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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 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
• 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 Matthew Chilelli (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 are listening to Scriptnotes, it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

I love talking to screenwriters about their experience getting their first movies made because it’s the difference between writing a script and actually creating a movie. Last year, we had Justin Kuritzkes on to talk about his experience with Challengers and Queer, back-to-back with Director Luca Guadagnino. Today, we’re here talking with Nora Garrett, the first-time writer of Guadagnino’s current After the Hunt. Welcome, Nora.

Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I think one of the reasons why I love this as an example is we have so many listeners who are working on their scripts, they’re aspiring writers, they’ve written some scripts but they’ve never gotten a thing made. And so that transition point between like, these are all the words I have on paper and this is a movie that’s actually existing in theaters, just talking through that process gives people a sense of the journey. Craig and I could talk about it and our experiences, but that’s not what happens in 2025 and you have just gone through this process.

Nora: Yes, that is true.

[laughter]

John: I’m sure there were moments that were great and moments that were surprising and fantastic and also terrifying.

Nora: Yes. Oh, I mean, there were so many moments of abject terror that I felt like I was just in a complete state of disassociation watching myself go through it and be like, be cool, relax. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, it happened really fast. It’s interesting to be on the back end of it now looking back.

John: Cool. I want to talk about your journey as a writer, sort of getting up to this point, getting this in the hands of a director who actually made your movie with Julia Roberts starring. Because we have the actual script in front of us, I want to talk a little bit about the words on the page and your experience writing those words, but then seeing like, oh, those actual actors have to do these things and that whole process.

Nora: Yes.

John: And revisions, probably the most revisions you can also imagine. I saw from the cover page, you went to double white, so you went all the way through the colors.

Nora: Yes, we sure did.

[laughter]

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about day jobs, because until very recently, you had a day job doing other things, and I want to talk about what your experience has been trying to have an identity as the person who is a screenwriter and a filmmaker and an actor, but also the day job of it all.

Nora: Of course.

John: Cool. Well, let’s get into it. You and I are both from Colorado, so.

Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?

John: Yes. I saw that you were born in New York. Were you raised in Evergreen?

Nora: Yes, I was raised in Evergreen. Wow, where are you from?

John: Boulder, Colorado.

Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.

John: Talk to us about Colorado, because my experience of Colorado was that I had no idea how lucky I was growing up there. Then you go back and like, “Oh, my God, this place is so pretty.”

Nora: That was exactly my experience. Exactly. We moved from New York when I was four, but I was adamant that I was a city girl to the point where I have vivid memories of touring the houses that we eventually lived in Evergreen. I was telling the real estate agent, I was like, “I’m a city girl, I don’t belong here.” [laughs]

John: You’re four. Yes.

Nora: I’m four. I’m four. I think my father at that point was like, that’s when he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do with this girl.” It wasn’t until I left Colorado to go to NYU and then came back from the city that I realized that this is such a gorgeous, bucolic place to live. My experience of Colorado, and I think it’s still true, is that it’s a pretty big artistic town in the middle of the country.

John: I grew up in Boulder. We had the Shakespeare Festival. For not being at a hub, we had a lot of cultural things.

Nora: Exactly. I was dancing at first at Colorado Ballet and then I transitioned to acting and I went to Denver School of the Arts, which is a local magnet arts high school. I think that there was a lot of local theaters and a lot of local theater that I was able to be involved in alongside the Thespian Convention and the Shakespeare Festival. I always felt like Colorado had a liberal and an artistic bent to it, even despite being in a landlocked state. [laughs]

John: Can you talk to me briefly about dancing? Because you’re the only person I know who’s gone from dancing to screenwriting. Dancing, my perception of it, especially ballet, is that it’s all about reducing differences between things, being flawless, and practicing thing until it’s absolutely perfect. Then I don’t want to say you’re interchangeable with other people, but there’s just no flaws to be seen. Did you love it? Why did you stop dancing? What got you out of dancing?

Nora: Sure. That’s a very astute observation. I think that I loved ballet. I loved it so much because of the regimentation that you’re talking about, I think. I think I was someone who really responded well to structure and that’s been true throughout my entire life. I responded really well to six days a week, very rigorous, two to three hours a day of ballet. I responded to the same rigor when I went to school and took that really seriously.

I think having parameters was important to me, but it’s a ruthless job. Ultimately, I stopped because I had sort of a prescient notion at the age of 13 that I was like, I’m never going to be a prima ballerina. The best I can hope for is corps de ballet. Just because my body simply didn’t do the things that they needed. I didn’t have clean lines. I don’t have hyper-extended elbows or knees or really good turnout. What I did get from that experience was a certain amount of discipline, regimentation, but also it was very performative. There was a lot of opportunity for performance at Colorado Ballet because it’s not like ABT where it’s super competitive to get in the nutcracker.

John: I shared your love of just being, for me it was like testing and standardized testing in school. I loved actually just being right and knowing that I finished the thing and I was done and I’ve gotten the correct answer. I loved that there was a correct answer. While I was always good at writing, and I loved being praised for writing, there was something just really comforting and nice about just like, oh, no, I got like 100% on the test, and that was really easy.

So much of what we’re doing now, there is no right answer and there’s no perfect word for this thing. There’s no perfect scene. You’re always dealing with the imperfection of it all. Going from ballet, which you’re right or you’re not right to acting, there’s no right performance. What was the transition there?

Nora: Yes. Again, really great questions. I feel like the ballet of it all, I mean it’s really just containers, right? I don’t know. I got familiarized with Anne Bogart’s work in college, but she’s a director who talks a lot about the container of something and specifically the container of archetypes. I think with ballet, there’s a really rigid container of steps, but there’s still room within those steps for expression.

A lot of ballerinas take acting lessons because you don’t have words, so you really have to give an ontological experience of emotion to the viewer. I think that with acting, I thought there was a right way, for sure. I was not able to enter into going from pretty much regimented dance to regimented acting classes. I was not able to segment my brain and be like, okay, there were steps that I learned and there were perfect ways to do things in this medium and there’s not in this medium. I thought those two things were transferable to my own detriment, really.

John: To some degree, in musical theater where there’s a track, and to learn a track, you have to drop in that thing, I have such respect for the swings who can come in and just go through any track and a thing, but it really is not directly comparable, the experience.

Nora: No.

