Search Results for: logline

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.

You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you 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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 681 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do you do when the answer isn’t yes or no, but an extended and interminable maybe? We’ll discuss strategies for coping and navigating periods of frustrating ambiguity as you’re trying to push projects forward.

Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how to know when a movie or TV show has had reshoots or significant re-tinkering. Craig and I will spill the secrets that will help us notice that things have changed there.

Craig: Let’s ruin it for everyone.

John: Absolutely. That’s why I put it in the bonus segment. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can just skip the bonus segment.

Craig: We’re going to spoil everything.

John: The tricks, the tips, the everything. First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Sure. Elizabeth writes, “Can you please ask Craig to stop joking that nobody in Post reads the script, supervisor’s notes? My notes are nearly always utilized by the editor and Post team, and the role of script supervisor has been dismissed, disrespected, and marginalized for far too long by directors and producers.”

Craig: Okay, Elizabeth, this feels like manufactured outrage. I’m literally expressing an opinion in support of script supervisors and the way that their work is overlooked, and your reaction is to say, “Stop dismissing us.” Here’s the reality. You’re not in the editing rooms. I am. I’m telling you, after 30 years, it is extraordinarily rare for the editors or the Post team to refer to the notes. Take my word for it. It’s extraordinarily rare. If you’re frustrated by that, imagine how frustrated I am about that.

I’m not saying it never happens. Clearly, you had a nice experience where it happened at some point, but Elizabeth, hear me out. I’m on your side. That’s why I’m saying this. I want editors, especially up-and-coming editors who listen to our show, to read the effing notes.

John: Yes. You have sung the praises of the script supervisor on The Last of Us so many times.

Craig: So many times.

John: Apparently, it’s fantastic, which is great.

Craig: Chris Roofs.

John: Great. I will say that even if those notes are not being used for the editorial process, I suspect there have been times where you needed to refer back to those notes because you’re doing inserts, pickup shots, you’re reshooting some things, you need to figure out like, what was it that we were doing here?

Craig: That’s a separate thing. In the crazy list of things that the script supervisor is responsible for, it’s the Swiss army knife of crew members. Keeping track of inserts that we owe is one of them. That is a separate list that is generated and shared with the post-production supervisor and the producer and the editors so that everybody’s on top of that. The ADs, most importantly, to make sure that they’re scheduled.

John: More follow-up. This one is from AI Guinea Pig.

Craig: Is this a real person or an AI guinea pig? This is a real person, okay.

John: This is a real person. Drew, it’s a long story, but I think it’s an interesting story because it feels like, oh, this is the bellwether of things that could come.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Drew: “In 2023, I had a script make the annual blacklist. The script led to the proverbial water bottle tour and eventually an option offer. The offer came from a producer with many produced credits on movies and shows over the last two decades. As my reps and I asked around, we also learned that he had a good reputation, both as a person and as someone with a knack for getting things done. What’s more, his pitch was compelling. He claimed to have access to financing, didn’t hurt that there was money on the table with the option agreement. I was going to become a paid screenwriter.

My lawyer negotiated the option agreement. I signed it. The check cleared and we were off. The producer and I had our kickoff call, and this is how he opened. ‘So, how much have you played around with AI?’

The producer, as it turns out, was intending to launch a new AI studio with my script as one of the headliners of its slate. After no mention of AI during our initial conversations or negotiations, I was now being told my project was going to be made using generative AI. What’s more, I came to realize that the producer’s so-called access to financing was not access to financing for traditional film production. It was for this technology specifically.

I tried to give the producer the benefit of the doubt. I expressed my many ethical and creative concerns around AI production. I asked if there was still a possibility of traditional production with a real live cast and a real live crew. The producer paid lip service to this idea, but once the announcement of the AI studio went public, it was clear to me that it was only ever that. I quickly got on the phone with my reps and my lawyer and asked out of the option agreement. I would gladly send the money back if it meant keeping my script and my soul intact. Surprisingly, the producer did not push back. It’s probably not a coincidence that the other movies in the announcement slate are all from unproduced screenwriters.

What’s the lesson? We now live in a world where we can’t take traditional paths to production for granted. We need to ask a prospective partner’s feelings about AI and even bar it contractually if we can. Yes, this producer kept their intentions hidden, but there was also nothing in their filmography or reputation that gave soulless AI tech bro vibes. Next time, I will definitely be asking.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Wow. A whole journey there. Usually, people are writing in for advice. In this case, the person is giving advice, but I thought it was good to keep all the context in there because this is a real thing that writers will be facing. You and I may not face it directly, but I think a lot of our listeners could be encountering this where, in a general case, you enter into an agreement thinking that you’re making one kind of movie, like a live-action movie with actors, but you find out, oh, it’s animation or it’s generative AI where there’s no people behind it.

Craig: I’m guessing this wasn’t a WGA agreement.

John: There’s nothing prohibiting that, no.

Craig: Oh, it’s just that it prohibits AI as literary material for the purposes of credit. The good news here is this was an option. Therefore, copyright had not yet been transferred, sold. There was no work-for-hire agreement in place. You didn’t even have to give the money back. You could just let the option lapse.

John: The producer could have exercised the option and he would have lost it.

Craig: They don’t have the money. I’m just going to say flat out, they don’t have it, but true. Hopefully, the money wasn’t a lot for the option. I guess it’s exciting when you get money for an option. It’s not so great when you have to give it back or you need to give it back. In this case, brilliant maneuver to get out of this mess.

Let’s talk a little bit, John, for a moment about, there’s a phrase that popped out here, and that is there was nothing in his résumé or past credits that would indicate AI tech bro. Probably there was. We need to think about producers in a different way than we think about writers and directors and actors. Because no matter what the quality is, if you get a writing credit, you wrote, directing, you directed, acting, you acted.

There are 12,000 flavors of producer. There are so many different kinds of producers, including producers that routinely do nothing that the producers themselves had to invent a fake guild, of which I am a member. I love that they call it a guild. It’s not.

John: It’s an association.

Craig: It’s a trade association to self-regulate which producers actually warrant the best picture award. One thing is to look at the credits. If, in movies, you see a lot of executive producer credits, well, that’s different than producer. In television, if you see a lot of producer credits as opposed to executive producers, the other way around, that’s also possibly a red flag that what this person is, and there’s no shame in it, is somebody that puts projects together but isn’t necessarily making them. And those people over time, like water, find the path of least resistance to escape and head towards money. In this case, it sounds like this guy thinks it’s AI.

John: It’s entirely possible that this producer who has a lot of credits rarely has that PGA after their name, which would indicate that they really did produce the movie. Let’s assume maybe for the sake of argument that they did produce those movies, and they’re at a place right now where they’re finding it very hard to make movies. Some tech people show up saying, “Hey, we have this generative AI technology to create the video basically on demand, and so we can film things without a studio, without people, without anything else.”

I could imagine them going to a person who has some respectable credits, who actually knows how to make some movies, and convincing him to do this. That’s also possible that it is a legit person who’s just at a certain point in their career realizing, “Okay, this is the thing I do next.”

Craig: That’s another tricky one. When you are coming up, and you’re trying to get your first thing out there, you sometimes meet people on your way up that are on their way down.

John: Very true.

Craig: Everybody’s in the middle of the ladder. Figuring out who’s on their way down can be very difficult to do, and producers are extraordinarily good at convincing you that they’re amazing. That’s part of their job. It’s part of their skillset.

In this case, what is so startling to me is that this producer thought they were going to get away with it by not saying anything until after the deal was signed. I’m going to go with idiot on that one. Great warning here. Let’s just get this out to all the lawyers around town. This should be standard now in option agreements that this material will not be used to assist in AI. It will not be a springboard for AI. There will be no AI development of this. I think that clause now needs to just be in there.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between generative AI as a technology versus animation or motion capture or other things which are different ways to do stuff. You had a good initial meeting with this producer and he was talking about a vision for the movie but apparently was describing a false vision for the movie or was being so vague about what it was he was trying to do that it’s frustrating.

Listen, would I fault Guinea Pig for making a deal with this producer that was going to try to use this AI thing? For a feature film, I think yes. I think that’s a bad look. If it was for a short film where they’re going to hire you on to do this little experiment, that’s a choice you make whether you’re going to do it or not do it.

