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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.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. 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 you get each week as a premium subscriber.

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.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 669 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, the revelation that many of the biggest AI models have been trained on film and TV dialogue has writers up in arms. How should we think about this moment-and-coming AI fights? We’ll discuss the options. Plus, we’ll have listener questions and feedback on contracts and bailing on a project.

In our bonus segment from premium members, Craig, you frequently say that we are living in a simulation.

Craig: Yes.

John: Does that mean that you are a theist who believes in a creator? We’ll discuss the philosophical implications of this dynamic.

Craig: Fair question.

John: All right, fair. First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out. Let’s go back to episode 666 a few weeks ago where we talked about satanic movies.

Drew Marquardt: Steve writes, “I have a slightly more detailed answer to Emily’s question about the difference between thriller and horror. Thrillers scare us with the fear of death, usually in a gruesome manner like being cut with a knife or slashed by the claws of a beast. I would say that slasher is just a subgenre of thriller that is maximally bloody and usually involves a maniac with a blade, hence the name.

Horror films often involve the fear of death, but more importantly, the fear of losing your humanity or soul. Being turned into an undead vampire, werewolf, zombie, et cetera, is its own type of death.

As John pointed out, the first alien movie was horror in space because the thought of being turned into a host for an alien offspring and being alive while it’s growing inside you is a true horror, and then the darn thing is born and it’s game over, man. Just losing your humanity like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now is enough for him to utter the famous line, ‘The horror, the horror.'”

Craig: I appreciate the thoroughness of this theory, and I like the way it’s circled back around to Heart of Darkness, but yeah I don’t know if I agree.

John: I think any time you’re trying to establish a clear taxonomy between genres, between categories of things, you’re going to run into some messy things. What I like about what Steve did here is he talked about there are a lot of movies that are clearly thrillers that are not horror films, and they involve peril in a way, and sometimes physical peril, but sometimes it’s getting your adrenaline up in those ways, versus horror films, which there’s sort of a seeping dread quality to horror that is different than what you find in a thriller necessarily.

Craig: Yes, I think it was just a little too narrow on thriller because thrillers adrenalize you in so many different ways. They don’t always involve the fear of being slashed or dying.

John: There’s a peril, something’s in threat, but it’s maybe not your own life.

Craig: Right. Did I mention that movie, Flightplan, last time?

John: Oh, yes, we did.

Craig: I don’t know why I keep coming back to Flightplan of all. Because the thing is, it’s a great idea for a movie. It wasn’t my favorite execution, to be fair, but I love the concept of it, and that’s a great thriller. Someone’s gaslighting you into believing that you didn’t have a kid, but your kid is lost. There’s no fear of death there. You’re not afraid of your own life. You’re more just– it’s a paranoia thriller.

Drew: It’s a remake of a Hitchcock movie.

Craig: Is it?

Drew: The Lady Vanishes.

Craig: You’re kidding. I never put that together.

John: Sure.

Craig: Oh, you know what, everything comes back to Hitchcock.

John: It does all come back to Hitchcock.

Craig: He’s very good at thrilling you.

John: Let’s talk about some generational narcissism. LaWant wrote in with us.

Craig: Wait, I need to know if that’s– sorry, is that narcissism? Oh, I remember.

John: Yes, I think you made up that term last time.

Craig: Okay, because when I heard it, when you just said it, I thought, well, somebody’s narcissism is so profound. It’s like a generational narcissism. Once every 20 years, someone is so narcissistic. Okay, let’s talk about generational.

John: Once every 20 years, there’s a generation born that is narcissistic.

Craig: Now we can talk about the generational narcissism.

Drew: Yes, this one had to do with everyone thinking their generation was the last or the end of the world.

Craig: Yes, of course.

Drew: The last episode, Craig was looking for a word or phrase to describe how every generation assumes they’re the last one. He came up with generational narcissism. Here’s my suggestion for another one. Temporal solipsism. We can see the past, but we can’t see the future, so part of us assumes it doesn’t exist.

Craig: There’s a running theme here. People are just complicating stuff that we’ve said.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We’re actually pretty good at this. We did a very good definition last time, I think, of thriller and horror. I think generational narcissism is a little more accessible than temporal solipsism. Solipsism means nobody else exists.

John: Yes, that’s the problem. I think the challenge with solipsism is like me as an individual is the only thing that has meaning or could ever be known. Really we’re talking about a cultural sense that we are all together at the end times. That we are the last generation.

Craig: Thinking that you’re somehow special or important is not solipsistic. It’s narcissistic. I stand by my words.

John: All right.

Craig: That said, we encourage feedback.

John: Yeah the subtle distinction between solipsism and narcissism is something we’ll get into in Episode 1053 of Scriptnotes.

Craig: You say that, and then what’s going to happen is we’re going to get there.

John: Absolutely. Someone’s taking a note right now. “You said you would do this in 1053.”

Craig: “You guys.”

John: “You guys.”

Craig: “You guys.”

John: Unlike Craig, I do recognize that people do listen to the show.

Craig: I had no idea.

John: We got an email from a mutual friend who was talking about running into another big-name writer who referenced a very specific thing mentioned on one specific episode of Scriptnotes.

Craig: Can we just say who it is?

John: Yes, we can say who these guys are.

Craig: You could say who both of them are. It was Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and she ran into the living legend, Tony Gilroy. Now, I’m still suspicious. I don’t think Tony Gilroy he listens to– I don’t know.

John: He listens to at least the Moneyball Episode because he referenced a thing that was specifically mentioned in the Moneyball Episode.

Craig: Somebody probably said, “Hey, go listen to the Moneyball Episode.” I can’t imagine that Tony Gilroy was like, “Hold on, let me–”

John: How do they have time?

Craig: “I got to put Andor on pause for a second, listen to a debate over what makes a thriller and what makes a horror movie.”

John: Now, there’s an equally valid way of saying Tony Gilroy was eating at a restaurant and ran into the legendary Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Craig: Yes, although by her telling, it seemed more the other way.

John: That’s because it was her telling him. Therefore, she’s always going to place herself in the inferior role to someone she admires.

Craig: Opposite of generational narcissism. Generational core shame. I’ve never actually met Tony in person. I’ve been on some email chains and things with him, but I do know his brother, Dan. I’ve spent a little bit of time with his brother, Dan, who’s a lovely guy and also brilliant. Some pretty good storytelling genetics over there in the Gilroy clan.

John: I guess so. They didn’t grow tall, but they grew smart.

Craig: They’re not short, as far as I can tell. I don’t recall them being short.

John: No, but I would say they didn’t grow tall genetics. Let them be like, “Oh, they’re a family of basketball players.”

Craig: No. No, they are not. This is rarer, to be honest. Tony Gilroy, that guy’s good.

John: He’s good.

Craig: Oof.

John: A thing you learn all now on the Scriptnotes podcast is that Tony Gilroy, the Emmy Award-nominated and Oscar-winning probably.

Craig: Wildly celebrated. Do you think that he’s just finally figuring it out now, listening to us like, “I am good”?

John: “Wait, I am good. This inferiority complex I’ve been carrying around this entire time, this imposter syndrome that I’ve been living with, maybe because John and Craig are saying, ‘Tony Gilroy, you’re good.'” This is a podcast about how good Tony Gilroy is.

Craig: It is now.

John: It is now. Let’s do some more follow-up on how Hollywood got old. This was Episode 664. We were talking about how there used to be these young studio heads and you just don’t see young people running Hollywood anymore.

Drew: Yes, and so the one episode I was gone, Craig, you talked about the lack of ambition amongst young people in Hollywood today.

Craig: You timed it perfectly.

Drew: Scriptnotes the producer.

