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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-noah-baumbach).

**John August:** Hey, so today’s show has a few bad words. There’s a clip, and in that clip an actor is saying some four-letter words. So if you’re in the car with your kids maybe skip over that part. Also, they may not want to hear about a couple going through divorce. But, maybe they will. So, that’s the one language warning for this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Noah Baumbach:** I’m Noah Baumbach.

**John:** And this is Episode 435 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on assignment.

Luckily today we are joined by writer and director Noah Baumbach whose movies include The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Frances Ha, and his most recent film, which is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Welcome Noah.

**Noah:** Thank you.

**John:** It is so good to have you here. There’s a couple things I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk about two handers. So Craig and I often talk about movies that have two central characters and generally those are romantic comedies or they’re buddy pictures. Your movie is neither of those things, and yet you still have to find the balance of those two characters and their shifting POVs. So I really want to get into that. I want to talk about the passage of time, because your movie skips ahead in ways that movies don’t tend to do these days. I want to talk about the passage of time.

**Noah:** OK.

**John:** Your movie is funny. So even though there are big serious topics, it’s really funny. So I want to talk about finding the jokes in those moments and trying to balance the comedy and the drama in your story. You have some great speeches in your movie, but you also have a lot of spontaneous dialogue. So I want to talk about the contrast between writing what characters would say in the moment versus things they kind of rehearse to say.

And we can talk about this because we have the script in front of us. So this is going to be one of those episodes where if people want to print out the script or look at the PDF online we might refer to page numbers. So, this is an episode where page numbers can actually matter. Sound fun?

**Noah:** Sounds great.

**John:** Cool. We have a tiny bit of housekeeping. We’ve been talking about the agency agreement between the WGA. This last week APA signed with the WGA. The week before it was Gersh. So congrats APA. And also Craig will be back with us for a bonus segment at the end of this show. So a reminder that Premium members get a bonus segment at the end of the main show. This week Craig and I will discuss escape rooms. Do you like escape rooms? Have you been to an escape room in LA?

**Noah:** I just heard about what this is. I think I know what it is.

**John:** So escape room, it is a concept where you and a group of friends are kind of locked into a room and there’s all sorts of puzzles and you have to find your way out of it. Craig and I do these a lot. We did one right before the holidays. So we’re going to talk through our techniques and recommendations for escape rooms. So if it’s something you considered doing in the future you’ll want to hear this bonus segment.

**Noah:** So you go to like a mall that has escape rooms?

**John:** Sometimes at malls. In Los Angeles you often find them in sort of industrial districts. And so there might be two or three escape rooms at industrial districts. Generally it’s about an hour to try to get out, if you get out in time. They are tremendously fun. So we have recommendations for anyone who is doing it for the first time, or seasoned pros.

**Noah:** And who creates them?

**John:** Very smart people. Puzzle designers. Listeners of the show, there’s a lot of overlap between screenwriters I think and the narrative designers who are putting together these experiences. But it’s people who want to do that kind of storytelling but in a limited period of time in a limited space. It has overlap with theater, so that also ties in with some things I know you’re interested in. It’s how you give people an experience of being in a place and a time.

**Noah:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll get into that. But, let’s talk about Marriage Story. What is the origin of Marriage Story? What was the first stuff in Marriage Story that you actually wrote down?

**Noah:** It’s hard for me to remember. I don’t know if you have this feeling of often a kind of amnesia. Once you get into the script it’s hard to know how you got there exactly. And often when I look back at old notebooks I’m reminded and surprised by things that I thought I maybe discovered later that I actually had earlier and vice versa. I think it’s often a confluence of things that gets me excited about writing something. And with this one there were various things that ranged from working with Adam Driver again to thinking about new ways of telling a love story, or new to me anyway. And exploring divorce and both the minutia of what that system is and can be.

And then probably hundreds of other little notes and things that have found their way in that sort of gave me a kind of in to, you know, or at least the feeling that, OK, now I can start to write this thing. I don’t know if you have that feeling. It’s like you start writing, or when I start writing it’s like I write and in one sense I feel, OK, this feels like a movie to me and I feel like I can see the movie. But at the same of course you can’t see anything. And so you put one foot in front of the other.

**John:** So you talked about notes and notebooks. How important is that process to you? So you’re sort of gathering up your wool before you knit the sweater.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Are you methodical about that? Or as an idea hits you you will take some notes? What is that pre-writing process like for you?

**Noah:** Well, I think in general over the course of a day I will just write something down if it occurs to me. What tends to happen – once I start maybe a story or some sort of world starts to form itself then every idea or thought I have I almost will sort of pass it through does this fit in the thing that I’m trying to create. And some do, some don’t. Some come back later.

So, I have sort of notebooks, like little notebooks that I carry with me, and then I have more of like a notebook I have at home that I write longhand in. I tend to like to write longhand in earlier stages. And often I’ll find I’ll even write the same note or idea a few times in the book, almost like I’m trying to work out why it’s interesting to me. And at some point I’ll start transferring notes into a Final Draft document which is sort of when – so at least I have it ready when I feel like it maybe can turn into a script.

**John:** So for Marriage Story by the point where you’re switching from longhand into typing into the computer did you know your characters? Did you know the boundaries of the movie by that point?

**Noah:** I think, I mean, I had the notion that it would be a two-hander. That it would be both her and his story. I had some ideas for scenes. I had some ideas for story. The locations. I think all of that was in there fairly early. You know, all the sort of various relationships or how the story was going to tell itself I didn’t know yet.

**John:** Well how the story tells itself is really surprising to me when I saw it because I think I went into the movie with an expectation that we would see this couple either meet or fall in love and we’d see things go wrong, so the expectation would be there’s going to be a turn and we’re going to see everything fall apart. And what really excited in the opening of your film is you see those moments and you realize later what the context is of those moments. That it wasn’t what you anticipated being.

How early in the process did you write that opening sequence? Those first six or seven pages?

**Noah:** I think fairly early. Because I always knew the movie was going to start at the end of the marriage. And so I was sort of tasked with that challenge of investing you in a relationship that’s already over in a sense. And I wrote those sequences I think to some degree as almost an exercise for myself to kind of figure out the characters. Because both sequences are about both of them. I mean, one is the object, but the one speaking is also revealing themselves as well. They’re revealing what they – it’s what they see in the other person which says as much about them as it does about the person they’re talking about.

And it was a way to kind of get inside their relationship and to – I got ideas for character in that as well, of course, because in coming up with things that he might say about her, you know, that she would be this sort of person and vice versa when she talks about him. It also establishes their sort of milieu, their jobs, their everyday life, their son. But in doing that I also realized it provided me with a good beginning.

And as you say in some ways we kind of pull the rug out from under you. But I also felt like it actually – it also sort of sets you up for what the movie is going to be about which is ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances in some sense.

**John:** So, because this is a podcast we will play this opening scene so people can listen to it, but if people want to read through in the script we’re talking about the first four to five pages is what we’re going to cover in this opening section. So let’s take a listen to the opening of Marriage Story.

[Clip plays]

**Adam Driver:** What I love about Nicole. She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things. She really listens when someone is talking. Sometimes she listens too much for too long. She’s a good citizen. She always knows the right thing to do when it comes to difficult family shit. I get stuck in my ways and she knows when to push me and when to leave me alone. She cuts all our hair. She’s always inexplicably brewing a cup of tea that she doesn’t drink. And it’s not easy for her to put away a sock or close a cabinet or do a dish, but she tries for me. Nicole grew up in LA around actors and directors and movies and TV and is very close to her mother, Sandra, and Cassie, her sister.

Nicole gives great presents. She is a mother who plays, who really plays. She never steps off playing, or says it’s too much. And it must be too much some of the time. She’s competitive. She’s amazing at opening jars because of her strong arms which I’ve always found very sexy. She keeps the fridge over full. No one is ever hungry in our house. She can drive a stick. After that movie, All Over The Girl, she could have stayed in LA and been a movie star, but she gave that up to do theater with me in New York.

She’s brave.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So you say that this is setting up the life before the movie starts, before the plot starts, and also functions kind of like an overture. If this was a big old fashioned musical they’d play the themes of the show so that you get a sense to hear what you’re going to hear ahead of time and sort of cue you up for it. So here you have literally Randy Newman’s score underneath there and sort of setting you up for what it’s going to feel like. Musical things we’re going to hear. But you’re also setting up rhymes for things that are going to happen later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** And about cooking, about what they see in each other, and how they’re different. And things that attract them to each other but can also repel them later on. So, it’s a really smart sequence. You know, I love – the first shot we see of her is framed in darkness and it just feels like big drama. Then you establish that we’re in Brooklyn. That is what their apartment is like. This is the apartment that we kind of don’t go back to once it starts. This is the home that they’re going to lose. You establish that they have this kid, Henry. That he’s going to be the focus. He’s the stakes behind all of this. You’re setting up her family even though we’re not going to meet them for quite a long time, but that she has a family. That she comes from California.

There’s a couple moments that here on the page that didn’t make it into the film. There’s a moment in the theater where Nicole is putting on a song, getting people to dance. Did you shoot that?

**Noah:** Yeah, that’s in there. Where they dance is in there.

**John:** It’s described a little differently on the page than what it is here, but it could just be a difference in the script versus what you originally did. But it gives us a good sense of who these characters are and most crucially the tone. This is a movie that is going to be funny at times. And so the pickles moment. That she is weirdly good with pickles.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Writer Noah Baumbach as you’re doing this, like it’s so easy to put these words on the page. Did director Noah Baumbach get frustrated with writer Noah Baumbach for these one-eighths of a page that must have been so much work to set up?

**Noah:** Yeah. In some cases it can be a more difficult challenge from a directorial standpoint to do something that’s going to be five seconds of film versus an 11-page scene, which there are in this movie as well. So, yeah, those become scheduling challenges. And there are scenes in that apartment as well, so often it was at the end of the day you’d be like and we’re going to do Monopoly and cooking or something like that. You would have to fit all those things in. Shooting still lives of tea cups around the apartment becomes of course on a film set longer than you’d like it to be.

**John:** But those are often things you can maybe grab when you have like 15 minutes before lunch, or like while you’re waiting for someone in hair and makeup.

**Noah:** Yeah, those you could do because you don’t have actors in them. But, yeah, the others you’re doing, everyone has to change. You have to come back. You have the kid hours.

**John:** Well, the Monopoly sequence. Monopoly is a really short moment in here, but that’s four shots or something to get that Monopoly and different setups. And your wardrobe person is like it has to have a separate change just for that thing. Or is this a day that matches another day?

**Noah:** Well, yeah. You’re sort of balancing the thing, too. Because part of what I like with characters in movies is to see them in the same clothes sometimes–

**John:** That’s real.

**Noah:** It’s real. But we have the sort of storytelling of this that things are different days and different times. The clothes can help illustrate that. And we’re also sort of setting up their wardrobes for the movie that we’re about to see.

What helped a bit which is actually something is the style of this, the shooting style, we shot this handheld which none of the rest of the movie is shot that way. We did it because it sort of emphasized the intimacy of these moments and putting you right inside it. It’s the way I shot all of the previous of mine, Squid and the Whale, was all handheld. And in some ways with that movie, because I had 23 days to shoot it or something, part of it was by design.

**John:** Efficiency.

**Noah:** Efficiency. Because rather than stopping to cover scene you would just sort of move around and shoot. And so that did help us pick up these sequences in that we were last exacting about camera movement and camera angles by design than we are for the rest of the movie.

**John:** So we open with this sequence and we have his voiceover. And suddenly we switch perspectives and we hear her voiceover talking through the same things. And it’s a nice match because when we just hear his we assume like, oh, does he have voiceover power through the whole movie. Is this going to be his point of view? And then once we have hers like, oh, so she has voiceover power, too. And we very quickly come to see like, oh, this isn’t actually a voiceover movie at all. This is just essentially prelap for what would be happening in that therapist’s office that we’re going to experience later on.

I should have said at the very start, of course, there are huge spoilers to everything we’re going to be talking about here. So this is the opening of the movie. We will get to bigger spoilers as we go through this.

So, as you’re writing these first sequences, you write his POV, we have her POV. Did you know that her POV was going to become a bookend? That basically he would finally find out what she wrote in that list? That that was going to be your ending?

**Noah:** It came to me fairly soon after I had it. By the time I had really written both these sequences and fleshed them out and figured it out I did know that it was going to return. I didn’t know how I was going to get there. I didn’t know at what point in the movie, how it was going to fall. But it’s partly what even sort of generated the earlier bits was then thinking of it as a kind of big reprise later on.

**John:** That’s great. Now, how much did you outline before you went into this? How much did you have a sense of like these are the beats of the story? Or were you finding your way through and just finding the scenes as you came upon them? What was your process in writing this?

**Noah:** Yeah. I don’t outline in any kind of formal way, but I often sort of going back to what we were talking about in the beginning, I think as I’m inputting notes and things I start to have at least ideas for where they might fall in the movie. And so they’re often just scenes or pieces of scenes or lines of dialogue that I just have at the bottom of the document that I’m kind of waiting to reach at some point as I go. And sometimes I never do. And sometimes they just never find their way in. Or sometimes I sort of try to force them in and they don’t stay. But there isn’t any formal outline.

**John:** Did you put any restrictions on yourself saying like this is not a movie where this will happen, or these are things that don’t happen in the world of this movie?

**Noah:** Well, everything was going to be from one or both of their perspectives. And this opening sets you up for that, whether you realize it or not, that it is a kind of more very straight forward way of – I mean, it’s literally his voice and her voice, even though we don’t return to any kind of voiceover in the movie. But it always – every scene is either her perspective – even scenes – so there are points in the movie where we’re with her where he enters into it and I always thought of it as almost like he’s part of her movie at this point. And then likewise when – and that’s when she first goes back to Los Angeles. And then when he arrives and she serves him, then we sort of move over to his – I always thought of it as sort of like you could make two separate movies of these stories. And now we’re going to be in his story for a little while and she’s almost like a visitor in his story.

And then once they start mediation and the lawyers come in it’s both of their movie. They’re sharing it now.

**John:** A notable example of that is there’s a scene fairly early in the movie where all the lawyers and everyone is up in this high tower meeting and there’s a discussion of what to order for lunch. And Scarlett’s character is helping him figure out what he wants to order for lunch. And that’s a case where it is sort of both of their point of view perspective. You couldn’t say it’s one or the other one’s scene at exactly that moment.

**Noah:** Well that scene is really the first time where I felt like, OK, they’re sharing this – they do in the beginning of the movie, too, when they come home after the theater and they’re in the apartment together. But then we move to her perspective as she cries and goes into the bedroom and then she goes to Los Angeles. And we kind of leave him behind for a time.

The scene you’re referring to is when we’re kind of – I felt like we kind of meet back up and it’s both of their perspectives.

**John:** Now, at what point did you have a screenplay you could show to people or were you talking about the project before you had a full screenplay? What was your process in sort of getting your ideas out to other folks to weigh in?

**Noah:** Well, I did approach – Adam Driver and I had been talking about sort of ideas a few movies back that have found their way into this movie. So he was always going to be part of it as far as I was concerned. So I did let him know at some point I’m writing sort of about this divorce. And we would have conversations, more generalized conversations when I didn’t quite yet know what it was fully about what profession it could be, just various things. And then just even general conversations about relationships and just life stuff.

And then when I brought Scarlett in and Laura as well I would have sort of similar kind of conversations with them. Once I kind of knew what the story was and the script was I talk less about it. Then it becomes a more interior process. And then I wait until I have something that I can show people.

**John:** Singling out just some little small things on the page, stuff that’s scene description and no one is ever going to get to see on the screen, but is delightful. Top of page 10 we meet this mediator. We don’t know very much about him. But he’s wearing a sweater vest with too many rings. Sitting tightly-crossed legged facing them. So, he’s not a crucial character. We’re not going to come back to him a lot, but you did spend the time to give us a very specific description of him so we know what it was we were looking at as we were reading through the script.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** How important is it to you that the screenplay make sense to anyone who reads it as opposed to just you who is going to direct it?

**Noah:** That’s a good question. I think – and I don’t know that I’m always consistent about it – I think there’s probably times where I know much more – I have a lot of visual ideas about it or the way I might want to shoot it that I don’t really feel is relevant for the read of it and so I won’t put that in. Likewise a character. But I find with most characters, even if like you’re saying they’re only in one scene, both for the read but also I think just to give us all ideas later. The costume designer. Even myself again later as a director. If I can put in little things that might spark stuff for us, give the actor something to think about, but also give the reader a kind of visual or an idea that just sort of grounds them a bit more, I will do that.

**John:** So on page 13 it’s an example of a tremendous amount of dialogue on the page. So you do a lot of dual dialogue throughout the whole script. But this was a great example of there are a lot of little small conversations, we’re picking up little snippets. And so your approach to showing us all these little snippets is to do a lot of dual dialogue and have people sort of circle around. Is this exactly sort of what happened in the moment or was this just giving you an overall plan for what you hoped you might be able to capture? Basically I’m asking like did you write this page planning like these are exactly the lines I’m going to get, or I want these things generally said and I’m going to catch them?

**Noah:** I mean, I take time with these lines so I actually do want everyone to say these lines. And to overlap the way they are on the page. Sometimes though when we’re shooting and suddenly now you have a theater group and you have a bunch of people I might find that we either have too much or not enough in terms of covering. Because it’s also like music. It’s like atmosphere in the scene. And particularly with this theater company they are almost like Greek chorus in some senses. And so there were cases where I would add a little bit more later to fill out something, or even reduce stuff. Or switch out and give different actors different lines because the – I would say to your question I think does it need to be actor three saying this and actor five saying that, that was more like well once I know who the people are and I know also what the blocking is and how this is all falling together I might switch out some of these lines and give one actor one of them and one another. Unless it’s a specific line to the character themselves.

But I was conscious too though that like actor three know she’s done with it, know this time it’s really over. He’s more skeptical of things. So I would keep all of that very consistent in terms of when I cast. And also I thought about like Matt Maher who I cast as one of the theater company is a great skeptic the way he plays it, so I was sort of thinking when I cast him he would be perfect for that sort of attitude.

**John:** A thing I noticed about your dual dialogue and I don’t know if you’re even aware that you consistently do it is page 13 has an example. So Beth is speaking. And then when it goes to dual dialogue Beth’s dialogue always moves to the right. So the character who is speaking always drifts off to the right rather than staying on the left. And I think it’s just a way of helping to indicate that, OK, this new person on the left is interrupting or cutting into the flow of an ongoing thing. So Beth is probably one continuous thought, but actor three is the one who is interrupting here. You’re very consistent throughout the script as you do that.

**Noah:** Yeah. I think that’s more intuitive in a way. I’m trying to think in terms of left and right. But, yeah, I mean, I do try to – now that I’m looking at it – I think I do try to keep that kind of consistent, and also for the read so that you kind of know what you’re supposed to follow mainly. Also, by naming her Beth I feel like I feel like you’re also ultimately the other actors have names. But it’s a way for the read – I find it’s always very hard in the script when you have so many names you really do get bogged down and need a glossary. And in this case I put in Actor so people reading would kind of know who to follow.

**John:** Yeah. On page 14 you do a thing where Frank stands and makes a toast to Charlie and Nicole about their move to Broadway and how they’ll miss Nicole and then makes it about him returning to Broadway with the Young Turks. In 1986 he was the Young Turk. So in scene description you’re sort of setting up a speech that is not fully on the page. Talk to me about your decision to do that.

**Noah:** I don’t do that a lot, but I do do that sometimes is put in the direction stuff that I think should probably be turned into dialogue later. Part of this, too, was I knew I wanted Wallace Shawn to play this character who is also a friend and also a wonderful writer. And what we ended up doing in the shoot, too, because I ended up making trims in this scene in the movie, is Wally actually ends up making a toast to Charlie and Nicole as it indicates in there, but also giving you story very straightforwardly he says Nicole is going to California. We’re going to Broadway, she’s going to California. We’re saying goodbye to her.

**John:** Crucial.

**Noah:** And we’re cutting between Charlie and Nicole. We get their looks. And so I was able to actually in his toast and also in the visuals tell the scene faster than I had fully figured out on the page. So, there were other lines in this bit that I cut out of the movie because it felt repetitive in terms of where Charlie and Nicole were going to go from this point forward.

**John:** Absolutely. Well where Nicole is going to go is to Los Angeles. And so cut from a discussion in the apartment, you say we switch over to Nicole’s point of view, and then suddenly she is in Los Angeles. And so we’re establishing on page 20/page 21 new characters who are brand new to us. So actually page 18 is where we make the switch over to Los Angeles. You knew from a pretty early moment that this was going to be a movie that was split between two characters, but also between two worlds, so New York and Los Angeles.

You’re a New York person mostly?

**Noah:** Mostly.

**John:** How much research did you have to do on Los Angeles to sort of figure out the LA part of this all?

**Noah:** Well, I’ve spent a lot of time here and I kind of knew it, or at least had my version of it. And I shot my movie Greenberg here as well and it was a different kind of view of LA, but I had thought of LA in terms of a movie before previously.

**John:** You had a good understanding of what a New Yorker would think of LA coming here. So the frustrations that Charlie might feel trying to adjust to it.

**Noah:** Right. And versus Nicole’s where it’s both where she grew up but a place that she had since been away from for a while.

**John:** So Nicole has moved to Los Angeles. She’s going to be working on this pilot. There is a really good and really funny sequence of her shooting this sequence with this baby and it’s going to be CGI and all that stuff. And as we’re looking at this, as I was first watching this scene and thinking like, oh, this is going to be a major focus of the story and it’s sort of a misdirect that it’s actually not about this scene or this science fiction at all. It’s all really about a setup to like, oh no, you need to get yourself a better divorce attorney. Did you feel any pressure at any point to trim, to get to the lawyer part of that faster? Because it’s just so funny, but I’m wondering whether even on the page or in the edits did you feel any pressure to sort of get through that stuff sooner?

**Noah:** Well, I thought of it in some ways her hair and makeup test or her TV, the stuff done on the TV lot, I was thinking of it a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, how the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion all kind of echo – they’re played by the same actors – the farm hands, so that there’s this sort of familiarity in a new place. And I was also thinking about this, it’s actually a conversation I had with Scarlett at an early stage and we were talking about how when you go through a divorce or a kind of major life transition how the world feels weird to you. And you often find yourself in places – you might be more likely to go to some party you wouldn’t normally go to, or something. That you always find yourself in strange – and everything feels a little bit stranger.

And so I thought of that sort of TV experience both as an echo of the theater company, because we have, again, sort of all these overlapping voices that are disembodied and she’s meeting people rapid fire and they’re all new and they all may be a big part of her life going forward, but we don’t know. We don’t know if this show is going to get picked up. We don’t know what it is. And everything is kind of happening rapid fire.

And so I thought it was actually a good introduction to the lawyer thing because it was funny. It was a way to also bring, like you say, have some humor. But I also in a way felt like it kind of captured a certain kind of mindset for Nicole who has kind of done something somewhat radical. And she literally wakes up in her childhood bed. It’s like everything is familiar but unfamiliar. And I thought this sort of added to that.

**John:** Well it’s also a moment of her being very competent. She’s the center focus, again. She’s not in a periphery of her husband. And she’s actually speaking up for like is that the right thing. I think this is not actually how you hold a baby. And should that character actually be killed off? She’s actually starting to assert some authority which becomes important later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** So even though the TV show is not a major player in this it’s showing her finding herself in this element. She’s not completely thrown to the wolves. She’s not overwhelmed by it. She’s actually pretty good at it.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I thought it was a way both as you say for her to sort of start to find voice. And she even pitches herself as a director and at the end we’re going to find out that she is directing. But also in some ways you could also read it as she’s taken some Charlie with her. And so in a way there’s still the kind of connection there. And how when things end, which I think the movie is in many ways about, it didn’t mean because it ended it failed. And that there are many wonderful things that she’s bringing with her from this experience even though it’s an experience that she no longer wants to be part of.

**John:** At the end of this sequence we’re going to move into meet Nora for the first time. And she has an amazing introduction. So at the bottom of page 28. This begins an eight-page scene. So, Noah Baumbach I need to tell you that the lords of screenwriting say that the longest a scene should ever be is three pages. And so you’ve now broken the rules of a three-page scene.

**Noah:** Well there’s an 11-page scene coming up.

**John:** Yes, I know. You’re setting yourself up for some long scenes. This I think is a great example though of prepared speech versus spontaneous speech. Because Nicole is going to be talking a lot, but all of what she’s saying she’s kind of saying for the first time, or it’s the first time she’s putting it all together. Versus Nora who believes what’s she’s saying, but she’s said this exact same thing a bunch of times. And the contrast between the two is just so nicely drawn and so well done.

You know, an eight-page scene, what was the process of you working on this scene?

