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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 this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, so you’ve been nominated for an Oscar, what do you do next, how do you translate this attention and heat into that next project, and hopefully into a career? To help us answer this question, we are joined today by a writer-director pair facing this exact dilemma. Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh are a writer-director pair whose short film Two People Exchanging Saliva has racked up a bunch of awards, including an Oscar nomination. Welcome and congratulations.

Natalie Musteata: Thank you so much.

Alexandre Singh: Thank you so much, John.

Natalie: Thank you.

John: We should say you actually are Scriptnotes listeners, so this is not a strange place for you to show up.

Natalie: Not at all. This is actually the first podcast for screenwriting that we ever listened to. It was 10 years ago. Alex and I, we come from the visual arts, and all we ever did was talk about film. Alex suggested, “Rather than talking about film or writing about film, why don’t we try and make films?” which I thought was audacious, as two people that had never been to film school and knew absolutely no one in the film industry.

Alexandre: This is a full-circle moment for us because, quite often in the podcast, we’re talking about emerging filmmakers, emerging screenwriters, regardless of how old they are, were coming from careers in visual arts, and then everybody dreaming of making films. Coming up in an age when you don’t have to go to film school, there’s so much that you can learn from podcasts, from YouTube videos, and of course by putting word to the page and making scripts that are not so great to begin with, and hopefully, get better as you learn the craft.

Natalie: We certainly wrote a few scripts with passive protagonists, [laughter] like everyone does at the beginning.

Alexandre: I would say there’s so many things that you learn over the 10 years of going from zero to wherever we are as writers. The thing I would tattoo on my arm is beware of reactive protagonists. That’s just the biggest lesson I would say. Then everything else is all details.

John: I want to talk about those 10 years behind you, but also the 10 years ahead of you, because I really want to focus on what do you do now. In many ways, you’ve achieved the dream, you got this Oscar nomination, you have heat, you have all these meetings, you’ve signed with an agency, all these things, but there’s lessons to learn, and there’s also decisions to make. I want to talk this through while there are live, active questions for you guys. I want to talk to you about your decision to make this film, but also how anyone listening to this, whether or not they are nominated for an Oscar, they’re going to have moments of heat. Some producer read their thing and liked their thing, and it’s getting passed around. How do you capitalize on that?

What I think you guys have done so well is capitalize on the heat that happens before everything happens, and coming in with a plan for what’s next, and also some flexibility. I want to talk through all that, but also for a bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to talk about black and white, [laughter] because you made the decision to shoot this in black and white, and it was such a smart choice. I just want to talk about making a black and white film in 2025/2026, because it helps, and it was the right choice.

Natalie: Yes. I think that in general, we really leaned into bold decision-making. Making the film black and white was a really easy, early decision that we made. We love black and white films. For us, black and white feels like an X-ray. It’s the essential of the image, and it reduces all the noise.

Alexandre: Color distracts. We’re on the radio, but here we’re surrounded by colorful wires, a colorful table.

John: Trust me, we considered making this podcast in black and white [laughter] for just those reasons. In the bonus segment, we’ll get deep into the black and white. I want to talk about now your short film.

Let’s talk about maybe not the last 10 years, but at least the decision to go in and make this specific film. Before this point, you’ve written some things, you did a short film, which got some attention and got some awards. The decision to make this specific film, what was the ambition, what was the goal? You want to tell a great story, you want to make a great film, but I think you also want to make a film that would attract attention and showcase things you’re really good at.

Natalie: Ironically, yes.

Alexandre: This is something we’ve been thinking a lot about. When we made our first film, we had never been on a set before. The very first moment when we had the first short, which was inspired by the opening shot of Rear Window, needless to say, overly ambitious, using a gimbal, we learned, for example, that changing lenses on a film camera takes much longer than on a photo camera. When your DP says, our DP on our first short, Antonio Paladino says, “Yes, we’ll shoot on vintage glass,” vintage glass is wonderful, but the gears for the follow focus are not in the same places. We were learning on the fly. Our ambition at that point was just to make our film. Would it cut together? Would it be a story? Would it be engaging? Would we–

Natalie: That being said, whenever you’re making anything, especially when you’re finally achieving a dream of making a film, the ambition is great. You’re like, “We’re going to go to Cannes. We’re going to travel far with this film.” We did not see the pandemic coming, which is right around the time that first short came out. That being said, with this short, we had learned a big lesson from the first to the second. One was that while we did make a film that cut together and was really fun and playful and visually sumptuous, it did not do the one thing that we care about most in cinema, which is the element of catharsis and telling an emotional story that’s very character-led. That was something that was really important for us to have in this short.

With this short, we had no ulterior motive. We didn’t know whether we were making it for a museum or for film festivals. We certainly were not projecting far into the future at all.

Alexandre: We weren’t thinking about the short as a stepping stone. We weren’t thinking about the short as a proof of concept. Otherwise, we would not have made it 36 minutes long.

John: Yes, it’s a long short. [laughter] I’m going to put a link in the show notes to The New Yorker is hosting it now, which is great, because when I saw it, I saw it as a Vimeo link, but now everyone can see it through The New Yorker. The very short description, I’ll say, is that it’s a film that takes place in Paris in a society where kissing is forbidden. People pay for things with slaps to the face, a very high concept. We meet this unhappy housewife who becomes fascinated by this salesgirl, and it raises the suspicions of a jealous colleague. That’s to set up what it feels like.

It’s in black and white. It is gorgeous and sumptuous. This department store is incredible. The fashion, the costumes, everything is really elaborate and beyond what you would expect to see in a short film. How early in the process of thinking about doing this piece, instead of it might even be a museum piece, which is so fascinating, I would never even consider that– Of course, that short film is made from museum pieces. How early in the conception of it did you know what you wanted it to look like, feel like, what the experience of the film should be like?

Natalie: We knew very early on because we wrote it very quickly. It’s the fastest thing we’ve ever written. We wrote it in two to three weeks. We shared the first draft, and immediately it was greenlit, which was a huge surprise.

Alexandre: A surprise to us.

John: Greenlit by whom? Who was putting this money?

Natalie: Our producers. The film actually originated out of a constraint, which is that we were asked by these producers, whose company is called MISIA FILMS in Paris, whether we had any ideas set in a luxury department store.

John: Oh my God. Great.

Natalie: We would have never written a film that was set in such a luxurious and impossible-to-access space. We had this unusual playing field. We were like, “Okay, if we’re going to set a film in this very loaded environment where you have the intersection of beauty and commerce and power and social status, how do we subvert this space?” It was in–

Alexandre: How do we put a stamp on it? It was during the Zoom meeting when we were asked, “Go away and think about this.” During the Zoom meeting, we were spitballing ideas. This image came into my mind of someone being slapped in the face and someone counting it out, and that being the form of transaction. Even if that was something that we couldn’t verbally articulate at that time, we knew that there was some thematic juice there. They very kindly didn’t shut this down immediately and asked us to go away and think about this world. It was–

Natalie: Then we started exploring what that would mean. There were a lot of news stories at the time, like today, that were influencing our creative– I don’t know.

Alexandre: Whether we were responding to either laughing or fuming at whilst reading the news, at the time, it was the nascent MAGA days of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, there was the protest movement in Iran, Woman, Life, Freedom.

Natalie: All of which is still happening today.

Alexandre: That has been dialed up to 11 today.

Natalie: Part of it for me was also that when you open up your phone today, if you are opening up Instagram, for instance, side by side, you’re being confronted with images of civil unrest and then an advertisement for a luxury handbag. There’s this normalization of violence side by side with commerce that just, I don’t know, felt like it was related to this idea that had come about almost subconsciously. We started developing the film. Very quickly, this yin and yang idea came about, if violence is normalized, then intimacy is not. The love story within this absurdist world started to come about.

Alexandre: We started to become very attached to these characters. Actually, all three of them. Malaise, who’s the young woman who decides to play a game with Angine, an older shopper, pretends that she knows her already. Their antagonist is Petulante, who is a saleswoman who’s been at the store for a long time and feels not just professional jealousy, but perhaps romantic jealousy or just the desire to be touched.

Natalie: It’s a story of three different women from three different generations who are responding to the repressive rules of the society in very different ways, and their differences that lead to the drama of the film.

John: I want to leave it to listeners to watch the film. Then, if you want to read the scripts, you can read the script in English and in French. The French one does not very closely match the English one because things changed along the way.

Natalie: We were rewriting the script as we were shooting. Then, even in the edit, obviously, scenes shifted around. Then some things were cut.

Alexandre: As Victor was saying recently on the podcast, you go into at best, hopefully, the script is 90% there. As much as we want to really labor over the script and have it be perfect because it is the foundation of the house that you’re going to build, sometimes you’re building that car as you are driving it. This was very much the case with this film because we knew we had to shoot in a window before the Christmas sales in the department store. It was the only time where we could shoot four or five nights in a row.

John: Which actual store is it?

Alexandre: The name is Galeries Lafayette. It’s an iconic.

John: I’ve heard of Galeries Lafayette, but I didn’t recognize it.

Natalie: There are two locations. We shot on the one on the Champs-Élysées. We shot in both. We mix and match. The majority of it is the smaller of the two stores, which is on the Champs-Élysées. As you can imagine, it’s open every day of the week. We’re shooting in the middle of the night.

Alexandre: In the same way that sometimes when you write a text, and you need to see it afresh, you print it out or you change font, with all these tricks, imagine that you write in English, and then you rewrite the dialogue in French. That’s a real seeing it afresh.

Natalie: Alex was born in France. My family’s from Armenia. They went to France in exile. I grew up with the two languages. That being said, we live in America. Our French is very, very good, but-

Alexandre: It’s different.

Natalie: -it’s different.

Alexandre: It’s not the natural thing to write in.

Natalie: There was a moment where we wrote something, and it turned out to be not–

Alexandre: It’s a sexual innuendo that we did not know.

Natalie: Did not mean what we thought it meant.

John: Didn’t [inaudible 00:11:56]

Alexandre: Yes.

[laughter]

John: You won’t have heard the episode yet, but Joachim Trier came on the podcast-

Natalie: Oh, amazing.

Alexandre: Oh, wow.

John: -to talk about Sentimental Value. His script was written in Norwegian, but with a lot of English in it. Then, of course, there’s also an English script, which is an important part of the process along the way. For your script, you’re writing this in English. Then, were your French producers reading the English version or reading your French version, or both? How did that work?

Natalie: Oh, that’s a good question.

Alexandre: We were translating it with every draft. People complain sometimes about making documents. Well, imagine that you have to make all your pictures, all your treatments, all your scripts, and then each time update them in each language.

Natalie: At a certain point, we stopped writing in English, and we were just writing in French.

Alexandre: Once we locked pages, we were in French, and we just concentrated on that script. Then, as Natalie says, we were rewriting during rehearsal, we would rewrite on set, we would rewrite the voiceover.

Natalie: Some of this, you can see on our Instagram page. We did a video where we compared one of our main actresses’ audition with the actual film. You can see the dialogue has changed. We’re not tied to the words. It’s the sentiment that counts.

Alexandre: I would say, for example, probably the best thing we did in this entire process was choosing the title of our film, because choosing the title of a film costs you zero, nothing. Having a distinctive title– Our first film was titled The Appointment.

Natalie: Too general.

John: Too general.

Natalie: Too general.

Alexandre: Too general.

Natalie: We realized almost immediately. It was too late. We thought of the right title very quickly, but yes, it was already out in the world.

Alexandre: When we came up with this title, there was a lot of pushback, not just from our producers who thought, “Oh, it sounds good in English, but it’s ugly in French.”

Natalie: Then our American friends were like, “It sounds great in French, but it’s really ugly in English.”

John: It’s distinctive. I remember when it crossed my email inbox, I was like, “Oh,” I recognized it’s stuck in my head.

Natalie: It’s also just, for us, tonally appropriate. It describes a romantic act, but in a very clinical, absurdist way. That is the tone of the film. It is at once romantic and absurd. For us, it just made so much sense. In general, my biggest piece of advice for anyone making anything is, “Do not dull the edges.”

Alexandre: Be a bit spikey.

Natalie: Yes. Also, make those bold decisions. It’s important to really stick to your gut and do the thing that you want to make and not constantly pander to everyone’s opinion.

Alexandre: You can’t make everybody happy. In this day and age, you need to make a subsection of your audience just effing love your film, and some people are not going to like it, and that’s how things are.

John: All right. The short exists. It’s wonderful. Congratulations on it. I really want to focus on you have a short, what do you do with the short? You say you have these French producers, you have a way to make this thing, but you’re going to have this short film. When did you know what the plan was, what festivals to go to, how to launch this into the world?

Alexandre: This is the paradoxical thing I wanted to say. With our first short, we had perhaps the naive ambition that this would be our ticket to the professional world. It came out in March 2020 on the festival circuit. We met zero people. It did nothing for our careers whatsoever. In some ways, we had a– what’s the expression, the Irish expression, a lonergan?

John: A mulligan, yes.

Alexandre: A mulligan. A Kenneth Lonergan.

[laughter]

John: A Kenneth Lonergan to mulligan, yes.

Alexandre: We made this film with no ulterior motive whatsoever. I think, paradoxically, that is its strength. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It switches perspectives between not just two characters, but actually briefly three characters, something that’s not even advisable to do in a feature film. In that sense, there was no plan whatsoever. We just poured our sincere artistic and creative ideas into the film. Then, after having made it, thought, “Oh bleep, what are we going to do?” because no sales agent would take it. There were very few festivals that we could apply to.

