The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Whoa, whoa, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 577 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re sitting down the writing/directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, to discuss their film Everything Everywhere All At Once and all the stuff that led up to it. Welcome, Daniels.
Craig: Daniels!
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you guys.
John: Oh my god, hello.
Daniel Kwan: As a longtime listener-
Daniel Scheinert: Congrats, 577.
Craig: Woo!
Daniel Kwan: Wow. I know, it’s crazy. I’ve listened to every episode. That’s not true, but I’ve listened to a decent chunk, so this is very exciting. Thank you for having us.
Craig: A decent chunk is a lot, so thank you.
John: We’ll happily take it. We want to talk to you about Everything-
Craig: Everywhere.
John: … and how you got started, how it all came together. If you could stick around for our Bonus Segment, we would love to talk to you about music videos and other things you guys shoot that are not movies, because somehow, we’ve made it through 576 episodes, and we’ve never talked about music videos and commercials and all the other stuff that writer-directors get to make, which is I’m sure a crucial part of your learning process.
Craig: (singing)
Daniel Kwan: That’s exciting.
Craig: God, I love that music video so much.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: That is a music video that occasionally, if I’m feeling down… If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Turn Down for What. If I’m feeling a bit down, sometimes I’ll just turn it on. It’s instant mood lift.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: I’m sure for the two of you it’s nothing but traumatic memories, but for me it’s instant mood lift.
Daniel Kwan: You have no idea. I’ve gone to so many weddings since that video has come out. Any time I’m at a wedding, someone tells the DJ, “You have to play Turn Down for What.”
Daniel Scheinert: “He loves it.”
Daniel Kwan: Truly, it’s now a traumatic experience hearing that song. Even you jokingly saying that is making me want to leave.
Craig: Good. That’s my job on the podcast is to try and shorten the length of each episode by driving people away.
Daniel Scheinert: I like this.
John: Let’s talk about it. Let’s get into how you guys got started, because I first met you guys up on the mountain at Sundance Labs. You guys were great. You had a crazy script. I don’t think I worked with you guys directly on it, but I hear all these stories about, “It’s a farting corpse movie.” I’m like, “These guys are geniuses somehow.” That’s when I first saw your shorts, but I don’t know how you guys got started. Can you give us the recap of the origin story for you as a team?
Daniel Scheinert: Totally. We met in college, didn’t get along. We were taking an animation class. I participated too much. He thought I was an asshole. He didn’t participate enough. I thought he was wasting his money at film school.
Daniel Kwan: Classic rom-com.
Craig: I love it so far.
Daniel Scheinert: Our Harry Met Sally didn’t take as long. It didn’t take a decade. It was a year before we had a summer job as camp counselors for the New York Film Academy, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but I do recommend as a job. It’s a great job.
Craig: Get paid by them but don’t pay them is what you’re saying.
Daniel Scheinert: Exactly. Most film schools are [crosstalk 00:03:08] as far as how much they cost.
Craig: I love you.
Daniel Scheinert: They’re pretty great as far as who you might meet. We both have camp counselor vibes. We like to make art that way. We bonded and got very jealous of the kids. After work, we started making some short films together that the internet liked.
Daniel Kwan: I think the through line is that our collaboration has just been a series of accidents. We just decided to do a short film together. It was actually just like a quick test. I wanted to teach him aftereffects. He wanted to teach me how to shoot live action stuff. We put it online.
Daniel Scheinert: He had a new camera. Then it was like, “Oh, let’s try out the new camera.”
Daniel Kwan: “Let’s test this out.” We did something stupid together. Scheinert put it on his Vimeo account, and we were put on the front page of Vimeo. We were like, “Whoa, what happened? I’ve been trying to get on the front page for the past eight months, and we just did this thing randomly.” It just kept happening.
Daniel Scheinert: He was so jealous, because it was my page.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: Did you suspect that maybe Vimeo just puts white people’s videos on right away? Was there like a little bit of a, “Hm, hold on a second.”
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, I don’t want to-
Craig: “I’ve been working pretty hard at this, and this guy literally-“
Daniel Scheinert: You were here first.
Daniel Kwan: Vimeo is racist. That’s a whole other conversation, not the Vimeo is racist thing, but just the way our race actually has played into our careers is fascinating.
Craig: We’ll dig into it. We’ll dig into that.
Daniel Kwan: Long conversation for later. I will say that we accidentally started working together. Through this very strange Pavlovian response, we got some rewards, and we’re like, “Let’s do it again.” We just kept doing it. Next thing we know, he asked me if I wanted to help him on a music video. We’re like, “Sure, let’s try that out.” We did that. A month later, someone from London says, “Hey, I saw your music video that you did for free. What if we gave you $12,000 to make another one?”
Craig: Hello.
Daniel Kwan: We’re like, “Sure.” We quit our jobs. I was working at DreamWorks Animation at the time as a low-level designer, and Scheinert was working at a VFX company as a runner. We quit our jobs, went to New York, did a music video. Then another month later, someone was like, “Hey, you want to do it again?” It just became this slow-motion thing where our identities became entrenched and we had to figure out our process. We like to say that the algorithm gave us an arranged marriage. The internet accidentally put us together.
The relevant part of the story is even the leap from music videos to screenwriting, feature-length screenwriting, was an accident. We were finding success in music videos. We got a manager, Josh Rudnick, for anyone who cares. He’s incredible. They started sending us scripts, and none of them were speaking to us. None of them felt like the kind of thing that we would actually feel passionate enough to spend years on.
Even though neither of us considered ourselves writers at the time, we took a step back and we’re like, “Hey, we’ve been writing all these music video treatments for a few years now, dozens. Every couple months, we just write a new idea.” It was like a boot camp. We were like, “What if we just tried doing that ourselves? None of these scripts are going to be the thing that makes us want to direct a feature. Let’s try to write our own way.” We naively jumped into screenwriting, thinking that it would just be like a long music video. Oh boy, we were so wrong, but lots of lessons learned. That was our path.
Daniel Scheinert: One of the lessons that’s fun, it was through writing music videos that we discovered our writing process. We didn’t even think we were screenwriting when we would do this. We would listen to the song. We were usually attracted to a story, not just visuals. We would structure our little short films based on the verse, chorus, verse, chorus of whatever song and designing moments that pop, to try to set them up and create. We were very much like visual screenwriters at first, because there’s no dialog in a music video. We would have to break it down beat by beat and time it out and find the rhythm of the scene. That still informs how we write.
Craig: You’re pulling something out that’s actually quite profound, that I don’t think we’ve actually talked about in our four billion episodes, which is that the very simple structure of a classic pop song, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, is something that provides a fundamental and essential shape to a story, even though we don’t realize it’s happening. We are all taught, and I don’t know why it works. I guess our brains are designed around verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, but it does-
Daniel Kwan: I have a theory that I’ll tell later.
Craig: Tell me.
Daniel Kwan: Continue.
Craig: Tell me now. I need to know.
