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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 680 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We’ll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. Then it’s a new round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let’s welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and The Flash, Christina Hodson.

Christina Hodson: Hello.

John: Christina Hodson, we’re so happy to have you back.

Christina: I’m very happy to be back. I cannot believe you’re on 680.

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

John: Yes, but as we’re doing the Scriptnotes book, now we’re in sort of the last minutes on Scriptnotes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There’s just a lot there. It’s been a lot of sifting through stuff and the culling phase now where it’s like we’ve had these amazing guests on. It’s like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It’s like, oh no, there’s no room. There’s no room for these people.

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

John: Oh, he’s gone. Ryan, if you’re listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You’re wonderful. Twice.

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

John: Christina, we want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you’re such a valuable part of the Scriptnotes community and yet you don’t have your own chapter.

Christina: Fuck.

John: You can swear if you want to on the show.

Christina: I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing.

John: All right. We’re going to have some swearing. We’re going to have some good crafty things. We’re going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for paying members, I want to talk about the cold email, when you have to just email a person you’ve never met before and pitch your case and do that because it’s a thing I find myself having to do a lot and some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful.

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

John: People I have questions about what they’re doing. Sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we’re working on. I’m actually kind of shameless and I have some techniques which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from.

Christina: Is it possible that your technique is being John August?

John: That is a part of it. Just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves, so pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re doing it for somebody else.

Christina: I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself.

John: You’ve got that British accent though. It still helps. It works. It really does.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped, we’re so grateful to everyone who’s been playing with it and installing it. You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that?

Christina: I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software.

John: You were, because one of the features in Highland 2 which you helped to work out was gender analysis. We were the first app that had a thing where you could put your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? We put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. They could all see what that was like. Do you find yourself using those tools now?

Christina: I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. I think now I don’t start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully.

John: It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you’re thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there’s going to be so few female characters, or they not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other.

Christina: Totally.

John: This just all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of– You’re nodding like, maybe I helped out on it?

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

John: Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It’s all a blur.

Christina: It was Me Too, and Me Too got wiped out by COVID.

John: Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, me also.

Christina: No, I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID.

John: Absolutely. Everything’s been memory hole’d. It’s so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was a New York Times article we were both in.

Christina: When I Google myself now, I find you.

John: Absolutely. There’s a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

Christina: Pretending to read notes from my notebook [laughs]. I find that endlessly amusing.

John: All journals are basically 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment.

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

John: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. One of the things I’ve noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that– There’s some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I got a feature of the app store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you’re just done at a certain point.

It’s just like, oh, it’s out there and it’s finished and it’s this completion versus something like an app. We’re constantly putting out updates and there’s bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we’re all responding to stuff. You have a chance to fix things, which is great, because it’s not frozen in amber, but there’s also a responsibility to keep doing

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

John: Yes, it does hang over you for a while. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review, that is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven’t tried Highland yet, it is available on the app store for Mac, for iPad and for iPhone. It’s a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot.

Next up and follow up, director’s chairs. We were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director’s chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Sarah writes, “Last summer, I was six months pregnant as the on-set producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It’s much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended.”

John: Christina, what’s been your experience with director’s chairs and chairs on sets?

Christina: Very bad. I’m clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn’t and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I’m a disaster. Director’s chairs are terrible.

John: They are terrible.

Christina: There’s got to be a better solution.

John: There are better solutions. Ryan wrote in and what did she say?

Drew: “I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show. Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director’s chair and this made a huge difference for the execs. The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out.” She included a link, which we’ll put in the show notes.

John: That’s great. It’s nice to see that there are solutions out there and it’s just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to just do this better.

The common threads we see, which Sarah’s first email talked about, is that you got to be lower to the ground. Part of the problem is that if you can’t put your feet on the ground while you’re in the chair, you’re going to have more problems. The other problem is the seat, and the little sling seats, you would think it’d be comfortable, but they’re the worst. It just pinches you in a really bad way. We won’t probably fix this problem on this podcast.

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

Christina: Just as a suggestion, guys, this is why you invite me back. Great ideas.

John: Great. Let’s continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms.

Drew: Stephanie B. writes, I’m writing in response to 679, where the terrific Liz Hannah’s one cool thing is to get a mammogram. She pointed out that insurance doesn’t always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

Even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. There’s a little secret hospitals don’t advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket.

Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn’t matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn’t covering it anyway. My breast cancer was caught early with a mammogram I paid for on my own and it was taken care of quickly. I’m so, so glad I didn’t wait another year to get a mammogram that my insurance would have paid for. Please don’t put it off. To all the men listening, please remind all the women you love to schedule a mammogram. They really do save lives.

John: This is great advice. I was like, I’m not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. I will say that the women in my life who’ve had breast cancer, it’s always been a situation like, oh, I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn’t do it. If you have any suspicions, if you have any reasons to think-

Christina: Even if it’s not an insurance thing, people just put them off.

John: They do.

Christina: Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. You still got to go.

John: You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally a bit of follow up, Birdigo, which is the game that I’ve been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo that people loved and a lot of people were running and saying like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo and I want to just keep on playing. Basically, I’m jonesing for more Birdigo and I’m locked out. What we’ve done is we’ve unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want. We added a bunch of new feathers to get your points up higher and we added keyboard support. If you’re playing on your laptop, it’s actually a really great, fast and different game. If you want a little word game that has really cute, fat birds in it, Birdigo is on Steam right now. They’re really cute little birds.

Christina: I’m very excited to pick it up now that I know it’s yours, I didn’t realize, I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I’m very excited to find out.

John: Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds.

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

John: You just play yourself and it’s tremendously fun.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you’ve become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card, is you write big action movies with set pieces in them.

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well and so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. Let’s just talk about what doesn’t work on set pieces in scripts and the bad things we’ve read, because I’m sure you’ve gotten sent stuff where it’s like, oh no, no, no.

Christina: It’s so bad. There’s so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive though and talk about what makes them good. Bad things are like, when it’s a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh God. Because it’s fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. It’s like, oftentimes people can’t speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical.

John: Yes, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It’s just so crucial to help the reader get their way down the page, because if you give them a wall of text, they’re going to skim.

Christina: I know, it’s really sad, isn’t it? We can read books, but in screenplays, if you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you’re like, no, I won’t.

John: No. Some bad action sequences on a page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? What would I be seeing?

Christina: Sometimes people feel like, because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don’t actually have anything to say for two or three pages. They just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost.

The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. That’s how I think you can tell, and this is where I’ll turn it into a positive because I’m so positive today, John.

When you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they’re writing in, it can be in any genre. We ran a writer’s program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. Often they didn’t already have an action sample and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. You can tell even in a drama when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene, because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up. All of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff is there on the page, whatever the genre. A really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space.

John: Absolutely. You sense that you are in that space with them. We talk about, we see and we hear useful things that a screenwriter might choose to use, but it’s crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater. Experiencing this thing around them and so they’re simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it’s going to feel like on that screen.

Doing both things at the same time, it’s really tough. I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it’s storyboarded and there’s a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but there has to be a plan for it on the page.

Christina: Yes. Also, I was going to say, this is a really important thing where there’s a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft and your first draft. The draft that’s going to go out that you’re trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they’re going to shoot on the final day. The first pass of the Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of the Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn’t intended to go on and on. It was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever.

By the time we got to the end, there’s 30 extra pages because you’ve got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can’t be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you’ve got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen.

John: I want to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. The idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell, for a lot of things, it’s not. You shouldn’t at least discount the work that you’re doing in your production, in your own script.

Christina: Oh, I think the first one is way more important, because that’s the one that sells it.

John: Exactly.

Christina: That’s the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project.

John: Absolutely.

Christina: To me, that’s a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft.

John: Sometimes the production draft, it’s because you’ve had to add all these little scenes to do these different things.

Christina: Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone’s holding and what exactly everyone’s wearing and when the jackets come on and off and stuff that you don’t normally care about.

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

John: Absolutely. What we’re mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you’re doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You’re selling the movie on the page. That means you have to really clearly communicate what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling.

Christina: I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. You can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. You should know what you want it to feel like, the intensities, like the ebbs and the lulls.

John: Absolutely. And the vibe. Is this a cool, crisp, everything is sort of precise or is it just chaos? That’s the thing that you’re going to be able to communicate on the page. I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world, but if we don’t have characters and the character’s experience within those moments, it’s pointless.

I’m thinking back to The Flash and like some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else, it’s a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. As challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character’s experience of those moments is what makes it land.

Christina: I also think just generally people, not even just beginning writers, I think a lot of writers sometimes think put character on hold and just focus on the action. To me, like you’re going to have a dead set piece if you’re only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character’s story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way– Like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? All of those things and the way people work together, to me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc.

John: I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron’s Aliens, which we’ve referenced endlessly on this podcast.

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

John: It’s so good. As you guys are watching, it’s scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie. They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I’ll read this aloud, but we’ll put a link in the show notes too.