Natalie: Especially in Europe. It’s a European film. The duration limits for shorts on the festival circuit are determined by the awards. In the US, it’s 40 minutes because that is what the Academy Awards deems a short film. In Europe, it’s 30 minutes because that’s what the European Awards deems a short film. As a 36-minute film, we were not eligible for 90% of film festivals. We didn’t even know shorts distributors were a thing.

John: Tell me, to what degree are they a thing? I don’t have a good sense of what the distribution mechanism really is. I know The New Yorker because The New Yorker has good ones, but tell me what you found.

Alexandre: There is a wonderful, rich world of short filmmaking that is centered around mostly more international festivals. The number one festival for international short films is called Clermont-Ferrand. It is happening right now in Clermont-Ferrand in France. It’s described as the Cannes of short films.

Natalie: Honestly, we had heard of it, and we knew its reputation, but until you experience it, you can’t imagine the quality and the care that is put into this film festival. For instance, it’s the only film festival in the world where, between shorts, they bring up the lights. It’s like a palate cleanser. They tell you, this is a moment of respite, and then–

Alexandre: They change the Dolby level for each film. It’s very, very carefully thought out.

Natalie: The cinemas are enormous. The smallest is 300 seats, and the largest is 1500. You’re playing every day for 10 days in amphitheaters, and every screening is sold out. We played on a Monday at 9:00 AM once. I was like, “Alex, prepare yourself. The weekend screenings were full, but who is going to come to this 700-person cinema at 9:00 AM on a Monday? It was full.

Alexandre: This is the Sundance and Cannes of short films. There are short film distributors there who distribute the films for French and German television channels. They are trying to sell on all different kinds of platforms.

Natalie: Yes, including Criterion, MUBI, Netflix. They’re pitching these things to everyone, but it is primarily a European market, I would say.

Alexandre: It is rare for a short film to get enormous visibility. The Oscar shortlist and Oscar nomination is a type of visibility that is incomparable to the amount of eyeballs at these kind of events.

John: Was Clermont your first festival you debuted in?

Natalie: No. We debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2024, which was, again, something that had been recommended to us. It felt like a pipe dream because they only take five to seven shorts.

Alexandre: Seven. Seven shorts.

John: Wow.

Natalie: Seven shorts. They’re one of the few film festivals that’ll take a short up to 60 minutes. In that sense, we were like, “Well, we have to try.”

Alexandre: If any of your listeners are wondering, did we have an in? Yes, there are ways to get into these festivals, but that is very much the exception. We applied on the website. We sent in our little fee, as we did for all of the festivals, and we got in blind.

Natalie: Yes. We really didn’t expect to get in, so much so that we went on vacation, not having finished the film, because we were so sure that it was an impossibility. Day 1 of our vacation, we find out that we’re in, and the festival’s in four weeks, and we had to cancel our vacation, fly back to New York, finish the film in a rush with our sound designer because we had just started the sound design.

Alexandre: Then at the second festival, we showed out here in Los Angeles, AFI FEST, we won the Grand Jury Prize, which meant that we qualified, too, for the Oscar longlist. We knew almost a year in advance that this was a possibility, and we had a discussion about it, and we felt–

Natalie: We knew it was a possibility, and we prepared over the last year for this journey, were it to happen. That being said, it all felt really like a magical idea, not something that was a reality. No matter how many people told us, “Your film is very good. It could get shortlisted. It could get nominated,” it didn’t feel like a reality until it happened.

John: Telluride, Los Angeles, then you know you’re on the longlist. Then I imagine it becomes easier to get into other festivals because they know what you are.

Alexandre: You would hope so.

John: You would hope so, but [inaudible 00:20:15]

Alexandre: Actually, no. Ironically, the festivals that you think you’re going to get into, you don’t. It’s very hard to predict.

Natalie: Yes, but I would say that our first three festivals were so strong. At Clermont-Ferrand, we won the Audience Prize and the Canal+ Prize, which meant that we had distribution in France and Switzerland and French territories. It was already, for me, such a Cinderella dream-like situation.

Alexandre: That was the beginning of, to get back to your very original question, that was when those conversations that we had even stopped thinking about started to happen. We were approached by international producers asking, “Would you be interested in making this into a feature film?” Those conversations started happening quicker and quicker. More people approached us. We participated in the Square Peg event in October before even making shortlist. Something that we had been listening to for many years on the show about managers and generals and agents that we had always thought, “Oh, we’re just thinking about the craft stuff. That doesn’t really apply to us,” we entered into that world.

Started having meetings in Europe, the UK, and also in Los Angeles and New York with production companies that represent actors, financiers, now also with some of the studios, and learning as we were going along what those meetings were. I think it was a few meetings in before we realized, “Oh, this is a general meeting.”

Natalie: Because we didn’t make this short with any intention of making it into a feature, we did a scriptwriter’s lab in France that’s a little bit like the Sundance of France, called Groupe Ouest. There, we gave ourselves a few weeks or a couple of months to really discover, “Is there a feature in this short? What would it mean to do that? What form does it take?” We gave ourselves the freedom to play again. It was in that process that we found the emotional throughline of what the feature would be.

Alexandre: We also started to develop some of the other ideas that we’d been thinking about, often ideas that had been generated in the last 18 months that were similar to the short and similar to the feature ideas that, on their surface, are absolutely ridiculous, but that we treat quite seriously because, for the characters in these worlds, this is very serious for them. We started to get a sense of what our “voice” is, what it is that we bring to the table, and feeling quite confident about the kind of films that we want to write, the kind of films that we want to make.

To harken back to a previous recent episode, the short at 36 minutes, when we go into meetings, people say to us, “We feel confident that you guys can pull off a feature film.” That’s not always the case with a short, and that is not something we had strategically decided to do. We had done it very sincerely, rather naively, but the end product was that that’s how these meetings have been going.

John: All right. Let’s talk about past success stories, people who’ve transitioned from, “Oh, you got a lot of attention,” and then that short film got them started on a career, and then we can talk about sometimes it doesn’t work, and the decisions that you guys are making that everyone has to make about how to prioritize what to do next and where to put your efforts and energy.

Taika Waititi, Two Cars, One Night, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, 2005. 20 years ago, Taika Waititi got started, went from that to Eagle vs Shark, and lots of other things. Andrea Arnold with Wasp, also 2005. Martin McDonagh, the short film Six Shooter in 2006. Shane Acker had his animated short 9, which became a feature film 9.

Damien Chazelle had Whiplash, the short version of it, which was a proof of concept, which became the film. It’s a short film, but it got attention. Jim Cummings with Thunder Road from Sundance, the Grand Jury Prize. David Sandberg, Lights Out, which started as a short. I always send people to Lights Out because it is just such a great, small, little short concept, and they were able to make the feature version of that.

Those are all great success stories. What’s tougher to find, it’s un-Googleable, is the silent evidence of the people who had really great short films that got attention, they got an Academy Award, then you can look up and say, “What have they been doing since then?” unless you call them up and ask, “What went wrong, or what happened?”

It’s because they were all at this moment that you’re at right now, which is they have the heat, they have the attention, and what do they do next? A little spoiler, you are thinking about a feature version of the short as one of the things?

Natalie: We are, yes. I think that we have the advantage of being slightly older, and having had careers in a different field, and coming to the film industry with our first short, it was quite naively, and now less naively. I think that’s an advantage for us. At the same time, I think one of the reasons that people are very interested in the short, but also in other projects that we’re pitching, is because in this moment, when it’s very difficult to get people, the high concept or more absurdist-leaning films are the ones that are working. That is what comes naturally to us. A lot of our ideas are–

Alexandre: The A24 and Neon things, which they’re a little bit bigger swings.

John: Bigger swings–

Natalie: Also, one of the reasons that we did this shift in our careers was because what we love about cinema is the relationship to the public and to the audience, which is very different than it is in the visual arts. Really, you make an artwork, and you hope that people will have a response to it, but really, there’s no relationship between a painting and an audience in the way that there is in a movie theater.

John: You have very different audiences. You have the random museum goer, but you also have the curation aspect of that, and who are the tastemakers, decision makers? That’s all a very different thing.

Natalie: Yes. The tastemakers in the visual art world are the key to everything, whereas in the film world, the audience is everything. When you’re making a film, you’re entering a contract with the public, and you’re saying, “Over this period of time, whether it’s 36 minutes or 2 hours or 3 1/2 hours, I will take you on a journey, and it will be worth your time and the money that you spend to come here.”

Alexandre: “We will challenge you, we will push you away, we will bring you in, we’ll make you laugh, we’ll make you cry.”

Natalie: We came to it with an incredible amount of generosity towards the audience. “We’re making a weird film, but we’ve made it with a lot of heart.” I think that comes through. It was those things that have made the film very attractive to people, and the fact that we do want to make things that are– Joachim Trier is a perfect example. Recently, he said, “Tenderness is the new punk,” and we could not agree more. For us, a film cannot just be high-concept. It needs to have that emotional heart. It’s those two things in concert with one another that we try to achieve with the short, and that we hope every single feature that hopefully we make in the future will have as well.

John: I want to talk about the feature version of the short, which there’s lots of challenges to do that because the engines are going to be different for that kind of situation. You could approach this as, like Damien Chazelle did with Whiplash, “I have a vision for a feature film, and here’s the short that is a proof of concept that lets me expand into that.” I see so many people who try to do short films that are just shorter versions of their feature film, and they are almost always terrible because they don’t have the engine for a successful short film. They don’t have the setup development payoff, the joke structure that you’d actually need for a short film to work.

In your case, I can’t imagine you actually would have written the feature version of this first. It was just because the short film exists and you actually know the world, and you can think about, “Where does it want to go?” that it makes sense to try to do a feature version of it, knowing that it’s going to be different and it’s not the same thing as it’s going to work in the feature version.

Alexandre: In some ways, we’re adapting a short film that we have seen and loved, and that really spoke to us, and we have ideas about how we would expand that world and what we believe to be the emotional throughline of the story, the vertebra that we would hang the story on, and what the larger engine would be.

John: That’s proof of concept. There’s also, I would say, a proof of execution. You talk, Alexandre, about you realize you have a voice and you have taste. Basically, you have a way of presenting the world. You were saying that tenderness is the new punk. That vision could be applied to a different movie. As you’re having conversations with people or pitching other things that you want to do, if it fits in the same space that they’re seeing from this first film, that’s really helpful. If you were to show up with this short film and say, “I really want to do an animated story about gnomes,” I’m just like, “I’m not so sure.” “I want to do a dark and grungy thing that is completely different than this,” everyone’s like, “That’s not helpful for me. I can’t help you there.”

Natalie: I think that would be really tricky.

Alexandre: One of our strengths is, and this comes from maybe a visual or background, is that we have a lot of ideas all the time. Out of those ideas, many of those ideas are not necessarily in our lane, in our wheelhouse. Sure, we could tell a Sundance coming-of-age story. We have ideas for those kind of stories, but we have enough stories that very much echo the qualities that people have been attracted to in the short. In these meetings and conversations, I think it’s been a very natural fit because the ideas that we’re pitching really resonates with what they’ve seen us execute with the short film.

Natalie: Before, I was talking about cinema-going and how there’s been a decline, and at least studios feel like we need more films like this. It’s also the times that we’re living in. We’re living in a moment where the ridiculous and the horrific are side by side like almost never before, or at least in a while now. I think that there is something about that. There’s a tonal line that we’re constantly–

Alexandre: There’s an urgency that we feel as storytellers that I think the people we’re meeting with are feeling. Our film is not a necessarily political film in a didactic sense. It’s not a PSA at the end where there’s a little chiron that gives you facts that, “In France, many people are put into boxes because they have…” [laughter]

John: It’s absurdist in the way Terry Gilliam films are absurdist. It’s a sense of this is a crazy world, but you can see the clear parallels to Brazil.

Alexandre: As crazy as Brazil is, there are aspects of Brazil that chill us and that have resonances with today. I think often of that scene where it’s Michael Palin who is a torturer and Michael Palin comes out covered in blood, and they have a conversation about their children. That is actually a feeling that inspires our film, that dissonance between the everyday comfort of the society that we’re existing in right now, where I’m drinking some tea, having a wonderful conversation with John in this beautiful location in Los Angeles, meanwhile, we’ve just been experiencing what’s been happening in Minneapolis, in Maine, what is happening in Iran right now. All these things are happening at the same time, and how do we, as human beings, navigate that and find meaning in our lives in these very dissonant moments?

John: You said two or three months before the nominations is really when you actually felt like a change happened, and it was actually very meaningful. When did you recognize that something had shifted? Was it the amount of incoming calls and emails, and you started to have meetings with reps, and figuring out where you wanted to go next? Talk to us about that time and what decisions you had to make.

Alexandre: I would say I had an image that came into my mind around this moment that somewhere on the planet there was a switch and that someone flipped this switch. Suddenly, as in a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, we are running after the industry. Suddenly, we exit frame. Suddenly, we’re running back the other way, and they’re running after us. How that happened, what that was, we felt that suddenly there was a switch that flipped.

Natalie: In 24 hours, we met with all the agencies, and not because we had planned it that way. It just happened to be that there was a confluence of events. We were also just out there in the world in a way that we normally aren’t, because as people that come from the arts, we are a little bit more interior-facing. We’re used to being in our little cubby, writing one in front of the other. Suddenly, we were really out in the world showing the film in a very public way. All of that attention– Our trailer had just come out on Deadline, too. Suddenly, there was a flood of emails in our inbox, “We would like to see the-

John: Full short.