Daniel Kwan: I had a roommate in college who was a musician, very heady, philosophical guy. He was telling me about this essay about the pop song and why it’s so important to the human experience. It’s because it’s meant to imitate sex, reaching towards climax. There’s the tease. There’s the lift. There’s the comedown, the teasing again. Now you bring it to the bridge. That’s when you’re getting really close. You hit that climax. It feels like this really beautiful, cathartic experience packed into five minutes, which I think is incredible and very narrative. Very narrative. It’s got three acts. You’re right. It’s a really perfect way to think about story. Even when we were just doing music videos, people would tell us that, “Your music videos sometimes squeeze more story into four minutes than some features do.” Some people might say that’s a bad thing. For us, it was an exciting challenge.
Craig: We’re going to get into that. When we start digging into, which I’m sure will happen soon, into Everything Everywhere All At Once, I definitely want to talk about the… You guys call it maximalism? What is the word that you use?
Daniel Kwan: Maximalism, yeah.
Craig: A whole lot. There’s so much. I don’t know. John, should I short circuit things by talking about it? Should I just ask my question?
John: I think there’s actually a very nice segue though between the videos you’re doing… If you looked at Turn Down For What, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Turn Down For What, a tremendous amount happens in there visually. You’re constantly adding new layers to things. You’re literally falling down through the floor, into a new layer, a new layer, a new layer of a story. I want to talk about your short film, Interesting Ball, the 2014 film, which was an ongoing series of vignettes that all tie together and feed into one big thing. What is the process for you guys developing those ideas? You talk about [inaudible 00:09:42] song and then having to figure out what is speaking to me. That’s fine if it’s one person. If it’s both of you, do you have to give veto power over what ideas are happening? What is the process like for figuring out, “Okay, this is how we want to do this thing. This is a story. We should follow on this.”
Daniel Kwan: Before I answer that, I just also want to include Foster the People, Houdini is another one that has a very dense story, and then our Simple Song by The Shins, also way too much story in five minutes, just in case people want to see what we’re talking about. It’s too much. It was great.
Craig: It’s a great song.
Daniel Kwan: The collaboration, like I said, it’s all very accidental. It’s all very organic. A lot of times, we just constantly pitch things back and forth. The things that stick are the things that we chase, which is why me as an individual director and Scheinert as an individual director, we would be making very different things on our own.
Our Venn diagram is so specific and strange that it has to excite us both in order for us to chase it. It’s not fun to drag someone along on a journey that they’re not fully committed to. That really hones and sharpens what the story can be or the potential for what it is. Oftentimes, it is the stuff that scares us the most, because on our own, I don’t think I would be quite as brave. Together, it’s like, “Are we going to bite off way too much? Are we going to chase after something that we probably shouldn’t be chasing after as storytellers? That sounds exciting.” I think that’s something that at least within our relationship, that’s the strongest part of the Venn diagram is that’s risk-taking.
Daniel Scheinert: I think I maybe get a kick out of tricking Dan into making his craziest ideas actually happen.
Daniel Kwan: There’s that too.
Daniel Scheinert: I’ll become the cheerleader for the weird ones. There’s rarely veto power. In fact, in some ways, there’s tons of it. We’re just looking for that thing that makes us both excited. Over the years, we’ve learned to not sweat it if an idea falls flat for the other person and just be like, “Huh, okay. I trust his taste. For some reason, that idea doesn’t sing to him.” Then sometimes it’ll come up again a few months later. There’s a movie idea that I’ve been pitching to Dan for years that just recently got consumed by this other idea that we’ve been working on. I’m like, “Oh, it’s actually happening now.” It took years of throwing this dumb idea against the wall for it to finally find its home.
Daniel Kwan: It’s a slow-motion passive veto. If it gets buried by time, then that’s the veto. I think this is an acting metaphor that an acting coach once told us. The reason why you don’t want to say no is because you want to allow the bush to grow in every direction it needs to grow before you start trimming. Otherwise, you won’t know what shape it can be. I think that’s a part of our process working with actors, but also a part of our writing process is just letting things grow. If it’s meant to die, it’ll die. You never know what the bush could be until you see it in its biggest, most unruly form.
Daniel Scheinert: I love that metaphor.
Craig: There’s something beautiful about the permissiveness of your process, where you do allow each other to say and come up with ideas that maybe other people would reject out of hand. One of the things that struck me when I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, or can we abbreviate it to EEAAO, is that…
Let me back up for a second. John and I, I think, do a decent job of generally educating people about screenwriting. I think in all the time that we’ve spent looking at say the Three Page Challenges and things, I think we are good at helping people get better, but I’m not sure that we’re good at helping people be Good with a capital G. I think that there’s something innate. Obviously, there is talent that exists. Watching your movie, I felt overwhelmed in the best possible way, by quality of ideas. There were not 1 or 2 or 12 fresh ideas. Movies oftentimes give you zero fresh ideas. There were 1,000 fresh ideas.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
Craig: By the time I got to the Everything Bagel, which I think may be the single best metaphor ever immortalized on film-
Daniel Scheinert: Oh my god.
Craig: … I was just overjoyed by the amount of original thought. I just want to dig in a little bit to ask you guys, are you aware of how original all of these thoughts are? Is it something you pursue very purposefully? Do you worry about losing connection with some of the necessary conventional things, which I think in your film you did not lose touch with? How do you manage this fire hose of brilliant thought?
Daniel Kwan: Oh my gosh, thank you. That is such an incredible compliment. Regarding the bagel metaphor, I feel like Twitter would disagree, but it’s okay.
Daniel Scheinert: [Crosstalk 00:14:40].
Craig: I quit Twitter.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: Fuck Twitter. They’re wrong.
Daniel Kwan: I should quit. The first thing I’ll say is, in college I remember I heard someone say something funny and snarky about success that has always stuck with me. They said if you want to be successful, you either have to be the best or the first. From the very beginning, I was like, “I will never be the best, but I can be the first.” That was definitely a very inspiring moment. That was something that me and Daniel had a proclivity for is just surprising each other. That’s why the duoship works is because half the time, that’s all we’re doing. We’re trying to surprise each other, either with a joke or even with an emotionally resonant idea. How do we surprise each other so that we can surprise our audience?
A lot of it comes out to the fact that I’m realizing now as an adult, I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD, and people with ADHD are novelty seekers. I’m the truffle pig. That’s how my brain is defaulted to think about the world and look at the world. I think a lot of people look at it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is way too much.” To me, I’m like, “Welcome to our brains. This is just how we think.”
I’ve been reading a lot about neuroanthropology, this idea of taking anthropology and going back to ancient traditions and the ways that brains worked back then to decode and understand how we can hack our minds for the modern world or whatever. One of the things they talk about is how important innovation is and novelty seeking is for the human condition.
A lot of people can be like, “Oh yeah, it’s just new for new’s sake,” as far as our movie goes. It’s whatever. It’s just random and fun. I do think that the newness and the freshness of our stories is very much intentional, because I think humans are so fickle. You learn a moral to a story or you learn this beautiful, life-changing idea, and two months later, you’ve already forgotten why you felt that way. I think we were constantly having to remind ourselves, as humans and as storytellers, these very simple, universal truths. Unless we wrap it in something new, it’s hard to penetrate our very hardened, logical, cold brains. Innovation to us is really fun and playful and inspiring but also feels important as a vehicle for story.