Craig: Yes, because you just weren’t ambitious enough to show up that day. [chuckles]

Drew: Clearly. Well, a few of our listeners had my back.

Craig: Okay, here we go.

Drew: Alyssa wrote in. She said, “I just turned 37 and while I would describe myself as incredibly ambitious my whole life, my hardcore f the rules career ambition took off only a couple of years ago. The reason this has come so late is simple. Student loans. Unlike the generation of hustlers before us, we also had monthly loan payments of $1,200. To cover this, I worked two jobs, one full-time and one part-time at night. These loan payments almost completely exhausted the ambition out of me. I did manage to get into a production company by swinging one day a week as an unpaid intern, but they cut my position in favor of those who wanted it more because they could afford to put in more days.

Everything changed when I married a man with a steady teaching job and parents who could afford to send him to college. As soon as I was able to share finances, I could drop down to one job and just like that, my career took off. Suddenly, I’m proud of the ways I’m figuring out how to get my work out there despite a slow market. I’m not waiting. I’m grabbing the industry by the throat in all the ways I couldn’t 10 years ago.

I’m not giving you excuses. I’m simply pointing out one reason why my generation may look stunted to those older than us. The drive is there. The ambition is there. But many of us are slaves to a debt we didn’t realize we’d be paying for the rest of our lives when we took it on in 17.”

Craig: I love when people say, “I’m not giving you excuses.” Here, however, is a reason why — that’s called an excuse. There’s nothing wrong with excuses. Why did that become a bad word?

John: I know. Why did excuses become such a pejorative? Excuse is an exclamation.

Craig: You’re excused. It’s like you’re pardoned of a crime. That’s what an excuse is. I’m sure this is what she was hoping the answer would say. Did you have student loans, John?

John: I did not have student loans, but I went to an inexpensive school.

Craig: I had student loans. I don’t know why. The premise of this seems to me that student loans just suddenly popped into existence or something. They’ve been around forever. I had student loans to pay off. They’ve always been there. The cost of education has gotten insane. Now, some schools, my alma mater, for instance, have eliminated all loans. Whatever you can’t afford, they just grant you. There is no more loans. In my case, I had to work and pay off loans. Sometimes when we talk about these things, there’s a temptation for somebody to go, “Whoa, I’m being judged.”

“If I’m not in charge of a studio, then you’re telling me that’s my fault because I’m not ambitious.” That’s not why. Here’s why. Almost no one can be in charge of a studio. I just want to be clear. This is not about you, this is about us in the aggregate.

John: I think we’re also talking about slightly different things. We’re talking about aspiring screenwriters versus aspiring like, “I’m going to run a studio.” One thing is that I think we were– I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but the same young people who were running studios back in the day, I think are not working in this industry. I think they’re working in tech and they’re working in other places.

Craig: That may be true.

John: I think that’s the missing piece that I’m finding here.

Craig: A lot of variables, but I think part of the problem is a self-perpetuating cycle. When you look and see who’s running a studio, that’s who you presume should be running a studio. In this case, it’s a bunch of people who are our contemporaries. Donna Langley, for instance. People who are 23 are going to look at Donna Langley and go, “You’re supposed to be Donna Langley’s age when you do this, you’re not supposed to be mine.” There did seem to be a little bit more flexibility and attraction to wunderkinds.

Another thing that probably made a huge difference that has nothing to do with ambition is how Hollywood is owned. Because when we entered the business, a lot of these studios were still their own companies. They hadn’t become the massive international multi-conglomerates. In that case, risk aversion starts to set in. If you’re just Columbia, why not? Wing it, go for it. If you are part of the Sony Corporation, maybe not.

John: It’s also reminding me of the conversations we had around Pay Up Hollywood and all the issues of those entry-level jobs being so woefully underpaid in Hollywood and the work that we did to try to make sure we were increasing those two survival wages is that the two jobs Alyssa was taking, she should have been able to get one job in the industry that was able to cover her rent and give her the experience that she wanted. Increasingly, for a period of time, and still today, it’s really challenging to do that. The people who can afford to take those jobs, that’s not the breadth of people we would love to see rise up in the industry and kick ass.

Craig: Yes, I completely agree. Life is complicated now. There are a lot of bills that you and I never had to pay. We never had an internet bill. We weirdly had phone bills. They were so much cheaper than cell phone bills.

John: We also had long distance though, which is a weird thing to pay for separately.

Craig: That’s why we never called anyone, or that we would make all our calls at work. “Press nine to get an outside line.” Oh yes, sneaking in– did you ever get in trouble for making long-distance calls at work? I did.

John: I did not. But I do remember a friend calling me who had figured out a scam long-distance calling card number. He was just calling me because he didn’t really necessarily want to talk to me. He just wanted the scammability.

Craig: Free minutes?

John: Yes, free minutes.

Craig: At three minutes, I got to go talk to somebody or I’m wasting my crime. I remember getting called into the office in my first workplace, just a small advertising company. They were like, “Your extension, you’ve called a number of these, and it’s added up to $40 or $50.” Which, as a percentage of my weekly salary, was significant. It was a real problem.

John: Now Drew, does any of this resonate with you? Because you grew up in a time post long distance, but you were living overseas, so there probably were still costs for calling home.

Drew: I’m trying to think. No, I had Skype by the time I was overseas.

Craig: Skype?

Drew: Skype was basically free.

Craig: What were you stealing from work then?

Drew: Pens.

Craig: Pens? Physical pens?

John: Yes, it’s just not worth as much.

Craig: Drew, you might’ve been stealing funds. Just fully embezzling.

Drew: Yes, just absolutely.

Craig: Funds? I was stealing funds.

John: We had a writer from Australia write in to say that the opposite phenomenon was happening there.

Drew: Anonymous Down Under says, “The situation here in Australia is an interesting flip of this. When the major international streamers all set up shop here over the last three to five years, they uniformly put young, relatively inexperienced people in charge of their Australian branches. This in turn uniformly pissed off all the established producers and creators because they felt, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not, that they were pitching to someone much more junior than them.

On a more existential level, we had all these Gen Xers suddenly terrified that they had been superseded before they’d had a chance to achieve anything. As it turned out, all the major greenlight decisions still got made out of the US anyway, and everyone got used to the idea that a young person might actually have some good ideas after all.”

Craig: Well, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Obviously, everybody’s cranky about everything. One of the things about a limited resource industry is that people will immediately start blaming each other for the reason why they’re not getting the resource. The reason they’re not getting the resource is because there aren’t anywhere near enough. In this case, we’re talking about writing jobs or getting a show on a streamer. It’s a one-in-a-million shot anyway. Yes, you could blame the young person. You could feel it’s an indignity. I think if you’re in Generation X and you’re saying, “This has happened before I even had a chance to do something,” you’re in your 50s. We got to go start to shuffle aside for the kids at some point.

John: The first time you’re working with someone and for somebody who’s younger than you, it’s a little bit jarring, but you get past it, you get through it.

Craig: I also think that if somebody’s smart, it doesn’t really matter. I think it’s cool. I also think sometimes when I’m working– I’ve been in situations where I’ve been writing something and there’s a couple of executives that- actually, all the executives that I work for at HBO I think are a bit younger than me. One of them is very young. I never think like, “This is nonsense.” No. I just think sometimes it’s a benefit because when I was 26 and the person I was working for was 50, they looked at me like, “You’re a kid.” I looked at them like, “You’re my dad.”

Now I think sometimes people that are younger are like, “Oh, here’s the calming older presence here who’s been around a lot.” It’s a little harder for them to say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I don’t mind it. Do you have any weirdness at all?