Natalie: -full short.” Then meetings started to happen, and everything was one after another. There was a pressure to make a decision right away, which was very stressful. At the same time, now that we have representation, it’s opened so many doors. We really were skeptical. Is this a useful thing? There were some people that were advising us, “Don’t tie yourself down. It’s great to be an independent agent.” As two people that do not come from the film industry, this has been incredibly helpful for us.

Alexandre: We’ve had the experience coming from visual art of being the little engine pushing all those carriages up the hill, raising the money, producing it ourselves, building the sets ourselves.

Natalie: Alex taught himself VFX for this film because we didn’t have the budget.

Alexandre: I did a pre-visualization of the whole film in Blender, so a 3D animation of the film. We’re used to doing everything. I think it’s good to keep having that energy, but all that representation is very additive. Suddenly, you are accelerating. It’s like in Mario Kart when you go with the lines, and suddenly you start to go faster. It increases momentum.

Natalie: There was just so many things that happened all at the same time.

Alexandre: A lot of luck. I think luck is something that we don’t appreciate. So many people are lucky the first time. They begin life, like a game of Monopoly, and they roll double six, and then they roll double six again, and they roll double six again. Suddenly, they’re sitting in, be it a creative field, or they invested in cryptocurrency, or they are the richest man in the world, and they don’t realize that so much of that was luck. We are just as creative and hardworking as so many of our friends, and we just happen to be in the right position at the right time.

That said, we’ve had full careers in the visual arts. This hasn’t happened one week coming out of film school at age 21, but still getting the cast that we got to say yes, shooting the film, and the building not burning down, or no one having a heart attack, or all the things that could go wrong on a film–

John: It’s not just all the things that went right. It’s all the things that could have gone wrong, which somehow you avoided.

Alexandre: Also, the same is true for the life of the film. You get into that festival. It just happens to be, for example, at Telluride, those shorts are selected by Barry Jenkins, who chose our short because he has an affinity for French, black, and white cinema, and then has gone on to support the film. So many of these encounters and things that have happened professionally have been a mixture of luck and our hard work.

Natalie: We find ourselves here today because of a chance encounter.

John: I want to go back because, Drew, can you take a look and figure out when did we first get contacted about this short?

Drew: Good question.

John: Because I know we got it–

Natalie: I’m sure our publicist– [laughs]

John: It was your publicist, because your publicist has been dogged, which is great. It totally makes sense. I was thinking it’s both a fire burns, but also people were scraping sparks there a lot.

Alexandre: Yes, very much so. The publicist was dogged because we said, a year ago, “Oh, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could go on Scriptnotes? It will be a dream come true.”

Natalie: Really, this is where our cinema education begins. For us, this is a dream come true in many ways.

Alexandre: A similar thing happened with Charli XCX, who wrote a review of our film on Letterboxd. Around a year ago, her Letterboxd account was made public. I was watching TikToks where she was talking about a film– I think you recently talked about her Substack on the– I was thinking, “She is really incredible. She has incredible taste. She’s very smart. I think she would really like our film.” We did what anyone would do. We asked, “Does anybody know her neighbors, gardeners, dog walkers?” We went in so many directions. Nothing happened for an entire year. Eventually, our manager said, “Let me just reach out to her agent.”

Natalie: No, it was still like one person led to another person led to another person.

Alexandre: I’m at home flicking through Letterboxd, and I follow Charli. She’s one of my “friends” on Letterboxd. Suddenly, she posts about a film, and it’s our film. I think I jumped off the couch. I was so excited.

John: Did you find the first email?

Drew: December 22nd, 2025.

John: That’s pretty recently. That’s pretty recently. My manager separately had reached out, so that’s another connection. Clearly, he probably had a meeting with you or his company had meetings with you about stuff. Also sent it to me. Then, of course, Matt Byrne, who was my former assistant, had met you randomly at a party and made these connections. We talk on the show so often about, “Do you need to live in Los Angeles? Do you need to live in New York?” No, you don’t, but the fact that you were in New York at the same time there and at a party, just being around people who are doing the thing you can do, leads to the chance of encounters. If you were just in a house in Maine, it would be less likely for that to have happened.

Natalie: For sure. I mean, it’s incredibly helpful being in New York or LA. I mean, we’ve been here quite a bit as a result of all of this. That being said, I think going on the festival journey was also really valuable. That was the first step, really. It’s just making friends in the industry. Not people above you, but that are trying-

Alexandre: Your peers.

Natalie: -to do the exact same thing, that are doing the exact same thing, and really just connecting on a creative level.

Alexandre: We’ve met filmmakers who are the equivalent of someone who lives in the woods in Maine, who then goes on the festival circuit and meets lots of people and then returns home to recharge and doesn’t have to pay New York City rents.

John: There are helpful things about living in the hub of all this stuff. From the podcast, you know that Drew went off and made a short film that he’s now submitting to festivals. He has learned a bunch of stuff. I thought we might learn from what he’s learned and get your feedback on how the experiences overlap.

Drew: It sounds like they already figured it out before. I had to go through a process to figure it out, but I wrote a bunch of stuff as I was going of, “Oh, this is–” and tell me if I’m wrong too on any of this. First one was, part of why the comedy isn’t working is because I’m shooting this like a drama. There’s a difference, and it’s not just letting things live in the wide.

Natalie: Interesting.

John: Do you consider your short a comedy or a drama?

Alexandre: It’s absurdist, but–

Natalie: It’s absurdist. I would say that we categorize it as an absurdist drama, which means that it has–

John: Is it dramedy?

Natalie: I just call it absurdist. It has elements of comedy in it.

Alexandre: Without sounding too highfalutin and egotistical, Shakespeare’s work mixes pathos and bathos, I think, of the Grave Digger scene in Hamlet. Joachim Trier’s work, within the same scene, it’s mixing comedy and serious drama together. As to the question as to whether comedy works more in the wide,– That is–

John: Well, it does, but there’s some ineffable thing that in previous shorts I’d done, it was much funnier, that tended to be the cheaper stuff that I did. Then doing this, and it looks beautiful, and we have all these beautiful lenses, and it feels so heavy. I’m trying to figure out if that’s framing or if that’s light or what it is, but I’m trying to get to the heart of it.

Alexandre: It’s hard to say because sometimes comedy really comes from editing and pacing whereas a joke is about delivery, and that involves cutting and coverage in some ways. Sometimes comedy comes from the awkward and the uncomfortable. I think, for example, of Ruben Östlund’s films where everything is happening on a wide, and this short is going on for a really long time, and I feel really uncomfortable, and the kind of Larry David idea of comedy, the uncomfortable idea of comedy. I think it’s difficult to say without having seen the film which direction something works or doesn’t work in.

John: Let’s talk about during production, you had an idea about takes.

Drew: Oh, yes. I wrote, more takes is actually better. Try letting actors do three or four takes on their own before you start redirecting.

Natalie: I think in an ideal scenario, you have more takes. In our experience, we just never get past take three because we always have to move on.

Alexandre: I have an idea that seven is the perfect amount of takes. The reason being that it takes two or three takes for everyone to just get into the flow of things, get warmed up, as it were.

John: For your DP to stop fiddling with things.

Alexandre: Yes. By four, five, and six, usually you’re going to hit your best, best takes. Then seven is your coverage, or just in case, or just so we all feel like we’ve covered it.

John: Do a weird one.

Alexandre: If you’re going to take nine, 10, 11, or 12, it’s because something isn’t working and that’s no shade on anybody. That’s because either something technically or we haven’t found it yet.

Natalie: That being said, Alex and I, we always do a complete pre-visualization of the film, especially because there are two of us and because we have very little onset experience, we need to have a plan going into the shoot. We cannot show up and just be like, let’s find it. That doesn’t mean we don’t deviate. We do deviate from time to time, but we’re always coming in knowing, okay, we do have a plan that works. There are parts of our film that are a one-to-one replica. I think that preparation is the most valuable thing for us.

John: I want to talk about the pre-visualization for a second too, because the next thing is film a popsicle stick version. What I did is I did a storyboard. That didn’t catch little things of like how long it takes for this person to walk from here to here. I really should have done, and it sounds like Alex, you used Blender, and that was so smart.

Alexandre: I’ve had the experience on our first short of doing storyboards drawn by hand in Photoshop, but it’s real drawing, and then being very reticent to change them because it took me a long time to draw them. Whereas in this pre-visualization, you are able to change shorts very quickly, change the blocking very quickly.

Natalie: It also meant that we could edit them together. First, we scanned all our environments using an app called Polycam, and then we created this 3D model. Then Alex, he would create these little marionettes, and he would put the camera in 30 different places. I would look at him and be like, [crosstalk] this is far too many options because obviously we’re not going to have 30 setups for each of these scenes. Sometimes even within those 30 setups, I’d be like, none of these are right. We would go in, and then we would find what is the most economical and also the best way to tell this particular scene.

Alexandre: One of the things about location scouting that we found quite difficult is that you’ll, on one day and one morning, go visit five locations. You have 20 minutes. Imagine we’re shooting in here, and my immediate thought is, oh, can we get a great wide if we were up there in that corner? Oh, we’re going to have to go get a ladder. There I am with the camera, not really quite comfortable. Whereas we can come in, we can scan it, not knowing whether we’re actually going to shoot in it.

Then as we’re cleaning up the model, I’ll be underneath the table because there was strange little jagged edges. Suddenly I see, oh, there’s a short where I see just John’s foot tapping. Oh, I would never have thought to do this, but this could be an interesting way to begin the scene. There was a lot of the inspiration process happened in the pre-visualization in the same way that as you’re writing, you have those moments in the shower where inspiration arrives, like a little elf suddenly appears on your shoulder. That happens over the weeks, months, days, years of the writing process.

Then also in the pre-production process, you are open to those moments of inspiration, just like as when you’re on set, you have your storyboard. Suddenly in the camera, we had a scene where our character, Angine, is dreaming about the girl she loves, Malice. She imagines herself wearing the iconic geometric black and white dress. As she is walking towards the changing booth, as we’re shooting it on the dolly, the camera suddenly started shifting down, booming by accident, like a mistake. Everybody suddenly stopped and said, that’s the short, this mistake.

That inspiration happened by accident. It’s about being open to all those moments. Maybe the drawn storyboards can, unless you’re Pixar and you’ve had 10 years to storyboard the shit out of this thing.

John: Even Pixar, they animate those things right away. Your last point I want to focus on is to this. It’s hard not to focus on what’s not happening in a take, but I need to figure out how to see what is happening. Here’s what I take from that is that if I’m looking at the monitor, my eye is drawn to everything that’s wrong. I’m trying to fix everything that’s wrong, but it’s hard for me to say, oh, that’s actually really good because you get distracted by all of the errors and it’s so hard to focus in on what’s right.

Natalie: I think the only thing that matters personally is the actor. Everyone that is watching the film is watching it for the first time most of the time. Hopefully, your film is so good that people will watch it a second and third and fourth time. Even when you’re watching it a second time, people just have a way of zeroing in on a person’s face because that is where all of the emotion. That is what they’re reading into.

Alexandre: We have 100 million years of evolution, which involves looking at people with two eyes and a nose and trying to figure out, does this person want to eat me or make love to me? Now they’re being sincere about it. Performance is what we are dialed into. Everything else can fall away. There’s a scene in the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink where the studio boss, who has been asking him to make this boxing movie and he doesn’t know how to write it, hauls him back in.

In the previous scenes, he’d been so magnanimous and so generous and so like, oh, don’t worry about it. You’re a genius. You’re a New York author. I’m going to support you. He absolutely berates him and destroys him. During that scene, I think he has these lapels because it’s during the Second World War. His lapels are moving around like nobody’s business. It doesn’t matter. The performance is all that matters. I think Walter Murch said the same thing.

Natalie: It’s always the thing that I’m zeroing in on. It’s just like, what is happening on the actor’s face? Is it communicating what this scene is about? Because all the other stuff is noise.

Alexandre: There’s a thing that happens in filmmaking that I’ve rarely heard people talk about publicly, but I think is the most magical and beautiful part of filmmaking. We like to stand very close to the camera lens with those tiny little monitors. Whether we are really receptive to the character and the actor, whatever that thing is, that hybrid of the two, what they’re feeling at that moment. You’re watching the film on that little monitor, and suddenly you know that we have just shifted into the actual film. You just know that this is going to be projected for history.

Natalie: Hopefully.

Alexandre: Frankly, hopefully. For those 10 seconds and then it sort of like drifts away. That is one of the most almost like spiritual moments of filming that is so beautiful.

John: Yes, Drew. I think I would say is that, yes, you’re noticing all the things that aren’t working, but like Alexander is saying, there’s moments where you get that little vibe like, oh, that’s it. That’s it. Every day you’re basically chasing that. There’s times where I was like, I didn’t have that the whole time through, but I have the pieces to get me to that. Then you have to make the choice like, I guess I moved on because I’m going to have to stitch that together in editing.

Drew: I think one thing I was fighting was, so you get in the edit and then you watch a take that when you watched it, you were like, the actor’s not doing the right thing. Then you see like, oh, they’re doing something else that’s actually there’s value to that, of course. Like, oh, shit, I missed this gem that they were bringing and maybe push them away from something that could have been interesting.

John: Because you, you had a vision on your head.