**Noah:** Well, the scene also, and this is something that Jen Lame, my editor, and I talked a lot about when we were cutting the scene is how Nicole, because Nicole has this long monologue–

**John:** Page 35 is just a column of text.

**Noah:** Right. She starts in on 33 and I guess speaks all the way to 36. The monologue relies a lot on the rhythms of the previous part of the scene. So that was a balance in the editing which we were always very conscious of. But I’m glad I didn’t know about that they tell you that you shouldn’t be longer than three pages. But to what you were saying which I think is very interesting, somebody said to me, one of the women I interviewed to sort of research for the movie, she said it’s very hard to leave without momentum. And I thought it would be compelling to create a scene where in some ways you watch the momentum develop in front of you.

And so I thought in a lot of cases like with this monologue that you could see her, as you’re saying, she’s putting things together. It’s the stuff of her life, but she’s in effect kind of creating a narrative out of life that’s giving her reason and momentum to move forward. Because she’s in a place right now where she’s sort of done something. She’s now feeling bad about it. She doesn’t know if she’d done the right thing. And Nora in the context of this scene gives her an opportunity to find voice.

But as you say there’s also this interesting juxtaposition of the fact that Nicole is the actress who by design says scripted lines. We’ve seen her act earlier in the movie. And Nora is the lawyer, I mean, you could say a non-performer, but of course in this context Nora is the performer and Nicole is speaking in an unprepared way.

But then you also have this thing, I thought of this monologue, well, and this is something actually – I always knew how I wanted to shoot this, even though it doesn’t specify it in the script, because in the script as you say it’s long columns of dialogue. But I always felt like it should be – we shouldn’t see it coming. Of course when you’re reading it you see it, so you know what – you’re like, wow, this keeps going, and probably most people reading the script turned the pages before they even went further just saying like, wow, OK.

But in the movie you don’t know how long it’s going to be. And that’s something I felt like, well, it’s a great opportunity to sort of create a situation you don’t realize it until you’re midway through, oh, this is still happening. And a lot of that is in the way we blocked it and framed it, which you wouldn’t get from the script.

**John:** Absolutely. So the script makes it clear that there’s moments where she stands, but it doesn’t make clear like that monologue involves a whole trip to the bathroom where she’s off camera for a while and coming back in. It’s not just one single close up the entire time. It actually has a real plan and a real shift in things. So, Nora’s character, her motivation is clear from the start. We know when the scene opens what she wants to do. She wants her to be a client and she wants to comfort her, but also she wants her as a client.

It’s a little more challenging to figure out what Nicole wants at the start of the scene, and it shifts over the course as the conversation goes what she actually wants changes. And what she wants in that moment but also what she wants in the very near future and the long term future. You can see her starting to form a different kind of plan for her life.

A challenging thing to figure out on the page, but I also imagine a detailed conversation you’re having with an actor as you’re figuring out the beats of the performance. What is that conversation like and does it start – are there rehearsals? How are you going through this to figure out how to make all that work?

**Noah:** Yeah. We rehearsed it. And one thing I always felt strongly about and talked to Scarlett about was in effect I felt she should live it as she says it. In another movie we would flash back to these scenes. And that she should give us that experience–

**John:** She is the flashback.

**Noah:** Yeah, she is. And because the telling of it is as important as what she’s saying. And so – and it’s something she does brilliantly in the movie is that when she’s telling the happier times you feel her inside those times. You feel that exuberance. You feel that being seen by him and what that meant to her. How falling in love, the rush of that. And then you feel, you know, at the point where she says “I got smaller” you feel the shift. You feel the sadness, the disappointment, the self-realization. So, that was something we were all very clear about.

And what she could do brilliantly is she could make adjustments two pages into that monologue, you know, when we did take four. And if I had an idea for later she could make these sort of hair pin turns and still stay in the emotion of the scene which was kind of – was really kind of wonderful.

But I think because the earlier part of the scene as you were saying is in effect a seduction scene. It’s somebody trying to get a job. But what she’s also doing is she is giving Nicole permission to tell her story. And to take control of her story. And I mean I’ve had a lot of interesting responses and people’s interpretations of these things or how they feel about Nora. But many people have held very strongly about the fact that Nicole wouldn’t have ever gotten what she needed if it weren’t for Nora. It doesn’t matter whether you like Nora or not. She was necessary.

And I certainly felt that was true in this scene. And we actually – one thing, too, is that we shot the monologue, it was always one take, because I wanted to have the option of just never leaving her. But it actually we felt like you do want to see Nora listening, because the listening is important. You see the invitation in Laura’s face.

**John:** Let’s focus in on one little moment, that moment you cited where I got smaller. We have a clip of that.

[Clip begins]

**Scarlett Johansson:** In the beginning I was the actress, the star, and that felt like something. You know, people came to see me at first. But the farther away I got from that and the more acclaim the theater company got I had less and less weight. I just became who, well you know, the actress that was in that thing that time. And he was the draw. And that would have been fine, but I got smaller.

[Clip ends]

**John:** So you’re saying that in the actual shooting of it that might be take four. You would have discussion about sort of nuances of sort of where you get to and what moments. Are you directing that with verbs, with a scale of one to ten? Like how do you fine tune where you want to be at different moments in this long monologue?

**Noah:** It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for her, obviously, but it’s a challenge, yeah, for me as I’m watching it to be able to find those moments and mark them.

So, and of course the success of the monologue as I was saying is its own momentum. And the fact that it feels, it’s all live action in a certain sense. And so it isn’t as simple as saying do this part this way, this part this way, this part this way. I mean, that wouldn’t have worked. Even my perfect version wouldn’t have worked. So, I found myself somewhat specific about where, if I felt things. It really was more about keeping them on storytelling I think. And making sure it was clear where we were in the story as she’s telling it. And also keeping that sense of momentum because it is – it’s a scene that has so many beats just anyway so that when it’s still going – and I knew that in effect part of what was going to work about it was that there is a point of like, wow, this is still happening.

**John:** Where the character herself is aware that she’s been talking for a long time and she’s still talking.

**Noah:** And she’s still talking. And by the time she’s on the couch it’s like a different part of the story. And things that I did in the direction for instance is that we actually move in on her while she’s talking and she’s on the couch. It’s the only time until Charlie sings Being Alive that the camera moves unmotivated by physical motion. Because I felt it was an internal development that’s motivating the camera.

**John:** Her monologue is very much like a song without lyrics.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** She’s saying what she sort of can’t dare to say otherwise. And, of course, songs in musicals are those moments where like words fail you and suddenly a melody is supporting you.

**Noah:** Right. And in both cases the character is in a different place at the end then they were at the beginning. Another thing we did in this sequence in the clip you played, it starts earlier when Nora is talking to her on the couch and she says what you’re doing is an act of hope. The central air kicks on in the room. And when she says I got smaller it shuts down. And so that’s that sort of silence when you’re in a place where you’re hearing white noise of some sort, when those things do go off suddenly it feels much quieter than you realized.

**John:** Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the sense of time and sort of what you did so smartly at the start and jumping us ahead in the story. But also as it goes along it feels like we’re getting these bigger and bigger gaps where we’re suddenly catching up with characters, like wait, how much has happened in the meantime.

An example at the top of page 73, this is a moment that really caught me, Charlie and Henry are off going to meet lawyers and Henry says, “I remember those fish,” which was just a great moment where it’s like, oh, well of course kids think of all fish the same. And then you realize like, oh, one of our characters has been doing a tremendous amount that we haven’t seen. So basically Nicole has been visiting with a whole bunch of lawyers that we didn’t know about. And it’s such a rug being pulled from underneath us. We thought we sort of knew everything that was going on with Nicole and we realize we didn’t know everything that was going on with Nicole.

So it’s both time had jumped forward, but our assumptions about how much information we had about what each character are doing are not quite correct.

**Noah:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Did you in your head map out sort of what both characters were doing in the scenes we didn’t see? Or were you just kind of only working on the scenes that we did see as an audience?

**Noah:** Well essentially yeah. That time off camera is built into the structure of the script. So the fade outs that are also scripted, those were – between fade out and fade ins there’s always some gap in time. And so I would always sort of essentially figure out what happened off camera, I don’t know everything, but I would know what was going to at least be revealed in the next sequence like the fact that she’s seeing other lawyers.

I didn’t know that necessarily while I was writing it all the time, and there were scenes that I entertained writing or wrote versions of that I decided were more effective just alluded to and not seen. You know, in the early stages I’m sure I thought about writing, if I didn’t write a draft of Nicole visiting a lawyer and choosing not to hire them.

**John:** What draft of the screenplay did you shoot? I mean, how many drafts did you go through before you were in production?

**Noah:** I often work in sort of perpetual revision in a way. I don’t move too far forward unless I revise what I have. I edit that way, too. I’m always kind of like moving backward to move forward a lot. So that by the time I get to the end of something, like if I have a draft of the script, it’s often – I mean, I’ll change it, you know, of course after that, but it’s at least in the ballpark generally of where I’m going to get. And I don’t really know then how many drafts. I mean, there are many because I’ll always sort of – you know, any changes I make I always sort of make a new draft and work off that. But I don’t know exactly.

**John:** While you were in production how much did Noah Baumbach the writer come back and do work? Were there new scenes, new pages, new anything?

**Noah:** Rarely. Only in like I’d say in those moments like I was saying, like if I feel that some of the incidental dialogue that I’ve written needs to be either developed further or trimmed down. I mean, a little bit more in rehearsal. I mean, when I work with the actors thinks might adjust a little bit. Or an actor may say is it OK if I say this. Do you think maybe I could say this? Or this might be a better way of saying it.

But once I’m shooting it’s pretty much the script.

**John:** How much rehearsal did you have with your principles and with other folks? How many days did you have with them?

**Noah:** I had like two official weeks of rehearsal because Scarlett and Adam and Laura were involved. And I cast even some other parts earlier. We had sort of unofficial conversations or like they’d come over and we’d read together and talk about stuff. So I felt like everybody had a good sort of base even once we went into the two weeks. And the two weeks of rehearsal I mainly focus on the rhythms of the dialogue and just making sure everybody sort of almost speed a lot of the time, of just like – and how these overlaps might work. And then blocking. And I try to get into all the locations as much as we can to block the scenes out so that when we get there on the day of shooting we’ve sort of explored it already.

**John:** Absolutely. So people aren’t walking into a space they’re supposed to be knowing intimately for the first time. So they get a sense of that. You’re not doing really basic stuff, wasting time. You can really focus in on those scenes themselves.

**Noah:** Yeah. And where I can I like to bring in – not in the very beginning of rehearsal – but once they’re up on their feet and moving around a location I like to have the DP and the editor and script supervisor and production designer even there for part of it to give them ideas. They can see what we’re doing, but also give them ideas. And often it can also give the actors ideas, too. A prop can give the actors ideas. Or the placement of something on a wall or whatever it might be.

**John:** I want to jump ahead to page 90. This is a scene, Charlie is calling Nicole. She is at a Hollywood party. He is at his apartment. It’s one of the few long phone calls in the movie. And they’re arguing. We have a clip to listen to here.

[Clip begins]

**Adam:** Are you moving out here?

**Scarlett:** Did you find a lawyer?

**Adam:** Yes. Henry says you’re moving here?

**Scarlett:** Have your lawyer call Nora.

**Adam:** I want to talk about it as us.

**Scarlett:** Who the fuck is us?

**Adam:** Let’s just get in a room, you and me. That’s what we always said we’d do. It’s not up them. It’s up to us.

**Scarlett:** My lawyer would never let me sign anything.

**Adam:** It’s our divorce.

**Scarlett:** They say I could later sue them for malpractice.

**Adam:** What am I walking into?

**Scarlett:** What are you walking into?

**Adam:** Yes, what the fuck is going on?

**Scarlett:** I read your fucking emails, Charlie. I read them all.

**Adam:** When?

**Scarlett:** I don’t know. Recently. You’re a fucking liar. You fucked Mary Ann.

**Adam:** It was after I was sleeping on the couch.

**Scarlett:** It was bullshit about working on us. You know what? I have been working. I’ve been doing the work alone.

**Adam:** How did you read my emails?

**Scarlett:** I hacked into your account you dumb fuck.

**Adam:** I think that’s illegal.

**Scarlett:** Don’t give me this shit about being surprised about LA. Surprise, I have my own opinion.

**Adam:** How do you even know how to do something like that?

**Scarlett:** Surprise. I want things that aren’t what you want. Because, surprise, you were fucking another lady.

**Adam:** One time. I think you’re conflating two different things. Mary Ann has nothing to do with LA.

**Scarlett:** I am conflating mother fucker. You watch me conflate.

**Male Voice:** Did you just stamp your foot? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.

**Scarlett:** I’m just so angry.

**Male Voice:** You look like you needed me.

**Scarlett:** Yes, I do. Thanks.

**Male Voice:** You know the Japanese are making really interesting tequila right now.

**Scarlett:** That’s exciting, I guess.

**Male Voice:** What are you so angry about?

**Scarlett:** My fucking ex-husband. I spent all of this time feeling guilty and he’s so self-absorbed it’s pointless. It’s a game I’m playing with myself.

**Male Voice:** Oh, hey, Pablo. We met at the—

**Scarlett:** You held the bounce board.

**Male Voice:** The flirty grip.

**Scarlett:** Here’s what I want you to only do. OK?

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** I want you to finger me.

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** Just finger me.

**Male Voice:** OK.

**Scarlett:** That’s all we’re going to do. Just fingering. OK? I’m changing my whole fucking life.

[Clip ends]

**John:** All right. And that is why we have a language warning on this episode. Some strong words being said here. Why I wanted to use this clip is I thought it was such a great example of two characters are having a serious argument and saying some real things to each other for the very first time and things we knew separately they’re saying to the other person for the first time and it’s getting really heated. And then we stay on her point of view and she’s having a comedy moment right through and out of it. And I just really loved it. It was a character you had set up earlier. He’s perfectly cast. And one of the biggest laughs you got from me was her reaction to his tequila line. It was just a really great moment.

Talk to me about the bounce though of comedy and drama. And at what point are you mindful that you’re not stepping on the drama by trying to go for the joke, or worried that you’re going to be too serious if you don’t lighten up. How do you find that balance?

**Noah:** I don’t think about it so much, I guess as much as it feels intuitive to me. I guess I think of it more like these things live side by side anyway. So, it’s sometimes they reveal themselves or not. I mean, I think, you know, in the case of this I thought of her, too. In the storytelling of the movie a thing I was always aware of is like you have on one hand this sort of high drama of this divorce and then just ordinary life is always – you know, once you hang up the phone you’re back in your life. And she’s furious, but she’s also at this Halloween party. And she’s with her new group of people and she’s still sort of feeling her way out there.

And I also thought it said a lot about where they are at this point in the movie. I mean, she’s sort of active and having new experiences and he’s in this hotel room alone, totally out of his element. So I think I thought of it more that way. And then bringing Pablo back just seemed like a good opportunity. Less about the tone balance and more just about the sort of reality of the situation.

**John:** Well, it sounds like the drama is both of them trying to figure out their future and also dealing with all of their past versus the comedy is very present tense. It’s like what’s right there in front of them. It’s the very day daily life, the stuff that comes up. And, you know, the minor annoyances that are in front of you and the possibilities in this case in terms of like Pablo and people say dumb things. And so you can respond to them.

**Noah:** Right. And it’s not that different thematically from ordering lunch in the meditation. These things still have to get done. And maybe in another movie you’d not show them and we’d just assume at some point they all ate lunch, or you assume at some point the lawyer would tell you what they charge, or that you wrote a check to the lawyer at some point. But I thought for this movie all that stuff was part of the story. So I wanted to include all of these sort of ordinary quotidian things.

**John:** Well, an example is there’s the inspector who comes to the apartment and so Charlie’s character has this sort of parental inspector person sent by the state or sent by somebody to watch them do really basic stuff. And so it’s all the tension, the high wire tension of being watched while you’re doing all this stuff, where just normal daily stuff is happening, and suddenly there’s a magnifying glass on what normal stuff would be. And how you cannot act normally when someone is watching you.

**Noah:** Right. Well Charlie’s apartment, a lot of what happens in Charlie’s apartment speaks to that. I mean, because it is – he actually set decorates it to make it feel like a home and then he’s supposed to act like ordinary life with somebody watching. And it does sort of go with this notion of performance which is set up at the beginning of the movie in that they’re actually part of a theater company. And then here he is performing as dad, as human being on the planet in front of somebody. And in an artificially set designed place.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little terrarium for a father.

**Noah:** Yes. And so it’s, you know, while also a potential step and stage in divorce proceedings, and it’s very real, it’s also – the movie has kind of set you up for something.

**John:** Well it’s a really thematically dangerous moment, and yet in the character of this woman who is coming to inspect him she is a comedic character who just underplays everything so dramatically that like you want to laugh and you do laugh while not neglecting the stakes that are there for him. And that she cannot be pleased. And so you’ve given him a central sort of very classic comedy where he’s trying to please a person who clearly cannot be pleased.

**Noah:** Right. Right. And with Martha who played the part so beautifully, she’s absolutely unreadable. And that is in a sense what all the divorce proceedings are in every stage is that there is no clear answer. This sort of notion of court as a court but no court – I mean, he and Alan Alda’s character Bert, I always thought of those as like an Abbott and Costello routine. It’s like this sort of perpetual – I mean, it’s why Kafka was such a genius, or one of the many reasons why Kafka was such a genius, but it’s these journeys where you keep feeling like you’re coming to some sort of conclusion or answer and there isn’t any. But then there’s some strange logic in that.

And so yeah this scene sort of furthers that notion and if you think about marriage or the fact that their theater company, there’s performance, but of course there’s also what comes up in the divorce proceedings is, oh, you said you were this person and you never were that person, which is also other notions of persona and misrepresentation and who we say we are versus who we are, or who we want to be versus who we are. And so here you have some sort of strange playlet, the playing out of a guy simulating being a father.

**John:** Simulating perfect divorce dad.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** So talk to me as you get through the end of this story as a reader, as the writer, as the director, what thematic goal posts were you aiming for? What were some of the thematic things, questions you wanted to raise and hopefully answer and what new ones came up as you were working through the process? Going into it what did you think it was about and coming out of it what did you think it was about?

**Noah:** Well, when I was writing, and I think generally when I write I think less thematically and more I really try to tell the story as entertainingly and as effectively as I can. What I find is if I’ve done that successfully the thematic stuff all starts to reveal itself. I don’t know if you have this experience. And often it really is just structuring it right.

I mean, I feel that way working with actors as well. It’s like if the blocking is right, if the lines are right and the blocking is right it really gives them a lot of freedom and access to playing the scene in the most effective ways possible. And I think that’s also true I find for me with themes is that they tend to reveal themselves only when I’m actually telling the story correctly, or at least – correctly is probably the wrong way to say it – but I mean when I’m telling the story effectively. That the themes start to – I start to see these themes. I didn’t choose a theater company because I thought, oh, this is really about performance and the lawyers will become performers later. I chose it because it seemed – I liked it visually. I liked that milieu. I liked the idea of having a theater troupe. And I liked the director/actress relationship.

I also liked that they collaborators. I thought well that raises the stakes for them in the breakup.

So, but of course as I’m filling it out I start to see, oh, these things kind of relate to each other in some way.

**John:** And things also rhyme. So he starts as a director. She ends up getting an Emmy as a director.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** As you go through this story you sort of see what each of them wants and becoming what they want to be to some degree. You see Charlie trying to just get back to a thing that he had before and finally accepting that he’s never going to get back to that thing that he had before and he has to move on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** He could’ve done that right at the very start of the story, but he wasn’t ready for it at that point.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** We as an audience are sometimes frustrated that her character is not willing to sort of read that list aloud at the start. That she’s not able to acknowledge at the start sort of what she has. And she eventually finds her way to that point. But you didn’t know that all when you were doing your pre-writing, as you were starting. You just had a shape of ideas that could become a thing. That you felt had stuff that connected them together, even if you didn’t know quite what those connections were.

**Noah:** Right. And I knew in a sense – I was referring to The Wizard of Oz – I mean, I was also thinking of things like The Odyssey that I knew that they were going to go, you know, two people going on both an adventure together and separate. And that they were going to meet all these interesting characters along the way. I mean, it sort of goes to the rings. Like I want, you know, to make everybody compelling who they meet because I thought it’s like you’re going to learn something from each person. I mean, sort of like you do in those, like 18th Century novels, like Clarissa or Pamela where they go on these sort of adventures and they seem kind of wild and sometimes kind of horrible, but they end up sort of OK at the end. They get through it.

And so I was in a sense really trying to follow that story. And then also be true to at least a – tell the story of these divorce proceedings. Sort of going back to your earlier question about drafts, I would say the biggest thing I learned in the first draft, the first full script I had, was that scenes that didn’t stay within that narrative of getting them through this divorce process to the end were all the ones that felt extraneous. So things of running into – I had things at Henry’s school. I had things of Charlie running into friends, like another couple that had been their friends that was taking Nicole’s side. I had some stuff with Nicole and Henry that again was sort of off the topic of this.

Because what I realized in telling it was that – and this goes to the ordering lunch and to the Pablo sequence – is that ordinary life is just there anyway while they’re getting divorced. So I can do both simultaneously.

**John:** Yes. Fold those moments into things that actually have to be there for plot, otherwise they could be cut away, you’re going to probably end up cutting them away.

**Noah:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. Your script, at least the one we have printed out here, is 152 pages, which seems long. So 120 is sort of what we leave it at. But your movie is not long at all. So tell us about why that one page per minute rule does not apply.

**Noah:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve discovered that over the years that often having some quite short movies when I – I mean, this movie is long for me.

**John:** What is the running time on your movie?

**Noah:** It’s two hours and 15 or 16 minutes or something.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t feel long.

**Noah:** But that’s still shorter than the script count would be if it were a page a minute. Yeah, I mean, The Squid and the Whale was 81 minutes. And I remember hitting like the hour mark and realizing I was almost at the end when I was cutting it and I thought like, oh man, I hope I have a feature film. You know, Frances Ha is like 84 minutes. But those scripts were all over 120 pages. So, I just discovered, you know, I do tend to write at least in sections of the movie quite a lot of dialogue. And you know I play it very fast, generally play it fast.

Although this script did have things like Charlie singing Being Alive is just a line. It’s in there, but it’s a line of–

**John:** You’re not sticking all the lyrics there.

**Noah:** Yeah. I didn’t put the lyrics in. So, of course, that was longer than the page count would indicate. But at this point going into this one I sort of have much more of a sense of how my scripts play, so I wasn’t overly concerned by the script length. Although I knew it was going to be a longer movie than I’d done before.

It also has longer pauses. The pacing is a little bit I’d say different than many of my previous movies.

**John:** Well with your nominations I think you officially have dispensation so you can have 11-page scenes and have a longer script. You are allowed, Noah Baumbach.

**Noah:** I’m grandfathered into it.

**John:** We were talking about Charlie’s apartment being sort of like an LA terrarium. And so we got a question which I think you may actually be able to speak to really well. Adam asks, “All the recent assistant talk and advice for the gentleman moving from New York to LA has got me thinking about a weird social science phenomenon. LA housing favors coupledom. In my day job I’m an entertainment industry drone who doesn’t make very much more than an assistant, but I’m not rent-burdened. I share a one-bedroom apartment with my wife. An LA one-bedroom is comfortable for two people sharing a bed, but not for roommates. When we lived in New York the apartments were so much smaller we needed a two-bedroom not to kill each other. Being coupled is no cheaper than having a roommate there.

“Being an Angelino while poor-ish incentives coupledom. Is this why New Yorkers seem to have more adventurous sex lives? How many dissatisfied Angelinos stay together for housing? Should all the 20-something single assistants shack up with the first warm body?”

So, I look at Charlie’s apartment and compare Charlie’s LA apartment to his New York apartment. And his New York apartment seems much lovelier and cozier, but his LA apartment is bigger. And it’s a recurring thing that people say in the movie is like there’s so much more space. What do you think of Adam’s suggestion that LA is cheaper for couples? Does that make sense to you?

**Noah:** Well, I think about it in terms of the movie, your observation is interesting because it is like the LA apartment by all accounts seems bleak, but it is actually bigger than how he would be living in New York. But, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** You never lived in sort of Charlie’s apartment here. Charlie’s apartment here is a real apartment. Is that correct?

**Noah:** It’s a real apartment. I actually wanted to build it but we couldn’t afford to build it. So it took a long time to find it.

**John:** And so you have to rent that apartment. You have to deal with all the neighbors around it. There’s always noise. I mean, in my movie Go we shot that, again it’s an apartment, in a real apartment. And it was a nightmare for everyone involved. And I feel so bad forever. I should still to this day be baking them cookies for all the nights we were shooting there.

**Noah:** Well fortunately I think that that complex didn’t have a lot of long term people in it. And had enough space that we actually ended up renting like – like we had holding rooms upstairs. There was nobody next door because Adam had to hit that wall so many times that I guess apparently it went through to the – like the wall in the apartment next door broke off, too. So, but it’s was interesting that it was that hard for me to find an apartment to the specifications of both conveying what it should be but also having the visual interest and being, you know, both realistic and also because of the amount of scenes we have in that apartment, something that was big enough to shoot in.

