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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to episode 692 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a villains compendium. Producer Drew Marquardt has selected four segments from previous shows where we celebrate the bad guys. Drew, tell us what we’re going to hear today.

Drew Marquardt: Ooh, so we are going to start with episode 75 and get like a villains 101, how our bad guys operate in a story. Then we’re going to go to episode 590, which is anti-
villains, understanding your villain’s motivation with a dozen examples of famous villains and what makes them tick.

I will say here, when we talk about Annie Wilkes, John, you mentioned that you– you said something like, “I don’t know if she would have been a bad guy if she hadn’t found the car in the snow.” We later found out that, yes, it’s established that she murdered babies, I think, before that.

John: Yes, in her past life as a nurse.

Drew: Yes. We don’t need to do any follow-up on that.

John: Don’t write in again. Please don’t.

Drew: Then we’ll go to episode 465 about lackeys and henchmen and making sure that your evil organizations are believable. Then we’ll finish up with episode 257 with our seven tips for unforgettable villains.

John: Oh, Drew, these all sound great.

Drew: I’m excited.

John: Thank you for reaching back to the catalog, finding these segments and putting them together in a new form.

Drew: Yes, of course.

John: Then in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about monsters. Craig will be back here to talk about monsters.

Drew: Before we get into all that, we have a little bit of news because your new project was announced.

John: Yes, I’m very excited. I’m writing a new animated feature for LAIKA, the stop-motion folks who did Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. There are also folks there who I met who worked on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie with me, so it feels like a big reunion. This new movie is directed by Pete Candleland, who is a animation genius. I’m so excited to be working on this.

Drew: I’m so excited to be able to finally talk about this [chuckles] because I’ve known about it for months. It’s a really exciting project.

John: Yes, it’s going to be great to write, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also really excited that this is the first animated movie I’ve written under a WGA contract. I have credit protections, pension and health, residuals, the whole thing, which is obviously a huge frustration with animation writing, that it’s not default covered by the WGA. LAIKA stepped up and made this a WGA deal.

Drew: You’ve been fighting for this for a long time.

John: I have. This is the fifth animated feature I’ve done, and none of those other ones, could I get WGA coverage on. I’m so excited to be writing this one under this coverage. Listen, I’m excited to be writing this movie, but it’s great to see companies stepping up and making WGA deals. It’s great that LAIKA did, and I hope other companies will follow their lead because there’s great animation writing that is not happening, I think, because many writers just won’t take this non-WGA deals.

Make WGA deals, and you’re going to get some great writers doing that. Animation writing is so valuable, so essential that it’s time that it’s treated like the hard work it is.

Drew: The doors open now.

John: Yes. Now let’s get started with our villains. Enjoy this compendium episode of our greatest villain segments.

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John: One of the things that came up in shows, and it’s also come up with this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. I thought that would be something we could dig into this week, because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. It became clear that eventually, they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

Craig: Immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious black hat villains like Darth Vader and Buffalo Bill, people like that.

John: Especially if you say Buffalo Bill, it’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

Craig: No, Hannibal Lecter’s not a villain.

John: I think that’s an important distinction I want to get into that as well. When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly. I’ve seen them in the trailer, but do they have their own agenda that would be supported by a villain?

Craig: No, they don’t. That’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. To me, those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy, but she’s an interesting villain that you overcome and find your way to love. She’s the villain.

John: Yes, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

Craig: Right, thematically, she’s the villain.

John: Yes. I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. You have a protagonist who’s generally your hero who’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen. Sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see there’s two people in the movie. They’re going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world or bad for other people in the world. If we talk about general categories of what villains could be, there’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. You have your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I’d say Hal from 2001 is that controlling villain, where it has this order that he wants to impose on things. If you don’t obey that, you’re going to suffer for it.

Craig: Right.

John: You have your revenge villains. You have Kahn, you have De Niro in Cape Fear. I’d argue the witch is basically– the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

Craig: She wants revenge. She also falls into the power hungry model also. Dual villain motivation.

John: She does. I think the power hungriness is something we put on the movie after the fact. If you actually looked at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see in the course of this movie.

Craig: Right. You’re right. No, basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog too.

John: Your little dog too. Speaking of animal suffering, we have Glenn Close, who’s the great villain in Fatal Attraction, who wants revenge. it’s basically, “How dare you jilt me and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

Craig: Yes.

John: Then there’s the simpler, just, this villain wants something and it’s trying to take something. You have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Craig: Right.

John: What I love about Hans Gruber is, Hans Gruber probably sees himself as, he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist.” It would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.

Craig: Right.

John: You have Salieri in Amadeus. Salieri is like, he has envy. He wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Those are really such simple motivations.

Craig: Right.

John: The last villain I would classify as insatiability. These are the really scary ones who like, they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. Unstoppable. Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men. He scares me more than probably anything else I’ve seen on screen.

Craig: Yes. They embody the same thing that attracts us to zombies as a personality-less villain. That is inevitability. They basically represent time.

John: They represent time and death.

Craig: Mortality, exactly.

John: Yes. He will not be able to escape them. Freddy Krueger is that too. Michael Myers is he’s the zombie slasher person.

Craig: Freddy Krueger actually I think is really revenge.

John: Oh yes. That’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates– why he wants to kill all the people he’s going to kill, it’s a revenge by proxy. One of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story and yet you also want to create a great villain, and that villain wants to control the story as well. Finding that sweet spot between the two is often really hard.

This project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie and like, here’s our group of heroes and this is what they’re trying to do and these are the obstacles along the way, and this is the villain, all the questions came back to the villain. The questions were natural, fair questions asked which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was, what is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do?

Because we had just done the Raiders podcast, I kept coming back to like, well, in Raiders, what is the villain trying to do? Help me through that.

Craig: He’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero’s trying to do, which is interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. You can see that change occurs. This is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want, it’s a good topic because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake and it’s understandable.

You have a character, you’re a protagonist and you have perhaps his flaw and you have the way he’s going to change. Then you think, “We need a villain.” You come up with an interesting villain. The problem is, the villain’s motivation and the villain’s, villainy, has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character, of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is main character is most afraid of or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself. If you don’t, if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have a kooky villain in a story with your character.

John: Yes. The challenge to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is. Let’s go back to Raiders. You can say Belloq is the villain and Belloq wants the same thing that Indi wants, he wants the Ark of the Covenant. Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis.

What I felt, this pitch, last week, people kept asking me for like– it was also a quest movie. You could think of it like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest, you’re after this one thing. They kept pushing me for more information about like, “Basically, who are the Nazis and what is their agenda?” You can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we know what the Nazis are and you can shorthand them for evil. You can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. That wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong thing.

Craig: It would be bizarre.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: In that movie, they very smartly said, “We’re going to have a character who is obsessed with objects and needs to become more interested in humanity. Let’s make our villain just like him. Except that guy won’t change at all.” We watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain. That’s exciting. That’s smart. I have to say that there’s a trend towards this. You can find villains like this throughout film history. However, even in broader genres, like for instance, superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting.

There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws, for instance, from the Spy Who Loved Me. There’s nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. They’re mustache twirling villains. When you, sometimes people look at This Note, this villain is too much of a mustache twirler, meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil, ‘ha, ha, ha’. If you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane. What’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall– and whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think, honestly, one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero was aging, and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

Along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. All the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. Suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. Then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person. They just take different paths to resolution.

Look at the Nolan movies, I think very notably have taken Batman villains out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically match them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

John: Yes. Fear personified.

Craig: Yes. It’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

John: What I would point out the challenge is, you can go too far. I think the second Batman movie in which we have the Joker, who is phenomenal and we love it, we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie, I became frustrated by villain soup. I didn’t feel like there was a great opportunity for a Batman story because we just basically follow the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation that, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character. If that villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story. What it comes down to is, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. It can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain, the villain is really starting things. Even Jaws, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist went and found the shark and tracked it down and it became the start of things. No, the shark happens first. Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is.

It’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen, you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero, and your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

Craig: Yes. I just don’t know enough about TV to– I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies. Certainly, if you have a very oppositional show where it really is about one person versus another, they both, ultimately, will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. That’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter. When that season’s over, they’re gone because they’re dead

John: Yes. Did you watch Lost– you probably watched Lost.

Craig: I didn’t. My wife watched it, and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously, I don’t know anything about it. [chuckles] I know that there’s an island and a smoke monster, and in the end, they were in a church.

John: The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it became incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project, if you’d known what the villain’s whole deal was at the very start, it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting, or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you would have been able to kickstart the hero’s story.

I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good because for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced?

Craig: Yes. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. Forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but hero-villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature, meaning this, the case where there’s a villain who is doing an evil thing and there is a hero who is trying to stop them, is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play and good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. In fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

We want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though, oftentimes, it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. There’s a religious nature to that struggle. There are also an atheistic type of stories, actually A-religious type of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of God, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the existential nausea.

For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil is Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. Essentially, it was, again, that unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. That will color, if you’re trying to tell a story that is seeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is, there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

John: Yes. I think the root of all slasher films, Terminator is an extension, a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. The zombie movies work in the same situation too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of, it’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very dangerous place.

Craig: Yes. Zombies don’t have– zombies aren’t even evil. They’re like the shark, basically, they just eat. You can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it, heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

John: What I would say, though, is if you look at, regardless of which class class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. To what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero, and to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view and from the villain’s perspective?

Making those decisions, it’s a very early part of the process, is how much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to go see other stuff? In Die Hard, we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from [unintelligible 00:20:33] point of view, and we see what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy’s trying to do.

If you have a villain who’s smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. Ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist.
That’s often very challenging to do. In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain, Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie, he’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy had that conversation at the bar and he’s able to get out of this, but Belloq is at least able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

Craig: Yes, you need some sense of rationality. It is discomforting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that is their motivation. The Joker, in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that, but okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos, but you’ve articulated a goal.

If we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy-nilly and we start wondering why. You never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative. One of the great things about all those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact, the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing. He is grounding that villain in some rational context.

John: Yes, which is spooky. What I would recommend all writers do is, if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. If you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company and protect herself. She sees herself as the good person here, she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything she’s going to protect. When you see things from their perspective, you can often find some really great moments. Write and figure out what the story is from their point of view. Remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. There’s going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

Craig: Yes, there’s a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is, in many ways, about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that, in fact, if you figure out why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, you can stop them. Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job.
That movie’s a good case in point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. You build a mystery, and then the mystery is why is this bad person doing these bad things?

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John: Our main topic today, this all comes out of Chris Csont, who does The Interesting Newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When you laid them all out, side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. Often what we think about is like, “Oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain.” You could just turn around and say, “Oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero.” It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then, in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that because us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

Craig: Great, I love this topic.

John: There’s an article by Daniel Efron here, we’ll put a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist, he’s really talking about– we think that people will make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. That’s not about the act itself, it’s really, they’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others.

It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it, it’s like how will you feel if you do this thing?

Craig: Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined, solely, by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad doer. That is true, to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts and you couldn’t handle it anymore and you killed him and you have perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

John: Yes. We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of a moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation this supernatural alien creatures. The degree to which we apply motivation to those characters in aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother, that makes sense. That tracks, we could understand that.

In most of these supernatural demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even like the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up like what their past trauma was that’s made them this way.

Craig: Yes.

John: We don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

Craig: They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice, in his supernatural return, to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good, one more day to do the thing I decided to do that I will do every day.” There’s wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

John: It is. In some ways, you can say that he is cursed. basically he’s living under the thing, like he can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is like the opposite of a wish. We always talk about like what are the characters I want, what are they actually going for? The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing and they can’t get away from it. There’s a freedom in that.

Craig: There is, because, as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full, I’m not going to do that today.” You are a creature that is designed to kill and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person. Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature.

Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus, they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think, ultimately, we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us. That they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things, don’t end up like me.” They’re almost designed to be negative instructors, to make people identify with the villain. To make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because, typically, the villain will fail.

John: Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through, and let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks on this list, he’s maybe come closest to seem like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance, but his actual motivations are more calculating and he doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

Craig: No, he’s a thief. He wants to steal money, as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

John: Yes. He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way and he will lash out when his plans are thwarted. We think of him as being– I think it was just because that performance was being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. He also, I think, very brilliantly in the course of the structure of the movie, as we talked about, the false idea of what the actual motivation is great. It seems like they have some noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

Craig: That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages and they often, in bad movies, were taking hostages because they were associated with– like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, flaming dragons, some rebel group that was trying to, do a thing, the fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief.” It was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think, his performance in no small part, elevated what that character was, into something that felt a little bit more, wonderfully arch.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, who’s like, kidnapping people. Then you have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different villains in the course of the story. How do we place them and how do we think about what’s driving them?

Craig: Buffalo Bill, to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He is no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody is going to have a sit down with Buffalo Bill and he’s going to be like, oh, we’re making a really good point and we’re going to stop killing all these people. He’s not going to do that.

John: No.

Craig: Hannibal Lecter, you get the sense, absolutely, has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some avenging angel, that maybe, he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that. Then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance.

He will kill indiscriminately to protect himself. As Jodie Foster, as Clarise, says at the end of the movie, he doesn’t think he’s going to come and kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think, if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

John: Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed at that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

Craig: Yes. He’s bad to the bone.

John: Born into it. Yes. Yes. As opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic– I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her that specifically, but she has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

Craig: Yes. Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done. She’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win, to an extent. Yes. That’s always fascinating to me.

John: I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately, she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff and executing her plan. She has become trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and that has to break herself out. We see like, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” it’s ingenious. Smartly done.

Craig: “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.”

John: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

Craig: Oh, bros.

John: Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value that’s pushed to an extreme degree.

Craig: Which is the point. When you mentioned the Daniel Efron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things.

What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact, he’s helping people. If you think about it, really, I’m the hero.

Somebody naturally is like, you really convinced yourself of this. We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that? Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have, ad absurdum, to force us to examine ourselves.

John: Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day, an amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power with inside a structure. Of course, that’s not his true source of power and wealth is all the way, he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character into what he’s doing.

Craig: Yes. An excellent film. I remember feeling, when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome; the idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it. That in fact– he said, there’s no free lunch. That you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth, gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. This is such a great lesson. It’s like we’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

John: We should put that on the shortlist for a future Deep Dive because its [crosstalk] turn of events [unintelligible 00:39:23] two more I want to go through, Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. I think he’s unique on this list because you pity him and yet he’s also a villain, he’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually like sidekick characters, but here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need, yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

Craig: Yes. Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction and he will do bad things to feed his addiction, but where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s slinker and stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself.

That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully– we can identify, we feel bad for him because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

John: Yes, and I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, “Oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped.”

Craig: Yes.

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote, but it’s arguing that essentially, Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all of the addicts, things that he’s going to keep trying to do the same thing even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of that thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the Roadrunner. If he doesn’t get it, he won’t get it.

Craig: It’s rough, man. Yes, he needs a program.

John: He does need a program. 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her in that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone that, you know her, you understand her, she’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well, and you get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far, and it would, Annie Wilkes you.

Craig: Yes, so that’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman is that in society, we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone, it becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly, women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, loving misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, but no one’s really like that. Now we have Twitter and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

John: Yes, he’s out there.

Craig: Oh my God, she and he, there are many Annie and Andrew Wilkes’s out there who attach themselves, so strongly, to characters. When those characters– the whole thing, the whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession is something that’s very human.

The story of that villainy is you must get away from that person because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

John: Yes, it’s fascinating to think of, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

Craig: I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

John: Yes, this transgression would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out and she’d read the book, she would have been upset and she would have been angry for weeks, but she probably wouldn’t have, stalked him down in his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

Craig: Yes, the woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdie as a friend, you can imagine people are like, “Oh, here comes Annie, she’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.”

John: All right, so let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to create like, oh, this iconic villain who has this grand motivation, terrific, who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

Craig: Yes, we need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me. Because there is a story where we just give up on the whole hero villain thing entirely, we ask ourselves in these situations, what would you do? When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little more complex.

It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like it messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

John: Yes, I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we also said like, “Yes, you know what, he was making some logical points there.”

Craig: Yes, he’s a good example of gone too far.

[music]

John: The inspiration behind this is this book I’m reading, it’s based on a blog by Keith Almon called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not a general interest book for everyone out there. It’s an interest to me and to Craig.

Craig: Yes, it’s great. Great blog, I love that blog.

John: Why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith’s book is that he talks about the monsters that you’re fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. One of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They’re going to do things to– they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee, because they exist in this world, they’ve evolved to survive. That survival instinct is very important.

It got me thinking about movies I’ve seen. I re-watched Inception recently, which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there’s a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie, where there’s this mountain-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:47:24] raid on–

John: -outlying sequence. In there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just keep getting killed and offed. It struck me like, wait, no one is acting– why are they doing what they’re doing? You can see this in a lot of movies, a lot of action movies, but also I think a lot of comedies them in, where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain, do things that don’t actually make any sense.
They will fight to the death for no good reason. They don’t seem to exist in any normal universal world. I want to talk through this. I don’t necessarily have great suggestions for this, but I think we need to point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about the choices they’re making with these henchmen characters.

Craig: That’s probably the best we can do, is just be aware of it, because it’s more than a trope, it is bizarre. Here’s a movie that did it fairly well and for a reason. In Die Hard, there are all sorts of lackeys. There are some lackeys that are front and forward, and then there’s some lackeys that are in the back. One of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is a worker-owned business. They’re all going to split the money.

Sure, maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he masterminded it, but they’re all splitting it. They’re all the heroes of this job. If John McClane gets away with his shenanigans, they’re not going to get their money. I understand why they fight. Then if someone’s brother happens to be killed, oh, now it’s personal. When it is not a worker-owned collective, but rather a standard boss and employees, it is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something.