John: No, I think sometimes I need to watch what I’m saying that in no way sounds patronizing or it sounds like, “Young whippersnapper, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” That I know what I’m doing here. Also I feel like they’re coming to me with the expectation that I do know what I’m doing in these circumstances.

Craig: I do think if you trotted out “Young whippersnapper,” they wouldn’t even know what that means.

John: Yes, absolutely. Completely.

Craig: “Sorry, the what now?”

John: Absolutely. Monty Burns is sort of a–

Craig: The jumping on TikTok, “What is whippersnapper?”

John: Hope back in my stagecoach.

Craig: Even the fact that I said jumping on TikTok. God.

John: Cringe.

Craig: If my kids could hear me now, they’d barf.

John: There’s really nothing more cringe than cringe though.

Craig: Cringe is the cringiest. We’re recording this the day after Thanksgiving.

John: Yes, so this will come out two weeks after.

Craig: Is Amy home? Did you have Amy here?

John: No, it’s so bizarre to have my kids going to visit her friends in the UK because like, “Oh, it’s just a long weekend, so I’m going to go visit her friends in the UK.”

Craig: My youngest daughter, Jessica, is here in town and we combine Thanksgiving with another family and they have three daughters. One is in the UK, but the two that came are both high school age, senior and freshman, I think. I’ve never felt older in my life. I’ve actually gone so far around that I’m kind of cute. It’s funny how out of touch I am. They like it.

John: It’s always fun when she’ll like drop a name of some celebrity and it’s like, “Do you know this?” I could just quickly Google and provide context, but I will honestly answer like, “I have no idea who that person is.”

Craig: That’s cool. I think sometimes if you try, that’s where it gets cringe. Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane, dad, be dad. They kind of want that.

John: All right. All right, well, let’s get me fully back in my lane here because we have some AI to talk about. AI and screenwriters to talk about. This all blew up, now as you’re hearing this a couple of weeks ago. This is Alex Reisner writing for The Atlantic, has this article saying, “I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work, not just The Godfather and Alf, but more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes.

Craig: Sorry, did he say not just The Godfather and Alf?

John: Yes, he was trying to provide, I think, the broad edges of the framework, or maybe that was related to the prior paragraph which I omitted.

Craig: Oh God, I hope so, because what a weird way to just start.

John: What a lead.

Craig: “Not just The Godfather or Alf.” Okay, fair.

John: “These models have been trained on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes. Dialogue from all of it is included in the AI training data set that’s been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies.

Craig: Great. Great. Oh, fantastic.

John: You might think like, “Oh, they just scoured the internet and they found all the screenplays,” because you can find screenplays for everything, but instead, this is actually taken from opensubtitles.org.

Craig: I had a feeling.

John: What they do is, they extract subtitles from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, internet streams. Sometimes they’re just using OCR to actually see what’s on screen, and they’re uploading to this big database so you can find the subtitles for whatever episode or thing is. You can criticize that for existing.

Craig: Sure.

John: But it’s also useful for translations for people who want to see things in other languages. It’s out there in the world. Basically, these models sucked it up and used that for training data, and you can see why it’s useful for training data, because it’s just dialogue, it’s just people speaking to each other. You have the context for what it is. It doesn’t have all the other goop around it. It’s well-formed. Honestly, our podcast is two people talking to each other. It’s probably useful for training data for stuff.

Craig: Great. Can we get them working? Can we get that going for next week?

John: I want to talk about this legally, ethically, philosophically, and how we as writers probably do feel about it and what things can be done about it.

Craig: That second question’s the fun one, isn’t it?

John: Let’s talk about your emotional reaction to this and what this makes you feel like.

Craig: Well, I think I’ve probably felt all the immediate feelings in the past. What I feel like now is a sense of general resignation. I feel like the guy in Tiananmen Square, “No, tanks, stop.”

In the end, people who are only familiar with that photograph don’t realize that, no, I don’t think that man died, but the protesters lost and lost permanently. I don’t know how to stop any of this. I don’t think it can be stopped. We are probably baited into arguing about it and then AI will take transcripts of our arguments and learn from them.

John: I think a lot of writers and some writer friends of ours– Robert King was on some podcasts talking about how he was feeling about it. I think a lot of people are in those earlier stages and they’re feeling a lot of the feelings. I want to talk about the feelings. I think the feelings are valid, and then also talk about what can actually be done and how not to get baited into the wrong fights over it. Let’s start with, I think a lot of writers feel angry. When you hear why they’re angry, they’ll say, “It’s theft. This is theft.” If someone steals your car, that’s theft. If someone makes a bootleg copy of your movie and sells it, that’s copyright infringement, which could be a criminal act. There’s also civil penalties for that.

As we’ve talked about on the show, when someone steals your idea for a heist film set during the Iditarod, that’s not really theft in the same way. This could be closer to that third thing where it’s like they’re not taking your– as we described, unless you are actually taking the expression of those ideas rather than just the idea itself, unless you’re using that expression of ideas and showing that stuff, it’s going to be very hard to make a case against it.

Craig: Well, when people talk about theft, who do what we do, my general response is, you’re talking about somebody stealing something you don’t own because you gave it away because you took the money. What we do, we don’t own the copyright and the companies do. It’s their property.

John: It is.

Craig: This came up when Napster came around back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. Then following that, all the file-sharing services like LimeWire and so forth, and then BitTorrent. Everybody was panicked that everybody was going to steal everything. Writers were upset that their residuals were going to go away. I just remember thinking, “Well, if the companies that own this stuff don’t care, then it’s all over.” But generally, they do.

John: They do.

Craig: This is one of those times where I think we get to hide behind the monster we’re usually fighting, because if there is some compensation for this, it’s the studios. They’re going to have to figure it out. Problem is some of those studios, I think, don’t care. Apple, I don’t think they care. I don’t think they care. I don’t think Amazon cares. I think they’re probably into it. I think they’re probably sitting there going, “Well, what if we could replace all these people?” If that happens, if the studios are willful collaborators in this theft so that they can enable the tech industry to replace all the humans, then nothing matters anyway. It’s over.

John: A model of an industry coming up and pushing back against this, we were listening to those examples of songs that were generated from AI models that listen to a bunch of songs and could recreate it. Give me something that feels like a surfy kind of thing. It’s like, “Oh, that’s exactly a Beach Boys song.” It has a lyrics of a Beach Boys song. Those examples are so clear cut, much harder to find examples of that in our texts. Doesn’t mean we won’t happen, but it’s harder to do this. That’s going to be the interesting thing if they decide to go after it, which they might.

Craig: For the case of songs, artists do own the copyright to the publishing, to the lyrics and the music itself, not the recordings, although some artists do. It’s a more complicated situation. Individual stars can go after these people, I suppose, like Taylor Swift could probably do that. If people are going to go through Big Fish and they’re going to go through The Last of Us and they’re just going to scrape it and teach it to a thing so it could write Big Fish 2 or a Last of Us spinoff, if HBO or Sony, Warner Brothers or Sony, if they don’t care enough to stop that from happening or sue somebody, it’s happening.

John: Yes. Individually, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it. Let’s talk about a different thing which gets conflated with it, which is plagiarism. Vince Gilligan, who’s on the show, was a great episode when he came to speak with us. He described generative AI systems as basically, “An extraordinarily complex and energy-intensive form of plagiarism,” which is such a great quote for this. Plagiarism is interesting because it’s not a criminal thing. Plagiarism is a moral thing. It’s a set of rules we’ve agreed upon. Institutions will have ways to define plagiarism and enforce them.