**John:** Yeah. Doug Liman often will say if you want to shoot – it’s tough to shoot a boring a party, because you have people standing around and not having fun, well that’s actually not going to be interesting to see. So in this case you needed a drab, boring apartment, but it needed to convey that message but without actually being so uninteresting to the eye that we didn’t want to spend time in there when we were in there. So, finding that balance can be tough.

**Noah:** And that was a challenge of the movie. Because of the story there are so many scenes in offices, both personal offices, then conference rooms, then the windowless room off the conference room. Even Charlie’s theater company is in a rehearsal space. There’s all these sort of transitional spaces which of course worked for the movie because the movie is about one giant transition in some sense. And his apartment was that as well.

But I like that challenge of making something that by design is supposed to have no personality sort of finding beauty in that. And we had all these sort of different versions of white that we would bring from some of these rooms to other rooms, and Charlie’s apartment being one that we tested a lot of different versions of white for that.

It’s also why shooting on film I thought, I mean, I love shooting on film just anyway. But I felt particularly in this movie because there are all these blank walls of sorts to have the grain.

**John:** Give some motion, yeah.

**Noah:** Gives them, yeah, gives it a kind of body that it’s hard to find digitally.

**John:** Yeah. At the end of every one of our episodes we do a One Cool Thing. Were you warned about the One Cool Thing?

**Noah:** Yeah, I was told. Has anybody recommended David Byrne’s show in New York?

**John:** No. So tell us all about that.

**Noah:** it’s called American Utopia. I think it’s a version of what he toured with, but he’s been doing it on Broadway. And Greta and I saw it and Rohmer my son saw it over Christmas break. I mean, it’s just a fantastic show. It’s a concert essentially, but it has not unlike Stop Making Sense if you’ve seen that, he’s kind of created a kind of concept for it which is really beautiful. But he told a story in it which I thought is very interesting about – I think about it a lot with sort of script and directing and script. There’s a song in the show called Everybody is Coming to My House. And he tells the story about how a children’s choir I think in Detroit or somewhere recorded a version of the song. And he said, you know, it’s the same lyrics, it’s the same arrangement, and it’s a totally different meaning when they sing it to when he sings it.

And he said you know when I sing it it’s clear I’m not so sure about everybody coming to my house. I’m worried they might stay. Or won’t leave. And when they sing it it feels like an invitation. It’s about inclusiveness.

It’s also in his telling of it I felt – he seemed so touch by that notion that something that he had really been thinking about, his version of it could be interpreted that way. And of course we’ve experienced that with covers of songs and all the Halleluiahs that are out there. But I think about that a lot. And I’ve talked about it a little bit in terms of people asking me about sticking to the script. Because I do find that there’s actually so much room for interpretation. If you create a framework actually I feel like it gives the actors all the freedom.

**John:** Yeah. Greta was saying that same thing when she was in your seat saying that even having come out of an improv background she feels as an actor she just has so much more permission to go further because she has the words to back her up. There’s something holding her up as she goes and explores things.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I love improv and I have an improv background a bit from college. And I actually think I employed a lot in writing. I think I’m improvising with myself in some way. But I feel the same way she does is that when we’re going to do it, but it’s also why the script has got to be ready and you have to spend that time getting it there, yeah, that there is more freedom.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is also about getting a script ready. So ten months ago back in Episode 390 we said goodbye to Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell who had just gotten staffed on a TV show. This past week it was announced she’ll be writing Captain Marvel 2, a big giant Marvel movie that she is now in charge of. So congrats Megan.

**Noah:** Fantastic.

**John:** That will be a big thing. And I don’t think that will be a big improv movie. I think that will be a very scripted movie and a very different process than even I think you went through on Marriage Story. I think it’s going to be a very different kind of screenplay and very different requirements. But I’m excited for her and really proud of her.

Noah Baumbach, thank you so much for joining us on this show. It is a pleasure to have you here with us.

**Noah:** Thank you. It was really fun.

**John:** Reminder to our Premium members that we will be back after the credits with Craig to talk about escape rooms. But this episode is produced Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Alex Winder. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Noah, you’re not on Twitter are you?

**Noah:** No.

**John:** No. Good plan. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We get them up the week after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Noah, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on Marriage Story.

**Noah:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment begins]

**John:** Craig Mazin, I just finished talking with Noah Baumbach who has never been to an escape room.

**Craig:** Well, my opinion of Noah Baumbach just plummeted.

**John:** Well, he was at least curious about it. So I was trying to describe what it was and he had a sense that there are things that are in malls and you go in there. But I promised him in this bonus segment we would talk through our experience with escape rooms, our guidance for first time escape room attendees so that he can have the best experience. He and Greta can both go to an escape room and really maximize their enjoyment.

**Craig:** I mean, that would be nice. Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Everybody should go there.

**John:** But between all the award show stuff, I mean, they can do an escape room. The little PR limo can stop there and they can have an hour to do an escape room and then go on and do more press.

**Craig:** Award shows are actually the worst escape rooms ever. You’re just like, well, I’m trapped in this room. There’s only two ways out. Winning or losing. But either way I’m trapped.

**John:** The good thing about escape rooms though is it has a timer on it. It’s only going to be an hour and then you’re out. They can’t go long.

**Craig:** Oh man. What I would give. What I would give to have these things be an hour. Oh my god. I’m so ants in the pants, ugh. Man. Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s define our terms. So what we mean by an escape room is this is a business that you go in there. Oftentimes they have multiple rooms but you’re going in to do one specific room. You signed up for it. You and a group of four to eight, sometimes a little bit more, people/friends of yours hopefully are going into this room. They give you instructions and then they close the door and then you have usually an hour to find your way out of this room by solving puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, each one sometimes more difficult than the last. Is that a general definition of escape rooms that matches your expectations?

**Craig:** That’s pretty much accurate to me. Yeah. Some rooms have a slightly different measure of how many people. Some rooms are a maximum of only six. There are a few rooms where they say you can’t do it with fewer than two people because there are people that sometimes just go we’re crazy, let’s do this, just me and you.

Some rooms sometimes have puzzles that require multiple people working at the same time. Fairly common. But, yeah, what you just described. It’s always organized around a theme. Typically there is some kind of narrative. So before you go in the room the person who runs the game will give you a little backstory. And then off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And so you and I got our chance to do our first escape room together, because I’ve done a bunch, you’ve done a bunch. The first one we did together was right before the holidays. So it was all the Quote-Unquote, the podcast folks, and your folks all together in an escape room. We solved a Jumanji room. And I had a really good time. It was not the best room I’ve ever done, but it was really fun doing it with you. You I thought had a good combination of leadership but also inclusivity which is I think two crucial qualities for a good escape room experience.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. And, you know, the thing about escape rooms is only one can be the best escape room. So they’re always, like every escape room to me is a little bit like the way I approach crossword puzzles where I think, OK, you know what, overall I generally liked it, or I generally didn’t like it. But here were some highlights. Here were some things I loved. Here are some things that drive me crazy when I see them in escape rooms, which I’m happy to talk about.

But the escape room personality that is best to have, I think, and I thought you had it as well – and in fact I thought everybody had it that we did this with.

**John:** It was a good room.

**Craig:** Is essentially a generosity of communication.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You’re just telling everybody everything. You have to presume that some people are just going to solve a puzzle before you can or ever would. So you just keep sharing and then your own brain will naturally match up with certain puzzles that you’re just, you get. And other people will go, oh, the thing that’s frustrating you or completely mystifying you I know what to do. It’s such a relief when one of your partners knows what to do.

**John:** Absolutely. So when we say communication it is to call out the things that you’re seeing, especially when they are inputs or outputs. So you see something on the wall that says like, OK, I need a three digit number. And someone else is saying like, OK, I see it and this is a map and there’s dots on the map. And you’re calling out the things that you’re seeing so other people in the room who hopefully aren’t all clustered around you can see, OK, these are the things we’re looking for. And that kind of constant narration of the things that you’re working on is really important.

Also in that communication is we want to say like this is already solved and done. Because so often when I see people who are struggling in escape rooms they are trying to solve a puzzle that has already been solved. So calling out when you’ve done something is really important.

**Craig:** Exactly. The other thing that you want to do is point out patterns that may not be inputs or outputs but feel like they’re relevant. If something on the wall is some words but they’re in colors and they’re arranged in a certain way, just say we’ve got some words with colors over here. Because you may uncover something later and go, oh, those are the colors that that thing is in. And in this way you can kind of keep everything together. It’s good to announce like you said that something is solved so everybody knows that’s burnt. We don’t need to deal with that anymore. It’s over.

**John:** Almost never in an escape room will one thing be used for multiple purposes. You’re not going to go back and use that same thing twice. So if a lock is opened, you’re done with it. And if there was a key that had to go into that lock, just leave the key in that lock because you’re not going to use that key for anything else. So, cleaning up after yourself and moving on is a really crucial skill here.

Many of the escape rooms will actually have multiple rooms. So you’ll enter in one place and you’ll go into another place. In most cases you’ll never go back to that first place once you’ve crossed a threshold into a new room. Not 100% true, but keep in mind that you’re probably not going to be backtracking a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally speaking there’s forward motion. There are two kinds of rooms and sometimes I’ll ask what kind we’re dealing with, but sometimes I just don’t want to know. There’s linear and there’s parallel. In linear rooms you solve a puzzle, it gets you to a next puzzle. You solve that it gets you to your next one. And you proceed as such. In a parallel room there are multiple puzzles that are available to be solved at any given time. You choose which ones. Eventually you have to solve all of them. But they will begin to open up other things. And you may have to backtrack. And you may have to use something twice. And something could get reinterpreted. Those rooms are harder. It’s fun to play either kind. And it is also fascinating to see how we can trap ourselves.

So, sometimes it’s really good to call out and say I have a theory. I just saw a this, and I know that there’s a that over there. My theory is if anybody discovers a blankety-blank it will tell us how to interpret this to put into that. And sometimes you’re right. And sometimes you’re not. And when you get stuck it’s important to kind of go through and say what are we presuming and let’s challenge those presumptions because what if we’re totally wrong. What if we’ve been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out how to stick a square peg in this square slot when that’s actually not at all what this is for?

And it can get frustration. It’s kind of part of the job.

**John:** It can.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The other thing is to avoid your perfectionist tendencies. So if a combination has four pieces to it, and you have three of them, don’t worry about the fourth one. Just go through all the options on the fourth one until you find it. Unless it’s really clear from the start that there’s some sort of time limit or number of attempts possible on this combination lock before it locks you out for a time. And in that case you will need all the inputs in order to try that thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will at times – and they usually let you know. They’ll say, OK, for this electronic lock it’s very common that you’ll face a safe that has a standard keypad on it. For this electronic lock if you enter the wrong code, if you enter three wrong codes it will lock you out for five minutes. That’s important to know. Because that’s not something you want to try in brute force. But you’re right. If you have a combo lock and you know three of them, that’s fine. Back solve it. I’m a big fan of that.

**John:** Absolutely. And then I would say rotate out and around. So, if you’re working on something and you don’t get it, let somebody else swap in for you and tell them what you’ve tried and let them figure it out. So in the escape room we did before the holidays, like Bo your assistant was able to figure out something that I just could not figure out. And I told her what I had done and she was able to step back and figure out what I was missing. So, it is good to have – when you have multiple people they have fresh eyes and they sometimes can have a perspective that you yourself were missing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen for confidence voice which is different than false confidence voice. Confidence voice is I know exactly what to do. Here’s what we’re going to do and this is why it will work. I’ve got this. Let’s do this. Usually when somebody gets confidence voice it’s good for everybody else to stop arguing with them and let them be right. Because what you don’t want to do is debate what the right path is. If someone has a path that they’re sure of that won’t take an hour to try, yeah, line up behind them and let’s see if they’re right.

**John:** Let’s talk through some of our frustrations with escape rooms and the things that would keep them from getting ten out of ten. For me it is when it is unclear whether a problem is solved or not solved. Where there is no visible sign. It’s not clear that you’ve actually done the thing. No change has happened when you’ve solved a particular puzzle. That is a frustration of mine.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will occasionally hear of someone come on the speaker. You’ve done something. Something should have happened. It didn’t. You think well I guess we didn’t do it right. And someone will say you did solve that correctly. Something has opened. And you go, oh, here’s a cabinet that had a magnet release latch and it opened, but it opened so silently and in such a small way how would we ever know. It’s such a problem with rooms I think when they don’t give you that feedback.

**John:** Absolutely. Or the thing opened but there was no sound cue. There was no light. Nothing told you that this was a thing that was possible to have happened.

Oftentimes in a room you will sense like, OK, there is a door. A door is going to open here. And so therefore I’m looking for that. But it’s something that doesn’t look like it could open that does open, as a designer you probably feel like that would be a wonderful surprise. But it’s not a wonderful surprise if none of us saw that as possible, or no one could have been possibly looking there.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this general technology issue. So you can sometimes walk into these very old school rooms in the way that rooms used to be done let’s say five years ago or so when they really started cranking up where it’s a lot of very analog stuff and it’s locks. Just a ton of locks of different kinds. Well, generally speaking locks don’t break. Although I have been in a room where the lock did not function well which was really frustrating and just sort of a time-waster where you’re like if the point is for me to figure stuff out, I figured it out, and now you’re just punishing me because your lock is crappy. How about this? How about just spend another ten dollars and fix the lock? Seriously. Just put a new lock in. So that drives me crazy.

There are rooms that are more technologically advanced which I love. I love rooms that have tricks. But then they have to work.

**John:** They do have to work.

**Craig:** They can’t not work. It’s maddening when they don’t.

**John:** So you and I both loved Lab Rat which is a room that we’ve mentioned on the podcast before. And one of the things – no spoilers – one of the things I loved about that room is that there were things you would encounter for a second time and like, oh, that’s how those things relate. And the context behind what that item was there and sort of how we might use it were clever on second viewing. So that’s an example of not just good narrative design but good sort of puzzle design. What we assumed was the reason for something being there actually had a very different purpose.

**Craig:** Right. So recontextualizations are great. There’s a lot of – I think I like it when rooms pull tricks that don’t use clichéd methods. So if you want to build a clichéd room at some point someone is going to discover a little flashlight that is a black light flashlight. And it will reveal black light stuff. As opposed to in some rooms where the entire light in the room changes. That’s cool. I mean, that’s fun. But, oh look, it’s the black light flashlight again. We found it. Again.

So there are things like that where I’m like, meh, OK. I also have a huge issue with rooms that require you to break something or push something with a lot of force, of any kind. Because one of the basic rules of escape rooms that you were told a billion times is please don’t break our escape room. So use two fingers of force, no more than that. If it feels like it’s not moving easily, don’t push it. Because people go in there and break the rooms.

And so that’s bad. Which means if you’re a responsible escape room escaper you don’t want to break things. There is one room in LA that I’m thinking of that is a very prominent escape room. And it’s a good one. But it does require you to break something at some point and I hate that. And I honestly think all escape room companies should get together and form some sort of consortium where they agree to not do that, because all they’re doing is training people to break shit in other people’s escape rooms.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say a frustration of mine is sometimes – like in an escape room you should look underneath things. You should turn stuff over because often that’s where you’ll discover important things. But where a chair will have like a number on the bottom of it, if it’s not actually a relevant number, it’s actually just some tag that indicates what room it goes into that’s frustrating for me. If you’re in a room where numbers seem important and there’s a random number 14 on the bottom of a chair, I’m going to assume that it’s important for some reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve actually touched on two things that drive me crazy about escape rooms. And when I see them I get angry. Thing number one. You put something in there that looks like a puzzle and it’s not. That’s not a red herring. That’s a time waster. So there is a room that I did recently and there was in the corner of the room there was an object that had a lock on it. There was a lock holding it flat down on a tube.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** And we were just killing ourselves trying to figure out how to open that lock. And finally someone came on and said that’s not part of the room. Then label it. But if you’re going to put a lock in an escape room, hey guys, we’re going to try and unlock it. That’s why we’re there. So don’t do that. And the other thing that I just honestly loathe – loathe- are escape rooms where part of the thing is stuff is hidden. Like, oh, OK, the big puzzle here was that I had to look underneath the drawer in the corner and find this little key on the ground in the dust bunnies? Great? I feel so smart? What’s the point of that? It’s just – why?

**John:** Yeah. You’ll find stuff tucked into a jacket pocket. And I guess I’m OK with that, but I would prefer that if it was related to the narrative. That there was something about that person’s coat and therefore we have the idea that, oh, it will be important to search inside the coat. But like looking through every tag and every piece of clothing just doesn’t feel like a puzzle.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. Yeah. Like if we unlock – let’s say there’s like a high school locker. And we find the lock combination and we open it up and inside is a jacket, like a varsity jacket. And that’s all there is. Something is in the jacket. Or something is on the jacket. Totally fair game. But if there is a key for a box and that key just happens to be in the corner of the room under a rug. I did an escape room in Vegas and you couldn’t – it was a linear escape room. So if you hit a bump and you don’t know what comes next, you’re done. And what came next was that there was an area rug in the room and you had to lift it up because there was a key underneath it. No. No, escape room, that’s bad.

I don’t like it.

**John:** With that rug, if there were some piece of something sticking out from underneath the rug that gave you the sense of like, oh, this rug is not simply just there for floor covering. It is actually part of the puzzle, then that would be fair.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But it was not fair what they were doing.

**Craig:** Correct. So in my beloved Room games on iOS one of the things they’ll do is if there is something that you otherwise would not think would be movable they might if you examine it closely put little scratches in the metal around it as if to say somebody has been moving this. It is movable. Let me try and move it.

But if it’s just some random thing you just end up wasting time. Like OK there’s a bed. I guess we have to lift the mattress up, too. Do we pull the pillow out? And then they come on like you don’t need to do anything with the bed. Well then don’t hide stuff. How about we use our minds to solve problems instead of just go on some sort of dumb room cleaning assignment?

It’s funny. I love escape rooms so much that I actually do get angry when they fail you. But I wish that – so ideally escape rooms take these elements that we’re familiar with and they just reinterpret them in fun ways. The way that you and I in our jobs have to take stories that people are familiar with and reinterpret them in interesting ways. I’m not giving anything away. No spoiler here. There’s a terrific room in LA called the Stash House. And those of us who have done a lot of rooms have encountered a lot of locks. Well at one point you encounter some locks in that room. I don’t know if you’ve done Stash Room yet.

**John:** I’ve not done it yet.

**Craig:** You’re like, OK, not bad guys. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat. And you go that’s pretty cool. And it’s because it’s like, oh, you guys have also played escape rooms. You also get angry at crappy escape rooms so you didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls which I always appreciate.

**John:** Yeah. I do look at escape rooms as kind of a new narrative art form. And so sort of like the early days of cinema or early days of television there are conventions that are starting and growing up and we are able to push against those conventions as well. So, I’ve loved the escape rooms I’ve done so far, but I’m actually really curious to see where we’re at five years, ten years from now with the possibilities of the format. So, that will be cool.

So the same folks who do Lab Rat, they have a new thing called The Ladder which sounds really cool. Where you can play it multiple times because there’s multiple endings. That sounds smart.

**Craig:** Yep. No, I’m totally on board for that. I have very, very high expectations for that. And I also like the fact that when I travel somewhere, whether it’s in the US or abroad, there are escape rooms. I’ve done I think most of the escape rooms in Vilnius, Lithuania, and there’s some good ones. There really are. I do escape rooms, if I’m just in some random city I’m always looking for an escape room. Always. And it’s fun.

And, you know, sometimes each city has its own flavor. I’ll tell you. Salt Lake City escape rooms brutally hard. I don’t know what’s going on there. My goodness.

**John:** It’s the altitude that makes it so much more difficult.

**Craig:** It is just – they are like – because they’re nice. They’re so nice. And they’re like, all right, good luck. Close. And oh my god, when you don’t get out, and usually I escape. I don’t think I’ve escaped a single escape room in Salt Lake City. And then when they come in they’re like, oh, you were so close. Here’s 4,000 other things you would have never known. I’m like, wow, amazing.

**John:** Yeah. Amazing. All right, to the future of escape rooms. Craig it was very good talking with you and I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Excellent. See you then, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Read the script for [Marriage Story here](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/marriage-story-ampas-script.pdf) or watch [Marriage Story](https://www.netflix.com/title/80223779?)
* [APA Signed with WGA](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/apa-deal-writers-guild-of-america-1203475114/), congrats APA!
* [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/), former Scriptnotes Producer, to write [Captain Marvel Sequel](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/captain-marvel-2-movie-works-wandavision-writer-1272259). Congrats!
* David Byrne’s [American Utopia](https://americanutopiabroadway.com/)
* [Noah Baumbach](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000876/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alex Winder ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/435st.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig).

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

**Greta Gerwig:** Hello. I’m Greta Gerwig.

**John:** And this is Episode 433 of Scriptnotes.

**Greta:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 433 episodes.

Today on this show we will be discussing ambition, authorship, and adaptation, which is why we’re so lucky to have Greta Gerwig filling in for Craig. She is the acclaimed writer and director of Little Women and Lady Bird. We’re going to answer some listener questions about descriptive writing and parenthood as well.

**Greta:** Great.

**John:** Craig is out sick today. But he has promised to join me after the credits for a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about what was happening with him and Tiffany Haddish at the Golden Globes. So, Craig won a Golden Globe. He won a Golden Globe for Chernobyl.

**Greta:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Which is great. And now you already had a Golden Globe, because you won a Golden Globe for Lady Bird.

**Greta:** Actually you know what? The thing is because I wasn’t listed as a producer on Lady Bird or Little Women I actually don’t have any awards.

**John:** Well, you have many awards. You don’t have a Golden Globe?

**Greta:** No. Because it won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy but because I’m not a producer I don’t have a Golden Globe.

**John:** I’m going to throw this table.

**Greta:** I know.

**John:** I’m so angry.

**Greta:** I know. People are like let me see your Golden Globe and I’m like the thing is I don’t have one. It’s quite all right. I think eventually I will be a producer on my projects. But for the first couple I was like I want other people to be able to take that full space.

**John:** That’s fair. So I assumed that you and Craig had that in common winning Golden Globes. But you and I have something in common I discovered during our research. We are both born on August 4th.

**Greta:** No?

**John:** We are birthday twins.

**Greta:** Birthday twins. Plus Obama.

**John:** Plus Obama. The three of us. A powerful–

**Greta:** Have the same–

**John:** A powerful team.

**Greta:** And I think Queen Elizabeth. Is that right?

**John:** That sounds right. I’ll believe it. Say it with confidence and we’ll believe it.

**Greta:** Queen Elizabeth. No, that’s really great. A Leo.

**John:** Yeah, a Leo. I don’t really believe in astrology but like–

**Greta:** Oh, I do. [laughs]

**John:** But I have many qualities of Leo.

**Greta:** I mean, actually I don’t know that I believe in it in that I don’t know that I think there’s a correlation between the facts of the world and what you can glean from astrology. However, I think people use lots of things which it’s not technically based in hard fact at all. And if it makes you a little happier, why not? I mean, an astrologist told me once that I was in a lucky corridor. It was when I was making Lady Bird actually. And then she was like so if anything goes wrong, just ask yourself how is this an opportunity for me. Because it is.

And I was like well that’s just pretty good advice in general.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Astrology maybe not true, but good advice always welcome.

**Greta:** Good advice. And I have Leo-ish qualities.

**John:** I’m going to be asking a lot of advice from you for our listeners. But let me lay out the overall agenda of things I’d love to talk about while I have you here for this hour. So I want to talk about your adaptation of Little Women which is unconventional and just terrific.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** We have the script in front of us so we’ll be able to do some deep diving on some scenes. But I want to know how you came to write it. Why you wrote it? It’s a story about ambition. Jo is very ambitious. You are ambitious as a filmmaker. You were instrumental in helping create a whole genre of filmmaking. So we should talk about that.

**Greta:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then I want to talk about the notion of authorship because Jo aspires so hard to be an author. And the work I associate you with is so autobiographical. And so like Little Women is sort of meta autobiographical because of some of the things you did, but Lady Bird is highly autobiographical. So the degree to which you are writing things that only you could write is I think a good thing for us to talk about.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** That will be our agenda for this hour. But I want to know how you came to write Little Women because it’s a public domain story. You could have written it at any time, but you wrote it in a very specific way. So tell me about how you came to write it.

**Greta:** Well, the truth is actually I didn’t really know about the public domain for a long time, in terms of the text of Little Women. But I grew up reading this book. I read it many, many times. And Jo March was my favorite character. And in many ways she was the character that made me believe I could be a writer, because she wanted to be a writer. She was a writer. And then in some way that I didn’t know completely but I think you intuit when you’re reading it is because you’re holding the book Little Women in some ways you know she became the writer who wrote the book even though it’s a different name.