Drew: I was like, yes, the character’s running in this direction. They were like, actually, if we go this path, it’s interesting.

Alexandre: Parathetically, having had not that much experience making films yet, when you’re on set and you’re doing a scene, it’s like play. It’s creative. Even though the clock is ticking and your first AD is hovering there whispering in your ear, you have to pretend like, [crosstalk] to use a cruder analogy, like making love, that you have all the time in the world and that you are completely relaxed and that you are here to play and you are here to play with one another and that your actors are creative collaborators, inspiring partners, and they’re offering ideas and you’re offering ideas back.

There are probably filmmakers who have a global totalitarian vision of what the film is and maybe like Hitchcock, they are manipulating their marionettes. I think you, Akim Trier, and all other great filmmakers have probably said it’s about this exchange and you’re playing tennis with them.

John: We have two listener questions that are surprisingly on topic here. Let’s start with this first one, who’s an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.

Drew: Unwrapped writes, “As a seasoned documentary filmmaker who earned an Oscar nomination in the mid-2010s, I’m struggling to move forward in the industry. I never secured representation after the nod because I was working comfortably in academia and assumed the nomination would keep doors open. Years later, after leaving academia, I found myself an Oscar-nominated filmmaker with a strong but limited body of work, a piece of evergreen IP, no representation, and no clear path into the current marketplace.

Is there any viable route for someone like me to secure representation in a business that now expects new heat, recent sales, or major attachments before anyone will even take a meeting, even though those require representation to achieve in the first place? I’m in a Catch-22.”

John: Here’s a person who was in your place and didn’t capitalize on the moment that things passed by. I think they need to do something new because you can’t rekindle off that older thing.

Natalie: I think you either have to create something new, like another short, unfortunately, that catches fire, or you have to write a feature that is undeniably great. I think that great scripts are hard to come by. I think that people are always searching for that next film that’s going to bring bodies into the theater.

Alexandre: I do have a theory about this topic, which is that the greatest films are made by 19-year-olds who don’t know what they’re doing and are just full of gusto and confidence and 45, 55, 65-year-olds, and I think of Milton writing Paradise Lost in his 80s when he was blind, who just at a certain point give up on trying to play the game. They’ve had enough of trying to write vampire stories because that’s fashionable. They’ve given up on trying to make a new Yellowstone.

They just write the thing that they really care about, paradoxically, that they don’t think will work in the marketplace whatsoever. Those are the kind of ideas that actually really grab people’s attention. It’s hard to say to someone to do that, but just really dig in.

Natalie: I do think it’s really important not to think about what the market wants and to make something that feels very true to yourself.

John: I would say that it feels like the doors are closed, but I think with some new thing, you have an advantage of getting those doors to open up again. If you made a short that you were submitting to things like, oh, you’re the Oscar-winning director of this other thing, they’re going to pay more attention to you, which is good, which is helpful.

Natalie: Yes, absolutely.

Drew: People love comebacks.

John: That’s also nice. Question from Leah.

Drew: Leah writes, I’m directing a short film and have a producer going out with offers to actors. Should we be attaching the script to the offer email or waiting for the agent to respond back and then sending the script to them? I’m not sure if agent emails have filters that put anything in the trash immediately, that has an attachment for someone they don’t know, or if it’s better to save time at the front end of the convo by preemptively sending the script.

John: What did you guys do for your script as you were going out after actors?

Alexandre: I think we always attached it.

Natalie: We always attached it.

Alexandre: It’s not enough time to have that back.

Natalie: The script was what attracted people. I think it’s really always important. People always ask us, how did you get this amazing cast? It’s like, we just asked. You always have to ask. You just never know.

Alexandre: In some ways, people don’t ask them and so they’re flattered. You never know. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested, and you may as well try.

John: It’s a short film also. It’s not secret information. It’s not a huge ask. If they’re curious, they’ll open up the PDF, look through it, and if it’s good, they’ll send it along. I don’t think it’s a problem.

Drew: Did you guys do cover letters to your actors?

Natalie: We did, always. I knew we do cover letters for the smallest thing. I’m like, would you like it?

[laughter]

Alexandre: No, we only wrote it to those actresses and that particular man. I think it’s always good to articulate. We’re not just going out to you because you’re well-known or because you’re a great actor. It’s because something about your work and who you are as a human being, because often, who they are as an artist, is woven into who they are as a human being. It profoundly touches us and connects with us and connects to this story. I think sincerity is a very powerful thing.

Natalie: Yes. The reasons that you want to work with someone should be very specific. We always take the time to articulate what that is and to write something that’s personal because when you’re making art, it is personal.

Alexandre: Can I ask a listener question?

Drew: Please.

[laughter]

Alexandre: I’ve always wanted to write in with a listener question, and this is much easier. Natalie and I have a four-year-old daughter. We have careers. I’m a visual artist. Natalie is an art historian. Those things have really been on the back burner whilst we were making this film, and specifically when we were making this campaign. Every week, I listen into a podcast, and I hear John and Craig talk about– I know John has Highland Software. He is making games. He’s also writing young adult fiction, and he’s also playing D&D on Sundays or-

John: Thursdays, yes.

Alexandre: On Thursdays, and also playing some video games.

John: Rarely, but occasionally, yes.

Alexandre: Then he’s also writing great feature film scripts, and then apparently also does a podcast, I’ve heard, as well. Where is this magic time machine where you are using– are your days 28, 32 hours long rather than 24?

John: No, it did– Drew, maybe you can help out.

Drew: I also have this question. I’m around John more than anyone else in my life.

John: I get a lot done, for sure. If I write two hours a day, that’s great. I get a lot done, but there’s a lot of other stuff I want to do, and I just find ways to do it. Also, I think I’m really good at recognizing the common patterns between things. The software stuff isn’t really that different than the filmmaking stuff I’m doing because I’m using Highland every day to write everything I’m doing. All the other stuff, too.

Drew: You have your to-do lists, which I think helps focus you quite a lot.

John: I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I have my daily list, which I print out a sheet that’s folded in fourths. It’s just what I’m going to do, things I need to do today. It’s a checklist of those things. There’s some stuff that’s pre-printed on there. My Duolingo and my other stuff that’s drastically done every day. I fill that list, and that’s my plan for the day. I get basically everything on that list done every day. That helps a lot. I try to make sure they are very– I’m writing the actual achievable thing that I can do.

That’s the next action aspect of it all. I make a list, and I get the things on the list done. That’s how it gets down to it. You have a four-year-old. Also, it’s recognizing that any plan fails against a child. It’s just like children are– they will take every bit of everything, but they’re also wonderful.

All right, it’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing, keeping with this whole theme, is a short film. It’s a short film called Troy by Mike Donahue. It’s from two years ago, I think. It’s a comedy about this New York couple who become obsessed with their neighbor who is a sex worker. They get too involved in his life.

It’s really well done. It’s a perfect New Yorker short film. It’s exactly what you want from it. The YouTube algorithm just served it to me randomly, so thank you. It’s just really delightfully done. Troy by Mike Donahue. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Natalie, what do you have to share with us?

Natalie: I would like to share the New York Public Library’s picture collection, which is where we begin all of our projects. Oftentimes, even before we know what a story will be or a script will be, we’ll go in. It is a physical place in the New York Public Library on the 42nd Street, 5th Avenue.

Alexandre: The Lions Building.

Natalie: The Lions Building, the iconic building. It’s a room in which there are like-

Alexandre: 2.8 million images that have been cut out of books, newspapers, magazines over the last 50, 60 years. In an age where we are experiencing AI that is regurgitating images and art back to us, making us into Studio Ghibli characters. When visual research sometimes involves just typing in a location or an idea into Google and seeing the first-hand images that come back, which are always going to be the same images. There’s something about the serendipity of going into this place and digging through images that are not online, that are sometimes misclassified, that sometimes have a different image on the backside, and being inspired.

Natalie: Oftentimes, the story will take a turn because of something that we’ve seen in the picture collection. It’s just sort of a magical place for us, so we always come back to it.

John: A question, just because Alexander just completely took over your one cool thing. You’re married, and do you set a time of like, we’re going to stop being our creative selves at a certain point and just be a married couple?

Natalie: No, it’s impossible. Yes. No, I think that’s part of the fun, too. The triumphs we celebrate together, the disappointments we also get to weather together. I can’t really imagine it any other way. It became very obvious very early on that we would make a really good duo because we have the exact same taste and we love the exact same things, but we bring totally different things to the table. It ends up– I always get sad when duos break up because once they do start to make films independently, you can actually see what they brought. You’re like, oh, but you know, it was the combination.

John: Those brothers are so good together.

[laughter]

Alexandre: Which ones? There’s been a few.

John: That’s why I pick brothers. No, not those brothers. Yes.

Natalie: Yes. I feel really grateful that we work together and there are arguments here and there.

John: There’s creative friction.

Natalie: There’s creative friction from time to time, like in any duo. At the same time, I would say 90% of the time we agree, and when we don’t, it’s the detail that no one really cares about but us. That’s part of the fun, too.

Alexandre: Writing and directing requires so many different types of skillsets. You need to be the introverted person sitting in your bathrobe, hunched over a typewriter for months on end in a Los Angeles hotel, and you also need to be the extrovert on the can-read carpet getting your photo taken, wheeling and dealing. Whilst we can have that schizophrenic quality sometimes, it’s much easier if that can be reflected in your creative partnership, obviously the writers, the directors, the producers, all bringing complementary things to the table, but always having the same idea of what film we’re making.

Natalie: I always joke that it’s easier to write together and to work together than it is to parent together. Not because we don’t get along in that either, but just because having a child is just like the ultimate work of art. I’m like, it’s an uncontrollable one with no end. Alex really treated our child for the first three months as a pre-production.

Alexandre: Yes, I’m going to do this, it’s going to be perfect.

Natalie: Then three months in, he’s like, oh my God, this never ends. He’s like, I can’t bring this energy 24-7 forever. It’s all a pleasure, and it’s all part of the magical ride that is living.

John: Alexandra, what’s your wonderful thing?

Alexandre: I did hesitate. For a long time, I thought, maybe my remarkable tablet, which means-

John: Oh, yes, I love those. Talk to me about how you use it.

Alexandre: Actually, that was my not actually wonderful thing, if you allow me. The remarkable tablet is a E-ink display that you can write on that has a very stripped-down interface. I come from the generation of people who wrote in many notebooks with a beautiful fountain pen, and then ended up carrying around seven or eight notebooks and destroying my back. I can use it for writing ideas. For school meetings, whatever it is. It has enough satisfaction. I know Craig has complained about the glassy feel of an iPad. It’s not as beautiful as a fountain pen, but it is still very satisfying.

As someone who will take notes in every meeting, sometimes I won’t even read those notes back, but the act of writing by hand helps the information go into my brain. I’m going to cheat a little bit because actually, this being script notes, I would like to bring to you a game.

John: All right, which is?

Alexandre: I don’t know if you’re familiar with this game. In very long car rides as a child, the only games that I think we had were 20 questions and what am I seeing out the window eyes wide?

John: A hand.

Alexandre: There’s a game that my friend, the novelist Benjamin Hale told me about, which he has deemed stinky pinky, but you may know under a different name. It is a game in which you put together a adjective and a noun, and the answer is something that rhymes. For example, the name of the game is, the explanation. If I was to say to you, smelly finger, you would think about it and say stinky pinky. For example, I can give you a very easy one. Overweight feline.

John: It’s a fat cat.

Alexandre: Exactly. Part of the pleasure is deciphering it, but part of the pleasure is coming up with them. For example, one of my favorites, which is a very hard one, I’ll give it to you, but with no expectation that you’ll get it, is dashing pirate.

John: All right a-

Alexandre: This is the hardest one I’ve ever come up with. It’s debonair corsair.

John: Debonair corsair. Very nice.

Alexandre: The clue, this involves French. False enemy.

John: Faux foe.

Alexandre: Yes. Isn’t this a fun game?

John: Yes, it’s a fun game.

Alexandre: The great thing is it’s great for car rides. It’s great for airports if you’re into puzzles. You can play with your children and set easier ones. You can come up with devilishly difficult ones.

John: It’s also very Craig, so he will enjoy it.

Alexandre: I think he might enjoy it. Stinky pinky.

John: That is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Thank you to John Pope, our DP for this episode. We’re trying this out on video. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books.

You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Are you guys premium subscribers?

Natalie: We are. Yes. Yes, I think so. All right.

John: You get the bonus segment, so you’re familiar with it. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on black and white. Natalie and Alexandra, thank you so much. Congratulations.

Natalie: Thank you so much. This is such a pleasure.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Your film is released in black and white. Talk to me about when the decision was to do this in black and white. Were you black and white on the set? I assume you shoot color and then color time it down to black and white. Talk to us about all the decisions to do black and white.

Natalie: It was a really early decision. Part of it was that we just didn’t have control over the store. We’re shooting between midnight and 6:00 AM. The store had unusually long hours. It would be open at 9:00 AM and close at 9:00 PM. We would rush in the doors. We would have to have an hour-long break at 3:00 AM for lunch. All of which is to say we had very little time. In the morning, everything had to go back to normal. We were always choosing very carefully where are we placing our camera. By turning the film in black and white, we were imposing our own artistic aesthetic onto the store.

Alexandre: We knew that even before we visited the location. We’d been thinking about the Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, which is mostly in black and white with some sections in color. That film has an iconic library, which I’d always been fascinated by. We’d spent a lot of time on Google checking out this library in real life. In color, I think the carpet is orange. You have all the colors of the sleeves of the books. It doesn’t have that-

John: Color’s distracting, yes.