They watch in dismay as the approaching ship dips and veers wildly. That’s uppercased. Its main engines roar full on as the craft accelerates towards them, even as it loses altitude. It skims the ground, clips a rock formation. The ship slews, side-slipping. It hits a ridge, tumbles, bursting into flame, breaking up. It arcs into the air, end over end, a Catherine wheel juggernaut. Ripley shouts, run. She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship’s massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again, like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball. It goes on. It gets to the Hudson’s. We are in some real pretty shit here.

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

John: Let’s talk about caps. Here’s what’s uppercased in this section. Crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that’s uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and also, they tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase?

Christina: Generally sound I do in caps, generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there’s so many loud moments and there’s so many big moments and crashes. If you do every crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience in a studio job with an old school, terrible producer person who is no longer with us, so I can shit all over him. He was a mean, mean man. He once told me that a set piece I’d written, he was just like, “This is dead. This is nothing. This is terrible. You got to rewrite this completely. There should be real punch in it.”

I was not this much of an asshole, I only did this because this was 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career: I just added caps. I didn’t change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. I resubmitted it and he was like, “This is incredible. This is what I’m talking about. This has real pizzazz.” I was like, wow. He just needed capital letters.

John: That’s what he needed. He needed something to hang on.

Christina: Underlining and capital letters. I just think there’s too much sometimes, I find it, like when it’s overused. This to me is nice.

John: This is really nice. These paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs. Yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did it need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It’s just really good writing.

Christina: Nice short sentences.

John: Love it. Let’s compare this to Tony Gilroy who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things including the new Andor. I’ll read this, but you actually do need to see this because what Tony is doing at the end of every sentence basically, it’s a dash-dash.

Christina: Not even end of sentence, he’s interrupting himself constantly.

John: Absolutely. Basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is.

Bourne, the light bulb. He’s tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window and she ducks down as it shatters. Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment, and the frosted window peppered with holes, and Marie on the floor as the window shatters above her. Castel, he’s in the air shaft hanging from an out-of-sail rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment, and Bourne kicking that chair across the room, and Castle reacting, instinct moving target, and the chair just strafed to shit, and Bourne rolling away, and Castle, he’s coming in.

The last piece is a window frame crashing away as he swings to the apartment, and Marie, right below him, shit raining down as he flies, and Ward throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late, the knife catching him in the neck, and it just keeps going.

Christina: I think people need to read that, because it sounds crazy when you read it.

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Christina: Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Which is he’s using the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut between.

John: Yes, totally.

Christina: You can’t realistically start. This is easier because you’re just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you’re doing an action set piece where you’re moving between characters who are not right next. They’re not really in the room together. They’re in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they’re in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time-

John: You can’t.

Christina: -it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read.

John: No, impossible.

Christina: When you’re doing the first draft, forget the rules. Find your style. You can basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you’re consistent with yourself.

It’s really annoying when people switch up. I’ve seen people who do in capital letters on John August, colon, and then do the next line and do whatever. Here, he’s just doing the name of the character in capitals and it’s one smooth sentence. Whatever you’re going to do, make it your style, but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise, it gets crazy making.

John: If you do have people in different spaces, but you’re constantly in between the two of them, what I’ll tend to do is establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. Then it’s really clear that I’m doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I’m back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise, it’s all scene headers and it’s exhausting for us. Here, what I like so much about what Tony is doing is it’s almost you’re seeing shot by shot. Each line is basically just a shot, and it’s great.

Christina: Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this. One of my favorite ones. We’re like– Just, you know Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp’s Jurassic Park script, the one that he’s got on his website, is so good.

The sequence that is the best where they’re outside the T-Rex Paddock when the power goes down. He does this really well, where he’s moving between the two cars, different spaces, very fluently, and it just ups the attention massively, because every time you move away from one character, you’re wondering what’s happening to the other one and it’s fantastic use of exactly this.

John: Yes. Let’s wrap this up with The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn’t properly formatted, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. I liked a lot of what they were doing here.

Exterior lab day, Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent. A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, “Here they come. A massive primate barrel towards them.”

Officer 2, “There’s more of them.” Jacobs, “Those are my chimps.” They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car they’re crouched behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob’s black jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car and then they’re gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Christina: Nice.

John: Nice. It’s really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right.

Christina: Yes, and you feel the chaos work is quiet, which is lovely. It gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes just forget about the end. The end is really important.

John: The end is really important. Absolutely. I always think about action sequences as being like, they’re the songs in a musical. Instead of breaking into song and dance, you’re breaking into this action sequence. Those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They’re going to have verses and choruses. It’s going to feel like a thing. Often, it’s just like, action is just happening and then it’s over and you don’t know it. Nothing’s really been achieved.

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

John: Yes, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey. Action writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

Christina: They’re all difficult. It’s one of the bits I love them most. It’s the bit for our job that feels most like playing.

John: It is.

Christina: I literally will get the toys and play with them. For Transformers, I made them send me Bumblebees, which, by the way, was really hard to get. You’d think that would be really easy working with Hasbro trying to get hold of Bumblebees?

John: No.

Christina: No, it was not easy. Yes, I wanted to the toys, because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they’re transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it’s nebulous.

It’s actually interesting with the Alien, that’s an interesting example, because when you’re writing that stuff that doesn’t exist, you have to pick a lane on how much you’re going to describe stuff. Because you can’t go into crazy detail and just put every new nebulizer and whatever. You just can’t, because it gets so boring on the page. You also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. It’s a really tricky balance.

John: Talk us about then on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb as a limb is shifting from one thing or phase to another? What kind of stuff are you doing?

Christina: I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with Transformers. Which sometimes it’s really fucking tricky and you’re trying to bend that arm back into a bloody door and you can’t. I wanted do that for Bumblebee. He’s a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. Mostly, I would go by the way it felt for the characters doing it.

Then I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hailey Seinfeld’s character, is what does it feel like around her? Often, that was more about scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you. Yes, playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that.

John: Scale is a thing that’s often missing in action-side pieces too, or on the page, you’re just not feeling like, you have a semi-truck and you have a bicycle. It’s that difference–

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

Christina: The number of times I’ve seen people dive off a thing 300 feet and you’re like, “They would be dead. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that.” People often get scale wrong and distances away from each other.

I really recommend to people that they look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it’s like, because otherwise it just feels silly. As soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don’t feel that you can trust the writer, that they know what they’re talking about, you check out a little bit because you’re like, “This is just nonsense.”

John: You mentioned LuckyChap, and I remember having lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with LuckyChap to help writers who are not traditionally action writers get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to get people comfortable writing?

Christina: Honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn’t even in the guild yet, and then there were many who were experienced in TV but had never been in features. Like I said, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. You could get the sense of whether they could.

What we were really “teaching,” I shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone anything. What we were really focusing on was how we would help them outline the movie. They came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just a character dynamic. Then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just a kernel of an idea. Then we had wonderful people come in, talk to them about–

One of the things actually, which is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you’re interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. He talks about Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It’s not just like, pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that’s going to be boring.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie. Really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not [unintelligible 00:29:33] other things.

Christina: It was so playful and fun and funny all the way through.

John: Absolutely. Getting back to what you were doing with LuckyChap, what’s so important about the way you’re approaching it is that it’s not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. And you have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story, and they have to go hand in hand.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Which happens a lot.

John: It does happen a lot.

Christina: Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about.

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

Christina: Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I’m sure you, have found this. Either people are way too specific, and they’re using all these terms that you don’t know for martial arts that you wish you knew, but you don’t, or they’re not specific enough and it’s just like, “Uppercut, uppercut.” That’s a bummer, too. You don’t want to– Listen, we all know there are some writers who write, “This will be the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen,” but don’t do that.

John: Never do that.

Christina: Just don’t do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don’t do it.

John: When you see that in a script, you feel like they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by this. They recognize it’s going to be hard to do, and so they just don’t want to actually do it.

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

Christina: Anyway, but I do think it’s a mix with the specificity. For me, I look at it as zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I’ve had to write a few, big scale battle sequences where you’ve got hundreds of people and then key characters that you have to follow. For me, often that is about picking the moments that you want to highlight. I’m not saying never use specific martial arts terms. If it’s relevant, because, for example, it’s a character who’s just learned a thing that they didn’t know, if you’re writing Neo, sure, it’s fucking cool to drop in a turn that it doesn’t matter that the reader doesn’t know exactly what that kick looks like. Because the fact that they don’t know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too.

Then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it’s a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be on that battlefield.

The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a Swords and Sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff’s Troy script, that film is fun. It’s not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. Then there’s a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of “breaking the rules”, where he does–

It’s the Orlando Bloom plays Paris, when Paris fights Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone. He does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris’s POV and he switches to second person. It’s all, you’re in there sweating, like you can feel your heart beating. It’s really fun and it’s really evocative.

John: All right, we’ll find that script and put a link into the show notes. Actually, I’ve never read it.

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

John: Awesome. Let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? For folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we’ll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you’re curious about how we might make these into movies. The examples that we’re talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in.