And I didn’t really know who Louisa May Alcott was because I read books the way all kids read books which is that the things within the pages seem real to you, even though they’re fiction. And I think the last time I read the book when I was something like 14 or 15 and then when I was 30 I reread it and I felt like I’d never read it before. I felt like it was brand new.

**John:** You read it just on a lurk? There was no reason?

**Greta:** I was actually moving out of one apartment into another apartment and that’s often the occasion to uncover some things, which is why it’s sometimes good to either move or clean stuff out, because then you revisit stuff. Anyway, I had the copy of Little Women that I had had when I was a girl. And I reread it. Or I sat down to sort of like page through it. And then I started reading it and I was like, oh my god, this is – in one way I almost know this by heart, and in another way I feel like I’ve never read it. I feel like it’s totally modern and strange and pressing. And I knew I wanted to make it into a film. I started seeing it as a film.

And then coincidentally my agent mentioned that Amy Pascal and the folks over at Sony were interested in making it. And I said you’ve got to get me in that room. And I went and I talked to Amy and Denise Di Novi and Robin Swicord and I told them what I wanted to do with it. And I hadn’t yet directed Lady Bird. So it was a long shot. But they said – initially what they said yes to was me writing the screenplay.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer before that moment. Because you’d written on other movies before. And you directed before, but much smaller things.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so what were they reading of their work?

**Greta:** Why did they give me this job?

**John:** I’m truly curious. You’re coming into this room. What was it like?

**Greta:** Well, I had co-written two screenplays with Noah, Frances Ha and Mistress America. I think especially now that I’ve written and directed stuff on my own I think it’s a little easier to see how much of that is my writing. But I think when you’re initially a cowriter and also when you’re an actor I think there’s almost an assumption that maybe you just wrote the lines you said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Greta:** Which is not true. But it’s an understandable assumption. And then–

**John:** And that’s probably true for any writing team in general. You don’t know whether one of them by themselves can really do the work.

**Greta:** Exactly. And you’re not sure – and, because Noah had done things alone, it’s a little harder to tease out. But I’d done that. But then I had been hired properly – properly I mean by a person – I wrote a script for Lionsgate for Eric Feige and that I went in, I knew they had an idea of doing something I pitched and I said here’s what – and they gave me the job. And I wrote them a script. And so that was kind of the first thing that I’d done like that.

And then actually interesting on a sitcom that I tried to do that didn’t work, How I Met Your Father, How I Met Your Dad, I was a writer on that as well.

**John:** So there were things people could look at to say like she can really write by herself.

**Greta:** Yeah. There were a couple things. But it was kind of on faith. I mean, I did give them the script to Lady Bird even though I hadn’t made Lady Bird yet. And said, oh, I wrote this.

**John:** OK. That’s a pretty good script.

**Greta:** It was a good script, but I also think, you know, it’s hard to be the first one in the pool. And I thought it was a good script and I had gotten some feedback. People said, oh yes, it’s a good script. But like nobody really knows yet. You know, you have to believe in the thing before anybody else says it’s good. And that’s like what makes great producers is they can read something without anybody else telling them it’s good and think it’s good.

I had that script but it was still kind of – I mean, they certainly didn’t hire me to direct it. And it was like, well, give it a shot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** It wasn’t like–

**John:** Take a chance on you.

**Greta:** Yeah. It wasn’t like some big like now we’re all in on you. And I think I always wanted to direct it and thought that I should, but even though they weren’t thinking that way, I think a couple of things helped in that regard which is that I sort of had a sense of like I’m going to do whatever I want with this script because I mean nobody is ever going to make this.

**John:** Well let’s talk about talking into that room, meeting with – because I know Amy well and I know Denise and I know Robin Swicord. They’re all very smart, accomplished women.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** What was your conversation? Were you coming in to them saying like I want to do Little Women and here’s my take of a nonlinear way to get into this and how you’re going to handle all this? How much of it did you know as you were going into those meetings?

**Greta:** I knew quite a bit actually going into the meetings. Well, I think one of the first things I said was that I said to me this book is about authorship and ownership and it’s about money. And it’s about women and money and how that intersects with artistic output. And it felt like it was all over the book to me. And then I had already started looking at Louisa May Alcott’s life and what that was. And how that intersected with the subject of the book. And I didn’t quite know how I was going to interweave the time periods, but I didn’t know that I wanted to start with them as adults. That was the way I wanted to come at it.

And I think in part because I knew that the adaptation that I wanted to do was not just an adaptation of the text as it is in the book. Although I did rely heavily on the text in the book. I also wanted to treat all adaptations as almost an urtext as a collective memory of what Little Women is, so that there are things – you know, this is an example that I don’t know how much it’s useful but I always think about it. Our conceptions of heaven and hell for example. They’re not from the bible.

**John:** No, they’re not at all.

**Greta:** They’re from Dante. That’s where we got all of it from. So if you actually go to the bible and you’re like where are the descriptions of the hell fires? They’re not there. They don’t exist. Because that’s something we got later. And I do think that there’s this sense of an urtext or collective text which means more than even what the original text said. So I felt like I had the original text, but then I had images. And the images are things like Marmee and the girls gathered around the fire reading the letter from father. And the kiss in the rain under the umbrella. And Amy falling in the ice or burning the book. There are these little moments. Or going to the Hummels or the Christmas morning. These moments that I feel like they’re from the book but they’re also from all of the times we’ve seen it.

**John:** The collective unconscious. It’s what we associate as this being–

**Greta:** Exactly. So what I wanted to do was kind of find a way for that to be almost like the found materials. And then to explode it and deconstruct it and put it back together again.

**John:** So you mentioned the starting with them as older and then going back to them as children. My guess when I watched the movie was that part of your instinct for doing that was so that the actors that you cast would be established as the older versions so that when you come back to them as a younger version it didn’t feel like a weird mismatch. Like if you started with those older actresses as the younger versions you’re like, wait, she’s not 13. But you’re more forgiving. That’s something as a filmmaker you’re doing, but it was also your narrative sense of that you really wanted to make sure that the older life of them was as important as the younger version. What was your instinct?

**Greta:** Yeah, well, one thing that I realized – I mean, there are so many angles I could come at this from which leads to very longwinded answers. But there’s an inherent meta quality to the text which I was alluding to before which is that you’re holding a book, so someone wrote it. And then so you have Louisa May Alcott writing Jo. And Louisa May Alcott is writing something that looks vaguely like her life and Jo is kind of an avatar. And then Jo was also writing something that vaguely looks like her life. And then it’s me writing Louisa writing Jo. And I felt like the only way to represent all of this is to get quite Cubist about it.

It’s like there’s all these different points of authorship. And I think that there’s a real ache in the text. There’s a couple of lines I could point to that have it. But one thing is that the text is not told – it’s not first person. It’s not Jo narrating it. It’s Louisa or the narrator or whoever that person is. And there’s a lot of sadness in that person behind the people. And this perspective of Louisa’s real sister is already gone. Her sister Elizabeth died. And Louisa herself had gone to the Civil War as a Civil War nurse and had suffered through typhoid fever and almost died. And her sister, not Meg, but the character that Meg is based on, she’d gotten married and it was devastating for her.

And so there’s all these things of like she is writing about a thing that already past. And there was something when I was reading the text – and this is why every answer is so longwinded – I realized that once they’re all in their separate lives, like once Amy is in Europe, once Meg is married, once Beth is living at home but sick, and Jo is in New York trying to sell stories, they are never all together again. The thing that we think of as Little Women has already past. And I think that ache and that absence of the togetherness and that absence of the sisterhood as being the way that we contextualize these cozy scenes brought out something in me that felt was inherent in the text.

And then I think I wanted to start it just squarely with the publisher with this idea of this negotiation of will you buy my work and what do I have to change for you to buy it. And I think, you know, there’s another level on which like this scene is something that I know from this scene. I know what it’s like to sit across from someone who basically tells you morals don’t sell nowadays. So it was – I mean, there were lots of reasons for it. But emotionally I felt like there was, yeah, that ache. That it’s already gone. And then beyond that this relationship of Louisa to the text and me to the text of I think that what artists do is you write it down because you can’t save anyone’s life. Like I think that’s part of what the impulse is.

I can’t save your life, but I can write it down. And I can’t get that moment back, but I can write it down. And I think that’s part of it for me. And that kind of – and it allowed me to kind of weave that sense of is that how you remembered it or is that what happened. Is that what happened or is that how you wrote it?

**John:** But you also by moving back and forth between the two timelines you’re creating a tension for the viewer saying like, wait, how did we get there because I assumed that Laurie would be with her, but Laurie is with this other guy, so it becomes a mystery.

**Greta:** Exactly. And then also I will say this is a less poetic response. But I think there’s always been just when you tell the stories narratively straight, this is now just a nuts and bolts thing. I think there’s two things that are tricky about the traditional straight ahead narrative of Little Women. The first one is Beth gets sick and then she gets better. And then Beth gets sick and then she dies. And I always find that’s like a little hard narratively to kind of get like oh no, oh it’s OK, oh no it’s not. So one idea I had was just that stacking. And then there are poetic reasons within the stacking–

**John:** Of course. There are scenes where she comes down and sees her there, sees her not there.

**Greta:** Exactly. And that feeling of like when someone dies I think you have this inherent feeling of like but they were just there. And it was just the other way. And I felt like it was a way to cinematically give us that. And then the other thing was I felt as a viewer and as a reader and why I wanted – I hope there’s no spoilers – but why I wanted Mr. Dashwood as the publisher to say like “Frankly, I don’t see why she didn’t marry the neighbor” is because that’s what everyone for 150 years has thought. Like if you’re going to marry someone, you might as well have just married that guy across the street. Like he seemed really nice and he likes you. And what’s wrong with him?

I feel like it’s more true in movies than any other medium that the person you see them with first is the person you believe they should be with. I don’t know why it works like that. I just think it tends to work like that. And so one thing when you tell the story straight through is that you see Laurie and Jo together. And when it’s like Laurie and Amy you’re like what the hell is this? I’ve been with these other people.

The second thing is then when you meet Professor Bhaer you’re like dammit who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. I don’t care about this guy. I’ve never met this guy.

**John:** I don’t want him in my movie.

**Greta:** I know. He’s an old German professor. Like who cares? So in a way, I mean, that’s just nuts and bolts-y. I was like if I see Amy run into Laurie first and obviously he’s the object of her affection, and if I see Professor Bhaer at the beginning then I’m less introducing a new person later. And then on top of it someone said later they were like, oh, Professor Bhaer when he shows up it’s like deus ex machina, but to me I was like but that is what it is. It’s in the book. It is deus ex machina. He just shows up. And it’s like if we could set that early at the beginning and be like – and I mean, also because I’m dealing what is storytelling and what do you need and what do you expect from your characters, like with just the briefest outline of this is a romantic interest that you’re like, oh yes, I see it is a romantic interest. Part of it is playing with narrative expectations. So in any case that’s like the less beautiful answer.

**John:** But even in trying to establish that, Bhaer as a potential love interest, you’re doing a very deliberate rhyme where like she burned her dress both times with both of these guys. And so we associate like, oh, her burning her dress or being caught on fire is a thing that happens when there’s a love interest introduced.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. It’s right. And also the first scene of the movie when she’s trying to sell the scandal story and he says, “You know, if the main character is a girl make sure she ends up married, or dead, either way.” And then the very first scene you see her in it’s like well there you go. There’s the guy. I mean, we just set up guys because it’s like he just told her married or dead. So now we have to see is it marry or dead. It’s like putting a gun on the wall in the first act.

**John:** Chekhov’s marriage.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a listen to a scene. So this is a scene from Page 68 in the script. This is Amy and Laurie in France. I think it’s chapter 39 in the book. It’s pretty late in the book. This is a scene between Amy and Laurie. Let’s take a listen and then discuss the scene.

**Amy:** I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?

**Laurie:** It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you love it.

**Amy:** Well, I believe we have some power over who we love it. It isn’t something that just happens to a person.

**Laurie:** I think the poets might disagree.

**Amy:** Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And we had children they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

**John:** Ah, such a great speech.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** So Julie Turner who hosts the Slate Culture Gabfest, they were talking about your amazing movie on this week’s episode. And I asked her like Greta is coming in so do you have any more questions for her. And she said, “Did you always find Amy sympathetic or is that something that came to you on later readings? How did your view of her evolve?” Because this is the evolved Amy we’re hearing in this scene.

**Greta:** Yes. Well, no, Amy was one of the characters that I was just utterly knocked backwards by when I read it again. And she was the one that I kept underlining lines. And there were so many great lines I couldn’t even get them all in. I mean, everything about the script I will say can be essentially footnoted. I could tell you why every line is there. And it’s either directly from the book or it’s from a piece of research. But she has a line where she says, “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant.” And I was like holy crap! Who is this? That’s such an amazing sentiment. And I felt like, oh, she’s been sitting here this whole time.

And I felt to me actually the section when she’s in Paris and in Italy, but she’s with Laurie and she’s kind of contending with her art, I found that to be very profound. And it was, you know, the line “I want to be great or nothing” it’s straight from the book. And I was like well that’s not a person who takes their art lightly. That’s somebody who is really swinging for the fences. And I think that depth of seriousness about her work was fascinating to me and also the pain of giving it up because she doesn’t think it’s going to go great. That’s a very adult thing. And it’s something that I very much understand.

And so, yeah, Amy was the one who was fascinating to me. And also hilarious in a way that I felt like I hadn’t even totally tapped into. Or I hadn’t realized when I was younger. But there’s a whole section – I mean, there’s so many great things in the book that I couldn’t include. But there’s a whole section where she says, she’s asking about Beth because Beth is very good at piano. And I think it’s after Mr. Laurence gives her the piano, and Amy is trying to logically work out what the difference between her and Beth is. And she’s like, “Oh I see. It’s nice to have talents. But it’s not nice to tell everyone you have them.” And they’re like, right. And then but she’s not humble. But she’s figuring out that to be liked she better look like she’s humble, which I think is really funny and really great. And anyway she just was so much richer and funnier than I had ever really totally given her credit for.

In any case, and like the “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant” I later turned that into the line where she says – “Since when did you become so wise?” And she says, “I have always have been, you were just too busy noticing my faults.” I kind of thought that for me it’s like for 150 years we’ve looked at this character as being kind of petty and a little shallow. And I was like we never noticed. She was always kind of amazing.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this scene again. So this is a moment where Laurie is really noticing how incredible she is. So she says, “I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?” Laurie, “There’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you love him.” He’s the person challenging the romantic ideal that you should marry for love. And she has the insight to say, no, this is an economic transaction. This was obviously a thing you pitched from the very start.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** This idea that this is really a story of money.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** And here it is. So of her speech here, what comes from the text? Because we looked through chapter 39 and couldn’t find any of those words, but the spirit is there.

**Greta:** The spirit is there.

**John:** It’s a much longer scene and a much longer conversation. But none of these actual words. So how do you get to this?

**Greta:** Well, OK, so the line “I’ve always known I would marry rich” that’s from the text. She does say that. And later she feels sort of embarrassed about actually having said that. But this speech actually for the most part it comes from a conversation I had with Meryl Streep about this movie. We had an early coffee and we talked about it and she was going to be in it. The book had meant a great deal to her. And she essentially said to me the thing that you have to make the audience understand is this. And she said some version of this. But she was sort of like it’s not just that women couldn’t vote. It’s not just that they couldn’t own property. They couldn’t. It’s that they didn’t own anything. And that they legally couldn’t unless they were completely unmarried and had their own fortune. But even then it was complicated. They couldn’t get educated.

And so she was sort of laying out these limitations. And I knew I wanted Amy to have a speech like this, but actually this particular speech I wrote ten minutes before we shot.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Greta:** Yeah. Because I knew I wanted it to get there and I knew I wanted them to have this conversation. And I assume the people who are listening are screenwriters. In the run up to making the movie what often happens is you end up having to cut a lot of stuff to make page count seem lower, because you’re trying to be like this isn’t unwieldy. This is completely reasonable to make. So you end up like cutting so much stuff. And what I was doing, and it doesn’t matter now because it’s all made, but what I did was I cut the script down, but then I would just save the pages I wanted to make and then write before we’d go. I’d just give them to the actors and I’d say, all right, we’re going to do this. Or I’d give them the night before or something. Sometimes I’d just give it to them handwritten so there was no paper trail. Because I didn’t want them to give it to anyone.

And I’d say like can you just say these things. Because I figured once the lines are in the dailies what are they going to do? Tell me I can’t have them?

**John:** They’re not going to compare them back to the printed pages. No.

**Greta:** No. Nobody is going to do that. So I knew I wanted something like this, but I knew nobody is going to let me do this.

**John:** So this scene existed in the shooting script, but it was shorter and it didn’t have quite this text in it.

**Greta:** I think this scene ended before the speech. It did. It ended before the speech because nobody was interested in the speech. And anyway, I handwrote it. I gave it to her. But I always knew I wanted something like that in it. But I just felt like hearing Amy say I want to marry rich sounds quite crass if you don’t really understand the stakes of what that means. And it’s, you know, for women at that time it was the decision. And if you married the wrong person, if you married someone who had–

**John:** Disastrous.

**Greta:** –drinking problem, or couldn’t make a living, or treated your children badly, that’s it. That the worst decision you could make. So, in any case I wanted to give her context.

**John:** Now, while we’re looking at physical printed pages here, two things you do in this script which I find so great and so fascinating. So first off, all the scenes that are in the past you have printed in red. And was that from the very start. Did you always plan to do that?

**Greta:** Yes. I always did it that way.

**John:** Because very few scripts have such a back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It’s got to be so helpful for everybody involved to know like, OK, from production design to costumes to everyone like what world are we in.

**Greta:** It was a beast in prep I will say just tracking everything. And we had things set out that, you know, on boards where it was like here it is chronologically. And then here it is the way it appears in the script. Because I just always wanted the present and the past to be talking to each other.

**John:** Of course.

**Greta:** And there’s always a link. And in some ways like I felt like I wanted everything to work emotionally. Where moving from one place to another that even if you’re not intimately familiar with the story, because the truth is everything moves forward, which is there’s two origin points of the story. 1868 and 1861. And everything moves forward from there. You don’t actually go back in this story. You just go between those two timelines that are everything is going forward.

So I wanted it to work emotionally, but I also wanted it to if you broke it down to completely work logically. I actually did look at them like a graph, like Nolan had made during Dunkirk. I mean, he had the three timelines that took different amounts of time. And I mean I really loved that intersection of time and the play with it. But you might not know on first viewing how everything lines up. You just are watching it emotionally.

**John:** But you also have confidence that it will work.

**Greta:** Right. So if you do break it down later it all works. And so I wanted it to be, you know, have that thing that it both works. I mean, there’s lots of movies that do that. Obviously Irishman does it.

**John:** Big Fish does it the same way.

**Greta:** That’s right.

**John:** So Big Fish both timelines move forward, but we’re in a fantasy timeline or a real world timeline. And ultimately they overlap.

**Greta:** Exactly. I mean, I think it is one of the things – it’s tricky to do and it’s scary to do. But I think it’s something that movies do well. Can play with time in a way that other mediums can’t as much. Like it’s certainly harder in theater. And also because this is a movie about what it is to make something and to make something of your life–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Greta:** So it felt like the exact right way to play with it. But, yeah, I definitely put it in red from the beginning and I remember Tom Rothman at Columbia Pictures who is great, I always say he’s my favorite person to fight with. He was like, “But I know that it’s the other time because it’s red. How will anyone else know?” And I was like, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.

**John:** There will be a flashing red light in the corner that says PAST, PAST.

**Greta:** I know. But it was actually in the writing of it it was always like this. But it was a bit of a trick in the beginning to figure out how to present everything. But I really have faith in viewers. I love lots of complicated movies. But also people watch really complicated television shows with multiple plot lines, multiple timelines. And I was like viewers are super sophisticated.

**John:** They are.

**Greta:** Like I think that they’re very good at – I mean, I watch Game of Thrones. It’s amazing how intricate it is. I think that sometimes people underestimate how sophisticated viewers are. And they really are able to follow things that aren’t – you don’t need to sign post everything as strongly as you think you need to sometimes. And actually it’s so funny because I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. Like while you’re making something you encounter different things and then you’re like, oh, well they did it this way, and they did it this way. But also at Columbia Pictures was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which I loved very much, but like I remember talking to Tom about it and sometimes there’s a chyron that says it’s this place or this time, and then sometimes there’s not.

**John:** It’s arbitrary.

**Greta:** I was like how does he do that? And Tom I think was like because sometimes the audience needs it and sometimes they don’t. And I was like, oh, that’s right. You can do whatever you want.

**John:** Whatever is helpful is helpful.

**Greta:** Sometimes when you’re conceiving of these things everything feels like it has to be so very logical. And the truth is when you’re watching a movie sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t.

**John:** I will say in watching your film, at the start I wasn’t quite clear what timeline we were in for a while. And I gave up worrying about it and I just trusted that it was going to work, and it worked. But I was reading our local free paper that gets distributed, The [Unintelligible] Park whatever. The reviewer gave your movie a 9 out of 10. And said phenomenal except that it has this crazy nonlinear thing which is completely unnecessary.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s really funny.

**John:** You don’t understand the movie you watched, but you enjoyed it.

**Greta:** Well you know what’s funny? You might not think it was necessary, but maybe you wouldn’t have had the experience you had–

**John:** Oh, he wouldn’t have at all.

**Greta:** If you had told it linearly. I mean, that’s the thing. I don’t know. Movies are mysterious like that.

**John:** Someone will do a cut of Little Women that puts everything back in order.

**Greta:** Well, it can’t be done. I mean, it really can’t be done. Because it’s not made that way. It’s not constructed that way. There is no entry point. And I will say there was in the edits a moment where we looked at – because we were asked to look at could you do it the other way. And you can’t. I mean, there’s no movie. And actually one thing that’s not funny but just that I’ve noticed – again, I hope it’s not spoiler-y, but I assume if you’re listening to this you’ve seen it. One thing when shows have asked for clips one thing that’s interesting to me is I often find that the clips aren’t very good at communicating what it is because if you see just childhood in isolation–

**John:** It looks weird.

**Greta:** It looks weird because that’s actually not what it is. And if you see – it’s like seeing the kiss at the end of the movie as if it was just the kiss. But that’s not what it is. So, when you just see them gathered around reading the letter from father it looks like a very pitch straight down the middle. But it’s not a pitch down the middle. What’s the pitch that drops? Do you know baseball?

**John:** No. I don’t talk about sports well on this show and Craig always makes fun of me for not knowing. Like a slider? A drop?

**Greta:** Yeah, a slider.

**John:** Sure. We’ll pretend.

**Greta:** Like it looks like it’s coming over the plate and then it’s just not. So I find that like actually there’s no way to really – the tone is the contrast if that makes sense.

**John:** Totally. On page 68 we also have an example of something else you do which I’d not seen before. You have a lot of overlapping dialogue.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** But you also do this thing where you warn us in the title page. There’s a slash in the first person’s dialogue to show where the person is interrupting. And I’ve never seen that done before. Tell me about your choice to do that.

**Greta:** The slash is sort of a “don’t make,” and then there’s a slash “fun” and then Laurie is “I’m not!” So the word that overlaps is fun and I’m. So don’t make/I’m not. That’s sort of the way it’s supposed to sound. I took that from playwrights. Caryl Churchill does it all the time in her plays. And Tony Kushner does it in his plays. And it’s something that I find really useful because if you want to specifically hear certain words but you like a controlled cacophony it’s very helpful because it makes the actors know it’s not talking over each other. It’s like a madrigal or a round or something.

**John:** It’s also an anticipation of what they’re going to say and–

**Greta:** Exactly. So it gave for the girls in particular like the four of them it’s overlapping over the time. And it gave a very technical thing to work on during rehearsal which was wonderful which was getting everyone up to speed. And it means that, I mean, I like this in general. I like everything said exactly how I wrote it. Because I have strange rhythm things that if you change a word it sounds wrong to me. And it makes it so that you need to have the lines memorized in a muscle memory. You can’t be reaching for the lines ever. And I like that kind of memorization. And I like that kind of ability because it allows me to – especially with the group scenes – treat all the actors like an orchestra.

**John:** And you’re also able to stay wide which is helpful.

**Greta:** Yes. Exactly. And I think some of that does come from my background. My first love was theater. I wanted to write plays.

**John:** And plays are very much that. But here I want to talk about the other films you’ve made. The whole genre of filmmaking you’ve made. Because I associate mumblecore as being under-scripted.

**Greta:** Well it was. The funny this is, well, I wanted to be a playwright. But then I became involved with this very loose improvisational – and improvisational in all ways. We’d have characters, we’d have scenes, ideas, but we would have no actual lines written out, or just the most rudimentary lines written out. Because we would find it in improvisation on camera. And it was incredibly useful in a lot of ways because it, I mean, it became a film school. It became the way I figured out how things were edited and what the camera is interested in and not interested.