Plagiarism is generally representing someone else’s ideas as your own without proper attribution. If you could put a quote in from somebody, that’s great. You take away those quotation marks and the citation, that’s plagiarism. It’s useful to think about these AI systems as if you were to use them to generate some text, it could be plagiarized and you’d have no way of knowing that it was plagiarized. You’d have no way of actually checking to see what that is from. It could string together the words that are actually someone else’s expression of that thought and idea and it’s really hard to know where it came from.

Craig: Which is also the case with regular plagiarism.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: Plagiarism is immoral for that very reason. AI doesn’t pretend to not be plagiarism. They advertise their plagiarism. That’s the whole point.

John: I would say the plagiarism though, again, it’s the taking someone else’s idea and saying that it’s your own.

Craig: Which they do. Because look, when the Beastie Boys put out Paul’s Boutique and they originally had Paul’s Boutique, they just didn’t credit all the 4 billion samples they made. Everybody was like, “Yo, there’s A, the legal question of whether or not you can use this. B, you’re kind of pretending you made this.”

John: To me, Paul’s Boutique though, there’s a legal question there because of sampling. Because you could say this is directly–

Craig: It was both. There was a sample there and that was a whole legal thing, and they did have to end up crediting all these people. There was also just an ethical, plagiaristic question. Do the Beastie Boys, are they representing that they came up with this groove? Are they out there saying– Look, now, Paul’s Boutique’s awesome. They didn’t want to plagiarize and they did say, “Okay, sure, we’ll do all this.” They were young and they didn’t really care. I think that, yes, AI is essentially plagiaristic because the detailed training– when you say, “Okay, I’m going to feed you every Robert Frost poem. Now, give me a Robert Frost poem.”

John: It gives me the Robert Frost poem. The generation of that fake Robert Frost poem is the plagiarism.

Craig: Yes. Correct.

John: It’s the output that is plagiarism, not the input that’s plagiarism.

Craig: Correct. It’s the output.

John: That’s one of the decisions I want to make here is that training the model it may not be plagiarism. It’s the outputting anything from it.

Craig: It’s the output. No question. No question. Now, if AI had an ethical component to it, which would have to be imposed by law to identify everything that it did as AI and to say, “This is not a Robert Frost poem, or somebody that’s writing poetry that sure is awesome like Robert Frost, but rather this is an AI emulation of Robert Frost,” fine. I get that. I think that’s probably not plagiarism because it’s about acknowledgment.

John: Well, except that if I say it’s not a Robert Frost poem, but it would say like you’d have to cite the source of where it’s coming from or at least–

Craig: I don’t think so. I think that like specific citations is about academic rigor. The key with plagiarism is to say, “I’m acknowledging that I borrowed this and this rather,” than trying to pass it off as my own.

John: I get that.

Craig: If you acknowledge it, I think you’re out of plagiarism town and you’re also opening yourself up for people to properly evaluate and say, “You didn’t actually just do this by yourself. You read every single thing and then did this.” I think, honestly, if a human reads every Robert Frost poem and then writes a poem-

John: In the style of Robert Frost.

Craig: -as an homage, that’s not plagiarism. But the fact is there is not a human involved. Since it is only the text and nothing else, no life experiences or anything, it just gets much clearer to me that it is.

John: All right. Getting back to the feelings of all this, we have, “This is theft, this is plagiarism, or this is training something to be a replacement for my work.” That I described initially as the Nora Ephron problem. Imagine you fed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into one of these systems and say, “Now give me a new Nora Ephron script.” That feels really wrong. It will continue to feel really wrong for me because you are taking a writer’s work and generating just a fake version of Nora Ephron in a way that’s calculated and it feels gross and Nora Ephron is no longer alive to be competing, but like I am alive and you are alive.

If they say like, “Here are all these John August scripts, give me a John August script,” I’m suddenly competing against a version of John August who can work 24/7 and generate a million different scripts. That’s unfair competition. That’s what–

Craig: It’s not competition at all. You’ve lost. This is where I stand aside, I think from a lot of people when they’re like– because the silent phrase that is in front of, “They’re training, our own replacement” is “You don’t understand.” Oh no, I understand. What am I supposed to do about it? There’s nothing I can do about it. we can all be John Henry and like, “Look, I can pound these railroad ties,” or whatever he’s doing as fast as that steam engine. John Henry died at the end of that story. Steam engine goes on pounding the railroad spikes.

John: John Henry is the Tiananmen Square guy.

Craig: We are all John Henry here. There’s nothing we can do. People say these things like, “If only people understood that we were training our own replacements, they would rise up and…” What?

John: What would they do?

Craig: Yes. Like when you say it’s calculated and it feels gross. Yes. That’s what corporations do. That’s how we got Lunchables.

John: You just described capitalism.

Craig: That’s the whole thing. That’s why they’re successful. They don’t have the qualms that regular people have. If it’s going to happen, it’s because it’s what people want. In the end, this is all driven by a marketplace. If people go, “You know what, actually, I’m fine. Oh yes, give me AI Friends. It’s fine, I’ll watch it. It’s fun. It’s almost as good as the real thing. In fact, it’s better.” Then we’re done.

John: I want to separate two things out there. Giving me AI Friends, our work isn’t just being trained to create the fake versions of what we do. It’s actually being trained so the models can do all the other stuff. Like having Alexa be able to speak back to you in a more natural way does come from all the training that’s been done on dialogue. It’s not just about directly replacing the work that we’ve been doing. It’s part of a bigger–

Craig: Yes, also we may encounter something that AI does that was prompted as “Give me a romantic comedy written in the style of John August,” that you will watch and not know it was prompted by that.

John: Oh, totally.

Craig: It will seem original even to you. If these things are to pass, then it’s over. The whole reason copyright law exists in the first place is to protect artists so that there can be some innovation. The best argument that we can probably make against AI at some point is if you do this to the extent that this is no longer a job, you’re going to run out of stuff to train them on. They’re just going to turn into a loop of self-training and it will flatten out and go nowhere.

John: Maybe, and that’s a strong possibility, but it’s a question of when does running out of that data really slow the progress and is there a different way that they can progress beyond that? Because at a certain point it may not matter that much.

Craig: Then it really doesn’t matter.

John: Well, summarize for– I want to validate and sit with what it feels like to be a writer in this moment. You can feel anger and indignation because this is a violation. This is a theft. It feels like plagiarism. That sort of sense. If you’d asked me whether you could train on my stuff, I probably would have said no, but at least you didn’t even ask me.

Craig: It’s not yours.

John: It’s not mine. In some cases, some writers, it is their stuff.

Craig: That is a different deal. Yes, that’s a different deal.

John: I think writers feel threatened that this thing could replace them, and also powerless, which is what you’re describing there. It’s a sense that we have no agency in this fight.

Craig: We don’t.

John: We don’t. I want to propose a thought experiment. Let’s say that you’re one of these writers who’s feeling all these feelings, but you were able to peer inside the LLM and say like, “Oh, wow, actually, none of my work was used to train this.” If you actually realized like, “Oh, none of my stuff is there.” In the case of this most recent thing, anything written after 2018 isn’t in there. Does it really change how you feel?

Craig: No.

John: It doesn’t. That’s why I think “They’re training the model based on my stuff” isn’t necessarily as big a thing to be focused on.

Craig: It’s not an objection over an individual violation. It’s an objection over how our vocation is being viewed, treated, and used. If they can do it to you, that means they can do it to me, so there’s a little bit of a selfish concern in there. Mostly, it just feels wrong and unfair, and I suspect we’re all looking at each other the way that welders did in Detroit right before the robots wheeled in. What can you do though? This is one area where I think we have to all look at each other and realize that we are collectively complicit in creating the marketplace. We want to blame corporations.

I can say, yes, corporations don’t have qualms. They have no problem sitting there and injecting thousands of chemicals into something to create the Lunchable, which is– I’m obsessed with Lunchables because I love the name.