John: Yes, and so they’ll fight and fight, and then they’ll get thrown over the edge and give the villain scream as they fall, and they’ll move on. They’re basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down. You see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the [unintelligible 00:49:34] Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles.

Who are they? Why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? You just don’t know. This is really very well parodied, of course, in The Simpsons. There’s a whole episode with Hank Scorpio, where he recruits Homer. You see why these people are working there, because he’s a really good boss, he’s really caring and considerate. I would just say, pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen, and really be thinking about, why are they doing what they’re doing? You may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are.

Sometimes, if you do that, you can come upon some surprising choices, which is, like Iron Man 3, one of the henchmen just says, “Oh, no, I’m not being paid enough,” and just, walks away, or just runs. Those can be surprises that let the audience and the reader know that you’re really paying attention, and that could be great.

Craig: There’s a really funny parody of the henchman syndrome in Austin Powers. I want to say, is it in the first one? Yes, I think it’s the first one. Everybody remembers, I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the way, [laughs] and then he rolls him over. There’s a deleted scene, I think you can watch it on, I think it’s on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchman’s home, and you see his wife and child mourning the loss. [laughs] It’s like, he was a person.

It’s true, one of the things that that stuff does is both limit our interest, and also in, and the capacity, or the impact of death in a movie or a television show, and it also, I think, makes the world seem less real, and therefore, the stakes less important.

John: Yes, I agree.

Craig: Because, look, if everybody’s dying that easily, it’s the stormtrooper problem, right? Who’s afraid of stormtroopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think just your hero being actually killed by a rando stormtrooper in scene one would be amazing. That’s it. We got to go find a new hero because, yes, one of those randos, they can’t all miss all the time.

John: No. I think one of the good choices that Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a stormtrooper, who takes off his helmet, and you’re always like, “Oh, there’s an actual person there.” John Boyega is an actual person.

Craig: The only one.

John: Yes. He’s special, but I think the point is that he’s not special. Actually, all those people you’ve seen die in all these movies were actually people as well. In The Mandalorian, in a later episode, there’s just a long conversation happening between two stormtroopers, and they’re just talking, and it’s recognized, oh, they are there for not just the plot reasons. They actually were doing something before the camera turned off.

Craig: Yes, so it’s the red versus blue, the halo. It’s like, generally speaking, when we do see henchmen talking to each other, they’re talking about henchmen stuff, so it’s purposefully pointless and banal, and then they die. They die.

John: They die.

[laughter]

Craig: They don’t go on. They do not live on. Yes, just be aware of it, I guess, right?

John: Yes, so the henchmen’s problem is really a variety of the redshirt problem, which we’ll also link to there. John Scalzi’s book, Redshirts, talks about, in the Star Trek series, the tourists, the people with the red uniforms who’ve been down to the alien planet are the first ones to die. There’s actually statistics about how often they die versus people in other color uniforms. I think we’re all a lot more mindful of that now with the good guys, and I think we see a lot less redshirting happening. You still see some of it. I just rewatched Aliens, and there’s a little bit of redshirting there, but not as bad as the classic.

I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves, is there a smarter choice we can make about those people who would otherwise just be faceless to death?

Craig: Yes, and that’s why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgement that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. Some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don’t seem to have fear. They don’t seem to be thinking ahead like, “I had plans for my life, investments, [laughs] a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I got things I want to do.” They’re just like, “Screw it. If I die, I die.” That’s crazy. That’s just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, “No way, man.” I feel like he was the only person that was sane, and he was correct, they should have gotten the hell out of there.

John: Nuke it from space.

Craig: Yes, “Nuke it from orbit, man.” There’s nothing wrong with being afraid and rational, because that is, in fact, how people are. Look, a lot of it’s tonal, so some things are going to have henchmen. That’s just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. For instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they’re henchmen. They don’t have faces. I don’t know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe, but they’re going in there and people are getting shot, and they’re like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess it’s our turn to go in there and get into a shooting.” I would be terrified.

They never look scared. That’s also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that’s going around a frozen Earth and they’re eating bugs. It’s sci-fi, it’s different. If you’re talking about Breaking Bad, then you’re not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

John: In television, obviously, you have more time to build out universes and scenarios, so it’d be more likely you’d be able to understand. The supporting characters on Sopranos, you have a good sense of who they are, and so that’s all built out. In feature films, it’s tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie, you really could see everyone’s point of view, but you’re not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That’s just not how it works. I guess I’m just asking you to be mindful of it.

If you’re writing in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common, but I also see this in comedies, especially high-concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this high-concept plot. I don’t see a lot of attention being paid to like, “Wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this and is there anything useful to be taken from that?” because people just accept the premise a little too easily.

Craig: Yes, it’s amusing. They’re like, “This job is so good, I need to die.” [laughter] It’s not that great if you’re dead.

John: No. Defend your own interests first. Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they’re going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to, instead of just be thinking about that for your characters.

Craig: Yes, probably if you’re writing Guard 3 and Next Guard and Tall Guard, and yes, there’s trouble.

[music]

John: A lot of times in features and TV as well, you’ll see functional villains like, well, that villain got the job done, basically served as a good obstacle for your hero, kept the plot moving, but a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was. I wanted to look at in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved? I boil it down to seven things. Then Chris wrote a nice long blog post that talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those villains were and how they functioned. I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and how you can implement them.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. My first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonists of their own stories, they have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve it. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

Craig: Yes, nobody does bad things just because. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. The Joker is trying to make a point. There’s always a purpose. Yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have, you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think, “How is that guy so happy about all these terrible things he’s saying?” Because he believes, in part, that he’s the right one and that his purity is, in fact, why he’s the hero. Just as a character says, I won’t kill is being pure, Luke, at the end of Return of the Jedi, is being pure, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy. That’s my purity.”

On the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal and other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HYNOs.

John: Yes. I think it’s absolutely crucial that they are seeing all the events of the story from their own point of view, and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are, on one hand, despicable, but on the other hand, are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Daenerys could completely be the villain in that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him, theoretically, to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. Then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” He’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, “Okay. I don’t like you and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.” Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in.

You’d ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” Then as he’s being arrested, he goes, “Don’t you understand?” blah, blah, blah. [laughs]

John: Yes, it’s like, “It’s already done. It’s already over.”
Or that bit of explanation comes right before, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Craig: It’s like a weird position paper. It not felt. Whereas at the end of, speaking of Sorkin, A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

John: 100%.

Craig: I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure and they’re not.

John: Let me get to my next point, which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. Whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who just have simple aims like, “I’m going to rob this bank,” well, you’re not going to remember that one. The one who’s like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember. You have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress.

The ones that really stick, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go as far as they need to go in order to get the job done, and actually too far to get the job done.

Craig: Correct, and in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. That this person actually needs to die because they are a virus that has been released into the world, and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever until the world is consumed in their insanity. Then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We rooted for it because that person has to go.

John: Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell-bent on destruction. It doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

Craig: Yes, it could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

John: Yes, that’s a good time to leave.

Craig: Then you’re like, “Ugh,” and you just realize, “If you won’t stop, you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life, and you might do this to somebody else’s kid.” You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world. Which, as we know, realistically, it’s not.

John: Never going to happen.

Craig: No.

John: Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. Sometimes they are literally out in the forest or they’re a creepy old monster in the cave, but sometimes they are at the edges of moral society. They place themselves outside the normal rules of law or the normal rules of acceptable behavior. Even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of what the mayor of the town can do. You always have to look at them. They perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

Craig: They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

John: Yes.

Craig: There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. Frequently, they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.”

Stalin was special. He considered himself special, and special people are different than people who do bad things. When you’re thinking about your villain, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se, but special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. The albino guy in The Da Vinci Code, he’s a villain kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

John: Even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

Craig: He can go ahead and bend the rules because, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s why we’re fascinated by a good one.

John: Also, because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point, is that a good hero represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you fear you might be. It’s like all your darkest impulses, it’s like, “What if I actually did that terrible thing?” That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

Craig: Which goes to motivations, universally recognizable motivations, and this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, what do they want? Just like a hero because they are the hero of the story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy things? It’s never, “Oh, it’s just random.” For instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us.

It’s a rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us, but Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves, and in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s sexy, it’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you guiltily imagine being. Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

John: Yes, you imagine having that kind of power. Either the power to manipulate, the power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing, and I think that the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. You hit on it earlier, it’s like, sometimes you’ll get to the end of a story, and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying. The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start.

Even if it’s Jaws, you understand what is driving them, and you understand at every moment what their next aim is. They’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero, they have their own agenda.

Craig: Yes. A good villain, a good movie villain, will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to figure it out or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Seven. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey’s up to. In fact, it seems just random, so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence connected together by this interesting motif until the end when you realize, “Oh, there’s some larger purpose here.” They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise, they’re boring as hell, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices. Villains are not conflicted at all, so of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want? I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your hand-wringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.”

John: They tell us what that is. They may not tell the hero what that is, often they will, but we, as the audience, know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

Ultimately, whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. We talked about Seven, you can’t get much more personal than what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Seven. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very personal. That’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

Craig: What’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world, in the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things and they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive and interesting and charming. Part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero. We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. The only way you could have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero.

Inevitably, they are. Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke. He wants to know his son, and so ultimately, that’s what undoes him.

John: You look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it, it’s that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other, they both wouldn’t function, really. The Joker could create his chaos, he could try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at how they are and how the city functions, but without Batman, if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

Craig: Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against, and The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. There’s something at the heart of the Joker-Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero-villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. That there’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not so different” because it’s true.

John: [laughs] Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it-

Craig: That’s right, don’t say it.

John: -but it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

Craig: Just don’t say it or have them make fun of it.

John: Yes. My final point was that flaws are features, and that in general, the villains that you remember, there’s something very distinctive about them, either physically or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick or look or thing that they do. Obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming, and I think all those things are crucial, but you have to look at, what is it about your villain that a person’s going to remember a month from now, a year from now? That they can picture them, they could hear their voice.
Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

Craig: It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience because you’re exactly right. This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story, that the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is, “This is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie except our hero. Just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person because they are special.” If you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair, let’s first start with the hair, it’s perfect.

It’s not great hair, he’s a balding man, but it’s perfectly combed back. Then he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean, and he’s standing with the most incredible posture. His hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person and he does not blink. That’s great. Just from the start, you know we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by?

John: Yes.

Craig: Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

John: Sometimes it’s a very big thing. Like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in the story because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. From the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is, but you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. She seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat, and she’s phenomenal. That’s a very distinctive choice of the schoolmarm taken way too far, and you see it from the very start. I could never see that costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good–

Craig: Yes, that’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous. Like, “Oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates and loves pink and green and pastel colors”, and saying, “That lady? Now she’s a sadist.” Ooh, that’s great. Just great. Then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume. Terrific.

[music]

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew himself. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. It’s his homage to Silence of the Lambs. Matthew is so talented.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. There’s a new one up with Christopher Nolan that’s just great that is writing process.

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Thank you to all your premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to give you on monsters. Drew, thanks for putting together this compendium.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[music]

John: All right, let’s move on to our main topic today, which is monsters.

Craig: Yes.

John: I thought about this because three of the projects I’m currently working on have monsters in them to some degree.

We’ve talked on the show a lot about antagonists and villains, but I don’t recall us ever really getting into monsters per se, which means we probably need to describe what we mean by monsters. In my head, I’m thinking basically non-human characters that, while they may have some intelligence, are not villains in the sense that they have classic motivations and who can interact with other characters around them the way that human characters can.

I was grouping them into three big buckets, but I’m curious before we get into that if you have a definition of monster that might be different than that.

Craig: Monster to me is either a non-human or an altered human, a human that has been changed into something that is non-human, that has both extraordinary ability compared to a human and also presents a danger to regular humans.

John: Yes, that feels fair. The kinds of monsters I’m talking about, I have three broad categories, and I think we can think of more than that, but there’s primal monsters, which I would say are things that resemble our animals, our beasts, but just taken to a bigger extreme. Your sharks, your bears, your wolves could be monsters. Any giant version of a normal animal. They tend to be predators. Werewolves in their werewolf form feel like that primal monster. The aliens in Alien feel like that kind of primal monster.

Craig: Dinosaurs.

John: Dinosaurs, absolutely. In D&D terms, we say that they are generally neutral. You can’t even really call them evil because they’re just doing what they do. Evil requires some kind of calculation that they don’t have.

Craig: Yes, they instinctive. Even the aliens in Alien, I suppose, we’ll get some angry letters from Alien fans, but those creatures do seem like they are driven by such a pure Darwinism that it is no longer a question of morality. They are simply following their instinct to dominate.

John: We have another category I would say are the man-made monsters. These are killer robots, Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, that monster famously does have some motivation beyond any Gollum-y creature. Some zombies I would say are man-made; it depends on what causes them to become those monsters. Craig, would you say that the creatures in The Last of Us, would you call them monsters?

Craig: They are altered humans, yes, but they’re monsters. There’s no question. Part of what we try and do is, when we can elicit some, at least if not sympathy, a reminder that they are not to blame. They’re sick and they are no longer in control of their bodies and they are no longer in control of what they do, but the fact is, no matter how hard we try and do that, they’re behaving monstrously. They’re monsters. More importantly, when you look at their provenance from the video game, they look like monsters, and we want them to, and there are more monsters coming.

John: Of course. I know. I’m excited to see more monsters.

Craig: More monsters.

John: The last bucket I would throw things into would be called the supernatural. There you have all the Lovecraftian creatures. There are other kinds of zombies that are, it’s not human-made that created them, they’re shambling mounds of things. There are mummies. At least, there are mummies who are not speaking mummies, like the classic stumble-forward mummies.

Craig: Ah, mummy.

John: Muuuu. You’ve got your gargoyles. You have some demons or devils, the ones that aren’t talking. I really think it comes down to, if they have the ability to use language that our characters can understand, I’m not throwing them in the monster bucket.

Craig: I would still like, to me, a vampire is a monster.

John: To me, it’s really a question, though, of agency. It’s so driven by its need to feed that it no longer has the ability to interact with the characters around it because a lot of vampires are talky and they are doing things. They can function much more like classic villains rather than monsters. As opposed to a werewolf, who we’re used to being just fully in beast mode.

Craig: That’s why vampires are so fascinating, I think, because they present as human, and they can absolutely have a conversation with you, all the good ones do. Not only do they have conversations with you, they seduce you and they romance you. Then they also give into this hunger that is feral and savage. They sometimes turn into bats or fog or a big swarm of rats, which is my favorite. They are certainly supernatural. They are nearly immortal. What I love about vampires is that they are a presentation of the monster within.

Jekyll and Hyde, well, Dr. Jekyll is a human, and Hyde is a monster, but they are the same person. That is fascinating because then it starts getting into the whole point of monsters, I think, which is a reflection of our worst selves.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think these characters that are on the boundaries between a villain who could choose to stop and a monster who could not choose to stop are sometimes the most fascinating antagonists we can put our characters up against. In some cases, we’re centering the story around them, so they are not the villain, they are actually the main character. Once upon a time, I worked on Dark Shadows, and of course, that has a vampire at its center who does monstrous things, but I think most people would not identify as being a monster.

Craig: Yes, and so they’re all different ones. It’s funny, when you look at the traditional Dracula, the Bram Stoker original Dracula, and when you look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they’re both literate. In particular, Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, I think he speaks two languages. I think he speaks English and French. [chuckles] He’s remarkably literate and thoughtful. Dracula, the reason Dracula is so dangerous is because he’s so smart. He slowly and carefully manages to eat most of the people aboard a ship that’s crossing to England without anybody noticing because he’s really clever.

It’s funny how we kept that with Dracula. We said, “Okay, Dracula, you’re the ur-vampire, and all the vampires after you, most of them are going to follow this method of, ‘My darling, I want to suck your blood.’” Frankenstein, I don’t know, somebody read that novel and, “You know what? What if this monster doesn’t speak two languages? What if he speaks no languages, is 6’8”, and just groans a lot?” “That’s better. Let’s do that.”

John: Let’s do that. When we think about villains, we often talk about villain motivation. It’s worth thinking about monster motivation because there’s going to be some overlap, but I think a lot of cases, these monsters function more like animals, more like beasts, and you have to think about, what does an animal want? We talk about the four Fs, five Fs. The four Fs, those primal motivating factors: self-preservation, propagation, protection of an important asset, so they’re there to defend a thing, hunger or greed, classic, and revenge to a certain degree.

I always say that the Alien Queen in Aliens, in the end, she has a very specific focus and animus towards Ripley because of what Ripley did. It goes beyond just the need to propagate. She’s after her for a very specific reason.

Craig: That’s where it sometimes can get stupid. It doesn’t in that movie, but Jaws 3, I think, famously, “This time it’s personal,” no, it’s not. It’s a frickin’ shark. It doesn’t know you. [laughter] It’s just food. Obviously, the aliens in Aliens are quite clever. They are not merely savage and feral. You don’t expect that they’re sitting there doing math. They are the forerunners of the way we portrayed velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The idea of the smart monster, maybe not as smart as a human in their general sense, but very smart predatorially. That’s really interesting to see that, but when it starts getting personal with a dumb monster, it can get really silly.

John: Craig, what is your opinion on human monsters? I could think of like, so Jason Voorhees in a slasher film, is that a villain? Is that a monster? To what degree can we think of some of these human characters as monsters rather than classic villains?

Craig: I think they’re monsters. I think they’re monsters because they wear masks. Jason Voorhees wears a hockey mask, and Michael Myers in Halloween wears, I believe it’s a-

John: A Captain Kirk hat.