John: Innovation and novelty are amazing tools. They’re definitely going to help you find some new territory, but they’re not going to get a movie made. They’re not going to get a script written. How do you go from… You have all these great ideas. They’re great ideas you could’ve had in a dorm room, but you’re not actually getting them to a movie. You’re not getting them to a script stage. What is the process from these great ideas to, “Okay, now we’re agreeing on the words on the page to create this story.” What is that conversation? You have great abstract ideas, but you also have to agree on what is the scene.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s nonlinear. It’s still confusing. We’re still figuring it out. I do think that, back to music videos, we discovered our process on these short-form projects and discovered that we enjoy biting off something ambitious that we would have to keep trying to polish straight up until the final day. That the story wasn’t going to work until the effects were done was a fun way to make a story. I feel like that gave us the courage to write scripts, because we never look at our scripts as a final product at all.
Daniel Kwan: Great advice for a screenwriting podcast.
Craig: Nobody buys screenplays. It’s true.
John: It’s true.
Craig: They’re meant to be transformed.
Daniel Scheinert: They’re meant to be a blueprint to this other thing. That was a really freeing thought, I think, for both of us, because it meant we didn’t have to fight tooth and nail about exactly what the lines were, because we were like, “That’s just the line for now.” It gave us, I think, the courage to just write in a very iterative way, that wasn’t super OCD about the details. We did a ton of outlining, wrote a draft, went back and re-outlined it, drastically wrote a draft.
Daniel Kwan: We should send you guys… My whiteboard has an outline.
Craig: Please.
Daniel Kwan: It’s got 30 timelines across the thing.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: It’s tracking everything. It’s a mess.
Craig: I would love that.
Daniel Kwan: It’s hilarious. I think that gets back to, process-wise, not only are we looking for innovation on a moment-to-moment and idea-to-idea level, but structurally I think that’s where we find the most inspiration, and that’s how we organize all of it.
With Swiss Army Man, structurally what we wanted to do is we wanted to ask, “What if we started this movie with just the worst idea ever, a man who is farting so much that he’s able to be used as a jet-ski but it’s cathartic and beautiful? What if we started with that image and we still found a way to justify this film’s existence?” It felt like a very interesting challenge to us. The classic line that Paul Dano used to use at all the Q and As was, “It was a film that started with a fart that made you laugh and ended with a fart that made you cry.” It’s a semiotic experiment. It’s very academic. Structurally, that was what we were going for, and everything else was trying to be thrown into that bucket.
With Everything Everywhere, we asked ourselves, “Okay, what if we could create a multiverse movie that went to too many multiverses? What if we took the hero’s journey and deconstructed it beyond anything recognizable, where you had way too many stories, way too many wants, way too many needs?”
Originally, we wanted the whole film to fully collapse. Basically, we wanted the main character and the audience to not care anymore, to actually believe in nihilism, like, “Nothing matters. This story doesn’t matter.” Then we were like, “Okay, but what if structurally we got there, but then we still found a way to pull everything back together and make it make sense?”
When we came up with that structure, we were like, “Holy shit, this is amazing, because this reflects the lived experience right now that everyone… ” Twitter and social media and the constant news cycle that we were experiencing. We started writing this in 2016. Everyone knows what was happening then. This film was very much… That structure was like a reflection of that moment.
To us, we’re like, “Okay, great, we have a lot little, fun, innovative ideas, but we have this very big, structural, big swing that we’re excited to use as a blueprint for us to drop those ideas into.” That structure has stayed the same. I don’t know how many drafts we did, but many, many, many drafts. That structure was always the goal throughout, even though entire characters got thrown away, scenes got rewritten. Everything changed except for that structure. I think that’s something that maybe some people miss in the innovation conversation when talking about this script in particular.
John: We’re looking at a script that you guys sent through. It’s not quite clear what the script is that we’re looking at, because it has side-by-side the Chinese dialog for characters, it has some ADR stuff and other things thrown in. What was the script that you first went out to actors with? What was the first script that you had that’s like, “Okay, this represents our intention of the thing to make.” How long was that script? The script we’re looking at is about 125 pages. It has the end at Page 83. Then it restarts at 86. All At Once begins 124. Was the script you were going out to actors with similar to the script we’re looking at?
Daniel Scheinert: It was relatively similar, yeah. It was an interesting thing when the movie was done and we were like, “What script do we release?” I always think it’s funny when you get these award [inaudible 00:22:30] with a screenplay, and you’re like, “I think they hired a kid to transcribe the finished film.”
Craig: Exactly. It’s usually not a kid, but that is exactly correct.
John: We know a guy who does that.
Craig: In fact, we know somebody who has done that quite a few times.
Daniel Scheinert: We didn’t want to do that. We kept in stuff that got cut out. We wanted to keep in the stuff that changed, like when we did pickup shoots and ADR and stuff. That cracked the movie open. That was part of the writing process. It’s like, “That is screenwriting we did, so I guess we’ll put that in there.” It’s a mix of things.
I was just going to summarize that first we went out to Michelle years and years ago. We met with her right before Crazy Rich Asians came out, which I think was 2018 or something. That was pretty different script. I don’t think that character had a grandpa in it.
Craig: You mean you were Hongless at that time?
Daniel Kwan: Yeah, we were Hongless. [Crosstalk 00:23:25].
Craig: I have a huge problem with that, because James Hong is the greatest actor of all time.
Daniel Kwan: Agreed.
Daniel Scheinert: I think in that one, it wasn’t a Chinese New Year’s party. It was a wedding. Joy, the daughter, was getting married to her partner and hadn’t invited her mom. To Dan’s point, it had the same structure, like about a family, it goes to too many universes, come back, they hug at the end. Then we refined it. Michelle helped us refine it. Going out to different actors… We’d sometimes talk to actors and go home and be like, “Oh, that conversation totally helped you crack why the wedding’s a bad idea,” for example.
Daniel Kwan: The one thing I’ll add is it changed a lot, it changed a lot, it changed a lot, but the most important thing we learned on Swiss Army Man was making sure that the script was good enough before we shot, because we were rewriting as we were shooting, and it was miserable. What we ended up doing with this script is… Even though it was constantly changing up until the shoot day, by the time we were shooting, it mostly remained blocked. It was pretty close to the final thing. The script that you guys got is pretty close to our shooting script. The only difference is we added some ADR and stuff like that. Otherwise, the structure of it, the order of it, what you guys are seeing is basically what our crew saw when we started shooting, which I’m very proud of. It was very important to us.
Craig: I don’t know how you could’ve… I’m thinking about your poor first AD. Literally, I was thinking about your poor first AD while we were watching the movie. I’m in Calgary, watching it in this lovely little theater, and my mind is blown, but at some point, I think it was maybe one of the first super-montages, where we see Michelle Yeoh a thousand different times in a thousand different places, where I was just like, “Is the first AD okay? Did they take care of him?” because the thought of doing that movie without a locked, I mean locked script gives me hives just thinking about it.
Daniel Kwan: I think we knew that, and then we also got lucky, and Rod, our first AD, was also very good at his job and very zen about it.
Craig: You would need to be, I would imagine.