Alexandre: It’s distracting. It doesn’t have that simplicity. We came to realize that black and white is a little bit like an x-ray. It shows you how things really are. Color distracts. That made sense in a society where the film is about observing and being observed. It’s a society in which joy and intimacy has been sucked out of the frame and where smell is actually an important component. Smell is very difficult to communicate in cinema. We thought that perhaps in the same way that when you remove one of the Senses, other sensors become heightened, that perhaps the black and white could-

Natalie: I’m not sure but it’s an idea.

Alexandre: It’s a theoretical idea.

Natalie: It also, someone commented the other day that the film is like boxes upon boxes upon boxes. By reducing the film to black and white, you really see the geometry, the lines of the store accentuated and then reverberated in the coffin, cardboard boxes.

Alexandre: Black and white is very compositional. When we draw storyboards, we draw in black and white. When I think of the end scene of our film, it involves a character of Malaise being viewed as a shadow on a wall. There’s almost a relationship to film noir there. There is something very graphical and compositional about black and white that is very attractive.

Natalie: It also allowed us to distance ourselves a little bit from our own world.

John: The time period of this. I say we’re in Paris, but it’s not our Paris. It’s not what we’re familiar with. It’s not clear exactly what era we’re in. It’s like-

Natalie: I think you said there are cell phones and iPads.

John: There are cell phones. They have technologies, but it’s clearly not the same system. The cash registers don’t work the same because it’s all about slaps. It’s a heightened world. The black and white also helps you with the sense like this is heightened. This is not realism as you’re expecting.

Alexandre: It helps with the tonal questions. Tone was very important and one of the hardest things in the writing and execution of this film. This film doesn’t take place in a world where three weeks ago there was a virus that escaped from a lab and suddenly everybody started slapping each other in the face. It’s not science fiction. It’s not what the world could become.

Tonally, it’s absurd in the sense that it’s meant to be in the sense that our world is already absurd. The things that contributed to that were, for example, the names of the characters. The characters are not named Jack and Sally. They’re called Malaise and Longy.

Natalie: This is also one of the reasons why we felt really strongly that the film should have a narrator because the narrator isn’t there to give away any information. You take out the narrator and you still understand what is happening in this world and who these characters are, but the narrator is there for the tone.

John: Make it the fable of it all.

Natalie: Yes, the fable. Exactly.

John: On set, back to the black and white, were you looking at monitors that were just black and white so you could have a sense of what that was? I feel that would be really confusing if you weren’t looking at that final.

Natalie: Yes, it was also something we were talking about with our costume designer because obviously different shades, different colors, you need that contrast and it’s not immediately obvious which colors will create that contrast.

Alexandre: To get very technical and geeky, maybe too technical and geeky, but this is a film podcast.

John: Let’s do it.

Alexandre: There is an option now to actually shoot native black and white on, say, an ARRI camera by removing the Bayer sensor colors, which gives you, I think, maybe a stop or maybe two stops of extra light and locks in your decision to shoot in black and white. However, it does make the grading a little bit more difficult and it definitely makes VFX and cleanup work more difficult because there’s less information to grab onto.

John: If you had grid screens to replace, for example, you don’t have a grid anymore.

Alexandre: Or even just tracking an object for information is very helpful.

John: You did not do that?

Natalie: No. We did shoot in color but we were always looking at a black and white. Obviously, it’s essential in the black and white dress that is at the core of the story.

Alexandre: Black and white is very much about surfaces, about textures, about reflections, about metallic. It’s about mirrors. We made a decision in the film to always have a mirror in every scene, so the camera’s either shooting into a mirror or a character’s looking at a mirror. That’s something that worked really well in black and white. It’s a very silvery kind of-.

Natalie: Then there are so many black and white films that we love. Not just older black and white films, but contemporary black and white films like the films of Pavel Pavlovsky, Ida, Cold War, and even Frances Ha, or The Lighthouse. Actually, when we made this, we didn’t realize how controversial it is to shoot in black and white. It’s one thing for a short, because obviously, the market is different, and the market barely exists for shorts. In a feature, we imagine that this film will still be in black and white, and it’s definitely something that we’re going to stick to, but it’s a hard sell because there are certain countries that will not distribute a black and white movie.

John: Frankenweenie is one of the last black and white studio films to be released, and it was a real problem. The kids, for the first time, they thought it was cool because they just had never seen black and white before.

Natalie: We like to joke because everyone always asks us, why did you make this film in black and white? We want to ask the opposite question, which is like, why did you choose color? Color is so much harder than black and white. It’s just, I don’t know, there’s something so seductive about a black and white image.

Alexandre: The rules that we’re imposing on film are kind of rules from the 70s and 80s when color film was great and black and white felt nostalgic. Anything that can make a film stand out is a plus.

John: All right. Congratulations again.

Alexandre: Thank you.

Links:

• Two People Exchanging Saliva
• Taika Waititi’s Two Cars One Night
• Andrea Arnold’s Wasp
• Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter
• Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash short film
• Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road short film
• David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out short
• Troy by Mike Donahue
• The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection
• ReMarkable tablet
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Director of Photography is Jonathan Pope.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes, Episode 721, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Let’s say you have finished writing that script that only you could write and perhaps only you could direct, but how do you learn how to direct? Today on the show, we’ll talk with the writer, director, and star of the much-acclaimed film, Sorry, Baby, about their journey behind the lens, which landed them best directorial debut by the National Board of Review and a lot of other awards attention. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Eva Victor.

Eva Victor: Oh, thank you for having me. You know what? You guys have gotten me through some interesting, difficult days. Your voices are very comforting to me. It’s interesting to see your faces.

John: Weird, huh?

Eva: I totally attribute faces to voices, and it’s a very surreal moment. Thank you for this. I’m excited to be here.

Craig: It’s great having you. I’m sorry if we are disturbing you, if the cognitive dissonance is freaking you out.

Eva: Exactly. Thank you for saying that.

Craig: Yes. I want you to feel okay about this, but you might not. I get that. I remember the first time when I was a kid, I would listen to Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea what Howard Stern looked like. Then they started putting up ads for Howard Stern around the subways and stuff. I was like, “What?”

Eva: That’s a particularly surprising one.

Craig: Yes. That was really shocking. Well, Eva, I have a little bit of like, okay, you were comforting me, too, because even though I don’t spend a lot of time being cool and looking at things that other people are looking at, for some reason, back when you were doing videos, I guess on YouTube, but maybe there was something else, I saw you did one where you’re talking to your imaginary or potentially real offscreen boyfriend, “Babe,” about the heterosexual pride parade. I loved it so much, and it sent me down a whole rabbit hole of all of your videos, and I just thought you were hysterical. It’s so funny.

I have to say, not surprised at all that somebody as funny as you has made a movie like this because I think funny people are better at drama than drama people.

Eva: You know what? That is so cool. The journey of the year has been accepting that I did make videos in the past. I think I was-

Craig: You’re awesome.

Eva: At that moment, it felt really right for that to be what I was talking about. Looking back, I’m like, well, that day that video made sense, but now it’s random, but also have to give it up for whatever journey your journey is. It’s your journey, and that’s okay.

Craig: Tell me about it.

Eva: I’ve come to terms with the fact that there were skills built there. One of the main ones is moving through humiliation and putting yourself out there and feeling devastated by yourself to make something happen, and the pain of not doing something is greater than the pain of doing something and feeling ashamed.

Craig: Sure. Well, that’s what we do, and I like the way you phrase that. The pain of not doing things is worse than the pain of doing them, but the point is pain. Welcome to the show.

Eva: Welcome to the show, okay.

John: I wanted to save talking about short-form video to the bonus segment because we had Quinta Brunson on the show, and she came up at a BuzzFeed, and you were doing Comedy Central, and she learned so many crucial skills there. I want to talk about what skills transfer, what skills don’t transfer, and what you learn from that, but before we get that, we’re obviously going to talk about your film. I also want to answer some listener questions on talking to actors, writing exercises, when to share the script with people.

I also want to confess that the poster for your film is great. It’s you holding a cat, and so I assumed for months before I watched the film that, oh, the baby is the cat, that she’s talking to the cat, and the spoiler is that it’s not about the cat. It’s not about the cat. The cat is a small part of the movie, the adorable part of the movie, but not a large part of the movie.

Eva: I know, and the poster conversation was one of the more intense parts of making, because I went in this huge circle, and the main issue was trying to communicate a tonal movement through an image, and all the images that I was compelled by were sentimental value. I was like, oh my God, that’s the best version of a dramatic poster, and that’s what, if we had made a drama, simply a drama, it should have been– It was interesting, after having worked on posters, to be like, “This is the best image for the film.” That said, it is deceptive, and then I got a lot of feedback that people were like, “I can’t watch because the cat dies,” and I was like, “Oh my God, no.”

John: Again, another spoiler, the cat does not die. The cat thrives in the film.

Eva: That’s the only thing that does okay.

Craig: The cat starts healthy and just gets healthier?

Eva: No, grows up. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect cat.

John: Indeed. There’s another famous screenwriting book called Save the Cat, which apparently your film follows, but we have our own script notes book that’s out there in the world, and we have two little bits of follow-up on that before we get into the meat of the episode.

Eva: Whoa, look.

John: What, wait, what? Oh my God, there it is.

Craig: She’s got it in front of her. Oh my God, incredible.

Eva: Because you know what? I really need it. I’m a little bit through it, but I have to pause because it got to, it called me out a little too much, and I need to recuperate.

John: Not by name, but just by implication.

Eva: It’s like, “Eva, you are a bad writer in it.” I was like, “Oh.”

John: Oh my God. We almost took that one out and it almost dropped in the line edits, but you know what?

Craig: We figured it would be motivating. John, what do we– oh, we have some follow-up from Liz.

John: Drew has the flu, so he’s on the call, but he’s a rough voice. Craig, do you want to be Liz in the script notes book?

Craig: Sure, I’ll be Liz. Liz writes, “I bought the script notes book for my husband Nick, a longtime listener, for Christmas. I’m an author and through a series of unexpected events, ended up in a pitch meeting for a script this week, my very first time pitching a script. My husband suggested I read the pitching chapter in the book. I did, and the advice in there was such a huge help. The meeting was a big success, so thank you so much for writing this book.” That is so nice, it’s almost too nice.

John: Yes, it’s really nice.

Eva: Tell me the me- where’s the sad part?

Craig: There’s no conflict.

Eva: Where’s the underdog? Jeez, [unintelligible 00:06:32] must be nice.

Craig: Right. I kept waiting for my husband. Once I heard my husband suggest it, I thought, oh, this is going to lead to we’re getting a divorce, but-

Eva: Story-wise, interesting, yes.

Craig: Unfortunately for us, Liz’s life is nearly perfect.

Eva: Liz, I’m so happy for you, but you are incredibly unreadable, but congratulations.

Craig: Liz and her perfect husband Nick. Well, thank you. It is very nice. I’m glad. Listen, that was the point, Liz, was that we would help people. It’s nice to see that it’s working in the world.

Eva: You know what? The paper is good paper for a book that’s more– because it’s very paper-paper. It’s not glossy. It gives the energy of more of a manual that you can look to where you need to. That, to me, the paper makes the stakes approachable. It makes the book approachable to me. I thought that was very thoughtful. Orange is amazing, so you guys nailed it with that. The content of the book is amazing too, but also the look and the feel is really powerful.

John: All right, so that is a review from Eva Victor, acclaimed filmmaker.

Craig: That’s pretty great.

John: A lot of people have been leaving reviews online, which is great also because it helps people find the book. Thank you for leaving them on Amazon or Goodreads. I want to single out one reader who gave us only four stars. Fine, you can give us four stars.

Craig: That’s good. It’s four out of five. That’s great.

John: Yes, but most people are five stars. Four, it pulls down our average when someone gives us four stars rather than five stars, which is fine. This man wrote, “2,105 words on the Scriptnotes’ book.”

Craig: What?

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes too so people can read through it because it’s really impressively written. It’s a guy, Dimitri Papadimitropoulos.

Craig: His name is 2,105 words.

John: It’s incredible. What I like so much about his review, he says, “The book’s generosity is not that it is kind, though it often is, but that it treats the reader as an adult, someone who can tolerate complexity, contradiction, and the unglamorous truth that artistry is frequently indistinguishable from persistence.

Eva: That’s a five-star review to me. I don’t know where that–

Craig: It feels like it’s a six-star, and he might have tried to go to six, but it just busted him down to four.

Eva: That’s okay.

Craig: That’s common.

John: Eva, I thought that was a good jumping-off point to talk about artistry frequently is indistinguishable from persistence because that is the thing about filmmaking is that you say, “Oh my God, that was an amazing movie,” and it’s like, “Yes, but it wasn’t just brilliant because it was brilliant because the person had this great idea, it was so much hard work day after day, year after year to get things done.”

I think it’s the thing we talk about a lot on the show, but as I went through my career and as I’ve met and worked with some great directors, it’s just been always such a revelation. It’s like, “Oh, you’re just working really hard.” I think it’s a thing that’s just underappreciated, especially as we get into sometimes award seasons and you think, “Oh my God, this is the person is a genius, that person is a genius.” It’s like, “No, they’re just working really hard.” There’s luck and there’s all these things. There is talent, but it’s all these things.