Craig: It’s their original material. It just feels like if you’re going to go through the misery of creating something original, why then hand it off to robots to do what they do? The whole point is that you’re trying with your first thing to explain to everybody that you have value. If you immediately let them feed it into AI, you’re saying, “I don’t.” A very wise choice here. I think everybody should be looking out for this.

Also, I sure wish we could just say who these people were. We don’t happen to know who this producer is. This is the kind of person I’d love to bring on the show and just say, “Okay, let’s talk.” Not to beat them about the head and shoulders, but just to say what is going on here exactly and get under the hood of this.

John: I do wonder how this conversation will age 10 years from now. Because there’s the boundaries between what is using generative AI to do visual effects versus to film a thing and to replace the crew. Those are the first principles I think we keep coming back to, is that are you making this choice so you can avoid hiring the people whose job normally would be to do things? This does feel like that situation to me.

Craig: There are situations, I feel, where AI is replacing what I would call rote work. If the job is to take this peg and put it in this hole 4,000 times a day, well, automation has done that. That’s been around forever. That’s not AI. That’s just industrial automation. When the robots came, people in the auto industry were very concerned. Repetitive rote tasks are ultimately going to go to machinery. Words? No.

John: Words and the idea of putting together a crew to film something or a crew to animate a thing, to make those fundamental choices, that’s really what we’re pushing back against. You and I both discussed, if we are using AI tools to clean up audio in the way that we would normally have used other digital tools, I don’t see that as a crisis.

Craig: No, that is using a calculator instead of an abacus. I’m okay with that. I think with things like animation, it’s quite likely that we will progress to a place where an artist is creating the first frame of a two-second shot and the last frame, and then there is some interpolation, and then choices are made. Which one of these interpolations do I want? It will make things go faster. That’s sort of inevitable. But the key choices, I think, need to stay with us, or else we will end up with a whole lot of what the kids online call AI slop, which is a wonderful phrase.

John: I’ll try to find a link to this to talk about it. There’s a study that showed that you have people looking at a bunch of poems, and some of the poems are the actual real classic poems, and some are in the style of these things. People inevitably prefer things that are in the style of the things that are in AI. It’s just like taste is a weird thing. There’s a reason why people sometimes want the slop.

Craig: Oh, yes. Well, we know. We play D&D every week. As is tradition, I try as best I can to provide Cool Ranch Doritos at every session. When they came up with the Cool Ranch powder in the laboratory–

John: The geniuses.

Craig: Geniuses. That is synthetic, and that is short-circuiting a lot of work that our brain normally has to do to get that rewarded. When we were kids, you would get banana-flavored taffy. It’s an ester. It’s a chemical, and it certainly doesn’t taste like banana. It tastes like something else. It goes right into happy center in your brain way faster than a fricking banana would.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: AI is artificial flavoring, and it is chemicals. Yes, it can do those things. At some point, somebody does still have to make new stuff.

John: I continue to believe that as we move into this next decade, and more synthetic entertainment becomes online, I do think there will be a gravitation towards some live, in-person things, artistic plays that are staged in front of you. You feel like, “Oh, this is actually really happening. I’m not being fed a thing. This is a real moment.”

Craig: Absolutely, yes. Spontaneity and connection will not go away.

John: Agreed. All right, let’s get to our first topic today, which is something that I realized this past week was a thing I felt a lot at the start of my career. It never really went away. It just changed a little bit. I want to describe early in my career, and I’m sure you’ll recognize what this feels like.

I remember waiting for word back from an agent who was reading my script at CAA. I would come back from work every day and look at my answering machine, which was actually a physical box answering machine, to see if there was a blinking light, if there was a message from this producer, whether this agent at CAA had read it and hopefully liked it.

I’m waiting for like a month every day looking for that thing. There’s just a constant waiting. Early in my career as well, my scripts were being sent out and I was waiting to hear back from stuff.

Then this last month or two, and I’m being a little bit vague on some of these projects, but these are the kinds of things I was encountering, which was on one project waiting for the big boss to sign off on making my deal because it’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of speculation around town that this person may not be in that job anymore. Oh, well, does he actually have the power to sign off? Do you even want him to sign off? Do you want to wait for the next person? Because if he goes, then it becomes a project under the old regime.

Craig: Sure. I like the race between pay me and get fired, which will win– That’s exciting.

John: Another example of waiting is waiting for notes on a draft because the director is off busy shooting another movie. Waiting to take out a project because the rights holders have another franchise that they’re currently out shopping and they don’t want to confuse the market. Waiting for the company boss before taking out a different pitch because their attention is divided. I just want to talk about waiting. The frustration of a screenwriter is that you’re generating work, but you’re also waiting for results and for other people to do stuff.

Craig: It’s incredibly frustrating. Having now been on both sides of that ball, I can say that the waiting is worse. The making people wait is a constant churning guilt. But at some point, there is your limit for attention and your ability to focus on things because there’s a lot. The people who are making these decisions typically have too many decisions to make, too much stuff to read, and then the waiting happens.

Also, in our business, crises tend to occupy everyone’s time all the time. If you’re not a crisis, you just fall back to secondary position. We have to make peace with this horrible feeling, what Melissa calls sitting in your discomfort. We have to sit in our discomfort, which is awful. It is the most brutal indication that we are not in control of anything at all.

John: Let’s talk about control because I think one of the real gifts we have as writers is unlike actors and other people who make movies, we do have the agency to just go off and do other stuff. We’re not waiting for someone to give us permission to do our trade, a director needs to be hired on to do a thing. An actor needs to be hired on to perform in a role. We can just do new stuff. Obviously, the simplest advice is, well, go off and write the next thing and don’t spend too many brain cycles worrying about that other thing.

I don’t want to let us off completely there because I do think there is a responsibility for checking in and reminding people and finding ways to check in without being so annoying that they hate you. Most times, they won’t, but you are sometimes creating a bit of guilt so they actually do pay attention.

There’s a balance between how often you should do it and how often your reps should do it. I think one of the things I’ve learned over the years is how to stagger it so that the reps check one week and I check the next week.

Craig: Sure. Little pro tip for reps out there, and I’m sure they all do this. One of the things that happens with people whose attention is very divided is that they will swivel towards the potential for a loss as opposed to looking for the potential for a win. If a rep calls and says, “Hey, just reminding you. My client wrote this great script, you really should read it. That’s the potential for a win.” They’re like, “Oh, I’ll get to it.” “Hey, the script that we sent you, we would really like for you to be this person’s agent or this producer. Heads up, a couple other people now are on top of it and we’re getting a lot of incoming calls. Just doing you the courtesy of letting there’s heat now.” Oh, I might lose something? Oh, here we go.”

A little bit of a psychology there. It is much harder to do as the writer than it is, and this is why reps are useful. One of the reasons, I would say.

John: Agreed. Sometimes that ticking clock that you’re putting on there is John’s not going to be available anymore. Basically, you need him to do this next draft. We’re past the reading period and now it’s time to go on to the next thing. We should describe a reading period.

Craig: Sure.

John: In our episode where we talked about your contract, for each step in your deal, so writing a first draft, for example, there’s a certain number amount of time for you to deliver that first draft. You turn it in and then it starts a reading period. Reading period’s often four weeks. Could be longer, but it’s negotiated. It’s written down in your contract. They will ignore that. Expect that to be the minimum amount of time it will take them to read this and get you back to notes.

It’s useful that it’s in your contract because then if they come back to you after that time and say like, “Hey, we need to start this next thing.” They pass the reading period. You’ve got some negotiating room to say like, “He’s actually doing this next thing first because we missed this.” It’s also an invitation for your reps to call when that reading period is about to be over and say, “Hey, just so we know, this is the thing.” Occasionally, I’ve even been able to get people to commence me on the next step, even though they really haven’t given me notes because–

Craig: What happens is there’s a point where whatever the optional is for the next step, that number, that pre-negotiated number, only applies for a certain amount of time. If they missed that time, and this happened to me earlier in my career, where they blew past it, didn’t realize it, then they greenlit the movie. Then they said, “Okay, it’s time for you to do your optional polish.” We were like, “What optional polish?” Now it’s greenlit. We have a gun to your heads. I ended up getting paid more for that polish than I did for the first draft because they blew through it and they screwed up.

