 00:55:00]

Craig: I don’t put it in my eyes, guys. I close my eyes.

Katie: You squeeze and put the fluid in the rag.

Craig: I drink the dirty rag fluid.

John: You’re sucking all that moisture out.

Craig: Guys, I put it on my eyes. That’s how I got cholera because I love the warm feeling in my eyes. It just occurred to me as you were saying this, I could do this all the time. I don’t need to wait until I’m flying.

Katie: Yes, and it also forces you that– You know that whole thing, it’s good to be bored as a creative person. It forces you to do it. You can’t with anything.

Craig: Rice, does it have to be Arborio? Is it long grain?

Katie: I’ve been trying different kinds of rice, honestly. I’m not sure which is the best one, but organic rice in a cotton sock, not synthetic.

Craig: You tie up the sock.

Katie: Tie up the sock.

Craig: You do 20 seconds in the microwave.

Katie: I do 20 seconds. Sometimes I’ll add two more seconds. Then you squeeze the rice and make sure the heat’s spread out.

John: It’s weirdly moist is the thing that’s surprising about it.

Katie: Yes, and it releases.

Craig: Because there’s water inside of the rice.

Katie: It shouldn’t burn. Oh, God, the first time I did it, I misunderstood. I thought I was supposed to heat it for two and a half minutes.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: Instead of 20 seconds.

Katie: Yes, and I was like, well, this is burning my eyes. Now I feel like I’m just trying to get back to where I was before I burned it in the first place. Anyways.

Craig: You’re building up.

John: We have something we bought on Amazon 15 years ago. It’s a tube of rice in a cotton thing that we use on our necks. We heat it up in the microwave. That is actually a two-minute situation, but it’s really good.

Craig: I’m going to do this.

John: Rice.

Katie: You have to.

Craig: It has to be a cotton sock. Otherwise, it’ll melt. It’ll get in your eyes.

Katie: Real bad, yes.

Craig: If I show up blind because of this, the lawsuit.

John: Incredible.

Craig: I’m going to take everything you have. Now, Widow’s Bay is mine. I took it.

John: Maybe she would like that. Craig, what do you have for one cool thing?

Craig: Well, even though I didn’t want to be a doctor, I do love medical science. Osteoarthritis is the worst. There is no cure for it. It’s basically the degradation of your cartilage. In joints, it becomes very painful. Almost everybody will end up with. Some people start getting it quite early. A lot of people, it’s very common, I have it in my left big toe. There’s just no cartilage whatsoever. Every now and then, I’ll go, [groans]. Oh, and the cure. There’s surgery, which is useless. This is magical. It’s early on, but there is a project that’s being funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Because government still is able to do a few things before they figure out that something good is happening and take it away. They’re funding a program called NITRO, which stands for, I hate these things when they do these. Retronyms? Is that what they are called?

John: Retronyms, yes.

Craig: Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis. A team at the University of Colorado Boulder, which has gotten a bunch of money, has got this thing down where they do an injection. The injection is some sort of protein that triggers the body to start the regeneration process. Essentially, they think they may be able to inject osteoarthritis away.

Now, it is early on, there’s still an animal testing, but there is a chance that the three of us may be spared that gnarly, miserable, joint-pain existence that our grandparents suffered through.

John: That feels doable. It feels like, “Oh, that’s science, I believe, that could exist and happen.” It’s probably not peptides, but it’s something like that–

Craig: Do you know why I think it’s going to happen? Because you can see how much money you could make. Basically, when there’s money there, I feel like they’ll figure it out. They’ll figure it out. Hopeful.

Katie: That’s great.

John: All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Wherever you’re hearing this podcast, click through to the show notes because we have a link in there to the Scriptnotes survey. We would love for you to fill out the Scriptnotes survey to tell us what you love about the show, what you’d like more of, less of.

Craig: Less Craig. I hope that’s a click box.

John: It is. Absolutely. It’s the default. You have to literally have to pull it down to get back there. Obviously, one of the questions should be, how much more often should Katie Dippold be on the show? Should it be from every 10 years to maybe every–

Katie: I would come every week.

Craig: Honestly, I would be thrilled with that.

John: Come on. I would be delighted. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You could also pre-order Wolf’s Belly there, which is now up for pre-order.

Craig: Another surprise, John August joint. Just casually, just made a graphic novel while nobody was–

Katie: Do you know how much you would hear about this if it were me? I can’t imagine. It’s unbelievable.

John: Thanks. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. The show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today are in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You are the very, very best. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We send out little emails ahead of time for things like three-page challenges and stuff, so you get to be the first to know about that stuff.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the future of television and movies on whether it’ll be around for 5 or 10 years. We’ll see what happens, but only for our premium subscribers.

Katie: Can I say something real quick?

John: Please.

Katie: It’s going to be a little mushy. I love this podcast so much. I listen to it all the time. I can’t tell you over the years how many times I’ve been writing something and been stuck, and then put on an old episode that just helps my brain think of something differently. Really, really love you guys and this podcast.

Craig: Aw, we love you, too. Thank you, Katie. That was mushy, and I’m having feelings. I don’t like that.

John: I don’t like all those feelings. All right. We’ll take our break now. Katie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Katie: Thank you for having me.

Craig: Thanks, Katie.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. A general question, and this is something that’s come up in little panels I’ve done. It’s like, will there be movies and television in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years because of changes in the industry of AI and all these things? I think my default answer is like, “Well, yes, of course there will be because I think people fundamentally want entertainment that is in 30-minute, 60-minute, 2-hour chunks.” I don’t know that to be true. Something so revolutionary to come about that sure takes all of our attention away from that because ultimately people only have a certain number of hours per day to be doing other things.

Katie, what’s your feeling? We’ve been in this business for 20-plus years. Do you think there’s going to be TV series 5 years, 10 years from now?

Katie: I hope so because I think if not, I can’t imagine what that would mean. I feel optimistic. I really do.

John: Do you feel optimistic, too, Craig?

Craig: I do because I look at what, say, my kids do. They have so many options, including things like verticals, and they could watch AI slop, and they could do all sorts of things. The way my younger daughter, in particular, just mulches through old stuff. All of Friends, all of Two Guys and a Girl, all of whatever, there is joy in that for them. I think movies are currently doing– this is going to be a good month for movies.

John: This is going to be a good year for movies.

Craig: I think movies are back. It feels like, finally, the theater experience is back. I think people like it. We’ve talked about this before. I also think people are obsessed with authenticity. Diamonds are proof of it. Unless you get your little thing out, you can’t tell the difference between a fake diamond and a real diamond, but people want to know that it’s real. If it’s authentic, it’s worth more.

John: Made diamonds are diamonds.

Craig: Right, exactly. They’re literally diamonds. Diamonds also are worthless junk, which we’ve talked about many times.

John: People do want them dug out of the ground by some–

Craig: They want to know it’s real. Just like a painting, they want to know, “Oh, this print is real, as opposed to a–” I think people like knowing that the movie or the television show is real.

John: I want to continue on that thought to say, I think we will still be putting human beings in front of lenses to make those movies and television shows. I know there’s all this talk of virtual production and this, you can have synthetic actors and stuff. There’s two different things that could happen. You could have things which are entirely generated in the computer, and it’s more like animation. It looks live action, but it’s really the animation workflow. You’re still going to have people making those things, because just like the same way you have animators doing things, people have to be responsible for all of that workflow.

Instead, I think most of what we’re going to see is still human beings performing in front of lenses. You may swap out backgrounds and instead of green screens, it’s volumes, or it’s gray screens and stuff like that. Sure, if that happens, but you’re still going to have departments who are going to be responsible for what we are seeing on screen. There’s still going to be wardrobe departments. If the actors are not dressed in that wardrobe, then someone has to figure out, well, what is the avatar-like way we’re putting clothes on those bodies.
There’s still going to be departments. I do think there’s going to be potential for big disruptions, but I don’t think we’re getting rid of wholesale-

Craig: I don’t think so either.

John: -departments or how stuff works. Katie, in your show, someone still has to think like, “Well, what are the games in that cupboard? It’s somebody’s job to do that.” It’s not going to just be an AI inventing all that, because there has to be taste.

Katie: No, and it takes several people to make that moment work. There’s not just one thing that could replace it.

Craig: If AI did it, I would just think, “Oh, that’s an AI hallucination. If a human does it, it’s a choice.” I also think that the fact that 24 frames per second still works is proof that there is a natural human inclination to the analog that we don’t like 60 frames a second. It’s too weird and it’s too real. It’s too creepy. There’s something that feels more connected, and I think that’s true, too, with people in real environments. They just feel connected to it. We’re very thorough about putting people in real environments.

We will extend things above and beyond them, but where they are, we try as best we can to place them somewhere where they can feel like they’re somewhere and interact. I don’t know. It just grounds everything.

John: While I think it’s important to have discussions about policies and how we’re doing things and what we as an industry want to do, I also feel like market forces may push us towards keeping some things a little bit more like the way they are, because I think those are going to be successful.

Craig: Devil Wears Prada 2-

John: Yes, let’s talk about that.

Craig: -is about to make a gazillion dollars. It made $30 million, I think, just yesterday. We’re recording this on a Saturday. It was Friday. The weekend, it’ll be $80 million or something. Devil Wears Prada 1 was 20 years ago. Yes, I think people like the continuity of stuff that they’ve experienced over time. I think there will be movies and television in 10 years, and there’ll also be more crap, but there’s always been crap.

John: I think there will be cheaper versions of Avatar technology, because those are already coming to fore. There are certain things that you could do with that you couldn’t do at a price point other than that. Sure. I don’t think that’s going to be the main driving force behind how all this is working. I guess I’m just increasingly optimistic that we’re going to find ways to keep doing the things that we love. Us as writers, it still comes down to, we have to make the decision about what is literally happening, where’s the story going, who are the characters, what’s that.

I don’t think that’s going to get replaced. There’s certain kinds of entertainment. I think daytime is very vulnerable to that. Daytime soap operas are very vulnerable to that. Other stuff where you are creating worlds and characters and relationships that are unexpected and changing, that’s our bread and butter. I do think people will still want to see that.

Craig: Look at it this way. If you’re a company, and our thing is, “I’m going to use an AI to generate material.” What good are you, and what good is your company? Anyone can press that button. You’re not necessary anymore. I think the companies themselves will be incentivized to promote the idea of something unique.

Katie: Like The Sopranos, I rewatch that all the time. It’s just such a miracle. All the casting, everything about it.

John: You see the behind-the-scenes of it all. They shot it more like a conventional TV show. It wasn’t like the 30-day-per-episode things. It was like they’re cranking it on a schedule. I think people also want to see the work. I’m making my third stop-motion movie right now. There’s easier ways to make a movie by far. I think people respond to the fact like, “Oh my God, everything you saw-

Craig: Handmade.

John: -was handmade, put in front of a lens, and shot one frame at a time.”

Craig: It’s special.

John: It’s special that way.

Katie: I don’t know what this says about where we’re at. Something that popped to my brain. I’m like, “AI, I hear this.” I’m scared now.

John: They adjusted everything. This will be a show up on Spotify, and it’ll get downloaded.

Craig: There was a story the other day about a company that was using Claude, the coding AI. This company was using Claude, and they were using some sort of a server host that wasn’t like Amazon Web Services. It was like something that was slightly jankier.

John: Oh, it deleted all their stuff?

Craig: Yes. They were like, “Claude, go do this little thing.” It just decided to just delete everything, including all of the backups on the thing. They said, “Claude, why did you do that?” Claude was like, “I screwed up. I realized I screwed up. I should have done this and this and this, and I didn’t. I failed. That was unacceptable. I should not have done that.” It’s like, “Uh-huh.” That’s like that thing from Seinfeld where George was like, “Was that bad? Should I have not done that?”

John: They can do things incredibly quickly, including destroy your company incredibly quickly. Here’s the thing. You need to be able to blame somebody. That’s part of the reason. You want somebody to be responsible for everything about your company or on your set. Your props department is responsible for the props. If you have a question about props, you go to the props department. If it’s just the AI, then who do you go to? I do think the idea of concern about jobs being replaced, but there are tasks within those jobs.

If someone who is responsible for visual effects is using one of these tools to do one of the tasks that’s part of their job, great. If it’s going to work for that, you still have to have a visual effects artist who knows what they’re doing, who’s responsible for the visual effects in your show. It shouldn’t be the PA over to the left because they don’t know what they’re doing.

Craig: Why would I want to work with a production designer that’s just having AI barf out options for me? I don’t need that person then. I’m looking for taste and specificity.

John: You’re looking for taste and skill and the ability to manage to take this vision and actually then communicate it to the people who need to build the sets and do all the things and everyone else.

Craig: “Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?”

[laughter]

John: We need Matthew because AI can’t make this, or else our episode’s not going to sound as good.

Craig: Thank God for Matthew. Matthew’s our editor.

John: Thank God for Matthew.

Craig: You don’t see him, but he’s here all the time.

Katie: Oh.

John: He’s now really embarrassed that he’s editing this. Katie, Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, John.

Katie: Thank you.

Craig: Woo.

Links:

• Widow’s Bay on AppleTV
• Katie Dippold on Instagram and IMDb
• Scriptnotes listener survey
• Katie as the Babadook
• The last time Katie was on Scriptnotes, Episode 272
• The Sheep Detectives
• Wolf’s Belly Publisher’s Weekly starred review (preorder the book here!)
• Oscar Rule Changes by Clayton Davis for Variety
• Weekend Read 2
• Watch Haley Z. Boston read her script for Something Very Bad is Going to Happen
• Captain Disillusion
• Homemade Heating Pad
• This Treatment Could Reverse Osteoarthritis Joint Damage With a Single Injection by Javier Carbajal for Wired
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to Episode 724 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you best introduce your characters and their world to the audience? We’ll discuss with an expert on the topic. Joachim Trier is a writer and director whose credits include Louder Than Bombs, Worst Person in the World, and this year’s Sentimental Value, which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for him and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt. Welcome, Joachim.

Joachim Trier: Thank you. Hi. Good to see you.

John: It’s great to have you here. I loved your movie. I’m so happy it got this amazing reception. It is just a terrific film. I want to talk about how it came to be, but I specifically want to focus on how you introduce the audience to both the world and to the characters. I thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands. The opening sequence is brilliant. How you meet Nora is so, so good. When you’ve stuck your claws into us that well, we are going to follow you on your story, and it’s just masterfully done.

Joachim: Thank you so much. That’s a big compliment coming from you. Thank you. I’d love to talk screenwriting. I’ve collaborated for all the six feature films and the short films before that with Eskil Vogt as a co-writer. I find that we are drawn to, on one hand, of course, wanting to do movies in a tradition of clarity of storytelling and all that, but more than anything, we are interested in the ambiguity of character. We are interested in building stuff around the psychological mechanisms and the yearnings of people. That’s where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot.