I want to maybe frame some of our conversation with you around this because you came up, you have some experience, but as I’m reading through the press notes on this, you wrote the script not even necessarily intending to direct it. Can you talk us through the journey to this is a script and now this is a script I’m going to try to direct?

Eva: Yes, totally. I think that theme is very relevant for me. I feel like there was a moment that I realized my career would never be made by somebody else. It picked me up out of oblivion and gave me an amazing role that was the big role for my– There was this realization of you are the one who has to get you where you want to go. I have always been like, “Well, I’m not going to fail because I don’t work hard. I’m going to fail because I’m missing some intrinsic quality that people have.” I was like, “It’s never going to be because I don’t put in the hours.”

That discipline has kept me from I think mentally losing my mind. It’s like, “Well, what can’t I control?” I can write more. I can study. I can watch films. I can get my day job to a place where I’m making enough so I have these hours. I had a development deal with the studio that happened because of my internet videos. That was a very difficult experience because I was turning in page one drafts for, honestly, years thinking that if I just wrote the perfect draft, then I would get the momentum and attention from the people I needed to make that film happen but that didn’t come. That made me lose my goddamn mind. It made me really internalize something about I am fraudulent, I can’t do this, I’m not meant to write.

Then I wrote scripts for a body horror thing that didn’t make sense, but it had a lot of heart. I sent that around to people through my agents at the time. My rejections were very impersonal nos. The one person I’d met before I sent this script to read it and said, no, but the rejection letter meant everything, was Pastel, Barry Jenkins company. When I met Barry, he was like, “Your videos…” which I was even at that point ashamed of or whatever. He was like, “It’s filmmaking. It’s just not the way that other people do it. It’s a small version, but you are directing this. You’re making decisions about how people look, where the camera’s going, and what people are saying.”

I think that gave me this optimism or like, “Oh, man, someone sees the hard work behind these.” Then when I sent them the script, they sent a very generous no and made this really beautiful letter about the script and what was valuable about it emotionally. Then why they weren’t the right partners for it. That was weirdly like a letter that I read and cried out of like, “Oh, but there are people out there who are understanding.”

Then I had been, over the course of five years or so, been stewing on the idea for Sorry, Baby, but was like, “Man, the words, if I start writing them down too soon just for this particular project, I’m going to get too depressed about how bad it is compared to what the story means to me.” It took me a really long time to piece together the writing of it. Then finally, I sat myself down in a cabin in Maine and was like, “It’s time. You’re writing this.” I wrote it and sent it to Pastel again because I was like, “They get me.” They were like, “Okay, what do you dream of for this?” I was like, “Well, I’m going to act in it…” hoping that–

John: I want to clarify, at this point, you are an actor who’s been cast in things independently because you have acting credits. It’s not crazy to think that you’re going to be acting.

Eva: Right. It’s not crazy, but it is a different thing.

Craig: Yes, but there’s that concern that, oh, well, if we had Jennifer Lawrence, then maybe we would get the blah, blah, blah.” You’re like, “No, it’s going to be me.”

Eva: It was very clear that when I’m the lead actor, that means that the film is this big.

Craig: This big. [chuckles]

Eva: I was like, “I’m willing to sacrifice whatever thing that is.”

John: Eva, can I ask you about the script that you sent to Pastel? Does it closely resemble the movie that Ashley has made? The footprint of the film is very small. It’s a cabin in the woods and while the times are shifting around it, the actual literal geography it’s inhabiting is very small. Was it always that way?

Eva: Yes, it was always that small. It’s very similar to the script that we shot. There are some changes. Mainly, I did a little work with Pastel around the character of Lydia. Then once we got Naomi, that opened it up for me of how this person talks. There were a few scenes that we adjusted the dialogue. I have not had this sense, and I don’t know if I will, how little we had to work on the scripts. What do you think?

Craig: I think you worked on the script a lot. I think that what people sometimes think is that all the work on the script happens after the “first draft,” which is never really a first draft. Some people do write first drafts, but a lot of people hand a script over that they have been– you’ve been thinking about it for years. Then when you went to your Stephen King cabin, what came out was something that was already thought through. There was an enormous amount of intention and structure and care and thought.

I suspect, having seen the movie and having seen the way you directed it, that you had already directed the movie in your head. You saw it. You saw it, you heard it, you felt it, you smelled it. It’s all there. It’s okay for that work to happen earlier. I think it’s the best thing. I think it’s why people say yes. There’s a certain kind of movie that you can write that’s about, oh my God, the aliens are crashing to the moon, and you can figure that shit out as you go. For this, what I was so impressed by was how seamless the writing and the direction was. You are a walking billboard for what I think should be the gold standard for how we make feature films, a writer-director.

I just feel like even though there’s a conspiracy to convince all of us that somehow directing is this unattainable thing as opposed to writing, which we can all do, no. No, it’s not. You’re doing it already.

Eva: There is so many layers of the reasons why I didn’t think I would want to direct it that all have to do with not understanding what the job is and you can learn things to do a job. That you’re not born with information, even though it feels like you are. The college I went to, I never had any interest in directing. It was mostly plays where I went. I had no interest because I was like, “Well, this kind of guy does that and that kind of looks this way and talks this way. I don’t want to be in charge like that because I’m not compelled to be him.” It’s like, “Oh, I have my own way of doing that.”

It took a bit of soul searching to realize, oh my God, I’m desperate to direct this. I know how it looks and feels. I need to hire geniuses around me to help me find the words for visual language. It was a lot of, I don’t know, but I want to do it. I think I don’t know is so awesome.

Craig: Best words.

Eva: You’re allowed to make your first movie. You’re allowed to be doing something for the first time because you have to do it. I really fell in love with also– What was reassuring to me was the process of collecting images and moments and pieces, almost like a little scrapbook of information was a very enjoyable private process of building a world. I felt, as the work of director unfolded and I discovered what it was as I was doing it, each part of it felt like a miracle.

At one point in the edit, I was like, “Thank fucking God I like this and it’s [crosstalk].” I love it and I need it. Thank God because otherwise, why would you ever put yourself through this deeply intense experience that lasts forever?

Craig: It lasts forever and every day lasts forever, but also is way too short. It’s this nightmare of time that is never enough and is yet too much. I just feel like you’ve put your finger on something incredibly important, which is we all have a sense, whether we’ve learned it from school or from culture of the kind of person director should be. A kind of person a director should be is a man and he is a big– He’s Michael Bay. Basically, in my mind, it’s–

John: A bit of that personality.

Craig: It’s Michael Bay and I am not Michael Bay. I will never be Michael Bay. I don’t have whatever that is. That’s not me or Ridley Scott. I’m also not that. I am an ink-stained wretch, but ink-stained wretches are also wonderful directors. I love that you overcame the internalized image of what is because I honestly think that’s the thing that hurts us the most is we just start with a belief that we’re not.

Eva: Yes. Trust me, now it’s a different issue, but that one I overcame. I’m not to get through that, but I’m like, now it’s the first, honestly, if we’re going–

Craig: Please.

Eva: Now, because the writing of this film, now my experience of it is nostalgia for a time when I now remember it as flow. I don’t think it was. I toiled over that script. It was just I sent it when I was done with it. Now I’m like, “Oh, yes, directing, whatever, but writing, you guys, this needs oil. This is squeaky or something because it’s been so long. Now there’s eyes on me.” I thought the most painful thing was not having–

Craig: It’s the worst thing.

Eva: It’s the worst. Then this is also like, yes. I’m like, “Okay, now you’re trying to kill me by celebrating my film?”

John: How dare you say yes?

Eva: Well, just be honest, but also be nice. I’ve made a film. I only know how to make that film. It’s a mind fuck.

Craig: It is.

John: Can we rewind and talk about how you learned to make that film? That’s what’s so useful for so many of our listeners, is that you have a script and you have people say like, “We agree you should direct this. Now learn how to direct a film.” What did you assign yourself? What did other people send you to look at? What’s the process?

Eva: You know what? Yes. This I would love to talk about. First off was like, okay, you didn’t go to film school, so there’s a lot of fraudulence around not knowing things about film. I learned lenses will be good. Encyclopedic, ordering the books from film school, reading the books from film school. Research that was very dry, but I was like, “Let’s just read this. Let’s put post-its through it.” Quickly realized like, “Okay, this is simply information that actually I need.” It was a process of constantly being like, “Okay, that fills that need. Now what is missing still?” Then it became, I need to watch a million movies. I’d been watching movies, which is why I wrote a movie, but I was like, “I need to watch films. Then as I’m watching them, not fall into watching them, instead watch them.”

John: Look at them, study them, pull them apart. See what they’re doing.

Eva: Exactly. I became very into backwards shot listing films. A photo of every setup and blending them up and understanding when we return to the same set, it was very mathematical. When are we returning to the same setup? How long are we on Laura Dern’s face and Certain Women before we get to his face? Why? I became more aware of my taste. I was like, “Oh, I like the economy of not moving until we have to.” I became aware of what the film was needing from a visual standpoint.

I was backwards shot listing and would write out the shot list. Obviously, it’s not a complete picture because you never know what someone left out, but you get a sense of how cohesive vocabulary is built in a film. Certain Women was a really helpful one for me because that is three parts. There was chapters to that film and they’re related. How do you make three women who are strangers become related?

Then I created a shot list for my film, which instead of shot listing, because that felt random, I drew storyboards of everything. By the way, I had ample time. Man, fill your day with some shit to do because no one is knocking right now. We were just taking our time. It was drawing everything and every frame of the film. You could go through the storyboard and watch the film, which some of the shots are really what is in the storyboard. Then obviously, some very important changes were made in collaboration with my DP, Mia, who making decisions for good reasons later on. It was like an instinctual storyboard. What is the first thing that feels right?

Then I shadowed my friend Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow. I was like, “Oh, I’m ready.” I’m not ready, but I’m ready to start being ready. I’d been on set as an actor, but on set as an actor, it’s like, “Come in. Do you need water? Do you need Diet Coke? You’re good for the day. Good job.” I find acting very stressful in moments, especially when you’re there for some time, but not the whole time because it’s so vulnerable, but it is a different experience of things are hidden from you to protect you, which I feel complicated about, but whatever. Some things are just not your job to know.

When you’re on set sitting behind a director with nothing to do on the set besides watch that person, you realize how different people advocate for their film and the different styles of how people advocate, but also how a film is built moment to moment. It’s non-miraculous. It’s like by the end of the shoot, you have the pieces to go to the kitchen. Mixing metaphors is okay, I guess. That was my stuff. Then what you do is you take meetings with different heads of department, and through, they made a lookbook. Actually, I’m going to make a lookbook in return, and then you have a conversation with Image, and then you become specific.

The cool thing about directing a film is you make decisions every day over time. The film is built over time, and that was reassuring to me too because at first you’re alone, but then you bring people in, and it’s not just yours. That’s a relief really to, okay, you got that character thing, fucking God, that’s yours. Say it how you want to say it.

Craig: I think that what you just said from start to finish is, I’m going to use the word probably because I want to be kind and charitable to film schools, it is probably worth more than four years of film school. What you just laid out there, in part because you just belied the need for film school. You taught yourself what you needed to learn. I love that. I went through the same thing because I didn’t go to film school. There’s a special technical film school for directing, which you didn’t go to, and I didn’t go to, but we’re smart. We read stuff quickly and learned things quickly.

The thing about lenses, I don’t need a semester on lenses. I need 30 minutes on lenses to get the basic breakdown of it, and then I need to be on set and go, “Can we try something longer?” The cinematographer’s like, “Yes, you know what? 50. That’s cool.” Then you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s the thing.” You start to get muscle memory. All of these things you laid out, the way you storyboarded, the way you broke things down, reverse-

John: Reverse shotless thing is so crucial.

Craig: -shotless thing is genius. That’s genius.

John: I want to just pause for a second because people may not quite know what we’re describing. You’re watching a scene in a movie, and you can figure out, okay, well, we are a close-up of her, but there’s also a two-shot and there seems to be a wider shot, and so you can basically figure out, what were the actual shots they had on the day to make that thing? That was the plan going into it, but then you can also look at, how did they actually use it? When did they move into coverage? When did they stay wide? All the information is right there. You can see it because it’s in the film, and that is so useful.

Part of this is reminding me of, I don’t know, people who watch Drag Race. There’s bedroom queens who basically, who do really good drag at home, and they’re on Instagram. There’s also obviously queens who need to go out and actually perform in front of other people. That to me is the transition from you shotlessing at home and then going to a set and seeing Jane direct it on the set for her movie because you are watching like, “Oh, this is what it’s actually really like. This is what the actual decisions look like in the field where it can’t be perfected on Instagram.” You’re making choices moment by moment.

I’m sure you found this, and Craig, I know you’ve encountered this. When you are on a set and it’s not your movie. You’re still watching the monitor, and you have so many opinions. It’s like, “I can’t believe we’re moving on. There’s no way that’s going to cut right. That’s not what it is.” You recognize, no, but the director knows what they need. They know that, okay, between these two things, they know what’s important.

Craig: Sometimes.

John: Sometimes. Craig’s also a show writer who obviously does have control of a film.

Craig: Every now and again, they go, “Okay, we’re moving on.” I go, “No, we’re not.”

John: No, we’re not.

Eva: Declaring we’re moving on is like, well, that’s crazy. You can’t really go back on moving on. Okay, you have to be sure.