Daniel Kwan: He was just like, “We got this, guys.” Sometimes I’m like a part-time AD when we’re shooting. I worry about that a lot. I’m teaming up with whoever it is, to just be like, “What was the schedule today? What do we have to get? What are the priorities? If we get behind, what are we going to cut out? Does it matter? If we have time, what’s the fun stuff we’re going to sneak in there?” trying to manage expectations.
Craig: How many days did you guys shoot?
Daniel Kwan: It was 8 weeks, 38 days.
Craig: Wow.
Daniel Kwan: Then we had several days of pickup shoots and stuff during COVID, but they were small.
Craig: If by several you don’t mean 14,000, I am amazed. It’s really amazing how much you did in the time you had. Question for you. You’re making this movie. From your point of view, I hope you felt that you had covered all these brilliant bases. You had written this really interesting story full of very specific… We always go on about specificity. I can’t think of more specific writers than the two of you. It’s not just hot dog fingers. There’s cheese inside of the hot dog fingers.
Daniel Scheinert: Oh, cheese.
Craig: Every single thing has been thought through. I hope it was cheese. Maybe it was something else. Was it mayonnaise?
Daniel Kwan: Mustard.
Daniel Scheinert: Mustard.
Craig: Oh, it was mustard. I thought it was cheese.
Daniel Scheinert: That says a lot about you, actually.
Daniel Kwan: It’s whatever you want it to be.
Craig: It had that American cheese color. Fair enough. Mustard. See, even specific enough that it was mustard. You also had these incredible costumes. Stephanie Hsu, who I became obsessed with after seeing your movie, is in like 400 costumes that are each brilliant. At any point, or perhaps at lots of points, did the two of you look at each other and say, “Either we are going to succeed fantastically or this is going to be pointed at and laughed at for all time?”
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you’re getting at our sweet spot.
Craig: Good.
Daniel Kwan: It’s the big swing. It’s the disastrous, ambitious… I don’t want to speak ill of other movies, but I actually love these films. It’s films like Southland Tales.
Craig: It’s funny, I was thinking of Southland Tales, because we’re big Richard Kelly fans here.
Daniel Scheinert: Totally.
Craig: I really like that movie a lot, but it’s out there. That one, people didn’t quite connect with the way that they did with your film.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. I think I find that film so inspiring, more inspiring than most other films, because he just went for it and he put everything in it. It was trying to be political and funny. It was way too ambitious.
Craig: Weird.
Daniel Kwan: And weird. Films like that, they were our North Stars for this film. We were like, “We want to do what they did, but can we stick the landing? Can we stick the landing in a way in which our mothers might actually appreciate the film?”
Daniel Scheinert: A lot of times, we’ll pick something bonkers and something really broad as our two North Stars and be like, “Oh, can we land somewhere in the middle?” It was It’s A Wonderful Life and Southland Tales. Those are very different movies, but it’s fun to bounce between them.
Craig: Incredible. That’s a fun way to walk into a pitch at A24 and say, “Southland Tales.” They’re like, “Goodbye.” That’s awesome. The bravery is really just something else. When you say stuck the landing, it’s a wonderful phrase, because I do feel like the way I feel when I watch Olympians do really complicated things. If they don’t stick the landing, they’re probably just going to break their neck and die. I feel like you guys are so brave, braver than I am. That’s for sure. You’re just like, “Here we go. Might not live.” Amazing.
Daniel Scheinert: We also have a bag of tricks we’ve collected over the years that make it not as scary for us as it would be for other filmmakers.
Craig: Tell us about those.
Daniel Scheinert: You mentioned Interesting Ball. That was an experimental film that we made for almost no money. Part of the experiment with that one was the script was five short films that we thought would be fun to intercut. We didn’t actually know what would cut to where or how it would work. Even on the day, some of them were too ambitious, and we only shot some of the script. There was a whole sequence with these broformers where a bunch of dudes hug and turn into a big mech warrior made of dudes. That’s a hard thing to photograph. We ended up shooting only pieces of the script and being like, “I don’t know, let’s see if it works in the edit.” That one, we spent a long time in the edit. It was very hard finding this flow. It was wild to see just how much you can fix in the edit. It was part of the experiment of that short film.
We held onto that while making this. In this case, we designed how it would cut. It was in the script, so that we wouldn’t overshoot it or have to figure it out on the day. We did know in the back of our heads, we’re pretty good at montage, we’re pretty good at finding music to guide an audience through a scene that isn’t good. We’ve fixed our movies in the past a lot. We had some crutches that made a scary screenplay not as scary for us as it was for the producers.
John: It sounds like you guys have a good faith in Future Daniels. Writer Daniels have good faith in Director Daniels, and Director Daniels have good faith in Editor Daniels. You’re going to do your very best at that moment to give Future Daniels what they can use. You know that in the future you guys are going to be able to solve some of these problems and you’re not catastrophizing things on the day. If you can’t get that shot, if your shot list doesn’t get completed, it’ll work out. You’ll find a way through it.
Daniel Kwan: That’s such a wonderful way to put it. You’re collaborating with past, present, and future versions of yourselves. I think that that trust comes from the fact that we’ve gone through the process so many times in a very quick amount of time. I recently calculated. I think we’ve done about a dozen commercials, a dozen music videos, maybe close to a dozen short films, seven or eight TV episodes, and then of course we’ve done three features between the two of us.
Because we were able to do that so quickly, we really quickly understood what our strengths were within each other’s sections, the pre-production, the production, and the editing, in a way that… Even in the writing process, we always say that we want to start writing a movie that we have to grow up and mature to become the directors who can direct that movie. Right now we’re working on another film that is way too big, way too ambitious. We are not good enough directors to make that movie yet.
Craig: Yes, you are.
Daniel Kwan: That’s what you think.
Craig: Do it. Do it.
Daniel Kwan: That’s the fun of it.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s aspirational. We’re like, “Oh, I’m excited to become the guy that can do that.”
Daniel Kwan: Who can do that one day.
Craig: The reach is part of the process for you guys.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Also, the other thing that we have in our back pocket is, if something doesn’t work, we can just turn it into a joke. It’s such a cheap trick. Within the context of our films, so much stuff doesn’t work at first. We have all these different ways to repurpose it or recycle it, or worst-case scenario, we just cut it out, because like what you said, Craig, we have so many ideas that if something doesn’t work, we’ll be like, “There’s plenty of other things, so get rid of it.” The first cut is this crazy monster of a film that has all these appendages that are wonderful and beautiful but so bloated and so confusing. Our process has always been throw everything at the wall. We don’t know if it’s going to work, but at least some of them will work. Some of them will work really beautifully, and that’s enough for us for now.
Daniel Scheinert: With this movie, more than ever before, like Dan said, we really wanted to like the script and have something locked before we shoot. Some of that was being better writers, and some of it was a mental exercise. You just have to tell yourself, “Turn off the writing and focus on the filmmaking.”
Swiss Army Man, Dan and I had this argument, we’ve been having it ever since, about how much of it was not a good script and how much of it was just bad process on our part. We just shouldn’t have been rewriting it as frantically as we did. It wasn’t good. Shot listing might have been a smarter move with our time. This time, in addition to liking it, the scriptwriting process was so helpful in helping us figure out the priorities. The format of a screenplay forces you to essentialize. You can’t describe every costume, or else it becomes a 200-page script. We were constantly having to make hard decisions to get the page count down. It helped us know what really mattered. It was like, “We have all these gags, like with Raccacoonie, but they’re not essential to the story,” and so we’d cut them out.