All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning. It ran in the London Review of Books. It’s written by Fara Dabhoiwala and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this?

Drew: Sure. In 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It’s determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774.

John: Let me stop you there because at this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. If you look at it, it is a man who’s dressed in a formal attire. He’s got a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and his impossibly skinny legs. He’s got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny. One is resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. You’re like-

Christina: Is it very good?

John: Is it very good? It reminded me a bit of, there was that Spanish painting, The Restoration of Ecce Homo, with the Jesus face. I don’t know if they have repainted it. It’s not that bad, but it’s not good.

Christina: Yes, although I will say so. I looked at it and was like, “Oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting.” By the end of it, I fucking love the painting.

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

John: You cannot tell at the start, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? Continue with what the description is.

Drew: Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. He was arguably the most famous Black man in the world at the time. Lon’s book is actually a racist hatchet job. It’s incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams’ achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary.

At first, this portrait’s value is dismissed. Then later it’s rediscovered. It’s assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. After this author commissions a modern high resolution scan, it’s discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

Christina: I’m not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry. It’s so long. I was like, John, why are you making me read this? I loved it.

John: Yes, I loved it.

Christina: There’s twists and turns and reveals. Everyone should go read it. That doesn’t make it an easy movie.

John: It doesn’t make it an easy movie. Let’s talk about sort of ways into this movie. Because, okay, this is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most well-known Black person in the world at a certain time. Grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That’s problematic.

Christina: Problematic, yes.

John: Studied at Cambridge. Clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Dabhoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that’s Halley’s Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when Halley’s Comet was coming back. Clearly a brilliant man. You could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting. I don’t think you would. The painting is too interesting.

Christina: No, I was thinking of like comps. If you do the academic version where it’s about him, there’s like the theory of everything, but that’s Hawking who everyone knows. There’s a beautiful mind, but that’s really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Misan Sagay and Amma Asante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting, and then they created this fictional story. None of those feel quite right for this one. Did you find a way in?

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

Christina: I’ve got two, just to be competitive.

John: All right. I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you’re probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that. I’m curious what you’re-

Christina: That was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That’s one, and I was trying to find them. Please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It’s not The Hours, but it’s not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with someone in the present investigating something in the past. It’s a little bit Possession, but I haven’t seen Possession, so I know it’s not Possession, the A.S Byatt one. It’s doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in an old thing, and then you’re seeing that thing play out at the same time.

I do think you could do that. I think the reason, though, that we both want to do that, is just that it’s so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn’t love that? Someone going deep diving on this, the details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal, this tiny little detail that you didn’t notice before. I think it’s too nerdy to be a movie.

Then the way in that I actually got excited about was the person that painted it, William Williams. Super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy. It’s Francis Williams.

John: If you look at the other paintings, they’re all weird in the same way.

Christina: Oh, and that’s why I came to love it. There’s details, like the wrinkled stockings. How cool and weird is that little detail?

John: I had assumed that he was just a bad painter who just didn’t see anything.

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

John: It’s the same way that Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things.

Christina: Totally. There is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between– The idea is that Francis Williams, at the end of his life, he’s wealthy. They all said he was by then nothing. He’s wealthy and successful, he is. He does own some slaves, and I’d like to gloss over that. He’s doing Rodale, and he chooses to commission this. He’s the one who chooses what goes in the painting. There is something really powerful about the idea of an older Black man, and this young white artist. This man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man’s paintbrush, because that’s the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to, because no one will fucking listen.

He’s got this idiot, Ed Long, who’s written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. He’s choosing to put himself in history. There is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be– Obviously, it’s not a Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that becomes a romantic relationship.

Lindsay Doran, I went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival, and at the end of it, she was talking about King’s Speech and how they tested that movie, and it didn’t test that great. Then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the King and his speech consultant, passing, and that friendship.

Just that title card, just saying they were friends until they died, just completely transformed the scores. It makes sense. This is what I was missing from the story, is I want a friendship or a relationship story at the core of it. That, to me, felt like the most obvious place to put it. Let’s sell it.

John: We’re selling it. We’re selling it tomorrow.

Christina: John, taking it out tomorrow and we’ll sell it.

John: I’m embarrassed. Seemed to me like there’s no relationship in here. You need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself, because that is–

Christina: You could, but it’s such a struggle.

John: It’s Julie and Julia, and they’re separated by time and place. I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Fara Dabhoiwala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. He discovers that like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book and this book could have only gotten there by–

Christina: I know, but aren’t we just excited about that because we’re nerds? In a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be, or would it be cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? I’m so with you. I loved reading it.

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

Christina: I don’t know, but it’s cinematically exciting being like, oh look, this book was published in this year so it couldn’t possibly have been 1726. It must’ve been 1762. We’re excited, but we’re losers.

[laughter]

John: We are losers, but I think that’s potentially a good story. Really difficult to break. I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you’re moving back and forth between the timelines and how you’re telling stuff. I think it’s also really cool.

Christina: Everyone should read it.

John: Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. The article we’re reading is by Robert Klara for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a true life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was.

Drew: In January, 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train, the City of San Francisco, near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snow drifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days. During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually, all individuals are safely evacuated.

John: Christina, so we’ve had many train movies. We have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Orient Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real-life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here, in your estimation?

Christina: I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist, to a murder thing, to a whatever. Is there a version where it’s really– It’s not Society of the Snow. They don’t eat each other. It’s only three days. They’re a little thirsty and a little hungry. I’m not that excited about it. I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance.

By coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have some intense love story that develops in three days. Then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. The one detail in the story that made me giggle and made me think of Triangle of Sadness was that there were some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol, and they would take buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit [laughter], which you could do some funny satirical class thing, maybe.

John: Yes, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it’s not actually a movie. It’s not a story, because we don’t have characters in there yet. We just have a general place.

I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they’re going from where they’re stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it’s also fun. There’s something about that feels interesting too, and it could lend itself to a comedy. It could lend itself to something else, because there’s like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in.

Christina: Oh, like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain can be kind of funny.

John: Absolutely. There’ve been various versions of it, but for 9/11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada. There’s an article called When the World Came to Town. It’s essentially just like, it’s a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It’s always a good setup for comedy. I didn’t feel like a pressing need to take this one exact point.

Christina: We won’t be pitching this one tomorrow as well?

John: No.

Christina: We’ll just stick with A Man of Parts and Learning.

John: Yes. Next up, a UK teen’s parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lynsey Chutel for the New York Times. Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through.

Drew: British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents’ intentions, thinks that he’s visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents, alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities.

Christina: He’s still there, guys. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, “Oh, this kid is still only–” He went when he was 12. He’s still there. He’s only 14 or 15 now, still stuck.

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

John: As we said before, relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see the multiple perspectives on what this is. This is a family that wants to protect their kid, and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That’s really interesting. That perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid’s point of view. It’s like, “Oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London?” You would think that the life would be better and easier for him in London. Yet-

Christina: The judge said no.

John: The judge said no, and also knife culture.

Christina: Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. I was like, “Yes, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad.” The picture of the knives in the London like [crosstalk]–

John: All the seized knives, yes.

Christina: London, not so good. If you’re willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn’t– They’re from there, but he really doesn’t seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid anywhere where they don’t know anyone and in that situation, you’ve got to really be worried about where things are at in London. Yes, I feel bad for London.

The only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this setup, it’s super depressing, but then it becomes magical and wonderful. He finds incredible friends and the school is amazing, and he ends up really happy. The version where he sues his parents is– The version where they send him and then he discovers great things and connects with family and whatever, that could be great.

John: There’s a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to get back. It’s a question like, do you need any–

Christina: Gets back to the knives on the streets of London.

John: Get back to the knives, or that, basically, his parents’ vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he’s able to overcome it. Those tensions are really interesting. I don’t think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn’t have to be Ghana. It could be whatever.

That idea of this immigrant family who’s come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from, it’s really understandable and relatable. We can see both the family’s point of view and from the kid’s point of view, why it’s [crosstalk]–

Christina: Maybe that’s the way it is, that there’s something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents’ home country what they see in their home country, and they can then see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there’s something redemptive and nice there.

John: Also, I think about the non-immigrant families, you’re always worried for your kids and you’re always, you want to protect them. What that means and what you’re able to do really depends on where you come from. A family of greater economic means can send them to a private school. They can shelter them. For this family, this is what they thought their best option was. From the kid’s point of view, of course, they’re going to say no. That’s not what they want. Is it a movie?

Christina: I’m going to say no.

John: Yes, I think it’s maybe a movie. I feel like it’s like a Sundance-y movie.

Christina: Oh. Yes.

John: I think it’s a smaller movie, but I think it could– I don’t know. I think the good version of this gets some Academy Award attention.

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

John: I don’t know. You could end it in a way that like a Palme d’Or winning movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in that place.

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

John: It’s a crunch. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they’re being sent back to. Essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same setup, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that’s also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we’re looking at is by Chris Quintana from USA Today. Drew, talk us through what this article is describing.