John: I’ve never had a Lunchable in my life. I know what they are, but I’ve never eaten one.

Craig: It’s terrifying. But here’s the thing, people like Lunchables. If they didn’t, then Lunchables would have failed. The corporations are venal and greedy and have no morals, but it’s only in pursuit of giving us what we seem to want. Now, the consumer base, a lot of times, is not aware of what they want because there are things they don’t know they want.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: There are things that haven’t existed yet that they were just unaware of, and then suddenly, boop, there they are, and then everybody goes crazy over them. This is an us problem. We like cheap things. We like cheap things, and we like things fast, and we like variety.

John: We’d rather have sugar than a difficult-to-digest thing. They are wired for that, and so I think sometimes this stuff that comes out of AI does feel like sugar. It’s like it solves this immediate hunger really quickly.

Craig: We play D&D every week. We typically will have Doritos. Cool Ranch Doritos…

John: Incredible. What an achievement.

Craig: That team of scientists should get a Nobel Prize and also probably be put to death for what they have done. That flavor powder is astonishing to this day, and it’s been decades now, but I still remember when that blue bag came out, and I was like, “Oh, what’s the new thing?”

John: Craig, you and I are old enough that we grew up at a time when ranch dressing became a thing.

Craig: Yes. Ranch dressing was the proprietary dressing of Hidden Valley Ranch, an actual ranch.

John: Yes, so amazing. Incredible.

Craig: I know.

John: All right, let’s talk legally and philosophically this moment that we’re at. Legally, the copyright questions are still TBD, so it’s unclear whether it’s fair use to ingest this material. I would separate the ingesting of material versus outputting stuff that was based on material. We don’t know whether the material generated by LLMs can be copyrighted. Right now, no-ish, but it really becomes a question of, well, how much of that was outputted from this model, if that’s tough. There are going to be situations like the music examples before, which are just so blatant that, well, of course, that’s a violation, but other stuff could be more subtle.

The question that legally, whether this is unfair competition, restraint of trade, that’s a live ball. The FTC and the new administration, I don’t see them tackling this.

Craig: Any administration, it doesn’t matter, they’re not going to move fast enough. Every week, this changes, and the gears of federal justice are glacial. The legal venue that may make a difference, if any venue will make a difference, is Europe.

John: Agreed.

Craig: Now, Europe, they’re pretty severe about data protection. They’re pretty severe about advertising online and representations, truth and so forth, and clarity, misinformation, and I could certainly see them getting pretty deep in on this and pretty quickly. If you are Google, you don’t want to just not be able to be in Europe. That’s a problem. That’s a problem for all these guys. So that becomes an issue, but here’s the thing, Europeans like stuff too.

John: Also, I think we have this sort of understandable big corporate Western bias, but the same technologies that made OpenAI, or made Cloud, or made Google, can be done in China, can be done in other markets, and they exist free. There’s other models out there. The genie’s out of the bottle. It’s going to be there.

Craig: The only thing that’s centered on us in the West is that we are making a lot of content for the globe. It’s one of the few things that America makes that is devoured internationally on a large scale. Obviously, there are huge entertainment markets overseas, like in India and China, but if you compare, for instance, how many movies or television shows come out of Europe as opposed to the United States, it’s probably not even close. Yes, it is a thing. I don’t honestly know where it’s going to go. All I know is that we’re going to yell and scream about it a lot while we are conveyed towards our destiny.

Just imagine all of us on a moving platform yelling about it and debating what we should do and where we should go, and the platform just keeps moving towards its final destination.

John: One of the other big challenges legally is you think about, oh, there should be a court fight. Who is the injured party? Is the injured party the original writer? Is it the copyright holder? Is it society as a whole?

Craig: No. The society as a whole has no standing.

John: What is the proper court to even be deciding this in? We obviously think about US laws.

Craig: It would be almost certainly federal because that’s where copyright law is. The companies that own the IP, that’s what intellectual property law is designed to do.

John: Again, if they tried to go after that this was used– the ingesting portion of the phase, I think they’re not going to win. They have to be able to show the output phase as being the problem.

Craig: Which they would, but the amount of time it takes to do all that– Again, while you’re doing all of it, it just keeps going. Then the threat of a settlement keeps growing and growing. Who are you suing? Are you suing Google?

John: Yes.

Craig: Well, if you’re suing Google, that’s fine. Let’s say you’re Disney and you’re suing Google. At what point does it become easier for Google to just buy Disney? Where do we think Apple’s priorities are? Their handful of shows or their massive tech business? You can see the writing on the wall here.

John: Let’s move aside from legally and think philosophically and morally. Is it legal to scrape the internet? Is it philosophically moral to scrape the internet? Because, really, Google did this to create Google. Google searched everything. It’s impossible to actually Google the answer to, “Was it a controversy when Google scraped the internet?” Because I’m sure there were people who were freaking out about that because they’re like, “Wait, you’re reading my stuff and processing it and serving it up.” It’s not the same thing, but it’s analogous to the same thing.

Craig: Well, they were crawling and collecting, but they were really just collecting links. “Here’s a link to a page.” Then they were seeing how many other people linked to that page. That was their big page link. That was their big–

John: Well, they had to know what was on the page and do a bunch of sorting on that page to figure out like, what is this page really talking about?

Craig: Right. I don’t know if that was considered controversial at the time. I think everybody was just thrilled that Search worked. Of course, people that were making content on the internet, businesses in particular, were so excited that there was a way for somebody to find it.

John: Yes, because it was useful.

Craig: Yes. When you put stuff on a webpage, then how did you get people to go there? By giving them this endless long link that started H-T-T-P.

John: Or getting Yahoo to put it in the big category. The big-

Craig: Right. The list.

John: -catalog of everything, yes. A list of everything.

Craig: Yes. The phone book, right? I don’t know if anybody complained then. Is reading everything on the internet or handing it over to something, no, it’s perfectly fine. To me, that’s no more illegal than reading a book.

John: I think philosophically, “reading” and “copying”, how we feel about them really depends on where we’re sitting because I think the AI technologists will say, it’s reading.

Craig: It’s reading.

John: It’s reading. It’s reading a thing. It was like, “Oh, you’re making an illegal copy.” Every webpage you’ve ever visited is a copy of that webpage. You’re not actually pulling the original webpage.

Craig: Correct. You don’t make anything until you make something. If you said to people, “Listen, I’m building a large language model and I’m going to have it read everything you ever wrote, but it’s never going to write anything itself. It’s just reading because it likes to. If you want to come over and talk to it, you can, but it’s not going to write anything,” who would have a problem with this?

John: Some people would have a problem, but most people would not have a problem with it. Interesting counterexample here is Google Book Search. Google scanned hundreds of thousands, millions of books, and then it would show you a little excerpt from that book. Authors argued like, “It is taking away the value of my book because people can find what they want on that little book search and not actually have to get the book itself.”

Craig: I’m sure the book publishers would disagree and say, “Oh, no, no. No one was finding your book. Nobody was buying your book.” Now, 80 people bought it because Google Book Search led them there. Again, copyright’s a different situation there for novelists. For us, we are at the whims and mercies of the companies for whom we work, and they are either, in various levels, identical to tech because they are those companies, in bed with them or floating out on their own. The ones who are floating out on their own, I think, are the ones that are terrified right now, and probably looking for a tech buddy to join up with.

John: Yes. I’m hoping we still have some listeners who are still outraged. Who feel like this is outrageous and something has to be done because I would then prompt three questions: What do you want to see done, who do you want to see do it, and would the strategy be effective?