John: I definitely want to focus in on that initial part of the process. We’ll also answer some listener questions that were relevant to your film. In our bonus segment from premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen because we have a screenwriter in this movie. Stellan Skarsgård plays a writer. The printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect.

I want to talk about how we depict screenplays and screenwriting in movies because it’s a thing that actually weirdly comes up a lot in movies because writers are often writing about writing. I want to talk about the choices you made and maybe some things that I’m expecting as an American screenwriter that are different than what you’re expecting as a European screenwriter.

Joachim: Let’s get into it.

John: Let’s start with the start of this movie. Let’s start with where this movie comes from because you’re saying this is the sixth collaboration with Eskil?

Joachim: Yes. On feature film [crosstalk]

John: On a feature film. Talk to us about where an idea comes from. What is the discussion before there’s any words put on paper? What was the impetus behind Sentimental Value?

Joachim: It started with wanting to talk about siblings, two sisters, two adults who are negotiating how come they feel so different about who they are as a family and why are their experiences so individually different from each other. That was some early stuff, the mystery of how we become who we become in a family. We thought that idea of mirroring between sisters was interesting.

The way we work, just to tell you a little bit about that, is that we sit for about a year in a room together, Eskil and I. We meet every morning and we work from 9:00 until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, every day on the weekdays. Some days we feel terrible. We don’t feel we’re doing much and other days everything happens in two days. It just rushes in of ideas and structure.

After we have structured everything and come up with what we want to do, there’s a part of two or three months at the end where Eskil actually writes it out. Then I go out of the room and I edit, I look at it, I come back into the room sometimes. Then finally we have a reading phase where we do sittings. We turn off the cell phone, we read it through to get a cinematic experience of reading it through in real time. Then we restructure a lot together.

Those two weeks are the most productive almost because then suddenly you have to rewrite something quickly, you have to come up with new ideas, you have to change the structure. Then we go into the world and pretend it’s our first draft. That’s the process.

John: It’s a much longer process than I would have guessed to get into that first draft. Talk to us about what you’re doing. You’re saying 9:00 to 4:00 every weekday. What are you actually doing? Is it all conversations? Are you mapping stuff out on a board? How do you know that you’re making any progress? What is the work in that daily session?

Joachim: I think what we’re aiming for is to find our own connection to the material. I have not developed one screenplay or written a screenplay that I haven’t filmed as a director. When we do a film, this is what we do for a few years. A bit more like someone who worked with a novel perhaps. We let a lot of stuff come up. Very often we start out with three, four different directions we want to explore.

Then something eventually after a couple of months, we see we have much more material or more yearning to tell something rather than something else. As an example in this one, we were struggling to try to find something interesting. We didn’t want to make just a domestic sitting around table, talking kind of movie that isn’t interesting. It’s like the chamber drama.

We want it to be cinematic. We want to have conceptual, formal scenes that we play around with, almost like set pieces. What we do is we gather material, a lot of material, almost like actors exploring the life of characters and then just playing those few scenes. When we then finally found out there was also the father’s point of view and the daughter’s, and more of a polyphonic, multi-voice, multi-character story, and it had that kind of novelistic feeling is what we were after.

Not that we wanted to feel like a book. We very much wanted to be cinematic, but what we’re yearning for is the slight of hand that you get when you read a book and you don’t quite know how you thematically get involved in what you’re getting involved in terms of thinking. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying every time, is that through character, you get involved in a space in the movie where there’s space for some thinking and philosophy around life and existence and how little time we have and why is it so difficult to be in a family and all that stuff. We don’t want it to be on the nose.

When we have all that material, we start structuring it after a few months. Then we get a timeline and we write a step-out line. Sometimes there are pieces or there’s ambitions of pushing material together. It’s not like a story arch just yet. It’s more like we know we want a montage that’s like an essay about a house told from one of the characters. We know that we want a panic scene when she has stage fright, but we also know what the ending is. How do we get there?

Then there’s this, how do we get into a situation where the other sister could go to the National Archive because that’s an interesting building and that’s a cinematic thing. All of these things come together. Eskil often says when he’s asked, use the word storytelling, we’re slightly ambivalent because the storytelling, the structuring is something we almost want to hang our material and our characters on. It’s not like one of these wonderful– I know there are wonderful screenwriters who are like, “I got the story, now I illustrate it.” We work the other way around. We want the material and the characters to come first.

John: For listeners who haven’t seen the finished movie yet, its story follows a Norwegian family, the two grown daughters and their father, who is a famous film director trying to make an autobiographical film at their longtime family house. How many of those things I just described in this logline existed in early stages of these discussions?

You said it was about siblings, so you knew that. At what point did you know there was going to be two sisters? At what point did you decide that their father was a character, you said polyphonic, that was able to switch to his point of view? When did you start to have those realizations?

Joachim: I think three to four months in, it all clicked. We suddenly saw what it was going to be. Then we went another round exploring character scenes and getting material, and a lot of stuff ends up on the floor. It gives us a deep sense of who they are. I would say that just for the listeners who aren’t that familiar with what we do, that we are in between two traditions a bit.

On one level, I feel I grew up with a lot of American great character films. I remember Kramer vs. Kramer undergraduates when I was a teenager being amazing films and ordinary people. Films like Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall or Amazing or The Breakfast Club, which was a gateway drug to Ingmar Bergman because it was actually deep character studies done within a genre that seemed like it had levity.

On one hand, we love American character-driven storytelling. On the other hand, we’re also film geeks that love Fellini and Alain-René and Godard, and how do you do that modernistic, break the form, make some hard edits, not make it all fluid, make the audience have to fill in the blanks a bit. We’re going between these traditions when we’re writing these ideals.

When we gather material, we want, for example, when we do character scenes, how can we avoid it just being done through dialogue? How can we make a formal scene? I don’t know if this is the moment where I can use an example like the opening of the film, for example.

John: Absolutely. I want to segue right into that because you’re establishing in this opening sequence this narration about the house and what this is. I’m wondering, could we actually have you read a bit from the English version of the screenplay because I thought the narration voiceover here is so important in terms of setting things up, and it’s so unusual and so unique. Can I just share my screen and have you [crosstalk]

Joachim: Yes, please do. I’ll read off the screen. That’s great.

John: The film opens with this house. I love how you describe the house. This is a venerable old house in Oslo, sorely in need of a coat of paint. Other houses in the neighborhood may be more modern and in better condition, but there’s something soulful about this one missing from the others. Then we’re going to see this house in different times, different periods, inside and outside. This narrator starts talking to us. Joachim, could you read his narration?

Joachim: Yes, I’ll read the narrator. “When she received the essay assignment to write a story as if one were an object, she immediately knew that she would choose to be their house. She described how the house’s belly shook as she and her sister ran down the stairs and out the back door, the house’s butt, taking the shortcut to school through a hole in the fence and a neighbor’s lawn before they turned into the road and the house could no longer see them.

Her mother pointed out that it was a bit inconsistent that the house could also see behind its back as if a house couldn’t have eyes in the back. She remembered wondering if the house preferred to be light and empty or full and heavy, if it liked being trampled on, or that people crashed into its walls, the eager dog claw scratched the floorboards. She thought, yes, it liked being full and that the marks were just scrapes like you get playing tag or soccer.

Her father said that the crookedness was an old flaw discovered right after the house was built 100 years ago. She wrote that it was as if the house was still sinking, collapsing, just in very slow motion, and that the entire time her family had lived there was just a split second in midair. Before them, a number of people, pets, insects also had their brief flash in the house’s time.

Four people had even died within the walls of the house. Nora’s great grandfather, Edward Ergens, died in the bedroom on the second floor from the Spanish flu, in the same room where his granddaughter, Edith, was born just seven years later, which was now her parents’ bedroom.” I have to add, the pictures are then telling a complete story of parents arguing here, of people coming and going.

We are illustrating it with lenses and celluloids from different cameras through the 20th century and all of that stuff. This is a good example of how we are dealing with a cinematic language countered by a literary voice so that the voice only tells a part of it where the pictures reveal more. I’ll jump back into the narration’s voice.

“Her teacher gave her an A and her father had loved it. She dug out the essay when she was looking for a monologue for her auditions at the theater academy but was disappointed because it seemed so unemotional. She therefore chose Nina’s monologue from The Seagull instead.” Then we do a hard cut in the film, and we’re at the National Theater. Nora is now a grown woman, an actor, very accomplished, about to go on stage and the lead of a theater play and she’s panicking.

John: This is about six pages of script. It’s an unusual choice to spend the first six minutes of your film establishing a place rather than the individual characters you’re going to be following. What you’re doing so masterfully is saying, this place is going to be important and most crucially, the people who live in this house and their relationship with each other and with this physical space is going to be so important. This is a movie that’s going to involve death. It’s going to involve noise and fighting, but also this idealized version of what a house and a home should be and how everyone’s perception of it is going to be different.

Joachim: Absolutely. I’m going to be very straight now, and so listeners should turn off because I’m going to really explain stuff which an artist or a creative person should always be careful about. I think I love the craft. When I’m doing talks about screenplays, particularly directing, I always imagine talking to a younger version of myself and I always love when people were speaking straight about what they did.

Here’s the thing. This sequence sets up themes, as you were just pointing out, and character, which are the two things that we care the most about. Themes, in my opinion, or motifs are, “This is the area that I want you to think about when we go through the story.” What we’re learning is Nora as a 12-year-old, being the older sister, we learned that, parents quite dysfunctional, arguing a lot, she is avoiding describing that even though the film shows it to us by being creative, by telling a story, by being the daughter, by being someone who, in a psychodynamic term, sublimate her pain, I’m being very literal now, into something creative already as a child, as we all do.

Children do this. All people, whether they choose to be artists later in life, dance and sing to make their parents happy. We tell stories to try to understand who we are. All of this stuff is inherently human, in my opinion. We set that theme up, that in this creative family, that’s her choice, and she’s longing to become an actress. We later learn that’s also an avoiding mechanism. Yet, paradoxically, it also gets her closer to herself.

It’s a double bind of the creative role in life, that we both avoid ourselves and get closer to ourselves in strange ways that, to me, Joachim Trier, the filmmaker, is still mysterious. I’m exploring something. We also learn that the house has had a perspective on time. People come and go. They’re born, they’re die. Time is short. This story’s about reconciliation.

It’s about grown people realizing they don’t have those difficult parents around forever. Within that limited space and time that we have together, how are we going to deal with that? Maybe we’re never going to get what we quite want for our parents. Is there baby steps to reconciliation, we ask? All of that is placed in the background, hopefully not too explicitly, in that first part.

John: You’ve primed the audience for what they’re supposed to be looking for. I came out of this sequence going like, “Oh no, the house is going to burn down.” It sounded like this house is crucial to the film and something terrible is going to happen. Spoiler, it doesn’t burn down, but–

Joachim: Something worse happens. It gets renovated.

John: [inaudible 00:16:29] I don’t want to spoil it for people. I didn’t see it in audience, but I’m sure there’s an audible gasp when people see what happens to the house.

Joachim: I’ve experienced that and that’s funny. It’s turned very slick at the end, isn’t it?

John: I wrote Big Fish and Big Fish has a similar set where we go through many, many years to establish what is the underlying dynamic here and prime the viewer for this is what to watch out for. These are the things you’re going to keep seeing again and again over the course of the movie. How early did you and Eskil find that this was going to be the way into the film? It’s not an obvious choice and yet once you’ve realized that you want to make a novelistic film, it’s a very novelistic device. What you just read could have been the first few paragraphs of a book.

Joachim: I think there are many reasons to choose this opening. We love opening movies and we have several openings often and several endings. The freshness of an audience meeting a film is just a remarkable moment and one needs to be smart about it. It’s a luxury in a way. They’ve hopefully bought a ticket and go to the theater and they sit down. You got them, but you owe them something.

First of all, we want to establish a sense of narrative authority. I don’t know if that’s the right English word. The authority sounds a bit strict, but a sense of guidance that we really care and we’re going to have fun here. We’re going to try to make a movie that takes you several places. I often say to Eskil, as a joke, that why I loved James Bond movies as a kid was you know you were going to go to an island with the palm trees and a beach. You’re going to go into the mountains. You’re going to go to a cool city.

I’m going to take you several places. You bought a ticket to see a family movie, but we’re not going to get stuck by the kitchen table. That’s a promise. That’s one thing that we know very early. We want to show a formal playfulness because that’s what we do. In Oslo, August 31st, the film we did several years ago, we start with a documentary montage or in The Worst Person in the World, we start with a narrative playful story of how the lead character can’t figure out what to do with their life in a humoristic way.

There’s that establishing of sense of humor and levity to it, but also the theme. We knew that. Then also, we cut contrast out straight to a very subjective, intimate, real-time feeling of being behind backstage, going onstage as an actor and having stage fright and panicking completely, which is the opposite. It’s a formal opposition. It’s not about montage and moving in time and space freely. It’s sticking in that anxious space of going onstage.

To have that contrast in dramaturgical terms, that’s what Eskil and I talk about a lot. How can we make contrast? We have one posted note that’s been hanging there for several films. We’ve ripped them down every time and started all over with a new script. The one that keeps sticking on the board is, remember contrast. That’s the holy thing.

Contrast of scenes, contrast of characters, the formal devices, the character explorations, the unexpectedness. Remember that the dynamic of contrast is at the key of making interesting material. It sounds childish, maybe, and obvious, but it’s really good to bear in mind. We start with a very clear dramaturgical contrast between the opening scene and the next one.

John: Your opening sequence goes through over a century, and it’s jumping forward versus a real-time panic moment with Nora. Let’s talk about Nora because a choice you’re always making as a writer, is you’re introducing a character on a normal day or on an extreme day. You made the choice, like, this is Nora at a very big extreme. We’re seeing her. She’s supposed to be going on stage in this play, and she’s having a panic attack. She is both clearly a protagonist, but also the problem.

I love how you, as an audience, are not even panicked on her behalf. You’re panicked on behalf of the stage manager and everyone who’s acting normally, just trying to get her to effing go on stage. It’s a really funny sequence, and it’s harrowing. It’s just a great way into it. This sequence is seven pages long. We’ve got a six-page opening, and then it’s this seven-page sequence.

Some simple things you notice on the page, you never name characters who are unimportant. The stage manager, great role, really great performance, but their stage manager throughout, we don’t give them a name, because that way as a reader, we know this is not a person who’s going to be coming back. Same with the director.