Patience is one of those things that is highly recommended, only because we aren’t in control and we don’t know where the ball is going to bounce. We think that we are responsible to force the issue. The answer, whether it’s I like this, I don’t like this, I want you to be my client, I want to make this or I don’t, is actually fairly unpredictable. The factors that lead to that decision are far beyond simply the writing.

If you wait three more days, something crazy can happen and now everybody wants to do it. You wait three more days, something horrible might happen and nobody wants to do it. Your specific movie about this one person and this one, “Tom Cruise just signed on to do the same story somewhere else, you’re done.” There’s no way of knowing. I think distressingly, Zen is called for here. Don’t be passive, don’t give up, but also be aware that whatever you do, maybe you can impart about 10% of spin on the ball and the rest of it is up to fate.

John: The other thing I want to make sure listeners hear out of this is sometimes that the waiting, the maybe, the we’ll see, is actually just a soft pass. No one wants to say no, and they can’t say yes. They say maybe, but really it’s no. Sometimes when you’re not hearing back from people, it really is that they passed, they’ve moved on, they’re not thinking about it anymore, but they just don’t actually want to officially say no.

That’s why I’m always so grateful when people are very upfront about like, “This is what’s happening. Sorry, this is where we’re at.” There’ve been times where I’ve vehemently disagreed on the decision but totally respected the person for actually having the courage to say, “No, this is where it’s at.”

Craig: Exactly. Maybe without conditions is no. If it’s maybe, the following three things need to happen, but if they do, then yes, and you understand those three things? Okay, let’s see if those three things happen. Now, sometimes because people don’t like saying no, they’ll say maybe these three things have to happen. One of them is Jesus needs to come back. Okay, if you create an impossible condition, then it’s no also.

John: We’re waiting to see what the market’s like in a month or two months. It’s a no. It could potentially come into a yes, but it’s not likely to be a yes. You really should not pin any hopes on that.

Craig: Typically, when we’re dealing with large companies, the amount of money that we’re talking about here is not enough to rattle a stock price, nor is it an amount that gets shaken loose by the market. They have it or they just don’t want it. Because if you said, “Okay, we can wait for the market. Just FYI, Spielberg wants to do it over there. Let me know how the market is by tomorrow morning. Otherwise, we’re going to Spielberg.” They’ll buy it before you hang up the phone. As we often said, almost everything but money is no. That’s how it goes.

John: Certainly, something you brought up early on is we recognize that sometimes we are that person who is being ambiguous or is in the maybe situation. That’s why I try to be that person who gives a clear, quick answer on things. If somebody sends me a thing for a possible adaptation or whatever, “Is this of interest to you?” I will try to take a look at it that day and I’ll try to get a no as quickly as possible if it probably is a no. On a call, I will pass on something. They sent it to me and five minutes later, I’m emailing back, “Not for me, thanks.”

There are situations where I need to stew and ruminate on things or it’s a big book to read and it’s like I’m interested and it takes a while. I just try to make it clear that this is how much time it’s going to take me to do it, this is why I’m thinking about doing it and not hold up the gears because I’ve recognized over the years, sometimes I’ve been that person, just ambiguously sitting out there.

Craig: We also have an advantage to decision making, which is that we are the people that make stuff. We’re not really operating according to heat or market interest or any of that stuff. We’re just going by instinct. One of the things that you do have to do is accept that you may not want to do something that literally everybody else does want to do. You need to be okay with that.

I’m just thinking of– there was a book that is not yet published, but it’s in galleys and went around. It was a proposal and I understood the story behind it. I read the proposal and I thought, “Yes, this will probably be quite good in adaptation. I don’t want to be the one to adapt it.” Now, I need to make my peace with that because I’m pretty sure in about three days, I’m going to read that somebody incredible is doing it, which is exactly what happened. I was okay with that because I made my peace with it. I think it’s harder for the other side because they panic. There have been situations where people call back and they’re like, “Wait, did I say no? I meant yes.” No backsies.

John: No backsies, yes.

Craig: No backses.

John: That FOMO, getting over that fear of missing out.

Craig: FOMO.

John: That’s really what it is. I’ve also been in that situation. When I feel it, something that’s helpful for me is to get right back and say, “This is going to be such a great movie. I cannot wait to watch it. I’m not the person to do this. I’m sure you’re talking to X, Y, and Z. They’re going to kill it.”

Craig: It’s a very reassuring way to say, “It’s no, but it’s obvious you guys aren’t going to be left here with an unsold item. It’s going to sell. It’s going to sell to somebody great. Good news. You don’t have to worry about me being the person,” and always thank you so much for consideration because it’s true. It’s very lovely to be considered for anything. On the other side of things, I think for those of us who are stuck in limbo, waiting for things, creating a little FOMO, probably better than being thirsty.

John: Absolutely. Let’s wrap up this topic. Just getting back to what Melissa said is that making peace with the uncertainty, with the discomfort. I think sometimes just like recognizing it, labeling it, naming it. This is an open loop that I have no control over. It’s there. I see it. Now, we’re moving on and we’re doing other things. It was in that weird storm of uncertainty that I ended up writing Go. It was actually a very productive period because I was just waiting on other stuff. It’s like, I had the agency to do it and so just take advantage of what you can do as a writer, which a lot of other folks can’t.

Craig: If you can forget that you’re waiting, you win.

John: All right. Let’s get to the Three Page Challenge. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, we put out a call to our premium subscribers saying, “Hey, send us the first three pages of your screenplay, of your pilot. We will take a look at this on the air.” We put out a URL. It’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. People fill out a little form. They say it’s okay for us to talk about this on the air. Everything we’re saying here is because people send us these things and ask for honest feedback. We are not being mean to anybody.

Craig: Have people been suggesting that we’re being mean?

John: I think some people get uncomfortable with our– This is like, “Oh, you’re ragging on them.”

Craig: They need to sit in their discomfort because we are actually so much nicer than what we have had to deal with.

John: The thing is, we’re actually saying stuff, whereas other people would just like, “Eh.”

Craig: If people are paying you, brutal.

John: Yes, that can be brutal.

Craig: Brutal.

John: Brutal. Now, Drew, help us out here because you put out the call for folks to send in these submissions. You sent out an email through the little system. Talk to us about what happened there.

Drew: Oh, yes. We got 250 submissions in less than 48 hours. It was amazing. It was really good work.

Craig: Sheesh.

Drew: My eyes are burning right now.

Craig: [laughs] You read all of them?

Drew: Basically, yes.

Craig: My God, 750 pages.

John: Now, so the filtering mechanism you’re using is we only want scripts that don’t have obvious typos that feels messy in a way that’s like, we’re going to have to talk about the mess on the page.

Drew: Typos are automatically out, and multiple submissions, I’ve caught those before too. I’ll start reading and be like, “Oh, this is the same thing. Okay, gone.”

John: Now, any other patterns you noticed in this tranche of scripts?

Drew: Yes. Actually, this one, I’ve been seeing several scripts where character age and gender are in message board formatting, if that’s the right way to put it.

John: Describe it.

Drew: F24, M30, or something like that, which is new. It sort of makes sense. [crosstalk]

John: As long as we understand what it is, as long as it didn’t stop me, I’d be fine with it. It also reminds me of an advice column like, “Me, female 35, and my partner, male 26 are doing a thing.” I get that.

Craig: F number, M number, sure.

John: Anything else you’ve noticed, Drew?

Drew: We had a few scripts with email and contact info directly under the author name. It was titled by this person, then it was sandwiched right up. I don’t know if people are doing that for the Three Page Challenge.

John: I feel like bottom left corner is a great place to put that. I like it better down there.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s not the end of the world.

Craig: No. If I like the script, I don’t care where the email is.

John: All right. Let’s start off here with a sample called Scrambling by Tania Luna. Drew, if you could give us the synopsis for folks who are not reading along with us. If you are reading along with us, you might want to pause right now. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the PDF. You can read the PDF and then hear what we said. For Drew, everybody else, give us the synopsis.