Craig: Oh, Raccacoonie. It is essential to the story.
Daniel Scheinert: We’d remember them and be like-
Craig: Raccacoonie.
Daniel Scheinert: Stuff would rise back in.
Craig: God.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s essential to us. We knew these details were why we wanted to make the movie. The screenwriting process really was about killing darlings a lot of times. It was about like, “No, we have to focus on the family. We can’t get too enamored with what Jobu’s costumes are going to be. We’ll figure that out later. For now what matters is where’s our character at.”
Craig: Tupaki. The discipline that you guys applied to what seems like an absolute chaotic wellspring of ideas is why the movie works. You just mentioned Raccacoonie, and that brings up a question that I wanted to ask you guys. My grandparents were immigrants, and they lived with us. I grew up in a house where Raccacoonie type mistakes would happen all the time. I’m just interested in… The movie is so much about existentialism and what it means to survive and love in the face of what I think is true, which is none of this means anything, but at the same time, so much of the movie’s built around the immigrant experience, in a very honest way, a very eyes-open way. I’m curious how you came about smashing these two pretty disparate themes together in such a gorgeous little blend.
Daniel Kwan: A lot of it, I like to say that me and Scheinert are very naïve writers. We do things that we don’t have a plan for sometimes, or we don’t overthink it, because we’re drawn to it. We’re like, “We’re drawn to it. Let’s put it together. Let’s see what happens.” Oftentimes, what happens is some of the things don’t work. As you live with a script, that gets thrown out.
With the immigrant experience and the multiverse, as we were working on it, we realized, oh, these two things are actually a fascinating pairing, because both the immigrant story and the multiverse are talking about multiple worlds. Our parents and our grandparents, they live in-
Craig: Interesting.
Daniel Kwan: … different existence, very different point of views. This is what the multiverse is actually in real life. It’s just having a completely different outlook on life and that collision of those things. All this intergenerational immigrant narrative stuff is about the collision of the past, the future, and everything in between, as far as traditions and whatever goes.
Then also, a lot of the multiverse and the immigrant story is a questioning of life paths and decisions and asking yourself what if. When I talk to my mother about her past, a lot of it is like, “What if this happened? What if that happens?” The only reason why she came to America is because her family got the money together to send her there, as almost like a backup plan. They’re like, “Okay, if the family business in Taiwan doesn’t work out, you’re going to go to America. You’re going to get educated.” She was almost like the test subject. Then when the family company went under in Taiwan, her whole family moved over to Pennsylvania with her.
The whole immigrant experience is about this ever-branching list of possible life paths that you could’ve taken. It’s things like that that I love, where the pairings don’t necessarily make sense or the contradictions of what you’re trying to put together don’t make sense, but the longer you live with them, things get revealed.
I like to think of all of our scripts as these filters that we carry around with us, these fishnets. As we’re walking around through life, it’s going to catch real moments and real ideas. True emotions are going to be caught in that net. You won’t know what you catch unless you live with it. I think that’s one reason why our scripts take so long is because we want to live with them, and we want to see what we watch. People who are able to write a script in seven days I am so jealous of. Also, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to catch the things that I want to catch with it, because seven days isn’t a long enough time to live with something.
Craig: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you.
John: Daniel, what you’re describing is a phenomenon I always felt when I’ve been working on features, but especially in the times I’ve been working on TV. I was working on a show that was supposed to be a 22-episode season. The workload was so great that I felt like my life became just about grabbing things in the air and saying, “Is this part of the show? Is this part of the show?” I was the net. I would catch anything that could possibly wrangle them into the show. We heard a song, it was like, “Oh, how does it fit into this thing?”
Daniel Kwan: Totally.
John: You make a very good point, that I don’t know that that’s healthy or a great way to make great art, because your whole existence just becomes transferred into being the person who channels reality into the show. I felt like I was living for the show rather than living my actual life, which is so frightening.
Daniel Scheinert: I feel like the worse thing is the opposite, if you’re working on art that has nothing in common with your life, and so it just becomes a reflection of maybe something you read once or you’re just mimicking a movie you made sometime, but if it can intersect with your life, then ideally it can be a really good therapeutic project, to be like, “Oh, I’m going to work through some real things. This is going to come from an honest place,” as long as you’re not a workaholic, you don’t go crazy.
Craig: These guys are healthier than we are. Don’t you feel like they’re the healthiest versions of us? They seem so put together.
Daniel Scheinert: I was just thinking what inspired this movie. You bringing up Raccacoonie made me think about our producer John’s dad. The movie’s dedicated to him, Alexander Wang. He loved movies but could never remember the names of them. Originally, it was just a joke about how Mr. Wang always got movies wrong. Also, Mr. Wang passed away right after Swiss Army Man came out. I think this movie was inspired a bit by his funeral. It was also inspired by Dan’s wedding and also inspired by Dan becoming a father and also inspired by Dan going into therapy and all these huge life events. You can trace back pieces of this movie, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that a hundred percent affected the journey of the Wang family in the movie,” each of these real-life journeys we’re going on.
Craig: Amazing. I could talk to you guys all day. Let’s kidnap them.
Daniel Scheinert: Let’s do a four-hour podcast.
Craig: Everyone loves a four-hour podcast.
John: Daniel Kwan, I want to make sure to circle back to you, because early on in the conversation you said you wanted to talk about the experience of being Asian and working in the film industry. Is there anything more that you wanted to get into about that, or is the immigrant stuff more what you wanted to talk about?
Daniel Kwan: This is such a funny, unromantic way to look at our relationship, me and Daniel, and why I think we’ve been resilient through the fact… The industry’s constantly changing. The past 10 years, every few years, something has really shifted. Yet somehow we’ve managed to make a path through it all despite the fact that so many of our very talented friends and whatever have been having a harder time, if we’re being honest. The independent film landscape is just not a fun place right now. It never has been, but right now it’s definitely feeling… Especially now that even streaming is being turned over again. The whole thing is precarious.
They talk about in genetics, oftentimes when you take two people with very different backgrounds, it actually creates better genes. You become more resilient, because you’re actually knocking out things that… That’s why pugs look the way… They’re all inbred.
Craig: It’s why my children can drink milk. I can’t.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Oh my god, that’s so funny.
Daniel Scheinert: Wow.
Daniel Kwan: It’s a long-winded metaphor for the fact that when we first started, I didn’t think I was going to become a director, because I was an Asian dude. I was very quiet, very reserved. I wanted to go into animation, because I thought, “Okay, I can still create things, but I don’t need to be the leader or whatever. I can make things on my own.” Scheinert was a very confident white man who had been directing things since he was like 12. He came in, saw something in-
Daniel Scheinert: I was the kind of kid who was like, “Yeah, I could see myself going to film school. I could see myself becoming a director. Those dudes look like me.”
Craig: Wow.
Daniel Scheinert: It didn’t require much imagination.