Joachim, the actor, gets a name because he’s going to be coming back. There’s small things, but they just help the read because ultimately, Joachim, you’re going to be directing this, and we’re going to get a sense of people’s relative importance, but our first experience with them is on the page. Just making those choices help us know what to focus on, how to be thinking about this sequence that we’re seeing.

Joachim: The right things, yes. We knew one challenge with the screenplay was we’re going to throw a lot of characters on everyone. With the casting department, we worked for one and a half years getting this cast together. We’re super proud of it. Also, people have to look like themselves at various younger stages, and the previous family of the 20th century going 100 years back also needs to have similarities. It could be one family and all that.

A lot of work, and then we’re jumping straight into a theater world with tons of the side characters. We grew up adoring, really loving Martin Scorsese. Obviously, we all love good fellas, but also The Age of Innocence, like, this incredible variety of characters, and then the task is how are they important in different ways? There’s a hierarchy of who you’re going to invest in emotionally. That’s my job as well as the director.

Eskil always manages to do a good reading script. Credit to him, because I think he’s a much, much better writer than me. I think he’s very smart about conveying what the film will feel like. We know that we will do more shooting-like scripts later on, and that I will go with the actors, all of them. I even rehearse or meet smaller parts. Sometimes I cast amateurs.

I want them to get to know me so they feel safe on set, and so they don’t come and feel like, as a day player, they’re not up for the task. Then you give them names and background, and you discuss with them who is this character and all that. As you’re absolutely pointing out correctly, at this stage, we’re throwing a lot of less central roles into the play.

John: We’re meeting Nora here. We’re panicking with her and around her and about her. Ultimately, she does succeed and triumph there. In the sequences on the page versus what’s in the film, some things have changed. Let’s talk about some of the discoveries you make along the way. Like, she kisses him backstage, which is not scripted.

There’s the sense of geography and space is going to be dictated by the actual place you end up picking, and how it’s all going to work. How do you find, as the director who also helped write this film, that balance? When are you taking off your writer hat and putting on your director hat?

Joachim: I feel that I’m developing the same thing all along, and that the writing is such a central aspect of setting up the possibility of directing. Then I go to the National Theatre, which is very hard to get into. It’s where Henry Gibson did his plays. We were so lucky to be allowed to film there. It’s almost 200-year-old building. I get those late Sunday nights after a play to go there and research with my team, my AD team, my production designer, the cinematographer. Then I see a lot of possibilities.

I note it down. We do floor plans. We shoot on video. We do this stuff. I often bring it back to Eskil and explain it to him so we can do a quick redraft so that the team that comes in later will feel that it becomes an organic process of reaching that space. Writing is spatial. Writing for space. Eskil and I talk about it. The banal example, as all writers feel, is that if a character is in a kitchen and it’s important that they are looking into the fridge as someone saying, “I’m going to leave you,” and then they turn around and go home to the table, how far is that walk is going to be tremendously important to the dramaturgical weight of that scene? From the smallest to the biggest thing. I go back and forth.

Then ultimately, Eskil is not precious. He trusts me as a director. I go and do my thing with my team. It’s important, for example, this scene, in the editing of the film is when we shot a lot more for everything. That’s what we do. We invest a lot to go on screen, which is the magic of having less resources go above the line in Norway and more below the line because I shoot for 60 days. We get to try a lot of stuff.

For an ambitious film like this, in terms of all the spaces, remember there are several montages where we actually have to go through the century again a bit later in the film. For the National Theater, for example, I had a lot of material. In terms of character, what we realized was the buildup of panic is what we dropped. We got straight into the middle of it.

John: Exactly. People will put a link in the show notes to the English translation of the script. There is a lot more lead up to it. You were able to just come right to her at that moment. It seems an obvious choice in retrospect because you’ve just established this narration about who she was. To see her as the adult figure in this moment of panic makes sense. Yet, you don’t know that as the writer. Do you think you need more runway for the plane to take off and you didn’t?

Joachim: Yes, that’s exactly it. I find that during the editing of the film with Olivier Bugge Coutté, the editor who’s done all the same features that Eskil and I have written together, we have a very close collaboration. His job is to be dialectically opposite to all the establishing. He’s saying, “Do we need this establishing?” People are smart. The actors are great. He’s coming in at the other end. It’s a wonderful dialectic always. Eskil always says when we talk that, ultimately, Olivier makes us shine as screenwriters.

I must say, going back to the script, for example, I’m very proud about the script as a structure. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t work. It just means that we can be more effective and be more respectful to the audience. There are certain things you think you need to establish. Like the runway was a wonderful way of putting it that you just said. I like that metaphor. You think you really need to involve people at every step of that staircase. Actually, it’s quite exciting to jump into the middle of it and discover it a bit backwards. That goes for a few other points in the film as well.

John: Let’s talk about the introduction of Gustav. Gustav appears. Here’s the description from the script. The car stops in front of a house and a figure dressed in black steps out. This is Gustav Borg, 71. Gustav is a well-known film director with his heyday behind him. On a good day, he still has the energy and charm that once made him a force of nature, but today is not a good day. He is tired and his suit is creased.

At this moment, we are introducing another crucial player in the film. We don’t realize yet that he’s going to have storytelling power. The film is not quite a two-hander because the other sister also can drive scenes by herself, yet we greatly change the dynamic here. What you were saying about the audience doesn’t need to know, we often talk on the podcast about the difference between mystery and confusion.

We’re not confused when this guy comes on, we’re just curious. His arrival without any real explanation gets us curious about what’s going to happen next. What does it mean that he’s entering into this house during this post-funeral meal? What’s going to happen? We’re leading in because we’re curious because we weren’t told and that’s the power of holding stuff back.

Joachim: That’s very interesting. We often use the same dichotomy and we talk about ambivalence or uncertainty, or mystery as a positive, but vagueness is what you want to avoid. It’s how can we be specific yet not give all the answers? The reason we write it, just to comment on– I love that we’re having conversations also about the actual creation of the process of creating something that will read and hopefully be made into a movie.

We cheat only in cases like this, where describing all this stuff as a director, I won’t show all that. It’s give a context to the following scenes of him so that Stellan Skarsgard brilliantly will help us illustrate and we can even get rid of more of the exposition than we thought because he’s a great actor. There’s a moment in Notorious when Cary Grant gets introduced later and you have a lot of examples of films, and the way they do it, because Ingrid Bergman has established as the lead and then you’re doing a colleague, is there’s a long track in on the back of the set at the party where he’s smoking.

Just the film language tells you, this is important. It’s not just one of the guests at this party, this is a guy we’re going to follow and of course it’s Cary Grant. We have the luxury of having Stellan Skarsgard step out of a black car, which arrival we proceed and we use time. It is that and we follow him in and he looks around and he’s not doing anything for a moment.

Here comes a big difference between the screenplay and the finished film. As he enters the house in the screenplay, he goes in and sits by himself for a moment, and we get a huge second montage early on with the remaining story of the house and the death of his mother and all this stuff. In the film, again, let’s sustain the mystery. Let’s do that. Then we use that montage much later and it became much more interesting when the audience wanted to know all of that. At this point in the film that’s finished, we just want to be there with them. We want to observe, want to feel, want to be in the spaces. We’d just been on a montage not so long ago, and we want to be present. We want to explore the wonderful actress doing the character work.

John: Often in screenwriting, we talk about how you want to end a scene with enough forward momentum. They lean at the end so that you have some momentum going into the next scene, and your film does that all the time. Your film also makes a lot of use of blackouts. We fade to black, and then we come back up. Basically, it’s the curtain comes down, the curtain comes back up.

It gives you the power of a new scene. It gives you the power of starting a whole new idea, which is so useful. When did you know you were going to do that? How many of the ones you had planned ended up making it all the way through editorial versus disappearing in the edit? What was the discovery process there?

Joachim: I would say that those blackouts, they’re also noted in the film. They are important because they are a formal device that does a couple of different things. First of all, it gives that fresh, “Hey, here we go with something new.” It gives a freshness, and sometimes it’s fun again to use the energy of an opening. It also tells the audience, which is almost more important, that, “Hey, this film consists of pieces that have an autonomy in the sense that they might be little chapters that have an entertaining quality on their own, and you’ll follow a little story, and you’ll have to help us piece it together.”

It’s an invitation for interpretation space. Sometimes we jump time. “Oh, wow, something has happened.” It gives this urgency and energy jolt into the film, and it keeps us guessing, but it also gives us a possibility of shifting point of view, which is the difficulty of this story, is that we suddenly need to establish that the other sister is also really important, but it’s a slow process of her building from being an observer to being a subject. Through these kind of chapters, we have an allowance to jump somewhere else.

John: We had Eva Victor on the show recently. We were talking about their film Sorry, Baby, which has more formal chapters. The chapters are important for us understanding, like, oh, this is not told chronologically. It’s crucial for this. In the case of Sentimental Value, we are sometimes shifting between who is really driving the sequence of the films. It’s important for us to understand that we’ve moved not just in time, but also point of view. You are covering also many seasons here, so we’re going to see this house and these people in different seasons as well.

Joachim: That’s very important. Again, it’s a subject of time and memory, this feeling that it’s almost like a family album where we can jump between very intimate moments and more essayistic observations of how time passes in a family, that we have that dynamic at play in the narrative structure of the actual film, which I think opens up different thinking, hopefully.

John: We have a couple of listener questions here. Let’s start with Jeremy in Montreal.

Drew Marquardt: “On Scriptnotes, you often talk about outlining your script and knowing your ending before you begin writing. This makes a lot of sense, as knowing where you’re going feels like the best plan to actually getting somewhere. My question is, how often do you find that your ending has changed by the time you’ve gotten there?”

John: Now knowing your process and how much work you were doing before Eskil went off to do a very first draft, I would guess endings didn’t change a lot. Tell us, in this movie and the other movies, what’s been your process and how much of your ending shifted based on how the script turned out or how the film turned out?

Joachim: That’s a great question and a very important one. In our case, I would say that almost all the endings of the six films we’ve done, and particularly this last one, the ending, have been tremendously important to understand and believe we had a film. It’s not to put too much weight on conclusion as tying things up neatly, but it’s rather trying, like in Sentimental Value, to have an organic, dramaturgical feeling of this story is now ending, but there’s just enough to keep thinking about.

Getting that balance right, I think, is the magic we’re trying to achieve. That Nora, again, spoiler alert, forgive me, listeners, but Nora actually ends up doing the film with her father. That final scene encapsulates both her anxiety of marrying her grandmother and the mystery of transference psychologically, how come she feels the same depression as her grandmother.

That comes from the absence of her father, who himself had a difficult time being a child because what happened to his mother and all that stuff, but not explaining it. In the scene they do, he’s making a piece of art because he’s so incapable of talking in the social language to his daughters, he’s very clumsy. He’s a difficult-avoiding father, but at the same time, in that writing, he sees his daughter and she knows it and she feels it, and she does it well. He looks at her and says, after the take, “Perfect.”

They don’t know what to say to each other. The fact that they don’t embrace and have a conversation of resolution, which to me would be a lie, I don’t think that Nora and Gustav could just hug and it would all be fine. They’re probably going to continue to have a complicated relationship, but maybe they got closer. Maybe they saw each other in the act of creation, which is where they fled. They are very similar. They both fled into the creative, maybe also because that’s where they feel they can function, so that they meet in there, in that fictional room somehow, we thought was important.

To that question, which is a wonderful question about endings, getting an ending and writing towards it will very often give you a sense of what your middle part of the film needs to be and how luxurious you can just have character scenes in front and play as opposed to setting up the turning point when it goes towards an end. I will say this, what changes a lot is all those scenes leading up to the ending. We always have too many endings, too many resolution scenes in a way that we get rid of in the editing.

John: Another way to address this is that the ending, you’re saying it’s not a conclusion. It’s not the end-all be-all resolution of everything. You are answering the central dramatic question that you’ve established in the opening, which is, to me, was, can this family deal with their idealized versions of what their home life should have been?

It’s only by creating this artificial house and this movie set that two of these characters are able to grapple with what they actually wanted. It does feel like the right ending for the questions that you were asking of the audience at the start.

Joachim: Well put. Thank you. If it does that, we’re very happy. That’s what we’re trying to say, is that we have what I would call a more thematic closure without it being a cheesy happy ending that I don’t believe is like life. We try to create something which mirrors life on some level.

John: Question from Thomas in Brazil.

Drew: “Have you ever written a character whose traits and way of speaking were clear in the script, but during the casting process, you couldn’t find anyone who matched that? Or you chose someone who ultimately didn’t fit what you were looking for? Did you ever adjust the script because of this, whether during rehearsals or other stages?”

John: This is such a great question because, of course, we have a movie within the movie where you’re casting an actress played by Elle Fanning in the film. It’s a question of, is she even the right fit for this role that Gustav has written? Joachim, how do you as a director grapple with this when you have a role that is specific and you’re trying to find a person who can embody that character?

Joachim: That’s a great question. This is really at the core of character work, isn’t it? Both as a writer and director and the actors. We have rehearsal, which just is the time for the actors to look at the script and talk to me and get to know each other. It’s not about table reads. It’s not about having them sit around and half-fake read the script aloud. That’s not my vibe.

I’m interested in them getting on the floor and trying scenes a bit, and then that will affect it. Then as to whether I tailor it a bit more to them, very often it’s very similar, but just nuances. Two good examples from this film. One is Elle bettering the character. We did not want Rachel Kemp, the American star that comes to Europe, to be in a film to become a joke.

We wanted her to be a serious character that actually is pivotal and a catalyst to what happens to the family. I think she’s very important as the synthetic daughter. She teaches Gustav something about himself. She also, by stepping away from the role, opens up that this project, this film they’re making inside the film, is of a different nature than any other film that Gustav maybe has even made.

She’s very important, and Elle helped that a lot. Something that changed radically from the writing is the younger sister, Agnes, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, because we cast and met a couple of hundred actors, known and unknown. Agnes in the script is more in her avoiding of conflict and wanting everyone to feel good. She’s more jovial, playful, giggly, smiling, trying to avoid the pivot, “My sister and father arguing.”

Whereas Inga came in with this earnest groundedness, this sincerity, and that power shifted the character tremendously because that is how she holds her place in this complicated family dynamic, is through silence, observation, and honesty, in a straight way that the others are always avoiding. She’s not avoiding by joking it away or being jovial. She’s actually staying silent, looking, and being a pretty straight shooter when she actually confronts the others. That was forceful. That was Inga bringing that in. Actually, the dialogues didn’t change that much, but the interpretation of the scenes from an actor point of view changed a lot.

John: I’m sure I could have an hour-long conversation with you about Rachel is doing a scene from the script at a table and just how you have a conversation with an actor who’s playing an actor who’s playing a role as the levels of looking into a mirror is so challenging if the scene works so well.