Drew: Veronica, 24, walks quickly through the financial district of New York City, staring at her GPS, totally lost. She asks a stranger for directions to Front Street, which all the pedestrians are happy to give her, but their directions become this confusing cacophony of words. We intercut this with moments from her childhood. Lost in her school hallways, she imagines rolling fog and shadows until a teacher finds her.

Back in present day, when Veronica ends up on Fulton Street rather than Front, she hails a cab, which takes her to her destination only a few seconds away. She enters the ONG building, where the guard asks her which suite number she’s going to, and she’s overwhelmed by the amount of words in front of her.

John: All right. Let’s start with the title page here. Scrambling is written in a jumble of fonts. I actually really like the look of it. It’s fun. Then it says written by, and then it says Lania Tuna, and then that’s stripped through, and it says Tania Luna underneath that. Fun. We’re giving a sense of what the underlying dilemma is here for this character. It’s all in Courier Prime, which is a delightful typeface. I’ve always noticed that. It all looks really good. We got the email address and the phone number in the bottom left corner. Nothing on the cover page that concerned me. I had more concerns as we started going into this. Craig, talk to us about what you’re seeing as you enter.

Craig: Let’s talk about some good things first. These pages look great.

John: They do.

Craig: The way things are spread out is the golden ideal of a blend of action and dialogue. There’s some nice white space throughout. It was very easy to read. I moved across it nicely. The sentences were all well put together. The first thing that jumped out was this description. They walk fast, but Veronica, all caps underlined. I’m fine with that. Sure, why not? Veronica, and then in parentheses, 24, mixed-race, is faster.

I’m not sure mixed race is enough because that’s a very generic way to describe somebody’s ethnicity. If you’re going to make a point that it’s mixed-race, shouldn’t we know what the mix is?

John: Yes. In the next paragraph, we’re hearing long, straight black hair, yellow backpack, bouncing as she walk, runs, but we’re not finding anything more about her. Giving us just age and–

Craig: Basically, it was like saying Veronica, 24, won’t tell you what she looks like, is faster. That’s what it felt like to me. Either don’t or do. The halfway seemed a bit odd.

Now, what happens here over these three pages appears to be the demonstration of somebody struggling with some kind of information-processing disability. The glimpse of her struggling with this as a kid was interesting, but possibly out of place in this frantic opening.

The biggest issue I have here, as far as these three-page challenges go, this is a fairly high-level one. That’s good news because I think that Tania Luna can write fairly well here, is that if you’re demonstrating that somebody has a specific processing disability, don’t show me them doing something that I think they would be able to do regardless. If you’re 23 years old and you know that you have some issues processing information, direction, street names, things like that, and you’re going for a job interview, you will prepare. You’re not going to be helpless. You’re not going to wake up that morning and go, “Oh, right, I forgot I have extreme dyslexia or extreme dysgraphia, or I cannot remember names or places, or I’m face-blind.”

You know these things. Would it not be more interesting to meet this person in a situation where they did feel self-assured because they had prepared, and then something happens that they weren’t expecting, and then we see the expression of this disability and what it means for this person.

John: Yes. I think my frustration with the three pages on the whole was that it was three pages of just getting somebody to an office in a way that didn’t feel like, I didn’t learn that much about Veronica over the course of these three pages. I didn’t know anything specific about what she was. I didn’t get a sense of what her issue was. It’s some sort of information processing issue that she was overwhelmed by this scenario, but I didn’t know much specific about her, and that started with not getting a clear visual of her at the start.

I want to talk about just the very first lines here. With the New York City Financial District, skyscrapers jetted out of concrete like shiny Lego towers made by a kid without much of an imagination. I don’t see that specifically.

Craig: It’s also unnecessary because we know–

John: We know what skyscrapers are.

Craig: Yes, we know what New York looks like.

John: Cabs honk as they whiz by, a few meter trees, leaves yellow, dot the sidewalk. Not helping me get so much. Here’s my concern, tourists. So many tourists wander with the locals, business suits, business shoes, business expressions. I don’t associate a lot of tourists with the Financial District, so I think highlighting that there are people in business suits doing Wall Street work and that Veronica is maybe not part of that is actually more useful to us than the confusing thing of the tourists in there because I don’t understand who Veronica is in relationship to people she’s walking around. The GPS on her phone, the GPS just feels– it makes me think, “Oh, are we in the ‘90s?”

Craig: Right. It’s an incredibly ambiguous concept. It’s a technology that underpins all the other things we have.

John: We refer to it as a separate thing anymore.

Craig: Is she using Google Maps? Is she using Waze? Is she using Apple Maps? GPS is like a Garmin device.

John: Absolutely. Call up the map on her phone, which is fine. Beyond that, I mostly get it. Cutting back to the elementary school was probably not the right choice for cutting back and forth in these first pages leads me to think that we’re going to do this all the time in the movie, and that’s not, my friend. I get a little bit nervous about jumping back to the grade school so much at the start.

Craig: If you do jump back to the grade school, I need to know that it’s her memory. Otherwise, it’s the movie doing it, in which case I’m just frustrated. I feel, in this case, like the movie just said, “Oh, now, here’s her as a kid,” not okay, on her face, panicked, sweaty. There’s this memory of her being panicked and sweaty in a hallway. You’re absolutely right, where we place her in the beginning, none of those things are in service of her character. They don’t create specific obstacles. It isn’t a question that we almost missed her because she wasn’t interesting, but then we realized that’s part of the issue. It wasn’t that she was moving faster than everybody or getting jostled. Why the street? Why the here? What’s going on? Why not just, boom, panicked, running?

John: I want to get back to the thing you said early on. I said a person with this situation, this information processing disorder, would have a strategy going into it. They’d have a plan for coping ahead. That might actually be a more interesting thing. If we’re going to cut away from the moments, it might be more interesting to see what her plan was for that day, and then watch it fall apart.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You sit there and you make a plan. If I’m watching a 23-year-old young woman at night in her apartment practicing the map, practicing the movements, I would be so curious as to why. Then when I see her the next day moving, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, so she has some issue. That’s why she prepared this.” Then, “Oh, Con Ed has closed the street off. You can’t go that way. Oh, no.” Then I’m connected to her panic because I’m experiencing it. I’m part of it because I’ve been prepared for it.

One thing to consider, and I don’t know if Tania has this processing disorder or not, but one thing I would suggest, Tania, is to think, okay, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we think would be dramatic. Don’t worry. Better to be realistic. Then say, well, then what are the pettier, the smaller, the more mundane obstacles that will be unique to this situation?

John: As you were talking, I was thinking about, let’s say she’s coming from uptown to the Financial District. She gets on a train and she assumes it’s local and it’s going to stop, but it turns out to be an express, and so she goes three stops too far. We’ve all been in a situation where we’re like, wait, you just saw the stop go past you. We can handle that. We have an expectation of how we can handle that, but if we then cut back to her planning for how many stops it’s going to be, and you realize like, “Oh, this is a much bigger deal to her than it would be to me,” we’re leaning in, we’re curious.

Craig: Yes. If we replace this character with a blind character, we would not accept an opening where this blind character is moving through the New York streets with their cane, completely unaware of where they are. You would prepare, but we would be very invested if, for instance, like what you just said happened, and you realize, “Oh, my preparation is useless now. Now what do I do?” That creates connection with the character. What we don’t have here is a rooting interest because we’re just watching. We’re not invested.

John: Agreed.

Craig: I will say the ability to put sentences together, to lay things out in a convincing way, read, it was smooth as silk, so it’s all promising.

John: Absolutely. We’re sure pitching a better version of what’s already been solved.

Craig: Which we usually don’t have the opportunity to do, so that’s a good sign.

John: It is, agreed. Drew, our writer also sent through the logline to explain what’s happening in the full script. Tell us what else is happening in Scrambling.

Drew: The logline is, a dyslexic woman with a wild imagination accidentally lands a high-stakes job and must scramble to prove she belongs in a cutthroat corporate world that wasn’t built for her to succeed.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s right. It’s working girl. Great, love it.

Craig: Sure.

John: Let’s move on to our next script by Leah Newsome. This is Lump. Drew, help us out.