Drew: The author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There’s one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they’re online, but they’re connected to nothing.

Christina: To be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges.

John: Yes, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline.

Drew: We don’t know.

John: Here’s the reality. There are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. Then somebody, somewhere, it’s like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to-

Christina: Give me application fees.

John: Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. In some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about what major do you want to study. A person naively could think like, “Oh, this is a real place.” I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, googling them, you might think that there’s still a viable college. It’s not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though.

[laughter]

Christina: Oh, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there’s like less for the train, and there’s like three lines for the UK teen. For the zombie one, you will see it’s literally just the bullet point and nothing.

John: An empty bullet point. There’s something cool about that. The term “zombie college” is better than the actual story.

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

John: It’s just a scam. A journalist investigating a scam can be interesting, and maybe it can lead someplace. At the end of this article, I didn’t have a bigger perspective on it’s just scammy people doing a scam.

Christina: People who go to college and want to eat each other’s brains, who doesn’t want to watch that?

John: Yes, that’s good. Yes on zombie colleges, no on this specific article. Let’s do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we’re both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The trapped luxury train, it’s a setting, but it’s also a setting we’ve seen, so you’d have to do something interesting and new with it. I don’t think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Ghanaian teen, I think it’s a small movie. You’re less convinced.

Christina: I’m less convinced. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small–? I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people. I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping.

John: Yes. Honestly, I bet there’s a filmmaker out there who won’t have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie and is like, oh yes, that’s my story. Honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who’ve- they grew up in a struggling country and the parents shipped them off to the US or to the UK. They never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to put them out there in the world.

All right. Let’s answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland.

Drew: I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it’s difficult to write a first draft when I don’t exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative. I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

John: Side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they’re not your antagonist or a key love interest. They’re characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Albin doesn’t know quite who they are yet or what function they’re playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you’re having about those not central characters?

Christina: It’s really tricky because they take up space.

John: They do.

Christina: You don’t want them to be so generic that they’re just interchangeable. “I’m the funny best friend.” They’re always such a bummer to read. You also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. If you choose to have an assistant who is unusually older– Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There’s got to be a reason why you made your assistant 65 years old.

It’s just a tricky one because it’s a bit Goldilocks. In theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in True Romance, where they’re the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans. But also, you don’t want to be tediously shiny things all around the story.

John: I found that in planning out a story, those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won’t really know who they are as I start writing. Then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they’ll become more specific and I’ll realize, okay, that’s this person who keeps coming back through, or I realize like this kind of character shows up in three different scenes, it should be the same character.

Christina: I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. Often, I’ll use it as a parallel to another relationship. It’ll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo.

John: You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it. That can be really annoying, and yet it’s also functional. Is that the character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that moves the story forward, that’s a good use for the character. You don’t want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you, they are, just the same way that your scenes are functional, even though they are hopefully engaging themselves.

Christina: I would say if you’re doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which of the three scenes, and then maybe it’ll occur to you as you’re looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, and then they would have their own mini little arc because people like to be closed out.

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

Drew: Let’s try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I’m a student and I’m somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline?

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

Christina: Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don’t know yet. I still haven’t figured it out.

John: First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Christina: Whilst, if I’m trying to sound very British and posh.

John: Yes, but you probably grew up using it. Are you using it in daily life in America?

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

Christina: No. No whilst. Whilst. No, I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.

John: [laughs] Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Yes, you’re trying to do a lot and if you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I’m doing other stuff that I’m willing to not do that other stuff and write? That could just be giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff, but you’re going to have to make a choice to do some writing.

Christina: I’ve actually got recycled John August advice here.

John: I’m excited to hear it.

Christina: Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I’m an idiot and I can’t stick to anything. You, I can’t even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints.

John: Oh yes, let’s talk about sprints.

Christina: Just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. It can be really short, but giving yourself– Even if it’s 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it and don’t– Sometimes trying to clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible.

John: We won’t get more done in an afternoon.

Christina: No, you won’t. If you have a job and you have the whatever, and you come in the door and it’s the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you’re like, I only have 40 minutes. You have the timer running right next to you. Then you just go. You just give yourself a junk.

John: Yes. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the ScreenPants book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour’s worth of work. When the timer beeps, I went a little bit over that. If I had not set the timer, I don’t think it would have actually, I wouldn’t have opened the file.

Christina: I want you to know, I’m such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. I don’t know why, because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m terrible.

John: Yes. Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you’re prioritizing that writing time can help too, because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. That’s what writing is, yes.

Christina: We’re all selfish.

John: We’re all selfish. Be a little selfish. It’s time for our One Cool things. I have two comedy-related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia’s new show, The Good Life, this last week. It’s so funny. He’s just so smart and so funny. He’s been on the show multiple times. It’s just observations on life and the way he’s able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that’s generous to the folks he’s including, but also helps talk about larger themes.

It’s so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. See his show. I think there are more dates on. We’ll put a link to his website in the show notes. You should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like Scriptnotes, but for standup comics and just talking through their process and how they come to what’s funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it.

Second comedy thing is the print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it’s just so great. This last week’s just- everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at home loyalty tests, Baby Saves Affair, US military bands man with girls names from combat. It’s all just so smart and to get it delivered.

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

John: It feels so good. I strongly encourage you. We’ll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month and it’s just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us?

Christina: My one cool thing is a person and his company. It’s Padric Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. It’s researchdebt.com. Drew will hopefully find a link and include it. He is amazing. I’ve known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just as part of his job.

Then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It’s just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he’s just incredible.

I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted. I knew the character stories. I knew the character dynamics. I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn’t know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn’t know what country or what time period because I didn’t know how I would then lay it into the history. It’s not about the history, but it’s very important that I have the setting.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he’s not just a research nerd, he’s incredibly creative. His instincts on story and just listening to it and hearing it were amazing. The thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters.
I would have things like, “I’ve got this side character. It’s a maid.” We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about. Then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, a certain age. I was like, “This is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible?”

He would go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically that same age, race, in the same time period. I would get actual flavor of what those people’s lives were like. That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don’t even know how he physically does it, but then he scans all the pages in the books so that you have all of the resources, and then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. He’s amazing. He’s worked on a few TV shows and features as well. For any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing.

John: That’s fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Dept. Love it.

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

Christina: [chuckles] Great to see you and speak with you for the first time today.

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

Christina: Anytime. I’d love to. It’s a delight.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. As billed in the opening, the cold email. I’m old enough and you’re probably old enough too [crosstalk]–

Christina: What are you saying, John. I’m a child. I’m so young and fresh.

John: Did you ever make a cold call where you just had to call somebody?

Christina: That’s how I got started in this industry.

John: First, let’s talk about the cold call because the cold call is genuinely terrifying because you’re interrupting someone’s life with a phone call, which is just scary, but we had to do it.

Christina: How else did we do it back in the day?

John: We didn’t have email.

Christina: It was when I wanted to work in film. I had gone to my university career service and they said, “You can’t work in film. That’s not really a thing. Do you want to be a journalist at the BBC?” I was like, “No, I want to work in movies.” They were no help. I went online, but it was early crappy internet when you couldn’t really find anything good. So I got a yellow pages and looked up film production and then just made a list of all of the offices and cold-called all of the numbers.

I need to tell you that I am a person that, to this day, I’ll like go and do big studio pitches with big grownups. I still can’t make restaurant reservations on the phone. I’m so bad at speaking on the phone. I hate it. It like cripples me with anxiety, but I did it.

John: I’m so impressed that you did it. You made a list and you just did it. How did you set yourself down on a phone and pick up the phone and just do it?

Christina: I forced myself to do it. I reminded myself that the person picking up the phone was just the receptionist. They are probably not having the best day in the world. As long as I’m nice, as long as I’m not annoying and an asshole– No, sorry, I probably was annoying, but I wasn’t an asshole, I don’t think. I wasn’t demanding too much. I was pretty specific in what I was asking for, which was, do you offer any internships? Is there anyone that I could talk to about possibly doing any work as a runner? I’ll photocopy or I’ll pick up sandwiches.

Because I was offering something and because I made myself fairly succinct, which is hard for me, as you can imagine, it helped. I finally got someone who asked me a question and we had one thing in common. From that one thing, I like spun it out into like a 5-minute conversation and then 10-minute conversation. Then he was like, well, we don’t have anything now, but come in and have a cup of tea with me and maybe you could do some reading. That’s how I got my first job. Reader, then runner, then intern, then free intern assistant for a year, then an assistant. Yes, it’s tough.

John: Yes, but you did it. You were able to make that cold [crosstalk]–

Christina: It was cold calls.

John: Cold calling is much worse than the cold email. Let’s talk about the cold email, which is at least you’re not ruining someone’s day by calling.

Christina: No. Sometimes they ruin my day. They make me so mad. Because it’s a cold email, you should try harder. You’ve got all the time in the world.

John: Let’s talk about a bad cold email you get and a good cold email you get. What does Christina Hodson get as a cold email?