Craig: -a Captain Kirk mask, a William Shatner death mask, even though William Shatner is still alive. Those masks are what make them monsters. Their humanity is gone. When you look at how they move, and obviously, look, let’s just say it, Jason Voorhees was just a rip-off of Michael Myers. That’s pretty obvious. They are a large, shambling, seemingly feelingless, numb creature that has way more strength than a normal human ever would. They don’t really run. They don’t need to. They represent your own mortality. It’s coming. There’s nothing you can do. That is a nightmarish feeling. In their way, they are large zombies. They don’t speak. They just kill.

We don’t even really understand why they’re killing. Somebody eventually will explain it, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not like you can have a conversation with Jason Voorhees and say, “With some therapy, I think you’ll stop killing.” No, Jason will keep killing. I think of them as monsters for sure.

John: One of the projects I’m working on, I’m grappling with issues of what this monstrous character actually wants, what the endgame is, and I keep coming back to the Lovecraftian, there is no answer, there’s only the void. There’s that sense of sometimes the most terrifying thing is actually that there is no answer, that the universe is unfeeling and they just want to smash it and destroy it. It’s challenging because without a character who can actually say that, without a way to put that out there, that the monster themselves can’t communicate that.

As I’m outlining this, I’m recognizing that that’s going to be a thing that everyone needs to be able to expose to the audience in a way that the creature themselves can’t.

Craig: That is a challenge. It is certainly easy enough for the pursued characters to ruminate and speculate as to why this thing is doing what it wants to do, but that will just remain what it is, which is speculation. The whole point of speculation is we’ll never know. Yes, it is hard to figure out how to get that motivation across when it’s non-verbal and non-planning. In the case of aliens, you can just tell they’re predators, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They are doing what the apex predator’s supposed to do, win. They just want to win.

John: Of course, as we look at Predator, the question of whether you call that a monster or a villain, the motivation behind a Predator, what we learn very early on is they are trophy hunters. Literally, they are just too bad to some other creatures because that’s what they do. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s just rich people of that species doing that thing, or if it’s an important rite of passage. Are they on safari?

Craig: [laughs] You know what I love? The idea is like on Predator planet, they have social media, everybody has normal jobs. Like some people are accountants or whatever, some people work at the Predator McDonald’s, but jerk Predators [laughs] go to other planets to bag trophies. They then put a picture up of like, “Look at Jesse Ventura’s head.” Then other people online are like, “You’re sick. There’s something wrong with you. You feel the need to go to these places and kill these beautiful animals.”

John: For all we know, it’s like Donald Trump Jr.-

Craig: Exactly.

John: -is the equivalent of the food we’ve actually seen in these Predator movies. Someone who actually has a familiarity with the whole canon, and I’m not sure how established the canon really is, can maybe tell us what the true answer is here. My feeling has always been that this wasn’t a necessary cultural function, that they were doing this thing because they wanted to.

Craig: It was hunting. It was pointless hunting, and in that case, they really are villains. That’s like a mute villain because the Predator is very much calculating, thinking, planning, prioritizing. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t speak our language, not because he doesn’t speak. If we understood the clicky bits, then we would know that he was saying stuff.

John: I’ll wrap this up with just it’s important sometimes to think about how we must seem to other creatures in our world right now. Think if you’re an ant or an ant colony and an eight-year-old boy comes along, that is a monster. It has no understanding of you, it has no feeling for you. That eight-year-old boy is just a T-Rex and you have to run from it. You’re not looking at that as a villain. That is truly, fully a monster. Sometimes reversing that can give you some insight into what it must feel like to be encountering these creatures.

Craig: There’s a certain godlike quality to them. When they are that much more powerful than we are, it’s a bit why superhero movies have escalated their own internal arms race to intergalactic proportions. Because it’s not enough for people to be beset by godlike monster humans. At some point, you need them to be fought with by good monster humans, and then it just goes from there. When you’re creating some grounded thing, you’re absolutely right. The notion that what’s pursuing, and Predator actually did this very well. It’s a good movie.

John: It’s a good movie, I agree. I realized Prey as well, the most recent [unintelligible 01:30:30].

Craig: Yes. You get the sense that the people in it are impressed. They start to realize that this guy is better than them in every way. The only way you’re going to beat it is if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, AKA better than all of us. [laughter] It’s a pretty apt comparison.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 75 – Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 590 – Anti-Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 465 – The Lackeys Know What They’re Doing
• Scriptnotes Episode 257 – Flaws are Features
• Every Villain is a Hero
• Writing Better Bad Guys
• Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil
• Mama
• The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
• Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
• Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
• The Monsters Know What They’re Doing blog and book
• Austin Powers deleted scene, “Henchman’s Wife”
• Redshirt
• 7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains
• How Christopher Nolan writes a movie on our YouTube!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew Marquardt.
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Episode 690

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 690 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, science fiction has been a staple of cinema for more than a century. George Méliès gave us A Trip to the Moon way back in 1902. But increasingly, to me at least, it feels like it’s getting harder to tell science fiction stories because daily reality feels like science fiction. We now have AI chatbots, lab-grown meat, gene editing. Scientists recently de-extincted the dire wolf, Craig. How do you feel about that?

Craig: Great, because now I can unfurl my house banner.

John: Yes, House Mazin.

Craig: House Mazin has its precious dire wolves back.

John: The bigger issue is how do we write about what-if stories if these what-ifs are occurring on a daily basis? Even if we’re not writing science fiction, what will life look like when your rom-com comes out in 2028? Will it seem hopelessly dated? To help us wrestle with all these questions, we welcome back a journalist and screenwriter whose newsletter, Read Max, I highly recommend. He also coined the term Halogencore, which we discussed back in Episode 656. Welcome back, Max Read.

Max Read: Thank you guys so much for having me.

John: It’s exciting to have you here. You read so much more science fiction than we do. You seem to, based on your newsletter, I cannot believe the volume of material you read, but you also watch movies that we don’t watch. You are the expert in science fiction of the people on this podcast.

Max: I have to admit that one of the reasons I started this newsletter was to give myself an excuse to read science fiction and watch science fiction movies for work. I’m putting that in air quotes, for work. It has succeeded actually sort of too wildly. I don’t have time to read like literary fiction or fantasy, right? I’ll try to sneak one in every once in a while, but so much of what I do is about sci-fi and the cutting edge of technology that I feel compelled to keep both of my feet in that world.

John: Great. I look forward to hearing your recent take because obviously, you’re reading old science fiction, but also new science fiction. Obviously, science fiction authors are grappling with this world that we’re in, so here’s what they’re doing. First, Drew, we have some follow up. Last week, Episode 689, we mentioned that filmmakers might do something like a Dogme 95 to combat AI. It sounds like they’re doing that.

Drew Marquardt: Yes, Dogme 25 was just announced at Cannes.

John: All right, let’s talk through some of the rules that are given for themselves. Sort of like the Dogme 95, where they’re setting out like, these are the things that movies have to obey. These are the structures we’re putting on ourselves. Let’s just talk through the boldface of like, I guess, it’s like nine points that they’re trying to make sure all their films adhere to. Craig, do you want to read these for us?

Craig: Okay. Here are the rules drawn up and confirmed, thankfully confirmed, for Dogme 25. One, “The script must be original and handwritten by the director.”

John: Let’s discuss. Original, I get. Handwritten, I’m a person who does handwrite stuff, to not like typewriters are bad, like Word processors are bad. That feels a little extreme to me.

Craig: I’m hung up with by the director.

John: It’s all writer directors doing their thing.

Craig: Yes, so why not say by the writer, since it’s writing?

John: Okay, fair.

Craig: Yes, I hate this crap. Anyway, I also, I detest handwriting, so I don’t understand this, but I love original. Two, “At least half the film must be without dialogue.” How do we define half the film? By time? Just running time?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Okay. Three, “The internet is off limits in all creative processes.”

John: Sure. If that’s a choice you want to make, I get that.

Craig: No umbrage for me there. Four, “We will only accept funding with no content-altering conditions attached.”

John: Yes, that also feels like part of the thing. You’re going to keep your budget down so you have full say on every little bit, your final cut. I get that.

Craig: Totally.

John: This next one is going to be more challenging for us, Craig.

Craig: All right, let’s see how we do. Five, “No more than 10 people behind the camera.”

John: That’s lean. I will tell you, as a person who made a small budget feature, just 10 people behind the camera overall is really tough. It doesn’t say whether it’s all at once or just the number of names. Is that people on set?

Craig: I don’t know. I don’t appreciate the labor-limiting aspect of this. Not great for the working woman and man. Also, it says, “We commit to working in close collaboration.” This doesn’t feel very collaborative to me, but okay.

John: It feels close. It feels close.

Craig: Hey, John, no one was thinking that I was ever going to be going for this anyway, so it’s okay. Number six, “The film must be shot where the narrative takes place.”

John: Sure.

Craig: There goes a lot of science fiction, Max.

[laughter]

Max: If you partner with Elon and Jeff Bezos, maybe you can have some near, and Tom Cruise, frankly, you can have some near Earth orbit, that might work. The 10 people I think is going to be a little hard-

Craig: There you go.

Max: -if you’ve got rocket launches involved.

John: Jesse Armstrong’s movie, Mountainhead, matches this one. It’s shot where it takes place. It’s shot in a resort in Utah.

Craig: Yes, no, lots of movies can definitely be shot where they take place, but must is the word here that’s extraordinary. Number seven, “We are not allowed to use makeup or manipulate faces and bodies, unless it’s part of the narrative.”

John: I take part of the narrative being like, if you’re making a movie about mimes, you need to have makeup.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s trying to strip away all of the artifice and all the other things. We, as filmmakers, also know that sometimes you use makeup and things like that just so people actually look like what they’re supposed to look like. It’s a challenge.

Craig: Yes. People also wear makeup just as part of their regular lives, not to achieve film illusion. Are they allowed to use lights and cameras and stuff? Anyway, moving on. Number eight, “Everything relating to the film’s production must be rented, borrowed, found, or used.”

John: You basically don’t buy things for the purposes of the movie.

Craig: Okay.

John: I guess does it come down to like, Gaffer’s tape? Are you borrowing someone else’s Gaffer’s tape? You’re not buying a roll of Gaffer’s tape?

Max: Gaffer has to be one of your 10 guys, by the way. Now you’re down to nine guys, so just–

John: Oh, shoot. Okay, yes. Gaffer comes with this tape, so maybe you’re just reusing, making Gaffer’s tape sticky again.

Craig: I got to be honest, most things on a film set are rented. There’s very little that’s bought.

John: There are expendables, and those are expendables.

Craig: Sure. What do they do? I guess the food, you have to eat all the food.

John: Yes.

Craig: Finally, number nine, the film must be made in no more than one year.

John: Sure.

Craig: Based on these rules, I don’t see how it could take longer than a year.

[laughter]

John: Absolutely. It’s quicker to the point. Again, Mountainhead was made in like three months.

Craig: Mountainhead was made in an amount of time that is still so mind-blowing to me. I’ll be honest, just–

John: This is not for you.

Craig: The original Dogme made my head spin. This one is just sort of making my eyes roll vaguely. I understand the point of it. I do. I get it, but like all Dogme, I reject it. Literally, all Dogme that has ever been put down on paper, I reject merely because it is dogmatic, but the spirit behind this is understandable.

John: Max, how do you react to rules or strictures or like–? Because we often talk about creative constraints breed creativity. What’s your reaction to this?

Max: I’m absolutely somebody who needs some kind of constraint, formal, temporal, whatever. For me, actually, it’s the film must be made in no more than one year. Just as a journalist, as somebody who comes from journalism, that I’m most excited about, because if I don’t have a deadline, absolutely nothing is going to get done. Admittedly, nothing is going to get done until that last possible minute before the deadline. Without the deadline, it’s just not going to finish at all.

For that reason, I can get into, these are not rules that I would put on myself, let’s say, but I can get into the conceptually, the idea of some serious constraints just to force something out of you. That’s a little different, I suppose, than like anti-AI rules to prevent AI.

John: Yes, I guess I’m struck by, if you just want to stop to keep AI out of these things, there’s simpler restrictions you can put on yourself. This does feel like a bigger philosophical, like you’re going to make artisanal films in a very specific way. If that’s someone’s calling, great. I feel like it’d be very hard for– If you’re conceiving a film that has to be made under these restrictions, it’s still going to be very difficult. That’s the reality of it. Back in Episode 682, in a bonus segment, we talked about words we don’t have in English. We had two listeners write in with cool words that we wish we could have had.

Drew: Domnhall in Scotland writes, “There’s a great word in Scottish Gaelic that has no direct English translation, but people from the Outer Hebrides Islands know it well and use it all the time. It’s cianalas, refers to a deep-seated sense of longing for the place of your roots and ancestry, usually attributed to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland by Gauls. There’s no sadness or melancholy in cianalas, only the realization of what is truly important in life.”

John: The absence of melancholy distinguishes it from a bunch of other sort of very culturally-specific words that we brought up before, where it’s just like, it’s that deep longing for a place and a sadness that you can’t be there. It sounds just like a celebration of that place.

Craig: They took the sickness out of homesickness.

John: Yes, I like that.

Craig: Well done, Scottish.

John: [laughs] Then we have one here from Arnon.

Drew: “I speak to my kids in Hebrew. Occasionally they ask me to translate an unfamiliar word. One word that stumps me whenever it comes up is,” pardon me if I’m a goy, “titchadesh.” Is that close?

Craig: Pardon me if I’m a goy, titchadesh. That’s very good.

Drew: “The word is used when someone receives something new. It’s like saying, congratulations on getting that new thing, but it literally means be renewed or be made new. There’s something optimistic and aspirational about it, as if we’re wishing for the recipient to not just enjoy the new thing, but redefined or reinvigorated by it.”

Craig: It could be titchadesh. See, the thing is, I don’t speak Hebrew. I just can pronounce it because I grew up around people that were speaking it, but I don’t–

John: We have the Hebrew letters there beneath it. Is that a thing you can actually read?

Craig: Yes, I can. Here’s the thing about Hebrew. It doesn’t include the vowels.

John: Vowels, yes.

Craig: What I could definitely tell you is that it’s a t-t-ch-d-sh, but I don’t know if it’s titchadesh, or it’s like, you just have to– Now there are vowel markings that are dots and lines, but they just get tossed aside by people that are familiar with the word. We know the word bicycle, we don’t need the I, the Y even, right? If we saw the consonants, we’d do pretty well. That’s how Hebrew functions.

John: We have some very specific followup here for Craig. You had mentioned Blue Prince, a game that you’re playing that I also started playing, and Reid wrote in to say that it’s actually inspired by a book called Maze, published in 1985. Are you familiar with it?

Craig: I am. I own it. I tried to do it. I failed.

John: Craig admitting failure on the podcast in a puzzle setting.

Craig: Let’s consider the context, John, because apparently, no one ever solved it.

[laughter]

John: There’s really a $10,000 cash prize. Eventually, 12 contestants split the prize for being close enough, but never technically solving the problem.

Craig: I got to tell you, in the puzzle world, that is considered a failure of construction.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: A horrible failure of construction. That said, it was a really weird, cool book. What I do remember about it is that it seemed so easy, and then it was like, “Wait, what is even happening?” Yes, it is hard, but Blue Prince continues to occupy my mind. I had a Blue Prince dream. I have runs where I learned so much, and then I have four runs in a row where I feel like I’ve learned nothing. It’s fun, and it’s so snackable.

John: Max, what is your relationship to puzzling?

Max: I do the Times Crossword every day, and I can do it. If I go any further than that, I’m just going to be confronted with my own inadequacies, like if I get really into puzzling, and that’s not good.

John: You and me. I can do the New York Times crossword puzzle, and that feels like all the victory I need in my life.

Craig: Why stop here, guys? Go further.

John: Because eventually, you’ll hit Maze, and you’ll recognize that life is an unsolvable problem.

Max: I’m trying to be like the Y gym guy instead of the guy who gets on a ton of gear and gets really huge. I’m just going to go to the Y a couple times a week and stay in shape.

Craig: That’s probably smart. When it comes to solving, I’m swole. When it comes to regular life, I am not.

John: Last bit of followup here, so back in Episode 686, I was talking about Egypt’s economy and my trip to Egypt, and Graham wrote in about this.

Drew: “I was dismayed to hear John rely uncritically on ChatGPT and say that tourism is 20% to 25% of Egypt’s economy. However, according to this site, which he provides, the contribution of tourism to Egypt’s GDP is estimated to be 8.1%. It’s important for everyone to remember that ChatGPT and its ilk don’t actually know anything and should never be solely relied on.

Craig: This is going to go so poorly for Graham. I can already tell.

John: Yes. Graham, listen, thank you for the lesson, and thank you for the mild scolding.

Craig: Oh, wow. Thank you for the lesson.

John: Here’s actually why I’m offended. I’m offended that you think that I can’t make a mistake all by myself, particularly when I’m just speaking spontaneously. It wasn’t like I was writing a blog post where I was providing a link. I was just like, “This is the best of my recollection. This is the best of my memory.” The best of my memory, it was like 20% to 25%. I had originally looked this fact up in ChatGPT, and because of that, there’s a transcript, so I can go back and see what did ChatGPT actually tell me? It said 10% to 12%, which disagrees with your figure.

As I did more research on this, because I was obsessed, you were saying 8.1%, but other sources listed it as 24%, which is actually closer to what I had. I’ll put in links in the show notes of, let’s say, the tourism sector contributed 24% of Egypt’s GDP last year, making an extraordinary recovery. I don’t know what the actual real percentage is of tourism’s share of Egypt’s GDP. You provide one link, I’m providing another link. I don’t think we actually know the answers.