But I always missed writing. I really always missed the written word. And I missed what actors could do with text because I found that in a certain way I think we’re all understandably self-protective. And as actors improvising I think it’s actually very hard to go to scary places. Something will stop you from doing it. You know, your brain is protecting your ego or however that works. And one thing about text is it forces you to be vulnerable in a way that you might not be if you weren’t given it.

So when I think of part of the job of an actor is to rise to the text, you can have very complicated, very vulnerable things that you might not access another way. So I always missed the text. And so when I started writing with Noah Baumbach and I wrote those two movies with him part of it was because – the first time I worked with him was as an actor. And when I read his screenplay for Greenberg I thought oh this is, yes, it’s so precise. It is so precise. I know exactly – I could hear it when I was reading it. And that was something that we really shared. So when we started writing together that’s how I wrote.

And then as I continued writing that’s just how I continued writing. I mean, maybe one day I’ll loosen up. But I really like things just said as they were written. [laughs]

**John:** You talk about vulnerability, so I want to get to a second clip. So this is Jo and Marmee. They’re talking in the attic. So it’s page 100 of the screenplay. Probably comes from chapter 42 of the book.

**Greta:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Jo:** I just feel – I just feel like women – they have minds. And they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition. And they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.

**John:** So that is a terrific. A terrific moment. So iconic. Let’s talk about what it looks like on the page. So they’ve been having a conversation. It gets down to Jo. The parenthetical reads (crying, trying to explain herself to herself). And then it gets into those words. What a great parenthetical.

**Greta:** Oh yes. I do like a parenthetical. You know, it’s funny. I do think of screenplays as pieces of writing that should be able to stand on their own. And I try to make them as deep as possible. And I think I never want it to be just a blueprint. And I think one of my sadnesses actually about screenwriting is unlike playwriting is that the screenplay is just never a thing.

**John:** It’s not seen, read.

**Greta:** No. And I have some pride in what the actual text of the screenplay is, including screen directions, including parentheticals. So, in any case thank you for pointing out the parenthetical that no one will know. But I also think sometimes I try to cue in the actor to something that is going on. But in any case.

So this scene, you know, it’s come off of this sequence of death to marriage. I wanted to do this thing of like the older timeline where Beth lives then all of a sudden it’s Christmas. And then when you go back she’s gone, then it’s to funeral, and then of course to me it made perfect sense to go from a funeral to a wedding. These are the ceremonies of how we mark life. This is how we do it. This is what… – Anyway, so we do that. But there’s all these losses that have accumulated in both timelines. And this comes from the chapter where Jo does say–

**John:** I am so lonely.

**Greta:** She actually doesn’t technically say I’m so lonely.

**John:** Oh, Marmee says, “I see you’re lonely.”

**Greta:** Yes. And Marmee says it. And then but she does say, “If he asked me now I’d say yes,” which I felt like, wait, we always think of Jo as being like so certain in her path. She never doubts it. I think that’s kind of to the urtext of Jo. And I was like she doubted it. She wondered should I have done the other thing, which just kills me. And in any case this text, this speech, “women have minds and souls, as well as hearts,” actually is from another book that Louisa May Alcott wrote. This is from Moods, I believe. I have to go back and double check that. But I think it’s from Moods. And I found this piece of text. I thought it was so beautiful, but to me that “but I’m so lonely” just was kind of the penetrating thing in this chapter.

I will say about this chapter, too, which goes to the idea of the narrator, is that it begins with the narrator, which we can assume is Louisa May Alcott, speaking about being a spinster and speaking about never marrying. What she says is, “Girls of five and 20 joke about being spinsters, but they do it because they don’t really think it’s going to happen. But when girls become 30 they stop talking about it at all because they know it is happening.” And then she says, she goes on this kind of tangent of be kind to the spinsters because you don’t know what passions are hidden under their somber gowns, or something like that.

It’s this amazing tangent. And I was like, oh my god, it’s her talking. Like you don’t know what my life was, or my loves were based on the fact that I didn’t get married. You cannot tell my heart from my outsides. And I just thought that that was such an incredible thing and in any case I wanted that to be part of this scene. And so when I found this passage I was like I love this passage and I want to add this penetrating loneliness. And I also think there is something about not just Jo as a character, but I think there is a certain loneliness to the writer. And I think she has the loneliness of both.

**John:** At the end of the script we get to sections where they’re labeled “fiction?”

**Greta:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the lovely controversies of your movie is sort of like what actually happens. And I’m not going to ask you to specifically state because clearly looking at the script you want there to be some ambiguity in terms of to what degree did she do this thing, did she not do this thing. To what degree is she the author of this text? You start the movie with a book by Louisa May Alcott and you end with a book by Jo March. So it’s clearly getting into that sense of what is authentic, what is authorship.

But this choice of labeling fiction at the end, was this controversial at all during the development?

**Greta:** Yes. Well, it was controversial also because someone said, “Oh, you sent the wrong thing. There’s question marks all over the end. This can’t possibly be the final draft.” And I was like, no, it is. I mean, this is the end of the book. The end of the book is she’s opened the school, she’s married Professor Bhaer, and it’s Marmee’s birthday. That’s the end of the book. So that is the end of the book. And in life Louisa May Alcott, she didn’t get married, she didn’t have kids, but she did keep her copyright. And the book which was printed, which is actually the book that you see being made is a reproduction of the first printing of 1868 which sold out in two weeks, which is kind of incredible.

**John:** Crazy.

**Greta:** I knew I wanted it to interweave. And this goes more towards directing, but to me directing and writing, it’s all so linked. Because to me everything needs to be on the page in a way that I understand. And I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to shoot this, or how I wanted to shoot the scenes of the past or the “fiction?” But I did know I wanted the style to be different. And it’s a more heightened style.

**John:** It is.

**Greta:** And I wanted it to feel that way.

**John:** You got some big long Steadicam shots.

**Greta:** Yes, well actually we’re on a crane. We’re on a big like–

**John:** The Techno Crane kind of thing?

**Greta:** Yeah. And someone is on a wheel. And we did these big long shots. We did two, no, three sequences. It took all day to go through the house and then to go on the other side of the house and then go down to Marmee. In any case, it was a big – I don’t actually have a lot of – I have two moments of Steadicam in the movie. But everything else is on dollies or cranes.

But in any case like I knew I wanted it to feel heightened. It’s funny, I was actually just talking with – I hope I’m not giving away trade secrets, but I think he’s talked about this – Edgar Wright about the end of Baby Driver, which is a fantasy.

**John:** Sure.

**Greta:** But he was like well some people don’t know that. That’s OK. Like that’s OK.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Greta:** Like whatever you want to know about it. In any case, I hope I didn’t give anything too much away about that. But I wanted it to be both. But what I did know is that I wanted the moment at the end when you see Jo hold her book. And I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be this way. I wanted to figure out how to do a trick where the image you didn’t know you wanted to see was this girl holding her book.

**John:** Exactly. You’ve established the goal of the character from the very start to have her book printed.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so if the movie ended with like Marmee’s birthday that’s not rewarding.

**Greta:** No. It’s not. Marmee’s birthday–

**John:** It’s lovely, but it’s not the reason we’re here.

**Greta:** But I felt like because I’m doing this thing where I’m honoring the book itself, I also really wanted to do the literal ending of the book, which is this birthday. Someone was like, “Oh, it’s so weird that it’s her birthday. Why do you need that?” And I was because for the people who know how the book ends this is how the book ends.

**John:** Julie Turner had one extra question which is related to this moment. She asks why did you make the professor a smoke-show. Why is he hot?

**Greta:** Oh. Well, I mean, for a couple of reasons. Number one, movies. It’s movies. [laughs] But really, I mean, I don’t want to get too much into this because I hesitate to talk about male gaze, female gaze, because I think it can sometimes ascribe something gendered to something that doesn’t have to be. Like I don’t want to say like this is how women see the world and this is how men see the world. Because I just think that that’s too reductive.

But, I’m a female filmmaker. I want Professor Bhaer to be Louis Garrel.

**John:** Great.

**Greta:** I mean, I feel like men have been putting glasses on hot women forever and telling us they’re awkward. I can do whatever I want. I always saw, you know, with Laurie and Professor Bhaer and with James Norton who is also very beautiful, you know, all the men. You know, Chris Cooper. Tracy Letts. They’re beautiful men. And I thought, you know, the very first time we see Timothée Chalamet I shot that 48 frames per second. I shot that to be slow because I wanted to shoot him like Bo Derek. He’s the object. He is the object. And I felt like no one really understood why I’d done that. And actually I felt like no one knew totally at the studio why I had done that and thought it was kind of goofy and weird and maybe take it out.

And then the first time I ever had a screening of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey I heard every girl in the audience go – [gasps] – they did exactly what Amy did and I was like because that’s the way we feel about Timothée. And that’s OK.

And I felt like I wanted to make Professor Bhaer the same way. I’m a female filmmaker and this is in some ways if you’re allowed to author that the way that looks maybe you get to author it this way. You know, I wanted to do that. Also, I just Louis. But, in any case it was in a way my own commentary on what we’ve been told women are in movies.

**John:** Two questions that people wrote in with. They’re not specifically about your movie, but I think you might have some answers for it. This one you kind of already answered but I’ll ask the question, too. Jordan asks, “I recently read the script for Parasite by Bong Joon-ho and was completely blown away by how the scenes lifted off the page and roped me in. To be clear, I haven’t seen this movie yet, but the text was enough to draw me in and make me incredibly invested in the family. I also read the script for Annie Hall, another movie I hadn’t seen, but it felt like a chore to drudge through despite many people saying it’s one of the best movies of all time. I felt like if I was a reader at a studio and came across this on my desk I would have passed on it.

“My question is how important is it for a movie to be engaging on the page? Writer-directors don’t necessarily need to paint the world as richly because they’re the ones shooting it, but it seems strange to leave that detail on the page because you know you have it in your head.”

Now, you were saying that you think the screenplay needs to be a real document to read and enjoy that you can really see and feel the movie.

**Greta:** Yeah. Sorry, I’m just going to go to the first – I want the sentences to be active and to draw you in. I want to feel part of something that’s in motion from the beginning. And I’m very deliberate about this.

**John:** Do you want to read some of your first page?

**Greta:** Sure. So, you know, it has the sort of New York publishing office, 1868. Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. To me, I’m interested. What? She hesitates. Like I feel – it feels open. It feels like I’ve opened something. And not everyone has my taste, but for me to give something that feels perhaps unnecessary, you could just write she’s standing in a hallway. Like there’s no reason. But the hesitates, you’re like why? What’s going on?

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** So Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. In the half-light of a dim hallway she exhales and prepares, her head bowed like a boxer about to go into the ring. She puts her hand on the doorknob. A pause. And then she opens it onto a disorderly room. Like I want the words to draw – I want it to draw the picture. And then even at the end, and I didn’t know what I meant when I wrote this, but at the very last page she’s given the book and I say, “Jo turns it over in her hands, touching it like the holy object it is, her inchoate desire made manifest. Jo looks up…and sees the future. Cut to black.”

I don’t know what I meant by “sees the future,” but I also did.

**John:** Yeah. You knew what you meant.

**Greta:** And I knew that Saoirse would be able to do that because she’s a genius. But I feel like for me I always want every piece of making a movie to be as excellent as it can be. Because the truth is I don’t know if this is going to become a movie because it’s so unlikely because they’re so unwieldy and expensive and it takes so long. So for the moment all I have is this script. So I want it to be as good and as emotional and as detailed and as specific and honestly as dense as it can be. Because this is all I have of the movie at this moment. I don’t have the movie yet.

So, I want every piece of it to feel that way because that’s how I know it’s – I can will it into existence if I can feel it on the page.

**John:** Yes. You’re going to be asking all of your department heads to do their very, very best work. And so you as the writer doing your very, very best work, it’s got to be inspirational if they can see what you’ve done on the page.

**Greta:** And I also think like little details, little details that are – like I mean on page two a parenthetical that I always liked, I mean now I’m just complimenting myself.

**John:** I enjoy.

**Greta:** But I do think nobody ever knows the parentheticals, but on page two it says, “What do you – that is, what compensation?” He’s saying, they’re talking about the story she’s selling him. He says, “We pay twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. We’ll pay twenty for that.” She says, “You can have it. Make the edits. But the parenthetical just says “(money over art).” And like to me I was like, oh, no one will ever see it. But I think – I sort of wish – now this is probably I shouldn’t say this, but I sort of wish that the screenplay that would get distributed would be the actual complete shooting script. Because I find it, you know, you do take things out and change them. And this is very close to the shooting script.

But, at the same time, I mean, I find as a screenwriter one thing that helped me tremendously was being an actor because there were lots of things that I auditioned for that I didn’t get. But what I did get was to read the script. And then I got to watch the movie. And then I was like, oh, I see. It went from this thing to that thing. And I feel like reading essentially a transcription of a movie after the fact isn’t as useful as reading the screenplay. Because then you can really see what happens.

So, I understand why later it’s like, well, you don’t need to have the scene in that wasn’t in, but I mean, but for my movies actually I will say they cut really, really close to the actual screenplays. And also my line producer said to me, he’s like, “You really did use all of it.” And I was like I told you I would. That’s why I needed it.

**John:** So the next movie they’ll know.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** So, on this podcast a lot we’ve been talking about assistant pay. And how low assistant pay is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. There’s a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this. You can see a photo of me and producer Megana Rao in this exact room where we are recording this. But Kimberly wrote in with a question. She said, “I’d love your thoughts on assistants with or wanting to start families. I’m really hoping to start a family within the next year and I have 100% confidence in my ability to get both my assistant work and my own work done while also having a baby. But I’m afraid to ask for any maternity leave or an increase in pay to do so. Do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family? If this becomes an issue with my higher ups do I have the right to call foul for women’s right? Will this cost me my job, which I like and want to keep entirely? I recognize this is an issue that is country-wide and spreads across multiple industries, but I’m hoping you can talk more about specifically assistants who aren’t in their young 20s who may have families or rather responsibilities, especially women, and how they can navigate moving up in this crazy industry?”

**Greta:** Yeah, well, I mean, this is a big one. This is the big – I think this is a huge part of talking about women both in our industry and all industries. And what we’re doing about it as a country and collectively. And I think it’s something that, I mean, I don’t want to speak to things that I don’t have actual correct knowledge to speak to, but I do think that there is something about things that are “women’s issues” or “family issues” where somehow they become something that you just have to deal with behind closed doors and we have no idea how you got from A to B.

And I think that’s a failure of our sense of what civic life is. And I think civic life is family life. How do you think we get engaged citizens? By people raising them. Mothers and fathers. And I think you can point to a lot of Scandinavian countries who have very excellent ways of dealing with this. And when I was in Sweden they told me they have not just maternal leave, but they have paternal leave which is mandatory.

**John:** Absolutely. Norway has it as well.

**Greta:** Because otherwise they want to make sure that men don’t not take the time.

**John:** Or that women are penalized for having taken the time and men are moving up.

**Greta:** And men are moving up. So, I mean, I think that this is at the center of a civic discussion is what are we doing for families. And it’s everything. It’s healthcare. It’s benefits. It’s leave. And I will say, because I was pregnant while I was making Little Women and I gave birth 72 hours after I showed the studio my cut. And it’s something I’m still educating myself about and learning about because I did not know a lot of the laws that were already on the books. And I’m not someone who doesn’t have access to information, but I actually didn’t know that you have – in California – that employers are required to have a certain amount of paid leave. And I didn’t know any of that. I actually didn’t know stuff like that. And I also think what are the laws that are on the books? What are the laws that we need to get on the books? What do we need to move forward?

Also, I mean, childcare. I mean, national childcare. I have help and I also have my mother. And my mother and my dad watching my baby while I’m able to do different things.

**John:** Record this podcast.

**Greta:** Record this podcast. And I also have an amazing nanny. And that is something I am able to have because I have access and I have means. And not everyone has that. I mean, this is a big old thing. So, I guess everything I’m saying is just to say I don’t know if that’s the right question. And I think I am everyone else, I do want to figure it out.

I think also as filmmakers it’s difficult because if you’re employed by a corporation there’s laws that you can – again, I don’t know that this is completely right. But there can be laws that constrain and also prescribe corporations to do X, Y, or Z. So if you are an assistant working a company, or employed through a company there is something that sort of can be done in a top-down way. But if you’re a writer or if you’re a director it’s a gig economy in a different way. Then it’s like you’re writing something on spec, there is no one to give you leave. You’re on leave because you’re not working. Do you know what I mean? So, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

Same with acting. Like it’s not–

**John:** Totally.

**Greta:** And I think, and I don’t know if that’s something that we need to go guild by guild, or it’s a national thing we need to be dealing with, or industry, but it is – here’s another thing I’ll say in addition to being in Sweden. I shot a film in Paris. There’s French hours.

**John:** Oh, French hours are required.

**Greta:** French hours are also – the women who are working on the set, and the men who are working on the set, because of the day is more manageable they were able to either take their kids to school in the morning, or give them dinner and put them to bed. But if you’re working 12 hours and then with transpo and everything it’s 14 hours away from your family, if you’re a man or a woman when are you going to take care of your family?

**John:** Craig and I are both pushing for French hours.

**Greta:** I think it’s so much more human. And so that’s a whole lot of gobbledygook I just spat out, but I–

**John:** I share your frustration. And in Kimberly’s question when she said “do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family” I wanted to throw a chair.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Because, yes, you do.

**Greta:** Yes, you do. Yes.

**John:** And part of like having reproductive rights is the right to become pregnant.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And of course – and also there should be laws to protect that and resources to help you. I mean, actually there’s a book I read. The title of it is, it sounds much more hard than it is. But it’s called Motherhood and Cruelty. But it’s by a really interesting thinker, Jacqueline Rose I think is her name. Anyway, she says it’s funny that parenthood is seen as an antisocial act because what could be more social. That it’s something, meaning as we were speaking about civic responsibilities, but sort of like a thing you do on your own. But yet what is more social than parenthood?

**John:** Parenthood and continuing our culture and our species and our civilization.

**Greta:** That is a social act. But it’s seen as you do on your own time. And the social thing is seen as just capitalism or commerce. And somehow that’s not part of it. But, anyway, yes, of course you have the right.

**John:** At the end of every episode we talk about One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is actually a puzzle which is sitting in front of you. It’s called New York in Color. It is this really good 500-piece puzzle we did over Christmas holidays. It’s these photos by Nicole Robertson. I just loved it. I love a jigsaw puzzle.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s so cool.

**John:** I find it a great way to make my brain stop braining and just sort of focus on puzzle pieces. Especially good for the last thing at night before you go to bed. Just check out.

**Greta:** Puzzling. You know who is a big puzzler is this genius actress I’ve gotten to work with is Laurie Metcalf.

**John:** Oh, I can imagine.

**Greta:** Loves a puzzle. She also puzzles before she goes on stage every night on Broadway. She’ll like get there an hour early. She’ll puzzle for a while. And then she’ll go out and give the best performance you’ve ever seen in anything. And she kind of, I don’t know, she’s extraordinary. I love her.

That’s good. Well, I guess I’ll give a book suggestion.

**John:** We love books.

**Greta:** It’s a big book, but it’s a rewarding book. It is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I don’t want to give the title wrong, but he’s a professor at Stanford. He’s an evolutionary biologist, I think. But he’s written a lot about – he studies primate behavior. Anyway, he’s written a lot of really fun – I love science books for lay people.

**John:** As do I.

**Greta:** Because like I don’t really have the math to do it.

**John:** Give me some Dawkins. Give me all that.

**Greta:** Yeah. Like I can’t do any of the real stuff, but like I’m so happy to have it explained to me in sort of laymen terms. And I loved it. And it’s chockfull of lots of interesting things. But it’s sort of about a given behavior that we say like why this. And he sort of walks it through kind of from the nearest proximity to the farthest away.

So like milliseconds before a behavior happens, what are the synapses in your brain doing? How does it get from there to here? But then if you walk it back two weeks, where are your hormonal levels? And then if you walk it back 100 million years, how did we get to this point of this behavior? It’s a very interesting book and also I think one thing is because obviously I tend to – I read a lot of fiction. But it’s not a book that I inherently thought, oh yes, I need to know all about this. But I think as a writer it’s important to read widely.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And this sounds like a book an actor, a director, a writer.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Like talk about behaviors.

**Greta:** It’s interesting.

**John:** What is the motivation that got that moment to happen?

**Greta:** And it’s looking at it from a very specific perspective, but it’s really, yeah. And I also think – somebody told me when I was young, it was actually a neighbor who said, “If you read widely consistently, that’s as good as going to college.” And I said, really? And she said, “Yeah, just keep reading everything and don’t only look at the one thing you’re interested in.”

And I mean I ended up going to college. But I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe you didn’t have to.

**Greta:** I never forgot that she said that.

**John:** I think that’s probably true. That is our show for this week.

**Greta:** Oh.

**John:** So for listeners who are Premium members, stick around afterwards because Craig will talk about what happened at the Golden Globes.

**Greta:** OK.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You are not on Twitter I’ve noticed.

**Greta:** No, I’m not on any of those things.

**John:** You’re so smart. So smart. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to the books she mentioned and we’ll also have a link to the screenplay so you can download it and read it. That will also be up in Weekend Read if you want to read it there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

And, of course, you can become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Greta Gerwig, thank you so much for being on the show. Please come back any time.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Greta:** Bye.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig Mazin, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you John. A little under the weather. Sorry I couldn’t be there. I was so bummed. But you did not want me there. That’s for sure.

**John:** So when I was talking with Greta you thought you had a cold but that was not in fact the case.

**Craig:** No, so I thought I’m feeling worse than I would normally feel with a cold. And I had a night of – you know those dreams, those looping dreams?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**Craig:** Where you just dream about like the same four seconds of dream over and over and over.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a fever thing.

**Craig:** That’s a fever thing. So I went to work. I sat there. I did absolutely nothing except feel awful. And on the way home I swung by the urgent care clinic here in my little town. And they did a test for the flu. Have you ever had the flu test?

**John:** No, but is it a nasal swab? How do they do it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a nasal swab. They put a little Q-Tip up both nostrils. But man they go in deep. It is incredibly unpleasant. Anyway, they go and they do this fast test and the doctor came back in and she said, “Well, you know, let’s just cut to the chase. You’ve got the flu.” Which is bad. And I’m stupid. I didn’t get the flu shot. Because I was – it’s not because – I love the flu shot. I worship the flu shot. I just, you know, oh I was too busy. Blah. Well.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** And people are nice. They’re trying to comfort me by saying I got the flu shot and I also got the flu, which can happen. But they put me on Tamiflu immediately and it’s been very effective I will say.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you have a choice between getting a cold or getting the flu and having Tamiflu started immediately, weirdly you’re better off with the flu and Tamiflu.

**John:** All right. So you’re on the mend. Now the reason why I desperately wanted you on for this bonus segment is you and I have not spoken since you won your Golden Globe and most crucially since that moment where you were up on stage and Jared Harris is speaking, he’s giving a speech, but you’re holding the Golden Globe. And Tiffany Haddish leans her weight against you. And there’s an eye contact moment. What was happening between you and Tiffany Haddish on stage at the Golden Globes?

**Craig:** You know, some people thought that maybe she was going to faint or something, but I think all she was doing was taking her shoes off. I think she was uncomfortable in her shoes. And when I look at the shoes that people wear I get it. I understand why. So we were just kind of – so I was like, oh, this is cool. Me and Tiffany Haddish. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. We had a good conversation. It’s private. It’s private stuff between me and the Tiff.

**John:** 100%. I get it.

**Craig:** But, well, I’ll tell you off the air. I was so happy to not – so I had arranged to not do the speech. Some people were wondering why I did not do the speech. And the answer is, you know, we all worked on this. And when it comes to an award where the show was winning I think it’s fair for some of the other people that worked so hard on it to talk. We initially – I had convinced Jane Featherstone to do it, but we all expected Jared to win. And he didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what I thought would happen happened. I thought Jared would win and I thought the show and Stellan and Emily would lose. And Jared did not win. And the show and Stellan won. And I said to Jane, what do you think about the speech and she said, yeah, let’s give Jared the speech. I mean, he was our quarterback. And so he did a great job.

I mean, he was a little nervous that he had to have a rejiggered speech up there.

**John:** He also had to follow Michelle Williams which felt like just I mean a bullet dodged on your behalf because she gave really the moment of the evening. And the next speech after that was not going to be as big a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when you’re watching television that’s probably how it feels. In the room itself there were a lot of good speeches I thought. I mean hers was terrific. Maybe my favorite was Ramy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I thought he was adorable. I was like this guy is so humble and not fake humble. Humble-humble. And genuine. And funny. I thought that was fantastic. And I could have listened to – Tom Hanks who I think gave me the flu from the stage. I didn’t meet him. I didn’t get to meet him. I was so bummed out. But I think just by listening to him intently I got his flu. But I could have listened to him for another hour. I was fascinated by him.