Drew: A desert town in the year 2140. Very pregnant Ingrid, early 30s, is being given a cervical exam by a doula in an old dingy motor home. The doula is feeling for something. She finds it, says no, and ends the exam. Ingrid hangs her head. On her way out, the doula encourages Ingrid to go to a hospital across the border as they’re cleaner. Ingrid is reluctant. Driving home, odd beeps and screeching comes over the radio. Ingrid accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic but avoids a crash. At home, Ingrid makes tea but panics when she drops some of the water on the floor. Sean enters, informing her that the water filter was jammed, and fence was cut.

John: All right, and so on the title page here it says, “Inspired by the mythical epic The King of Tars.” I’ve never heard of The King of Tars.

Craig: I’ve never heard of The King of Tars

John: I believe it exists.

Craig: It has to.

John: It makes me curious.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, and I also like that you’re saying the medieval epic because it’s like, nothing about this feels medieval. Great.

Craig: Yes, that’s inspiring.

John: Yes, if you’re just making it up just to pique our curiosity.

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Brilliant.

Craig: Actually, a genius movie.

John: Well played. All right, let me start us off here. We are starting off in this doula’s motorhome. I like the visuals that we’ve got here. I like sort of how we’re being set up. The super title over it says The Excised Lands 2140. I bristled a little bit at The Excised Lands. It just gave me that sort of fantasy sci-fi thing.

Craig: Slightly fanfic-ish name.

John: Yes, fanfic-ish. Yes, it does feel a little bit like that. This is a small thing. In the Courier Typeface, you use dash, dash. There’s no such thing as like a long em dash. Whatever Leah’s doing here to create those em dashes, those long dashes in the first paragraph and second paragraph, just a little bit weird. Just it bumped for me. I noticed it. Not a big thing.

What is a little bit bigger of a thing for me is fourth paragraph. She leans over Ingrid’s legs, finding the right angle. The last person who’s named was Ingrid. I didn’t realize it was the doula immediately. Just say doula. Just keep it. It’s that read to make sure that everything is unambiguous the first time you take a look at it. I was a little bit frustrated by the end of this first scene. Doula says, “Sorry.” I wanted more. I felt you were being ambiguous for no purpose. The doula would have said more there.

Craig: Yes, this is the reaction. The doula is doing a vaginal examination to check what? Dilation possibly to see if it’s time for the baby to be born. It’s a cervical exam. Cervical exam would imply, yes, that it is. We’re checking dilation, right? Then the doula feels for something difficult to find. The cervix is not difficult to find. Now I’m like, “Okay, well, what is difficult?”

John: Is something else happening in there?

Craig: Something else happening. Okay. We are in the future. Are we hoping for a two-headed baby? I don’t know. All I know is that the doula says, “No,” which is very casual. No, sorry. Ingrid drops her head onto the table defeated. It’s a bit like, I didn’t get the job. Not my baby’s dead. If your baby isn’t ready to be born, then that would be a different response. I had no idea what I was meant to feel there.

John: Yes. Here’s why it matters because we’ve established she’s very pregnant. We say that she’s very pregnant. We’re just seeing this exam or calling a cervical exam. Then the idea that she’s going to cross the border to do a doula makes me wonder, and not in the right way, is to wonder what’s going to happen next. I feel like if she’s close enough that she’s there for this exam, that the baby’s just about to come.

Craig: Let’s talk a little bit about the post-apocalypse, if I may.

John: Do you have any experience about that?

Craig: When you begin, it’s important to introduce changes slowly. The things that are contrasted to our life are important, but you don’t want to just pile on 12 of them at once.

John: No.

Craig: Because now nobody knows really what the rules are. Nobody knows quite what the connection is to the past. There’s so much going on here in this first scene that I don’t– They don’t have stirrups. She’s got to hold her own legs back. It’s in a motor home, but they do have rubber gloves or latex gloves. Then there’s an oil drum fire pit, which I have to say, I have a rule on The Last of Us.

John: No oil drum fire pits.

Craig: No oil drum fire pits. It is the most possible cliche thing to do in the apocalypse.

John: Where do we think– Was it Mad Max where we first established the post-apocalyptic oil drum fire pit?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Because they used to actually exist. In the Great Depression, that was actually a way that people kept warm.

Craig: From oil drums? It was a metal thing.

John: It was a metal– [crosstalk]

Craig: When do you find– Oil drums exist. You’ll see oil drums in the second season of The Last of Us, but not for braziers. Isn’t it rare to just see oil drums with the top lopped off that you can fill with garbage and light on fire, and they’re always on the street corner? I think it’s because it’s just they’re easy to source for productions. They’re at a height that makes it interesting. Otherwise, people have to sit. I don’t know. Anyway, but here’s what I really don’t understand. There’s an oil drum fire pit and it’s 100 degrees out.

John: Yes.

Craig: What? What?

John: Yes. What is that? They’re playing a card game near the fire.

Craig: Why would they be near the fire sweating through their clothes when it’s 100 degrees? Now, that may be explained also, but then I want the script to tell me that’s weird. At least to acknowledge to me, I’m supposed to note that that’s strange. One thing I do think that would help this is if we took the excise land 2140, moved it down a bit.

John: I was about to say the same thing. If that’s, as she’s getting back to her truck and everything else, that’s when we’re saying that, great. Because then also it makes that first scene clean. It can be about the duelist medical examination. We’ll notice like, okay, is this just a– what’s happening here?

Craig: Generally, you want to put that title over the widest possible shot.

John: Agreed.

Craig: Where you get the full scope of the world and you go, “Oh yes,” that’s not just that I’m in this horrible junkyard or a terrible mobile park. Look at the horizon, look at the sun, look at the sky, look at whatever.

John: I want to make a proposal for the second scene. In the second scene, we’re outside the motor home and Ingrid is walking to her truck. She gets in her truck. I would propose that we start the scene a little bit later on, because right now we have an action line. Ingrid pulls her keys out of her pocket. That’s not an interesting line to give to itself. If she were to get into the truck at that point and the rest of the conversation is there, then we can end on the finally get the car to start the engine rumble into life. I would say just get us into that car sooner. It’s probably going to be your friend.

Craig: This is also a place where knowing where people are and how motion is functioning will help. Why is the doula following her? I didn’t even know the doula was following me until she started talking. Is she trying to keep up with Ingrid? Is she worried about Ingrid? What she’s saying here, I can’t tell what the intention is. Is she worried for Ingrid’s life? Is she just being just a know-it-all? I can’t tell because I don’t know how she’s moving with her.

John: Yes. If that first line from the doula is like, listen, you could probably make it in time if you left now. If she was following her and like that’s the first line, in the sense that she’s restating a thing she said before.

Craig: Also it says exterior doula’s motorhome day. The motorhome door slams behind Ingrid and the doula. That’s it.

John: Who slammed it?

Craig: Then they don’t seem to be walking. They’re just standing there. Is the truck right next to the motorhome? Where is everything? This is the classic Lindsey Durant question. Where are they standing? Are they moving? Where is the truck? Where are the women relative to the motorhome?

John: My instinct is they should be in motion as the scene starts.

Craig: It feels like they should be in motion because I would understand that the doula is worried about her. For the doula to be worried about her, I need to go back to the prior scene where Ingrid drops her head onto the table, defeated, then starts to get up. The doula goes, “Wait, wait, wait.” Cut to, boom. “Hold on, hold on.” Just because I don’t know why this next bit is happening. Just thinking about how people actually function. They don’t just do nothing and then suddenly appear together outside of the door. Find the intention.

John: Yes, agreed. As we get into Ingrid’s truck, she’s driving back. I was confused by the radio voice because the radio voice to me feels like, at first I thought, is it a dispatcher? No, it’s just convenient radio-

Craig: It’s the news.

John: -telling up the news.

Craig: It’s the news. I really struggle with this. Three arrested west of the former municipality of Phoenix.

John: Oh, come on.

Craig: If it is 2140, you’re not calling it the– That’s like us referring to New York as the former New Amsterdam today. We don’t do that, right? You could call it west of Phoenix territory or west of– Fallout would call it New Phoenix. That’s what they do. New Vegas. Why is there just this casual– If you have this casual news update, I feel like there’s way more civilization going on than we thought there would be.