Christina: I’m so mad just talking about this. The bad ones, the ones where they’ve copied and pasted it, and they’ve like changed the font on your name because it’s copied and pasted and so the formatting is all wrong.

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

Christina: They’ve copied and pasted the credits in to be, “I love your film, bah bah bah,” but they’ve like copied and pasted that and you can tell. They also sometimes haven’t removed some of the other ones that you didn’t write. It’s so maddening. There’s just no point in doing it. It actively makes me want to block you forever.

John: Yes, I hear that. The mismatching fonts is just a dead giveaway. To me, a good cold email is one that is from the subject line, I can tell what it is they’re trying to do, what they need. It doesn’t say like from a fan or something like that. That doesn’t help me out. It’s specific about a movie.

A good cold email is like, hey, I’m putting together a documentary about women in Tim Burton movies. If the subject line was like Women in Tim Burton movies Documentary, oh, okay, I can see what that is. Quick introduction of like, this is who I am. These are some of the things I’ve done. I’m working on this thing. Could I convince you to come in for an interview for 90 minutes one day?

I’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll understand what the request was. It’s when something is so vague or takes forever to actually get to the ask that I’m like [sighs] “Ugh.” It kills me.

Christina: What about when they’re coming from, not someone trying to make you jump, when it’s someone that is starting out in the industry, that’s reaching out to you for advice? Now you have a whole podcast, they have a whole system they can go through. Do you have any tips for those ones where it’s like– I very often get a, “Could I take you out for a coffee?”

John: The answer is no, from my side. Also, I have a podcast and I can push people towards–

Christina: You’re like, I’ve got 680 episodes you can listen to.

John: Yes. The answer to that has generally been no. Let’s flip it around when you or I need to ask an expert in something about a thing. You were just talking about the research department, who’s a guy who is probably doing a lot of those cold emails to- trying to get those things. When I need to reach out to a specialist in something, I’ll just be very clear like, hey, I’m a screenwriter, I’m working on a thing about this. I see you’re an expert in this field. Could I get on the phone to ask you 10 minutes worth of questions about this subject?

If I read an author’s book and I really liked it, I’ll just reach out and say like, “Hey, I really enjoyed your book. Quickly, I’m John August and this is my thing. I just really wanted you to know how much I appreciate that.” No one’s going to get upset to read that.

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

John: If you’re a cold email, make someone’s day a little bit better.

Christina: Yes. I also think with that, in your example of reaching out to a specialist, because I’ve actually recently done that, some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Some people are like me and don’t want to make restaurant reservations because it involves being awkward on the phone. So I give them the choice. I say, “I’m happy to talk on the phone for 20 minutes or whatever, but if you’d rather email, I can lay it out here,” so that they have the option.

John: Yes. Give them choices. Don’t let them feel boxed into a thing.

Christina: Be specific about the ask. The general, like, “Can I take you out for coffee one day and pick your brain?” I’m like, no.

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

Christina: No. If someone emails and say, “Can I pick your brain? It’s this.” Then they give me one question in an email and the rest of the email is actually thoughtful and I think they have bothered choosing to ask me specifically rather than just generic screenwriter, then I might be like, oh yes, actually, this is an interesting question and you seem nice.

John: Do you seem nice and not like a crazy person?

Christina: Do you seem like you bothered proofreading your own email? Typos in those emails drive me crazy. Especially if it’s someone trying to be a writer, which it most often is.

John: One step better than cold email though is the introduction email. When some neutral person has done this or you’ve asked for a CC into a thing, then best practices are, they’ve CC’d you in, you put them on BCC so they can disappear off the thread and you can actually just do this. Drew, you’ve had to do some cold emails.

Drew: Oh God, yes.

John: Talk to us about what you find successful and what you dread.

Drew: It’s being specific with the ask and making the ask easy, to your point. If it’s one specific question, it’s a very short, that can be a fun after– If you need a break for something, you can answer that question. The general is always death. Especially like, because I’m essentially John’s firewall for emails.

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

Drew: We get a lot. To your point on the, it’s usually an assistant who’s having their own day. The things that are easy to elevate, that’s great. That’s fun. Think about that intermediary, whether that person exists or not. I think if it’s an easy ask, great. If it’s not, if it’s more complicated, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

John: We did a 100th birthday party for our house. Our house turned 100 years old.

Christina: Congratulations house.

John: Stuart Friedel, who’s a former Scriveness producer, undertook this giant research project to figure out the whole history of the house and basically everyone who ever lived in the house.

Christina: That’s so cool.

John: One of the things I’ve always admired about Stuart Friedel is he is incredibly good at the cold email. He actually has none of that shame in there that stops someone from reaching out. He will just do it.

Christina: He does it in a way that’s charming and that people respond to.

John: Absolutely. He was able to get all this information because he was just unafraid to reach out to people and make that happen. In the setup to this, he said, “Oh, it’s easier for you because you’re John August?” It’s like, sure, but it’s also easier if you’re working on behalf of somebody else. For that, sure it’s his job. He’s sort of doing it for us. I was able to do it brilliantly because he had no sense that it wasn’t proper. Of course, it was proper. His asks were Also really clear. It’s like, we’re talking about one house.

Drew: There’s also that sort of motivation too. If it’s a thing that’s important to me, I will always be terrified to send the email or call or whatever. If it’s easy, if it sort of doesn’t matter–

Christina: This is just for John, who cares? [laughs]

Drew: Yes, totally. My wife’s favorite animal is a red panda. I was like, I wonder if a zoo would let us hang out with the red panda. I got shockingly far up the chain at I think the LA Zoo, maybe San Diego Zoo, where I just called. I was like, hey, can we hang out with a red panda? They were like, let me ask. I don’t know. I got like three or four people up the chain. The only reason we couldn’t is they were like, well, the red panda’s pregnant. We’re going to have some weird–

Christina: What? They’re going to get inundated now.

Drew: I know, right? That was one of those things that was like, that doesn’t affect the rest of my life. It’s just fun.

Christina: I’m going to think you like an email to hang out with animals.

John: Christina Hodson, Instagram. Will you message people on Instagram or not?

Christina: I’ve done it once, drunk, but I don’t know how to use Instagram. I have it under some– I had a cat who’s not even alive anymore. It was under her name. I drunkenly, in an Uber, once messaged someone and then didn’t know how to check my messages. The reply, I found two months later.

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

Christina: I don’t think I would do anything professional on Instagram.

John: Yes, I’ve done a couple of professional things on Instagram.

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

John: It’s also the difference of I think being a man versus being a woman on Instagram. Just the amount of crap that a woman gets on Instagram is much higher. Back when Twitter used to exist, that was the really useful way for me to reach out to somebody because I could– If I already followed them or if I deliberately followed them on that, they would get a notification because I was a verified person and then I could DM and that was–

Christina: Back in the early early days, it was just like, are you a funny person? If I scroll back in your tweets, are they witty?

John: Absolutely.

Christina: Then you can get anything you want. It’s a very different world now.

John: Yes. That is the nice thing, though, about even Instagram is that there’s a little bit better sense of like, oh, this is the actual person, versus an email could come from anybody. It’s really hard.

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

John: It could be a catfish. You never know. Christina Hodson, you’re not a catfish. You’re an actual real-

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

• Christina Hodson
• That New York Times article with John and Christina
• Bamboo Director’s Chair
• Birdigo on Steam
• Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
• David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
• A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
• When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
• A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
• Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
• Mike Birbiglia
• The Onion in print
• Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Vance Kotrla (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A 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, and you’re listening to Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you honor a genre while still pushing at its boundaries? Our guest today is Robert Eggers, a writer and director whose movies include The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and most recently, Nosferatu. Welcome Robert.

Robert Eggers: Thanks for having me.

John: Reading through those credits, this is going to be your first movie that doesn’t have a ‘the’ in front of it, at least that I’ve noticed. There’s no ‘the’ in Nosferatu. You’re breaking new ground here. You’ve left off the definite article.

Robert: Yes. It was very intimidating. Maybe The Vampyre would have been more appropriate.

John: I want to talk through Nosferatu, I want to talk through the genre, your other films, but I also want to get into your POV as a writer versus a POV as a director and where you’re at as you’re putting scenes together. Also, I want to try to answer a couple of listener questions we have about historical detail, feeling stupid, and whether writers make bad romantic partners because you’ve just made a gothic romance. We want to talk about that.

In our bonus topic for premium members, let’s talk about cycling because that is the thing that you do in your off time that I don’t think I’ve had anyone on the podcast talk about before. I want to talk about cycling, how you got into it, and what role it fills in your life. Let’s dig right into it.

Robert, give us some backstory on how you came to be a writer and director. You grew up in New England. Where did you start with storytelling and with movies?

Robert: Avid movie watcher like a good American kid growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and watched ungodly amounts of television, which was also perfectly acceptable back then. I did theater growing up, acting in theater and my mom had a kid’s theater company. We were also involved in building the sets and doing the costumes. There were parents who were more skilled in these things, but everyone was involved. My dad was also a Shakespeare professor. Even though I lived in rural New Hampshire, I had the opportunity to see things that a lot of people didn’t get to see and occasionally going to Boston to see a play or go to the ballet or the art museum or whatever.