Craig: My thing on moving on is before I move on, I check with the tent. Who’s in the tent? My script supervisor is in the tent, and a producer is in the tent. My assistant is in the tent, people who have been watching this, and I’m like, “Are we feeling okay about this? We’re good? Do you think we got it? We got it? We got it. I feel like we got it. Okay, moving on.”

You’re absolutely right. It’s like an abandonment, and it’s the worst part of directing is that you have to do more than you have time to do so you move at such speed, but you get better as you go. You are, I assume, a much better director week– I don’t know how many weeks you shot for. Let’s say five, four?

Eva: 24 days.

Craig: Five weeks. Week five, you were a better director than week one, almost certainly.

Eva: Definitely. You know what? You don’t really self-reflect like that but then Naomi was there the whole time. She was there the first day, and she was there the second to last day. She was like, “Bitch, what the hell?” She was so proud of me. I was like, “Realize, so true.” You know what? There was actually something else I wanted to add, which was a really pivotal part of my building the film two years, was we did shoot two scenes from the film in a very small– Me and my DP and a group of my DP’s students at NYU came to shoot in an Airbnb in New York where we both lived two scenes, and the prompt for my producers who produced it and it was a practice setting, the prompt was, two scenes that scare you.

I did a scene that was terrifying for me to direct because I didn’t understand the mechanics of the movement of the people, a lot of movement. Then the other one was as an actor, this scene in the bathtub where Agnes tells Woody what happened.

John: It’s a Sundance Labs thing. That’s exactly what you do.

Eva: Exactly. Then I worked with an editor, Kate Broca, who that was the moment when I was like, “Oh, you cannot cut from a Y to a Y.”

Craig: Ah, love this.

Eva: I’m like, “Oh, man, what a master class in failure and a good [unintelligible 00:30:51]. I didn’t really realize it was a test, but then there was this moment when they were like, “What would you have changed about how you shot it?” That was the moment when they were like, “Okay, yes, you understand what you would change.” Also shadowing a set is very interesting because I shadowed a couple days on Billions, the show that I was on, just to watch those directors. The budget of that shoot is one real particular thing. The vocabulary of the show is very heavily covered. We go over every shoulder, clean, we do everything.

Then Jane’s film was a particular budget that was much larger than the budget I was going to have but to go backwards, to get a sense of scope and how much can you get done in a day when you have more days, when you have less days, when you have an actor who can only be there three days. Just to get a sense of a few different things, to understand that things on your set will be particular to your set.

Craig: I think you did a fantastic job. It’s funny, I was watching through and I was noticing, first of all, I have a particular– It’s just taste. It’s not that I don’t like when people move cameras around. I just don’t like it when cameras move around for no fucking reason. I like a camera to be still and I like the people to move around. I loved how still it was so frequently.

I noted as I was watching how many scenes didn’t really seem to need coverage. You had a nice two-shot and it worked that way. That’s how the character were interacting and it was great. The scene that I was like, there’s one that was probably tricky, was when Decker and all of his grad students are around a table. Shooting around a table is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare that nobody– I’d rather shoot a car chase than a scene with that many people around a table.

Eva: That makes me feel better because I’m like, “How do you fucking shoot a car chase?” Would never break that–

Craig: It turns out it’s because you can edit the shit out of car chases, but the eye lines around a table, that’s nightmare stuff for me. You did it really well.

Eva: Thank you. There are a few mistakes in the film, continuity issues, and one of them is in that scene, I’ll never say what it is. Okay, you just have to live with the fact that happened. I think, honestly, Billions prepared me for that.

Also, so much of understanding a scene is who is the scene about and his special attention to Agnes. It’s like, that helps. That helps these boys can be in a two-shot, a three-shot, and they will be cut to highlight that this is less vulnerable.

Craig: Then you got to explain that to them. Sometimes actors don’t like that.

Eva: No. They’re my close friends, so they understand.

Craig: It’s a tricky one. You’re like, “No, I actually think that you guys come through better in this.” [crosstalk]

John: Just so we can see the chemistry between the two of you.

Eva: When I’m in a movie, i.e. one other time besides this, now there’s no bullshit of I know I’m a character. If I’m next to someone who is on set every day and I’m here three days, I get it. I’m here to get you here. It’s interesting. It’s interesting.

John: Eva, you’ve perfectly set up a question we have from Anne. She writes, “How should writers talk to actors? Specifically, do you tell them about their function within a script, or do you just talk about the human being their character is?” It’s that balance between this is the character, this is who you are, the world is that, and functionally, this is what I need you to do. This is your job at this scene. What’s your instinct there? How you talk to actors?

Eva: Depends on the actor. I feel like I’ve now been in enough rooms where people don’t know I’m an actor or they forget. I hear people talking about actors, “Be careful.” I don’t talk about actors like that. I really think what they do is psychotically intense and next-level vulnerable. When I wrote Sorry, Baby, every character I wrote as if I got to play the character. I was like, “You’re going to say something I like. I want the words to be good because what if I do it?” It was very important to me that every actor was who they were in the film. I obviously was a part of every casting decision, but I’m like, “The world is as important as the people who lead it.”

I don’t know, talking to actors, you get a sense of how an actor wants to be treated. Some actors want to be handed off the role, and that I love to do. I love to be like, “You’re the expert now, go fly, you know more than me.” Often actors who are writers too are like, “I get who I am in this.” It was interesting because Naomi is completely brilliant. We never rehearsed. She really wanted to just do it. She’s so connected.

It was a very different process than, for instance, Lucas Hedges, who is brilliant as well, equally brilliant. We rehearsed for weeks beforehand. It was amazing to work with actors who I was learning from who were more seasoned than me because I was like, “Oh, every actor, their soul is how they do things.” It’s great if an actor knows themselves well enough to say, this is how I like to be treated.

John: Let’s go back the other way then. You’ve cast an actor in a role. What is that conversation like? If you’re the director, how do you have that conversation about let’s talk about how you like to work? Any tips on how to have that conversation with an actor?

Eva: My thing was always offering up meetings, calls, rehearsals, and going off of how they responded to that and what they needed for their process. My process as an actor was- I worked with Rebecca Dealy, who is an amazing casting director and also an acting coach, and so my process was also about building my character privately- I think offering everything that anyone could want and then respecting whatever they need.

Craig: That’s a great way of thinking about it because as much as I understand the impulse here that Anne has, which is tell me how to talk to actors or should we give actors this information? They’re all different. Big surprise. They’re all different. One thing that one actor craves is the thing that another actor will throw an absolute fit over. Learning that is easier for some people. It’s probably easier for you, Eva, than it is for me. I’m a little dense. It takes me some time sometimes to realize, oh, this person doesn’t need that and this person does need that. Just because this person needs it doesn’t mean that person.

It takes me a little bit of time. I’m not instant with it. I let them know when I start. I’m like, “Feel free to tell me, hey, this would help, this would not help.” Then my attitude is, I’m here to get the best performance out of you. Help me help you. What do you need?

Eva: There is, I discovered, a lot of value in acting across from your actor because it’s like you’re not coming down from on high with a note. I don’t really believe in the idea of a note. Anytime a director has given me a note– I like the idea more that a director delivers a secret or an idea or just that like, “What if she had this thought?” To me, there’s an immediate trust that happens if you’re in a scene with someone of, I have to have your back and you have to have my back. When I’m acting with you, I can’t judge your performance, [unintelligible 00:39:05] whatever you say. If I have an idea of what you could do differently, I’m going to give you something different, which is–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Eva: It’s less condescending of, I have an answer. It’s more like, “What if I said it like this? What happens with you?”

Craig: You direct them by altering your performance.

Eva: Not in secret.

Craig: No. You let them know. That’s amazing. It’s funny. I do wish they were like– because I want to be a good boy. Really, more than anything, I don’t want actors to feel like, I don’t know, I don’t want them walking away going, “He’s just difficult today.” I want to do right by them, but sometimes it’s impossible.

John: Craig, you’re trying to balance, you want their performance to be fantastic and you also have to look at the entire scene and entire story, everything around it. That’s the challenge, is you’re always balancing all these different competing desires.

Craig: I’m not acting.

Eva: Every day on set, you have to make a calculation of like, “Okay, if I give this person this thing, then this is taken from this person.” If I go late this day to make sure I know I have it, but does this actor need to feel like they have it, that will report me because it’s their first day, because this scene is vulnerable or whatever. That calculation of like, “Okay, we are going into overtime and because I haven’t done that, I can do that this day,” constant calculations of what is best for the film. Having to kill your darlings even of like, that person will not be happy with me tomorrow, but I won’t go late tomorrow. It’s a busy mind.

Craig: Oh, man, is it ever. It’s like your busy mind has made something absolutely beautiful. I really do appreciate it. I know we have more questions, but this isn’t a question. This is for me. It’s just a statement. What I love so much about what you did was you made a movie about relationships and half of the movie, and I’m just guessing, but half of the movie by weight is you alone, and it’s still about relationships. It’s always, there’s always a ghost in the room with you. It’s incredible how dialed in you are to the only thing I care about in stories which is relationships, and just so well done, just so well done.

Eva: Thank you so much. There are so many ghosts that are on the cutting room floor that in the script, I was like, “Yes, that is my favorite thing in the script that just once the film starts to become–”

John: It tells you what it wants to be. I was looking through the script yesterday and I noticed like, “Oh, these are whole scenes that are in the movie,” and basically what you cut were things that broke out of your POV. The script had scenes that did not have you driving the scene, and then those scenes, they didn’t last in the movie, and that’s not surprising, and I’m sure they were delightful. I’m sure they’re really funny, but the things that were there, they weren’t absolutely necessary, and therefore they fall out.

You had the first scene at a sandwich shop. You had two guys talking about paninis. You had an Agnes and Natasha scene. You had two jurors talking. They’re all funny and great, and I could totally imagine why they were in the script, and I can completely see why they weren’t in the finished movie, and that’s also directing.

Eva: If you had told me we were cutting those scenes, I would have been like, “Let’s just not fuck each other.”

Craig: That’s the fun part. You don’t know.

Eva: It’s crazy, and it makes me so relieved that we shot more than we needed. I mean, I know obviously there are sacrifices that have to be made when you have more pages. It just took everything, but honestly, strategically, those scenes for me, the way I felt about them in the script were like, “I’m deliberately giving my audience intermissions, energetically intense stuff,” but then it’s like, right, an intermission makes tension fall through the floor, so why would you ever do that?

I was like, I didn’t understand that they would change the pace of the film and would be so jarring that whatever tonal shifting I was trying to do that kept people locked in, there was a jolt that was too jolty and would make no one trust me with the other transitions of tone.

Craig: Yes, people lose confidence.

John: Absolutely. Well, I’m really happy that the script you’re putting out there shows the scenes in there because it’s such a good lesson for like, you can see like, oh, this is the shape of a movie before it films, and that this is the shape of a film afterwards, and you discover things along the way. My question is, how early did you know those scenes were dropping out? Was it after the first assembly where like, “Oh,” or did it take a while to figure out that those were things that weren’t helping you out?

Eva: I went through the mental intensity of shooting the film mainly happened in the edit where I was finally seeing myself on screen and the energy of the film wasn’t diluted by cut, and then you shoot a piece at a time, but when you watch it, you’re like, “Oh my God, this is a sad movie.” I was surprised somehow that it was a sad movie and I had to [unintelligible 00:44:19]. Take a second, I really fought for the sandwich scenes, but the second that, for instance, there was a first scene with John Carroll Lynch, and then there’s a panic attack scene, and the second, that first scene–

John: It’s so good. The second scene is so good.

Eva: The second scene becomes-

John: Important.

Eva: -completely different. What that scene did in the film was it gave us too much information about Agnes being mentally unwell that it’s math. It’s constant calibration, constant, “Well, yes, what if we try?” It’s like puzzle making, and you just have to try everything because you are going to get basically questioned by everybody on why each thing, and you can only choose it if you know what it is.

Craig: You have to be able to justify it. Everything does impact everything. It’s like making a jigsaw puzzle, but when you put one piece down, the colors change on the other pieces. It’s a really weird thing to do, and it is hard to say to a great actor like, “Oh, by the way, we left one of your–” People have left scenes with Meryl Streep on the cutting room floor. You just have to do it sometimes because you find what you needed, and everything was a theory. The fact that your theory worked out 98% of the time is insane. It’s miraculous.

Eva: Really wonderful actors, they know that the movie working makes their scenes work. In the Natasha scene that got cut, when I told Kelly, who plays Natasha, “We cut this one scene,” and she was like, “Yes, that makes sense. It was the same scene as a scene before.” I was like, “Oh, sweet, Kelly, nice to know.” I was just like, “Oh, yes, people get it.” People understand that what that does for something else is more.

John is able to be proud of the film because of how his character experienced as a breath of fresh air, completely new energy, 75% of the way through the film. There’s real power in that. Yes, it’s nice when actors get why. I wish every script that you could read was a shooting script. My God, would that be– That is the one cool thing about when you get to know people. There’s a lot of cool things about getting to know people who do this, but one of them is you can make them send you shooting scripts instead of–

John: The sanitized, yes.

Eva: I’m just like, “This is a key to the kingdom,” which I feel like should be more possible.

Craig: Yes, I agree with you. It’s also comforting to see how a great movie had a shooting script that was 90% correct.

John: I think we’ve actually achieved our goal and our thesis, which is basically that it’s not brilliance, it’s actually mostly just hard work. You can’t distinguish and differentiate between the two of them. This conversation about like, “Oh, no, it was just really hard work.” Yes, inspiration and incredibly talented people, but also hard work and constant questioning of, “Wait, am I actually doing this right?” Eva, thank you so much for this education.