John: We have a lot of guests on the show who’ve gone through improv classes. They always were recommending improv classes. The thing about that is there’s no time to stop and make the perfect choice. You just have to continue with what you’re doing.

Nora: Absolutely, yes. I think for acting, it’s something where you can really get into a point where I’ve certainly been there, where you just belabor the thing. I think that it took me a long time to realize that sometimes, especially for someone who can be really cerebral like me, it’s better to just get yourself into a different track and just go with the first instinct as opposed to trying to find the perfect choice.

John: We had Greta Gerwig on the podcast a while back and she was talking about coming out of the mumblecore tradition and how she loved and respected a lot of it, but she got really frustrated that there wasn’t a text to anchor yourself back down to. You felt like as an actor, it was just too terrifying to have nothing underneath your feet to get back down to and that she felt like she could actually push much further once there was a text underneath there.

I hear some of what you’re saying there. It sounds like ballet, yes, you’re getting every step right, but then you’re finding ways to express yourself within that. As an actor, if you have scripted lines, you know those scripted lines, you’re making choices about that rather than every other moment.

Nora: Right. I think that the best-case scenario as an actor is you get to the point where you know the lines so well that everything feels spontaneous within the structure of the memorization and within the structure of having the understanding of your character. Everybody gets to that point differently, which I think was something that took me a really long time to understand. Some people really need to focus on every single line and the motivation behind every single line in order to trick their brain into being spontaneous, and some people can’t do that. They have to just veer straight into the spontaneity. I think I was very convinced that I was like, no, there’s one method and I must find it. [laughs]

John: Was that the reason for going to NYU was to find that method, to find that answer?

Nora: I knew I always wanted to be back in New York, which based on my four-year-old dictums, I think.

John: It’s Eloise returning [unintelligible 00:09:52] and stopping that, yes.

Nora: Exactly. I read all the Eloise books. I read Eloise in Russia. She went to Russia.

John: Of course, she did. Yes.

Nora: Of course, she did. There’s hotels in Russia. I was very adamant that I was like, I’ve got to be back in the city. I belong in the city enough with like, I don’t know if you felt this when you left Colorado, but I met people who didn’t know what elk were.

John: Oh, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. They’re not necessarily like, no, they’re these giant wild creatures who doesn’t wander through your backyard. Yes.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They’re bigger than deer. I was like, “Oh, yes, everybody knows what an elk looks like.” My first friends at NYU were like, “No, you know what an elk looks like. We do not.” I think I was in high school looking back on it. I think that I was told I was a talented performer. I don’t think that I was going off of a feeling of like, wow, I love this and I’m obsessed with this and I just want to follow this. I think I was chasing the feeling of being good and of being someone who was talented and had that sort of external validation. It wasn’t until I got to NYU that I was like, “Oh, I really love this.”

John: Can we talk about NYU? Because I visited New York in college and was like, “Oh, this is overwhelming.” Specifically, the NYU area is just an overwhelming place. My daughter did a summer program there in high school. She’s a city kid. We lived in LA and Paris. She’s like, “I can’t handle the street harassment. Just the daily life of it all was tough.” What was your experience coming from Colorado to a place like NYU?

Nora: My family lived in New York for a really long time, like my extended family. I would go back and visit. I think what I was super attracted to was the autonomy of it. I’ve always been someone who was like–

John: Yes, developing quickly.

Nora: Yes, very quickly. I think that I felt like a person who was an adult faster than other people, which not true, but I felt that way. I’ve always been really attracted to the notion of being there and you can get yourself wherever you want to go and you’re not reliant on anybody else to get you there. There’s a certain amount of autonomy in that respect that I wanted to have. I was desperate to get out of home. Not because of anything bad, but just because I was like, I want to be alone.

John: Also, you’re like the protagonist in your own story and you recognize that you have to leave home in order to have your great adventure.

Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.

John: When did you read your first script? You probably read some plays in high school, but when did you get the first sense of that when it wasn’t like another classic play that you’re reading?

Nora: That’s a good question. I have to think about that. I read a ton of plays for a very long time, but also read a lot of books. That was my first introduction to writing was just being a huge nerd and reading a ton. I remember very distinctly learning how to use a parenthetical for the first time as a very young kid. [laughs] I think that it must have been in college because of– I want to say that I’ve read a script before this, but we did have a class I think my sophomore year of college, where it was acting for film within the container of, you’re at a school for acting for the stage.

We read The Talented Mr. Ripley. The goal of the class was to learn a certain filming technique as opposed to a theatrical one. We read The Talented Mr. Ripley seven times, I think, back-to-back. That was probably my first experience. I remember being really struck by how little was on the page compared to plays.

John: Let’s talk about that, because classically when I look at plays right now, there’s sometimes a lot of scene descriptions where it’s setting up to look at the thing, but then there’s pages and pages and pages of dialogue. What you’re saying, it’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this is for an acting exercise, so it’s really about how are you able to communicate to when the camera’s enclosed, what is the edges of your frame? What was not there on the page that you were expecting to be there?

Nora: More, I think. [laughs] I just thought–

John: You thought it would be much more scripted in terms of every little movement, every step?

Nora: Yes. I thought it would be– it’s not only about stage direction, because I think also, I was very obsessed with the canonical plays. I loved Edward Albee. I loved Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams stage directions are verbose. It is just like a stack of stage directions or very stacked, rather, I don’t know. I think that going to reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, I was like, “Oh, this is so much about the actor’s performance.” I think that that varies script to script, because now I’ve read so many. In that one particularly, I was like, oh, wow, it really is about who you are as an actor bringing yourself to this, because it’s not the same type of roadmap, I think.

John: Also, you look at the differences between a stage play and a screen play. A screen play only needs to be filmed once. It only needs to be actually acted once. Those scenes, they’re going to do it once and they’re going to be done. You can experiment with that versus stage play. In theory, this is a set of instructions for creating basically the same experience again and again and again, no matter who’s in those tracks and who’s in those roles.

Nora: Exactly.

John: That’s an inherent difference between those two things. You’re reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. You start probably reading some other things. When did you start acting in people’s films? Were you acting in shorts while you were at NYU? What was the first time that you were on a set with a camera aimed at you?

Nora: Sure. I did start doing short films in school. I think they really started kicking off probably around the summer after my junior year because NYU and specifically Stella Adler, where I was studying, they have a very rigid– It’s so funny to look back on it now because the stakes felt so high, but they basically were like, “You’re not allowed to act anywhere beyond the confines of this school until your junior year,” which not everybody subscribed to. Again, I was the rule follower and someone who was very serious about this education. I felt like, okay, I’m not ready. I’m a nascent creature. Then I have to wait until one teacher tells me I can go off.