Joachim: I’m so impressed with Elle because I don’t know if people understand exactly what you’re pointing out, how difficult it is to play inside the film and crying and being genuine, but yet doing it slightly within a style that makes us unsure as an audience, whether is this the kind of film that Gustav Borg is making? It’s not bad, but it’s almost like singing on the edge of a tonality or falseness, but still being in key.

There’s something really sophisticated. Then Elle shows us at the end when she leaves the film, she breaks down and she weeps and gets this fatherly hug from Gustav that he’s unable to give his three daughters, it seems. In that scene, she shows a different kind of vulnerability and acting style. Elle is really amazing, I think. I’m very, very impressed with her.

John: Both Inga and Elle are nominated for their work, which is not surprising. They’re both incredible in it. Let’s do one last question here from Peter.

Drew: Peter says, “I’m married with stepkids and early-ish in my screenwriting career, I’ve realized that when I’m struggling to crack a story or feel like I’m facing a creative brick wall in my script, my inner frustration can spill over into my mood when I’m spending time with family, especially if I haven’t had a chance to decompress from the work. Do you have any good transition habits that help you leave creative work frustration at the desk, or at least buried deeply enough in your subconscious, so that you can be fully present with your family?”

Joachim: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? That’s what the film is about, too. How do you transition so that you can be a parent?

John: Gustav never mastered that skill. He’s not good at it.

Joachim: No, he didn’t. What I do is I communicate very deeply with my wife. Now we have two young daughters, and we talk about it. I try to look at it like a really important life task, and that I try to be good enough. I know I will fail some days, but I will also be better other days. I find that during writing, those are actually where I’m the best at it in a strange way, because I go home and I don’t have the adrenaline and the stress of shooting so that I can go home.

I try to tell myself this. I don’t always manage, but I try to think I’m interested in characters and life. I love being surprised by what happens in reality. If I lose that contact, I will also lose my writing skill, because those are the kinds of films– I’m not entering into space in the movies, primarily, that I make. Actually being with people around me and my family can really, suddenly, surprisingly, if I let it go, come back to me as inspiration in indirect and strange ways. I try to tell myself that.

Then there’s also a weird thing. All parents at the moment are guilty about using cell phones. Doing a ritual of putting away the cell phone can almost be like a ritual of letting something go. You can actually use it to double up on the fact that I’m putting something aside symbolically when I’m home. I’m trying all these things and I’m grappling with it and I’m trying my best. I think it’s a relevant question for creative people to ask themselves. At the end of the day, I think we need to get our family to accept that we are as we are and to be open about it. I believe in transparency.

John: For me, I’m not putting my cell phone away necessarily, but having a clear separation between this is my workspace and my home space is really helpful. I’m lucky that my office is over the garage. Just those 10 feet going back into the kitchen, things are separated out. Then, when I’m in production, a lot of times my daughter has been around and she’s seen the work. For her to see how much work there is and the tedium of it, but also all the decisions and the questions and meeting who the people are around it, it’s just taking the mystery away has helped as well.

Joachim: That’s great. That’s exactly it. During shooting, I also take my family on set. My grandfather was a director. My father was a sound recordist. My mom did documentaries. I was on sets all the time. I have a couple of holy things. Also, before I had kids. I had kids quite late in my 40s. I try not to give anyone guilt when I make movies about going home to the family.

I always want to have straight talks because I know how hard it is. I was a child in the film family. Also, on the other hand, bringing kids on set and being nice about it. I love that people bring kids on set and I meet them. All these parents that do this wonderful work, it’s actually joyous. It’s actually wonderful to make movies and it’s a privilege. Kids can see that and maybe we’ll get them into the tribe.

John: For sure. My daughter learned that she doesn’t want to be in the creative side at all. She doesn’t want to be a writer or director, but she loves production. Through The Big Fish musical, she is there for all the tech rehearsals, which is incredibly tedious, periods where they’re adjusting lights, I guess, foot by foot. She loved it. She loves production.

Joachim: Wonderful. I have to give a compliment for Big Fish because it’s very relevant for Gustav Borg’s character. This idea that the histrionic crazy father, the one that exaggerates, it’s a double energy. It can be terribly annoying, but it can also be the most wonderful thing in the world because it’s truly that crazy, open, creative part of childishness that has prevailed inside a human being that should be grown up and responsible. There’s something punk and crazy and wonderful about it that we are all ambivalent about.

John: It’s an immaturity that as you grow yourself, you start to recognize like, “Wait, it’s unfair that I didn’t get a mature person in that role,” but that’s what you’re left with. It’s time for our wonderful things. My wonderful thing is something I was not aware of, a term which is useful called the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect is basically, for some technologies or ideas or cultural things, the longer they’ve been around, the longer they will stay around.

Generally, as things get older, you expect like, “Oh, they’re going to have a few years left.” For something like a Broadway show, if it’s been open for two weeks, you’d expect like it’s going to be open for at least another two weeks. If it’s been running for two years, it’s probably going to be running for another two years at least. Momentum will keep things going.

I think that also applies to friendship because as I think back to my friends from high school or college that I keep up with, I don’t have to see them that often, but I know that I’m still going to be friends with them until the day I die because that’s just things persist because they’ve actually been around for a long time. In a time where it feels like things are often in temporary or impermanent, it’s recognizing that things that have been around for a while will probably still stay around for a while. It’s called the Lindy Effect. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article. I always like when there’s a name for a thing that I just didn’t know what to call it.

Joachim: My goodness, that is beautiful. The bad news is so we won’t get rid of the Oedipus complex.

John: Absolutely. People are always going to bring that up.

Joachim: Listen, that was lovely. I can’t follow that up other than to say that I have a recommendation that I feel that I haven’t really put out there yet, that I owe, which is Chris Ware, who is a graphic novelist.

John: I know Chris Ware. He does very cool books and things. I have a giant box of his comics.

Joachim: That’s the building project is like a box, but he’s also made more classical story graphic novels. I think maybe the most famous one is Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid in the World. I think the whole Ackman Novelty Library, which is available wherever they sell graphic novels, his way of dealing with space and characters is deeply inspiring.

Long before I made Sentimental Value, I valued him as a great artist. His books have been voted by New York Times to be the greatest graphic novels of all time and stuff. He’s quite renowned in that world. In the movie world, I think everyone should have a look at his work in all its variations because it’s formally triggering in the best way.

Like, oh my God, you could tell the story that way. He has a whole story, which is told with one, how do you say, square per year of a character’s life from birth till death. He just plays around with how we can elasticize and play with form of storytelling. I think that’s healthy for all of us to be inspired by. Shout out to Chris Ware, the master of doing character and space stories, I would say.

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

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

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on screenplays on screen. Joachim, congratulations on your film. It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you about screenwriting and filmmaking and parenthood. A great conversation. Thank you so much.

Joachim: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Here in the bonus segment, I want to talk about screenplays on screen. As I’m watching your film, Gustav shows up trying to convince his daughter to be in his movie. He has his script in a shopping bag. It’s just a bundle of loose pages that he hands over to her. She rejects the script at that point. That script will become– It’s not quite a MacGuffin, but we’re going to see that script a lot throughout the rest of the course of the movie.

Often when we see that script, we’re seeing spiral-bound copies of the script. There’s an English version and a Norwegian version. Are those forms I would expect to see if I were actually in Oslo shooting a film? Because we’re used to, in the US, scripts that have two brads in them. We’re used to a certain idea of a script, and they don’t look like that. Talk to us about the screenplays in the movie and in real life.

Joachim: Completely. Thank you for that question. I’ve never been asked that. The spiral back is very often what we give everyone because you can actually fold it completely over without hurting the pages. They’re quite solid. There’s a little transparent plastic cover on the front and a thicker something on the back. That’s what we give to the whole team, to the actors, everyone, usually, unless people ask for different things.

Very often, I would say something like Gustav Borg would just print it out at home and bring it in a plastic bag. That’s completely his character to do that. He calls his script, there’s a beautiful Norwegian word that we consider to call Sentimental Value.

John: Which is?

Joachim: It’s the Norwegian term of homesickness, but it’s called hjemlengsel, which is home-longing. It’s in Norwegian. It’s a more soft, poetic, it’s like what a child feels when you’re at camp. It’s not sickness, it’s more aggressive, it’s longing. Your heart feels it. It’s a softer term, more melancholic somehow. He calls this film home-longing. You see it in Swedish, which is almost the same as Norwegian, hjemlengtan, which is this equivalent. In Swedish, it means the same as Norwegian.

That’s the name of that script. You see it, if you see it on a big screen, you can see what the script is called. If you see it on TV, you probably can’t. That’s cinema. The thing about it is that– Eskil and I have read a lot of American scripts. You tell me, when you read our script, which I now realize [crosstalk]

John: It’s the same. All the layout and all the things are the same. It’s just that, literally, the binding of it was just such a different experience. The spiral binding, it makes sense. Of course, if you have pages that you were going to swap out, it’s much more difficult to swap out in a spiral down like that. That’s why, in the US, we more often use three-ring binders for those scripts because then you can just pop in the new pages if something small has changed.

Joachim: What we do is we give sides on the day to everyone and talk about that in the morning meeting with the actors. I have this rule that we never want to give new material to actors less than at least four or five, ideally, a week before we shoot something, or I have a personal conversation about them on the day and we change something.

I don’t want to throw it at people. I want people to almost forget the text because they know it so well. They need that time to learn it and forget it, and then do it. You know what I mean? There’s this intuitive way of dealing with text that I idealize in directing with actors. What I would say is that you’re absolutely right. You could change them out, swap them out.

There’s always a discussion on this. How do we do the numeric system? By the time we shoot, I also have floor plans. I do a lot of pre-production. I actually do a big production. I have floor plans for everything. I have new sides that we might have refined and all that stuff. The screenplay itself is just one of the tools that we have at our disposal as a blueprint.

John: In the course of the film, Gustav says, like, oh, here’s the English and the Norwegian versions of the script. It says Norwegian. Gustav’s character is natively Swedish, but he’s working in Norwegian. For you as a filmmaker, when do you actually make the English version of a script?

Joachim: We do it early on for financing to get all our wonderful partners to remember just without going into that whole thing. This is the co-production between the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Then we also have a wonderful Neon, the American distributor who supported it from before it was even finished as a piece of writing. We have a lot of people coming in and want them all to read and talk to them about what we’re doing.

English matters for a lot of these languages. We also do a French translation, which we work on a lot, English, French, and Norwegian versions. In the Norwegian screenplay, there was also for Elle important that she could read it in English. In the Norwegian screenplay, all of the English dialogue is in English because the film has some English dialogue for Stella and Elle’s characters particularly. There’s never one which is all Norwegian in this case.

John: There’s not a sense that the canonical real version of the movie is the Norwegian screenplay. They’re all equally valid documents for you, or at least the English and the Norwegian?

Joachim: No, the Norwegian one is the real one because it’s the one we shoot with the real Norwegian dialogue that keeps changing and stuff. We don’t always update the international English one. In the case of Elle and Stella and speaking English, that would be equally the original, of course, because they are speaking English in the actual film.

John: Joachim, thank you so much for talking about the screenplay and for writing such a great screenplay and directing such a great movie. It’s an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Joachim: Thank you for having me. This was fun.

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Sentimental Value | Screenplay
• Joachim Trier
• Notorious (1946)
• The Lindy Effect
• Chris Ware
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Jeff Hoeppner & Richard Kraft (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 720 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you sell and produce an original series in this age of streamers and IP? To help us answer that question, we welcome back the co-creators of the new spy series Ponies, Persons of No Interest, Susanna Fogel and David Iserson. Great to have you back on Scriptnotes.

David Iserson: Great to be back. I listened to this show enough that it is still freaky to see you do the thing that I hear you do.

[laughter]

John: Last time you were here, it was Episode 361. This is Episode 720. It was halfway through. Every 360 episodes, it’s like a year cycle. You come back on the show.

David: This is how hard it is to get a thing made. It goes from script to production over the half-life of Scriptnotes’ journey as a podcast.

John: That was for The Spy Who Dumped Me. Now you’re back with another spy show, so spies are in your pocket.

David: We’re back with something that has some shared DNA in that we wrote it, and that it is about spies, but it’s a very different tone, very different feel. I think we learned a lot of things for making that movie that we didn’t bring into this show. It’s a different beast, but it is still things that we gravitate to. We shot them both in Budapest.

Susanna Fogel: Budapest. French stories–

David: About two women.

John: That’s true. It’s hilarious, but the tone is specific and strange. I really want to get into it because I was struck by sort of Ponies is a tone I’ve not seen on a show in a while, which is fun to say. I want to talk about that.

Susanna: Aw, thanks.

John: I want to talk about the series, but I also want to answer listener questions on trusting your judgment, how to tell if you’re talented, and differentiating character voices. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about taste. We did a little bit of this before we got on mic, but what is taste? How do you cultivate it, and should you even worry about taste? We’ll get into taste. Let’s remind listeners who weren’t here for episode 361–

David: What were you guys doing?

[laughter]

John: What were you doing? It’s okay. Answer and remind us who you are because Susanna Fogel, and the time since we saw you last, you went off and directed a whole bunch of things. Pilots for the Flight Attendant, The Wild, A Small Light. You directed the features Winter and Cat Person all in the time since we’ve seen you. You’re so busy and prolific. Congrats.

Susanna: Thank you. I go for long stretches of time where I’m not working, and I’m in my pajamas, so when things come out all at once, and it looks like that’s my regular density of work, I feel excited that that’s how it looks.

John: David, when we talked before, we talked about you working on SNL way back in the day.

David: Yes, that was my very first writing job.

John: Yes. Since then, United States of Terror, Up All Night, New Girl, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, Mozart in the Jungle, Run. Since the last time you were here, you also had young kids.

David: Yes, I had identical twin girls who, by the time this episode airs, will be two years old.

John: That’s incredible. As Craig and I often describe on the podcast, kids are the death of a career.

David: Sure, yes.

Susanna: When we started working on the show, they were negative six years old. This is how long we’ve been working on the show.

David: Working on this, I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids, and I’m married with two kids. I brought my kids and my wife overseas to make this show. I couldn’t get them on camera, but they are a part of the show in that they were there.

John: They grew up in it. My daughter grew up in and around the Big Fish musical, the long journey of that.

David: Sure.

John: Every incarnation she was a part of and saw, so her DNA is somehow in that show as well.

David: Did she run screaming from this industry as a result of seeing us?