Of course, cinematically, I was still into more mainstream things to some degree. Then talking about Nosferatu, that was a film that I saw when I was young around nine, and it made a very large impression on me. Max Schreck’s performance, of course, but also the atmosphere of the film because it’s not the beautiful restored versions that you can even watch on YouTube that are color tinted and have– You can watch it with the original German inner titles with subtitles if you want, but this was very degraded and you couldn’t see Max Schreck’s bald cap, you couldn’t see the grease paint on his eyebrows. It felt like a vampire. It felt real. The atmosphere of that and the reality of that was really inspiring as a kid.

Also, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later, the fact that Murnau, his collaborators, and the screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, turned Stoker’s novel into a simple fairy tale compared to, the Bela Lugosi version that I was familiar with that was based the Balderston Dean stage play, which is pretty stodgy and so as the Tod Browning movie, if we’re honest, after Transylvania, this was crazy for me.

I grew up doing tons of theater. When I was 17, I had the opportunity to do a senior-directed play. Me and my friend, Ashley Kelly Tata, who’s now a theater and opera director, we co-directed Nosferatu on stage. I had been doing also some theater with a theater called the Edwin Booth. The artistic director was a gentleman named Edward Langlois, who is the only person who is doing interesting stuff. He wasn’t doing My Fair Lady, he was doing The Duchess of Malfi.

I invited him to see it, but he saw that play and asked if we would want to do a more professional version of it at his theater, and that put me on this trajectory. It cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director, that I wanted to tell the stories that I was interested in, and it also made Nosferatu something that would always be part of my identity as someone who’s trying to make creative work for better or for worse.

John: I want to go back to that high school Nosferatu. Can you describe what that was? Was it one act, was it two acts? What was the texture we’re working off of? What was that play you did?

Robert: It was mostly based on the Murnau film. Of course, the version that I had was, as far as I understand, an English translation of French intertitles. That would have been the version that Henri Langlois screened in Paris at his theater. The Ellen/Mina character was called Nina, but most everyone else had their Dracula names. It was weird, but we didn’t know it was weird at the time. We drew on that and also some things from the novel.

The Coppola film had also been something that I watched a ton, and there was definitely some inspiration from that. It was a silent film on stage. We were wearing black and white makeup and costumes and black and white sets and wigs and acting in a very stylized expressionist way. There were super titles above the proscenium that would say the text and there was music playing the whole time.

John: What’s the success? You were doing this as a high school student. Did you feel like, “Oh, this was the accomplishment I set out to make.”? What did you learn while you were doing it?

Robert: It definitely felt like we had hit on something pretty cool. In this very humble environment, it was a successful production standing room only, blah, blah, blah. Good reviews from the local newspaper. It was a very satisfying, formative experience for sure. I have very fond memories of all of us doing each other’s makeup and gluing sideburns and mustaches on people and all that.

John: You’ve done stuff on the stage and you’ve grew up with stage because of your parents and so you had a chance to see that thing, and then you were adapting a cinematic work for the stage and trying to pull the ideas of cinema to the stage, the title cards and all this stuff. When did you start becoming interested in how do we do an actual cinematic language? When did you start thinking about, I want to pick up a camera and shoot a film and learn editing? What was that transition?

Robert: Eventually, I’m directing off off off off Broadway Theater in New York with my friends. As I felt at the time, I don’t know how I would feel about it if I watched it now, but at the time I felt we did a pretty good job of Othello, also well-reviewed, but nobody saw it. Then we did street theater because we felt like people have to fucking see it if we do street theater. That was cool, but it was also– We were working out of a dirt floor basement and it was extremely humble.

I thought, “Clearly cinema’s the way to go.” I half seriously, just trying things, took some Shakespeare plays that I knew well and adapted them to screenplays as an exercise. Then eventually, I made a short film of Hansel and Gretel that somehow is on YouTube. I don’t know how the hell it got on there, but it’s absolutely terrible. It got into one film festival and on the bus ride home from the Boston Underground Film Festival, I thought, “I really have to make something that is not terrible.”

Then I started working on this short that became an adaptation of the Tell-Tale Heart and Jarin Blaschke, my cinematographer, and Louise Ford, my editor for the rest of my career thus far, were on that. That was a very formative experience. Also, basically, I was making my living doing set and costume design for the stage at this time because I had always done it myself in New York. I enjoyed it and had a knack for it. That was how I was making my living.

This also, aside from being a calling card as a director, helped me break into doing art department, wardrobe and film and television, non-union commercials, and stuff like that. It also helped me make a living. Sometimes I’d have a great job. Sometimes I would be a set carpenter or I was sewing curtains. In between all these things, I was writing and wrote a bunch of screenplays that were all dark and fairy tale adjacent, but not in an identifiable genre and thus not commercial enough to finance. The Witch was me trying to be more commercial, but being true to myself.

John: Let’s go back to Tell-Tale Heart because we’ll put a link in the show notes to it. It’s great. It’s really good. It’s a very strong short, and I think we’re often talking about on the podcast is people are waiting for permission to do the thing that they want to do. It looks like with Tell-Tale Heart, you made the short film that you could with the resources you had, and the skills you had, and the group that you had assembled around you were able to make something that was what you wanted to make, as opposed to Hansel and Gretel. This was a true representation of what your aims were.

Watching it now, it’s like, “Oh, that feels like Robert Eggers.” That feels like all the calling cards of what you’re going to be doing down the road. It has that style. How many days is that? What did you have? What was your big basket of stuff you could put into this thing? There’s costumes, there’s sets, there’s a sense of production value that’s way beyond what you might expect from just a short film. Tell me about putting together the Tell-Tale Heart.

Robert: I’ve been saving up my money, and at that time, I was waiting tables and then asked friends and family if they would help chip in. It was also before the big financial crisis, so we were able to get donations from people. This was before Kickstarter and all that thing. We did lots of fundraising events to try to get some money. We had some money to work with, but we found an abandoned house, which, shockingly, in my hometown.

It was a very rural town, and someone in the more wealthy town of Portsmouth in the 19th century decided to build their wife an amazing house out in Lee, New Hampshire. Then, I don’t know, something happened. The family lost their money or whatever. It had been sitting there rotting. Only the kitchen had electricity, and the walls still were horsehair and plaster. It was just like a good old-fashioned haunted house.

Ed Langlois, the artistic director of the Edwin Booth, he came in to help with the costumes and the production design, and we were in there in the freezing fucking cold decorating this abandoned house. We drove up to Maine to get some fabric that was fire and water-damaged, that we could get a super-heavy discount, but get massive bolts of it. Because we wanted it to look like shit, it was perfect. We got to use that, and I rented some costume pieces from a costume rental house in New York that I’d been working with on stage stuff. Then we had a few things built and some top hats made by someone on Etsy.

John: You were driving all of these decisions yourself. You were producing this yourself, in addition to having written and directed it.

Robert: I had producers as well, Mike Neal and Maura Anderson. Of course, the big decisions of how this is going to work is coming from-

John: The hustle was you.

Robert: The big creative decisions were me. There was plenty of hustle for everyone. Ed actually– I sent him the script and asked if he wanted to work on it. He said it was very nicely written, but it was just fucking Masterpiece Theater, and he wasn’t really interested in it. He said there was nothing exciting about it as finely written as it was. At the time– I don’t know how we’re going to get to the rest of my career if we take this long about the Tell-Tale Heart, but it’s fine with me. Basically, I had wanted this dying painter who was in his 90s to play the old man, and then I realized that in this horrible location in February, he was probably going to die.

John: That’d be a lot to kill the man in the Tell-Tale Heart.

Robert: It would be stupid to have someone in a bunch of prosthetic makeup. It would be better, I thought to myself, on the Chinatown bus, if it was a fucking doll. Then I thought, “Maybe that’s actually really cool if it’s a puppet and there’s something death-like about it the whole time. It could be really interesting.” I shared that idea with Ed and then he said, “Now that’s cool. Now I want in to this.” Then, my friend, Chelsea Carter, who I worked at the same restaurant with, she was working at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in New York. I did the sculpt of the face, but then she built the puppet.

John: Great. What I hear in your story is that you’re running into obstacles and you’re just figuring out, “What resources do I have? Who do I know? What other thing could I do that makes this thing possible to do?” You weren’t taking no for an answer. You weren’t taking in the fact that this guy was going to die if you tried to do it. You’re like, “That is a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity to do something different and something weird and something special and unique to our movie.” It’s the stuff that’s specific to your approach that makes it exciting for people. It’s what gets people to sign on. We’re going to do something that’s different. It’s not just a plus-one version of an existing thing that we could’ve done anywhere else.

Robert: Not fucking Masterpiece Theater.

John: Exactly. I want to talk to you. This guy was complimenting your writing. When did you first read a screenplay? You’ve obviously grown up reading a lot of plays, but when did you first read a screenplay, like this is a plan for making a movie? Do you remember what the first script was you read for a movie?