Yes, it was probably around summer of junior year. I have done so many short films, some of which have seen the light of day and some of which have not. I think that I’d probably be terrified watching them back now. I think it all started because I was dating a guy who was very into film. I think his friends were also very into film. They were these people who were involved in the acting school, but they knew they wanted to go to Hollywood. They knew that they wanted to be screenwriters. They had a–

John: They’re the worst. They’re terrible people.

Nora: I believe the term is film bros now. If I’d had that verbiage, I would have used it back then. They’re still my friends to this day, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. I grew up watching Legally Blonde, Charlie’s Angels, Liar Liar, and The Big Green on repeat. I was like, those are my four. That’s what I’ve got.
[laughter]

John: [unintelligible 00:17:01] right.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They had seen everything. I felt like, “Oh, those are the people who make this,” but they were also very committed to making short films. Because I was dating this guy, and I was an actor, I got into that web.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are making short films. What advice could you give to them about having been in a bunch of short films and student short films and posts? What are good experiences? What are bad experiences? What are things you wish those directors had a better sense of when they cast you in something?

Nora: Great question. I feel like I would say really use short films as a sense of experimentation. I think I took everything very, very seriously. I felt like I never knew what short film was going to catapult me to fame. [laughs] That’s what I felt like. Honestly, I was like, “Someone’s going to see this, and then I’m going to be famous at the age of 20.” It’s just not that. You’re making stuff with your friends, and it’s really, truly a time to learn and expand and make really bold choices that may or may not work.

I think that when no one’s watching, it’s really the opportunity to veer into that and steer into that scope. I think as an actor, it’s a great time to learn about your own process and what works for you and watching yourself back, and trying to figure out the dissonance between, oh, this is what I meant to do, and this is what’s actually on the screen. I think everyone in the short film process probably feels that way. Yes, that’s what I would say.

John: I’m friends with some folks who’ve been making a bunch of short films using folks who are very good at social media. These are folks who film themselves constantly. I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be fascinating to watch 10 years from now is how many of those people graduate towards doing bigger, longer, expanded things. These are people who get a chance to iterate all the time.

I think what you’re describing is that they can just constantly experiment, but they’re not used to the sense of an ongoing narrative. They’re used to a 90 seconds, but if you have to tell a story in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it’s just a different beast. Or if you need to work with a larger, more experienced crew, it’s not just you setting up lights yourself. It’s a different thing. I’ll be fascinated to see how that works.

I’d love to just push a little bit more on, you’re an actor who’s agreed to be in a short film. What are your expectations going in? What do the directors and people who are helping out to make the film need to know about? How do they make it a good experience for an actor?

Nora: Sure. Okay. I feel like some of my best experiences were when you knew that– It’s a couple of things. I think you want to feel like, especially with short films where it’s sort of run and gun and everybody’s doing a lot of different jobs, I think you want to feel like your voice is being heard and you’re being valued as a creative entity within the film.

I think it’s important that you know that you’re going to be taken care of throughout all the process, throughout all the extenuating processes after you film. I think it’s important to, and again, this might not be important to everybody, but I think it’s important that you know what cameras you’re shooting on and you know that those cameras are going to look really good, that even if this isn’t a perfect product, you’re going to have something that’s really good for your reel and that it is going to be edited and that there is going to be a final product that you can eventually see.

John: That it actually goes to you and it disappear.

Nora: Exactly. That’s happened to me before. I’ve shot shorts that never seen the light of day. I think it’s much more holistic when you understand that this is going to be something that you can watch because everybody needs it at that point. It’s not the same thing where you’re like, okay, well, I committed my time and energy for free. The promise of that is I’m going to have something to look at at the end of the day. I think it’s a matter of short films are so stressful. I do think there’s a certain way that you have to protect your cast from that stress.

John: Some of these short films you were making with friends, which is great and that’s a safer experience, but were there things where you just auditioned, like you saw, noticed, and you went and auditioned for, you submitted for, and you were just working with strangers?

Nora: Yes.

John: What is that like as a person? You probably didn’t have reps or you had no one on your team at that point. How are you making sure that this is going to be a good situation that you’re actually safe?

Nora: [laughs]

John: For example, would you only meet in a public place or would you go to a place-

Nora: Oh, sure.

John: -where there’s an apartment? I would just love some good advice.

Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–

John: I’m not thinking just for our actors who are listening, but for filmmakers, make sure people feel good about the experience.

Nora: I think something looking back on my experience, especially immediately post-collegiate when I was auditioning a lot for these– I was on Backstage, I was on Actors Access. I did a big cattle casting call for Columbia Film School, which was actually one of the best. I did the same thing for USC when I moved out here. Those were some of the best experiences because you’re meeting film students who are doing their MFA and you’re auditioning in Columbia and you know that it’s the container of the college, so you know that all these people are very committed to doing something and making something and have the resources.

I don’t know if I ever auditioned in someone’s living room. I’m sure I have, but I think for Friends, I think there’s a certain desperation of a young actor that really, at least for me, I would have done anything. You know what I’m saying? I think I would have gone anywhere, seen anybody, done anything, because I was like, again, I was just like, put me in pictures kind of thing. I was just like, “I’ve got it.” I think also there’s a lot of stuff told to young actors that is really hard and harmful. I don’t know if you watched The Rehearsal.

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, but I was watching it this most recent season and it just broke my heart, because I was like, “These people just want the opportunity to be on HBO and it feels like, God, I really recognized myself in that.” I was like, “I would have done anything too. I would have made out with someone for 12 hours on a soundstage.” Because there’s a certain amount of you just really– you’re told for so long that this business is impossible and you’re told that you have to do whatever it takes and you’re told that no one’s going to make it. Part of doing whatever it takes is sometimes, I think, hopefully now it’s different, but compromising what you believe to be artistic integrity or just the integrity of self. Yes.

John: As an actor, you’re constantly waiting for someone else to pick you to do a thing. As a writer, you can just write your own thing. When did you start writing in screenplay form? When did that start off?

Nora: I always wrote since I can remember, and started with prose and really bad poetry. Got into slam poetry in high school, which is embarrassing, but I feel like I should say it.
[laughter]

John: If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. This is a part of your identity.