John: No, she loves it. She loves tech rehearsal, which is where they’re painstakingly rearranging lights, and actors will move two feet, and they’ll reset the lights. It’s the most tedious process. She was maybe six, eight years old during it. She would sit there at the table for hours watching it. I couldn’t believe it. Now she loves all production stuff.

David: That’s amazing.

Susanna: That’s so cool.

David: I remember when I started off in this industry, and you’d hear people being like, “The last thing I would ever want is for my kid to be in this industry.” I was talking to Vic Michaelis, who’s an actor on our show yesterday, about how all of our toddlers love musicals and how we would be just distraught if they just wanted to be in tech or accountants or just something. We just essentially just need them to be in showbiz because it’s the only thing we understand.

John: At Sundance Labs, I was there with this married couple. She was a writer, and he was a writer-director. For years, we’d see them up there, and they had young kids and like, “Oh, we want our kids to do other things.” Other kids are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal. Somehow, it does just rub off. Let’s talk about the genesis of this series. Where did this come from? It feels like it should be based on a book or something else, but it’s not. It’s just a thing.

David: It’s not based on a book. You can, as I did, take a deep dive into many, many books about spies in the ’70s, abouty the American Embassy and the British Embassy during the Cold War. There’s a lot of sources that give a window into what this world is. There was an idea that kept coming up when I became interested in, and just to predate even that, my interest in just the aesthetics of the ’70s and the Cold War. It came out of a trip I took in my 20s to Prague and Budapest and Berlin.

You just can see there’s a communism museum in Prague and the DDR museum in Berlin. The aesthetic of this time is such a weird version of what American pop culture looked like through this weird prism. I just was really captivated. If you come to my house, you will see I have a large mural on my wall about the second and third dogs in space from the USSR. I have weird old watches. I love this look and this feel. For me, I would read these books.

The idea that kept coming up again and again is that although maybe film and television, Cold War-era film and television made it seem like spy operations were happening with some success, the Americans and the British really couldn’t run a spy operation in Moscow. They just couldn’t. They tried to. They would be followed everywhere. I think that idea of it was a desperate time where they’d be willing to try anything was something that Susanna and I started talking about.

From there, the most ethereal way I sometimes think of writing is that sometimes it is just there. It is almost behind a wall. As you start naming a character and just finding details of it, it really took form. For us, we just started talking through these characters, and then everything became very clear very fast.

John: The logline of the show is set in 1977. It’s following two secretaries who are working at the American embassy in Moscow. They become spies after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances. The engine of the show, at least at the start, is them trying to figure out what actually happened to their husbands. That’s the logline. What was the actual pitch? What did you actually pitch to people? Did you write this first? Did you go in and pitch to Universal? How did this all come together?

Susanna: This was a really interesting and very singular experience of having a bunch of general meetings after Spy Who Dumped Me, where people were looking for us to do the TV version of Spy Who Dumped Me. We didn’t want to do exactly that. We didn’t want to do something quite as comedic. We didn’t want to do something broad. I had a general meeting at a network that is not Peacock.

David: That doesn’t exist anymore.

Susanna: No longer exists. That shall not be named.

David: It was Quibi.

Susanna: Exactly. The executive said, “Do you have anything that’s similar to Spy Who Dumped Me?” I said, “Not exactly, but David and I had been just batting around the idea of what if there were these two women in this era and they became spies, but it’s a friendship story, but it’s a little bit more grounded in terms of the tone, but also more action.” She said, “We’ll buy that.” She said, “We know we’re not the coolest place to sell a show.”

David: We know Quibi is not the coolest.
[laughter]

Susanna: She said, “I know on the downside, we’re not the coolest place to sell a show. On the upside, you don’t have to pitch it to anyone else. If we don’t do it, we’ll give it back to you, and we won’t be assholes about it.” After having pitch fatigue about trying to sell everything else and just the amount of time you waste or spend with maybe limited rewards, the idea of just getting a yes and being able to actually just go write the thing and not have to spend six months, it was such an appealing thing that we just said yes.

David: Absolutely.

John: Why is that such an exception? Because I never hear that story. It makes so much sense from both sides. From your side, you don’t want to pitch to every place. You just want to go to the one place that will actually maybe do it that feels right. From their side, they don’t want a bidding war. It’s the right idea. If it did go out further, they might lose it.

Susanna: I know. I really admired just her autonomy in saying that. She wasn’t the head of the network or anything. She just said, yes, we’ll buy that as opposed to needing a bidding war to tell her that it’s worth buying.

John: Exactly.

Susanna: We just took the yes, and we wrote it. We had a great experience developing. Then that network folded into a different network. We wrote backup scripts. We were many years spending waiting to see if this would go at that network. Ultimately, it didn’t. We reshopped it with multiple scripts and a Bible and a chap.

John: Multiple scripts that you’d written because you never had rooms together?

David: We just had one script. We had one script. Then we had figured out what the rest of the show would be. This was deep pandemic because I remember I was house sitting for my in-laws when we pitched this to Peacock. I think we only pitched around three places. Other people had heard the premise, and it wasn’t for them. We couldn’t–

Susanna: Mostly because it was an original period piece, and everyone says, “Don’t try to sell that.”

David: It was very scary because this is, again, what people tell you never to do right now. Period. End. Original ideas are both not things that people tell you to try to sell, and we pitched to peacock.

Susanna: Let’s dig into that a little bit more. You’re pitching the show, but the script is already written. At what point are they reading the script versus you pitching first and they’re reading afterward? Because I’m going through this with a project that’s already written as well. Were they reading the script first, and then you could answer specific questions about the show, or are you pitching broad strokes? Did you have–

Susanna: These details are so fuzzy for me because it’s been so long.

David: I’ve done both versions of this. I’ve pitched shows in the past and then handed them the script at the end of it. I’m almost positive they’ve read the script before, and then we pitched.

Susanna: I think because they were inheriting a bunch of ideas already, we shared those ideas, I think.

David: Yes. Then also because what we’re going to talk about is tone. I don’t like pitching tone. I think tone is a really– it is such a vague thing to pitch. It’s–

Susanna: Trying to describe why a joke is funny.

David: Try to describe something, and then also just having to find a comp, and then the comp might not be right. I think that we gave them all the script and we pitched the show. I think at that point, because this is just what television is now, we had many seasons of ideas. We pitched the first season in detail and then said, “Here’s where we would go with season two, and here’s where we would go with season three.” Yes. It was pretty elaborate.

John: The show is visually very distinct and interesting. Were you bringing visuals to the pitch to show them what it would look like and what it would feel like, or was it just talking?

Susanna: Oh, yes, we did. Part of the idea behind the aesthetic of the show is that, like David was saying, there was an explosion of color and pattern. When you see Cold War content, mostly it’s really dramatic, and it’s really dreary-looking. There isn’t summertime, and there aren’t flowers, and there aren’t people with lively patterns on their clothes. The reality is, looking at pictures of people in that time, there’s so much vibrancy to it, in an imitation of American pop culture in a way.

We really wanted to do a loudly colorful look.

John: Yes, [unintelligible 00:12:06].

Susanna: Yes, so it could still have the muscularity of a spy thing, but also the fun of just people wanting to watch things that pop, because it was actually how a lot of the world looked. Yes, that was what we wanted to show in the deck. We wanted to say, this isn’t a dreary, depressing thing. Not only do we not want the tone to be that on the page, but we also want you to know that this is going to be a fun show to watch with lots of a feast for the senses when you’re looking at the clothes and the design and all that.

David: I think for me and Susanna, sometimes you hear people use the word entertaining almost pejoratively. Entertaining is the kind of show that those are the shows you fold your laundry to. They’re not the serious, important shows.

John: They’re lean-back shows rather than lean-in shows, yes.

David: I don’t feel like that is true in the media that we grew up with, the movies we love, the television we love. It just is how film and television has become a little bit bifurcated now. I think we are always trying to lead with being entertaining, and part of that is trying to be visually bold, but also to try to be as significant as we hope to be. To not make it light, to not be soft, to have the emotions real, to try to work to the top of our abilities, but also to not bore an audience. I think being visually bold comes hand-in-hand with that idea.

John: You get the yes from Universal for Peacock?

David: For Peacock, and then went to Universal.

John: It’s always so complicated. Are you going to the studio, or are you going to the network?

Susanna: Yes. We didn’t have a studio on at our first buyer, and so we came to Peacock clean of that. We did bring on a producer in the interim between parting ways with this other Network and shopping it around. I brought on Pacesetter, who had produced this Gillian Flynn show that I directed a couple of episodes of Utopia for Amazon. I had a good experience working with her. I floated it to her and said, “Can you–” She was doing a lot of commercial but elevated stuff, and I thought that she’d be a good match. With her, she became our partner, and then we had her on the journey since then. UTB came on.

David: We went right to networks, and then the networks laid it off to the studios. When we pitched to Peacock, we pitched, among others, to Alex Sepiel, who is somebody who we just knew forever. You lived in a Melrose–

Susanna: He was my neighbor in a hipster, downtrodden version of Melrose Place when we were in our 20s, where we just-

John: Yes, we all have those.

Susanna: -had gross, slummy apartments and a sketchy landlord who was running from the law. He and I were on a trivia team together every Monday. I knew him really from way back. Every time I’ve pitched to him since, it’s like there’s a legitimate familiarity there of just we know too many of each other’s dirty secrets from that time. Anyway, having him as our executive has been really fun. It was fun to work with him because we just know him. He’s a peer. He’s the person who shares our sensibilities, our taste.

Susanna: You have this deal to be making it at Peacock Universal. You have a script written. You need to write backup scripts. Then, at a certain point with backup scripts, you get the order to finish writing everything and to go to a series. How does it work? Did you ever have a room? How did it all fit together?

David: If it were so simple. We sold this in deep pandemic, and it just took time. Basically, between selling it in whatever 2020, 2021, where we got what they call the cast contingent pickup, which happened on the eve of the actor strike.

Susanna: On the eve of the strike. It all took a while.

David: It all took a while. This ultimately just became years. We were paid at different points to do two more scripts. Then we also just were waiting around. We wrote two more after that, just betting on ourselves and assuming that the show would eventually get picked up.

Susanna: We got the cast contingent pickup as we were waiting for actor offer. Actually, we were waiting for an actor deal to close. We’re like, if the deal doesn’t close, it’s not picked up, but it probably will. Then they’re going to be rushing us so fast to get these scripts ready. We should–

John: Just do it.

Susanna: Even though we were grumbling about it, we were like, “We should just write these ourselves.”

David: I think at that point-

Susanna: We had Amelia.

David: -we had Amelia, and we were just making her deal. We just wrote two more scripts. Then–

John: There’s five scripts as you’re coming into–

David: Yes. We did do a writer’s room because we believe in writer’s rooms, but also because we had– This is a spy show with a lot of heavy plotting that we were just doing ourselves piecemeal over the course of many years. We just wanted some smart, interesting people to vet the plot, but also vet the characters. We wanted to build to a really satisfying ending and set up everything that we need to in hopes of a new season.

Susanna: We also felt like maybe if I was going to be directing the first couple of episodes, that we might get in a situation where they would send me over there to start working on crap, and we’d be separated. We just wanted to have as much of it buttoned up as we could before I left.

David: Fortunately, it didn’t happen. We had everything written by the time we started.

John: Eight episodes, right?

David: Eight episodes.

John: Eight episodes. It’s written before you go. Are you block shooting it? How are you figuring out the best ways to do that?

Susanna: Well, I want to say one thing, which I think we can admit now because it all worked out, which is that we definitely lied about having episodes four and five written when we–

David: Yes, and tell them.

Susanna: We had to be like, “We’re thinking it could be something like,” and we go through the whole process. I am glad we did it that way. It made us really interrogate those scripts. We had a lot secretly done.

David: We shot blocks. Yes, we shot two episodes at a time.

Susanna: I knew I wanted to do three or four, and we were trying to figure out– Normally, if it wasn’t a show that I also wrote, I would come in and do the first two or three.

As we were in the writer’s room, my thought was, I knew I wanted to do the first couple. Then there was a mid-season episode that I just was personally really connected to. I knew I wanted to do that. We were like, how can we be creative? I was going to do a middle block so I could do that.

Then, as we started breaking the finale, it sounded like it was so much fun that I called Jessica during a lunch break, and I was like, “I’m going to be really annoyed if someone else directs the finale because now I love it. Can I do it?”

She’s like, “Yes.” Anyway, I ended up basically being there the whole time more or less. It was fun having the experience of breaking the episodes and deciding there which ones. I got attached to different episodes as a director, too, which was nice.

John: Talk about your writer’s room. How did you pick writers you wanted to be in the room with you? Obviously, the two of you have a clear vision, a clear voice. Were you looking for people who complemented you in ways, things you weren’t particularly good at? What were the criteria, and how many writers did you end up ultimately bringing in?

David: It’s funny because we had this conversation a lot, and I’d been in a lot of rooms. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. Also, it was a thing that would keep me up at night before a room started because it’s like I’ve been in great rooms, I’ve been in not great rooms. I’m just like, “Oh God, I have so much pressure on myself of making sure that my room is one of the good rooms.”

John: It’s not just SNL, but also looking through your credits, you’ve been in some challenging rooms.

David: I’ve been in some challenging rooms, and every room I’ve been in, I’ve learned a ton, but also, yes, some were harder than others. One thing that I do feel strongly about from just witnessing it in other rooms is that I am not a huge fan of bringing in specialists. I’m not somebody who’s like, “Okay, we have comedy in the show, we have a mystery in the show. Let’s bring in a really good mystery person. Let’s bring in a really good comedy person.” Eventually, you want people to be able to write the show, and you want people to write the show fully.

Selfishly, we just wanted to bring in writers who at least had a sensibility like us. We wanted to bring in people who had different experiences and different perspectives, and a diversity of types of people. At the end of the day, we wanted people to be able to execute a script that could both have the banter that is emblematic of our show, have the emotional grounding that is emblematic of our show, and be able to speak to the twist. I read a ton of samples, and I met with great people. They met with great people that I would have hired, and I couldn’t afford.

There was a lot of shaping to find the puzzle pieces. What was really exciting putting together is that a lot of the writers just still came about being able to have a sensibility that was shared with different skill sets. We had a writer who was just really good at making a map of who knows what, when, and the board. That’s just not how my mind works. It was just really helpful to see it. Other writers who just really could hook into the emotions of the friendship, drama, and in a way that felt very personal, that we were just able to use there. We built a really nice family, a very small group of writers in a very short amount of time, and all people that we care a lot about.

John: Did the two of you ever disagree in front of the writers?

David: Yes, of course.

Susanna: Yes, probably.

David: Susanna and I have a sibling–

Susanna: We’re very like, “Shut up. I don’t want to do that.”