So, what do you want done? Do you want to shut down any model that’s been trained on this data? Do you want to compensate the writers whose work was included? Do you want to ban the future use of training off this or similar materials? Those are things you could ask for. You’re shaking your head. I don’t think they’re achievable.

Craig: No, they’re not achievable, nor would they even be enough because technology is just going to get around that. It’s like water. It’s going to figure out how to get where it needs to go, even if it has to carve a canyon through rock. Oh, we didn’t train it on your stuff. We trained it on this stuff that was trained on your stuff by somebody else who’s out of business now. That was free leave. There are so many ways for these companies to engage in f-ery. That’s F-dash-ery. I think we’re just kidding ourselves.

John: Yes. Honestly, I feel the same way I feel about the pandemic, which is that I feel some people who are so outraged and angry, it’s like, well, they want a time machine, and there’s just not a time machine. I can’t take you back to a time before the pandemic. I’m sorry you might’ve voted for this person because you believe it’s somehow going to take you back to 2019, but it won’t, and we’re still here, yes.

Craig: Yes. Now more than ever, I think it’s important to engage in the Serenity Prayer when we can.

John: “Worry about the things I can control,” to paraphrase.

Craig: Yes.

John: What’s in our control?

Craig: In this instance? The only thing, as far as I can tell, that is in our control as writers is whether or not we assign copyright to another company of original material that we’ve created. That’s it. That’s the only thing in our control, and that has always been the only thing in our control. Even as a union, that stuff, that collective bargaining, it’s also not really in our control.

John: No. I get frustrated because Kim Masters on this last episode of The Business was saying like, “I got to believe that the WGA should do something.”

Craig: Oh.

John: Kim–

Craig: I love her. She’s smart and everything, but the WGA is not going to be able to do anything here.

John: First off here, everything that could have been done, we did, and we did first. Writers are human beings, material generated by LLMs is not literary material. Writers cannot be forced to use LLMs. We are negotiating a contract with our employers. As far as our employer relationship, I think we’ve done everything we can. We should defend what we’ve done and make sure we don’t lose those protections.

Craig: We can expand it as maybe some f-ery occurs, but the WGA isn’t Batman, right?

John: No.

Craig: All they can do is control that contract. If the companies arrive at a place where they can create literary material that is of the same quality or, God help us, better than the stuff that we make as humans, there is no more WGA. It doesn’t matter. What are we supposed to do? Just argue over a contract that employs nobody because they’ve got the robots doing it? I just think when somebody says the WGA has to do something, they’re almost setting up someone to blame.

John: That’s really what I do feel like because it’s like, listen, the strike was not about this, but it was partially about this. I testified before the Office of Copyright and for the FTC. Our president testified before Congress. Do you want us to enter a giant lawsuit against somebody? That’s going to waste a bunch of money.

Craig: It’s not going to work. While we’re doing all of that, what will be is what will be. We don’t like these things, but if the rest of the world does, we lose the vote, and the market votes with its money.

John: I want to make sure we’re focusing on what things we can control. As a writer, you have the choice of what technologies you’re going to use and what technologies you’re not going to use. You can be smart about those things. It’s also, I think, good to make a set of policies for yourself and stick to those policies. If you’re never going to touch one of these systems, God bless you, stick with that and make a plan for that.

We should continue to fight for the protections that we already have. We need to keep ourselves educated about these things and defend the idea that art should be created by human beings is a noble thing to keep fighting for. Set professional standards for ourselves and others. I just think this is a dumb hill to die on. It’s just going to be a distraction from actual meaningful fights about the future of our labor.

Craig: The thing about hills to die on is you got to go have a chance to not die. This hill, this is Death Hill, right? It’s not that we don’t think it’s important enough to fight for, but there are things where you can just tell this toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. In fact, we’re not even sure what’s about to come out of the tube. We have no idea. All we know is it keeps coming day by day. What’s going to happen is we’re going to take our stands and we’re going to be angry and we’re going to say our things. Then somebody that we really know and like is going to be like, “By the way, I just had this incredible interaction with AI and did this thing and it’s great. It actually is super, and culturally, just watch.”

What are you going to do? You’re going to just yell at cars all day long because you really loved horses?

John: No.

Craig: It’s not going to work. When it comes to protecting artists, I’m afraid that in our line of work, not painting or songwriting, but in our line of work – television and film – we are subject to the vicissitudes of our employers and their varying interests in whether or not they want to defend their own intellectual property. That’s what we got.

John: Yes. I think if you were to take all of our work out of the models, everything that a WJ writer has ever written, pull it out of the models and permanently ban it from all the models, the models would be slightly worse. A slightly worse AI would still eat your job.

Craig: Yes. Maybe they would just get to where they were going to get a little bit later.

John: A month.

Craig: That’s the part that’s really upsetting. This has been something that has happened throughout history. Typesetters must have been really pissed when word processing came along and just automated [crosstalk].

John: Yes. Automated that whole thing.

Craig: This is what happens.

John: Elevator operators.

Craig: Ah. Which is why I love New York, because there’s still like, you know what? Every now and again you walk in an elevator, there’s a guy. Hopefully we’ll make it. I don’t really think there is an example in history of anything like this.

John: Yes, it’s different.

Craig: This is different, which is terrifying. What is also terrifying is how blithe everybody is as they run around and run toward it, and yet everybody seems to understand that it’s happening. Mostly people seem to be shouting at each other about it. Which, if I were a conspiracy theorist and thought that AI was trying to take over the world, I would suggest that AI had been doing a brilliant job of turning itself into the distraction that we all yelled about while it quietly ate our lunchables.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions. First, we have one from Jonatan about finishing work.

Drew: Yes. Jonatan says, “Do you think that every screenplay should be finished no matter what? If you’re working on a script and realize that it’s not good enough to become a movie, is it better to finish every script regardless so that you make a habit of actually finishing your stories and not normalizing quitting, or is it better to drop a story when you realize it’s not good enough?”

Craig: Normalizing quitting?

John: Normalizing quitting.

Craig: I love the kids. I think that if you are early on, this is your first or second script, yes, get to the end.

John: Get to the end, yes.

Craig: Finish it, know what that means, even if you see by the time you finish it why it was not meant to be finished. If you’ve got a couple behind you, if you ever finished any screenplay and you’re writing a script, and you’re like, “Oh no,” yes, normalizing quitting is just not working. Ball it up and– think of it as a really, really aggressive rewrite, where you’re rewriting it to something else entirely.

John: I think it’s important to finish a script. Craig and I have our feature bias. We were thinking about a 120-page script, which is a long thing. Listen, that could be months more of work. I don’t want you to kill yourself over something that saps all your will to live to finish this thing if you think it was a bad idea, it’s a fundamentally flawed premise.

But it’s also important to realize that writing is just hard. At a certain point in a script, everyone goes through that crisis of faith in a project. It’s like, “I don’t know how to do this thing. It’s the worst idea. I should never have pursued it.”

Craig: Yes. That’s why I think if you have one finished, then at least what it means.

John: You know what it feels like. You know what place. On the second script, on the third script, you’re like, “Oh yes, I recognize this feeling. It’s not the end of the world.”

Craig: I think default to finishing, but it’s not quitting. It’s making an executive decision about your artwork.

John: Yes. Let’s answer one more question. This is from Brett, who’s had his first contract.

Drew: Brett writes, “I’ve been ‘hired’ to write my first assignment. First, thanks so much. All along the way, as producers argue and the director gives notes, your voices have been echoing in my brain reminding me that my job is to make everyone feel heard and respected, while ultimately protecting the movie. Quick preface, I work in music, and I know this director from music video shoots where we’ve crossed paths in the past. Here’s the question. This is a non-union gig. The budget is $10 million. There is IP from a well-known song and participation from a well-known musician. Because it’s non-union, the producers have basically put the impetus on me to define my financial terms.