Robert: That’s a great question. I really don’t know. Certainly, I read a lot of screenplays. I don’t read a lot now, but in my 20s and early 30s, I read a lot of screenplays.

John: Having read through Nosferatu, I think you actually like screenplays. There’s some writers I’ve talked to-

Robert: Yes, I do.

John: -who clearly the writing script is only just so that they can actually make the movie, but they actually don’t like the screenplay form itself. You actually seem to sit in there and enjoy it. It doesn’t seem like a burden to you. Is that fair?

Robert: Yes. Definitely, I like what a screenplay can offer.

John: Here’s your initial description of Thomas in Nosferatu. “She looks across the room. Thomas Hutter, mid-20s, is tying his cravat before a small mirror. He’s very invested in tying it well. His back is to her. He’s handsome, if not pretty. Kind, determined eyes. He seems unaware of the darkness in the world. Their middle-class bedroom is cute with brand-new aspirational furnishing. This is to help disguise his overall shabbiness.”

There’s a lot there in that paragraph. It’s meant for the reader. There’s things in there that will be helpful to everyone else in the other departments, but it’s there to give you a sense of what it’s going to feel like to be watching this movie. That’s great to see on the page. Your script is full of that.

Robert: I think that in my films, I’m trying to create, a tremendous amount of atmosphere. If you don’t feel that in the script, then it’s hard to believe that it’s going to get there on screen, Also, I think that I wrote that because that’s what seemed right to me, and it was telling a lot about the situation. I think sometimes, consciously, when I’m describing characters, especially secondary or tertiary characters, I want to give them a good description, also so the actors are like, “Okay, I can see who this might be, and I might be interested in playing this role,” instead of just leaving them high and dry.

John: Absolutely. Another thing I noticed looking through your scripts is that you uppercase characters’ names a lot. If a paragraph starts with a character’s name, it’s almost always uppercased. It’s not a shot list, but paragraph by paragraph, you can feel like, oh, this is a shot, this is a shot. You definitely can see what the camera’s going to be looking at based on your paragraphs, which is great and works really well for you.

My question, though, is, as you’re writing a scene, let’s say you’re writing this initial scene between where we’re meeting Thomas and Ellen in this room, are you, as the writer, sitting in the room with the characters, watching them go about their things, or are you sitting back and watching in the frame in the proscenium? Where do you, Robert Eggers, fit in that world?

Robert: It depends scene to scene and screenplay to screenplay. I think very often I’ll start out, usually, I want the beginning to be very clearly shot listed in my mind as I’m writing it, whether I describe it as shots or just in prose without describing what the shots are. I think that as I get deeper into the story and there’s problems that I need to solve, then it just becomes the worst fucking TV coverage to just tell the story. Then I have to work on making it classy later.

The most recent script that I wrote, however, 80%, this is a shot, this is a shot. I’m saying like, “It’s a shot, we cut to this.” I just wanted to write a script like that for whatever reason. You know what I mean?

John: Going back to your experience in theater, though, because of course theater doesn’t have shots, it doesn’t have cuts. In theater, you’re in a space with characters. As you’re writing a piece for theater, you might be thinking about the blocking and where people are, but you’re really about what is the reality within a scene because there’s people in a space and you’re just with those people in a space.

I’m talking about street theater. You don’t even control sometimes the environment, you don’t even control the POV on things. I’m just curious, with Nosferatu, when you’re in those moments, how often were you thinking about, this is what the camera’s seeing versus this is the reality of being in a space with those characters?

Robert: I would say it was mostly about being in the reality of the space with Nosferatu. Then there’s a final step of writing that is the shot listing and the storyboarding with Jiren, where oftentimes we’re actually like reorganizing the beats so that it will flow better cinematically. I will very often rewrite the scene to match how we’ve simplified it or found the essence of it.

John: That’s great. When is the shot-listing process most helpful for you? Is it way in pre-production? Is it closer to the day of shooting? What makes sense for you?

Robert: Now, anyway, we’re storyboarding the whole damn thing. We don’t really finish until a little bit into the shoot, but in a perfect world, it would all be done well in advance in prep. With Nosferatu, Jiren and I moved to Prague much earlier than anyone else. We’re in my kitchen, in my apartment, planning the shots, hoping to get– We got a head start, but we were still a couple of weeks into production, still storyboarding.

John: How much of Nosferatu was storyboarded? Obviously, there’s going to be big sequences where you’re going to have visual effects, you’re going to have to put stuff in the background of things where you would need to storyboard it. For dialogue scenes, were you drawing those out?

Robert: Some of the dialogue scenes were shot-listed instead of storyboarded. If we had it our way, we would have storyboarded every single thing. We did storyboard the vast majority of the film. We just simply ran out of time. For some of the dialogue scenes, we shot-listed instead.

John: Who gets the storyboards? I know the Coen brothers, for example, will share with the actors, “Here are the boards for what we’re going to shoot today, the scenes we’re shooting today.” What are the edges of who sees storyboards for you?

Robert: Everybody.

John: Talk to us about the journey for Nosferatu, the movie, because you had intended to make this earlier on in your career, and it sounds like other things came before it. Was this always the first movie you wanted to make? Where did this fall in the– If I were talking to Robert in his early 20s, would he said that this is his next movie? When did the idea of the Nosferatu movie happen?

Robert: It was after The Witch. Talked a little bit about it, then I started developing a medieval knight movie called The Knight.

John: See? Another ‘the’ movie.

Robert: Yes. Basically, I was just so naive about Hollywood, and we worked for almost a year on it, not really realizing that myself and the studio were on parallel courses making two different movies, which was nobody’s fault but my own naivete. When I realized that that’s what was going on, I said, “Look, let’s push pause on this, and why don’t we do Nosferatu? I’m telling you right now, it’s a more commercial version of The Witch. We know what that is. Let’s go for it.”

Ultimately, I’m really, really, really glad that it didn’t work because I’ve grown a lot as a person and a filmmaker. I’m much more fluid with my collaborators. We’re further extensions of each other, and it’s easier for us to get our collective vision out of our brains and onto the screen the way we see it. I don’t think it would have been accomplished at the level that it’s at, whether that’s good or bad, had it been made back then.

John: Did you write a Nosferatu script back then?

Robert: I did, and it hasn’t really changed much since then. There was a lot more exposition when I had left it, and so it was mainly getting rid of exposition and tweaking things back and forth for budget and historical accuracy, both in the minutiae of German stuff and in the folklore. Ultimately, that first good draft is the same film.

John: It sounds like you knew what you needed to do as a writer, but as a director, you don’t think you were ready to make the movie you were able to make now?

Robert: Completely, yes. It was interesting. In the process of writing it, I wrote a novella, which I’ve never done before or since, but because this was an adaptation of a piece that’s important to so many people, myself included, I needed to find a way to get ownership of the world and the characters, and writing this overly long novella, that was filled with things that I knew would never be in the movie, helped me tremendously.

John: Let’s talk about genre in the bigger sense, and the genre, whatever you want to put this into, whether it’s gothic horror or how you perceive the movie. Nosferatu is a story that existed before, but you’re making your own version of it. What was the balancing act between staying true to what had come before versus putting your own stamp on things?

Robert: Obviously, it’s a question of taste, and it is subjective. I tried to run it on a parallel course and have all of my choices be some kind of extension of things that came from the Murnau film. One of the first things I did is open up Lotte Eisner’s biography of Murnau and the Galeene screenplay in the back of that, read that, go through it, check out Murnau’s notes carefully, and really try to understand where that team was coming from creatively and understand that Albin Grau, the producer, was an occultist, practicing occultist. I don’t know that he actually believed in folk vampires, but he almost certainly believed in astral vampires as a reality.

John: What is an astral vampire? You have to tell us about that.

Robert: People who can, or potentially elemental spirits who can send their astral bodies psychically to drain people of energy and stuff like that.

John: Sort of what we see Orlok doing at the very start, the sense of this mystical figure that comes to Ellen.

Robert: Yes. You try to understand all that stuff, great. It was always striking to me that Ellen becomes the heroine by the end of the film. I thought, “This is taking the inspiration from the original and running with it. What if it’s her movie? What if we see it through her eyes? Perhaps there is the ability for the film to have more emotional and psychological depth this way.”

In the original film, she’s called a somnambulist, and sleepwalkers in the 19th century were believed to be able to see into another realm. That became entirely inspirational into, first of all, understanding the Murnau film a little better, but then also understanding who this character could be. As much as I love Max Schreck’s iconic makeup design, and so does planet Earth, what is that thing? It certainly isn’t actually a vampire, anyway, as folklore would have it. I wanted the vampire to be scary.

Obviously, with my interest, I turned back to folklore and the early Balkan and Slavic folklore. These folk vampires were ambulating corpses that looked more like a cinematic zombie. That seemed very exciting to me. Then the question is, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? Then I go from there. He still has Max Schreck’s fingernails. He still has a bit of Max Schreck’s profile and hunch to take a nod back to the original, and because he is in this putrid state, he is a bit of a monster the way Max Schreck’s vampire is a monster.