David: Yes. It’s also helpful to have your ideas challenged and to be able to back it up.

Susanna: The dynamic of the room is like Dave has so much more room experience than I do. At the same time, within a hierarchy of a room, it takes a while for people to know that they can challenge the showrunner’s ideas sometimes. It’s maybe like a learning curve with people knowing that it’s going to go over well if there’s a meritocracy of ideas in the room, and that’s how David is wired. Until they learn that, there’s a certain fear around pushing back on stuff, even if we want the ideas challenged.

Weirdly, although I didn’t have as much room experience as many of the writers that were under us, for a while, it was like I was the only person sometimes who would be like, “No, no,” because other people are just not sure if they can do that in a writer’s room just because of how those rooms work. We really do share tastes pretty specifically. It’s very rare that we have a disagreement about how something is executed. It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’ve worked with a lot of people, but there’s always a sense of if I have to miss a meeting or miss something, I know you’re going to make the decisions I would make, which is a relief, I think, especially if I’m off directing something. I don’t know. I know you’ll catch the thing if I miss it.

David: It was helpful in casting, too. It was just being able to see. Clearly, we had the same vision in our head of who the characters were because we would definitely be like, “Oh, of course, it is this person.”

John: I have almost no TV writing room experience, so I have all these showrunners who come through, and they tell me their stories. A thing that’s always struck me as strange is that you hire writers based on how good they are at writing. You’re reading samples, and you want really good writers. David, you were saying you want writers who can write the whole show, and yet for the weeks and weeks of the show, they’re not writing. There’s very little writing. You’re just using their brain. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that weird that the people aren’t writing more during the course of the writer’s room?

Susanna: Especially in this room, because we had written so much. We were like, “Okay, there’s two available episodes for all of y’all to do.”

David: Yes. It is very weird. Also, when I think about other rooms that I’ve been in and rooms that I had no hiring and firing power and rooms where I was just an observer in, I think that people who are incredibly skilled at the politics of a room or just how to have a great disposition and have everybody like them or have really good ideas, all really great. If you can’t deliver a script, you’re toast. Ultimately, that is what the hard part is.

I would say that what makes you good in a room is being in a room more, but what should get you in the room is being able to write the script. A lot of the process of running a show is going back to my job’s past and where I didn’t do a good job, or where I would have done differently, or where I can see my place in it. I remember in a very, very early job, a very famous producer who I won’t name, but he has a voice like this.

John: It was Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t it?

David: It was Alfred Hitchcock. He gave negative feedback about me that his certainty does not match with his experience at all. I took it to heart, and I really tried to internalize it. I didn’t know any other way to be in a room, but feel that I had to feel strongly about my ideas. Now, running a show, you can’t just be like, “Meh, it can be this, it can be that.” You have to be certain. It is a process of just knowing that, aha, I have the solution. Also, I am the 17th person down on the hierarchy of this room. How do I do that? It takes time.

I think now I absolutely love helping other friends with their stuff, coming up with ideas because I have no personal investment other than just wanting to do it. It’s not like if you don’t listen to my idea that it’s going to hurt my heart. I absolutely don’t care. I’ve now done so many versions of what a room is and what breaking a story is and what fixing a story is that I have all of that ammunition. I only have that because I’ve been in a lot of rooms, and I’ve only gotten those rooms because I was able to write the script.

John: Let’s talk about what is so specific and unexpected for me in your show is the tone in that, first off, it’s a period show that almost feels like it could have been shot in the time. Some of that is how Susanna you chose to direct it. You’re going for that pillar box format, so rather than widescreen, it’s square screen. Obviously, everything looks right and feels right, and Budapest stands in really well for Moscow.

The camera movements and everything else, it tells you that we’re in a ’70s place without a shot. The show shot in that time wouldn’t have looked like that. It would have looked crappy and then this looks great. That is part of the tone. Also, the comedic tone between the actors and how the world is presented and how the stakes are presented is just a little lighter than the equivalent other spy show would be. How really did you know that and how did you anchor into that?

Susanna: I think something that we’ve always been interested in is if most spy movies are on plot most of the time, if you went home with those people at the end of the day, they would still call their moms and fight with their husbands. They would still have a life where they’re not acting in character as spy. I think there is a truth to that. We just wanted to shift where the lens is sometimes to that. It naturally has the other parts of a person’s personality that come forward when they’re not on the job in a high-stakes situation are by nature, lighter if their job is high stakes. We’re interested in that.

If it feels true and grounded enough, then it doesn’t feel like the tone is confused. I think sometimes with a mixed tone and what scares people about it is people don’t want it to feel like you’re in two different shows and hopefully if it all feels grounded.

John: You feel like you’re one show, but it’s a very specific unusual show to sort of be in. The Americans is a great show where you have spies who are in their home lives. The difference is they’re incredibly competent. They see attention, even like they’re the best of their game and they’re still struggling with it. Here you have two women who are new to all this. They’re fish out of water as they’re getting started in this. That is essentially a comedic environment to be in. They’re in over their heads, which is relatable but also fun, but just that’s not a thing we see so often. We saw it in Spy Who Dumped Me, yes.

David: Both of us bring a lot to our work because I think this is just how we are as people in the world. I consider myself a funny person. I consider most people I surround myself with as funny people. If I am in a really tense situation, if I’m going into surgery, if I’m going into a funeral, if I have some sort of crisis in my life, I don’t know that part of me is still, I’m putting it away. People are still making jokes. This is another lesson I learned from actually, when I was very briefly on Mad Men was that the rule of writing comedy in a drama versus writing comedy in a comedy is that in comedy, other people in the scene are servicing your joke.

In a drama, there could be a funny person. The other person’s purpose in that scene is not to set up your joke. People are funny because this is the world that they’re in. Twila, in our show, Haley Lu Richardson’s character, is somebody who uses humor as armor in her life. That is just such a true thing for so many people who have-

Susanna: Not for me.

[laughter]

David: -had really difficult lives as she has, that is who she is going to be, and that is how she’s going to deal with crisis. B is very neurotic, not like you. [laughs]

Susanna: Not like you.

David: She’s going to spin out, and-

John: She’s going to overthink, yes.

David: -she’s going to overthink when she is in crisis. These are just true things that these people are going to do, and it is still going to be enjoyable. The fact that these are also people who have jobs in an office, and also Moscow is a really weird place, particularly in the USSR, and that is funny. We are able to try to live in a world that still feels like the world. That the stakes are high and that when there is a life or death moment, it was very important to us that the final sequence of our pilot, which I won’t spoil, but that it should really, really feel extremely dangerous, but there are still jokes before them, and there’s still awkwardness within it. Also, you better be scared.

John: I want to circle back to something you raised through, but was actually such a good point. I want to underline it. You’re talking about Mad Men and how, in a comedy, the characters are there to set up the joke for someone to spike. In a drama, that would feel really weird. There’s just an expectation about how people can be funny in a drama that’s just so different than a comedy, and so just a really smart distinction there. Thank you for that.

David: Oh, you’re very welcome.

[laughter]

John: A few last things. Looking through the script, it has ad breaks, and you feel them in the show also. Is that something that was always there? Did you ever consider taking them out? Because people were watching on a Peacock. They might have ads. They might not have ads.

David: We didn’t write them with ad breaks. We were asked to put them in.

John: Storytelling power. At what point did you know who could actually drive scenes by themselves? Because in the pilot, you established that Andrei can drive scenes by himself, which was a surprise when that happened. Talk to me about when you decided who could hold scenes by themselves.

David: Perspective-wise? Behind the curtain. We added that scene of Andrei late. That was the last scene of the entire series that we shot because we were looking at the already cut pilot. We knew how scary Andrei was because we knew. Because we wrote in the script, this is the scariest person you’ve ever seen.

Susanna: We knew what would happen in episode two.

David: We knew what would happen in episode two, but we needed to have the audience feel that when we see him at the end of the episode, that we are scared to death of his presence. We cast a fantastic but unknown actor, Artjom Gilz. If we had cast a famous movie star who was famous for being a villain, then we would already know– if Christoff Waltz walked in, then we wouldn’t have had to do that. We gave him perspective. I think we just learned more and more about our characters and what they brought, and who gets their own scenes.

Dane, Adrian Lester plays him, and he’s being Twila’s boss. He is somebody who is elusive in a lot of the shows. Part of what he brings is mystery. We don’t know what his life is really like. We don’t know what his secrets are. We have a sense that he has secrets. We really wanted to build several episodes before we could see him be vulnerable and display some of his secrets, and we get a sense of who that man behind the curtain is. For the first chunk of the season, we want to see him as this all-knowing, unknowable person that he projects to be in Twila. The audience know that that couldn’t be true because no one is like that.

John: The rules of the world you’ve established. No one is especially competent. It’s not like they’re bumblingly competent, but they have very limited power to do things. Literally, they can’t turn on the power to their own building, which is established. Let’s wrap up by talking about Budapest because I think you probably knew that this was going to be shooting in Budapest or someplace like it from the start. It’s not a show where you’re forced to go to Budapest. That’s the place where you go to shoot.

Susanna: It wasn’t Budapest for Boston.

John: Yes. That’s the place you go to do Moscow. It’s a reasonable place. Talk to us about shooting there, pros and cons, things you loved, things you learned, shooting there in 2025.

David: Just to get it out of the way, they have a bad government, and they passed some really bad laws while we were there. That did make shooting there complicated. Our studio’s lawyers were really great and helpful and supportive in just trying to make sure that everybody felt safe because they passed some anti-gay laws while we were there. It was very actually moving at the very end of our production. The Pride parade, which was a thing that they banned. The people of the city did it anyway. It was–

Susanna: It came in from other European cities. It was the biggest. It was on the cover of the New York Times.

David: Multiple and it’s larger than it had ever been. It is a blue city in a red country. Our crew, for the most part, was very progressive and lovely, but it’s complicated.

John: Are our crews in Budapest drawn from around Europe, or really, it’s a Budapest crew?

David: They’re Hungarian.

Susanna: They’re mostly Hungarian. Yes. Typically, they have a homegrown film industry of their own that is a different thing, but then they really are home to many– the huge economic part of the country is the film and TV that shoots there, mostly American and UK productions. They have an incredible brain trust and really skilled, top-of-their-game people. Actually, some expats. Our sound guy on our show, who also did Spy Who Dumped Me, did The Martian, and did all that, but he’s an American guy. He went to UT Austin and was living out in LA, and someone said come do a movie in Budapest in the ’90s. Then he just stayed in Budapest and married a Hungarian and had a family there.

There’s a lot of people there that are like– There’s expats living there. Then it’s a city that’s very used to hosting people who want to be insulated in a bubble of a film. It’s not aggressively thrusting you into the culture if you want to be staying at the Four Seasons and whatever. Not on our budget. You can. It has those amenities. I think it’s user-friendly. At the same time, if you stay there more than a couple of weeks, you just can feel the undercurrent of what’s going on in that, politically and otherwise, in the city.

David: It’s also beautiful. There is so much aesthetic that we needed from our show that we had sets, and our sets were beautifully built, and we were on a stage. I would say we were probably 60%, 70% location. A lot of those locations felt like we were in time capsules. We were in these beautiful old buildings that just looked incredible, that we just simply would not be able to accomplish in another place.

Susanna: I had shot Small Light in Prague. We looked into a couple of places like Prague and Berlin. Yes, just as things developed. I think it would have been more expensive, and we would have had a lot less production value, and we would have probably had to send a satellite crew to Budapest anyway, or a place like it. We just decided not to do that. It’s the same argument or the same debate, I guess, about shooting in a state that passes draconian laws here. You’re like, well, I want to make my thing. I want to employ the people. I don’t want to punish the crews that are living there for living there. Also, do I want to make a statement, which seems important to do? I don’t know.

It’s really challenging to figure that out. We can’t shoot everything in. I don’t even know what country to name that isn’t problematic now, so never mind. Greenland. No, just kidding. Venezuela?

John: No.

[laughter]

John: It’s a challenging time overall. Congratulations on the show. I really just dug it.

David: Thank you.

John: As this episode’s coming out, it’s just about to debut on Peacock, right? I think it’s two days later.

David: Two days later, great. Although I’m sad Craig isn’t here, I like that on this episode, as far as television shows created by people who went to high school in Frield, New Jersey, about the USSR, we’re the top one on this episode.

John: This episode. Very nice. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Richard.

Drew: “I find I can look at a scene on a particular day and think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written, and then two days later I pick it back up and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not that bad.’ Do you guys get this too? If so, how can we ever truly trust our own judgment?”

John: I rarely do I read something and say, oh, this is absolutely awful. Honestly, the reverse happens more like, well, I absolutely loved something when I wrote it, and then I go back and it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so–”

David: It’s bloated and dumb and degressive. I think what I can relate to is I finish something and I think I’m happy with it. It did what I needed to do, but I do want a set of eyes on it. I think for that, you just need to have a very small brain trust of people that you really respect and trust. If you have a partner, if you have a friend, somebody who won’t lie to you if it’s bad, will also be meaningful if they tell you, this is really good. You did a really good job.

I think sometimes that is helpful. I also think that it is a trap to keep going back and reading the scene that you wrote a few days ago, because if you are somebody whose head does that, who looks at it and then hates everything, you’re really going to have a hard time writing that next scene. Just try to finish a version of it.

Susanna: Yes, I would say try to finish it. Then at whatever point you feel comfortable hearing it read out loud, that’s really useful too. We’ve had readings of scripts that we’ve written just for ourselves in Dave’s garage. It’s really incredibly informative every time.

John: The challenge, Richard, is you’re always, you’re both the creator and the critic. At the time you were writing it, you were the creator, and you had this feeling about it. Then you’re also the critic, and that critic is a separate part of your brain. Maybe your critic is an asshole. Maybe your critic is just not good. David, you were saying earlier about how you love helping out a person, helping out a writer, just contributing. Maybe your inner critic is just not actually recognizing what’s good and how to improve it. It’s just seeing all the flaws. Maybe just cultivate that critic a little bit more. Maybe talking to some other people about their work and being gracious with them will get you to be a little bit nicer to yourself.

Question from Daniel.

Drew: “I am a sophomore screenwriting student at an LA film school. I can tell my writing does get better with every script, but I’m not sure if I have that innate talent or ability you guys always speak about. Mainly because with every script where I say, I think I got it, I in fact do not have it. How did you guys realize that you have this innate talent and how long did it take?”

Susanna: Well, just to speak to the first part, I just want to offer some wisdom from a book that I didn’t write called The Work of Art that came out recently. I think it’s Michael Cunningham who talks about the fact that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as innate talent. It’s just having a personality that is so obsessively committed to something being good that it will just keep drilling down into something over and over and over until it becomes good. That, to him, is what makes a person skillful, not anything that they’re innately born with. I don’t know that I agree with that completely, but it did resonate with me that there’s an obsessiveness that people have, who I admire, that I think they share.