I’m not cash-strapped, so I’ve been creating literary material without any agreement, but it’s time for me to start the screenplay, and they have asked me again about pay. I would like to enjoy in the back-end success via residuals, but I assume that’s impossible in a non-union production. Could I or should I ask for a tiny percentage of the sale? Otherwise, would you recommend asking for some amount due upon delivery of the first draft? Maybe a weekly rate for the rewrites and polishes?”

John: A $10 million movie is not tiny, and it feels like this could be a WJ movie if they chose to make a WJ movie. It’s like it’s really easy to spin up an LLC, but they’re not going to do it, so not a lot worth having. A $10 million movie, you should be getting terms that are like what you’d be getting for the WJ film. What I would say is go on the WJ website, pull up the most recent contract, and figure out what are the prices for a draft, for a set and revisions, and work off of that as your template. That should be the floor you’re thinking about rather than starting from scratch.

In terms of back-end, they may not know what they’re doing either, so there might be some definition of something that is actually meaningful. Regardless, you’re going to want to have an entertainment attorney take a look at this to make sure you’re assigning something that’s just not dumb.

Craig: I think probably an entertainment attorney here would also be helpful to provide context. Because if they are reputable and they work at a firm, this is not the first time that the circumstances are risen. They can say, here’s other movies that roughly cost $10 million that were non-union deals with non-signatories. This is generally what we try and do. We try and capture X percentage of the budget for the writer, which is very typical.

John: Back in the day when we were doing budgets, and Drew, correct me if this is wrong, because you’ve done this more recently, 1.5% is what it is.

Craig: 1.5%, okay.

John: Drew, is that familiar to you at all?

Drew: That sounds right, yes. We tend not to do back-end anymore. Everyone is pushing more towards Box Office Bonus.

Craig: And back-end would be a trap with a company like this because the worst possible news is, yes, we grant you all of your back-end requests that, as worded, will never equal money. So a buyout could be possible.

John: A production bonus would make a lot of sense.

Craig: Production bonus. Also, is this going to be a negative pickup for a distribution company? Part of that fee. Do we get a percentage of that sale, as defined by what? You needed a lawyer. You need a lawyer real bad. The WGA minimums would be where I would start, and a lawyer will help you with this. There’s no way around that. We’re not lawyers.

John: No, so we can only point you in directions of things you’ll talk to your lawyer about.

Craig: Yes. Like this.

John: Yes, like this. Money.

Craig: If you’re going to ask a question about contracts, nine times out of 10, we’re going to be like, “You’re going to need to check with a lawyer.”

John: Yes. I wouldn’t say ChatGPT would be your friend here.

Craig: No.

John: No. They’ve not had the on-the-ground experience with this kind of contracts.

Craig: You could hire an AI lawyer and you go to real jail.

John: Great. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is this video I watched a couple weeks ago. This is Jon Batiste hearing this Green Day song for the first time. Jon Batiste is an incredibly good composer, singer, songwriter. Just brilliant at the piano, has sort of Stevie Wonder energy, and just basically sort of can rips on anything. In this video, they have him with headphones on and he’s sitting at the piano. He’s hearing this Green Day song for the first time. He has no idea what the song is, and he’s not told it’s Green Day.

Craig: Oh, I’ve seen this. It’s great.

John: Yes, it’s great. He’s just hearing the vocals and drum track, and he’s just at the piano figuring out what the music is that goes with it, and it’s just– off the top of his head it’s brilliant. Just to see this–

Craig: Interesting.

John: Interesting. Co different but completely interesting. Craig and I both had the experience of being able to work with really talented composers who could just do anything. Suddenly, things that are–

Craig: It’s magic.

John: Yes, it is genuinely magic. He is just a magician. Seeing what he’s doing, whilst also just seeing the joy he’s feeling in the moment, and then actually hearing the full track versus what he did, it’s incredibly good. If you just want to see the value of actual human beings in creation of art, I can think of no better example than Jon Batiste listening to Green Day. We’ll put a link in the show notes to YouTube.

Craig: I also, my one cool thing derives from a video. I, like millions of people around the world, opted to make the viral Mac and cheese for Thanksgiving. This is Tini. I think it’s pronounced Tini? Tini, T-I-N-I?

John: Yes.

Craig: I should know this. Anyway, she had a video, it was on TikTok, where she makes Mac and cheese. For some reason – and even she is like, “I don’t understand why” – it became the sensation, and everybody felt a strong need to try and make this Mac and cheese.

John: What’s different about this approach?

Craig: Honestly, I just think it’s a solid approach. She recommended cavatappi pasta, which is much better than an elbow macaroni. Shredding your own cheese-

John: For sure.

Craig: -because pre-shredded cheese has starch on [crosstalk].

John: Now, she’s making a béchamel sauce and melting the cheese into it.

Craig: She’s making a roux-

John: That’s classic.

Craig: -which turns into a béchamel. It was nice also watching it because I cook a lot, so it was cool to think, “Oh, a lot of people are now learning what a roux is, which is cool.” Some interesting flavors in there. Smoked paprika and a little bit of Dijon. Anyway, I made it.

John: Was it good?

Craig: Outstanding.

John: Oh, it’s great to hear.

Craig: Like 11 out of 10 would make again. Really, really good.

John: Breadcrumbs on the top?

Craig: No.

John: Oh, okay.

Craig: No, no breadcrumbs. In fact, she was very, very adamant. Like, “No. Get your effing breadcrumbs away from my Mac and cheese.” No. At the very end, you just put it under the broiler for like two minutes just to crisp it up. That’s it. It’s intense. It’s a heavy dish. It’s not an everyday food.

John: What’s so fascinating about Mac and cheese is that there’s two separate categories of things. There’s the Mac and cheese you’re describing, and then there’s just Kraft. Kids who love Kraft, and you try to give them your Mac and cheese, they would throw a fit.

Craig: Kraft, as we have mentioned earlier, is a corporation that spent so much money coming up with that orange powder, which is awesome, by the way.

John: It’s also great, yes.

Craig: A Kraft Mac and Cheese is delicious. I resent it for being that delicious, but also, when you look at the effort, I will say, Tini’s Mac and cheese-

John: It’s a lot of work.

Craig: -it took a while. Just a little elbow grease getting all that cheese shredded there. Yes, I thought it was great. Tip of the hat to her.

John: Awesome.

Craig: She did a nice job.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matt 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 the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week now as a premium subscriber. That’s new. We thank all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Craig and I to do this show every week, along with Drew and Matthew. You can become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the difference between living in a simulation versus living with a creator, or if there even is a difference. Is there a conundrum? Is there a paradox there?

Craig: Let’s dive in.

John: We’re going to dive in. Only for our premium members. Thank you to those folks. Drew, thank you for a fun show. Craig, thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Drew: Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Drew, to start us off here. Read this email from Tim.

Drew: Yes. We got a follow-up from Tim, who writes, “In Episode 665, Craig’s one cool thing was the WIRED article about scientists reimagining the underpinnings of reality and discovering new depths of its elegant simplicity. He commented that simplicity makes sense since reality is a simulation. It made me curious. How would Craig make a distinction between the cosmic classifications of simulation versus creation? Both imply a closed system with intentional design and a first cause. Is it that simulation is usually associated with natural designers, while creation is often linked to the divine?

What, if any, distinction would Craig make between the type of designers who lay behind either model, and why does he prefer the simulation metanarrative?”

Craig: What a good question. I enjoy this. Okay. There are almost no differences. Really what it comes down to is that the idea of divine creation ascribes a sense of moral order to the universe and purpose. This is the most important thing, purpose, whereas the pure simulation way of thinking about things implies no moral order whatsoever, and very specifically, for me, implies no significant purpose.