Eva: I have a question for you guys. You have both had psychotically successful things. I am curious about your return to the page. Maybe this isn’t your experience, but I am–

Craig: I’m scared.

Eva: -conflicting that– Well, beyond scared. I think reconciling with the fact that each process is humblingly different than another process and work in a new way that you have to relearn, but coming off of attention.

Craig: Attention is the poison, so you can’t. In my experience, when attention is as focused and relentless as it is on something like you and your movie during award season, it is poison in your veins. It’s a beautiful thing, of course. It’s a sign that people connected and loved what you did, but attention causes pain and you need to be alone to write. I really believe that. I don’t think you can write in a room with glass windows and everybody staring at you. You need a little time. You need a little time to flush it out.

I call it going down the well. That’s what Bella Ramsey and I call it, going down the well. You’re going to go down the well and you’re going to be at the bottom of a well for a bit. People are going to wonder, why are you at the bottom of a well? You should be on top of the world. You’re like, “I’m crying a lot.” They don’t understand, but that’s okay. Then the attention, this is the best part.

Eva: Goes away.

Craig: I mean, oh my God. You think it won’t because they just can’t take their eyes off of you and then it’s gone. Then you’re like, “Oh, thank God.” Then, of course, later you’re like, “Oh, no, it’s going to come back.” That’s a different dread. My advice is give yourself a little bit of time.

Eva: Thank you for saying that. As you’re saying that, there was this journey. I was making these videos. It was daily attention on the videos. The turnaround was so psychotic. DMs from people that would break my mind. What had to happen was I stopped. I had Cold Turkey run away for a few years and decide who am I, what is going on, what do I want to write, what do I care about, and it’s like, “Oh my God.” I totally did that and I needed so much silence. Hearing you say that, I’m like, “Oh shit, I actually know about that and that’s amazing.” It’s a different thing, but it is this crazy thing.

John: I would also say that I suspect your curiosity will overcome your fear at a certain point because your curiosity is, as I’m sure driving you through a lot, there’s things you want to explore and do. Just the same way you were intentional about thinking about how you want to direct, you’re going to be intentional about thinking about what do I want to do now? What is interesting to me? What is a thing I want to tackle? You’ll find a clever way to do it.

It could be a new original story or it could be an adaptation of something that you’ve always like, “Oh, I know how to do this thing. Why does this thing not exist in the world?” Then you’ll make that thing and it’s going to be awesome.

Eva: Isn’t that crazy? Thank you so much. You guys are so nice. Always time with everything. Yes.

Craig: It’s really annoying. It’s annoying. We have no problem accepting that for our physical selves. No problem at all. You cut yourself as a kid, it hurts, and then it scabs up, and the scab is itchy, and then it goes away, and then it’s pink and weird, and then it’s okay, and then it’s like it never happened, and it’s just time. We are so frustrated that our emotional pain takes time.

That’s what Dennis Palumbo, who’s a therapist that I went to for many years, and he came on our show and talked on our show, he would often say to me, I would say like, “When does this stop?” He would say, “Tincture of time.” I’m like, “Shit, but also good.” Tincture of time. Yes. A little bit of time. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be more than fine. You’re going to be great.

Eva: Thank you.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. I have a book that I’m reading that I really love that I want people to read. It’s called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. It’s by Sophie Gilbert. It’s really good. I think you’d both like this a lot. It goes back to some earlier times and the cycles of feminism, post-feminism, and to this churn that happens. Women, and particularly young women, get co-opted into this system of beliefs and any attempt to form an identity for themselves gets marketed back towards them. It’s really smartly done.

Here’s from her opening chapter, which is her thesis. She says she wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and that we were a joke. Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? I just loved her framing on all of this because it just does feel like you have girl power, and then it becomes a thing that is sold back to women that they can buy and purchase.

It’s about culture. It’s capitalism. It’s also really about porn, which I hadn’t thought so much about, but the degree to which porn is always on the edges of culture and warping things in a weird way. I thought it was just a great book. Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl. It’s a book out from last year, but I’m just now reading it.

Eva: That is amazing.

John: Craig, what do you got?

Craig: My one cool thing is the Vancouver SkyTrain. I love riding a train, but I’m a New York boy. I love the subway there. The subway goes pretty much everywhere, and I love it. Vancouver is not New York. It’s a much smaller city. It doesn’t have a subway. It’s got this little monorail thing. I just never took it. I never got on it. I was just like, “Oh, it’s a train.” The studio complex where we are based and where all of our stages are is just walking. It’s like a two-minute walk from a SkyTrain station. I was like, “Should I take a train?”

I am so obsessed with riding the SkyTrain. It is so much better than driving. It’ so much better. My mood driving to work, I get in my car and I’m already angry that I’m driving. Then my blood pressure and rage accelerate so that when I finally arrive at work, I am already just at a 9 of pissed. Then I have to go to meetings. The SkyTrain is like, ah, and it’s clean. There’s a train that comes every three minutes. In the subway in New York, you’re like, “Oh, I just missed it. It’s going to be 12, which is really 15, or there’s a stoppage.”

This thing never stops. Three minutes, just [onomatopoeia] and it’s lovely. I’m not saying anything that a lot of Vancouverites don’t know, but if you do live in Vancouver and you haven’t taken the SkyTrain, and you’re wondering, fantastic way to get around.

John: Love it.

Eva: They’re going to be so happy you said that.

Craig: I should get money.

John: Absolutely. Eva Victor, do you have something to recommend to our listeners?

Eva: Yes. I was going to do this mini Nutella that I got in Spain today. Instead of that, I have decided to shift my one, so this is me sneaking in two things. There is a website called rainymood.com. If you go rainymood.com, you can listen to rain sounds and it can be a tab open on your computer while you do other things. I find it incredibly relaxing. You can also listen to music while you listen to rainy sounds, which I think is really beautiful. Rain has always been a comfort to me and consider checking it out.

Craig: The website has rain. It’s like you’re looking through a window that has rain coming down. It’s a beautiful website. This is really nice. The SkyTrain is its own vibe. Also, it’s Vancouver. It’s always a rainy mood. This is shocking right now, what’s going on behind me, the fact that it’s not raining. When I go to sleep, my iPad is doing white noise, but it’s technically brown noise because I’m baby still. I’m just an old baby. The older I get, the closer I return to looking like an actual baby. Soon, the diapers will come.

This actually seems like something that might be nice for when I’m writing because I don’t like specific noises, but rain is comforting like that. This is lovely.

John: Love it.

Eva: No word.

John: No words.

Craig: Love it.

John: Great. Awesome. Thank you so much. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with our signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The ScriptNotes book is available wherever you buy books. Eva Victor has hers with her in Spain. You’ll find us on Instagram @ScriptNotesPodcast. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for ScriptNotes and give us a follow. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Eva Victor as a premium subscriber. Nice.

Craig: We’ve been siphoning $5 a month out of her pocket for a long time.

Eva: Five is a fucking steal. You guys are seriously doing more than $5 a month, but I love it.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Maybe just Venmo then.

Eva: I’ll send a [unintelligible 00:58:02] to you two.

Craig: You’re a big filmmaker now. I don’t know.

John: Absolutely. You can send and become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on short-form video versus directing feature films. Eva Victor, congratulations on your directing of your feature film, your writing of it, your starring in it. All the attention for it, which is wonderful, but will also pass and then allow you to do the thing after that next. It was so great having you on the show. We’ve tried for a while and I’m so glad it finally happened.

Eva: I am so happy. This is such a milestone for me in a way that’s beyond, so thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Eva.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Eva Victor, we first became aware of you, Craig specifically, because you were making funny videos. You were working at Comedy Central. You were doing other stuff too. Can you talk to us about what you learned making those videos, but why it didn’t take a transfer directly to what you were doing for making a film? That era in making short videos, what was that like for you?

Eva: The most important skill, as someone acting in the film that I was directing, was to look at a take and quickly know if I had what I needed in my performance or if I needed to go again. The muscle of judging my own self and giving myself a note was quite harnessed, which was really helpful because I wasn’t afraid of what I saw. I knew what I looked like. I knew how I sounded. Mostly, was noting myself. I rarely gave notes to other actors. It was more just like, “Let’s do one like this.” I wasn’t building someone. They did that. They did an amazing–

I think also, understanding visual vocabulary and having one vocabulary for one piece. I was making videos, and then that got me the job at Comedy Central. I started making my videos at Comedy Central. I had this series there, which was this web series on their YouTube called Eva vs Anxiety. I got an episode of that, and they made me script stuff. I was like, “Oh, man, I like to come up with the things.” They’re not funny once I write them down or something. I liked when it was more exploratory, but I had to script them for the process of working there.

The first episode we shot was shot with, in my opinion at that time, high production value. It became clear to me, this is not funny for this medium. It actually requires me to hold the phone, and I have to be the director of it because if someone else is, you can tell. It just was, oh, the visual vocabulary that’s appropriate for this medium right now is handheld. You can almost see my arm in it. It has to be for this thing to be funny.

Craig: Editing that chops off the last word. It’s a very–

Eva: Yes, like no air. Yes, exactly. I think part of the reason when I got to, Sorry, Baby, I was like, the first shot’s going to be like 100 seconds because I now can take time. Just understanding that each thing is going to have its own way of being and a way it needs to be. Also, me just doing a monologue, listen. Also, it was interesting because at the time, whenever I took meetings, the only thing I ever heard was, “Well, what’s your Fleabag?”

I always said to people, you would not recognize it because it wouldn’t look a damn thing like Fleabag. What are you talking about? I think there was this limited idea at the time that like, “Oh, if I make these videos online and those translate to Twitter, that means when you make a film, it has to be as close to that because that’s what we know get the views on Twitter.” I’m like, “No, it would be a totally different scope and story.”

In a lot of ways, it opened a door to me practicing a lot and messily trying to understand how to build something. Also, it got me in the door. Once I was in the room, it was hard to find people who could see past the idea of a viral video. That’s what I was useful for.

Craig: I think it’s notable that you dealt with authority in an impressive way because I think when I was starting out, I was young, I was maybe 24, 25, I would put authority ahead of my own instincts all the time because I’m like, “But that’s their job. What the fuck do I know?” I think one thing that your generation has the benefit of is that you had a platform to do it yourself minus any authority. The authority came to you because of the things you did without the authority. When they start to dish out the authority, it feels like there’s a reasonable chance for you to go, “No.”

Eva: Yes, or you make something with the authority and you’re like, “Well, yes, this isn’t working.” They are like, “Wait, so how do you make it work?” It’s like, “Well, right.”

Craig: I stop listening to you and the things that you want me to do.

Eva: Something that was hard about working at Comedy Central was we would have meetings on a weekly basis about who was watching the videos and how much they hated any of the women working there would comment about how ugly everyone was. We would have meetings about how are we going to work on that. Then it was also like, “Well, the viewership base is people who we can’t isolate.” It was a lot of corporate stuff that I was like, “This is crazy I’m in this meeting.”

Then again, I guess that probably also prepared me for nothing shocking to me now. Sometimes you meet with people and it’s like, “Damn, that’s a crazy thing to say to me but the men on the internet said something so much worse.”

Craig: I made the mistake of going to– I never go on Instagram. I have an Instagram account, but I never use it. I went there because my daughter put something on there and I wanted to watch it. Then because I never use Instagram and I’m on the website, there’s things on the left that have red numbers. I’m like, “Are these my friends talking to me?” I click on it and it’s just like a list of people literally telling me to die. Because I make a show based on a video game and it is a little crazy.

It didn’t feel great, but then I was like, “Wait, close the box, put box back in lead lined coffin, put coffin back in ground, never look at again.” No one is ever going to tell me in a meeting like, “Honestly, our feeling is that you should die.”

Eva: Not your people, but just people in general.

Craig: Maybe right on again.

John: Craig, I suspect that five years from now, you and I are going to be talking with a filmmaker who came out of Instagram, Reels, and TikTok. Just like there’s a film grammar for what you’re doing at Comedy Central for those videos, there’s a film grammar for TikTok, for Reels. These people are incredibly talented at what they’re doing. They’re so smart and so sophisticated and they have such high production values, but it’s just not a film TV kind of thing. Them learning how to do that, it’s going to be so fascinating.

A friend of mine has a bunch of YouTube creators who are so smart and so good, but this last summer they did this thing where they all made short films, which is just really trying to learn what the film grammar is like. It’s just so different. Because you’re really good at one thing, you think anything, I’m great at being in front of a camera, but it’s different as Eva will tell us.

Eva: I will say, if you want to figure out how to do something, you have to watch a million things that they want to do. It’s the only way. If you want to make a movie, you watch movies. You have to watch movies from every time of the world. It’s interesting because I feel very grateful that when I was making videos on Twitter, there was 13 people doing that. Man, is it a crazy place now? I don’t know. There’s so much talent.

I am really excited to see what comes because access to an audience has never been easier, and that is so much of what stands in the way of people being able to do things. Having an iPhone is like–

John: Yes, it’s crazy. Eva, thank you so much. Congratulations again.

Craig: Absolute joy.

Links:

• Sorry, Baby
• Read the Sorry, Baby screenplay
• Eva vs. Anxiety
• Eva’s straight pride parade video on X
• Demetri Papadimitropoulos’s review of the Scriptnotes Book
• Certain Women
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert
• Vancouver SkyTrain
• Nutella mini jars
• rainymood.com
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.