Nora: Exactly. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that if I say it-

John: Slam poet.

Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–

John: Former slam poet, Nora Garrett. Yes.
[laughter]

Nora: If you only knew. Yes. I got really deep into it.

John: Oh, yes. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. [crosstalk]

Nora: Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing, but I loved it. I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series, and so I wrote a couple of web series. They were just bad. They were bad. I think it was also the Girls’ renaissance.

John: Oh yes, of course.

Nora: Everything was that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. It’s only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is and how you can’t repeat that. That’s what we were all trying to do. Yes.

John: You’re writing those things and you’re writing stuff that you would shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say like, oh, this is what was on the page. This is what it’s actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. You do get a lot of experience that way.

Nora: Yes. My last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. That was really like we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. They looked horrible. They were just awful. I would love to think that I had the cognition at the time to have any creative feedback about the artistic process, but I think I was really just caught up in how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time. I think it’s also when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you’re just like, oh, this isn’t even that art form.

John: No. [chuckles]

Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s an image on a screen, but that’s really about as close as we got there.

Nora: Right, exactly. You’re like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they’re supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes.

John: When did you write your first full-length feature-y script?

Nora: The truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature.

John: That’s great.

Nora: Yes, that is the truth. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the idea of it and going into it. I guess we should say that I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won’t have seen the movie yet. How do you describe it? Maybe describe what your initial intention was for it, and if it’s different than the final thing, tell us what changed.

Nora: It all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. Again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a character who had, at the core of their identity, a secret? This secret is something where I thought it could go one of two ways. I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long, and I was trying to gamify the system in a way, but I was obsessed with the price of it, and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price.

I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of This American Life. Basically, the upshot of that was that statistically, people who are more successful in our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. That can ensure more success. I thought, A, I felt validated by that, but B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion? Again, what’s the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.

Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you’re coming online enough to understand what you’ve done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life and specifically when you start having adult relationships? Then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help, or is there an eventual consequence?

John: From that initial instinct, were you trying to feel like, well, what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to explore this thing? The Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. She’s uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth, how do you live an ethical life? She has this secret at the start of it. Was that baked into the idea initially?

Nora: Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first logline, I did think about the professor and student relationship. Having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself. It was the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience.

John: Yes, so very classically, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they’re wrestling with and digging through. It makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there’s a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies.

The thing we always do for [unintelligible 00:30:09] is about Episode 483, Philosophy for Screenwriters. We were talking through that and that we don’t see it. In this case, your creative character was just so exactly wrestling with that situation. Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I’m not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie?

Nora: Yes. I think the genre that it started out initially was the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real? I think that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, when you’re like sort of what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true, and what is false in what’s happening right now, that to me is the source of that almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? Then I think Luca was more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama?

John: Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that has a negative connotation right now, but we used to make melodramas. Is there something delightful about the drama is the drama in a way?

Nora: Yes, of course. Yes. I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yes.

John: Let’s talk about Alma and all the balls you have her juggling. She is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. There’s that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student who is daughter-like to her, but also obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage which is okay but has some weird dynamics and strains in it. Her husband is a psychiatrist.

She has a best friend who’s also in the department and they have a complicated relationship, an Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition, which I’m not quite sure what it is weighing on her. She has a secret. She has a secret from before. She has a comfortable life, but a lot of things pull in her in different directions. In other stories, one of those might be sort of enough, but there’s a lot happening there. Then these aspects conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper?

Nora: I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that I was part of a group of female writers who we’ve all share our work with each other. One of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you’re just going to finish your first draft in 12 weeks. Basically, the idea–

John: That’s a classic sign-up kind of thing.

Nora: Yes, exactly.

John: A boot camp, like you’re just doing it.

Nora: 100%. You’re just doing it. I thought, okay, I’ll do that. That could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.

John: [unintelligible 00:33:26] containers I’ve heard so far.
[laughter]

Nora: Yes, containers. [laughs] I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer myself. [laughs]

John: Oh, okay, great. Yes. We’ll get to that in the bonus segment.

Nora: Yes, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. Part of that was really beneficial because you just got out of your own way. I think that it’s hard to look back and narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the triad of Julia Roberts’s character, Ayo Edebiri’s character, and Andrew Garfield’s character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.

I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to to see if this was someone who was very calm, cool, and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of.

I think also I was interested in substance use. I don’t know, just sort of that as somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being degrading to their body. I think especially as a woman and especially as a female character, women’s bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. I was interested if you can take the Brad Pitt character where he’s constantly eating in half of his films and give that trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. [chuckles] That notion of just hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind.

John: Great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. Over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script? Did you get through it?

Nora: I did because, again, I love rules. I did finish it. Again, it was just really bad. I think all of it was a really good exercise in learning that just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it’s not the final iteration by any means.

John: Let’s talk about that, getting it from it’s finished to actually to good. What was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?

Nora: I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belonged to the cabal of people that I went to college with. I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was very financially stressed.

Part of that was by necessity and then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. Then I re-outlined, re-broke the second draft, re-wrote it, and then started sharing it. I started sharing it with a group of just really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected. Then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends.

John: Yes, I was going to ask. Knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to hear some stuff and see what’s working there. What did you learn in that reading?

Nora: I don’t know if you have this, but there’s an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud. [laughs]

John: Absolutely. All the things you’d never notice were like, oh, my God, that actually isn’t the text. There’s a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work.

Nora: Yes, 100%. Or I’m like, “God, I use that word so much, like container.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? That makes no sense.” It’s, yes. After getting over the initial hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing, after that, I tried really hard to just step back.

I think it’s really important when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it’s like I had actors who, it was during the actor’s strike, and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other job. It was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors. If they are struggling with this moment or if this doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth, then I know something needs to change.

John: Yes, if they can’t sell it, it probably is the line.

Nora: Exactly.

John: It’s not the person reading the line. Through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of Imagine who ended up taking it? What was that process of I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?

Nora: It’s so funny looking back on that version of myself because I feel like–

John: Looking back, what, two years?

Nora: Yes, [laughs] looking back. It’s not long ago.

John: The younger me.

Nora: The younger me. No, but I think it’s– I’ve had for so long, I’ve been really timid and skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. All of my friends, for the most part, there’s obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. You have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place and then suddenly you’re seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you.