If, say, we launched The Sims, and we had gotten to a place where The Sims was so good that all the little individual Sims were actually fully conscious, would we be able to explain the purpose to them? The purpose is to what, amuse me? I guess that’s a purpose, but it’s not a divine purpose. It’s not spiritually significant. I suspect that the simulation that we live in is not spiritually significant, and I don’t think that there is a moral order that is implied by somebody. Oh, absolutely, it could be a person. It could be one person. We could be the work of one-

John: One consciousness.

Craig: -one consciousness, one entity that has coded this and is running it, or we could be the product of 2,000 simulations deep. I don’t know, nor could we know. But, of interest, I did read an article – I’ll have to find the link to it – where people were arguing about the Big Bang, and what they’re struggling with is they can’t get around it. It happened. They don’t know why. And every time they try and beat it, they can’t.

John: They try to get around it scientifically or philosophically.

Craig: Scientifically. They’re trying to say, “Look, surely there’s something other than an unmotivated explosion.”

John: It feels like division by zero. It’s undefined, yes.

Craig: It just seems like. Really, what I think we’re struggling with is that somebody turned it on. The program was launched, that’s the Big Bang, and we can’t handle it.

John: Actually, I want to dig into what you’re thinking. Do you believe that the simulation began with a Big Bang or do you believe that it started at some other point and a narrative was installed, and basically, retroactively it sort of filled in the space behind there as an explanation force of?

Craig: Either one could be true. It’s either that the simulation was running along, and then someone went, restart it, but start it with this, and let’s– I suspect that it’s really more that the actual initiation of the simulation appears to us through our primitive physics as a large explosion in which everything, information, was contained. The Big Bang Theory says there was one little tiny, infinitely small dot that contained everything that we see. The gazillions of things. I don’t know how much mass we suspect the universe has. All of it was there in that tiny little dot, and then it exploded outwards. I think maybe it just turned on. Seems like it turned on.

John: Yes. Expansion versus creation.

Craig: I think it was the code began to run.

John: I should say before I forget to say that if this is an intriguing conversation for anybody or this resonates, my movie, The Nines, is actually about this.

Craig: Yes. Go see the movie.

John: Go see the movie. I want to dig in a little bit more here, because when I think about– I would consider myself an atheist, or at least I don’t believe that there’s an act of God who cares. I think, like you, I’m fine with the idea that there is a creator, the first cause, the first mover of things. I remember taking a philosophy or religion class in college, and we went all through ontology and teleology and all the proofs for the existence of God. What I was being so frustrated by is like, “Well, even if philosophically I’m willing to say like, okay, sure, it doesn’t get me to like the Christian Abrahamic God at all.” There’s no tie in there that makes any sense to me.

Again, the idea that someone flipped a switch, sure, but that doesn’t actually get me to Jesus died for my sins.

Craig: Correct. Nor would it ever. The history of philosophy is riddled with otherwise brilliant people bending themselves into absurd pretzels. Descartes in particular. What the hell? Come on. “I think, therefore I am.” What was underpinning “I think, therefore I am” was I think, therefore I am. If there is an I, that means that God must have made me.

John: Yes. The I is important.

Craig: It’s so topological.

John: I think, therefore I am. Yes to all that conversation. My question though is these philosophers who were tying themselves in knots to then say, “Oh, but this proves the divinity of this and the thing.” Was it because they actually believed it or because they needed to contort their statements in order to fit the culture in which they were living for their own safety? I was just reading through Seneca’s tragedies, and Seneca, the younger, I didn’t realize was actually like Nero’s tutor. He’s writing these brilliant examinations of power and government, but he writes about the ancient Greeks.

They weren’t that ancient at that time, but he was writing about the Greeks. That they had plausible divine ability. He’s not actually writing about what he’s seeing around him.

Craig: I think once we get into, let’s say, out of the Middle Ages, and even from some of the people in the Middle Ages, it is a question of how demonstrative and vigorous they are in their pursuit of this proof of God. Some philosophers just really– Kant really believes in God. Clearly, he’s not trying to get at anything.

John: The question is– and again, I could read the books, but I haven’t read the books. Do we say that Kant believes in God in his heart and therefore, that’s informing how he’s putting his thoughts together, or does he intellectually deeply believe in this Christian God that he’s writing about?

Craig: It’s intertwined. I think what happens is there are some things that you just need to believe. You need to believe them. Kant is so profoundly smart and boring. He’s one of the most boring writers ever, but incredibly smart. It’s clear that there is a presupposed notion, which is ironic, because that’s this whole category of knowledge that he invents. This idea that there are some things that are provably true, that existed before we proved them, nonsense. However, he needed that to be there because it also explained part of how his own mind worked.

I think that some people grow up in a way where they just– they have to deal with the fact that this must be true.
Proving God’s existence seems like utter folly to me. The whole point is you can’t. Isn’t that the point of faith? I’m like you, it doesn’t bother me. I’m so atheistic that I don’t even get bothered by religious people. I’m like, “Sure. For sure.”

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m fine, I’m over here.

John: This notion that there is a creator, and that creator is therefore watching us or is somehow involved, always felt like a giant leap to me. Because we’ve all seen systems that just keep running forever. Someone starts them and then they walk away and they keep doing it and they might spawn other things. Stuff is just happening in the background, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s, again, a plan, a moral directive for how these things are supposed to be working. That creator might have set the initial conditions that creates the fundamental laws of physics and how the universe functions. Maybe there are moral laws underneath stuff but lack of evidence that they are enforced.

Craig: Lack of evidence. We also don’t understand how time functions for– let’s call this person the mover or observer. They’re running a cycle of a thing for some reason, or a thing of a thing of a thing is running a cycle of a thing. Maybe even this is some AI trying to learn something, who knows? Our billions of years of existence and our personal tens of years of existence could be gone in a nanosecond.

John: We’re just a training model. We’re being used to train some other model.

Craig: We might be. What I find interesting is how as years have gone on from the beginning of history, which is recorded history, early on, generational narcissism, people were just starting to observe themselves. Therefore the idea of a God that was watching us all, evaluating, judging one by one, and then assigning to a fate made some sense. Yes, Osiris and Anubis are going to be here and weigh your heart against a feather and blah blah blah. Okay, but it’s been thousands of years. The world is ridiculously complicated.

The idea that there is a God watching all of this down to every individual person, to me paints the picture of an enormous dullard. Somebody who’s so dull they’re incapable of being bored. Because I can’t imagine anything more boring than watching every single person, every single second of every single day forever to sort them into bins, for what? That sounds like a dullard.

John: Yes. It’s actually worth their time to be evaluating, “How did this one do?”

Craig: The most powerful being conceivable is just down to sorting.

John: Unless it’s like reinforcement learning, basically. It’s like, “I’m going to set up all these different things and see which one of these models learns to walk the best,” or do something else. Maybe that’s what it is.

Craig: We’re back to simulation.

John: We’re back to simulation.

Craig: The idea of like this isn’t a simulation, this is somehow metaphysically real, and there is somebody watching. I’m watching. I’m listening to you. I hear everything, see everything. What a terrible way to spend your day if you could do anything.

John: What a great question from Tim.

Craig: Thank you, Tim.

John: Tim, thanks for your great question.

Craig: I called God a dullard.

Links:

• Flightplan (and The Lady Vanishes)
• There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI by Alex Reisner for The Atlantic
• Vince Gilligan Statement on AI to USCO
• Lunchables
• The Serenity Prayer
• Jon Batiste hears Green Day for the First Time
• Tini’s Mac and Cheese on TikTok
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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