But you know the truth is honestly speeches–

**John:** Speeches.

**Craig:** Speeches.

**John:** Now the reputation of the Golden Globes and everything I’ve heard is it’s a very boozy evening. Was that your experience there in that room?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. So it is. There’s two large ice buckets on your table, each with a magnum of Champagne in it. I think that’s what that’s called. That big bottle. And they have wine coming around all night long. And people are getting drunk. There’s no question about that. It’s a very strange kind of dinner. We got there on the early side. And because it’s – I mean the red carpet had no interest in me. And the feeling is mutual. I’m not wearing like some flowing gown, or am I an actor.

So Melissa and I just headed on into the ballroom I guess you’d call it and there were – you know, maybe it was like 20% full. And every single seat at every single table there was a bowl of soup. And after about eight or nine minutes of being in there and maybe five or six other people had come in an army of waiters just swept through and removed the soup. And I just thought no one is ever going to have the soup.

**John:** Nope. The soup is gone.

**Craig:** The soup is gone. And then, yeah. It’s a very–

**John:** Maybe it’s a lesson for life. Like the soup will always disappear. If you don’t take advantage of the soup when you can have the soup, there’s no soup to be had.

**Craig:** I just thought like – but I get it, because actually what they don’t want is people eating during the show. If you don’t want people eating during the show and you do want people on the red carpet then you should just not have food. But then I think some people will get grumpy and drunker. Look, I mean, I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I mean, the tables are so close. Everyone is very chummy. I mean, it is tight.

**John:** And Cousin Greg was joining you at your table for at least part of the evening.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We were so happy. So Nicholas Braun who plays Cousin Greg on Succession, aside from being one of the tallest people in the world is also one of the most pleasant. He’s just a sweetheart. And there were just a lot of Succession people. And he kind of got overflowed onto our table. And I kept telling him I’m like first of all I spent most of the night just yelling the word Succession out because I love that show so much. And Jesse Armstrong is so brilliant. And the cast is so great.

And they seemed like a happy family. They legitimately do seem like they like each other which is always nice. Especially when it’s a show about people that hate each other, or are rivals. And I said to Nicholas if we win you should come up there with us. Just come up. Let’s not explain it. Let’s not make it seem weird. You just happened to join us as if you were on the show.

**John:** Yes. The way Greg Roy is always showing up at the Roy’s places. Like why is Cousin Greg there?

**Craig:** Right. And he said, “Should I?” And there was an HBO executive at the table who said, “No. You should not.” She said, “You know, Chernobyl is over. Your show is continuing. No.” [laughs] But so we almost had him. We almost got him.

**John:** Congratulations on the Golden Globe. You are skipping out on the – is it TCAs tonight? What was the awards tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight is as we’re recording this it’s the Critics’ Choice. And I’m very sorry I can’t be there. But Carolyn Strauss and Jared Harris are there. And hopefully we do well. But, you know, listen, I never thought I would be in any Critics’ Choice short list. So, it’s very nice. And I’m sorry I won’t be there. But I think everybody would prefer that I not bring my contagious self.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, congratulations on that. I hope you do get a chance to hang out with Greta Gerwig in the future because you would love her. We talked about parentheticals and a lot of stuff on the page. She will be one of your favorite writers I suspect. But Craig continue to heal up and we’ll have a normal show next week hopefully.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Appreciate it. Bye.

Links:

* [Follow along with the Little Women script in Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173)
* [Little Women Script](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/little-women-by-greta-gerwig.pdf)
* NYT Article with John and Megana [Hollywood Assistants Are Fed Up](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/business/metoo-hollywood-assistants.html) by Rachel Abrams
* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [New York in Color Jigsaw Puzzle](https://amzn.to/2FDEBI0)
* [Behave by Robert Sapolsky](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/)
* [Greta Gerwig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1950086/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/433standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/holiday-live-show-2019).

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes contains some explicit language. Also, for this live show we have three guests, one of whom uses sign language. So you’ll be hearing the voice of her interpreter. It will make sense in context, I promise. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is the Holiday Live Show 2019 for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, tell the listeners at home where we are.

**Craig:** We are currently recording live in Hollywood – I was about to say that, live in Hollywood – live in Hollywood at the LA Film School.

**John:** It’s nice. So we do this benefit every year for the Writers Guild Foundation which is a fantastic foundation which does a lot of great work throughout the year. A question though for the folks here in this audience. It’s a very packed house. Do we have any assistants in the house? Oh my god, look at all those hands going up. That’s really nice.

**Craig:** Why aren’t you at work?

**John:** So, we have heard from a ton of assistants over this last couple of months, and so it’s so great to see so many folks here.

A tiny bit of news happened this past week. Verve, the agency, stepped up and decided to pay its assistants more, which is great. We are always happy to congratulate the folks who are doing better, so we don’t have to chastise the folks who are doing worse.

**Craig:** Yes. Although, well, I actually love that.

**John:** Because they’re not a bad guy.

**Craig:** I feel like that’s not the last.

**John:** I hope it’s not the last.

**Craig:** Of the important organizations that employ assistants.

**John:** Absolutely. So, hopefully we’ll be also applauding the second, the third, the fourth, and the 15th places that do step up and start paying assistants better. It’s certainly a goal for 2020.

**Craig:** And then we collect a little piece, just a little taste. Whatever your increase is, just, you know.

**John:** Is that called a Vig? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** A little something.

**John:** A little something.

**Craig:** You know, wet my beak.

**John:** It works out. Now, Craig, while we’re talking numbers, I think it’s important at the end of the year for us to sort of review our numbers and really take a look at where we’re at and sort of where we’ve been and where we’re coming to. So let’s take a quick look at the numbers here.

**Craig:** Statistics.

**John:** Statistics. So Scriptnotes, where are we at in terms of the numbers? You’re the guy who crunches the numbers, so tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I’ve worked real hard on this. We are currently at 430 episodes of Scriptnotes.

**John:** Nice. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yes. For which I have been paid zero dollars.

**John:** Not a cent.

**Craig:** We have every week an average of 80,000 listeners.

**John:** 80,000 listeners across the world.

**Craig:** 80,000.

**John:** We have listeners here from Germany, which is awesome.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Our staff is you, it’s me, it’s Megana, our producer, and it’s Matthew our editor.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good. Every week that’s what we get it done with, four people.

**Craig:** Although I do notice a former staff person here.

**John:** Aw, Stuart Friedel is here.

**Craig:** Stuart. You know, we used to talk about the Stuart Special, but it’s our Special Stuart.

Every week we receive on average 103 emails.

**John:** That’s a lot of emails. Megana is reading a lot of emails. So thank you for sending in–

**Craig:** 99 of them are stupid, but man, those four. Whew.

**John:** Some of them are good emails.

**Craig:** We get some winners. And, of course, we continue to provide transcripts for every single episode.

**John:** Every single episode. So transcripts are a way for people who can’t listen to the show to experience the show. Also it lets me Google to see how often we’ve mentioned Kevin Feige on the show, which is a ton.

**Craig:** Yeah. Weirdly. Mostly critical, so we’ll get into it.

**John:** Yeah. Now.

**Craig:** Because I want to commit career suicide.

**John:** That’s a good idea. All right, so last year at this show we were talking – the big thing was about all the mergers, so we had Disney and 20th Century Fox was merging. That was a big, god, remember that?

**Craig:** I do. For sure. That was crazy.

**John:** That happened. We had Comcast and AT&T.

**Craig:** Wait, I thought AT&T was Warner Bros?

**John:** Oh, I did make that wrong. Somebody else was buying out – it’s so confusing.

**Craig:** That’s Warner Bros.

**John:** Who owns who now?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** That’s the thing. We don’t know who owns who.

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure that that Death Star owns Bugs Bunny.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So I got a little freaked out this show last year because I was worried like should we merge with somebody, because we could just be swallowed. So I was thinking we could merge with Pod Save America. I mean, that feels like a good, safe choice.

**Craig:** It’s a good show.

**John:** S-Town. S-Town is really popular. I mean, like there’s some problems with it, but it’s a popular show.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then Dirty John. Really the serial killer thing.

**Craig:** Dirty John.

**John:** Yes. I could be a serial killer.

**Craig:** It’s the partner of Sexy Craig. Dirty John.

**John:** So ultimately though you convinced me. Craig, what did you convince me?

**Craig:** That we should stay indie, man. Because my indie cred is crazy. Yeah.

**John:** So this is to announce we’re not merging with anybody. We’re staying the same way we’ve always stayed.

**Craig:** Which is free.

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** With no ads. It’s sad that I have to look at this to tell you I’ve done 430 of these. We come out every Tuesday as you know.

Now, only the most recent 20 episodes are available freely to everyone. And generally speaking we didn’t do a lot of bonus stuff.

**John:** We didn’t. So we do have a premium feed. For the last couple of years we had a premium feed. And the premium feed has all the back episodes. It has bonus episodes. It requires a really janky app.

**Craig:** That app was jank. It was called jank.app.

**John:** So frustrating. At least like 45 of those 100 emails are about the app. And it’s confusing. Signing up for it was confusing. So we asked our listeners what would be better. And they said anything would be better. And so we’re making some changes here.

**Craig:** We like clear feedback, it’s our favorite feedback.

**John:** So people wanted things to be simple. People wanted to use their own player rather than the janky player. They wanted more bonus stuff. And they wanted all the back episodes.

**Craig:** I know what, let’s use Patreon.

**John:** We talked about Patreon, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do it.

**John:** So, here’s the problem. Patreon is simple, kind of.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** You use your player. Great.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** More bonus stuff.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** The problem is we couldn’t get all the back episodes in Patreon.

**Craig:** Also just like me.

**John:** There was no way to do it. So, we ended up going with the folks who do Slate. So we partnered up with them. They didn’t buy us out, though. We’re still indie.

**Craig:** Indie, man.

**John:** Indie, man.

**Craig:** No sellouts here.

**John:** But this is Scriptnotes Premium. Scriptnotes Premium is now the thing. Simple. You can use your own player, whatever you use to listen to normal Scriptnotes in. Listen to it in this. More bonus stuff. And all the back episodes.

**Craig:** Now, as you know, I’m not great with this. So let’s say I have a way I like to listen to podcasts. First of all, let’s imagine I listen to podcasts.

**John:** Yeah, Craig who hosts like multiple award-winning podcasts.

**Craig:** I host them, but listening is–

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** So, let’s say I have my favorite app. But now there’s the thing. How do I get it to go to my favorite app?

**John:** OK. Three steps. First step, you join. You go to Scriptnotes.net. You put in your email address and your credit card. That’s it. There’s no password. There’s no username. Just those two things.

**Craig:** This is where the money comes to me?

**John:** You click subscribe. Then you can subscribe to the Scriptnotes Premium feed, any of the back episodes. We broke it down by seasons so you don’t have to download everything at once. Finally you just listen to it in whatever app you like to use.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s pretty cool.

**Craig:** That is pretty good.

**John:** Craig, you get confused sometimes about sort of how stuff works.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We made stuff even simpler. So you just put in your phone number and it will send you a link to how you actually install it in the app. So it’s pretty–

**Craig:** So then I just tell it what I want it to–

**John:** You don’t have to use Siri at all.

**Craig:** I text back, “I use this.” So I’m talking to a robot.

**John:** You tap a link. Can you tap a link?

**Craig:** I talk to a robot all the time.

**John:** Ha, you do. You tap a link. You tell it which app to install it in. It’s installed and it’s there.

**Craig:** This is fantastic.

**John:** And you subscribe.

**Craig:** Even I can do that.

**John:** So you get all the back episodes. All the new episodes. We’re going to do some bonus stuff, too. Craig, talk us through some bonus stuff that we might end up doing.

**Craig:** Well you know we like to do a deep dive every now and then on a classic film.

**John:** Absolutely. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Little Mermaid.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** What should we do first?

**Craig:** I’m thinking Die Hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Die Hard should be the first episode we do. Let’s have it come out on Christmas.

**Craig:** Let’s. Shall we? Because it is a Christmas movie.

**John:** A couple other things. Scriptnotes comes out every Tuesday. Honestly, Megana gets it done on Monday. You get the episodes on Monday afternoon when she’s done.

**Craig:** That Megana.

**John:** And we’ll also try to do things like advance tickets for shows like this. Because we now have your email address, which we never had your email address before, which was weird. So that is the–

**Craig:** To recap, if I may. Nothing is changing about the classic Scriptnotes that theoretically you love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes Premium does not require that weird, janky app anymore.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Huzzah. And there’s a bunch of new stuff, including early episodes and bonus segments. So that’s pretty great. And you can literally subscribe now to it, although again I just want to make it clear I get none of the money.

**John:** No, Craig will still get nothing.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** This money will pay for Matthew. It will pay for Megana. And honestly we probably need to hire somebody new because it’s just been a lot. So it will help us pay for–

**Craig:** The emails alone.

**John:** The emails on assistant stuff alone has been crushing. So, this is Scriptnotes.net. You can sign up for it on your phone right now. But no one in this room should do that because we are going to draw one ticket and that person is going to get a free lifetime subscription to Scriptnotes Premium.

**Craig:** Lifetime.

**John:** Craig, that box is right behind you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Take a seat and draw one of those cards.

**Craig:** The price will go up yearly. So, ultimately this will be worth millions of dollars.

**John:** Now, technically I should say that this has no cash value. I think it’s something about a raffle, you’re not supposed to say–

**Craig:** I said a million dollars.

**John:** A million dollars.

**Craig:** It has absolutely no value. That’s a weird thing to say. We’re raffling off something that is absolutely valueless.

**John:** Worthless. Last four digits maybe?

**Craig:** Last four? Got your tickets out? 3-2–

**John:** Yeah, people sweating there.

**Craig:** You guys are going to walk out and leave. Raise your hand if you’ve got 3-2. Who has got 3 and 2 so far. Oh god, we’ve got to winnow this down. 7. I know. Who do we have left now?

**John:** Stuart Friedel has his hand up. If Stuart Friedel wins we’re drawing again.

**Craig:** Really? We so are. Stuart, with your fingers what do you have? You lost. Again. 1. Yes.

**John:** Sir, what is your name? James. After the show find me or find Megana and we will sign you up. All right. Hooray. That is the introduction of all this.

Now it is time for our actual show. We are so excited with our guests. We’ve had amazing guests in previous episodes. I’m sort of especially excited by this group of people we have. We have acclaimed writer-directors. We have acclaimed writer-actors. We have a person who created a whole cinematic universe. This is going to be good.

Our first guest is Lorene Scafaria. She is an actress, writer, producer, and director, best known for Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Meddler, and most recently for writing and directing Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, and Julia Styles. Welcome back to the program Lorene.

**Lorene Scafaria:** Thank you so much. Appreciate it. This is very nice and overwhelming.

**John:** Overwhelming in a person who has had a movie that has played everywhere that has gotten huge acclaim.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Still overwhelming?

**Lorene:** Yes. You guys are going to use big words and I’m not going to understand half of them.

**Craig:** We won’t be sesquipedalian I promise. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.

**John:** Lorene, I’m going to take a chance here.

**Lorene:** Oh god.

**John:** So April 2018 I was in the backyard of Dana Fox’s house. There was a benefit dinner thing. And I was talking with you about a movie that had just fallen apart. Was that this movie?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** This is Hustlers. It had just fallen apart. You were really frustrated and heartbroken and I felt so bad for you. And now I’m so happy.

**Lorene:** That’s very nice.

**John:** That it got back together again.

**Lorene:** Yeah, thank you.

**John:** So Hustlers is an amazing achievement. On the show often we talk about How Would This Be a Movie. And this is something that’s based on and inspired by an article. Can you talk us through the How Would This Be a Movie for you? What was it about this story that was the first impetus of like, oh, I see how this could be two hours of amazing entertainment? What was the click for you?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was an incredible story. It was really compelling. I read the article that it was based on in the summer of 2016. And it just felt like a world that we haven’t really seen through a certain group’s eyes. We haven’t really followed dancers in a strip club in this way before. So, I was really just taken in by the world and the story and these characters who I think are often misunderstood.

And then there was a crime drama. And a friendship story. And it touched on so many themes I was really excited to talk about. Gender as it relates to the economy and women under capitalism. And all that good stuff.

**Craig:** And when you’re going through that article, the article is just facts. I mean, they create a bit of a narrative but mostly it’s facts. Do you instinctively start to go I’m going to use that, I’m going to use that. That I can’t use. This I got to change. How fast does that happen, that engagement as a writer?

**Lorene:** I would actually look back at the article every now and then just to see if I could read between the lines, if I missed something. You certainly have to embellish a lot. Have to add a lot. It’s obviously creating scenes and dialogue. But that central relationship between the two characters, in real life I think they were more like business partners and it didn’t run that deep, and it wasn’t that mentor/mentee dynamic.

**Craig:** Mother/daughter kind of.

**Lorene:** Yeah, mother/daughter. Whatever kind of love story that is being told. So, yeah, there’d be a sentence that would talk about Christmas. And I would think I can’t wait to see what Christmas looks like for these women. And then my own research, obviously, talking to strippers. Going to clubs. And speaking to people. That all informed a lot. But, yeah, it always felt like the crash, the financial crisis was kind of the end of act one and where to go from there. There is a rise and fall story. There are a couple different timelines. It jumps around. And it’s kind of a reflective story that Constance Wu’s character is telling to this journalist played by Julia Styles. So, there’s some back and forth there. And that was in my original pitch actually for how I would adapt the article.

**John:** Talk us through that original pitch. So is this an article that you found or someone came to you?

**Lorene:** No, it was sent to me by the producers, by Gloria Sanchez and Annapurna who was the studio at the time that was making the film. And they sent it to me. It was certainly not my job yet. And they wanted to know what my take was and how I would adapt it to the screen. So I went in for that meeting and, yeah, gave them my whole pitch and talked about why I thought it was an event movie at the end of the day, even though I thought there was a really nuanced conversation to be had and a very specific way to kind of see their world it felt like at the end of the day. You know, we were going to bring the club to the theater.

**John:** So in that original pitch how closely does that resemble the movie that we saw? So in terms of its central protagonist/antagonist relationship between the Jennifer Lopez character and the Constance Wu character, and in terms of the flashback structure. Did you have all of that when you walked into that room with those producers?

**Lorene:** I had a lot of it. I mean, I look back at my old notes and we stayed pretty true to what I originally set out to do, so that was certainly nice to realize with a large group of people. So, yeah, it was pretty similar. I knew that the journalist was a really compelling, important part of it, not just a device, but a very integral part of the relationship and the dynamic and the judgment that the audience sort of imposes on these women. There was a lot of that in there. And certainly a tone that I think that the tone was what was shifting a little bit. I think the concentration on that central relationship, that love story between them, that changed a lot.

There was an unreliable narrator in the article that I kind of hung onto for a little too long that no longer felt important at some point. So that was different.

It felt more like a story being told by these two different characters. And it was kind of pitting them against each other in a way. So I did a million drafts. The movie fell apart. We lost a home. We brought the script around town to everybody who hated it. [laughs]

**Craig:** Hollywood. Always with their finger on the pulse of America.

**Lorene:** Well, I think maybe a lot of them identified with other characters in the movie.

**Craig:** Huh. Do you mean Lizzo?

**Lorene:** Yes. That’s exactly.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Lorene:** So, yeah, it took a minute to find the right home and we were certainly questioning a lot. I kind of did this page one rewrite after we found this new home and kind of just smashed the script on the ground and opened up at title page and changed it to Destiny and Ramona, the two main characters. And then wrote this love story, this relationship. And, yeah, it was different. A lot of scenes came out of it. The training sequence that’s there. The sort of dynamic between them. That came out of it, that mother/daughter relationship.

But it ultimately wasn’t the right movie, so had to kind of smash it on the ground again and start from scratch.

**Craig:** And you get it to a place where you feel like you got it right. You do have a home. They have given you the funding. You have this great cast. And now I’m always fascinated by writer-directors, how did director Lorene handle her relationship with writer Lorene on a day-to-day basis?

**Lorene:** I did refer to the writer often as—

**Craig:** An asshole?

**Lorene:** An asshole. Yeah, painted us into a lot of corners. And wrote really something too ambitious. It was a $20 million budget which sounds like a lot but it’s not. It grew.

**John:** Oh. For listeners at home she was pointing at Kevin Feige at that moment.

**Craig:** Kevin earlier asked me if the budget for this was $20 million. So he has no sense whatsoever. None.

**Lorene:** And shooting in New York for what it was, so we had a seven-week prep, a 29-day shoot, and an eight-week director’s cut. It was all pretty brutal. Don’t recommend it.

**Craig:** That’s actually a great way to think of it. On any given day you had a plan. And when your writing your plan is perfect. That’s my perfect plan. And now you’re short on money, you’re short on time, you’re dealing with weather I assume occasionally here and there.

**Lorene:** Yeah. Actually out of those 29 days it rained 26 days.

**Craig:** Of course it did.

**Lorene:** Because it was April.

**Craig:** Yeah. So on those days how do you adjust without losing maybe the heart of what it was that you needed to do that day for that moment between those characters?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was certainly a race every single day to finish it, but those fights happened in prep. The cast wasn’t fully on board other than Jennifer and Constance before we got there. So that whole journey I remember there were days where they said like, “Well you don’t need to shoot anything on Wall Street.” And I was like I don’t know about that. I think that’s actually a pretty major part of this, something that we really need to see. So you make compromises here and there. But I think part of it was to go in with a really strong plan and to shot list everything. And to sort of continue to make the arguments that we wouldn’t need much in order to achieve this. We need these locations. We need this amount of hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We need to create a period piece. We need to capture the authenticity of this place. We need a real strip club. We need 300 extras.

**Craig:** Extras are surprisingly expensive.

**Lorene:** They’re really expensive.

**Craig:** Bob Weinstein, true story, once looked at a tent full of extras and then turned to me and said, “Do we pay them?”

**John:** No, Craig, they’re just there for the fun of it.

**Craig:** No, they’re slaves, Bob. Sicko.

**Lorene:** I’m sure they were.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re expensive.

**Lorene:** They are. They are. And, I mean, yeah, dressing them is expensive. And dressing them in 2007 clothes requires its own truck. And that truck costs money.

**Craig:** You could have just come to my closet. That’s what I’m in right now.

**Lorene:** Well that was just it. Eventually we kind of had to ask these guys to bring your own bad shirts.

**Craig:** No problem.

**John:** Now, Lorene because you’re here I get to ask you a question that struck me the moment I saw your film. Which is the moment that Constance Wu comes up on the roof and she sees Jennifer Lopez there in the fur coat is iconic. As you were filming it did you know this is the movie? This is the moment when people will gasp and recognize I’m in the hands of a master.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** You knew it at that moment? You knew as you were shooting it?

**Lorene:** Yeah, Jennifer Lopez is in that outfit underneath that coat sitting on that rooftop.

**John:** To stipulate it’s absurd and absolutely marvelous. It’s such an iconic thing.

**Lorene:** Oh that’s nice. I mean, I say yes, obviously, just because we were in the throes of it and it was so exciting to finally get there. It was the first scene that I wrote in the whole script. I think the last thing we shot. Or second to last thing we shot. So they had already come full circle their relationship. They were so close by then so there was just that magic in the air. But, you know, a lot of thought went into it because I had thought this was the scene. This was the crux of the whole movie. The moment that Jennifer invites Constance into her fur coat. That really is the moment that everybody’s lives is changing.

So, yeah, it felt really, really important. The rooftop felt important. We built that sky light. That fur coat was a journey to find and to convince people that it was something that we needed. You know, just making sure they sat in the right position. I remember there was a moment where they were sitting next to each other and I was like crumbling inside going like, no, it’s not what I was imagining all this time. So, you know, we just found that rhythm. And, yeah, it felt magical.

Honestly, when she reclined with the cigarette that was not something that I had fully envisioned. That was something that just happened in that moment and I thought, yes, we need to cut to this. We need to – when we found that in the edit we first played it for people, it was this laugh out loud moment. And sometimes an applause break.

**John:** Oh yeah. In my theater people did applaud. That’s magic.

**Lorene:** That’s wild. That’s, obviously, but I credit Jennifer Lopez with half of that certainly.

**Craig:** And I’m going to bring up something from your past slightly.

**Lorene:** You guys.

**Craig:** No, but it’s – years ago when they would talk to you, they meaning the press, there was probably something that would come up a lot. Do you remember a name? A special kind of name that would come up frequently? Fempire. Do you remember the Fempire?

**Lorene:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Back in the day female screenwriters were so rare that they had to give you a special name, like Seal Team 6. And it seems like without saying that we are where we should be, as one of the women that was there in the beginning for me, you know, where I was beginning you were beginning, how do you think it’s going in terms of progress? Bad, good, steady?