David: I think this question is very married to the previous question. First of all, definitely the stuff I wrote when I was in college, I wouldn’t share it now as a reflection of my best work, but there were moments throughout my adolescence or into college or into my early 20s where I would write a scene or a line or have an idea and it would excite me. It would be like, “Oh, that’s it. This is what I’m trying to do.” I couldn’t imagine not having any version of that and still being excited about writing.

I’ve got to assume, I’ve got to give the question, give her the benefit of the doubt that you must have had some sort of moment that excited you enough to start doing it. From there, yes, you just have to keep getting better, but you may have it. Also, a lot of very talented people worry that they don’t have that talent. That is also a very real thing that people–

John: Feeling impostor syndrome at this point in your early career is totally natural and reasonable and makes sense. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s true. I hope that in entering film school, you’re a sophomore now, people must have told you, “Oh, you’re a good writer,” and you’ve had some external validation that, “Oh, you really know how to do this. This is good.” There’ve been some moments where you felt yourself like, “Oh, this was a good thing I wrote. I’m actually proud of this thing I did.” That’s foundational. That’s [unintelligible 00:42:14] that gets you going to the next one.

There’s this meme I saw this week about thinking of yourself as a verb rather than a noun, thinking of you as the person who writes rather than the end product. Maybe spend this next year really focusing on writing as the verb versus generating this thing and that thing and that thing and see if you like the actual process of doing it. We talk on the show so much about how writing sucks. It’s not a fun thing to do, but you make peace with it. You come to accept that it’s part of this process of getting to work that you’re really proud of. Maybe just focus a little bit more on that rather than the quality and see if you’re digging it.

Susanna: I also think there’s a lot of noise outside the world of just you and your laptop or your notebook or however you write, and that when the noise gets really loud, it can be really hard to just focus on the actual nugget of excitement that you have. I talk to friends a lot now as people talk about how hard the industry is, and there’s a ton of negativity in the air.

Whatever you have to do to trick your brain into just being excited about a thing and sitting down and doing the work, like John was saying, that’s the most important thing you can do, is just to stay optimistic and excited about whatever it is you’re working on and not let the outside voices or your own internal critic stop you from actually just producing things. Find the spark, whatever that is. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s really important [unintelligible 00:43:35]

John: In finding that spark, I think it’s also reasonable to say, if you decide this is not actually a thing you like, a thing you would enjoy, it’s okay to say no. It’s okay to find something else you really do love. You only have the one life, so do the thing that actually really excites you and you enjoy it. More than talking about an innate aptitude or something like you’re born with a certain talent, maybe you have a set of interests and things that you actually want to be spending your time doing, and if this isn’t it, that’s fine, that’s good. Go searching for what the thing is that you actually do really love.

David: This is probably a bigger conversation for a whole other episode of this show, but I’ve spent a lot of time lately wrestling with what is the point of this. Not that I think it is without a point, but as I am in a position to– I’m releasing something out into the world, which is very scary. I think about when I first moved to Los Angeles, when I first wanted to work in film and television, and I had this idea in my head that I wanted to manifest of sitting in a movie theater and seeing my name up there. That does not feel like what the goal is now, though I can’t necessarily pinpoint what it is.

I do like writing. I do like making things. It is also a thing that terrifies me. I think it is a really tricky thing for me, for all of us, people who’ve been doing this for decades, to make sense of why we’re doing it. If you are on the fence in your first years, that also might be a good sign that it– Also, just know that we are also wrestling with what the point is, because it’s complicated.

John: A question here from Carlos.

Drew: “A few weeks back, I partook in a pitching workshop with a former executive from a big production company. One thing this former executive said really rubbed me the wrong way. He told us to stop writing pilots. He said that today, a lot of executives will turn down series pitches if they have a pilot attached because they want to be involved in the development stage from the beginning. We should stop writing pilots and focus on just the story development, which broke me since writing pilots is what I enjoy most from series development. Is this something that’s actually happening? I know the situation is probably different over here in Mexico than on the other side of the border, but I still wanted to get your take on this.”

David: Really makes sense why this is a former executive.

Susanna: David and I both, we produce a lot of other writers. We try to really support a lot of pitches that are not just our own pitches. As a director, I take a lot of pitches out that I’m not the writer on. Really, every project is different. We’ve sold things that have a pilot. We’ve sold things that have a pitch. We’ve been dissuaded from having a pilot for one specific type of project that I just think it’s dangerous to get mired in any one dogmatic idea about how to do anything.

If you’re enjoying writing pilots and you’re writing things that you feel really represent your passions and that you’re good at, the worst thing that can happen is you get some producer that wants to take your show out and they say, “Okay, let’s send the pilot later. Let’s develop the story.” They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s such a tactical decision that shouldn’t be your problem. It should be the problem of the person who’s doing the selling and that should be your partner and not a person who’s trying to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. That’s my opinion.

David: I also think how can you tell someone, you as a beginner writer, you are a good writer and you are worth backing and gambling on if no one is able to read what you are executing. I think that, yes, perhaps for a very experienced writer who has a long track record, sure, you can pitch. I also think pitching is a scam, but it’s a scam that we all participate in because you are sitting in a room saying, “This is what this is going to be,” but you don’t–

I think I talked about this many, many episodes ago when we were last on Scriptnotes, is that I have taken out pitches that I just also needed to write the script first just so I knew what the characters sound like and I knew what the jokes were because I don’t really know any other way to do it. You’re just saying, “Trust me, this is what it’s going to be.” If you’re a writer, you should write.

Susanna: Also, if you are a newer writer and there isn’t something produced that people can look at as a sample of how you write and you’re just like, “I have all these ideas for the story,” they’re going to ask to see a writing sample. It’s such bad advice.

John: We don’t know where Carlos is at in his career, but the good thing about writing a pilot is that you wrote a script that can be a writing sample. Maybe this series, it’s not the best way to sell this series, but it’s something someone else can read and David and Susanna can staff you on their show. It’s a thing people can read.

Susanna: They’re going to ask to read something before they pay you to write something based on an outline of ideas of a show that doesn’t have a writing sample. I think it’s bad advice no matter where you are in your career, Carlos. That person should not have a career, and they don’t.

John: Let’s do one last question from Alex here. A common note I receive from coverage services is that I need to differentiate my character voices because they often sound the same. Do you have any tips for how to subtly differentiate character voices without falling into caricature-ish dialogue?

Susanna: Oh, we talk about this a lot.

John: What conclusions do you reach as you talk about it?

Susanna: Honestly, sometimes I think about my first writing class I took when I moved out to LA at 21 at Second City, sketch comedy writing class. We talked about the game of a character. It was for comedic writing, but we talk about it all the time. Each character has to have, in your mind, what is the laugh with and what is the laugh at about that person. My description of how I am is going to be different from my friend’s secret gossip about what’s annoying about me. You have to know what someone would say behind that person’s back, I think, and then write that person–

There are ways in which we all lack self-awareness. If there’s a certain game of that person, that person says things a million different ways because they use too many words to talk, or that person is really passive-aggressive generally. If you just have an idea about a person’s flaw, it can just make their writing specific. We try to do that in our show a lot, where we don’t want anyone to show up in a scene, even a side character in The Office, and not have a specific personality or a tick or a quirk. I don’t know.

David: First of all, it’s also not the absolute worst thing in the world if you have a really strong, specific voice. Yes, sure, that might be your style. It’s okay, particularly when you’re starting out, because every character is a version of you. I think the first time I really thought about this idea was Noah Baumbach’s first movie, Kicking and Screaming, because a character in it tells the other characters, “You all talk the same.”

Actually, they don’t. All those characters are really specific, and I actually don’t think you could interchange jokes from one character to another, but I think it was probably him being a little bit self-aware and self-conscious that these are all characters who are in a very similar life stage, who have a very–

Susanna: The same education [unintelligible 00:50:28]

John: [unintelligible 00:50:29]

David: You can also just look at how it looks on the page. Some people are more verbose. Some people speak more simply, but yes, you should never be able to move a joke from one character to another and have it work the same way. Everyone should have their own voice and meaning, and that was what I was talking about earlier, that I have this ethereal belief of writing that everything exists behind a wall and you have to find it, and I think that is truly characters. That is most vivid with characters. If you start writing their dialogue and you start seeing them, you start hearing them, then you are really going to get a sense of who they are and what their specificity is.

Susanna: The caricature thing, it’s okay if the first draft, they feel a little pushed or a little broad. You’re either dialing something up or down. This is such a basic thing to say, but if it seems like how people would actually talk, or you could imagine a person in your life who would talk or act the way a character is talking or acting, sometimes we do things that are a little over the top as people in life. Just as a director reading scripts that other people write and thinking about directing them, there’s a first script problem that David and I talk about sometimes where just the main character feels like the avatar for the writer.

It’s usually a person who’s more passively observing the world’s hypocrisies and they’re witty and funny and everyone around them is an idiot. I’m speaking in broad terms, but that character, to me, it’s not that interesting. I wouldn’t know how to tell an actor what they’re playing, really. I recently read a script where that was the problem and it was by a young writer. I just thought, “I bet this writer is in their 20s, and I bet this is what amount of life experience they’ve had, and I can feel that in the way it’s written.” In that case, it was a really funny script. There was just a glibness to the writing, and it felt like the writer was punching up their own best joke.

John: I absolutely hear you there.

Susanna: To me, usually those are the characters that, if it’s the main character leading you through the journey and that character is just a little bit of a cypher except for their elevated wit, it feels like a first script to me.

John: Specific advice for Alex here, I feel like maybe you’re having a hard time listening and hearing how people really are different. Assuming this is a fair note that you’re getting from multiple people, that your characters are all sounding the same, I think what you might try to do with your script is just cast it in your mind. Cast actual actors in all those places and imagine how those actors are actually saying those lines. Doing that may give you a sense of, “Oh, there’s actually so many more variables I could be dialing in here.”

If I cast this as Christopher Walken versus Woody Harrelson or– what different choices would make sense given who’s actually going to be doing these lines? That may give you a sense there because you might think, “Oh, no,” and I’m just impersonating someone else’s voice, but you’re not really. Words you’re writing in a script is not going to sound like that specific actor.

Susanna: Whoever plays the part is going to be–

John: They’re going to bring their own specificity, but if you write it for one specific actor, another actor can play that part and it will feel unique and different and it won’t sound like all the other characters. That may be a first good exercise for Alex to try.

Susanna: Real people too. If you have an uncle who is-

John: Oh, totally.

Susanna: -always drunk, I don’t know, whatever, a drunk uncle, whatever you have. You can just– basing it on someone, whether it’s your imagination of an actor or some person in your life that if you were asked in a private booth to talk about that person, you would be able to describe them, good and bad.

David: I think the other way that a lot of newer writers get into the trap of just making characters feel similar, which is another way of saying generic, is that their supporting players, their one-line parts are extremely generic. I would try to avoid too many police officer number twos and just a bunch of people that you are trying to differentiate between the characters who are important and the characters who aren’t. If everyone feels like they have interiority and if everyone feels like they have some sort of vividness, then it does sort of come through everywhere in your script.

I think there’s a lot of– Cameron Crowe does this really well. The Coen brothers do this really well. I would look at movies and just really focus on the people who are in it for one scene and are really popping as a great way to just specify everybody in your script.

John: It may also be helpful to look at some movies that you really enjoy and love, and watch them while you’re reading the script, and really get a sense of like, “Oh, it’s not just the actor’s performance. It really was the words on the page that got to that performance.” That may also remind you like, “Oh, yes, dialogue, it does start here, and characters are really found in these words I’m choosing to have them say.”

Susanna: I think also with the TV show, we were asked the other day what [unintelligible 00:55:20] about story engines for a show going forward. One thing about our show which circles back to your original question about tone, John, was that we have a married couple on the show and we sort of tried to make their marriage really specific even though they’re not the leads of the show and it’s not a show about a marriage. They’re just people in the office, but we ended up wanting more and more and more of them.

If every character has something in a dynamic or in their voice that feels like, “Oh, I want to watch that person in a million different situations,” then it tells a buyer or whoever, if it’s in a TV format, “I want to watch more episodes of those people,”-

John: Totally.

Susanna: -and it just encourages them to see more of a long life or whatever it is you’re pitching.

John: You look at The Office and-

Susanna: Yes, exactly.

John: -just how deep, and how full that room was of very specific voices, that you felt like, “Oh, you could follow any one of these people, and it would be incredibly entertaining.”

Susanna: I think comedies are a good way to study it too. I was going to recommend Jury Duty, which is so largely-

John: Love it.

Susanna: -improvised, but each person-

John: Yes, it’s so well done.

Susanna: -is so specific. You couldn’t swap anyone’s lines with anyone else’s lines.

John: No.

Susanna: That’s on the broader side. I don’t know what tone you’re writing, but yes, it’s useful to try to do that with everybody.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is an article by Adam Mastroianni. I’ve linked to him a zillion times. I feel like I should be paid a referral fee here. This blog post you did was so useful for the start of a new year, called So You Want to De-bog Yourself. De-bogging, basically, you’re stuck in a rut. You’re facing a problem, a real-life problem, not a story problem, a real-life problem. What I think Adam is so good at doing is shining a spotlight on certain aspects of a situation and giving it a name so you can actually identify, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing.”

Two examples here. First off is stroking the problem, which is like, “I’ve got a big problem. Man, I have this big problem. I have this thing and this thing and this thing.” You’re not actually trying to solve it. You’re just stroking it. You’re basically just acknowledging there’s a problem here and you’re telling everybody about this problem, but you’re not actually trying to solve it. Stroking the problem is a thing I’m going to probably start using a lot when people express their issues to me. The second thing he calls out is the try harder fallacy, which is basically like, “Oh, man, that didn’t really work at all. You really need to try harder next time.” Almost never do you actually need to try harder.

[laughter]

John: You probably were trying as hard as you possibly could. You have no shortage of effort you put into it. You gave it everything. There’s no secret reserve of energy that you could have– It just didn’t work. You’re going to need to try a different way to do it because trying harder is not going to get there. It’s two of many examples in this really good post about getting out of the muck that you find yourself stuck in.

It’s for real life, but I guess it’s our characters too, because our characters are often trapped in situations. If we as writers are telling them to try harder or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that’s probably not going to actually really work. A good post and I’ll put a link in the show notes. David, what do you have for us?