John: With this last line, suspects were found with stolen rations on their persons. That feels police-y. That feels like police dispatcher. Finding the right level for that is interesting.

It sounds like, Leah, we’re really harping on a lot of stuff. I want to love this. I actually like the space of it. I love a pregnant woman in this space and trying to make a decision about what to do next. We’re about to get to Sean, who’s apparently the father of the kid. We’re about to meet him. That scene is better. We don’t know who Sean is. He’s not given any other uppercase name. I’m curious to keep reading based on what you’ve done so far.

Craig: Yes. I love a scene that begins with a cervical exam. If you start with a cervical exam, hats off, good for you. Audacious, bold. There is a lot of clunky, cliche, sci-fi stuff going on here that you have to be better than because you just don’t want to end up in a Wattpad world with this stuff, right?

Last thing is to just think about where everybody is, give the audience a chance to visualize things. It means say less and make the things you say matter more. We are interior cat house evening. What does the exterior look like? Where is it? I don’t know.

John: I don’t know what interior cat house means.

Craig: I don’t know either. Cat house could be whore house.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then it says her house. I don’t know what’s going on. Then, listen, Sean is saying a bunch of things that I suspect are intentionally confusing. The filter, what is it? The fence, don’t know. Something with the water. Not sure. All fine.

John: All fine. He’s entering in as if he’s just continuing a previous conversation, which makes sense for people who know each other well.

Craig: She knows something from the doula. She hasn’t told him. Am I looking at her face? Is she contemplating telling him? Is she worried about telling him?

John: I don’t know what she knows.

Craig: I don’t know either. All I know is that she doesn’t seem to be concerned about it here anymore either. I think all this is to say to Leah, “If there’s one word I could give you, Leah, as advice for this, it is to focus. Focus in on what you want me to see. Focus in on why it matters. Focus in on, visually, on your frame, the movement, all of it.”

John: Yes, watch the scenes.

Craig: Watch the scenes. These feel written. They don’t feel watched.

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? What is the log line? What else is going to be happening in Lump?

Drew: Over a century into the water crisis, a couple moves to the former state of Arizona where they’re pulled into a violent and mystical cult of doulas following the birth of their Lumpchild.

Craig: Okay. My interest is piqued. I’ve never considered that there would be a cult of violent doulas. That’s hysterical. I don’t know what a Lumpchild is. Cool. A lot of questions.

John: A lot of questions. I would say I’m intrigued because the fact that the doulas are an important part of the whole story, I wasn’t getting that out of them.

Craig: Not at all.

John: I’m surprised that thing we saw in the first frame is actually a crucial part of the whole rest.

Craig: Because they showed us doula.

John: Doula, yes.

Craig: Not doulas.

John: There were other dusty old women out there, but–

Craig: They were playing cards by a fire in 100-degree heat. The thing that I think is missing from that log line that I’d love to hear is some brief reference to why doulas matter at all in this new world, or at least more than they did now, or why they would conglomerate into a violent cult in a world with terrible infertility problems. Yes. In a world where no new babies have been born. In a world where only 1 out of 1,000 children survive. Something to create relevance so that it’s not just– Because you could take the word doulas out and replace it with janitors, bubblegum manufacturers, girl scouts.

John: It doesn’t matter. The thing I was missing in that log line is Ingrid must make a choice. Basically, what is the decision that this central character has to make? Yes.

All right, let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is The Dread Pirate Roberts, written by J. Bryan Dick. Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re dropped from space down towards earth, specifically the Carolina coast, and into the middle of a 17th-century naval battle between two ships, the Revenge, which is filled with pirates, and the Queen’s Pride, which is a Navy ship. The captain of the Queen’s Pride believes they’re winning, sends his steward, Wesley, 18, to go get his victory snuff. As he does, the Revenge turns and rams the Queen’s Pride, and pirates storm the ship. Too scared to do it himself, the captain gives Wesley a dagger to cut them free from the pirates’ grappling hooks. Wesley is quickly stopped by a pirate named Scars, who encourages him to jump into the ocean like the rest of the Navy sailors.

Wesley pretends to run away but grabs a rope and slingshots back and knocks out Scars to cut the rope. Soon, a pirate in all black soars over them all, swinging up to the crow’s nest triumphantly, and a knife is put to Wesley’s neck.”

John: Now, for listeners who are saying, “Hey, that sounds familiar,” we should say that underneath the title on the title page, it says, a pilot for the lost adventures of the black-masked scallywags from The Princess Bride, William Goldman’s timeless tale of true love. This is literally fan fiction.

Craig: Yes, and that’s fine.

John: Fine.

Craig: Are you allowed to sell this? No, not without permission. Are you allowed to write it as a sample? 100%. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that.

John: I actually applaud this choice, because if I needed to read a sample, and I sort of know what the source material is, can this guy write in this kind of a style? Can it? Sure, and I think, actually, J. Bryan Dick did a nice job here. I enjoyed reading these pages.

Craig: Yes, the challenge with this is the bar gets higher.

John: It does.

Craig: Because everybody’s aware that you’re cheating. You’re not creating new characters. You’re not creating a new world. You’re not creating a tone. You’re building off of something. Therefore, a little more expectation, because you haven’t had to cook at all yourself. In addition, when it’s something that’s derived from a beloved movie, like The Princess Bride, that, basically, everyone has seen in our business multiple times, you need to also nail it. It’s not enough to be good. It felt good, but I wasn’t delighted. It just sort of was a pretty typical naval battle.

Listen, you’re trying to write like William Goldman. What a target that you put on your back. It’s confident. It’s crackling. There was one moment where I thought, “Oh, there’s a missed opportunity, where the captain gets scared and sends Wesley.” That felt like it could have been a little bit more of a Goldmanesque turn from overconfident bravery to, oh, you there. I have a thought. It just felt so quick as to be almost arbitrary. Yes. It’s a naval battle. I will say, I appreciated that J. Bryan didn’t bury us in action description. The boats collide and side by side. Got it. Okay. I can do that math.

John: Absolutely. We were focused on characters during it, which was crucial. I did feel there was a missed opportunity with the captain who’s just captain. Give that captain a name that crackles. His first line is only okay. The first line is, these pickeroons will be food for the sea. Reload. Make this pass our last. There’s a better version of that first line. I like pickeroons, but like these pickeroons will feed the sea, man. Something about that could feel fun. Let us also know that this is a bit of a comedy, because I didn’t feel like we were quite getting to the joke. Even though the captain is not going to be a crucial character, he’s the first person who speaks, and that becomes important.

Craig: Yes. That’s the issue is everything has to be as good as The Princess Bride.

John: Reading this made me think back to Mindy Kaling when she was on the show. We were talking about when she’s staffing for shows, she gets frustrated by reading original pilots, and she’s like, “I really miss the day when you would read, specs of existing shows, because then you can see like, can this person write in somebody else’s voice?” That’s obviously what she needs to know. It’s this, can this person do somebody else’s thing?

I think what’s nice about this is, as a sample would be like, “Oh, this person is adaptable and can answer, can get a thing, which is really useful.” In a weird way, I suspect that this pilot script, which you can’t shoot. If it’s all at this quality and beyond this quality, will be useful because it shows the ability to match a style that’s not their own.

Craig: This would obviously hinge on the relationship between Wesley and the Dread Pirate Roberts. The promise of that story is enough to keep me going. One thing that’s important tonally is that The Princess Bride was framed as a tale where a grandfather is reading from a novel to his grandson. I think that that is baked in to the world of The Princess Bride. Even if you just want to start inside of it, which I think is reasonable, here’s what you can’t do.

On page three, Scars says, “What’ll it be, boy?” With that, young Wesley charges to the side of the ship. Scars reacts. That was too easy. Young Wesley doesn’t go overboard. He launches himself into a taut rope and slingshots back at Scars. Scars says, “Oh, shi–.” We don’t curse in The Princess Bride. Ever. That’s not a thing. We don’t do that. Understanding tone is massively important.

John: Absolutely. That oh, sh, could be a reaction from Scars. You can put that in italics after that. We wouldn’t say it.

Craig: We just wouldn’t. We would not say that.