**Lorene:** Oh, it’s definitely not steady. I think it’s good and I think it’s muddy. And I think it’s like soup that we’re all kind of sitting in right now and trying to figure it out. So, I don’t know. I think a lot has improved. Obviously the last few years have shed light on a lot of bad behavior and we’ve rooted out some of that. But I think there’s work to do at the root, you know. I think there’s something to just speak to and have nuanced conversations about what the root cause is of all of this and how much of this is unconscious. And not just the broader strokes and the numbers which are important to speak to. But I think also there’s something about female stories and viewing them cinematically. And what does that mean? So there’s something to talk about, the percentage of female directors and all of that, but I don’t know. It’s like I want to get into it a little bit and get a little more nuanced about it. And not just that kind of black and white story.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. It is time for a game.

**Lorene:** Oh, good.

**John:** We are going to read you a list of award shows. You need to tell us if it’s a real award show or if it’s a fake one that I made up.

**Lorene:** I’m so happy about this.

**John:** Now, here’s the twist. Several of these you’ve been nominated for.

**Lorene:** Oh, that’s torture.

**Craig:** So don’t screw those up.

**Lorene:** That’s bad.

**John:** We’ll start with the Gotham Award. Real or fake?

**Lorene:** That was real. I was really there.

**John:** Yeah, Hustlers was nominated. Marriage Story won. Chernobyl lost.

**Craig:** Lost. I like that she got nominated and I got lost. It was the same thing.

**Lorene:** I didn’t win. You lost. I just didn’t win.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I lost hard. Viewfinder Award.

**Lorene:** Fake.

**Craig:** Fake. It’s so fake.

**John:** The Hollywood Film Award.

**Lorene:** That sounds real.

**John:** It is real. Kevin Feige and Victoria Alonzo won this year for Avengers: End Game.

**Lorene:** Hey, congrats. That’s awesome.

**Craig:** How about National Film and TV Award?

**Lorene:** You know what? This, I’m not kidding, I am so confused because I saw one tweet, only one, that said Jennifer Lopez won.

**John:** You’re right.

**Craig:** She did.

**John:** It is from the UK and she did win.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** OK. But I only saw one tweet so I was like this could be someone just playing a trick on all of us.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty generic name for an award, I got to say.

**John:** Hollywood Critics Association Award.

**Lorene:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Female Director.

**Lorene:** Oh, thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Houston Online Film Critics Association Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**Lorene:** Oh.

**Craig:** No, there is no online critics association.

**John:** They merged them. So it’s all one critics association, online and print in Houston.

**Lorene:** What do you mean? Now what is it?

**Craig:** It’s just Houston.

**Lorene:** Houston. Just the city of Houston.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** The Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh, I am wracking my brain. They are very real.

**Craig:** Deeply real.

**John:** Jennifer Lopez is nominated. Craig is nominated, Chernobyl for four Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh my gosh. Craig! That’s amazing. Four.

**Craig:** Well. Golly. The Rose Door? The Golden Rose?

**Lorene:** Why are there are two names.

**John:** It’s French.

**Craig:** I’m just translating it for you. The Rose D’Or. D’Or. Door. The Golden Rose.

**Lorene:** I mean, it sounds real just because of all this fanfare. But I’m going to say no.

**Craig:** It’s absolutely real. Chernobyl won two of them.

**Lorene:** Congrats.

**Craig:** I got two Golden Roses, my friend. I’m a double-roser.

**John:** The Satellite Award.

**Lorene:** That’s real. And that was the only thing I’ve ever been nominated for before Hustlers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice.

**Lorene:** We got one of those somewhere.

**Craig:** OK. The Palm Dog Award. Palm Dog.

**Lorene:** No. No, no, no.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** No.

**Craig:** Yes it is. It’s a yearly alternative award presented by the international film critics during the Cannes Film Festival. And this year it went to Sayuri for her performance as Brandy in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

**Lorene:** So it’s for dogs?

**John:** It’s an award for dogs.

**Craig:** It’s for dogs.

**Lorene:** We had a great dog in Hustlers.

**Craig:** Not great enough.

**John:** Something to shoot for, Lorene. Something to shoot for.

**Lorene:** You have no idea.

**Craig:** Step your shit up, Lorene.

**John:** Lorene, the Annie Award?

**Lorene:** Real.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Animation.

**Craig:** Animation. AARP Grownups in Film Award.

**John:** That’s AARP.

**Craig:** I say AARP.

**Lorene:** Hell yeah. It’s real.

**Craig:** It’s totally real. Jennifer Lopez nominated for an AARP award, which should be pronounced the R-P.

**John:** The Spotlight Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, real. Jennifer Lopez won for Hustlers. Palm Springs International Film Festival.

**Lorene:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The Dorian Awards.

**Lorene:** I mean, that can’t be real.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Location Managers Guild Awards.

**Lorene:** No, no, no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chernobyl won.

**Craig:** Yeah, we won.

**Lorene:** Really?

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Our awesome location manager, Jonas Spokas. Great job, Jonas.

**Lorene:** Wow. I might have to boycott, because we had a great, great–

**Craig:** Not great enough. Saturn Awards?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course.

**John:** Aladdin was nominated for a Saturn Award.

**Craig:** Well done Aladdin.

**John:** Finally, the last one here. The BRAs.

**Lorene:** It’s real.

**John:** It is real. It is the Black Real Awards. An annual awards ceremony hosted by the Federation for Augmentation of African Americans in Film. Hustlers is nominated.

**Craig:** You got a BRA.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Lorene:** I didn’t know that. I got a BRA.

**Craig:** You got a BRA nom.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, congratulations on your film. Congratulations on all the nominations and the awards.

**Lorene:** Thank you. It’s been nice.

**John:** I’m so, so happy for the journey that’s come from that backyard at Dana Fox’s house. I’m so happy your movie is out there in the world. It’s so damn good. Lorene Scafaria.

**Lorene:** Thank you. That’s very nice.

**John:** Craig, introduce our next guest.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so excited. I was lucky enough to meet Shoshannah. We were doing a panel at the Television Academy, a place that up until recently would have had me removed by security. Shoshannah is fantastic. She is an actress and a writer, known for her roles in Jericho, Weeds, The Hammer, and Supernatural. You left off my favorite, Another Period. Spectacular on that show.

She currently stars in This Close, a dramedy series about two deaf best friends navigating their 20s in Los Angeles. Shoshannah co-created the show with her actual best friend and fellow deaf writer-actor Josh Feldman. Spectacular work. Shoshannah Stern, come on up.

**Shoshannah Stern:** I’m disappointed that you have the mic because I want to make – drop the mic. I never actually used a microphone in my whole life, so I wanted to drop it once.

**Craig:** It turns out they’re expensive actually.

**Shoshannah:** I’m sure it is.

**John:** Shoshannah, a thing Craig and I were talking about this afternoon, your show is fantastic. And impossible to watch.

**Craig:** Not because it’s hard, because you can’t find it.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**John:** So your show is made for Sundance Channel, but it’s hard to find on that. Sometimes you find it on YouTube. Is it frustrating to have made something–?

**Shoshannah:** It’s on YouTube?

**John:** Sometimes.

**Shoshannah:** I mean, I hope it is. I hope it is.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** So my question, so many of us are making shows for streamers, for other places, and I’m so happy they made your show, but it’s frustrating that you don’t know if someone is going to be able to watch your show. As you’re writing this, as you’re putting it together is that a worry for you?

**Shoshannah:** It was. I think I’ve made my peace with it, so there’s only so much you can really do – that’s really in your control. And I think it’s like as a woman and as a deaf person creating a show, you know, we’re just reminded that there is no precedent for it. And you sort of have to prioritize what you have to worry about and sometimes you can’t because you just kill yourself over it. So, one of the things that I, you know, unfortunately yes it’s impossible to find the show. But the reason why that happened is because we actually made it for Sundance Now, which is a streaming service for AMC. And then we re-aired it, the first season on Sundance TV while we were shooting season two. I guess we just showed up and we were shooting it and they said your show is doing better than anything. So, we’re like, great, all right. So they were like we’re taking it. And I said, oh, OK, cool, great.

And I thought it would be cool because then I thought people would be able to find the show by just clicking, flipping through their channels, and they might happen across it, and they would find it. Because on Sundance Now you had to buy it, you had to purchase it, in order to find that show.

So, apparently it is now just impossible to find.

**Craig:** It’s very upsetting to me because I – so you said, “You got to watch my show.” And I said, you’re right, I do have to watch your show. And there’s one episode of the new season that’s available online for free. And so I watched it and I was like this is a great show. I mean, I legitimately got into it immediately and I want to watch the rest of it. So, I kind of did ask you to bring me a USB of bootlegged episodes of the show.

**Shoshannah:** You said that like I know how to do that.

**Craig:** I know.

**Shoshannah:** Biggest Luddite ever.

**John:** A question for you. So we were talking with Lorene about how she was pitching Hustlers. What was the pitch for This Close? When you were describing the show to people how were you describing it?

**Shoshannah:** We kind of had to pitch it three times, but in three different iterations. First of all, the idea with my writing partner Josh was about a deaf woman and her hearing gay best friend. And I think I was just so conditioned to seeing a deaf person on screen with a hearing person, a hearing scene partner, a hearing foil, really. You had to have a hearing foil. A deaf person always had to have in order to explain this is my life and it’s different than yours. So really that was what we were used to seeing on the screen.

So we pitched the show that way. And with one production it seemed like it was going pretty well, better than it had in the past. And then finally at the 11th hour they came to us and said, “You know, it’s a great show but we don’t really get why your character has to be deaf. Does she have to be deaf?” And I was like, well really I tried to explain the rationale and I couldn’t tell them. I needed to show it to them. So, I was like, OK, fine, cool. That’s where we’re at.

And we decided just to do it ourselves. It was in that hour that we made a decision over happy hour. We were just like we should just do it ourselves. So we decided to do that. And then just like why don’t we just go balls to the walls and make both of the characters deaf. Because we felt at that point like no one is going to do it anyway. So Josh said to me, “But who is going to play Michael if we do that?” And I just looked at him like, um, and he gave me an expression like, o……kay. And I looked at him and said, ah-ha, that’s who is going to play it.

**John:** Now, Shoshannah you are an actor. You’ve been acting for years. But Josh was not an actor. He was just a writer. And so he does great on the show. And you guys have a wonderful chemistry. Did you know it was going to work from that initial moment? Was there any fear whether the two of you together could work onscreen?

**Shoshannah:** No. I didn’t know. We were just drunk.

**John:** All right. That’s perfect.

**Shoshannah:** I think I just knew that if the show were going to work that it would have that chemistry. And I just felt like we needed to see two deaf people on the screen and if we’re going to have two deaf people and at the heart of show it’s about a friendship and my friend is sitting right here across from me at happy hour. So yeah.

**Craig:** That story kind of mirrors I think in a way the tone of the episode that I watched. The only episode that is available.

**John:** I watched the first season.

**Shoshannah:** Because it’s impossible to watch. Yes, I am aware of that.

**Craig:** Correct. We will keep re-traumatizing you about that.

**Shoshannah:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** No problem. But the show does a beautiful job of tone shifting. It is funny and it is also very, I don’t want to say serious, it’s earnest at times in the sense that it’s real. It’s not a sitcom but it has no problem with somebody fainting and dropping out of screen, which is hysterical in that particular moment because it’s set up beautifully. So, I’m just curious how you guys maneuver that – it’s a very difficult thread to maneuver. You don’t get too broad. You don’t get too sugary. You find this interesting way to move back and forth without feeling like the tone is jarring and the shifts are jarring.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. I don’t know.

**Craig:** You got drunk again?

**Shoshannah:** Well, yeah. Sure. That’s the answer. We’re drunk pretty much every day during filming. No. I think we just wanted to write things that felt real to us. And we also knew what we didn’t want to write. What we didn’t want to see. I think we knew more about what we didn’t want to show than what we did initially. We wanted to show characters that are centered, not have it be about them being deaf. I felt like that was my problem with the characters that I’d seen before on the screen. Characters that I’ve played to be honest. But the reason why I started writing with Josh is because I had an awful, awful audition and it’s hard to find truth in a character that’s written from somebody else’s perspective about what they think your life is. And you’re trying to find truth in something that’s actually not truthful. So, especially it’s hard when the character is written as a mantle, you know, to carry, you know, like Jesus. You know, Jesus you’re just carrying. I represent all deaf people in the world. It’s impossible.

You can’t write one female character that represents all of the women on the planet. And so there are characters that are underrepresented, misunderstood, and that often happens – it happens more often than we know. So we wanted to write situations that were messy. You know, that were in the gray areas. Deaf characters are messy, too.

**John:** Can I ask you about process? Because we’ve talked to other writing teams who write stuff together. What is the process with you and Josh? Are you in the same room together writing? Do you write an outline and split up? What is the process for you guys going through a script?

**Shoshannah:** Josh and I have a very odd process. You know, it’s sort of what the fuck are they thinking is the process. And that works for us. So we sit in a room and we outline it together. And once we have the outline we go off and we write our own version, each of us, of the script. On our own. Separately. Completely. A complete version. A to Z. And people are like, wait, a complete version on your own, separate from one another? Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s what we do.

So we go off and do that. And then we merge together again, which just means that one of us sits at the computer and the other person is breathing over their shoulder pretty much and says, oh, I like this line better than that line and we kind of merge our two versions together and we submit that. And we get 5,000 notes on it. And then we do it again.

**Craig:** Do you have some epic fights because, man, that sounds like it’s good fuel for arguing?

**Shoshannah:** You know what? Never.

**John:** That’s what a gay best friend will do.

**Shoshannah:** There you go.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** Now, we have a game to play and we would love for the two of you to help us out with this game. So this is something that Craig actually introduced at the last show and Craig set us up.

**Craig:** OK. So this is a game that I originally – it was originally a puzzle that I included as part of a puzzle hunt that I did with David Kwong at the Magic Castle that you attended. And Lorene were you at that one? You were at the one before. Shoshannah, are you a big puzzle solver/crosswords? Oh, OK.

**John:** She’ll be good at this.

**Craig:** And we’re going to have you come to the next one then. So the idea here is – well each of us, we’ll all do this in turn, we read a movie quote and we have a contestant trying to figure out what the quote is.

**John:** We actually have two contestants. So we pre-drew the contestants. Can you come down here to this microphone and re-introduce yourself?

**Craig:** Come on down contestant one and two.

**John:** Hi Zoey. I remember you from before. I’m sorry I forgot your name.

**Zoey:** It’s OK.

**John:** Do you watch a lot of movies?

**Zoey:** I watch some.

**John:** You watch some movies. That’s probably all you need for this competition. And behind you is another person coming up to the microphone. So Lauren and Zoey. Here is what’s going to happen. We are going to read a quote aloud from a movie, except that Craig has–

**Craig:** I’ve basically just created literal versions of these quotes. You’ll get it from the start. Shoshannah is going to do number one because she said earlier that she liked it, so I’m going to let her do number one.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. So Shoshannah is going to give a quote and you need to figure out – so whichever one figures it out first raise your hand and then you’re going to say what the actual real quote is. All right.

**Craig:** OK. So you’re ready to do number one.

**John:** No one yell out in the audience.

**Shoshannah:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship.

**John:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship. Do either of you – Lauren or Zoey, can you name this famous movie quote?

**Female Voice:** I’m really bad at this.

**Craig:** You complete me.

**John:** You complete me. That is what we’re going for. You complete me, from Jerry Maguire.

**Craig:** You got it. This is going to be bad.

**John:** This is hard, Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, that was the easy one.

**Shoshannah:** We have to work together.

**John:** Craig, try the next one.

**Craig:** I’ll do the next one. Strike it from your memory, JJ, or whatever nickname you go by these days. This neighborhood is largely populated by immigrants from Asia’s largest nation.

**John:** Any – all right? Yes, Zoey.

**Zoey:** Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**Craig:** Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**John:** All right. One to nothing right now. We will say first to four.

**Craig:** Malodorous tokens of authority. None are in our possession, nor are they necessary. Therefore I’m not obligated to display them as such.

**John:** Do either of you know this?

**Craig:** Audience?

**John:** It’s the we don’t need any stinking badges.

**Craig:** The audience is pretty good. I got to say. All of them together are a little bit better than the two of you.

**Female Voice:** Yeah, this is embarrassing.

**John:** Lorene.

**Lorene:** OK. None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**John:** Well let’s try it one more time. Laughter was high.

**Lorene:** None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**Female Voice:** Just give it to the audience.

**Craig:** Audience. That’s your Malcolm X right there. OK, Shoshannah do you want to do number five?

**Shoshannah:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**Craig:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**John:** So melee – it’s a very D&D word.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It is a very D&D word. It’s a melee round.

**Craig:** I think of it as a French word myself.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It means fisticuffs. Nothing?

**Female Voice:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Audience?

**Audience:** First rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.

**Craig:** Again, the audience a little bit better than you guys, I got to say.

Female Voice: It’s pretty obvious afterwards. It’s like you’re standing up here, but then when they say it you’re like, yes, it makes sense. But they’re not standing.

**Craig:** We’re not accepting your excuses. No, no, no.

**John:** No, no, no. Zoey and Lauren, what you guys can’t see is I see a lot of people are like moving their mouths as if they’re talking with the crowd. They really didn’t know.

**Craig:** All right. How about this one. You got this one. They got this one. Ready? Don’t turn away.

**Female Voice:** I want to watch.

**Craig:** No, that’s called cheating. Look at me. Here we go. You’ve got this. Early salutations, country once known as French-Indochina. Early salutations country once known as French – oh, they’re just blatantly cheating now. Go ahead. Go ahead.

**John:** Go ahead. Say it.

**Female Voice:** Good morning, Vietnam.

**Craig:** Yes, good morning, Vietnam. Yes! Yes! I do love this one. Lorene, do you want to do number seven, or the next one?

**Lorene:** Explain your grave nature. Explain your grave nature.

**John:** I have the answers and I kind of don’t get this one.

**Craig:** It’s a hard one.

**Lorene:** Explain…

**Craig:** The speed with which you just gave up was remarkable. Audience? Why so serious? OK. Shoshannah, would you like to do this one?

**Shoshannah:** Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Craig:** Hmm. Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Female Voice:** Oh.

**John:** One person got it.

**Craig:** Audience? Yes, just you?

Female Voice: I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark.

**Craig:** Yes, Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good. OK, you guys are dismissed. You did a great job.

**John:** Hey, hey, thank you very much for playing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, I think this was actually a really good moment for everyone in this room in defining sort of like what you’re like and what I’m like. Because you picked something that was wildly too difficult for this.

**Craig:** No, I’ll tell you what’s too difficult. It’s the bonus question.

**John:** All right. Bonus question. See if the audience can get the bonus question.

**Craig:** Audience, this is for all of you. And this is a TV quote. And I’ll help you out. It’s from a show currently on the air.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So I’ve limited it to 14,000 television shows.

**John:** Including This Close.

**Craig:** Weirdly that one is not, because we can’t find it. OK.

**Shoshannah:** Oh, you’re killing me. Oh, my heart. I’m stomping on it.

**Craig:** Sanctified female parent splitting in two like a road. Clothing for a torso. Round objects. Sanctified – you got it? Holy mother forking shirt balls. Nice work.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** That’s my kind of guy right there.

**John:** From The Good Place.

**Craig:** From The Good Place.

**John:** All right. Thank you for participating in this game. Craig, thank you for putting together this game.

**Craig:** No, no, the hell with them. I’ll make it harder next time. I’m going deeper.

**John:** All right. Our next guest, Kevin Feige, has been the driving creative force behind the Marvel cinematic universe. In his current role as producer and president of Marvel Studios Feige is hands-on producer who oversees Marvel Studios’ feature film productions, whose 23 films released have all opened at number one at the box office. And collectively grossed – that can’t be right – $23 billion worldwide.

**Craig:** $23 billion dollars. That’s the same budget – oh, no, you said million. I’m so sorry.

**John:** $23 billion dollars. And you have Black Widow coming up next. Kevin Feige, you are the person who has been mentioned most on Scriptnotes without ever actually appearing on Scriptnotes.

**Kevin Feige:** Is that true? Why is that true? I want to know.

**John:** Tell him, Craig.

**Craig:** We actually like you.

**Kevin:** Oh, phew.

**Craig:** It would have been weird if it had been like, here we go. You’re like the Final Draft guys. Oh, that was a great one. Kevin, we were talking earlier, and I have an interesting question. I think it’s an interesting question. And maybe you don’t have the answer, but you have such a unique job. And I’m sure that while you have your own kind of definition of what it is, is there anybody else in Hollywood that does the job that you do? Or is it separate and apart from what everyone else does? Because that’s how it seems to me.

**Kevin:** I produce movies and I oversee movies. And I think there are a lot of people that do that. I think there are a lot of creative producers out there, many of whom I work with at Marvel Studios, who do what I do which is try to shepherd projects to the screen. The nature of the Marvel element of it, which is fun, and which gets a lot of the attention is the interconnectivity of them which is fun and which early on – I’ve been at Marvel almost 20 years. August of 2020 it will be 20 years, which is almost half my life, not quite.

And for the first six years at Marvel we worked with – we were the IP holders that didn’t have a lot of contractual control, but on the other studio films, on the Fox Fantastic Four films and X-Men films and Daredevil films on the Sony Rami Spider Man films. But I was around and wanted to be in the room where it happens as they say and be a part of the brain trust.

I’ve forgotten what the question was now.

**Craig:** This happens all the time.

**Kevin:** Oh, nobody does it. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re different, right? I mean, it feels like you run a studio of a kind.

**Kevin:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you’re also a producer. But you’re also planning all of the movies. You are kind of an interesting hub it seems.

**Kevin:** I’ve been a part of maybe ten Marvel movies by the time we became Marvel Studios. And we knew with Iron Man 1 one of the things that could set us apart, because we didn’t have the “A-list” characters, was that we could start interconnecting them. Like the comics did.

**John:** We talk a lot to showrunners on our show, and your job is kind of analogous to a showrunner in that you have a bunch of things that have to continue. So it’s not just this one episode, it’s how it’s going to fit into this greater pattern. The knock we sometimes hear when some of our showrunner friends come on is that like, oh, but you didn’t know what you were doing, or you were vamping, you were making up as you were going along. To what degree as you’re starting Iron Man 1 did you have a sense of where you wanted to be three movies in, six movies in, nine movies in? And how much could you anticipate what the plan was?

**Kevin:** It’s a nice balance. It’s a nice combination of knowing exactly where you want to end up, but changing the ways, being open to changing the ways that you get there. And when we started Iron Man 1 the goal was very simply make Iron Man 1, and also the Incredible Hulk which we were doing at the same time. Go from being fully responsible for zero movies a year to we have to deliver two by summer of 2008. And that was an amazing experience of being like, you know, you take it for granted. I think people still take it for granted that when you see a poster in a movie lobby and there’s a release date on it the movie is coming out on that release date. That is not a given. There are a lot of people that have to work to make that happen.

And there was one terrifying moment during Iron Man 1 where I went that’s us. We’re the ones responsible for making that happen. And the dream was always because we’ve got thousands and thousands of comic books that you make a movie that succeeds and the reward is you get to make another movie. That’s always been the viewpoint that I’ve had. Let’s succeed so we get to do another one. And that was very true with Iron Man because we would not have been a studio if Iron Man didn’t work. And Marvel would have lost the film rights to ten of its characters.

So, we knew midway through Iron Man 1 around the time Sam Jackson agreed to come do a little cameo for us in a tag that we wanted to get to Avengers. That we wanted to do those first five, six films in phase one. After Avengers we started building out towards what became End Game.

**Craig:** So you have this interesting combination of fear that you won’t even be able to hit a release date for your one movie, but you’re planning for like five movies. And I like that combination. But you did have, of course, the benefit – I was a Marvel kid growing up. There’s Marvel kids and there’s DC kids. I guess there’s some kids that are bi-comical or whatever. But I was a Marvel kid. And there was this big book that was like the Marvel compendium of characters.

**John:** Oh yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** I would just flip through it and there were so many. There’s so many. And so you have this interesting possibility. But I want to read you something. This is I think the first time we brought up, this is without even mentioning your name, but the first time we kind of brought you up. This is all the way back in Episode 44. July 6, 2012, Ah. Remember that?

**John:** Oh my gosh. What a different world we lived in.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Back then Craig didn’t have an Emmy.

**Craig:** I would trade everything.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** Everything. OK. So John said, we were talking about Avengers I believe had just come out at that point. And John said, “Joss Whedon was kind of a risky director to pick for that movie. The director hadn’t made anything of that size and that scale. But other studios aren’t going to learn that lesson. They’re just going to learn that it was big and therefore it’s good. Whereas Marvel is smart. Marvel is smart. But that’s not the only lesson to take from that.”