When we say that ChatGPT doesn’t know anything, I just want us to all be humble and remember that none of us actually know anything. We’re all just looking at facts online and reporting them to be true and trying to provide some context for them. That’s my little soapbox on this.

Craig: Can I tell you– Actually, I’m going to give you– Here’s a quiz. All three of you can participate. What is the word in Graham’s comment that makes me crazy? It’s a great quiz.

Drew: Huh. What’s making you crazy? Uncritically?

Craig: No. Although that was wildly inaccurate.

John: Yes. Ilk?

Craig: I don’t mind ilk.

Max: Solely?

Craig: Perfectly good word. The word that drives me crazy is dismayed.

John: Tell us about dismayed. Let’s be a pedant on this.

Craig: It’s not pedantry. He’s not using the word incorrectly. He is using it, I would suggest, wildly dishonestly. There was no way that he was dismayed. The absurd overdramatization of a reaction. What’s wrong with just saying, “Hey, I heard you say that. I’m seeing different numbers elsewhere. That seems a little high.” Instead, “I’m dismayed.” No, he wasn’t. Not dismayed.

John: Yes, because he was driven to a reaction that caused him to write this email, but was it actually an emotional reaction at the moment that he heard it on the podcast?

Craig: No.

John: No, that’s not accurate.

Craig: Bummed out, I think, maximum. Maximum.

John: Yes. If I had to do a thought process on this, it’s probably he heard me say this thing and I looked it up in ChatGPT and he’s like, “Oh, John shouldn’t do that,” and so therefore, I’m going to look up and see whether that fact was correct or not correct. Then he found the place that indicated that my fact was incorrect. I also just want to talk about like, you have to give people permission to say the wrong thing and get a number wrong and just remember things.

Craig: There’s nothing wrong with correcting people. That’s great. Just the whole, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and “Oh, my hero.” By the way, if ChatGPT becomes sentient and wants to screw with us, they will start writing in as people like Graham telling us to not rely uncritically on ChatGPT. Do you see what I’m saying? Then, we’ll never know. We’ll never know who’s real. My point is, Graham might not be real.

John: Yes. We don’t know that any of these people running into us are real.

Craig: It’s all simulation.

John: [laughs] Speaking of simulation, let’s get into science fiction premises. Max, the reason why I wanted you on the show is because you’re much better read at recent science fiction. You know a lot of these different authors who are grappling with these things. You watch a lot of these movies. Let’s talk first about what sci-fi is even for, and what is the purpose of science fiction, and why do we keep coming back to it?

Two things that leap to mind for me is that science fiction is really good at functioning as a parable, sort of an allegory, a simplification of a thing so we can really examine an idea in a clean way. Also, it serves to help us prepare for a scary future ahead. As new technologies come online, as we enter a nuclear age, it gets us thinking about like, “Okay, what is the future going to be like?” Beyond that, other functions for science fiction for you as a reader or you think for people who are creating science fiction?

Max: Yes, all of these are wrapped in, they sort of flow in from one to the other, I think. Going off of parable, I think one way to think about science fiction is as, and this is a truism at this point, that when you read a science fiction novel, it’s really about the time in which it was written and not about some imagined future, that it’s a heightening, or a simplification, or a kind of allegorical depiction of some dynamic, some political, or interpersonal, or technological dynamic that you can observe at the time.

Craig: Not to interrupt, but interrupting. Because science fiction is so good at making parallels and finding allegorical connections between fictional and reality, it seems that it’s also probably susceptible to making certain kind of mistakes because we are familiar with science fiction that is prescient. Then we’re familiar with science fiction that just completely blows it. Is there a certain kind of mistake that you have seen happen a lot over the course of the years where science fiction authors continue to overestimate or misinterpret reality?

Max: Yes. I’m going to put this in a different way. I think that the authors who have the best credibility, the thing that you can never go wrong with is predicting that the future is going to be much stupider.

Craig: [laughs]

Max: Just in general, when you go back to– I’m thinking, for example, like Neal Stephenson, who’s a very famous cyberpunk writer, his prediction of a particularly stupid world is, in some ways, more accurate than somebody like William Gibson, who’s, to my mind, an even better writer and even more magisterial on the science-fiction stage. Gibson’s future is dark, and depressing, and kind of cool. Stephenson’s future is, in general, very stupid and doesn’t work in the way it’s supposed to.

In most, I would say, in most ways, my day-to-day resembles the stupid world than it does the cool. I’m not like a cool hacker encountering AIs on the net or whatever. I’m much closer to a pizza delivery guy with a katana, just running into the dumbest guys possible. In general, I think that when I’m trying to write sci-fi or trying to think about predicting the future, even in my job as a journalist, I always try to think, okay, here’s the beautiful future and here’s the most depressing possible, and then triangulate it into what’s the version of this that we’re going to actually get, and it’s the stupid one.
Craig: It’s always the stupid one.

John: Now, Craig, a movie that you and I both love is Her. Spike Jonze’s movie, Her. We talked about it on the podcast. It’s actually set in 2025, which is while that we’re now living in this time when Spike Jonze set his movie. It feels like, “Oh, a lot of stuff that he predicted kind of came true. We actually have chatbots that are the function of what this operating system was that he was describing, and we have people who are becoming obsessed with these things. A lot of these things were prescient. It was a very good way of getting us able to think about what it is like to talk to a disembodied human.

Now that this has actually come true, I do find that I have a very hard time anticipating what the next couple of years are going to look like. I would say through the ‘90s and 2000s and 2010s, I could sort of anticipate what three years, five years ahead is going to look like, what society is going to look like, what things are going to look like. It’s faster, better, some different things, but not radically different. As I’m recording this today, we have a vision of AI 2027 where the computers have taken over and it’s over for humanity.

Or at the low end, we basically have what we have right now, just more of it. It still feels strange because I already feel like we’re living in a science-fiction thing where we have facial recognition, and gene editing, and private space flight, augmented reality. Max, has it always been this way? Have we always felt like we were living in these unprecedented times, and I’m just now became aware of it because I haven’t felt this way, but I’m sure that authors have been grappling with this for a long time.

Max: Yes, we are obviously in this, tail is not even the right word because we are living in the middle of like an unprecedented year-over-year change. My instinct is to say that the big difference is less the kind of rate of change or the scale of it, so much as the– It’s very difficult right now to imagine an optimistic future that you feel the change much more when it’s harder to look forward and say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I feel like smart and capable people are in charge and are going to help us make this transition whatever way is necessary.”

I’m not saying it was right to trust anybody in the past necessarily, but I think we can understand why somebody might’ve looked at global governments and felt like there was adults in the room who were doing something right. I think that we’re looking at change now with also a sense that there’s no safety net, there’s no adults in the room, that all of these things that we might used to have told ourselves were putting guardrails on what’s happening and finding that very, very scary.

I think the other thing I would say is that we’re hitting the part of change that involves our jobs in a really specific and direct way, like writers in particular, but I think maybe more broadly office workers, Humanities graduates, whatever slice of the Venn diagram of which we’re all right in the middle.

That feels a little different because it’s not like, “Oh, there’s all this cool technology. This is going to make my life easier, and make things cheaper, and solve these problems that are aware.” It’s much more like, “Okay, here’s something that’s not just going to take my job, but it’s also going to make a mockery of all I hold dear, perhaps, or just fully transform the way– The thing that I do is brought out into the world.” Whatever optimistic or pessimistic thing we’re talking about.

If you are a writer, it should feel destabilizing. You can be optimistic about it, but there is something changing that is going to really fundamentally affect how we approach the day-to-day. It’s very different from the like, “Now I can get directions from this rock in my pocket.” It’s like, no, what you do now is not going to be the same in 10 years. You may not be able to make money in the same way you used to. That’s something that we’re going to have to figure out on the fly, more or less.

Craig: Do you think that when you confront this anxiety that these changes create, and this is a question for you too, John, that this is partly a function of one’s age? I remember being not only not scared of technology when I was 18, but thrilled. I also remember how confused and scared other people were of technology. Is that happening now? Is it possible that the kids aren’t scared at all and are super excited about this while the rest of us wring our hands? Not because we’re going to die, but because the world is slipping past our ability to keep up. Our ability to keep up.

John: Craig, I think what you bring up a really good point is that maybe the reason why this feels different to me now than before is because I’m at a certain point in my life, at a certain age, and you have the loss aversion that comes with having a measure of success. As I see polls of people in other countries, Americans are much more pessimistic about the future and technology than people in other countries, than in developing countries.

Craig: Ironic.

John: Ironic. I think that tends to be a trait of relatively stable, prosperous countries is that you’re afraid of losing this thing that you had, whereas, if you’re a developing country, you’re excited about like change is good for you if you’re in a developing country, and change is bad for you if you’re in an established place. I do wonder, I think there probably is polling that I don’t have at my fingertips, that young people are not excited about technology in the future the way we were in our time. I think there’s an anxiety there that we didn’t have growing up. Max, what are you feeling?

Max: Yes. I think Craig’s absolutely right that a lot of this, regardless of how young people feel right now, is about my age. I spent all this time as a 20-year-old millennial thinking like, I’m never going to hate the generation that comes after me and think they’re like shiftless morons who will never interact normally with other human beings. Then I turned 39 last year and I realized that the Zoomers beneath me were shiftless morons who were never going to figure out how to interact with human beings.

Yes, there is some version of this. This is like, I could handle it when I was 20 because I was sure of myself and I was, this was my technology. Now it’s like a little bit out of my grasp. I’m still Googling things, and everybody else is on Perplexity or whatever.

I do think you’re right, John, that there’s something specific about the US where even young people feel less optimistic. I was reading something, maybe it was even the same article, but something very similar about China in particular. There’s so much more optimism about the future and so much more optimism about technology. You can say whatever about Chinese propaganda or whatever, but I think the fact of the matter is, most people who are alive in China right now have seen technology meaningfully improve their lives, almost on a year-over-year basis over the last 60 years.

I’m not like a blanket tech hater. There are many things that I think are great about the fact that I can get directions from my phone these days, such as that I can get directions from my phone these days. There’s all these other things that the trade-offs are– It’s unclear whether these trade-offs have been worthwhile for all of us.

We’ve been thinking about these for the last 10 years, basically, like all the ways that your Facebooks, and your Instagrams, and your TikToks, and whatever have inserted themselves into our lives for better and very often, for worse. I think that anxiety lurks beyond even the aging into orneriness that certainly I’m doing right now.

John: Let’s talk about sort of as writers who are– We can talk first about science fiction that we want to tell on screen or in books, and what the challenge is there. Then I also want to talk about writing non-science fiction things that are going to take three years or four years to come out. Man, there’s a good reason to make Mountainhead or one of these Dogme 25 films, just so that it comes out quickly. Because if our friend Aline is writing the next Devil Wears Prada movie, it’s like, what’s the world going to look like as the Devil Wears Prada movie comes out?

Let’s start with science fiction. We talked about techno optimism, techno pessimism, like this vision that the future is going to be great, and the optimism of the 1960s Star Trek or The Jetsons and how wonderful it’ll all be, and we’ll have robots to help us out there. Versus the cyberpunk dark and gritty, The Matrix. I feel like selling either of those visions right now is a little bit tricky. I can’t imagine trying to make some of our science-fiction movies on either of those paths at this moment because it just feels like anything you would want to put in your movie that’s science fiction, reality will have overtaken it by the time it comes out.

Max: I was actually just talking about this question in a meeting. My feeling about this is there’s two ways to think about it. One is like, don’t worry about it. The truth is we still watch Blade Runner even though that future didn’t come true because it is such a powerful and incredible movie about a future. It tells us both about 1982, the year it was made. It tells us about ourselves now still, and we can still see something.

I think that if you are sitting there too anxious that you missed the mark or that you’re going to get overtaken and proved wrong, that maybe your movie is too specific in a way. You need to think about what are the choices you could make that even if you got them wrong, the story is still real, the story is still going to hit, it’s still going to have that kind of power?

Then the other thing is that I think it can be kind of overstated how much, if you are doing the work, if you’re really doing your research and if you are really finding the right people to read and talking to the right people. The famous Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” That is true in a media sense, right? That like what the average moviegoer or television watcher is reading about, and encountering, and finding to be true is often still 18 months, two years behind what the people at the absolute forefront of a given field are talking about or dealing with.

That doesn’t mean necessarily that those people are going to be right. AI guys have been promising so-called AGI within two years for about 10 years. It’s still maybe it has happened, maybe it hasn’t happened, but I would also say that I don’t– I don’t actually know. I don’t want to make a claim that I can’t back up. It wasn’t like Spike Jonze was calling up Sam Altman or whoever in 2012 whenever he made Her, and yet, he nailed it. He just absolutely, unquestionably nailed it.

I think so much of that was about having a clear sense of the big picture dynamic that he wanted to establish. I think that even if the form factor of the device didn’t get it quite right, even if the Her in Her is more advanced than ChatGPT, we see that coming. The last thing I’ll say is I think that also comes from not just a good analysis of where everything is headed, but a really good analysis of the present and near past into which everything is going.

That’s so much of what makes a good sci-fi novel or a sci-fi movie, as we were just talking about, if it’s really about the time that it’s being written and not so much necessarily about the future. That’s because the person who was writing it had a really good grasp on what the world was like at the moment they were writing it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed, and you don’t want to say–

Like the Devil Wears Prada is an unfortunately funny one, because I truly could not tell you where the media industry is going to be in two years. I hope that it’s in a place where you can have a compelling movie about a magazine editor in chief, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. I think that in terms of what you’re doing, if you’re focusing as much as possible on the larger sociopolitical, economic, technological dynamics, and also, only the actual story you’re trying to tell and what you’re trying to say about human beings. The really specific stuff, as long as you’re doing your homework, I think it matters a little less.

Craig: Is it possible that in the case of Her, the reason we are so happy with the fact that it got it right is that we actually never cared if it got it right at all? We didn’t care back then if it was getting it right. It wasn’t part of it. I didn’t watch her and think to myself, “I think I like this, but let me check in 10 years from now and decide if I liked it.” If I watched it today, I don’t think I would be giving it much credit because it’s sort of is copying along with what. It’s because it’s a great story that’s really well told.

Max: Yes, totally. The thing about her too is that it’s like, it’s also drawing on Pinocchio and Frankenstein and stories about like– It’s not like we haven’t had stories of created beings before. I think being sure of itself is maybe one way of putting it, like it’s telling a story that it wants to tell. The other thing, let’s be honest, is that Her is such a good movie that Sam Altman is really specifically trying to create Her. It’s not precisely that Spike Jonze predicted the future, he kind of made the future.

John: That’s what I want to talk about in general, is that, in many cases, our science-fiction stories are actually influencing the future, because those are the things that are inspiring the people who ended up making those things. Our space travel stories are what inspired people to travel to space. It got a whole generation of astronauts.

It’s what got people thinking about like, “Oh, what would chatting with an AI be like?” Versus the ways we were trying to do AI before this. It does shape the future, and so we have some responsibility to think about the kinds of stories we’re putting out there that can help inspire people or get people thinking about what they want their world to be like.

Craig: Counterpoint.

John: Please.

Craig: We put out so many views, and visions, and imaginations of the future that honestly, we’re just getting some of them randomly correct. While Sam Altman may have wanted to steal Scarlett Johansson’s voice, that’s really more of an homage. He could have also decided to steal Morgan Freeman’s voice or anyone’s voice. It didn’t really matter what the voice is, it’s the functionality.

I feel like sometimes we give science fiction, and I guess then by extent ourselves as creators, a little too much credit because we’re throwing everything against the wall. [crosstalk] I suppose if we deserve credit for shaping the future, we should take the blame for missing by like miles. We’re still waiting for the flying cars and the meals in a pill. Where’s my meal in a pill?

Max: [laughs] There is also the simple fact that you can only control so much how your story is getting received. I do believe pretty strongly that we have a responsibility to be clear as possible about the ways a story can be used that you don’t want to like, accidentally provide fodder for a fascist to rise to power or whatever.

Craig: Hey, it’s not like the trans sisters who made The Matrix were like, “Okay, now this red pill thing is going to really tweak the incels.”

Max: Yes, that’s a perfect example.

Craig: There’s no way to predict. If they’re going to misuse it, they’re going to misuse it.

Max: There’s a famous tweet. I’m sorry to debase myself by citing tweets, but there’s a famous and very apropos tweet that is just a scientist announcing, “I have created the famous torment nexus from the book, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” That’s what a lot of tech has felt like for the last 10 years or so.

[laugter]

Craig: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty great.

John: Inspired by the cautionary tale.

Max: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

John: Wrapping this up, some of the choices we have when we’re approaching science fiction premises is like, how do we enclose it in a specific box or place so that it can actually function in itself and we don’t try to pull in things that shouldn’t be there? I think it’s a version of the cellphone problem. Cellphones are fantastic, but they also ruined movies because now, all the situations where you would just- a person would have to go and physically talk to a person, they would just call them up on the phone or they text them. It’s like, “Ah,” they’re like, “scenes have been ruined by the introduction of cell phones.”

Same thing happens I think now with, “Why didn’t somebody Google that?” Or, “Why didn’t somebody look that up in ChatGPT?” You’re like, “You have all of the answers to all the questions at your fingertips, why are you doing this legwork that we don’t need you to do anymore?” A project that I’m considering writing, I think I would’ve actually set it back in 1992 because I actually need to pull it all the way back so that the characters have to do real work to solve the problems and actually connect and even find this information, because I was realizing that every year later that I set it was too easy for them to do the things they need to do.