Again, that gap is one that can be difficult to close, but also, it’s that awkward thing of I don’t want to ask my friend to help me. I don’t know what, I really don’t know what changed. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I had this script, and two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, “I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions.”

I submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. [laughs] I remember reading it and I was just like, “Whoa, okay.” [laughs] I think they issued some boilerplate statement that’s like, “We suggest you reapply or suggest you take this writer’s notes.” I don’t think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, “This is bad.”

John: You’re on the website now.

Nora: [laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it. There’s something crazy making in that because you’re like, “What is good?” I can’t say what’s good.

John: It’s a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure, and that there’s just no objective measure of any of it.

Nora: Exactly. It is that thing where it’s like okay, obviously, when the film comes out, we’ll see. There’s a big feeling of just like, “Okay, you hate my writing, and this person doesn’t hate my writing.” I think that I read the feedback, and I had that moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m horrible. Everything I do is bad.” Then I thought, I don’t know, my friends like this, and I trust them, so I’ll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I’ll just keep going. Again, I think that that’s an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, “You’re right, blue cat.”
[laughter]

John: “I’m embarrassed to tell this to you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

Nora: Yes, exactly. I asked a friend of mine who was representative. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me, and he set me up with my now manager, Sidney Blank. I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother’s house in New York. I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta. I took off of Meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting.

I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it’s the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it’s really talky. A lot of conversations, there’s a lot of $5 words, it’s very cerebral at times, there’s no major set pieces. I was pretty certain I was like, this would just be a really good sample, and I’ll be able to get in rooms, hopefully.

John: Getting a room on a succession-like show would be a dream with a script like this.

Nora: That was the dream, 100%. I was like, “Hopefully, I get a manager, and then hopefully, I start working in rooms.” Sydney was the first person who said, “I really think we can make this into a movie.” That was, I think, December of 2023, I think.

John: Yes, so recent.

Nora: It’s so recent or maybe two. I don’t know.

John: What are years?

Nora: What are years? It was very recent, though. Then that next year, which I think it– yes, God, I think it was 2023. Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. Incredibly lucky for me that she was right.

John: That’s great. Imagine read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process?

Nora: I remember that meeting really well. Yes, they met with me, and I met with them, really. It’s also so funny going from auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people’s offices. I had a meeting once in like an ante room of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at 6:00 AM. It was so bad. Then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, “Oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship.” Whereas before I’d been in the position of me trying to really sell myself.

It was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi. Immediately, Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can’t believe any of this is happening.

John: My first paid job was also Imagine. I went through there. Colorado and Imagine. Time shifted or something.

Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.

John: It’s so good. It’s rising up the charts quickly. At this point, they’ve purchased your script, they’ve optioned your script, or what it will be?

Nora: No. It was just a meeting of– Then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him. I had a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it, so we decided to go with him.

John: That’s great. Did you do drafts for Imagine before you went off to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened?

Nora: No. I think this was so atypical across so many different lines. It’s hard to say that because obviously, I don’t have another experience to draw from. I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. Once he signs on to something, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it. He’s like, “This is getting made. We’re going to get it made within the timeframe that I have.”

The process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience where I didn’t even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine’s repped by CAA. Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. Luca’s name was right up there at the top. They asked me after we decided to work together to hone in and find a smaller list of directors. I made a list of four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it’ll be the best day of my life, and Luca was in that little grouping.

We sent the script to his agent who happens to be married to Julia Roberts’s agent. Imagine really wanted things to be we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. The way it happened because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. Then she actually came on first because initially, Luca had a scheduling gap. No, he had a film that was going. Then that film, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. Then he came on.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia, for which she was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. You feel lucky to be in the room, but also, you’re trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make?

Nora: I think it’s really difficult being a first-time screenwriter in some ways because– especially coming from the acting world and just having zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms. I think I felt like, “Wow.” I feel so lucky to be here across the board. Again, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to look back and be like, “Oh, what was–” It just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now. I think it would have been insane for me to, at that point, be like, “Luca, no thank you.” That’s crazy.

I think that the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. I don’t want to spoil things, but I used to work there, and he was staying there at the time. Our first meeting was there, and my old manager was there. I remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1:00 AM every night, and he was there. I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino and he was like, “What?” This is a crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I’ve been so many times in such a different capacity, and now I’m meeting with this person here.

I love Luca as a director, and I’d seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. Then, of course, the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash.
[laughter]

Nora: I was like, “Oh, no, I knew it.” I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you’re just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect and I have no idea.

John: It should be obvious, but you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” I’ve actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I’ve been inside this entire movie for years, and so I really can describe everything that’s in here and why everything is in here. I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. It’s not like if this script had plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn’t have the ability to talk about what’s really inside it. You’re the only person who’s already seen the movie, which is- A hard thing to remember.

Sometimes as you’re talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” They’ve never been inside this. They’re just trying to find their way in. You had this meeting where they’re immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we’re going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with them?

Nora: I think Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the thorny social dynamics and really exploring the socio-political world in which these characters were in. I think that something I was scared of when all this was initially happening is I’d heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting denuded and the teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized.

I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he’s really able to silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.

John: Entering the movies, if it’s worth the psychological thriller, there’d be probably a clean answer to how somehow these things sort out. My experience with watching the movies, I went to a 10:00 AM screening in Culver City with just myself, and I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with afterwards.
Fortunately, I grabbed a sandwich nearby, and there were three women who’d just seen the movie, too, and I heard them talking, so I could join their conversation as– Let’s talk about these three things because it very much is one of those movies where you want to have some discussion about what really happened there. For a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places they got to.

Nora: Yes.

John: Can we take a look at some pages from the script? This is how we’re starting the movie. This is the initial scenes as they’re meeting all the different characters. I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. Emma Hoff, the Jill Robbins character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don’t give any specific more information with her at this point, but we’re going to see a lot of specific behavior from her. Frederick Mendelson, her husband. Can you read the description for him?

Nora: Sure. Frederick Mendelson, Alma’s husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over.

John: Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. We meet him in that parking lot.

Nora: Hank Gibson, 40, Alma’s colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower-class background.

John: That last clause, having worked his way up, that’s not evidence that we can’t see that on screen, but we’re going to see it in his behavior later on. That’s just the cheating that we embrace in a screenplay.

Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]

John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.

Nora: Maggie Resnick, mid-to-late twenties, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy.