And I said, “No, the lesson to take from that is hire a director and a writer, in this case it was the same person, with a specific point of view and a proven track record with an audience. And have him deliver the goods as best he can. That’s a risk worth taking. It doesn’t always pay off. But to me that’s so much more interesting of a risk and so much more potentially rewarding than the other way of thinking about it with I guarantee you is going on right now where people are sitting around going, ‘OK, please list for me at my studio here all the various heroes we have, create a team for them to be on, and do our version of the Avengers.’ And I guarantee you that that is going on.”

And John says, “Yeah.” And then I say–

**John:** I say yeah a lot.

**Craig:** And I say, “And all those movies are going to be annoying. And people are going to smell it.” It does seem like people have tried to copy the model of what you do. Is there any hope for any of them? I mean, legitimately would you say to them, “Please, no, you’re never going to get there. Or yeah, there’s actually a way for you to do this with any of your stuff?”

**Kevin:** Well, first of all I compliment the transcript because it clearly comes in handy that you do that on every podcast. That’s impressive. The truth is as I just said we set out to make a movie. We didn’t set out to make a universe. We happened to be making movies based on our comics and our comics are an interwoven universe thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the whole team there that came up with what may be the longest running fictional narrative ever. So it didn’t seem revolutionary to me that I worked at Marvel Studios and wanted to try to emulate what was in the comics. But I wanted to do it slowly because I wanted to make movies. And I wanted to make a lot of movies. And make a lot of different kinds of movies, which is why our first ones were a technological thriller/sci-fi Iron Man film and a crazy outer space Norse god film and a WWII film leading up to – and a monster movie – leading up to The Avengers.

Because what was always cool about Avengers to me in the comics wasn’t that it was a bunch of heroes together, that it was a bunch of heroes that I cared about from other stories interacting with one another. So, I always say we never set out to make a universe. We set out to make movies. And that’s still true today. We set out to do individual stories that have the fun of, a bonus sometimes, of interconnectivity. But we spend as much time going it’s too much. The movie has to stand on its own more, in the development process. The movie has to stand on its own more.

**Craig:** I mean, essentially your advice is stop doing the thing that you people are doing. Because what they do is they start by saying here’s a bunch of our IP, which is a phrase I hate anyway, and let’s make a universe out of it. Absolutely backwards.

**Kevin:** When I started working at Marvel people used to talk about IP and I slowly got the nerve to ask what is IP.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Kevin:** What are you talking about?

**Craig:** It’s sad. People talk about IP – the first time I heard it I was so depressed. But I think of this as art. And you guys are talking about it as intellectual property, like a product. Same thing when I heard franchise. I was like, ugh, now they’re like McDonald’s now. Now everyone says franchise they’re like, yay, it’s our favorite franchise.

**John:** You will have writers, directors, there’s filmmakers you want to work with. People are coming in to talk with you about doing movies based on your characters, based on movies you want to make. What is it that clicks with you about a certain person to do a certain project for you? What is it that you say when that person comes in the room that makes you say like, OK, that is the right person for me to bring onto this project? What are the things that work for you?

**Kevin:** It varies. I mean, we always start – we don’t have open auditions, so to speak. We don’t have people coming in and going here’s this character, would you make a movie about this character, would you make a movie about this character. We internally at Marvel Studios decide what movie we want to make, kind of what the movie is. So Thor, we decided we wanted to do a third Thor film because we love the character and we love Hemsworth and we thought there was great potential there.

But we knew we wanted to break the mold a little bit. And I was on the set of Age of Ultron talking to Hemsworth and he was in his full regalia for a big sequence. And he was saying, “May – what are we doing for the next one, May? What are we doing?” And I said, well, the truth is on the first Thor, Thor was blond hair, a red cape, and a hammer. Now Thor is you, Chris Hemsworth. So we can smash the hammer, we can rip off the cape, we can cut off the hair. So that started leading us into a general direction of what we wanted to do with it.

It was Taika Waititi that turned it into what we all know and love as Thor: Ragnarok with those elements. And we wanted to put The Hulk in it. And so we have these discussion documents that we call them, share them with writers or filmmakers, and then have them come in and pitch us a better version of it that sometimes is very similar and is sometimes totally different but way better. And that begins the then two to three year process of working together intensely.

**Craig:** You guys are drawing from this enormous base of what I consider to be literary work. I mean, comics are drawn, they’re illustrated, but I always read them. No one says I looked at a comic today. I read it. And because we’re writers and this is a show about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, you know, I’ve had this interesting experience in television and I know you guys are getting into television in a huge way where as a writer they say you are the author here, go and create something. In features, traditionally, the writer has just sort of been a widget. And then the director is viewed as the author.

At Marvel because you seem to be kind of in the, like I said, the hub, in the middle, how do you – and this is not a trap. Don’t worry. They won’t attack you. Feel free to, by the way, if he answers wrong. But how do you balance the authority of the writers and directors that you employ because you do employ a lot of the same ones over and over like Marcus and McFeely and the Russos, etc.

**Kevin:** Yeah. That’s the perfect case example. And, again, it varies person to person of course. I don’t think writers are widgets. I think that they make the whole thing possible. And when you find great writers like Marcus and McFeely who are willing to dedicate their art and their talent to projects you love and want to do, it’s amazing. And that’s why we got to Infinity War and End Game is because of those two.

You know, we were in either post on Iron Man 1 or prep on Iron Man 2 when we were taking meetings and first met Marcus and McFeely to do what became the first Captain America film. And the relationship with Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Anthony Russo is great. Yes, the Russo brothers are the directors of that film, but the authors of the film are the four of them, myself, Trinh Tran, Lou and Victoria from my team at Marvel who spend years together in a very relatively small conference room with more index cards than you’re ever seen in your entire life, putting together those movies. So it does vary.

When you find writers that are as authorial as Marcus and McFeely you keep them around and the directors will listen to them. When you have writers that you’re just starting out with and it doesn’t work, then you find another writer. That can happen with filmmakers, too.

In television, though, it is different as we’re learning. Because we’re trying to do our shows as close as we can to the way we did our films, which is to say it’s one filmmaker on the entire series. And one head writer on the entire series. They have a room because there’s so many–

**Craig:** So many scripts to write.

**Kevin:** Yeah. Although that was the understanding going in. There have been a few moments where that needs to be clarified that in the writer’s room the writer is overseeing much of it. On the set, the director is overseeing it. We haven’t gotten to post yet on those two projects.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s going to be fun. I would like to just come by to watch that. I don’t want to watch what’s on the screen. I just want to watch the people in the room.

**John:** So you’re now moving into a new phase of things. At the end of Avengers: End Game a lot of the characters and the relationships we built up are done and now we’re moving into a new phase. Is it weird for you that you’re both in this moment, but you’re also many years ahead? So is it hard for you to sort of flip back and forth to like, oh that’s right, the rest of the universe doesn’t know that this is a thing that’s happening? Do you find yourself–?

**Kevin:** Only when I’m speaking in public like this is it hard to realize, oh, it’s not 2023 yet so I can’t talk about that. But when you’re in it, no. And, again, like with Iron Man 1 the movie that comes out next gets the most attention. Because sort of nothing else matters. So in that case right now it’s Black Widow. And the primary focus is Black Widow, even though we have another film in production, another film about to go into production, two series in production, another one about to go. What comes next is the focus.

**Craig:** I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Scorsese-gate. But I don’t want to just—

**Kevin:** Is he here?

**Craig:** Yes. Huge fan of our podcast.

**Kevin:** How many times have you mentioned him?

**Craig:** Way less than we’ve mentioned you.

**John:** That tells me a lot about our show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Which kind of feeds into this question. Because it’s not so much what he said, but rather what I find interesting is that the movies that you guys make have—

**Kevin:** What he said. And what he said again. And what he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about. And what he said again.

**Craig:** I see you’re not at all sensitive about it.

**Kevin:** OK. I understand.

**Craig:** That aside, so you’re not the only one that I traumatize. I like to do this to everyone. Except Lorene. So, your movies occupy an outsized place in global culture from the time that you started with Iron Man to now. They have made an impression on the world. And they are now interwoven with just our global culture. And I’m kind of curious, rather than talk about what’s cinema and not cinema, because I don’t even know what that word even means. I’d rather just ask you where do you think Marvel films sit in our culture. What do you think they actually mean to people?

And is that what you want them to mean? Or are you airing for a kind of changing place in our culture?

**Kevin:** I think in ways that are both flattering and not flattering over the past decade the word Marvel has come to mean blockbuster movie. Blockbuster movies, “blockbuster movies,” that have a genre spin to them, or have action to them, or have visual effects to them have been the dominant form of box office entertainment my entire life. And that’s why I wanted to make movies. Those are the movies – I’m going to listen to your Die Hard episode on December 25. That movie I loved. And I remember thinking this is the best regular movie I’ve ever seen. And what I meant by regular was there was no time travel, there was no space, there were no aliens.

Because that was my primary – there were no super heroes, no super powers.

**Craig:** Best regular.

**Kevin:** Best regular movie ever. So those have always been the dominant, or maybe just to me, maybe just to my focus. In terms of place in the culture I never, ever think about it. I think about making movies that I always wanted to make with people that I’ve always wanted to work with. And make the movie that we would want to see.

And we have eclectic tastes. And the great thing about the Marvel comics is you can sit down and go, yes, we want to make an Iron Man movie, we want to do another Hulk movie. But we could also say I want to do a WWII movie. We want to do an outer space adventure. I want to do a time travel movie. I want to do a heist film. We want to do a ‘70s political thriller. We want to do a story, which is shooting now, about immortals who have been on earth for years.

All of those genres exist within the Marvel comics. And you can find them and flesh them out. And, again, Black Widow is our 24th film that Marvel Studios has produced in my almost 20 years. We want to keep doing different things. Disney+ has allowed that with the series that are also very different than things we’ve done before. So having the platform to continue to do lots of different types of movies that are shared by two things. One, they originated at some point in our comics. And, two, they have a genre element/sci-fi element to, which I enjoy in movies.

**John:** Kevin, will you come back on Episode 800 and talk us through how the next couple phases went?

**Kevin:** We will see. We’ll see if the references go down between now and 800. Yes.

**Craig:** I think you’re saying you want to keep being mentioned.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** Not a problem. Keep making those movies and we will keep praising them.

**John:** All right. We also do a thing on our show called One Cool Thing where we talk through small recommendations. Craig, did you remember One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. I have a One Cool Thing. I’m an enjoyer of the Twitter. And lately a little bit of an issue with Nazis. Just I encounter them and I say things to them. And they get upset. And so I find myself getting into arguments with Nazis, which is generally bad. But one of the upsides is you start to figure out who the Nazis are.

**Kevin:** Nazis are not your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** No.

**Kevin:** To be sure. Sorry.

**Craig:** Not since forever. But every now and then you run into a head Nazi, like the head vampire, and just like in movie mythology if you can kill the head vampire – if you can kill the Night King all – all – of the dead people go, right? So I encountered a head Nazi the other day and I was like I’m going to block her but I also want to block every one that follows her.

And there is a way to do it.

**John:** Oh, tell us.

**Craig:** It’s called Block Chain. Ah, amazing. So, it’s an extension that you can use in a Chrome browser. So, you know, that’s the only thing you use Chrome for. That’s fine. And you put in the person’s name that you want to block and you also want to block everyone that follows that person. And it’s smart enough to know that it shouldn’t block any of her followers that you follow, because sometimes people follow weird people to see like I’m going to keep tabs on that Nazi, which is fucking bizarre, but regardless. And this particular Nazi had about 80,000 followers.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Well, she probably had 400 humans and a whole bunch of Russian bots. But regardless, they all got blocked. I just watched the number – it was incredibly satisfying. So, if you do manage to run into a Nazi here and there, block chain. Spectacular.

**John:** Nice. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little thing. It’s called AI Dungeon. Some people here may have tried it. It’s an AI thing that generates, sort of like a text-based adventure like Zork. Did you ever play Zork? Ah, yes, you played Zork.

**Craig:** I played ever InfoCom game there was.

**John:** And so what’s clever about it is you’re doing the same things like, you know, look at door, pick up thing, but it’s all using AI. And so you can tell it to do anything and it will change whatever is happening around it to sort of fold that in. So if you said teach Craig to dance it will generate stuff like, you know, you start playing some music and Craig starts dancing.

**Craig:** So if I said pick up knife it will just say, ah, there’s a knife there.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Great game. I’ll play that.

**John:** Tonight. Kevin Feige. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Kevin:** I was given this question early and just did nothing but give me anxiety and go what am I going to give – what’s one cool that that’s going to be interesting. Because I knew you guys would have something super cool and interesting. Nazis.

**John:** Nazis.

**Craig:** And AI.

**Kevin:** And I got in my car on the way over here and put on the album I’ve been listening to time and time again and thought, oh, I’ll just say that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Kevin:** Even though it might not sound like the coolest.

**John:** Was it MMMBop?

**Kevin:** Much more obscure than MMMBop.

**Craig:** That’s Kevin Feige.

**Kevin:** There was a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway that has an accompanying soundtrack about industrial musicals. And I like to listen to the soundtrack of industrial musicals from the Bathtubs Over Broadway documentary.

**Craig:** Oh wow. That’s awesome.

**Kevin:** That’s a cool thing that I’m enjoying right now.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Shoshannah Stern, do you have something you would like to recommend to our audience here?

**Shoshannah:** Yeah. I do. But it requires a backstory. So my daughter is four and three-quarters. And I had an unplanned C-section, which I did not want to have. But it happened very quickly. And I asked if in the OR if I could see her. And they said, yeah, sure.

But at the last minute then I was in the OR and I couldn’t see her. This was the first time that I was really responding to having a physical reaction to sound. Because I heard her cry and I knew that it was my baby and I couldn’t see her. And I had some kind of attack of some sort and I was seeing all of the doctors standing around me looking at me. But I could only see their eyes. I couldn’t read their lips. I couldn’t see anything because they were just looking at me with these masks. And there was this sound but I didn’t know who was talking.

And I just was like, I screamed, “Stop. You’re crucifying me,” because of the IVs and I couldn’t sign. So I was just like grabbing at the IVs. So they brought me my baby. Yes, they did. Thank god. But I was like wow, it’s kind of fucked up to be a deaf person in that situation.

So two months ago the FDA approved a brand new kind of a mask where there’s a clear plastic area on the face mask so that deaf people can actually look and see the lips moving of the people who are wearing them.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Shoshannah:** I won’t have to go through that fucked up situation again. Or a fucked up situation like that ever again.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, top that.

**Lorene:** Why?

**John:** [laughs]

**Lorene:** Dolly Parton’s America Podcast.

**John:** Dolly Parton’s America. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Almost as good.

**John:** Almost.

**Craig:** Almost as meaningful.

**Lorene:** Humiliating. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Is it that good though?

**Lorene:** Nope.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** And that is the end of our show. So we want to thank our amazing panelists. Lorene Scafaria. Shoshannah Stern. Kevin Feige. Our producer, Megana Rao. Megana! Our editor, Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** And of course this is all in service of the Writers Guild Foundation and the Writers Guild Foundation has supported us in putting this event on. So of course we want to thank Enid and Dustin and all the volunteers from the Writers Guild Foundation.

**John:** Tonight I want to extend an extra special thanks to our amazing interpreters, Elizabeth and Robby. Thank you very, very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you to LA Film School, especially Hunter and Jared for tonight.

**Craig:** And finally we’d like to thank you. Our listeners. And a reminder that you can sign up now at Scriptnotes.net. This is why we’re ad-free. You can sign up now at Scripnotes.net. Scriptnotes.net for the Premium Feed. Happy Holidays and good night.

**John:** Happy Holidays everyone. Thank you all very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

We have someone lined up here at the microphone.

**Male Audience Member:** Just to say thank you. This is amazing. My question is to Kevin. But before I do I want to say to the ladies thank you. As a writer-director you guys are an inspiration. Thank you.

**Lorene:** Thank you.

**Male Audience Member:** Kevin, last year at the Produced By Conference I asked you about Ms. Marvel movie and you said you’re going to focus on the Captain Marvel and then you’re going to introduce. Now it’s going to Disney+ with Bisha attached to it. I was wondering if you’re ever going to bring it to the movie world or maybe with Wolverine or something. What are the future–?

**Kevin:** That’s two different questions I think for me. We shifted to Wolverine. Ms. Marvel is coming to Disney+. Yes, Bisha is our head writer on that. And, yes, the intention with that character very much is to introduce her on a Disney+ series and then bring her into the films. And everything we’re doing at Disney+ will start to go back and forth between the streaming service and the movies. Some characters like Falcon, Winter Soldier, and Wanda Maximoff and the Vision and Loki will go from the big screen to Disney+ and back. Some characters starting with Ms. Marvel will be introduced on our Disney+ series and then go into films.

**Craig:** I honestly thought he was asking about Lorene. I heard Wolverine, I heard Wolverine. I think he’s suggesting that Lorene direct.

**Male Audience Member:** Why not?

**Lorene:** That’s what you’re here for. That kind of pressure.

**Craig:** Just putting that in the world. Put it in the universe, see what happens.

**John:** Hello, welcome.

**Male Audience Member:** My question is for Kevin as well.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Male Audience Member:** So you said the comics gave you a good framework for the interconnected narrative. But I’m sure there’s some points where you were at a fork in the road deciding to adhere or to depart from what was already given to you. Can you talk about some specific examples and some of the harder decisions you’ve made and how you decided whether to stick or to depart?

**Kevin:** Well it’s always that decision of how close do you stick to the comics. The comics are both inspiration, sometimes very specifically, sometimes generally. Marcus and McFeely had the task of Civil War when I decided that now was the time to do Civil War. And it was a great comic and ten years before we were developing the movie reading the comic month to month. It was published. It was amazing. Going back and looking at it, it did not apply. It took place, as all the comics do, in the narrative of that moment of the comics’ universe. Did not match up hardly at all with what the Marvel cinematic universe was. But the general idea of Iron Man and Cap representing two different sides of a theological argument was the inspiration. And Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Ant fleshed that out based on where we were in the cinematic universe. So that’s one where it was very specific, even taking the title from a comic, storyline, which we rarely do. But really that was a jumping off point.

**Craig:** I don’t want to stereotype the group that’s waiting, but—

**Male Audience Member:** I got you, Craig, don’t worry about it. My question, not actually directed to Kevin at all. I’ve never heard of any Marvel movies. But I know that there’s this whole Pay Up Hollywood thing. And something that’s very new. And the question that I have to John and Craig is where does accountability come into play? Obviously this is a very difficult city to make it in. And everything that we’ve heard is I can’t afford $1,500 rent. OK, well maybe you need a roommate. I can’t afford to put fuel in the car. Well, you have a car. That sounds pretty nice. And I can’t live off $50,000 a year. Well, there’s seven million people who make that happen.

So, where does accountability come into play?

**Craig:** I have an answer for you. Before I ask people who are making $50,000 to be accountable I’d like to ask the people who are making $50 billion to be accountable. I am, listen, I’m a parent. So I’m always thinking about how to make sure that my kids understand the value of hard work and the value of responsibility. But the fact is that the people who do these jobs, and we know them, and we’ve seen them, are not being treated fairly.

You can extend the argument of accountability down to anything. Well, you’re eating. I mean, a sandwich is a good thing. So, if you get a sandwich a day you should be happy. At some point, right, it’s a slippery slope. So the point is it’s not about subsistence living. It’s about being treated just reasonably.

**John:** I have a related question. A related question and answer here. So I say that accountability is useful for thinking about it in terms of you can’t direct it back at the person who is asking to be treated fairly to say like so often implicit in the answer is, well, I suffered when I came up through this scenario so it’s not – it’s the same for you.

There’s two problems with that. First off, it wasn’t the same. Second off, just because it did happen that way doesn’t mean it was ever right. And that’s a thing that we learned out of #MeToo. It’s a think we need to be talking about now.

The second thing I want to stress to all of us, and as we go into 2020 to be thinking about. It’s great news that we have a higher hourly wage happening in some places. You don’t pay rent with hours. You pay rent with dollars. And so we need to always be thinking about what is the dollars that people are making every week that is going to make it possible to live in Los Angeles. And for people who are coming to Los Angeles with this dream of moving to Hollywood and working in this industry, so they know what dollar figure actually they need to be making in order to stay and survive here. Because equity of access is the first step before we get to equity of outcome where the people who can come to this industry can actually afford to work in this industry and go up the ranks and thrive and write movies for Kevin Feige.

**Craig:** Yes. Absolutely. And I would also say that there is a temptation to think that tough love gets results. That deprivation makes people work harder. It doesn’t. As it turns out, treating people fairly and with respect will get more out of them. I do believe that. And this is a general philosophical mistake I think we make.

And so this is something that we’ve been talking about on our show a lot. And we’ve been talking to agencies. Obviously Verve made a big announcement about this. After we stop talking to the agencies I very much want to start talking to the studios about this. So we’ll be coming. We’ll be coming. But not now.

**John:** Not now.

**Craig:** Not now.

**John:** This is a fun night.

**Craig:** Thank you for your question.

**Male Audience Member:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Thank you. One last question. A lot of pressure on your shoulders. You’re wearing the mantle of the final question of the night.

**Craig:** And surely this is for Shoshannah or Lorene.

**Lorene:** The Hustlers cinematic universe.

**John:** Oh, I want to see that universe.

**Male Audience Member:** This is actually for all three of you. I just wanted to ask very simply what when either you’re going to your computer and you’re trying to break a scene, or you go into your writer’s room and maybe you’re trying to break a film, or a TV show, or you’re on set and you get this wonderful inspirational moment from one of your actors and it inspires a story idea, what are some creative rituals that you do before you go onto set, the writer’s room, or your computer just to kind of get those creative juices flowing? What are some places you go to to get some inspirational ideas from?

**Craig:** Shoshannah, you want to start?

**Shoshannah:** Sure. It’s really simple, but I just put my feet on the ground just to carry my weight evenly on my two feet, fold my hands. I’m not so much praying but I’m just feeling the flow. And I just try to remind myself that I’m grateful to be in this moment, right here, right now, doing what I love really. I just center myself and then do it. You know, whatever is blocking me or whatever I feel might block me I let it dissipate. I just let it go away. It’s not a very interesting answer. Sorry.

**John:** Oh my god, that was fascinating. That’s your ritual, too, right?

**Craig:** I mean, she’s kind of better than all of us.

**Shoshannah:** Say that again. I didn’t quite catch that. I didn’t hear it.

**Craig:** You heard me. I liked your first answer better which was I go with Josh to a bar and we get drunk. I think that’s truer.

**Shoshannah:** Maybe.

**John:** Lorene, do you have any go-tos?

**Lorene:** Yeah, I mean I think in my soul I think trying to reframe things like instead of saying I have to do something it’s saying I get to do something. So trying to remind myself of that at the beginning of a day, or a task. On a set I try to have three or four beverages first thing. I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before lunch and then a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after lunch. And no lunch.

**Craig:** That is so weird.

**Lorene:** It’s so weird. They got me a big cake on my birthday on Hustlers. It was shaped like a giant peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Humiliating. 41. So, yeah. Those are silly rituals, too.

**John:** Kevin, any rituals for you?

**Kevin:** I have relatively severe OCD that I could give you lots of rituals that utterly a waste of time and worthless and I wouldn’t recommend at all. But the notion that I have to keep in mind a lot is when there’s a lot of pressure, when you can’t think of an idea, when there’s a story problem and it gets very frustrating and I’ve pulled all of my hair out already, but you’re realizing no, no, this is a good thing. I remember being an intern and being jealous of anybody there that was employed. Anybody there that had a job. And I would hear them complain. And there was always stuff to complain about. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with complaining.

But I remember being like if I was there I wouldn’t be complaining. So, wherever I am now if I start complaining or start getting – it’s not even about complaining. It’s about just getting agitated. You realize, no, this is – exactly what Lorene said – that we get to do this and we’re very, very lucky.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s a great final answer right there. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Thank you to our incredible guests: [Kevin Feige](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0270559/), [Lorene Scafaria](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1032521/), and [Shoshannah Stern](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0998074/), for joining us! And thanks to Robbie Sutton and Elizabeth Green for interpreting the show.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 44: Endings for Beginnings](https://johnaugust.com/2012/endings-for-beginners)
* [Twitter Block Chain Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-block-chain/dkkfampndkdnjffkleokegfnibnnjfah?hl=en)
* [AI Dungeon](https://www.aidungeon.io/)
* [Bathtubs Over Broadway Soundtrack](https://www.bathtubsoverbroadway.com/)
* [FDA Approves Transparent Surgical Masks](https://www.theclearmask.com/product)
* [Dolly Parton’s America Podcast](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/765024913/dolly-parton-s-america)
* [Kevin Feige](https://twitter.com/kevfeige) on Twitter
* [Lorene Scafaria](https://twitter.com/LoreneScafaria) on Twitter
* [Shoshannah Stern](https://twitter.com/Shoshannah7) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) and Intro by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_431.mp3).