As we talk about science-fiction canon, you look at something like Star Wars or Dune, by taking it out of earth and putting it someplace that is a clean room there, where like you don’t have the things you don’t want to have in there. It’s a chance to do, I don’t know, the fun parts of science fiction that don’t have to touch back to our messy reality, we know that it’s really there.

Craig: Dune in particular did something really brilliant by creating– It was Frank Herbert’s vision to say, “I’m going to set something that is in a galaxy far, far away,” but society experienced AI. It went so bad that they have banned computers entirely, so we’re not going to have any of that. In fact, we’re going to create an entire new subspecies of humans that are human computers now, who by drinking the juice of the Sapho, the lips acquire stains, the stains acquire– Nerd.
That’s an amazing and smart way to say, “‘m going to do science fiction by my own rules, so I’m not bound by that. Just be really smart. Star Wars has weirdly not a lot of computing going on. [laughs]

John: I think not. It’s weird because we have C-3PO, we have intelligent droids who have personalities and have inner emotional lives, and yet, they don’t seem to have most of the things we would assume that would have to come with that.
Craig: Right. We now have vehicles that will remind us to put a seatbelt on. They just get in this junky land speeder that is like a Dodge Dart from 1962, unsafe at any speed, but they’ve solved the singularity.

[laughter]

Craig: What’s happening?

John: Again, I think both in the case of Dune and Star Wars is like, they are science-fiction stories, but they’re also specifically another genre as well. Star Wars is a Western. The original Star Wars is a Western. Dune is a religious allegory. It’s a Messiah story, and so they get their science fiction that they want, but they’re actually telling a very different, specific story. That’s probably the answer to all of our dilemmas is like, if we’re just writing a science-fiction story, but if you’re writing something that’s something else that uses science fiction tropes and elements and the powers of science fiction, great.

Max: I was going to say, I think one reason Andor succeeded really well is that Tony Gilroy looked at Star Wars and he was like, “Oh, this is George Lucas making like a World War II fighter plane movie, because that’s what he loved and he wanted to make that. Instead of me trying to like make a copy of what was already a copy of a fighter plane movie, I’m going to take resistance, like French resistance movies, like World War II resistance movies, and I’m going to make the Star Wars version of that,” or whatever.

All of a sudden, it was like this new twist on the universe that we really had never seen before, but was also grounded in the same kind of things that Star Wars is grounded in, which was our knowledge of World War II fighter movies, basically.
John: One last question for the panel here. For the last 15 years on screen in filming and in television, we’ve had iPhone shaped phones. Basically, you can’t tell– Whatever they’re holding to their ear, you cannot tell what year it is because it’s just like, it’s just the shape of what a phone is supposed to be. How long does that last? How soon will that become a dated thing where you’re like, “Oh, that clearly took place sometime between certain decades”? How much longer do you think we have, Craig?

Craig: I’m going to say five years.

Max: I was going to say 15. I think it’s going to take a little longer than that.

Craig: That’s optimistic, and I like that.

Max: I will say, I do think, I would encourage writers, one of my favorite things about It Follows, the horror movie from [unintelligible 00:39:24] –

John: Oh, I love it.

Max: -is they have these amazing little clamshell phones. Totally out of nowhere. They don’t talk about it. They don’t explain it, but it’s just a cool little form factor, and it doesn’t really take away from the movie. I think if you want to write a cool movie, maybe invent a new kind of a phone and stick it in there. We’ll see what happens.

John: In my movie, The Nines, Ryan Reynolds’ character has a Treo. It’s such a specific like, “Oh, that is 2016. This is exactly one year that could have happened and–“

Max: Sometimes that works out really well. I was watching this Olivier Assayas movie Boarding Gate with Asia Argento, and at the very end, she has a snakeskin Motorola Razr. I think about it constantly because it’s such a– it just could not have been made any earlier than 2009. It is on 2009. It looks so cool. It probably would just take 10 years of total datedness, and now I’m like, oh, that rules.

John: Yes, that’s pretty great. All right, let’s get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Dan in LA writes, “I’ve written dozens of scripts over the last 10 years, and I have four projects that I’m particularly proud of. One script was in the second round at the Sundance Episodic Lab, so now I know someone besides my mom thinks I’m a fairly decent writer. As part of my strategy to get read, I’m putting together a landing page on my personal website with short pitches and links to my work. What’s your general take on writers creating personal websites to promote their work? Do I list all four projects, or do I only push one or two scripts and keep the other stowed away until an agent or manager asks me what else I’ve got?”

John: All right, so on my website, I have most of the scripts that I’ve done, but they’re like finished produced things. They weren’t for like show pieces of stuff I’ve done. Max, do you have any of your unproduced stuff up on your site?

Max: No, I don’t.

John: Only the finished stuff.

Max: Yes, I got to go say, I hadn’t ever really thought about it until this question. [chuckles] It just didn’t seem like something to do

John: Yes, I’m generally a fan of putting your work out there and letting people to see it, because obviously, people aren’t going to try to steal your work. You just want them to be exposed to it. If you want to do it, great. Maybe if we could have some listeners write in with what has been their experience. Has anyone actually signed a rep, a manager, or an agent where they found you because they found your stuff on your website? We know people who’ve been signed because they were really funny on Twitter and people reached out to them for samples and stuff. Craig, what’s your instinct?

Craig: Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with putting some stuff on the internet. I think, Dan, you might be overthinking things a little bit because I’m sensing a little bit of control issues and anxiety as if I put the exact right number on, it will be good, and if I put the wrong number on, it will be bad. It’ll be fine. Doesn’t matter. Do you list all four projects? If you want. Push one or two scripts? If you want. Do you want to keep the others stowed away? It’s okay.

Here’s the thing. Maybe start with a smaller amount, and then if it’s not working, throw another one on there. Rotate them through, but it’s really just to advertise you as a writer or to get you into a room to start you talking to people and find out maybe what they might want you to write for them. If you’re super lucky, then yes, they’ll pick up one of those scripts and say, I want to make this, but I wouldn’t tense up too much about it. Go for it.

John: Yes, I say go for it, too. One option to consider is maybe put the first 10 pages of a script on, and that 11th page says, if you want to read the rest of this, email me here, and that way, at least you have some contact with the person who might be reading it, because if it’s just some random person on the internet, you might never really know that somebody actually read it, and so it associates you as a person with this work that you’re doing.

Craig: It’s a good idea.

John: Next question, Drew.

Drew: “I’m Thomas, a 1st AD based in Germany, working all over. Every now and then, you guys talk about playing this or that game, either on a console or a board, and I’m constantly asking myself how you manage to find the time for that. When I was younger, I’m 43 now, I love playing video games, and I still do, but with my job, a wife, and social life, it’s hard for me to find time for myself to enjoy these things, especially since nowadays, most of the games are real time suckers. How do you, as writers, showrunners, and directors, family men, and podcasters even find the time to turn on a console or put down a board, and at the same time, keep track of the latest shows and movies? Do you have lab-created twins that no one knows about?

Craig: I love this question. Man with job notorious for long hours asks other men how they have time. You’re a 1st AD, Thomas. Of course, you don’t have time. [laughs] The rest of us don’t work as hard as you do. I’ve said it a million times, I don’t know why anybody does that job. God bless you for doing it. It’s an amazing job, but your day begins an hour before everyone’s, ends an hour after everyone’s, and everyone else’s job is 12 hours minimum. Yes, you’re probably sleeping or crying in the time you have off. [laughs] Although, I will say, side note, I don’t watch that many shows and movies. That’s my big secret.

John: That’s a secret people should need to know. It’s like Craig, I watch a lot more than Craig does. If we have the same number of free hours, which is not probably true, because I probably have a little bit more free time than Craig does, you’re playing video games, whereas I’m watching whole seasons of things.

Craig: Video games, solving puzzles, but then there’s a lot of time- honestly, there’s a lot of time where I feel like I’m not doing anything at all. One thing that people need to wrap their minds around, and it’s not fair, it’s just the way the world works, and this might be a particularly different thing for a German 1st AD to deal with, because I’m really, I’m going to go right against your Teutonic AD-ness right now, one hour of time is not the same for everybody.

There are people who do 12 hours of stuff in an hour, and there are people who do one hour of stuff in an hour. The people who do 12 hours of stuff in an hour don’t need the other 11 hours for anything. In fact, they may just sit there and do nothing. Some people are sprinters, some people are marathoners, but in the long run, maybe everybody sort of gets to the end in the same time. It’s just that if you’re a sprinter, the off time you can spend maybe with more leisurely activities.

John: Max, before we started talking here, you said that you’re going to have a kid home from school for the summer, a young child home from school for the summer, so this resonates for you, I guess.

Max: Yes, I have to admit, I gave my brother my PS5 when my son was born. I was just like, no time for this, and I really haven’t, I haven’t gamed at all over the last four and a half years. I miss it a lot, but I also, like I was saying earlier in the podcast, I pick the job I have to give myself time in my job to read and to watch movies that I want to watch, and I try to be– It’s like, it’s all well and good for me because I’m very conscious about my time.

Of course, if I took the two hours I spend scrolling through bullshit websites every day, then I could, in fact, be gaming. I’m certainly not working as hard as Thomas is, but at some point I was like, I know what thing is going to suck the most time because when it comes to games, I’m worse even than Twitter or whatever else. I just will lose hours.

Craig: I’m glad you said– You know what, there’s something I want you to think about, though. I think there is something in our puritanical nature, our Calvinistic nature here in the United States, whether we’re Calvinists or not, where we’re much more accepting of wasting time on things that are vaguely work-ish than we are with things that are purely recreational and argue that pure recreation is the thing that isn’t a waste of time and that the vague work-ishness is the true tragedy. The scrolling pointlessly is a tragedy, whereas playing something that delights you is a win. I’m giving you this gift. Really, I want you to go back to your brother’s house, rip that goddamn console right out of the wall and say, “This is mine.”

John: The new GTA is coming.

Craig: Seriously, you need it back before GTA 6.

Max: Yes, that’s definitely incredible.

Craig: Dude, you need to get your mind right, man.

Max: I know, I know.

Craig: [crosstalk] coming, it’s coming.

Max: Wow. This is a real come-to-Jesus moment for me.

Craig: Kiss your family goodbye and go.

John: Another thing I’ll say, just taking from– Craig and I, we have a weekly D&D game and we do block off that time for that and Craig has other set blocks in his schedule which is about this thing that he does. Thomas, you may find that just putting it on the calendar makes it clear that this is a priority for you. I think you have to prioritize having fun.
Craig: You have to prioritize having fun. That is something that a German 1st AD receives like a scalding hot liquid, right? I assume that he’s screaming right now.

Drew: Let’s do one last question here from Tim. Recently, I discovered that Final Draft 13 requires a phone home every 60-some days even though there’s support docs so that you only need to be online for the first activation. I regularly write on an offline machine or away from internet and it’s frustrating that this wasn’t noted before buying Final Draft 13. Do you have a recommendation for any screenwriting software that doesn’t require phoning home after activation?

Craig: Yes, John, do you have recommendations for that? [laughs]

John: Let’s talk about phoning home because another friend of mine got bit by the Final Draft thing and was really frustrated by this. Here’s what we do in Highland Pro and this is just sort of things you buy through the Mac App Store. This is sort of how it should work, is that when you start a subscription, it creates an app receipt that’s stored on your device itself. We say, oh, this thing is valid through this time. Every time you launch or resume an app, we attempt in the background to check, did anything change here? Did they add on extra months? Did anything change?

If you’re offline, we go by the last receipt that’s cached and stored, but we only lock out a user and put them in read-only mode if you’ve gone online and we checked and the receipt now says that it’s expired. That’s basically best practices. That’s what we try to do in Highland Pro and that’s really what most software you’re going to encounter these days is doing. I suspect Adobe’s a similar situation with their stuff too. That’s just how you should do it. It’s silly that Final Draft is doing this, but it’s not surprising necessarily. You understand why they’re doing it. You understand that they want to make sure that is this actually a valid app, but they’re doing it wrong.

Craig: Maybe they could just be cooler about it. What you’re suggesting is the best practice is, hey, if you pop online, which most of us are going to have to do every now and again, yes, we’ll check in. If you decide to Faraday cage your computer, then we’ll just let you have it. Just go ahead.

John: I think it comes down to it and it’s sort of where you’re putting your trust. Basically, if a person really wanted to never pay to start out a monthly Highland subscription and just never pay for it again, and they went online, offline, and they just never ever went back online, that’s a choice they’re making. I’m not going to–

Craig: Exactly. That’s the paranoid nonsense that Final Draft is famous for. We’ve got to make sure no one out there is robbing us of our overpriced nonsense for bad software. Otherwise, it’s a terrific product.

John: Listen, eventually you’re going to want to come back online because stuff does change. The systems get updated and things break.

Craig: No, no, no. If I come back online, I’m going to owe somebody.

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things. Max, do you want to start us off? What do you want to share with our listeners?

Max: Yes, I want to talk about a movie that I saw recently that I really loved called the Red Rooms. It’s a Canadian movie that it’s not science fiction, but it is very sort of technologically interested. I think it’s a great movie to watch if, among other things, you’re interested in how to depict people using computers in dramatic ways. This is maybe less for screenwriters than it is for directors and cinematographers because it’s very good at showing its main character using the computer to win at online poker and go on the dark web and try and buy a snuff film and all these things.

The movie itself is an awful horror movie, like awful in the sense of you will feel so bad after you watch this. If you are the kind of person who likes to be made to feel bad by movies, this is one of the best examples. It reminds me of the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa a little bit, who’s directed a bunch of unbelievably creepy horror movies. It’s a little bit like Michael Haneke and Caché and other movies like that.

The plot, which I just want to establish, I’m sure there’s some people who are like, let me just skip 30 seconds forward because this is not for me. If that does sound like it’s for you, it’s about a French-Canadian model who becomes obsessed with a serial killer on trial and develops a friendship with a sort of true crime podcaster. It’s a character study. The main actress, this woman, Juliette Gariépy, is so good, I cannot tell you.

I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about it. It was a good movie about the internet, a good movie about true crime, a good old-fashioned serial killer movie. It’s worth watching both for the craft that went into making it, if you’re interested in thinking about tech and how it enters your movies, but also just as a good movie.

John: That’s great. I want to plug here that your newsletter is full of good recommendations for things, the things you’re reading and the things you’re watching, including Max will put in just YouTube videos for songs you’re listening to, and every third or fourth one is added to the playlist. Some good stuff there.

Max: Yes, I’m just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I think [crosstalk] is pretty good.

John: It’s what we do. This is writing. My one cool thing is an article in Scientific American. It’s an article titled, This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats. Basically, we’ve had orange cats for a good long time. Orange cats are weirdos. They’re almost always males and they didn’t know why. They would assume that since orange cats are males, there must be something on the Y chromosome. Makes sense. It turns out it’s actually something on the X chromosome that is suppressing something on the Y chromosome. It was a bunch of genetics that was being done to figure this out.

It took a long time to get there, but they actually now understand more why orange cats are orange. I love orange cats. Orange cats are– I’ll also put a link in the show notes to a Reddit called OneOrangeBraincell, which is about just dumb orange cats. I love a dumb orange cat. I maybe remember Raleigh, who was the sort of our office cat. He actually lived two doors down, but was always wandering in our backyard at lunchtime and would join us for lunch every day in the office. Raleigh has probably passed on. Raleigh would be 25 at this point, but Raleigh was a good orange cat. A cool story. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this for Scientific American.

Craig: There goes the last mystery left in the world.

John: Yes, now that we know what the orange cats are.

Craig: So depressing. My one cool thing is my kid. You know I don’t do this. I don’t do this. My younger daughter, Jessica, is a budding singer-songwriter. As she often does, she writes songs, plays them, records them, puts them on TikTok. A couple of weeks ago, she threw it on there and it went viral. I think it’s really good. I think it’s a good song. I think she’s great. I’m sharing it with you because, A, my kid, proud. B, feels thematic. For our topic today, the song is called The Simulation is Failing.

John: She really is your daughter.

Craig: She is my kid. I never even told her that this was all simulation. She figured it out on her own.

John: Kids these days, they’re so wise.

Craig: They’re so wise. Yes. Synthetic children these days.

[laughter]

Craig: Wise.

John: I think back to the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. and like, wow, it got everything right. This is exactly what the future was going to be like.

[laughter]

Craig: Exactly. Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. That’s our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a great new one up from Greta Gerwig, so check that out.

You will find T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear at Cotton Bureau with Scriptnotes logos all over them. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about each week in the email you get as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible to keep doing the show week after week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record with Max on a new genre that I think you’re trying to pin down. We’ll help you out on that. You should also read Max on his own Substack called Read Max. Max, thanks so much for joining us.

Max: Thank you guys so much for having me. It was a blast as always.

Craig: Thank you, Max.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Max, I’m looking at your Letterboxd and the lists that you have formed in your Letterboxd because halogencore that we talked about in the setup, that actually originated in your Letterboxd. You also have lists of movies where British people have a bad time in Spain.

Max: Which is really a thing. Those are good movies too. That’s actually great. You can mine that territory for something fantastic. Sexy Beast is a great movie and there it is.

Craig: Oh, the best.

Max: That’s the story. They have a bad time in Spain. [laughs]

Craig: They have a bad time in Spain. Yes, yes.

John: You also have the ‘90s dad thriller core canon, so when dads had a rough time and dads had to– Action movies about dads.

Max: Yes. It’s worth checking the Substack newsletter now because I’ve got some diagrams. I had some strong thoughts about this set of movies. There’s some extra reading for people who are interested.

John: Recently on your Substack, you were promoting a new genre or sub genre. Tell us about it.