John: We would not say that. That idea of do you, will J. Bryan Dick adopt that framing that this is a tale being told within this? Maybe. I can imagine at a certain point, I think something just stops. It’s like, but what happened next? Sure. Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Promise of fun. Zippy pages to read. Not a ton of what I would call fresh invention here. Enough to make me wonder like, okay. I will say like the great idea here is to meet the Dread Pirate Roberts. Because we never met him. Yes. We met Wesley. He was not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. [crosstalk]

John: That’s fine. What’s also helpful about this is like, if you had to pick between 10 things to read and you saw this one, it’s like, oh, I know what this is going to be. There’s something comfortable about that.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Drew, help us out. What else? The long line for the rest of this pilot.

Drew: Set in the Princess Bride world, the Dread Pirate Roberts TV series, follows the adventures of each person who donned the black mask to sail the high seas and command the Revenge.

John: Oh, well, that’s an interesting idea that it’s not just Wesley. It could also be like the history of.

Craig: Then why are we starting with Wesley?

John: What, that he was the last one?

Craig: Then we go backwards?

John: Maybe there’s a whole cadre of other folks who are still around and a lot.

Craig: I don’t want to watch that. I’ll tell you why. Because television shows, unless they are anthology shows like Black Mirror, where everything is a different story. It’s about connecting with the characters and relationships. I want to watch the Dread Pirate Roberts tutor this young lad, to whom he says at the end of every day, “Well done, probably kill you in the morning,” and then doesn’t. I want to see that father-son relationship happen. I don’t want to just keep meeting new Dread Pirate Robertses.

John: Yes, I do. I guess the version of this I want is basically Hacks, but it’s pirates.

Craig: Sure. Did you see Our Flag Means Death?

John: I did not get into Our Flag Means Death. But it’s in that same space, for sure.

Craig: It is in that same space, although definitely a different tone. What I loved is you got to meet this ship full of wackos and got under the hood of those wackos. It was appreciated if I kept going to different ships and different people.

John: I doubt that’s really what’s happening here. This reminds me of, because I was just editing the chapter on what kind of story this is. Basically, we’re talking through in this strip dance book chapter, I have this idea. Is it a movie idea? Is it a TV idea? There is a movie idea for the Dread Pirate Roberts, where it’s all contained within one thing. The TV show version of this is fun in the same way that Cheers is fun. Is that like you are following a group of people and sort of the adventures of the week.

Craig: They don’t change.

John: Exactly. They don’t change.

Craig: That’s the key. Every week we meet a new bartender in Cheers. That part, I do think it would be a wonderful, I presume that this would be a movie.

John: It feels like it should be a movie. Let’s talk about just the final, could you actually make this thing? You could if this were terrific. I don’t know who owns the rights. Is it Castle Rock? Who would own this?

Craig: Yes. It’s Castle Rock, but you would probably need– yes, you wouldn’t need permission from William Goldman. Unless you were, no, you might-

John: Because of the underlying book.

Craig: Because of the underlying book.

John: Yes. I suspect in buying the rights to the book.

Craig: They probably bought it all out in perpetuity across the universe for all time. Yes, you’re probably right. Then it would be Castle Rock. Not impossible, but you’d have to know there would be a tremendous outcry.

John: There would be. The standards would have to be really high.

Craig: This is meant for, hey, I’m a good writer. Not, hey, make this show.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good writing sample. We want to thank everybody who submitted, all 250 of you who submitted, especially these three writers for letting us talk about their work on the air. Drew, thank you again for burning your eyes out to read through all of 250 of these.

Craig: I don’t know how you did that.

John: It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show that’s actually in the same space. It’s a specific episode of a TV series called The Goes Wrong Show.

Craig, you may have seen on Broadway, there’s a show, The Play That Goes Wrong. There’s also a TV series, which the premise is that it’s a theater troupe that puts on a show for television each week. A director explains what the goal was and also tells what challenges they felt they encountered that week. Never mind, it’s going to go fine for this live TV thing. Of course, things go wrong at the premise.

The episode, if people are, if that’s at all appealing to you, the episode I recommend to folks is one called 90 Degrees. It’s a Tennessee Williams type play. The premise of the episode is that the set designers mistook 90 Degrees as instructions for how one set was supposed to be built.

Craig: Everything is turned.

John: Everything is turned. It’s turned 90 degrees. The cameras also turn 90 degrees for it. You have characters who are trying to sit around this table and they’re falling down, and gravity just works against them. It’s incredibly dumb, but also just delightful.

Craig: I love dumb.

John: It’s a thing you could also watch with your kids because it’s absurd and it’s completely safe.

Craig: Where would I find that?

John: I think we found it on Amazon Prime. I would just google and see what servers you can find it on.

Craig: Sure.

John: All right. What do you got for us?

Craig: My one cool thing is someone I met in Austin. We were down there for South by Southwest and myself and Neil Druckmann and the many of the cast of The Last of Us got to meet Cookie Monster.

John: Oh my God. Cookie Monster’s the best.

Craig: And Elmo. No offense to Elmo. Elmo’s great. Cookie Monster has been there, John, for our entire lives. It was so strange to meet a puppet as a 53-year-old and feel like you might cry because it’s like when you smell something from your childhood, it’s just this instant thing of getting back. Now, one thing I noticed about Cookie Monster that I did not expect is he’s enormous. Those puppets are huge. They’re so much bigger than you think they are. They’re so big.

It was pretty, it reminded me of how powerful Sesame Street is as a cultural institution. To the extent that these kinds of cultural institutions are being assaulted and undermined, it’s so distressing because it is just an absolute positive thing that has lasted. Every generation of children that comes along magically loves Cookie Monster. The color of the blue, just his blue made me so happy. I just want to thank Sesame Street and Cookie Monster for welcoming us into their studio. I still don’t know why, but they did. [laughter]

John: Craig, tell me, so I’ve never interacted with Muppets. Was it hard to maintain eye contact with the puppet and ignore the puppeteer?

Craig: No, because the puppeteer gets very low. There’s a camera that’s filming things and the puppeteer gets very low. In fact, there’s quite a bit of scrambling right before they roll, which is like, lower, no, see you, lower. That’s why the puppet is so big. Because it actually has to fill a lot of space below frame to make sure that the puppeteer is not in the frame.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our host for this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s 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 and drinkware. You will find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the secret things we noticed that let us know that something has been re-shot. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, you are watching a movie, you’re watching a TV show, and your little radar is like, okay, there’s a recut here, something’s changed, something went off. What are some things that are tipping you off that things changed here?

Craig: The biggest indication is there is a rather long and explainy bit of dialogue that is not on camera. Someone is, the person who’s not on camera that’s talking to the person who is on camera says a long thing that explains a thing that they wouldn’t have normally said or needed to explain because he would have seen it, which is probably covering for the fact that that thing was essential to know for the plot, but the scene just wasn’t working and so they cut it.

John: Absolutely. We’ve both been in situations where in post, you are adding ADR lines, looping lines to take care of a little bridge or situation. ADR is used to fix little technical mistakes but also can be used to correct some narrative issues because a scene got dropped out because a scene where that information used to happen is no longer there. Watching the current season of Severance, and we’re recording this before the final episode, and I don’t really know any of the backstory on Severance, what happened this season.

Watching it, I did notice a few moments in these last few episodes where like, okay, something shifted here. One of those things, situations was a crucial word or term was used and we were not on the characters while they were saying it or we suddenly cut incredibly wide when a character says a certain phrase. It led me to believe like, okay, something shifted here. There was also a situation where one character had a confrontation, drove away to leave the show and then comes back and then leaves the show again. My suspicion is that the episode in which those were happening got shifted later on in the season and we were moving stuff around to accommodate that change.

Craig: That could absolutely be true. The interesting thing about the streaming world now is that episodes have variable lengths. It’s not necessarily the case that if you see a very short episode or a very long episode that things, may have, but sometimes when an episode is very short, it’s because there were some scenes, it’s rare to plan for an episode to be say 35 minutes if you’re an hour-long show. There may have been some things that got cut.