John: Cast in the movie, played by Iowa Deberry. Her being Black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the screenplay, you didn’t know that.

Nora: No, I didn’t know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn’t any specific notion of race.

John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.

Nora: Forties, a professor, emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.

John: Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. It’s delightful. Again, it’s the specificity that I’m loving about these things. Then we’re meeting her almost in class. We’re going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. We’re meeting Fabiola, not a housekeeper. She’s hired to help. She’s to do everything in person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don’t have kids. We’ll try to put this first three pages up, so people can download them.
There’s a lot of behavior, a lot of setting of worlds and establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven’s apartment life, which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London?

Nora: It was actually in London, yes. Something that Luca is very rigorous about research. He has a research that he’s used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. He is very adamant about verisimilitude. He is a wonderful set designer who makes-

John: The sets are incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. They’re always jammed. All these people are hoarders until you get to one point very late in the movie where we’re at a place that is incredibly spare and spartan.

Nora: Yes, exactly. That was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, where it’s like you’re walking-

John: You’re asleep no more.

Nora: Exactly. You’re walking around the sets and you’re opening drawers and you’re like, God, there’s actually what you would have in your drunk drawer if you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019. This was what it would look like. He was very meticulous about that. I think that that’s a wonderful thing for actors to have, for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to set up entering into these characters’ lives prior to feeling like, oh, we’re just at the fulcrum point.

John: Talk to us about the language, because we’re catching glimpses of them in class, and they’re just talking in what’s almost– It’s legalese or medicalese. It’s almost incomprehensible to what they’re saying to each other because it’s all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. To what degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft? How much of this came in later on? What was that process?

Nora: My cousin is getting her master’s in philosophy at Stanford. I really plumbed her experience and also literally some emails that she’s gotten from professors about announcing talks. The language that’s in the script is a very sanded-down version of the opacity that exists in that world. It is legalese. It’s jargon. Something when I was taking philosophy classes ad hoc, postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. The barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose.

There’s a part of me that loves the idea of you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences, but there’s another part of me that feels like, “Come on, guys, just say the thing.” I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. That was something where Luca really thought if this is someone who’s supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. That required a crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself.

John: It also creates structural issues because you need to find where do those scenes go in a natural way that’s advancing the actual overall plot that we believe that she’s teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and are happening after this.

Nora: Exactly, yes. How can we use those scenes that otherwise would be cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add drama?

John: The tension reaches the boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma just outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie who’s talking with their partner Alex and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It’s a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is that the thing that came along in the process?

Nora: Portions of it were always in the script, certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals.

John: Oh, great.

Nora: Yes.

John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.

Nora: Talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you’re just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals.

John: Is it in New York City?

Nora: No, San Francisco. She’s lovely and so warm and disarmingly so. We had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script, so it at least wasn’t like a complete cold meeting. Luca basically ran it so that obviously, the actors were all very busy, so we had to stagger who was involved in rehearsals. Sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. It started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I, and then slowly but surely, then Io came, and then it was Chloe, and then it was all of us.

John: How far in advance of production was this? Months?

Nora: Gosh. Not terribly far. I would say May, and then Luca went into prep in June. We started shooting early July, I think.

John: I’d love to read through some of this back half here because you’re at the point in the movie where people can more clearly state the themes and what their actual thing is. It’s not couched in specific language, or it could be a little more direct. If you put me at page 82, I’m nowhere near the actor. Anyway, Deborah is. I just want to read through some stuff here. She says, “I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.”

Nora: “Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown.”

John: “There are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible.”

Nora: “You’ve constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. You, you lie all the time, living in an apartment 10 times cheaper than what you can afford, dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting, fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility, another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It’s all a lie. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank, too.”

John: Again, it’s a moment where you actually can pull off all the niceties and things. You’re also answering an audience question. I was watching like, “Wait, if she’s rich, why is she living in that crappy apartment?” It’s rewarding the audience for that question you asked. You’re actually answering that question that was never audibly asked before. It’s like, “Why are you doing this thing?” Getting to express these, you’re not entitled to comfort, is an aspect too.

It’s almost like the audience is not entitled to a nice, tidy ending. It’s setting up, hopefully, the right invitation for the audience about what they’re going to get to because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was and stuff like that, they’re going to be answered but not answered to the degree that here’s the clear, it’s not the sixth sense. It’s not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It’s not that kind of clear answer.

Nora: Initially, it was. Certainly, the drafts that were circulated was very much like you got the answer. I think you’re absolutely right that it is a sense of a metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having.

John: Well, congratulations on the script and on the movie.

Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.

John: We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer.

Nora: Great.

John: Anita writes, “When is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? How long can you go with a character who’s talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to show that?” A script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It’s like, okay, what’s too long where I don’t actually need to show the thing? I don’t know.

To me, it’s just, it’s the instinct. I’m like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and show the story, but there’s other times where you just tell the story. If it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on to the after that long, I think my instinct is to stay. What’s your instinct?

Nora: I think it’s a difficult question. It was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there’s that feeling of how long can you hide the shark in Jaws. You know what I’m saying? How long can you make it? There’s going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually, you move towards satisfaction in the end. There’s a sense of what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying.

John: The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, there’s still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not? Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it’s trusting the filmmaker. It’s showing the actual real truth. That’s not the case. You’re going to have to do a little more work to undo that dialogue.

Nora: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s about rewarding people’s faith while creating as much tension as possible.

John: Let’s take one last question here from Nami. “I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.”

Tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s the buildup to a sneeze. It’s the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, “Oh God, something bad is going to happen.” It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there’s a bomb underneath the table, and you see the countdown underneath the table, or a longer-term thing where you’re just like, oh, there’s this sense of dread.

I think one of the issues that we’re living with as a society right now is that sense that there’s an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment. You’re just not quite sure when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like. In movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you’re cutting into something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we’re still worried about what happened before, or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment?

Your movie has a lot of tension in this building up to just mysteries that we’re trying to figure out. A lot of checkouts guns are being loaded in your movie. Any more instincts about tension and suspense?

Nora: First of all, I love The Twilight Zone. Again, I think it’s a delicate dance between feeling like what you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging, or what can you get away with not paying off and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience?

Nora: Sure. I’ve been really interested in Substack, recently. I think that it’s a great little corner of the internet when there’s a lot of scary corners of the internet. I also think it’s really great to just read Flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. Jessica Tofino is a writer who runs a great Substack called Flesh World. It’s a lot about the beauty space. I’m really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. There’s another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. He writes flash fiction. I just started reading him, and I love it. It’s really tightly told and very evocative.