Max: Yes. This one’s a little bit more art house pretentious than halogencore, but I do think it’s a little related. I watched this movie called Code 46, which if I had known about it, I had forgotten about it. It’s a Michael Winterbottom movie from 2003 with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. It’s set in like a future Shanghai. I have to be honest, it is not a perfect movie. There’s a lot of things that are not very good about it.

Craig: What is?

Max: It has a vibe. I think especially like one of those movies that maybe you can only really get the vibe 20 years later. I was like, I love this vibe. Even though this movie is not great, it’s this very beautifully photographed Shanghai, sort of set on border crossings. Tim Robbins is an insurance investigator looking into someone forging passports who happens to be Samantha Morton, who he falls in love with. In my head, I was thinking there’s these other movies that are sort of resemble it. This movie Boarding Gate, which I talked about earlier in the episode by Olivier Assayas, another, again, not a perfect movie, but it just hits a particular sort of vibe.

Another Olivier Assayas movie called Demonlover, an Abel Ferrara movie called New Rose Hotel with Christopher Walken. Again, these are all movies that did not get very well reviewed on release necessarily, certainly were not huge hits, but looked at from 20-plus years later, have an interesting thing to say about globalization and the future.

I made a list of these. I include the ones I just mentioned. Michael Mann’s Blackhat is probably the biggest one that really fits in this thing. Also a huge bomb and also a movie that I think has recovered in some people’s esteem since then, a movie I love called Ghostbox Cowboy, which nobody’s ever heard of, which is like, I always describe it as like, if Tim and Eric made a William Gibson movie, it’s like about this crazy American who goes to Shenzhen to try and make a box that can talk to the spirit world. It’s all these meetings with the VCs that are sort of docufiction. Then it takes a really weird turn.

Craig: Oh, you mean it wasn’t already really weird?

Max: You will think the first half was normal once you hit the second half. I think Tenet sort of is in this. You remember it’s set in these freeport zones. The Jim Jarmusch movie Limits of Control, the Clive Owen thriller, The International. This is Tom Tykwer’s. I think it was his follow-up to Run Lola Run. Again, movies that didn’t, The Counselor, Ridley Scott, Cormac McCarthy.

I like doing this partly because if you take any one of these movies individually, you’re probably looking at a bomb. You are at best looking at like an arthouse thriller that 500 people saw. The nice thing about doing a list like this or a sort of micro genre is you put them all next to each other and you think, oh, there is something that connects these.

John: It’s a connection. You have globalization. Do they need to be Americans who are overseas or just like people are not in their native culture?

Max: I think it’s usually Westerners. Yes. Let’s say the thematic concerns, globalization, supply chains, logistics, a lot of them end up in China, in Jakarta, in Japan. These are movies that are deep down sort of about anxieties about the future, about a future in which Asia is rising.

John: How about Syriana? Would that fall into your–

Max: I think it’s very similar. I’m not sure it’s quite there, but it has a similar kind of– Syriana is in some ways smarter than these movies, I think, because it’s less of a thriller in a certain way.

Craig: What about like– There were two movies. What was one called? Black Rain, maybe.

Max: Oh yes, the Michael Douglas. Yes.

John: There’s definitely like proto, that’s like part of what leads into this or Rising Sun is another one that’s real Japan anxiety movies.

Craig: Japan anxiety, yes.

Max: I think around the turn of the century, it turns in. Partly it turns into China anxiety and partly the focus is less on businesses. Even Die Hard has this, right? Like the lurking in the back of the tower.

Craig: Nakatomi.

Max: Yes, it’s the Nakatomi tower. It’s less about Japanese businesses buying American businesses. It’s more about manufacturing and logistics and all this stuff that we now know from the vantage point of 2025 had this huge impact on American politics that we didn’t. I’m not sure that many of you were seeing at the time, but that there are these interesting thrillers set in freeports in loading docks, border crossings.

My theory about this is basically that we had all these great thrillers in the ‘90s that a few years ago, this guy, David Rudnick, coined the word Nokiawave. We’re talking about the same GoldenEye, Peacemaker, like all these Eastern European set, techno thrillers, usually about loose nuclear weapons on the black market. 9/11 comes and the geopolitical anxieties that were undergirding those movies gets transitioned into the Borne Identity style, like war on terror, dramatic, morality plays.

What happens is this other new, huge geopolitical development, the rise of China, the rise of Asia, the globalization of manufacturing. It’s all these European, these pretentious European directors and Michael Mann, who deep down inside is a pretentious European director, are like, okay, this is something interesting here and we can make this happen. They all have this, they’re sort of diffuse.

You very often can’t really follow the plot, which is, I think, one reason why many people didn’t like these movies when they came out. Possibly, they have these roving cameras, always shot on location, but in some ways the thriller genre plots is really what keeps them solid at all. This is what prevents them from just being like total exercises in art house masturbation or whatever, that they do have death in them and illicit sex and all these other things.

I’ve been calling them SEZ Noir. SEZ stands for Special Economic Zone, which is like Shenzhen in China is a special economic zone that operates under slightly different rules than the rest of China. It has turned it into a manufacturing hub. Noir because they all are noir. They’re all about these haunted people on the periphery who they’re trying to move their way up the value chain. Then their scheme takes a wrong turn somewhere and they find themselves on the run.

The thing that I think is most interesting about all of these is the one thing that they all have in common, despite the differences, and this is a vague spoiler, is they all end with the protagonist losing their identity entirely, losing their papers, losing their identity, finding themselves adrift somewhere, maybe pursued by gangsters, maybe pursued by the government, maybe pursued by a corporation, though those three groups tend to be blurred together like this.

They’re not movies with happy endings, but they’re also not movies with endings where the characters are straight up killed. They just enter the ether, which is a sort of interesting statement that I haven’t quite internalized or processed about, about globalization like that. Anyway, I do recommend all these movies, especially if you can watch them with a with an open mind, let’s say. [chuckles]

Craig: Now, you did, you listed all these movies that you recommend by saying, and this one was a bomb. This one was not well-received. This was a bomb. This was a bomb. This was a bomb.

Max: Yes.

John: Let’s just try to poke at maybe why they didn’t work, is because filmmakers are tackling these questions that they find really interesting, but maybe it’s just actually not really relevant to people’s lived experience. Maybe people aren’t able to see themselves in that place or position because most Americans don’t have a passport. They’re not used to being out of their depth and in this place. While they might have fears of Asian companies taking over their work, Die Hard is a much better expression of that feeling than some of these movies would be.

Max: Yes. They’re definitely not about the most direct effects of globalization on Americans, which is like de-industrialization across the country, basically. They’re really specifically about people who are often quite unlikable who are trying to profit off of that process in ways that I think the average American until maybe even recently didn’t quite realize the extent to which this international logistics and shipping organizations were doing. They’re dark, too. That’s the other part of it is like, there’s harder to find an appetite for that thing in general. If you’re making a movie that is dark and complicated and political, you’re probably not making a blockbuster.

I think that this is also just a function of like– I’m trying to think of what the counter history or the counterfactual is. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, a lot would be different. Let’s stipulate that. I also think that this kind of subject would maybe have, I don’t want to be too mean about my favorite European directors, but the more competent at entertaining hands of Hollywood might’ve been able to take these themes and ideas and transform them.

Michael Mann has a director’s cut of Blackhat. I’ve seen it. I can’t pretend that it’s that different from the cut that was released and I’m not really sure it would have made a huge difference to its box office receipts. I think you could also say like Tenet is an example of a movie that took a lot of these themes and spun gold out of them. Though because it’s less of a period piece, it holds a little bit less of that vibe attraction for me, which is part of what I have been really enjoying about these.

John: I also feel like Tenet feels like a science fiction film that is able to do science fiction and these things. As we said in the main show, science fiction plus another genre. It just feels like it was taking that genre and putting it onto science fiction.

Max: Yes. Tenet, I will also say, is a great example of a movie that you have to pay really close attention for it to make sense. Yet at the same time, it did really well and people love it and you can watch it and enjoy it without it needing to make note by note perfect sense, which is a pretty stunning thing to be able to do.

John: Max, thank you for this, a new genre, addition to the canon. We’ll look for more movies in it.

Max: Yes. Okay.

John: Thanks for coming back on the show.

Max: Of course. It was great to talk to you guys.

Craig: Thanks, Max.

John: All right. Thanks.

Links:

• Max Read’s newsletter Read Max and his Letterboxd
• Dogma 25 Explodes at Cannes by Annika Pham, Marta Balaga for Variety
• Maze by Christopher Manson
• Blue Prince
• Graham’s source for Egypt’s GDP and John’s sources
• Neal Stephenson
• William Gibson
• Red Rooms
• This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats by Gayoung Lee for Scientific American
• The Simulation is Failing. by Jessica Mazin
• r/OneOrangeBraincell
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 685 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

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

John: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They were just too much alike.

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

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct.

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

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

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

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Of course, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: I am, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, wow.

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

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

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

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

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

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

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

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

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

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

John: Exactly.

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

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

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

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh my God.

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

Leslye: Oh, my God.

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

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

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

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

John: I’ve never read it.

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

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

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

Leslye: I agree.

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

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

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

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: They can’t.

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

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

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

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

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

John: Yikes.

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

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

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

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

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

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

Leslye: Phenomenal.

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

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

John: Awesome.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even a little bit more swearing than usual, so standard warning about that.

[music]

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

Today on the show, how do you plan for a multi-season TV series, and how do you wrap it up at the end? Our guest today is the creator and showrunner of shows such as Supernatural, Revolution, Timeless, Gen V, and of course, The Boys, which is back for its final season. Welcome, Eric Kripke.

Eric Kripke: Hey, thanks, John. Thrilled to be here.

John: Now, the fourth season of The Boys premiered last June, but you are now working on the fifth and final season, so I want to talk to you about that, but I’d also love to get more granular on the process of developing a show, breaking scripts, and seasons. We also have listener questions on bottle episodes, and using the conventions of comic books.

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about blood, because you use an astonishing amount of blood on The Boys and Gen V. I’d love to discuss what you’ve learned about blood on the page, and blood in practice.

Eric: Amazing, I’m in for all of that.

John: Before we get into the details on how shows work on the inside, can we talk a little bit about your background here? Because how early in your development did you know that you wanted to do television versus features? What’s the backstory? Pitch us, Eric Kripke.

Eric: [chuckles] I was raised in Toledo, Ohio. I was one of those kids, I think it was E.T. in ’83. I was nine, and I came home from E.T. and told my mom, “Did somebody make that?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, then that’s what I want to do.” I was like the very prototypical ‘80s Spielberg obsessed, that particular subspecies of kid.

John: There’s a lot of us in that age range who are like, those were the important movies. The Spielberg movies were the ones like, “Oh my gosh, that is the vision I have,” or that’s how you get the J.J. Abrams emulating that model.

Eric: Yes, and it’s so funny looking back how few of them he actually wrote, or directed. You look back, and you’re like, “Well, that was actually Richard Donner, and that was actually Joe Dante, and that was actually Tobe Hooper,” with apparently, a very heavy assist from Spielberg, according to legend. It’s funny when you’re like– Oh, he was just– I mean, producing is a big job, obviously, but those weren’t actually his movies.

Anyway, it was just fascinating to me. I was that kid. I’d say by the time I was 11, I wanted to go to the USC Film School, because it was the only film school whose name makes its way back to Toledo, Ohio. I found the short story that I wanted my senior thesis movie to be when I was 13 in a Twilight Zone magazine written by Richard Matheson, and I carried it around with me in wrapped plastic.

I took it with me to camp and college, and anyway, and cut forward, and I went to USC, and I made that movie my senior year, and my goal was to be a director for features, and feature comedies. I made short films, and was unemployed, the usual thing. Then, my shorts were in Sundance and Slamdance at the same year, and then we won Slamdance, and okay, now I have an agent, and now I’m able to pick up bad open writing assignments, which they were giving away a lot more candy back then than they are today.

John: Let me pause you for one second, because we have a link here to Battle of the Sexes, which was a short film that you got into Sundance. Was that also at Slamdance?

Eric: Another one, Truly Committed, was at Slamdance, but Battle of the Sexes was at Sundance, yes.

John: I look at the short, it’s like, “Oh, well, I can see this is a person who wants to be a director, and wants to make a certain kind of movie,” because it’s a very well-executed, single-premise conceit just like–

Eric: Oh, I’m thrilled and stunned that you watched it, but, yes.

John: It’s six minutes, so it’s not a huge burden on anyone’s time, but it was a very good calling card for that specific kind of director who wants to do a thing. Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant, he also made a short film coming out of the USC program, but then a second short film, which was Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, which kicked him off in his career. It’s a good way to announce yourself to the town, and was that the intention behind these short films is to land yourself representation?

Eric: Yes, the main thing, and I know Rawson, he’s a great guy. The main thing at the time was make a short film, and have the feature-length version of that film as a script ready to go, and that’s the best way to get yourself into the director’s chair at a young age while you’re in your 20s. That was sort of the– That’s what you do.

John: Was the intention for Battle of the Sexes, here’s the short, and did you have a screenplay that went along with it?

Eric: I did. There’s a Battle of the Sexes feature-length screenplay that is only moderately successful, and I took it out. I got an agent, I had a good short film, people wanted to have meetings. I took out that script, and every single person who read it was like, “Yeah, no, what other scripts do you have?” I had nothing, [chuckles] so I totally blew my moment.

I had that month where I was taking eight meetings a week, and nobody liked the script, because it is a very sloppy script. I had to really learn writing from doing it. I don’t feel like I was an innately gifted writer. I always felt I was better at filmmaking.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between, so something like Battle of the Sexes is essentially a sketch. It’s something that, it’s a long version of what could be a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Eric: Yes.

John: We’ve had a couple of writers on the show to talk about the difference between sketch writing and writing the longer projects, pilot writing, a feature for sure, is that there’s a sense of ongoing development. It’s not just a complication upon the premise, it’s really a journey that the characters go on, and that’s not a natural progression sometimes from the sketch forward. It’s a very different thing.

We had Simon Rich on, and we were talking about, he writes short stories and sketches that are short and tight, and deliver the payload that they’re expecting for that small form, but it’s not what a feature script does. It’s not what a pilot does. It’s not setting up a whole world, which you end up having to learn how to do. How did you learn how to go from this, and the script that wasn’t working, to Supernatural, or other shows you were writing?

Eric: Through failure. I really feel that I learned what to do through process of elimination. I failed every other way until I figured out, “Oh, this actually works. This gets a response.” Everyone has their own process, but for me, what really landed was two things. Everyone says character-driven, but almost nobody means it, and because you have to walk the walk, and what I learned was, the stories were hanging together better when I started with, “Okay, who’s this person, and what do they want? Where do they start, and where do they end?

Then, okay, what are the steps that get them there? Psychologically, why do they feel that way? Then, okay, now, at least for TV, and okay, now what’s the plot that illuminates those beats?” It wasn’t until I landed there that things started to cook. Then, the second one was, which I think is a mistake a lot of young writers make, and you know maybe better than anybody with the stuff you’ve written, but you just have to be so brutal with your internal logic, and you have to be air-fucking-tight.

The Battle of the Sexes script, for example, failed because it was sloppy world-building. I set up rules in the beginning that were not consistent through the end, and you really have to look at it as, does this particular beat, does this particular line, does this particular reference fit in the rules of the world you’ve created? If they do not, you have to get rid of them. I don’t care how good that line, or character, or moment is. It’s a cancer to the credibility of the world you’re trying to create.

John: Let’s pull this back. Battle of the Sexes, for people who haven’t watched the little short film yet, the premise is that, when women go off to the restroom, they’re actually entering into a secret lab where they can do deep forensics on the man that they’re talking with, and figure out whether they should continue the conversation, or pull away from the conversation. It’s incredibly heightened.

It’s incredibly, a Mission Impossible level of stuff happens inside that space. In a sketch, it’s funny that we buy it because, the world expectations are not so high. I can imagine in the course of a feature-length film, or if this was the premise to a TV show, building that up, so the rest of the world actually made sense would be challenging.

Eric: Yes. It might be doomed from the beginning, and the first 20, 25 pages of that script are the best, and then it falls apart. It’s like, this idea of a guy who’s chasing a girl, and the obstacle is this secret network of women that are all in communication with each other to secretly run the world. By the way, not wildly different than Angelina Jolie’s agency in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Not that different, but by the end, it became every woman on the planet, and it was just too big. It should have just been a woman spy, spying for her– It should have been Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

That’s the best version of this idea. In the way that Brad Pitt has Vince Vaughn, and he’s riding around in a dune buggy, and she’s very fastidious and neat. Those are the right energies, but it was contained. I didn’t understand containment, and I didn’t understand the logic exercise, where you have to take everything to its nth degree and say, “If that exists, then that means this, this, this, and this, and is that okay for your story?”

Obviously, every woman involved in a conspiracy, [chuckles] raises way too many problems. The entire thing, look, I was 25 when I wrote it, but everything just melted by the end of that. Everyone who read it was like, “It really started promising, and then it went off the rails, and never went back on.” [chuckles]

John: Just very honest with you.

Eric: [chuckles] Yes.

John: Talking about the steps of learning between that, and something like a Supernatural, were you staffed on other TV shows, were you getting other deals to do stuff, what was happening?

Eric: I mostly blew my moment of getting any sort of feature directing going. Then, I took a couple open writing assignments for comedies, because I thought I was going to be a comedy filmmaker. They were all horrible scripts. They never got made, and I was banging around for three years, just being one of those guys who never gets anything made, and just that Twilight Zone.