The other thing, let’s talk about an additive thing that is an indication. When a sequence occurs that is very self-contained and exciting, actiony, scary, sexy, one of these big, loud, noisy scenes that didn’t really feel like it needed to be there, didn’t change anything, suddenly sort of happened, didn’t impact stuff. That is oftentimes the result of a studio network going, this thing needs to be louder, sexier. I need a car chase, and so they just make one happen and shove it in. If you ever feel like something got shoved in, it’s probably because it got shoved in.

John: A thing I will notice is that you have key characters having a scene on a set with nobody else around them. It feels like a reshoot. It feels like we haven’t established anybody else in the world who could be in this thing, but we need to have this moment happen. Therefore, we’re putting them in this set. One of the recent Marvel movies, I did notice there were some sequences were like, “Wait, why are we here? What is this place that we’re in?” It’s a place that was not established. It’s a place that serves no other function, and yet we’re in this place for this one scene to happen. To me, it felt like six months later, they brought everybody back and shot this one thing.

Craig: If you see something like that that isn’t really set up and isn’t used again, either it was created for that, or there were five scenes in that thing. All of them except one guy. That’s another good point. Sometimes that can be an indication.

You’re right to suggest that sometimes it’s those scenes between two characters sitting somewhere that are additional photography, but sometimes those are the best scenes. Very famously, we had David Benioff and Dan Weiss on our show, and they talked about how in the first season of Game of Thrones, they just missed the target on how long the episode should be and needed to go back and put stuff in.

They were out of money, so they did the cheapest thing, which was write conversations between two people in a room that already exists, and lo and behold, those are some of the best scenes in season one because they’re good writers. They did a great job of creating scenes where you, what happened inside of there wasn’t just plot or filler, it helped inform the conflict and the character.

John: Yes, one of the issues with the way we make TV shows now, especially for series on streaming, is that we’ll often block shoot things. We could block shoot the entire eight episodes or 10 episodes of the season, but more likely we’re doing things in chunks and stuff moves around. I’ve talked with show owners who they need to do reshoots, and suddenly they have like four directors who are like all shooting the same week in the same space to do stuff. It gets to be really, really complicated. It’s not surprising that you didn’t go in intending the scene to work that way.

Clearly, that was what you could do with the situation you had. You have a character giving a piece of information that’s like, is not the most organic way to do a thing, but it’s who you had available at the moment to make this bridge fit.

Craig: Yes, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. You either are on a show where you have the resources to accommodate those things. It was raining that day and we needed it to be sunny. We’re going to wait for it to be sunny and do it again. It was raining that day, we needed it to be sunny. They’re going to be in the rain, and we’re not going to really talk about it. The fact that the scene before and the scene after are on the same day are sunny, just going to happen. Things like that do happen. It is remarkable what people notice and don’t notice.

One of the things about all of these strange bumpy moments is that we’re very well attuned to them, but they wouldn’t happen so frequently if they didn’t work. They actually get away with it all the time.

John: The other thing I’ll notice about, something has changed here. A scene got dropped, something got wedged in there, endless days or nights, or it goes day to night, day to night in a way that’s not really possible. These two things could not be happening simultaneously, and that’s just a thing. No, the writers aren’t idiots. It’s just that something changed and something shifted, and this is sort of what we can do. This is where we’re at.

Craig: Yes, if something occurs that is jolting in a superficial way, it’s probably because there was something in between that got lost. If you have characters who are getting to know each other at work, and then the next scene is it’s the evening, and they’re at some sort of very swanky party, and the woman is dressed in this like rotten ballgown. The guy’s in a tux, and you’re like, where did you come from? Why is this totally occurring now in this way?

Something got lost here, and one thing that we always have to watch out for when we’re doing all of our work is that if the people who are paying for it are losing faith in it, or their faith is wobbly, they will generally resort to faster. Go faster. You don’t need that. It’s slowing us down, and they have such a lower sensitivity to things not making sense than we do. We’ll say, well, that literally will not make sense now. If we take that out, this will not make sense, and they don’t care a lot, and that’s a fight you have to have.

John: Because they are familiar with the bad version, and it’s like, let’s get rid of the bad stuff, and if we get rid of the bad stuff, it’s all really good. It’s like, no, it may just not make any sense.

Craig: In their defense, I have watched things before that I’ve enjoyed, where at some point I went, I don’t know, I don’t understand that. Anyway, okay, still, what happens next? You can get past some of those things.

Now, what’s interesting is when you have a show that is built heavily on intentional mystery/confusion puzzle boxing, like Severance, it can actually be very hard to tell. Did this happen because you’re screwing with my head? Did this happen because something went a bit awry in production? It’s hard to tell. I give Severance the benefit of the doubt that everything is intentional. There is that illusion of intentionality that no matter what we see on screen, it was exactly the way they wanted us to see it.

It could be, well, maybe that was a stylistic choice to have them say that line over this big, huge wide shot. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but it’s cumulative. You get one of those, okay, you let it go. Two, eh, you start getting four or five of those things, the boat’s going to sink.

John: Yes. Over the summer, I helped out on a show that was doing reshoots, and you’re trying to be surgical, and you’re trying to not break any of the good stuff, but there have been times where it’s like, okay, that’s actually a pretty good scene, but it just doesn’t make sense with where we are right now, and we’re going to have to take all that information and put it into a new scene where it actually is where things fit better, and that’s, the frustration is that sometimes you have to lose good stuff in order to make everything else fit together right.

Craig: I’m going to give you, I rarely do this, but I will give you a specific example from my own career. I worked on the second Snow White and the Huntsman movie, and what had happened was they had a script, well, I’d actually worked on a script, I think, and that had gotten the thing to a green light, and then someone came on to make the movie, and they rewrote the script completely, and got all the way, I think, to they were like a week away from shooting, and the studio said, “Wait, hold on, we don’t like this.”

They then came back to me and said, “You’ve got about two weeks, and here’s the deal. These sets have been built, and these people have been cast, and this stuff is occurring because we’ve already spent the money on the visual effects development, so that’s not changing, but we need to make this all make sense, and so then it became an exercise in, right: I’m going to get some blue index cards that are stuff I can’t change, and now I have all these white index cards, and I have to figure out how to lead into those blue cards and out of those blue cards and into the next blue cards in a way that is at least coherent, and then provides hopefully what the actors are looking for, the studio’s looking for, there’s a new filmmaker on board, what is that filmmaker looking for, and that was very difficult, and in the end, you don’t get a prize for solving the math problem. Basically, people didn’t like it very much because it was, you could tell, it was like something had gone wrong here.

John: Absolutely, so what you’re describing is very analogous to what I was describing in the sense of things hadn’t been shot, but they might as well have been shot because you were locked into certain sets, I was locked into certain scenes, which that already exists, we’re never giving that actor back, so we got to go get me into it now in a way and put that in a place where it actually makes sense.

Craig: It doesn’t matter how much you protest, it doesn’t matter how much you say, if you would just not have to have this in that, and they’re like, yes, but we do, so that’s what’s happening, and also, you can’t write anything that would require a new set build. We don’t have the money or the time. Those kinds of math problems are sometimes how movies happen.

John: Absolutely, and sometimes creative constraints can lead to great solutions, but in two weeks, they’re not going to likely get you the best solution.

Craig: Everybody’s thinking maybe this will be, because it’s happened, maybe this will be that chaotic thing that comes together and is brilliant, because it’s happened. Usually, the best you can hope for is coherent.

John: Let’s wrap this up by saying, these are things that we’re noticing when we’re watching other people’s projects, but there’s so many things we’re not noticing at all. The patches were so well done that even we couldn’t see it. It was like the hardwood floors, they somehow matched everything together. It’s like, wow, you did a great job, because I did not know there was that issue there at all.

Craig: Listen, the first episode of The Last of Us was the first two episodes of The Last of Us that were combined together with some stuff removed and some stuff that I redid, and just a lot of interesting, careful weaving to make it as seamless as– and to make it seem inevitable, like it was meant to be that way. Tricky.

John: Tricky, yes. When it works, it works.

Craig: When it works, it works. That’s great. Thank you.

Links:

• Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! SCRAMBLING by Tania Luna, LUMP by Leah Newsom, and THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS by J. Bryan Dick
• The King of Tars
• Sesame Street
• The Goes Wrong Show on Prime
• 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 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.