Craig: That’s awesome.
Daniel Kwan: I also think having him interfacing with the record labels and interfacing with the bands or whatever in a way that I was not ready for, I did not have the confidence for early on, all those things made it so that we… I could sneak in on his back. It’s genetic hitchhiking a little bit, where I was able to navigate this world and learn. In some ways, our duoship and his whiteness was my training wheels. I learned so much from that process.
Then suddenly, #OscarsSoWhite happened, and the whole paradigm shifted, and everything changed. I remember distinctly the moment when we started getting scripts, and they weren’t necessarily for Scheinert, they were for me, if that makes sense. People started sending us projects that were very specifically Chinese. We were being invited to events because I was Chinese. Suddenly, the whole thing switched. Suddenly, he was on my back.
We talked very frankly about this, because again, it’s very unromantic. I feel very grateful that he found me when I did, and I was able to be ready for this moment. The fact that our relationship has been going on for 12, 13 years now, and we’ve been able to make the things that we do is in part because there’s two of us. We have very different backgrounds. Honestly, our belief systems were very different. Our upbringings were very different. Our inspirations were very different. We have very different ways of looking at the world. I think that makes us more resilient, both in just the race of it all, the race conversation of it all, but also just in the types of things that we make.
Daniel Scheinert: Hopefully, 10 years from now, as the world shifts, we still have something to offer, but who knows what that’ll be. Hopefully, we find something that we-
Craig: When the world shifts to white supremacy in the next couple years, it’ll be great.
Daniel Scheinert: Oh, sick.
Craig: You’ll be back again. Don’t worry, Scheinert. It’ll be your time in the sun soon.
Daniel Scheinert: They’ll trust what I look like, and then I’ll sneak in and I’ll rip it apart from the inside.
Craig: Not to overextend the analogy, but John and I are also very different people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different all this stuff. It is the vive la différence. It is something that makes it work. I don’t listen to podcasts, but I have noticed that a lot of them seem like they are hosted by four clones.
Daniel Kwan: Totally. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Craig: Differenceness is good.
John: I’m the Whoopi Goldberg. He’s the Joy Behar. It’s what makes The View The View.
Daniel Kwan: That’s amazing.
Craig: That’s exactly what I was thinking.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: I’m going to start with mine.
Craig: Great.
John: First, it’s a plus one on Craig’s previous recommendation of The Past Within, which is a very cool video game. Two people play separately but together in ways that… I was not expecting it to be so smart about how it works together. Recommendation on The Past Within, the Rusty Lake game. I have two movies to recommend. The first is The Territory, which is a documentary by Alex Fritz about-
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god. Sorry. We just met Alex last night at an event, at the Gotham Awards. He was incredible.
John: I bet he’s incredibly sweet.
Daniel Kwan: He is.
John: So smart.
Daniel Kwan: He might be listening right now.
Craig: I hate him.
John: [Crosstalk 00:46:36].
Craig: No, I don’t.
Daniel Kwan: Different walks of life.
John: Alex Pritz. I said Fritz. It’s Pritz. Such a smartly done movie. It’s about indigenous peoples in Brazil fighting to save their territory, their land from encroachment. So smartly done. You can imagine the bad, eat your vegetables version of this movie a thousand different ways. It managed to navigate through all that. It’s so smartly done. You can find that on Disney Plus. Check it out, The Territory. Second is My Year of Dicks, which is written and produced by our own Pamela Ribon.
Craig: Pam Ribon.
John: Directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir. So smart. It’s up for an Academy Award, Best short. People should watch it. It’s really, really cleverly done. Based on Pamela’s book about her teenage years and trying to lose her virginity. So great. If you like Pen15, you will definitely love this animated short. It uses animation in such a smart way to be able to show you what otherwise you could not see.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
John: I really recommend My Year of Dicks.
Daniel Kwan: A great title too.
Craig: Best title ever.
Daniel Kwan: Incredible.
John: You guys will love My Year of Dicks. [Crosstalk 00:47:39].
Craig: “You guys will love My Year of Dicks.”
Daniel Scheinert: It’s a great sentence.
Craig: It is. Continuing the theme sort of, at least etymologically, my One Cool Thing is spatchcocking. If you’re not familiar with spatchcocking, to spatchcock a turkey, you remove the backbone, then you flip it over, and then you push down, and you flatten the whole turkey out. Now, removing the backbone of a turkey, as it turns out, is incredibly hard to do unless you have-
John: It’s brutal.
Craig: … special poultry shears, which I did not have. For about 30 minutes, I was just in this war with a dead animal, almost lost, but finally won. The whole point of spatchcocking is if you keep the turkey on one flat level and put it in the oven, it will cook together at the same time. It will all cook at the same temperature. It will cook way faster. A 15-pound turkey took 1 hour and 10 minutes to cook.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
Craig: It was perfect.
Daniel Scheinert: Wow.
Craig: If you do like cooking and you are responsible for the turkey in your family, strongly recommend. If you have a butcher that you bring the turkey to, they will often just say, “Yes, yes, we will spatchcock it for you using our spatchcockers.”
Daniel Scheinert: It sounds disgusting. When you said spatchcocking-
Craig: Of course.
Daniel Scheinert: … the last thing I thought was that I was going to want to eat whatever you were about to describe.
Craig: Spatchcocking sounds like something you would need to do to jump to a different timeline. I’m hoping that somehow, at some point, you guys do at least include a little bit of spatchcocking. I feel like if somebody asks a typical filmmaker, “Hey, can you include something in your next film?” they’re like, “No,” but you guys…
Daniel Kwan: I like a challenge.
Craig: What’s one more thing?
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: What’s one more thing? Get the spatchcocking in. That’s all I’m asking.
John: Craig, last year we did spatchcock the turkey and, like you, had the same experience. It was so hard to remove that thing.
Craig: So hard.
John: Then it ended up working out much better. This year, we decided the only way to win the game is not to play, and so we did duck confit, duck legs instead of turkey.
Daniel Kwan: Whoa.
John: So much better.
Craig: Honestly, one of my favorite things in the world is a little duck confit. It is so delicious.
Daniel Kwan: Fancy. We did something similar, except for we went really far away from the tradition. We ended up doing a Chinese hotpot. It was amazing.
Craig: That does sound pretty good.
Daniel Kwan: Also, honestly, there’s very little prep too, so you’re not spending the whole day cooking. Usually, we’re on our feet, trying to get the turkey ready with the mashed potatoes, everything. It’s literally a nightmare, but some people love it.
Craig: Everybody’s basically chasing the French in Western cooking. The French just made cooking the most arduous possible thing. You’re just like, “There’s 4,000 steps.”
Daniel Scheinert: I know.
Craig: It’s the same ambition that you guys have for making films, I have that for cooking. I’m like, “Give me the recipe that no one else will want to do.”
Daniel Kwan: That’s great.
Craig: Hotpot’s just fun.
Daniel Kwan: Literally, give me some materials. I’ll dip it in the water myself. It’s the laziest. I love it. My One Cool Thing-
John: One Cool thing, Daniel Kwan.
Daniel Kwan: There’s this podcast that I’ve been obsessed with for the past couple years called Your Undivided Attention. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with-
Craig: You know I’m not.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Daniel Scheinert: Two clones.