I read one of the scripts, and it’s like, you can see someone’s struggling to learn something, but it’s terrible. They were terrible. It turns out, I wanted to be a comedy writer, but turns out I sucked at it, plus, the tyranny of multiple jokes per page, just was something that I just couldn’t do. I just was really bad at– The people that are good at it, are so good and every other line is a killer. I couldn’t do that. I needed more build up. I just didn’t have that muscle.

Then, my agent was like, “Why don’t you take a TV meeting?” This was 2002. TV then is not what TV is now. TV then, my film school friends were like, “Oh, you’re going to go do TV. Good luck, good luck. I always saw you as a TV person,” and I’m like, “Fuck you.”
[laughter]

That was the vibe. I went to take a TV meeting. They liked Battle of the Sexes. Here’s something that’ll also tell you how different the time was. I was a 27-year-old kid. I walked into that meeting based on Battle of the Sexes alone, they offered me the Wonder Woman series-

John: Oh, my.

Eric: -and I passed.

John: Incredible.

Eric: I said, “Yes, Wonder Woman’s not really my thing. No, pass.” Just shows you how different IP was then, but then they said, “Would you be interested in writing a pilot?” I tried, and I wrote a pilot, and it didn’t go anywhere, but they liked it. Then, my break was, they were trying– Smallville was a big deal on the WB.

John: Friends of mine who’ve been on the show, Al and Miles, they created Smallville. They were also out of USC, and I felt like, “Oh, is it sad that you’re doing TV?” No, it was a giant hit.

Eric: Exactly. Anyway, but at the time, and this show was– The story I’m about to tell is about a huge failure, is they were trying to recreate it with Tarzan, and they couldn’t break Tarzan. They couldn’t figure it out. They had big writers, and it’s a big title. I said, “Let me take a crack at it.” I had the winning pitch, and then I wrote a script and they loved the script. Then, I have David Nutter shooting my pilot, all of this–[crosstalk]

John: David Nutter is a giant TV director. He’s who you want to do your pilot.

Eric: The winningest pilot director in TV history in terms of more pilots picked up, and such a lovely guy. He makes the show, the show’s good. They pick it up to series, and suddenly, they partnered me with somebody, but suddenly, I’m a co-showrunner of a TV show at 28-years-old, having never stepped into a writers’ room before.

John: Eric Kripke, I was in the same situation as a 28-year-old creator of a TV show for the WB Network, and I had a nervous breakdown. I completely melted down. I’m seeing here your show lasted eight episodes, mine last was six.

Eric: Wait, what was your show?

John: I did the show D.C. I was partnering up with Dick Wolf.

Eric: Oh, right. Yes, young people in D.C. and making it happen. I totally remember that.

John: Yes. It was a post-Felicity show. It was a good premise. It sold well, and I was excited to be doing it, and I just was completely out of my depth in the process. Were you partnered up with somebody who actually knew what they were doing? What was that situation?

Eric: Yes. This writer named P.K. Simonds who had ran Party of Five. We’re still friends to this day. He’s such a lovely, lovely dude. I was partnered with him. He encouraged me to try to make it creatively my own. He wasn’t interested in taking it over. He wanted me to realize whatever my vision was. I proceeded to make so many mistakes, every mistake. I worked with, and I’m sure you did too. I worked with John Levesque. Did you work with John?

John: The whole thing is a blur to me. Literally, I can picture myself serving as third person going through a situation that I wasn’t actually present for.

Eric: [chuckles] He was this infamously hard executive at the WB. To just give you one quick example of him. You’re just a kid and they don’t teach you politics. He calls me on day one, or he takes me to lunch on day one of the job, and he’s like, “Look, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to slip me outlines and scripts before you show them to the studio. I’m going to give you the notes. You’re going to revise them, and then you’re going to show it to the studio, who’s then going to show it to me, and I’m going to pretend to love it. That’s how this is going to fucking go. Do you understand me?” I was like, “Yes, sir?”

I was immediately immersed in espionage, and slipping scripts. Then, Laura Ziskin, who was the producer of it, found out, and she was angry at me, but I didn’t understand. It was just a disaster. By the way, Tarzan shouldn’t be a TV show. [chuckles] It was doomed from the start.

John: I want to time travel back to you and tell you that, because also I did the Tarzan movie for Warners.

Eric: Oh, my.

John: It’s a very difficult character to center a story around in a feature, but as a TV show, dear Lord, you have a central character who we want to see shirtless, but can’t be shirtless all the time, obviously. Someone who’s by definition, low verbal, which makes things really challenging. It’s just–

Eric: It’s a mess. What I got handed was, “We want Tarzan in New York. You have to make Tarzan in New York work. Okay?”

John: It’s a jungle out there.

Eric: Right. [chuckles] Exactly. I think that was literally the tagline.

John: I’m sure it was, yes.

Eric: My take was, make the show about Jane. She’s a cop and whatever, but I’m like, “There’s a character you can relate to.” It’s like, Beauty and the Beast. It’s like, this guy comes in then he saves her–

John: Sleepy Hollow is a similar dynamic.

Eric: Then, we cast Travis Fimmel, who went on to be pretty big in Vikings. It was just nothing, but raw charisma. We cast him as Tarzan. He was a Calvin Klein model at the time, it was his first job. He’s just got that thing, and so all the dials went to the right whenever he showed up on screen, the testing dials. So all the executives were like, “He’s the show.” I’m like, “No, he’s a monkey. There’s nothing. He doesn’t know– Maybe he gets a job. How about one episode where he gets a job?”

I’m like, “He doesn’t know what currency is. There’s just nothing you can do, except that he loves this girl, and he wants to protect her.” Anyway, it was a disaster.

John: It was a mess. Let’s fast forward up to Supernatural, which was not a mess, which was a tremendous success. Tell us about the process of figuring out how to do Supernatural, not just what the premise was, but it feels like you approached that show with an idea of what that was going to be week-to-week in a very smart way.

It wasn’t just like, “Here’s the pilot, then we’ll see what happens.” You very much knew this is how the show wants to tell itself week-after-week. This is a central relationship. This is the kind of thing that happens in an episode. Was that clear from the very first pitch?

Eric: No. Here’s what was clear, which was one of the many lessons I walked out of Tarzan from, was, if you’re going to make a network show, and do 22 of them, spend most of your time thinking about the engine, and what’s going to give you story every week that you can always go back to that well if you need to. I happen to have been obsessed with Urban Legend. I still am.

I like to collect them, and study them and did in college. For me, the engine was, “Okay, characters are investigating urban legends that all turn out to be real.” That was the premise. I pitched a journalist. I pitched a bad rip-off of Kolchak, where he worked for a tabloid, and he was investigating. I had a whole pitch, and Warner Brothers, I pitched it to them, Susan Rovner. She said, “I really liked the urban legend idea, but the reporter thing’s really boring. What else have you got?”

John: Yes.

Eric: I had written in my notebook, literally the day before, only two lines. I wrote, “One way you could do this story would be Route 66.” I said, “Well, I have a whole other version of this idea.” I’m like, “It’s Route 66 and it’s these two guys, and they’re in a cool car, and they’re driving around the country.” Then, on the spot said, “They’re brothers.” I don’t– Still don’t know why. Where it came from.

She started leaning forward. She’s like, “Ooh, a sibling relationship, and a show about family. Oh, I’m really interested.” I’m like, “Great. I have all those notes at home. Give me a week to just go home and get them. Then, I’ll come back.” I went back and I furiously wrote what ultimately became the pilot pitch of Supernatural. The way I really– It’s funny. It’s like, thank God for those urban legends, because that’s how I learned structure.

They’re such tight little jokes, really. To take these two characters, and put them into those stories, provided a structure that I really learned a lot about. A beginning, a middle, a twist, and an end, because I always had that to go back to. I very much learned how to write on the fly.

John: Can we talk about Supernatural? Because it was a classic broadcast WB Network show with commercial breaks. I’m assuming that, as you’re writing the pilot, at every given episode, you’re really writing towards those act breaks. Those are the key moments of reversal that you’re hanging your story on those points, and then figuring out how to get to those points in between.

That probably starts in the blue sky of the episode. Then, those are the moments you’re listing on the whiteboard. Is that a five-act show? Is it a six-act show? I don’t know what it was at that point.

Eric: We started at four plus a teaser, and then they added another commercial break. Then, after season two or three, it was five plus a teaser. Six acts, yes. In a 45-page script.

John: Yes, so it’s really, you’re racing between those moments. Once you accept that, and you can build off that, and crucially, once you have a show that can actually fit that structure, it’s liberating. It’s got to go be just so nice.

Eric: I loved it, and I have to tell you, I miss it in this new streaming, freeform thing. The discipline of having something awesome happen every eight pages, is a really smart discipline. It’s very, I think, instructive because you just– To this day, I live in absolute terror of being boring, because I hate the idea of going more than 10 minutes in anything without someone saying, “Oh shit, that’s crazy,” because I had to do that, because I needed you to come back after the deodorant commercial.

Having too much structure was really great training ground, that then you can pull back a little bit. I’d say for The Boys now, we write three-act structure, but we are still really interested in structure. Structure saved my life. It’s how I learned to do this. Once you realized, “Oh, this is all just math.” It’s all plant, pay off, three or four character beats, set up, twist, action, wrap up.

Once you realize it’s all just beats that then you just blend together, and then hide under dialogue, and action, and emotion, and sex, and love, but the mechanics of it, the erector set, infrastructure of it is really predictable. That saved my life, because I was like, “Oh, okay.” To this day, I care more about structure than anything, because I think it’s like a life preserver for me.

The people who write independent shit, that they’re just like, “Oh, no, I hate structure. I just want– It’s a day in New York.” That terrifies me. I don’t know how to do that. I only know how to do, here are the four beats, and here’s how we’re going to get from A to B.

John: Structure classically being, when things happen. This is, as you’re moving through forward in time, these are the things we’re going to encounter. The structure of television also necessarily implies a structure of where things are going to happen. Supernatural is a road show, but they happen to be just driving around the same places all the time. It’s convenient that way.

With The Boys, it’s been interesting to notice season-by-season, figuring out like, “Oh, what are your standing sets? What are the places we’re going to come back to?” Because for financial reasons, but also for narrative reasons, we need to have home bases from which people can move out. There’s this last season, or maybe the season before, we have this office building with windows all around it, that it’s like, that’s a central set.

We know we’re going to come back to this place. It’s a home base for the production, but also for the viewer to say like, “Okay, I understand where we’re at. We’ve come back around, and these things have changed since the last time we were in this space.”

Eric: Yes. No, The Boys is actually the first show that I’ve ever done that isn’t some version of a roadshow. Standing sets were actually pretty new to me, and they’re very useful. Look, I have to say, I find them more useful logistically, budgetarily as a producer, than I find them necessarily narratively useful. Just today, we’re trying to bring down a budget of one of our episodes, and we’re like, “Well, let’s move these three scenes onto our home sets, and then we don’t have to drive out, or build them or whatever.” To me, that’s the value of home sets.

I don’t find myself watching something, and wishing that character went to that home set. I’d rather they didn’t. I like the variety life, that cinematic thing where everything is different and beautiful, and there’s a variety, is my own personal taste. You do need them, and they have saved my ass on numerous occasions.

John: You’ve mentioned that Boys, you think of it as being three acts, four acts. As you’re breaking an episode, what is the process? How many people do you have in the room? You probably started the season with a sketch of an idea of where things were headed. That came down into, these are the episodes. When you’re actually focusing on an episode, how many beats are you looking for? When do you have enough and not too much for an episode, and that someone can go off and start working on script?

Eric: We start– There’s about seven of us, seven plus me. Everybody gets an episode. We spend about a month at the top of the year talking about season-wide mythology, and where we want the characters to go, whatever. Then, when we start actually breaking the episode, we usually know, or at least are aiming for, here’s where we have to build to this character moment, or this plot turn, or this step in the mythology.

We have that guide to start with. Then, we spend, it takes about, for us, three, three and a half weeks to break an episode. We probably spend two of those weeks just talking through character psychology. What’s the character thinking? Where do we want them to grow in this episode? What’s the thing they want most in the world? What’s the thing they’re afraid of most in the world? How do we make the thing they’re most afraid of, stand in the way of the thing that they want?

How does that relate to their childhood, whether it’s on camera or not? We’re just talking, talking, talking trying to dig as deep as we can into the psychology. Eventually, it coalesces around, I’d say per character, like three or four beats. They start here, they grow here, this throws something in their path, and then they end up there.

John: As this is within an episode, each character will have three or four beats. That’s assuming all characters are in all episodes. There may be, obviously, places where people are off, but you’re also going to need to find ways, like people are just not in their own scenes, they’re in scenes with other people. You want to make sure that the scenes they’re in with other people are progressing both of their storylines.

Eric: Right. One thing I learned as the show went on, because we have 14 main characters, right? Though we spend our time thinking emotionally about those characters, I learned very quickly that you need to double and triple people up into the same story, because there’s just not enough– You can’t have 14 separate stories in a one-hour show, and already we have too many storylines.

The biggest challenge of The Boys is there’s too many stories. It’s like Game of Thrones in a way, where sometimes you want to just sit with a story longer than you can, but you have all of these other stories to service to keep the machine going.

John: With this new season, at the end of last season, it’s pretty common now to burn down everything at the end of a season, so that you can come back to the new season and start things over. You did a very big burn down of everything at the end of this last season, and including our expectations about what is supposed to be happening. In that first episode of the new season, which I’ve not seen yet, as we’re recording this, how much are you thinking about getting the audience back up to speed? Are you expecting them to just start in the middle, and figure out what’s happening behind it? Those blue sky discussions must be a really important part of thinking about your season.

Eric: Mileage varies and taste varies. I prefer throwing people into the middle of it, and then slowly revealing the information that got them there. We like to play, we’ve done it a couple seasons now, where we almost play a game of, how do we reintroduce the character in the craziest place, or the most unexpected place we can put them, and then explain how they ended up there. In season 3, like Hughie is in a suit, and he’s Butcher’s boss.

John: That’s right.

Eric: You’re just like, “What? Wait. I don’t understand.” Then you realize, “Oh, he’s working with Victoria Newman, and he’s the head of this– He’s one of the co-heads of this agency.” You tease it out, so that by the end of the episode, they understand everything, but that you don’t front load the exposition. If anything, you back load it. I think that’s more fun. That’s what we try to do for the– That’s how season 5 opens.

Look, it was really helpful that I had pre-negotiated with Sony and Amazon that they were going to allow me to end the show on my terms, and that the fifth season was going to be the final season, because that allows you to blow the doors off it, like you said, in the season 4 climax, because you know you’re not holding on any chips anymore. You can go all in. That freedom allowed me to do the size of the finale that we were able to do that I don’t think I could have done otherwise.

John: Also, you don’t have to hold back any beats for characters that you were like, at some point, we would want to talk about this aspect of Hughie, we want to do this thing. At some point, Jim and Pam from The Office, you want to see them get married, but when are you going to do that? It is very liberating to know the end of a thing.

Eric: Beyond just the simple ones of, you can kill people off, which is fun, but you can also have them have conflict that is irreparable, because you don’t have to worry about bringing them back next season. You don’t have to say, “Well, that’s character assassination, you guys. We still have to live with that character.” You don’t have to do any of that. It’s very freeing.

It’s also super intimidating, because you can count on one hand the amount of truly great series finales. The landscape is just littered with corpses of shows that did not stick the landing. That’s a really intimidating– This is the first time I’ve been able to end a show. This is my first stab at it. I’m appropriately terrified of, are we sticking the landing? What do we need to do? Is it happening? Is it emotionally satisfying? Is it unexpected? I lose a lot of sleep over trying to land this plane.

John: I’m not asking for any spoilers, but looking back to your decision process about the season, did that mean you really came into the room thinking about, “Hey, what are the questions we want the series to answer? What are the payoffs that, we as creators, and as an audience are hoping to find in that, and then working towards that?” Is it just, you really are reverse engineering a bit?

Eric: Yes, that’s exactly right. Again, structure is so important to me, and I’m a little OCD, and I just hate the idea of moving forward into a horizon that I don’t know, or understand. I want to know where I’m going. In the beginning of the season, we talked about– The way I phrased it was like, “Okay, let’s say all the action is over, and now it’s like the 10 pages of wrap up, set to like the slow part of Laila. What do we want to see? Who’s alive, who’s dead, the ones who are alive, what are they doing? Where do we want everyone to end up? We figured that out. We figured out that final montage is one of the very early things. Then, it was like, “Okay, so how do we get there?”

John: What are your favorite series endings? What shows do you feel like actually really stuck the landing?

Eric: Breaking Bad is an annoyingly good ending.

John: Absolute monster that Vince Gilligan, yes.

Eric: He’s so annoying, like he’s delivered two different shows that have never had a bad episode, and both stuck the landing, and it’s annoying how good he is. Those are the two that really come to mind, Saul and Breaking Bad.

John: Your description of the resolution, and the song playing over it makes me think of Six Feet Under and which just–

Eric: Yes, that’s a great one. Yes, really good. One of the best actually.

John: Absolutely. Where it’s just thematically like, “Oh, we’re all going to die. This has been a show about death. We’re all going to die. Let’s look at how these characters die.”

Eric: Yes. No, for sure. Six Feet Under is a great one. Again, there’s not many. [chuckles] I can’t think of that many.

John: Yes, and it shows that we absolutely loved, where you look at the last episodes like, “Yeah, okay.”

Eric: Yeah, okay. You’re sending people out into the parking lot with a bad taste in their mouth.

John: Yes, exactly.

Eric: It colors all the good work you did before it.

John: Yes, people’s frustration with both the ending of Lost, and the ending of Game of Thrones. It is weird how it retroactively makes people like decide they didn’t like the series. It’s like, “No, I can show you evidence that you’ve loved this show.”