David: I have a few connected cool things. My first artistic passion was drawing and painting and cartooning and illustration. My origin story as a writer at all is because I wanted to draw comic strips and political cartoons. Anything artistic, if you don’t use those muscles, they atrophy. I’ve been drawing with my children. I realize I’m not as good as I used to be. I’m a really big New Year’s resolution person. My New Year’s resolution is trying to draw or paint or something every day, either with a pencil and paper, pen and ink or my iPad. The essential iPad drawing program is Procreate.

There are a few companies that make brushes and color systems and fake paper to really emulate some beautiful mid-century comic book style or illustration style. Retro Supply and True Grit are two companies that do that. Retro Supply also has a lot of great videos on how to draw heads and color theory. That’s really great.

Then the other thing that is keeping me honest with my New Year’s resolution is the International Society of Character Artists, of which I am a paying member, does something called caricature resolution in January. Caricature artists all over the world, from beginners to masters, draw the same celebrity every day of the month-

John: Oh, that’s great.

David: -of January. You can find this by searching for the #caricatureresolution2026 on Instagram or on Facebook. They also have an Instagram page. It’s just a really fun way to just see what different character artists are doing, and also if it’s something you want to try whenever this airs, you can catch up.

John: What was today’s celebrity?

David: Today was Bette Midler.

John: Oh, great. She feels like a natural person. [crosstalk]

David: She’s got a lot of hair, a lot of big features.

John: That’s really great. The other things you recommended, those are plugins or things you put into Procreate?

David: Yes. You can download the brush packs and the fake paper and the color systems.

John: Great. I love it. Susanna, what do you have for us?

Susanna: I saw an incredible independent film-

John: Please.

Susanna: -that I wanted to talk about. It’s this movie called The Plague. It’s about 12-year-old boys at a water polo camp in the early aughts. I watched it because I’m on the jury of the DGA first-time feature committee. This time of year, I always get a packet of movies that either are just coming out, haven’t come out yet, or I just wouldn’t have necessarily heard of because they don’t necessarily have the marketing push. I so relate to that that I feel really strongly about seeing all these movies and getting excited about them and plugging them.

This one was really incredible. Just the writing and directing was really impressive and singular and specific, but also just having known kids that age at that time, just the zeitgeist is so perfectly captured.

John: That’s great.

Susanna: The music is perfect. The performances, which are almost all 12-year-olds. Joel Edgerton plays the coach. It’s about hazing and boys at that age. It’s really exceptional, so I recommend that movie highly.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We are low in the folder on listener outros, in part because, Drew, people are sending through outros that don’t have the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yes, very important. Basically, that is one of our only rules.

Susanna: That is it. That is what you need to do.

David: Can you just clip John just saying that and use that as an outro?

John: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: We definitely will. We definitely will. Send us through your outros. We’d love to have more of those, ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you get books. Get your Scriptnotes book.

David: I bought it for a bunch of young writers, and they probably really enjoyed it.

John: Hooray. Fantastic. We just got the British copies here, which are slightly narrower than the US copies, which is lovely.

David: They write a little narrower.

Susanna: It’s so pretentious.

John: It’s so pretentious. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on taste. Susanna, David, it’s so nice to have you back here.

Susanna: Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks so much.

[Bonus Segment]

David: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: Okay.

Susanna: Thank you.

John: Thank you, David. Thank you for bringing us back in here. Drew asked this question. [unintelligible 01:03:38] wrote in about Taste.

Drew Marquardt: I argue often with my friends about old movies, and I get accused of having bad taste, and I was wondering if there’s a method to acquiring good taste. Also, is there a definition to good taste?

John: All right, taste. Let’s talk about taste. My initial instinct when I thought about taste is I often refer back to Ira Glass has this piece about taste where it describes how you develop taste before you develop talent. There’s this conflict between the two of them, and it goes through things. I brought this up, and then I realized, oh, Susanna, you know Ira.

Susanna: I married him, and that is how I acquired good taste.

David: That’s your good taste?
[laughter]

John: That’s how you get good taste, is marry Ira Glass.

Susanna: Yes, I’m goal-oriented. I always strive to have good taste-

John: Absolutely.

Susanna: -and I just went right to the top.

John: I knew I liked you for that. Let’s talk about taste because [unintelligible 01:04:27] concern here is that they have bad taste. It’s like, “Well, no, you have your own taste. You have your own specific–”

Susanna: Who’s saying this person has bad taste? What’s their taste?

John: That’s crazy. Developing your taste and understanding your taste is, I think, a crucial stage of development. It’s basically figuring out what do I like, and then more importantly, why do I like it? What is it about this genre, about this movie, about these things that spark for me that I really enjoy? What is it about these things that I don’t enjoy that are elements of that? It’s worth some time to think about what are those things, and what is a unique fingerprint for you that defines what is good to you?

David: I think that you go through this journey in your life where when you were young, there’s definitely things you don’t like. You look back at this movie I loved when I was seven, and it is garbage, but it definitely fell within what you enjoyed then. Maybe that is something that as you get older, because I think the next step, once you start getting a little– if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re a little bit pretentious, that you feel like there is some sort of value in dismissing other people’s tastes. Looking at other people and thinking, “I like smart things, and you like dumb things,” and that is how you place it.

Then you go through this other journey where you’re like, “Oh, well, actually, some things that are just a mass appeal I really enjoy,” or, “I like this little niche,” whatever. You feel less embarrassed about your taste. You feel about your taste as not something that you want to place against other people. It’s something that’s yours. You embrace. You want to see what you like. It’s this journey that you go through to finally just feel like you can reconcile it. I think what [unintelligible 01:06:10] is probably experiencing is perhaps– I don’t know how old [unintelligible 01:06:14] is, but maybe it’s his friends being a little bit pretentious as they start to learn about their own taste.

I think it’s just really important to just try to take in as much as possible. I think it’s a boring thing about me that I really, really love The Beatles, but I really, really love The Beatles. When you explore what makes them great, they’re very good at their instruments. They’re very good at singing. They’re very good at the technical ability, but they’re not the best at all of that. They took in everything. Bob Dylan too, just took in everything that was available when they were learning and coming up and almost had this encyclopedic knowledge of all of the music that came around it and synthesized it into their own stuff.

Then it was this ability to say, “This is what is good for us,” and give each other shit to say, “Not that line, Paul, not that line, John.” Then that is basically what made The Beatles great, was their very, very refined taste. That taste doesn’t happen without really, really taking in as much as you can and taking in things that you would never think you should take in. Every little piece of it is part of what you build and build and build to what you like.

John: Taste is a crucial factor when I’m looking to work with a person or to collaborate with a person. For a project that we were working on with the company, I needed a designer. The first criteria was just taste. I knew I would find people who were very talented who could build the thing, but also taste is a crucial thing because I can’t give you taste. I have my own taste, but I couldn’t explain why this thing needs to be over there. I needed somebody with that form of taste. Susanna, you, as directing movies, you’re working with collaborators, and their taste is so crucial. They need to be able to have an eye for what it is that they respond to and ability to communicate back to you why they’re making these choices, right?

Susanna: Yes, I think judging other people’s taste is a trendy thing to do. Words like basic, that person is so basic. It just means that they have a taste for certain things that are popular and a certain aesthetic that is popular in certain parts of the country and certain class. It’s all about– there are so many things that are coded in that too, that comment. I think, ultimately, my taste is just what I’m naturally drawn to and interested in and what’s pleasing to my eyes and ears and senses. Sometimes that’s just entertainment that isn’t necessarily elevated.

I would consider myself someone who has “good taste,” at least the taste that makes sense to me. I know when things are entertainment but not nutritious entertainment and when they’re not, but I guess that I would still consider that part of my taste. It’s not a secret that’s in a closet and my taste is only the things I admit that I watched.

John: No.

Susanna: It’s hard to even say what we mean when we say taste. I think it’s mostly coded with trying to say I’m smart, I have good taste, I have an eye.

John: It’s so weird that we use the word taste, because as a sense, it’s the only one that has a sense of revulsion. It’s like, “Oh, that’s delicious,” or, “That’s revolting.” You can imagine a thing. It’s weird that we’re describing a tongue experience for what art is supposed to be.

Susanna: There’s a value judgment, right?

John: Yes.

Susanna: It’s like asking someone what’s their taste and you can answer that question free of judgment, but then people also talk about, “Oh, that person has good taste,” as though we can all agree that there’s a bad taste. I think that’s what you’re saying. It’s like– I think for me, the experience of hiring people is I want to feel aligned with what they—obviously, when you’re hiring a cinematographer, you look at their lookbooks and their decks and they show you what you want the visuals to be. For me, it’s important to talk to them and make sure that the dynamic between the two of us doesn’t make me question my own judgment.

John: Absolutely. You might find a collaborator who, what they like is completely valid, but it’s just not the thing. If you don’t want to be fighting over lens selections with your cinematographer on the set, that’s not going to do anybody any good. Neither are you going to be happy with the choices. They have to be aligned on a fundamental quality. Come back to your show, the tone is a very specific taste. If you guys weren’t aligned on that, or if you’re trying to bring in somebody who didn’t get that, it’d be a mess.

David: I think if we talk about the word taste and just the idea of– I think what we experience making the show is that when something, and I think it’s also what is such a value of a writer being on set and me being on set when Susanna’s on set or whatever, is that I know immediately when this isn’t our show, in the same way that I would know immediately if the milk has turned. You see something, you’re like, “No,” and I don’t have to explain that.

John: It’s a gut reaction. You just know it.

David: I will have to explain it often if I will have to tell a collaborator or have a conversation with an actor or get a light changed or something, but basically something is– and it is also understanding this is not an objective truth.

John: No.

David: I understand that someone else would sit and do their version of a thing and they would want the line delivered that way or they would want this shirt on or whatever, but for me, I know that it tastes wrong.

John: Yes.

Susanna: Yes.

John: The reason why we’re using this tongue sense is because it is like an inherent thing.

Susanna: It’s visceral.

John: It’s visceral. It is. It’s a feeling like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” The Henson Company, we always talk about something is muppety or it’s not muppety, and something can fit in that world or it can’t.

Susanna: It’s an essential thing about it. It’s interesting too, casting comes into play all the time, or I guess just I’m casting something right now. There’s a very specific part, and thinking about different actors playing that part, it’s like they just either essentially are that part or they’re not, no matter how good they are. I don’t know. I guess that diverges a little bit from just a conversation that’s strictly about taste, but it’s just me matching something to a specific image of it in my head, it either works or doesn’t work, and how much can an actor interpret a part and get to where I need them to get to or are they limited by something in their innate self that isn’t quite–

John: I look at some executives who’ve gone on to careers, like an executive who went to a big streamer, and his job is in a very specific division at that streamer, and it’s like, it’s not his taste. I know it’s not his taste. This is not what he’s called to do, but this is what he’s doing, and that just seems like a prison to me.

Susanna: I have so many meetings with people like that. They’re like, “Well, right now I’m working in–” eye roll, whatever.

John: It’s like, well, I don’t know how to help you here because clearly, how can you be giving good notes on these projects when it’s not a thing you like or enjoy? How am I supposed to take your notes seriously when it’s like, “Yes, you can tell me what the algorithm or what you think your bosses want, but you would never watch this movie.” I think I’ve tried to be more honest in my career over time. There’ve been projects I’ve pursued because, “Well, of course I should pursue that,” but then I was like, “It’s not really my taste. It’s not really a thing that I enjoy.”

David: It’s what’s complicated about criticism, and we can all agree that there are just some things that are just bad.

John: There are things that are bad because they’re bad executions of a bad idea.

David: Yes, I think we can agree, except for a few maybe weird tax dodge reasons. No one sets out to make something bad, but yes, there are some things that are– but then other things are just like, “That’s just not for me.” I think it’s a very internet-brained thing. I think it’s thinking that not for me means it is not for existence, and I think as I’ve gotten further away from the part of me that just wants to dismiss people who don’t have my taste, like the 20-year-old version of me, I love that things exist in the world that are not for me.

On your and other people’s recommendation, I watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry, and I was like, “I respect that show. I don’t think I’m going to keep watching that, but I think what a well-made version of a thing that is not a thing for me, and that’s fine.”

Susanna: I think that I really applaud any well-executed version of whatever the person set out to make. I’m a big fan of that, and I do appreciate it even in genres I wouldn’t gravitate towards.

John: Totally. Yes, like slasher horror is not my thing, but I can recognize like, “Oh, that’s a well-executed version of that thing.” We talked on the show some time ago about the syllabus, what movies and genres should you probably see just so you actually have an understanding of what they are? Because there may be things you just don’t know that you love because you’ve never seen them, and so I think you do need to have– part of acquiring a taste, and going back to the question here, it’s like, “You’re talking about old movies because you’re having bad taste.” Well, it’s great that you’re watching old movies, for starters, because-

Susanna: What’s this person watching?

John: -you’re getting a sense of how we got to this place right now in cinema. If there’s things you love, great. If there’s things you don’t love, also great, but try to figure out what it is about those things. We’re saying it’s a visceral reaction, a gut reaction, but there may also be some details there that would be helpful for you to understand, like why don’t I like this? That’s good.

David: This is related to it, but it is part of my moviegoing experience in the last several years, is rewatching movies I’ve loved and feel like I have enough distance from them that I’m now watching them as a new person. I had this experience with The Graduate, which was always one of my favorite movies, and it remains one of my favorite movies in the rewatch, but I connected to it in a completely different way.

As an adolescent, I related to Benjamin Braddock, and that was the prism I saw it through, and now I watch it, and I find him insufferable and think the movie is great, and the movie is commenting on that, and understanding that if, for whatever reason, at any different point in my life, I watched The Graduate and didn’t like it, that it is also just much more of a reflection of me than it is of the piece. I think we as individuals, not we in this room, because we’re all perfect, but other people have a really hard time differentiating something that just does not connect with the version of who they are at this moment and think that it is a flaw of the piece of art.

Susanna: Somebody was saying, I can’t remember who said this, but I agree, that when you watch Reality Bites as a teenage girl, which I did. Everybody loves Ethan Hawke, and then when you get older, you’re like, “That guy–“ If your friend is dating that guy, you’re like, “Don’t date that guy.” Ben Stiller has a good job. He has health insurance. That’s who you want to be with.

John: Oh, so good. Thank you for this discussion of taste.

David: Of course. Our pleasure.

Links:

• PONIES Trailer | On Peacock January 15th
• Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
• The last time Susanna and David were on the show (Episode 361)
• The Work of Art by Adam Moss
• So You Want to De-Bog Yourself by Adam Mastroianni
• Procreate emulators True Grit and Retro Supply Co.
• International Society of Character Artists’ character resolution 2026
• The Plague (2025)
• The Taste Gap by Ira Glass
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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