Daniel Kwan: Two clones talking to each other.
Daniel Scheinert: Two clones named Aza and Tristan.
Daniel Kwan: It’s Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. They’re both ex-Silicon Valley people who were very much at the forefront of Twitter and Facebook and all those things. They realized their invention was slowly destroying our ability to communicate with each other, social media. One of them even is the guy who invented the infinite scroll. Now he’s trying to figure out what to… They have a very beautiful, clear-eyed vision of what’s wrong with social media and also what they think are some solutions to it. They bring in all these incredible guests who are thinking about the world in a completely different way, because there’s the social media level of animal conversation. It’s all about that limbic system, what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what will keep you engaged.
I think so much of the discourse about how to save the world exists in this plane of animal fury. I think this podcast tries to rise above it and think about things very much from a system standpoint, an incentive standpoint, instead of just from emotions. To me, it’s been really healing, and I’ve been learning so much. Go listen to Your Undivided Attention. I’ll say a couple of episodes. Audrey Tang is an amazing person you should listen to, Daniel Schmactenberger, Jessie Wheal. I won’t tell you what they’re talking about. These are people that I’m-
Daniel Scheinert: Isn’t it Jamie Wheal?
Daniel Kwan: I’m sorry. Jamie Wheal, yeah. I went a little too fast. A big fan of Jamie.
Daniel Scheinert: That way they can Google it.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. If you’re someone who thinks about everything that’s wrong with the world and how we can fix it and you feel lost, for me it’s been a really good starting point for me to at least feel empowered in a world that does not want to empower us.
Craig: What about you, Scheinert?
John: Nice.
Daniel Scheinert: A bunch of my friends pitched in to buy my friend a stripper pole, because she’s been taking these pole dancing classes. It’s gotten her in touch with her body, her sexuality. It’s exercise. When we gave it to her, she taught me some of the moves. I had so much fun.
Craig: Really?
Daniel Scheinert: I’m on the hunt for some good heels. She’s going to teach me some more pole dancing.
Craig: Oh my word.
Daniel Scheinert: I just can’t wait to dress up in drag and do some more pole dancing with my friend. Just for anyone out there, just try cross-dressing. Try pole dancing. Just get in touch with another side of yourself. You can just go in the privacy of the garage. Also related is watching pole dancing. There’s a reason that’s the most popular thing at a strip club. There’s a way to do it respectfully, guys. You go and you pay well to watch someone who’s an incredible athlete. I’ve been going to one with some friends in L.A. and having a blast at Jumbo’s.
Craig: Can we ask where you go?
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, Jumbo’s Clown Room.
Craig: Jumbo’s Clown Room, the best name for a strip club ever.
Daniel Scheinert: You’ve gotta tip well. If you go and you don’t tip, you’re a loser.
Craig: Yeah, don’t do the stupid $1 bills dumb thing.
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, or just try it in your friend’s garage. Big cosign on the pole dancing.
Craig: You do look like you’re in excellent shape. If I tried pole dancing, I’m just sure that I would end up in the ER. I would end up in the ER with a wig on.
Daniel Kwan: That sounds great.
Daniel Scheinert: Step one is real easy. You just put your hand on the pole, and you just really slowly, confidently walk around the pole. That’s it. You just gotta work on your strut. Anyone can strut.
Craig: This is the problem is my confidence level. You know what? Something to discuss with my therapist. That’s awesome. Those were great One Cool Things. Those were Two Cool Things. Thank you for that. Incredible.
John: We like it.
Craig: Thank you, Daniels.
John: Daniels, thank you so much for being on the show.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you for having us.
Craig: Oh my god, it was a joy.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s our pleasure. Thank you for helping us write our script. We listened. We took notes. It was helpful.
Daniel Kwan: We ignored half the advice, but it’s so-
Craig: Thank you.
John: That’s the crucial thing.
Craig: That’s almost as important. What to disagree with is very important.
Daniel Scheinert: Totally.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Woo!
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re actually running a little short on outros, so we need some more outros there, folks. You can send your longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. Craig’s no longer on Twitter. I still am there @johnaugust for the time being. How do we reach you guys on the social medias? Are you guys there at all?
Daniel Kwan: Instagram’s good for me. Instagram, it’s @dunkwun, Dun Kwun.
John: Dun Kwun.
Daniel Kwan: Dun Kwun.
Craig: Dun Kwun.
Daniel Scheinert: My Instagram’s private, just for my friends. I’m sorry if you want to keep track of my life. Social media makes me super anxious.
Craig: I feel that.
Daniel Scheinert: Go check out our movie. I’m so proud of it.
John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find links to transcripts and our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to 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 music videos and other things that people pay you to shoot. Daniels, thank you so much for a great show.
Craig: Thank you, Daniels.
Daniel Kwan: Thank you.
John: Congratulations on your film.
Daniel Scheinert: Pleasure.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Daniels, so in the bulk of the episode, you were talking about writing for music videos. Can you talk to us about what you were actually writing? As you were proposing to do a music video, what does that look like? What are you turning in as a document? I’ve seen some proposals, but I don’t think our listeners have ever encountered that as a written form. What are you writing up if you’re trying to get a music video?
Daniel Kwan: Normally, it starts off, and a record label or a commissioner or sometimes an artist will reach out direct, and they will send the brief over. They’ll say when they need to shoot it, when it needs to be done by, what the budget is, and a rough idea of what the band wants. Usually, it’s not enough money, not enough time, and the ideas are super vague. That’s where it starts off. Usually, the prompt is like, “Okay, the artists don’t want to play music, but they also don’t want to act, but they also want to be in it, but also they want it to look cool. Make cool stuff happen around them.” It’s the most frustrating thing to get sometimes.
Craig: Sounds easy.
Daniel Kwan: Also, it’s like, “We need a treatment in two days.”
Daniel Scheinert: Or sometimes it’ll be like, “Drake’s really into Hawaiian shirts lately. $100,000.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s run with that. Let’s see what we can come up with.”
Craig: That’s an interesting exercise.
Daniel Scheinert: It is.
Craig: Narrows down the paths.
Daniel Kwan: It was film school for us. You talk about how we have so many ideas in our movies. It’s because we were forced by this industry to pump out fully formed ideas within a day or two. They’d be like, “We need a treatment in two days. Come up with a whole idea. Pitch us… ” Usually, they want a treatment, which has reference images, execution ideas, and a rough idea of what the concept is going to do.
Daniel Scheinert: Can I talk about the Maroon 5 renaissance?
Craig: Yeah.
Daniel Kwan: Great. Do it. Do it.
Daniel Scheinert: Right when we were starting out in music videos, our first thing we pitched for money got green-lit, turned in, and turned out well, which is a miracle. It turns out we thought, “Wow, music videos are easy.” Then we proceed to get rejected for eight or nine months straight. To his credit, Paul Hunter, who runs the company that had signed us, was like, “Hey, Maroon 5 wants me to do a music video. Do you guys want to help me come up with an idea? You could maybe ghost direct some of it and get paid, because I know you guys are getting rejected all the time.”