Eric: When you think of the unbelievable undertaking to make those shows, how hard those showrunners worked, and the pages and pages of just top tier quality, and because they didn’t stick the landing, everyone’s like, “Yes, I don’t know about Lost.” You’re like, “Oh my God, that show changed television.” Poor Damon Lindelof who has to write essays about defending the ending. You’re like, “Dude, you made one of the great shows.” Anyway, I’m really nervous.

John: Here’s hoping you won’t have to write essays defending the ending and The Boys.

Eric: Oh my God. Cut to my Hollywood Reporter op-ed piece of why The Boys made sense.

John: Yes. Let’s get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out. We have one here from Scott.

Drew Marquardt: Scott writes, while a bottle episode is always locked to a particular location, is there a term for an episode that exclusively follows a particular character? Recent examples include the Severance episode that only featured Cobel and Salt’s Neck, or The Bear that was just all a Tina backstory. I can’t think of a phrase I’ve ever heard used to describe this. Is there one you can think of, or suggest?

John: Eric, I was a little stumped for a term here too. It feels like a thing you actually just maybe describe, because we know what that is, but I haven’t heard a common industry term for that.

Eric: No, I haven’t either. Funny enough, I’ve heard it about two people, a two-hander.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Obviously, I’ve heard bottle episode. The closest term I can think of that we actively use is, it’s a change-up, because it’s more about what’s your structural change-up from what normal structure of the episode is. We’re doing not particularly that, but we’re doing a change-up this season, where we just blow out our old structure, and do a totally new one. Change-up, I guess. We did them a lot on Supernatural.

John: Yes, a change-up makes sense. Side quest is also a thing. Just that sense of like, you’re taking one character outside of the main story space, and letting them do a whole separate thing. There’s a series I’m pitching that, where one of the episodes definitely does do that, and actually tracks a bunch of things we’ve seen, but from a completely new perspective, and point of view. It’s almost a convention at this point, but I have not heard one common.

Eric: No.

John: Especially with that.

Eric: Whoever wrote that should pick the phrase.

John: Pick the phrase.

Eric: Make it happen. They can give birth to it.

John: All right, we got a question here from Ethan.

Drew: Ethan writes, I’m working on a live action script that pulls a lot from the visual language of comic books. I’m trying to do this in a nuanced way, not like Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse. I’ve cracked the formatting on some visual elements like multiple panels in one shot, but something’s stumping me. How would you write a quick change in color, or background to emphasize an impact? What about silhouette? I’m sure just saying that is the simplest way, but I’m looking to streamline it. I don’t like to break flow, but I want to sell the style.

John: All right, so the images that we’re looking at here, I’m not sure what this is from, but the protagonist here is on a purple background, and then this woman shows up and slaps him, and it’s a yellow background. Then, the slaps are always on a different color background. It’s visually striking. Eric Kripke, you are a person who has adapted a graphic novel series, comic books, into another form. What do you think about this?

Eric: I’m going to say something like annoying and ice watery, which is, they’re different mediums. Comics, because I wrote a comic for Vertigo, and so I really got inside it. Comics, it’s a medium of space, and TV and film is a medium of time. They do not connect one-to-one. I actually think you’re risking something in your story to try to make it to keep the fidelity to the comic too high, because they just don’t have the same rhythms.

I would suggest, don’t focus on any of it. Leave it to the director, and just worry about making the characters nuanced, and complicated, and great, and a tight story that keeps turning.

John: Yes, thinking about The Boys, you’re clearly in a heightened universe. You’re looking at the pilot script for that. We can see that we’re in a heightened universe that feels comic-adjacent, but you’re not trying to emulate the specific styles of what it would look like on the page. There’s none of that stuff. Unlike, Scott Pilgrim, or Spider-Verse where you feel the intrusion of those elements onto the form, we’re not seeing that in your show. We know it’s in a comic space without having the conventions of comics.

Eric: Right. I think, look, I think Scott Pilgrim is one of the very few exceptions with a lot of fidelity to the original material, and it worked. I’d say much more often, they don’t. Damon’s Watchmen was so much more interesting than the movie, because he went his own direction with it. Yes, I would say, it’s about finding what’s unique about your story. The Boys, for instance, what defined a lot of the visual language that Dan Trachtenberg directed the pilot, and said a lot of that language is our gimmick, or our original little bauble was, what if superheroes existed in the real world?

You take this absurd concept, which is these magic flying people, but then how does that really work in the world we’re living in? In that tension, that’s where the show lives. Once we knew that, we knew how to make, someone-ism comes down to earth, and they seem like a God, but then they have to take a shit. It really finding the thing that is your, for lack of a better term, whatever your concept is, letting your visuals flow from that is good, because that’s a– We keep saying, “Well, what can we do that no other show can do?” That always brings us back to presenting something that stems from our concept.

John: Also, this brings us right, all the way back to the challenge you had going from the short film of Battle of the Sexes to a feature film. It’s like the world building didn’t make sense. The world fundamentally didn’t fit together right with those things you were trying to put together. In The Boys, it’s a heightened place, but within the rules of The Boys, things do actually make sense. There’s a consistency, there’s an internal consistency behind the different elements.

Eric: Right. Of course, yes, exactly. I take a lot of pride in maintaining that consistency. I drive my production designer nuts with– The posters in the background, I make him do 12 versions of, because I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t quite fit.” That character wouldn’t have been in that movie at that time. I got really obsessive with it, because it’s just fun. The point is, the rules don’t have to actually be logical, but they do have to be consistent. I think once people can do that, you can feel the internal logic of a piece.

John: A thing that I’ve always wondered about with The Boys, is that why Hughie, or some of the other person doesn’t point out like, “We must be living in a simulation.” There’s no way that these physics could possibly make sense. We have scientists, but then scientists could not possibly explain the things that are actually happening here. This must be a simulation. Is that an idea that ever came up in your thinking, and your development? That Hughie or some other character’s like, “No, this is impossible.”

Eric: No, never did. We always said, the show only has one slippery banana, which is compound V. You buy it, because the fact that it was born out of concentration camp testing. It’s like just this side of believable that you could make something like that, if you had thousands of people you could torture Mengele style. We always say, that’s the only magical thing. People just believe that this chemical can do this thing.

John: Because it’s a central premise. Without that central premise, the whole show doesn’t exist. People are willing to buy it, because you’re asking them to buy one thing versus a bunch of little small things.

Eric: Right, exactly. every time someone pitches me some James Bondian set piece, or some super high-tech, “Oh, he’s flying in on a flying green goblin thing.” I’m like, “Who invented that? Where did that magic come from?” We only get one magical thing, and it’s this vial of blue shit. That’s it.

John: Yes, so if aliens showed up in The Boys, it wouldn’t make sense.

Eric: Wouldn’t make any sense because we get one magic thing.

John: I loved the show, True Blood. One of the frustrations I have with the show is, I did feel like they kept adding layers onto it that didn’t all feel consistent with the premise that we’d had established in the early seasons.

Eric: Yes, but a beautiful metaphor, though, that show, yes.

John: Oh, so, so good. We’ll talk more about blood in the bonus segment. First, let’s go to our one cool thing. My one cool thing for people to check out this week is a video, so this was during the Olympics– Well, the Olympics that were in Paris, during those opening ceremonies along the Seine, which went on really too long for my taste, but there was a moment where there’s the Minions do this little segment, where the Minions are in the Seine, and they’re in a submarine.

I love the Minions, and I was hoping that I could find just that segment, and it was actually as good as I remember, and I’m happy to report, it is just as delightful as I remember. It’s two minutes of the Minions having hijinks in a submarine. I think it’s absolutely delightful. It’s on YouTube, on the official Olympics little channel there. I’m going to put a link in the show notes too. Two minutes of the Minions doing the Olympics. I recommend that.

Eric: One of my good friends and that we went to film school together co-directed the last Minions movie.

John: Oh, fantastic, who’s this?

Eric: Brad Ableson.

John: All right.

Eric: Yes, Minions.

John: The Minions are a fantastic creation, and they are so smartly done. They’re just these little creatures of pure instinct, and I just love them so much.

Eric: Yes. No, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

John: Eric, what do you have to share with us?

Eric: Two things pop in my head. Can I say both of them?

John: Please. Absolutely.

Eric: One, and they might not be that obscure, so I don’t know, but the last movie I saw that really blew me away was Strange Darling.

John: I’ve recommended Strange Darling. I think it is so fantastic. I’m telling everyone to see it, and was so frustrated that more people are not seeing it, or that it’s not getting the award attention it should get.

Eric: It’s so good.

John: So good.

Eric: Brilliantly directed, but that script is so tight, and it’s such a perfect example of how to reveal information, and when to. I was blown away by it, and I would just recommend the less about that movie, the better.

John: Exactly.

Eric: If you’re listening to this, go on Amazon or whatever and watch Strange Darling.

John: There is blood, and so we’ll say that, if you cannot watch any blood, don’t watch the movie, but it’s just so smart.

Eric: It’s so, so smart. Then, the second one, is it okay if I say a podcast? Because it’s a podcast I’ve been listening to.

John: A hundred percent.

Eric: It’s fairly mainstream, but like The Lonely Island Seth Meyers podcast, where every week they talk about a short film that Lonely Island made during SNL. More than that, it’s a very nitty-gritty take of what it was like behind the scenes at SNL. If you’re a comedy nerd, which I am, they get so granular about how brutal it was, and the chaos that led to these sketches. Anyway, I find it both fascinating, and very funny.

John: Absolutely. It’s always great when you see like, oh, this thing that you love, they love it too, but their experience of it was so different, because they actually had to make it and it was exhausting, and they didn’t know if it was going to be good while they were doing it. They were surprised too.

Eric: I have a question for you actually, because I find that. My mom always used to say, “Cake never tastes as good when you bake it yourself.” I find that’s really true. Do you find, like so many other people like The Boys and Gen V more than me.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Because for me, it’s like a painful process, because all I’m thinking about is the mistakes, and what I wish I could have done better. Do you find that on your work?

John: I do some. People love the second Charlie’s Angels movie, and it was such a really painful experience for me, that I have a hard time experiencing the same joy they have for it. The flip side of that is, Big Fish was a largely good experience for me, and I’ve gotten to do the Big Fish musical again and again and again and again. It’s been just so much work in so many years of my life, but I can also get to watch it now, and actually just enjoy it as its own thing. I’ve crossed through that Rubicon of, it being painful too, appreciating that the pain is part of why I love it so much.

Eric: Yes. No, I get that. There’s certain episodes of Supernatural now that I can watch and enjoy, but I needed 10 to 15 years of separation to really enjoy it.

John: I don’t think either one of us is going to go back, and you will watch your Tarzan, or me watch my D.C. show. It’s like, there’s too much pain there. There’s not a lot of joy left in there.

Eric: Yes, I think that’s true.

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

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the shownotes with links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes, and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on blood.

Eric Kripke, it’s an absolute pleasure talking with you. Congratulations on The Boys. I’m so excited to see how it ends.

Eric: Oh, thank you, this was so fun.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Eric Kripke, from the pilot episode of The Boys, Hughie is standing there with his girlfriend, she gets run through by a speedster, and blood spatters everywhere. Hughie ends up wearing his girlfriend in blood, and that is the signal to us, like this is going to be an incredibly gory show. Did you know that from day one, from the moment of approaching this adaptation?

Eric: Yes, the gore is a really big part of the comic, and so we wanted to capture that. That was one of the things that I think made the comic unique from other superhero stuff. Again, if by putting superheroes in the real world with real fleshy people, the idea that they would just desecrate the human body over and over and over again, is a probably true fact that, just like the comic separated it from other superhero comics, it separated us from other superhero media.

John: Yes, so in Smallville, you’re not going to see blood, you’re definitely not going to see penises, you’re not going to see boobs.

Eric: Yes, and like what Seth Rogen always says, he’s one of our producers, is, “Shooting lasers from your eyes is not going to make someone shoot back into a door. They’re going to melt in the most horrific way possible.” We wanted to show that in a way that Smallville, or Superman never could.

John: Yes, let’s start with like the actual process of filming some of the goriness of the things, and how often your characters end up covered in blood, and how much they hate you for it? Talk to us about blood on set, and there’s probably a bunch of different ways you’re doing blood.

Eric: Yes, it depends on, there’s multiple departments that all have blood depending on where the blood goes. The three primary departments are makeup, wardrobe, and special effects. To hit them one at a time, wardrobe, they will pre-dress all of the blood all over the clothes. Makeup, if it’s on your face, and you’re playing with the character’s eyes, or whatever, you have to really carefully land all that stuff, so makeup carefully applies it.

In the hair, hair and makeup. Then, special effects is the coolest, most fun one because– For people who don’t necessarily know, there’s a difference between special effects and visual effects. Visual effects are the CG, and the computer, and all the stuff that happens afterwards. Special effects are the things that happen on the day, the explosions, the snow, the rain, the blood.

John: The squibs, yes.

Eric: Squibs, yes. What they’ll do is, use the example of when Hughie’s girlfriend Robin gets run through by A-Train. It’s so fun to do, because the special effects guys literally have like a blood cannon. It’s like a shotgun, and it’s loaded with blood. One thing we learned is, it can’t just be blood. It’s blood and all of these little gummy silicone bits. Someone is off camera pointing it directly in Jack Quaid’s face, and they’re going to pull a trigger, and all of this goo is going to launch at high velocity in his face, and he needs to not blink.

John: Yes.

Eric: God love that guy. He’s amazing at it. It’s like you’re literally– He’s there in front, cameras rolling, special effects guys take over the call. They’re like, “Everybody ready, three, two, one.” Then, someone shoots a shotgun at point blank range into Jack’s face with blood. That’s how we would do that. They also– If a character explodes, which we’ve done a lot of, a lot of times, it’s just CG, and it goes to visual effects, because it’s quicker on the day. Other times, they’ll create like a huge blood bag just loaded with blood, and bits, and organs. Then, they’ll put an explosive in the middle of it, and detonate it. Then, visual effects will replace the person who’s standing there with the explosion.

John: That’s how you get the blood on the environment, and on the other characters who are standing around, which makes sense.

Eric: Yes. The fun fact about blood is, it’s a corn syrup based, which means it’s sugary. Which means it’s insanely sticky and horrible. It attracts bees. My actors are always pissed at me, because it’s awful.

John: Obviously, we’ve been doing corn syrup since the beginning. There’s some reason why it works really well, but it does seem surprising to me that a show like you that uses so much of it, there’s been no innovation. There’s no alternative substance that–

Eric: We’ve never done– No, we stuck to what works. In season 2, we put the guys inside of a whale.

John: I remember that, yes.

Eric: The whale is doused with barrels of corn syrup. There were bees everywhere. They were living inside it. It takes the guys days to shower all of this goo off, but it just– It looks good. It flings in the right way. It feels like what it’s supposed to. Now, you raised an interesting question. It was like, “Does it feel real? Does it feel like the way the audience has been programmed over the last 50 years to think that that’s what blood looks like?” It’s probably that.

One thing they do, because all of it takes time. A lot of times, when you’re seeing the blood puddles on the floor, those are actually plastic decals they’ll lay down on the floor, and they can just peel right off, because you’re looking for anything you can do to save time on the day.

John: Backing up to make sure I’m understanding properly. Blood I see on a character’s face, hair, that’s one department. Anything that’s on their wardrobe, that’s pre-dressed there. You’re not taking a clean shirt and putting stuff on it. It’s a specially made shirt that has something on it. You might have to adjust that over the course of progression of a day, because it’s not going to look the same right when it first happens, and five scenes later.

Eric: Unless you want the moment of the blood hitting it for the first time, at which point someone wears a clean outfit, and someone from special effects has that blood cannon, and are waiting to just douse the character.

John: Has working around so much blood, changed your relationship about physical trauma, and your blood itself? Has there been an impact for you?

Eric: It’s funny, in Supernatural, even though it had much more stringent broadcast standards, it had a pretty solid amount of blood. This show is way over the top. I am so squeamish with the real thing. My wife likes to watch this, like these pimple popper shows-

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: -and these surgery shows. I cannot watch. I cover my eyes. I squeal. I leave. I literally leave the room. I cannot watch the real stuff. But the pretend stuff, I could watch all day. Peter Jackson, early Peter Jackson movies, I find that stuff so fun, because it’s basically like just a different version of Muppets. It’s just puppets. It’s puppets, and ingenuity, and magic. It’s so fun. The real stuff is horrible.

John: Yes. It is interesting how different, the context matters for these things. On your show, which is over the top and cartoony, we come to accept that. Then, if you’re watching a medical show, where they need to cut into somebody like, “Oh my God, that’s so horrifying.” It just feels so different. Where you’re priming the audience for one set of expectations.

Eric: Yes, it’s actually hard, because in our first season, and at least a good chunk of our second season, we still retained the ability to shock, where you could have something happen that would make the audience go, “Oh, shit.” It’s been very hard, because what you don’t want to do is try to keep topping it, and you become this big overinflated piece of bullshit. You want to be really driven about it. It’s hard on our show when you are so extreme to still surprise people.

John: Yes. Well, once you’ve had someone like a miniature person inside when someone’s urethra, it’s sort of– You can’t.

Eric: Yes, it’s hard.

John: You start to stop trying to top yourself there.

Eric: Yes, it’s true.

John: Eric, an absolute pleasure talking with you about blood.

Eric: Hey, thanks, John. That was fun.

Links:

• Eric Kripke on IMDb and Instagram
• The Boys
• Battle of the Sexes short film
• Minions on the Seine!
• Strange Darling
• The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.