John: That’s great. A couple of things to respond to on there. Flash fiction as a concept can be great. These are little short bits. It’s almost the textual equivalent of TikToks where it’s just like, here’s the idea, you’re in and you’re out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. I respond to it the same way. It’s like, just one more, just one more, just one more.

Substack is so fascinating, too, because there’s so many really good writers on Substack. Anytime you mention Substack, people are like, “But what about the Nazis?” It’s a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and that it’s corporatizing a bunch of independent voices, and yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating.

Nora: See, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn’t even know about any of that. [laughs]

John: Oh, that’s great. Literally, I’ll post something on Blue Sky about this post that I really liked, and the first comment will be like, “Oh, too bad. It’s on that Nazi platform.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Nora: Oh God. No, everything is ruined. I have to think of a new, cool thing.

John: The scolding that happens in popular culture is true, and that’s also part of your movie, too. Your movie is building off of reactions to me, too, but just the general sense of there’s no good way to be a decent person in the world.

Nora: No. I think it’s also a certain sense of, God, there’s nothing that seems particularly clean in this world now. Everything is touched, everything is tainted in some way, and it’s like how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy?
[laughter]

John: Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One podcast by Jesse David Fox. We had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. The Good One podcast, it’s scripted, but it’s talking with- funny people about how they do their work. One episode I really liked recently was Ben DeLaCreme’s episode.

Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.

John: He’s an incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but talking through the behind-the-scenes of RuPaul’s Drag Race but also the bigger issues of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we’re trying to do. You’re always grappling with, well, what is drag anymore? If drag isn’t dirty, is it still drag? All these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. One of many good episodes of The Good One podcast.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a 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. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

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Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we referred to and the new one, we’re about to record on day jobs. Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes.

Nora: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Let’s talk about day jobs because you are now a produced screenwriter, but for a long time, you were doing other things along the way. Let’s talk about some of the different day jobs you’ve had, some pros and cons of a person who needs to keep a roof over their head but also have brain space and time to do the things they want to do. What day jobs have you had over your life?

Nora: What day jobs have I not had? I was a personal trainer. I was a personal assistant. I was a professional organizer. I was a data analyst. I was studying to be a paralegal. I was a waitress and a cater waiter and a hostess.

John: That’s good. That’s a whole range of things. Let’s talk about the service industry side first, because you mentioned how at Chateau Marmont, you had been a hostess at Chateau Marmont. Then you’re going there for a meeting, which is a very classic moment. That’s a movie moment right there.

Nora: Very movie moment, yes.

John: As a hostess or as a waiter, some pros I can imagine is you leave the job, you’re off the job, you’re done. Great. You probably have a little bit more flexibility when it comes for auditions, which is the thing you were having to do.

Nora: Yes. Being a waiter was one of my favorite jobs.

John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?

Nora: I worked at Dominic’s before it closed down, may it rest in peace. It was a great restaurant. Then I worked at Crossroads, the vegan restaurant, which was– That was one of those environments where the chef was really totalitarian. You had to call him chef. That was my first experience of that. Then I worked at Little Dom’s and Chateau Marmont.

John: In picking those jobs or in giving those jobs, were you trying to optimize your hours to make your life manageable in a way that you could also write and do other things? Talk to us about that decision.

Nora: Yes. I always really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to be on a schedule that wasn’t a nine-to-five because not only could you get everything done that one needed to do during the day at a time where it wasn’t completely clogged with other people, but also, I liked being able to have my days free to write, to audition. The hard thing about working in the service industry is it’s like your days are free, but also, you’re working very late. There is that counterbalance of like there were times that I would write when I got home from work because you’re just so wired. You’re up until three, and then you’re sleeping until noon.

John: Talk to us about you’re waiting on these people. You’re waiting on decision makers. You’re waiting on parents, people who could be reading you, who could be casting you and things. To what degree is that a factor, or you just stop thinking about it?

Nora: I think the great gift of entering into this industry as an actor is the lack of control that you have in that profession is huge. The amount of control you have as a writer feels like the greatest relief in comparison. The thing that was always really difficult for me about being an actor was this feeling of like I can’t just go home and practice my instrument. I can’t go home and play violin, but you can go home and write. Then you have a product, and you have something that you can look at and read over and edit, and it’s immediate and pleasurable in that way.

There was a huge sense of frustration and a huge sense of, I think, impotence. Bradley Whitford, I think, talks about that. I think it was a commencement address at Juilliard or something like that. This idea that you have so much passion and desire and drive and need, and then you have this blockade of being like, “Well, if no one’s going to let me do this, I can’t do it.” I think it’s important to find something that’s lovely about working these type of day jobs in this city of Los Angeles is that almost everybody is trying to do the same thing as you. That can be demoralizing at times, or it can be really lovely to think like we’re all in the same boat, and so we might as well try to do something together.

John: If you were a waiter in Denver who dreamed of being a professional actor, well, you’re just delusional.

Nora: It’s like you’re in the wrong city.

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk through some of the other day jobs. Personal trainer? Was it personal shopper or a personal assistant?

Nora: Personal assistant. I wish I was a personal shopper.

John: That would be incredible. Personal trainer, I have many friends who are trainers, like my trainer, but other friends who train folks. Yes, you can set your schedule to some degree, but you’re always relying on other people showing up, not showing up. It doesn’t stop, I suspect.

Nora: No. Personal trainers do not get paid enough to teach classes. The people teaching your Pilates classes, your HIIT classes, they do not get paid enough. I was teaching a class that was-

John: You weren’t doing one-on-one clients. You were doing classes.

Nora: No, because I worked at a very fancy place where you had to teach the classes with the students. It was dance cardio because I used to be a dancer. It was very Jane Fonda adjacent. The reason I stopped is because I got a stress fracture in the middle of one of my classes. Being a dancer, I was like, it’s fine. I’ll go for another hour. I did. I was like, I’m in a lot of pain. That was the reason that job ended because I had to be in a boot after that. That was a crazy experience because it’s just I’ve never worked out so much in my life.

John: I have actor friends on Big Fish who would teach spin classes and things like that. It’s like, Jesus, your body.

Nora: You don’t even feel good. You’re a receptacle for food, and then you’re just constantly sweating.