Craig: Starving, yeah.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Daniel Scheinert: Then we listened to the song. It was bad. We’d try to come up with ideas. We could not stop coming up with joke ideas that were just making fun of Adam Levine.
Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god.
Daniel Scheinert: We would laugh our asses off at these things, being like, “There’s no way we could do that, but it sure is funny.” We were really struggling to come up with something that we actually thought would be good. A lot of those ideas that we did not pitch to them, that started as just us making fun of the band and the song, became ideas that stuck in the back of our brains, that we loved, that we actually ended up making. Over the next 10 years, we’d be like, “Oh my god, we’re doing one of the Maroon 5 videos again,” because there was one where their music’s so good it gets women pregnant, and we ended up making that.
Daniel Kwan: For Chromeo.
Daniel Scheinert: There was one where their music’s so good the floor falls apart and they fall down into a bar mitzvah, and then the floor falls apart, and they fall down into a rave. That turned into Turn Down For what.
Craig: I love that that’s the weird [inaudible 01:00:04] wellspring of all Daniels work is just that three-week period where you guys were just destroying Maroon 5 in your minds.
Daniel Scheinert: You never know if this is productive or not. We were laughing. Our favorite one that I’ll pitch, that way the people who came for this 20 minutes feel really rewarded-
Craig: Oh, good.
Daniel Scheinert: We sort of made this. The idea was that there was a huge crowd. They’re all chanting, “Maroon 5. Maroon 5.” Then a stagehand comes out and says, “Hey guys, I’m so sorry, this show’s canceled. There’s been an accident. I’m so sorry. They’re dead. Their bus went off the road.” The fans are starting to cry. The stagehand’s like, “I’m sorry, what? Oh, wait. Oh, I’m sorry, apparently I’m wrong. Here they are, Maroon 1!” Then smoke starts to pour out. This weird Weta [ph] puppet comes out in smoke, and it’s all five of them smushed into one weird, mangled creature. Then out of a crevice comes Adam Levine’s face. Then Maroon 1 becomes more famous than Maroon 5 ever was. They rocket off to superstardom and stuff.
Craig: They should’ve done that.
Daniel Kwan: The bridge is they are so successful that every other band wants to recreate their magic.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: Metallica gets in a car crash.
Daniel Scheinert: They start wrecking their tour buses.
Daniel Kwan: Sum 41 gets in a car crash. Everyone’s just trying to… Whatever. They’re all dying.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: Also, I think it ends with Adam Levine opening up his shirt, and he has six nipples, and he starts breastfeeding [inaudible 01:01:41].
Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different idea.
Daniel Kwan: That was a different idea.
Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different one.
Daniel Kwan: We still haven’t made that video yet.
Daniel Scheinert: One of our Foster the People videos started with the band dying and then the record label puppets their corpses.
Craig: See, it’s all there.
Daniel Scheinert: Then that led to Swiss Army Man.
Craig: See, everything comes… If people aren’t paying the $5 a month to Scriptnotes to hear this stuff, they really should start. That alone was worth $80 as far as I’m concerned. That was awesome.
Daniel Scheinert: I feel like we never actually answered your question though about what does a treatment look like.
John: What is the document? Is it a pdf you’re setting up that has all the images embedded in it, or is it a deck? What are you sending over these days?
Daniel Scheinert: A lot of directors do different things. The process we discovered was that we would collect a lot of images. Kwan was very graphic design savvy and could mock up some really lovely pdf treatments that would set the tone. For the first few years, each page would have five or six photos, and then I would end up usually writing a persuasive essay, because Kwan was a little too long-winded. The longer you talk about a music video, the harder it gets to wrap your head around it. I would write my attempt at a concise essay, and he would collect images and put it into a thing. We would always get bored try to reinvent it after a while and try to stay interested. Sometimes we resorted to gift treatments, because we found out collecting gifts was really fun and helpful. We started making much longer documents that were 10 or 12 pages and just putting 1 or 2 photos on there, because that became a nice way to break up the different ideas.
We have one friend who shoots videos of himself and edits in clips and photos because he just finds that that’s fun for him. Also, he’s a really charming British man, and so the record label will be like, “Oh, he’s so cute.” It helps him book the music video.
It’s pretty cool that as a writer, we didn’t have to follow Final Draft screenplay format. We started off with this very experimental writing process of just write whatever document you think will get you hired. Just try to be persuasive, whatever tools you have at your disposal.
Craig: It worked.
Daniel Scheinert: The bummer is you do a lot of these that just get rejected. Then you spend a lot of time writing. We never thought of it as screenwriting, but we’re basically writing spec scripts.
Craig: Yeah, and you’re practicing.
Daniel Scheinert: Constantly.
John: You’re a writer going out for an open writing assignment. It’s the same idea. They want to make this thing. Nineteen people are going in and pitching their take on this.
Daniel Kwan: Yeah, except for we’d be doing three a week. Literally, we’d get three different projects, and we’d have to pump them out.
Craig: That’s amazing. That you could do that at all is just I think really a testament to the fertility of your minds. You guys really are special. It was such a special experience watching your film. It’s been special watching your music videos. I really am just in awe of… There’s the whole quality and quantity thing. Typically, as quantity goes up, quality goes down, and somehow, you guys manage to keep those lines in lockstep. It’s amazing.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: There’s more and more of it, and it’s still good. That is just so special and rare.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.
Craig: I tip the hat that I am not wearing to you.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you. Sometimes we feel like we use quantity as a crutch, where we’re like, “If there’s enough ideas in there, they’ll like a few of them.”
Craig: If they’re good… When it’s suddenly like, “Oh my god, there comes [inaudible 01:05:26]. Oh my god, there comes this. Oh my god, there goes that.” It’s everything, everywhere, all at once!
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you did it.
Daniel Scheinert: He went for it.
Craig: It’s really good.
John: You did it. Oh my god.
Craig: I did it, and it just works. I’m really impressed.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.
Craig: I hate everybody. I gotta be honest with you. I just really hate everybody.
Daniel Kwan: Oh, wow.
Craig: I love John.
Daniel Scheinert: Me too. Let’s do a podcast about that.
Craig: By the way, if you want to do a podcast about hating people, girl, I’m there. We’re gonna do it, and it’s gonna be awesome. We’re gonna be canceled literally-
Daniel Kwan: Don’t tempt Scheinert.
Craig: We will be canceled in the middle of the first episode. We won’t even make it to the end of the first episode.
Daniel Scheinert: Let’s go back and forth. Who do you hate? Who do I hate?
Daniel Kwan: This is the bonus bonus.
Craig: Bonus bonus bonus.
Daniel Scheinert: Bonus bonus.
Craig: Our first episode is 14 hours long. Amazing.
John: Gentlemen, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you guys.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you.
John: Pleasure talking with you guys.
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:06:19].
Daniel Kwan: Really exciting to be here.
Links:
- Daniels on Twitter, Dan Kwan on IG
- Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon, Houdini by Foster the People, and The Simple Song by the Shins music videos
- Interesting Ball short film
- Everything, Everywhere All at Once
- The Territory
- Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks, directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir
- Spatchcocking
- Jumbo’s Clown Room
- Your Undivided Attention podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Jordan (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.