[laughter]

John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.

Nora: This is at Meta.

John: Was that your last day job?

Nora: That was my last day job. I had taken a break from working in restaurants to be an assistant for the longest gig I had an assistantship for, which is about five years.

John: Assistant to what kind of person?

Nora: I did a couple. I did actresses, and then I had a stint with producers at CBS and then produce director. I bobbed around.

John: This was personal life stuff? Basically, get me this thing, deal with the plumber, that kind of assistant thing?

Nora: It was both personal life stuff, and it was also all of my on-set experience. I’d been on set a lot, which was invaluable. It was also partially writing experience as well and staffing and reading and coverage and all of that kind of stuff.

John: If you’re working, imagine like an actor on set and you’re a personal assistant for them, what is your relationship between it? Your first responsibility is to that person, but you also have to deal with the crew and production itself. How does that interface work?

Nora: It’s really difficult. I think being a personal assistant is one of the most fraught jobs because it’s all of the intimacy of an intimate relationship without any of the perks. I think it’s really difficult to hire someone to basically be a facsimile of you. Once they get good at it, I think there’s all sorts of identity politics that happen where you’re like, “I want you to be able to write my emails,” and you’re opening up your life to someone. I think it’s really difficult on both sides.

John: This does tie back into your movie then, of course, because I share everything with you. You don’t share anything back.

Nora: Exactly. This notion of like, oh, I’m being collected in some way, but I’m also collecting. I think the weird, tacit understanding of being a personal assistant is that obviously, most people who become assistants are trying to replicate a guild thing where you’re like, okay, I’m going to learn from you.

John: I’m the apprentice and you are this.

Nora: Exactly. That’s a difficult thing because you have to, I think as a boss, have to understand that your assistant has ambition. At the same time, if they’re really good, you don’t want to lose them. It’s a really strange dynamic. I think it’s difficult on both sides.

John: That gets us to meta. You just apply to an open job?

Nora: I went down the LinkedIn rabbit hole where I was– I mean, God, just throwing cover letters into the void. I think I was just at a point where I went back to restaurant work. I went back, and I was a counter service waitress at Pine & Crane.
Going back to a restaurant at 31 is much different than in my twenties. My body was just getting wrecked. I was getting really mentally exhausted and feeling really bad about myself, especially compared to my friends who had enough disposable income to go on vacations and do fun things. I was like, “Okay, someone’s got to give. I’ve got to figure something out.” I started the LinkedIn route. I was actually recruited by meta because of some editing work that I had done for a nonprofit.

John: Some video editing or some text editing?

Nora: Some text editing. Yes, some text editing and development that I had done for a nonprofit. They’ve recruited me to be a data analyst.

John: Let’s talk through your advice to, let’s say, the next Nora is moving out from New York to Los Angeles and is looking for a day job so that they can act or write. Where to first? Do you think restaurants is the right, best first place? What’s your instinct?

Nora: I love restaurants. I think especially because it’s where I earned all my friends. It’s where I earned. It’s where I met all my friends. I had to work. I think especially most people who are attracted to this business are people who really thrive on novelty. The lovely thing about a restaurant is that every day is different. You really observe human behavior from close proximity. It gives you a lot of wonderful skills of memorization but also performance. As depressing as it is to have spaghetti sauce on your hands and under your fingernails for five days out of the week, it’s like there’s also some type of brilliant resilience in that.

John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.

Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Links:

• Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
• Nora Garrett
• After the Hunt
• Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
• The Rehearsal
• Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
• Big Reader Bad Grades
• BenDeLaCreme on Good One
• Preorder 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 Nick Moore (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 685 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

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

John: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They were just too much alike.

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

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct.

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

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

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

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Of course, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: I am, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, wow.

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

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

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

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

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

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

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

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

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

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

John: Exactly.

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

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

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

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh my God.

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

Leslye: Oh, my God.

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

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

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

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

John: I’ve never read it.

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

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

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

Leslye: I agree.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email that you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslye Headland, such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes.

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

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: They can’t.

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

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

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

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

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

John: Yikes.

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

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

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

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

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

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

Leslye: Phenomenal.

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

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

John: Awesome.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I will. You don’t know that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Go for it.

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

Craig: Survive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Okay, great.

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

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

[laughter]

Craig: “As you know…”

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

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

Tony: I know.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: That’s awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: That’s a great idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

Tony: I think we’re contemporary.

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: This is it? It’s over?

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

Craig: In Season 2, yes.

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

Craig: You found a way to get out.

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

Craig: Screw you, Gilroy. [laughs]

Tony: No, I’m out.

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

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

Tony: I know. He’s shrinking there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Yes, but that was a different–

Craig: You were in a different spot.

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

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

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

Tony: No, it didn’t help me out.

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

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

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

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

John: That’s amazing.

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

Craig: Right.

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

Craig: Describe that concept a little bit for us.

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

Craig: Once is enough.

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

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

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

Tony: Yes, a crisis, yes.

Craig: It’s a French crisis.

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

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

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

Tony: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes, I love that.

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

Tony: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh yes, I’m sure.

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

Craig: Jason can feel pain.

Tony: It sounds a little valium to me.

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: They did Bug’s Life and Antz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: I’ve been ripped off.

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

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

Craig: Did you sue?

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

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

John: Drew, another question here.

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

Craig: Stephen Schiff.

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

Craig: Could not agree more.

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

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

Tony: They’ll put their mom in it.

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

Tony: Vanity Fair.

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

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

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

Tony: Then wait for your first review.

John: Nothing will help you out more there.

Craig: That’s when you-

Tony: Karma.

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

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

Craig: Absolutely.

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

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

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

John: It’s actually just startpage.com.

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

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

Craig: You can.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Are you kidding me?

John: 100%, we love it.

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

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

Craig: Love it.

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

Craig: Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Like cloying or–

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

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

John: Yes.

Craig: The Germans surely have a word for this.

Tony: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance.

Craig: Grossbundance. I like grossbundance.

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

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

Craig: Gobsmacked.

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

Craig: Jaw drop?

Tony: Yes, I know.

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

Tony: They’re all a little mundane.

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, God.

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

John: You did not.

Tony: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely. Our baldpates, yes.

Craig: It’s sort of shyness.

Tony: I wasn’t going there.

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

Tony: I was not going there.

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

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

[laughter]

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

Craig: Fantastic.

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

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

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

John: Thank you.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.