John: I think we’re used to modern vampires being romantic figures in the classically sexual sense. We’re used to the Byronic vampire who’s charming, who comes in, and this is a more old-school, just actually terrifying monstrosity of a character who’s coming in here. While there’s still a sexual element to him, he’s this ancient old guy. He’s not Robert Pattinson, he’s a timeless demonic force.

Robert: Yes. A big, angry erection with a mustache. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the tropes of gothic romance and tell me if there’s other genres you feel this fits into. When I think of gothic romance, I think of that ruin and decay, which you definitely see in your movie. You see the darkness, the suffocating. I always think about suffocating collars, those Victorian collars that are choking people, that sense of doomed romance that there’s fate. It’s a sense of permeating evil that is specific and different from, a Cthulian or a Lovecraftian kind of darkness or horror. It’s something primal but also understandable by humans.

There’s something mortal and physical about it that just feels so specific. What were the things as you were writing and then as you were thinking about production design, that you needed to call in there to make sure that we were feeling this world of gothic horror?

Robert: The thing that struck me is that this is a demon lover story, and there’s plenty of that in Victorian fiction. Wuthering Heights was something that I turned to pretty quickly in the writing process to explore Ellen and Orlok’s relationship dynamics. Something that I had all my heads of department read was The Fall of the House of Usher, which I’m sure they’ve all read before multiple times. I don’t think there’s ever been anything better as far as the description of gothic atmosphere.

There are so many little things, but never turning off the fog machine is a big help, I’ll say that. Look, the production design is very clear about what it’s doing, and the desaturated color palette is very clear about what it’s doing, but something that was also just essential and was really the only thing that focus features was a little bit like, “Please God, no,” they were so supportive, but I insisted on only shooting when it was gloomy to keep that heavy atmosphere. Also, when you finally see the sun after two hours of not seeing it, it has more of an impact.

John: Can we talk about night? Night is one of those really challenging things to visualize on film. Basically, there’s no one perfect way to do it, and everyone has to make different choices. My first movie, Go, was almost entirely night exteriors, and it killed me. I realized as a writer, “Oh, night,” and then you’re actually out having to shoot night, like, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing possible.”

I think what you don’t really appreciate until you actually have to aim a camera at something in the night is like, wait, how are we seeing this thing? Our eyes are not the same as what the camera’s going to see. What were the choices you made for night in this versus Northman versus The Witch in terms of how we’re visualizing night and where the light is coming from? How much is it subjective to the characters? What are some of the choices you’re making and having conversations with your collaborators about night?

Robert: With all of the films, the lighting is a very sculpted version of what light is supposed to be actually doing. All of the light sources, if it’s candlelit, it’s coming from candles. If it’s lamplight, it’s coming from a lamp, if it’s moonlight coming from a window. You can better believe that there’s no movie lights, no Kino Flos no nothing, just lights coming from the window with the tremendous amount of bounces and frames and shit all over the place.

That’s the approach, and it can become– With The Northman, some of those really wide expanses at night were very challenging to shoot. Shooting the rather lovely lit crossroads in Nosferatu was a little simpler because Jiren just had a strip of light that he needed to get his helium balloons over.

But something odd that we did on The Northman and honed on this, but it seems to confuse a lot of audience members, so maybe it is not the best choice, is basically, we don’t photograph any of the color red. It’s virtually a black-and-white image that you’re seeing, which is how mammals’ eyes work at night.

We know the color of our sneakers and the color of a tree, so we imagine seeing it, even though it’s not there, so maybe because we’re imagining it there, maybe it should be there, but we decided to not have it. I think it is very beautiful, but sometimes– I don’t know how many times people come up to me after screenings and ask me, “What does it mean when it’s black and white?” I’m like, “It means that it’s moonlight.”

John: Really, I would challenge any listener, next time you’re outside at night, outside of the city, when you’re actually just out in the middle of the woods at night, recognize how you’re not seeing color, you actually are seeing basically black and white. You don’t think about it because it’s not top of your mind, but you really cannot tell colors apart. It’s just how our eyes work. I think we’ve been conditioned by so many other movies that are basically sneaking lights in places to give you a sense of, oh, this is what night looks like. That it’s not truly what night is.

There’s both the aesthetic concern, but it’s also the real practical concern. If you are a production that has a lot of night exterior shooting, that’s going to have a huge impact on your crew and your ability to get work done. It’s a challenge, and so making smart choices is important.

Robert: I’ve definitely also– The next thing that I’m likely shooting has so many nights, so whatever, but I find that shooting nights as I get older has become a lot harder.

John: Oh, yes. You have a kid now, and so you recognize, “Oh, sleep is good.” Sleep is an important aspect for folks. Again, every production is going to make its own choices, but if I were to make a TV show that had a lot of night shooting, I would, from the very start, think about what are the choices we’re going to make that are going to look best on a screen and keep us alive while we’re doing it because that just feels important.

Robert: As I’ve learned about how Jiren works, now, when I’m writing something, I’m talking early on, like, “Do we think, with the vibe of this, we’re going to want fast film or not?” Like, “Okay, oh, we want to use slow film.” I got to think about the light sources at night because I don’t want to have to have a whole bunch of fucking lights in this particular scene. What am I going to–“ You know what I mean? It’s nice to have those conversations as I’m writing now so that I can be not putting myself in a place I don’t want to be when I’m on set.

John: For the right genre of movie, I watch Survivor, the CBS TV series, and their nighttime stuff, now they just shoot with infrared cameras. It’s such a weird, cool look. It’s like, for the right production, that might be a look to take, but you’re going to have to make that make sense within your whole world of stuff.

We have a couple of listener questions that I want to get to, if we can. This first one here is from Lisa about detail. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew Marquardt: Lisa writes, “I’m in the midst of a historical fiction book where the author has taken pains to get the slang, dress, and other details right, but somehow it’s too obviously worked in. It calls attention to itself too much. It feels a bit like the author is showing off their work and not organic to the story. For screenwriters, how much is too much? When does one’s effort at getting things right become distracting, and any guidance?”

John: All right. A good question about historical accuracy and details and what you need to put there versus feeling like it’s been shoved in. Robert, your script has a lot of period details, and I never felt they were shoved in, but did you have any sense of, I need to put this in there or I need to back off?

Robert: I think that once you establish a location or the persona of a character or whatever and it’s very clear, unless there’s a major change or a major new addition, you don’t need to harp on it so much. As you get further into the script, you can also dial back, Again, if there’s been a big energetic scene, and then the movie takes a pause and then there’s a funeral where the pacing’s going to be slower, then you can add some details about the funeral shit because the pacing’s going to be slower.

Generally, as the thing develops, you don’t need to write it’s a wooden door with iron, blah, blah, blah because you fucking can expect that by now, I think that’s definitely a big part of it. I haven’t read what you’re reading and sometimes people just have bad taste, but I think that once you’ve established it, people now know.

John: One thing I hear you saying is that the speed on the page should match the expected speed of the actual story you’re watching on screen. I always describe like screenplays should make you feel like you’re sitting in the audience watching this movie and the really good screenplays I’ve read, I forget after a couple of years, “Wait, did I watch that movie or did it just read the script?” They can really evoke the experience of sitting in that theater.

These details can matter. Robert, you describe a character blowing the pounce off something and that’s just not the way we would say that in American English. Yet it feels completely appropriate to the period of time that you’re putting this in here that your characters aren’t speaking in German yet they feel like, okay, we’re in this historic time where– I believe that we’re in Germany as we’re doing this.

Robert: Also, the inclusion of that was because you needed a beat change anyway. You might have just wrote pause, which also could have worked, but because we needed a beat change, it was like a way to work in a period detail that also keeps the momentum of the scene going in the right way, hopefully.

John: That’s great. Let’s try Emil in Norway.

Drew: Emil writes, “I’m a film student in Trondheim, Norway, and started this fall. It’s been a lot of learning, which is great, but also overwhelming at times. My question is, if you’ve ever felt stupid during your career, what did you do? I felt stupid a lot this semester Not all the time, but those moments stick with me. So it feels worse than it probably is. I struggle to get my ideas out the way I imagined them, and I worry more about not seeming stupid than I’d like. I try to tell myself that knowing you don’t know the answer is supposed to make you smart, but honestly, that feels more like wishful thinking than fact. Any advice?”

Robert: I think once you have a lot more experience, it’s a lot easier to say like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” Than when you don’t have a lot of experience. I would just say, watch a million movies, read a million books, listen to all kinds of music, check out paintings, and just absorb stuff. I went to drama school and that is it. My wife has a PhD in clinical psychology, and I, definitely, when I was hanging out with her friends, felt like a fucking idiot. I was like, “I need to read some more books.”

Certainly, in the process of making movies, you do make mistakes and you do not know everything, but I think you just have to go for it and put one foot in front of the other, and then you learn more. I think, though, that one of the cool things about being a director, it’s also sometimes frustrating and does make you feel dumb, is that you are almost always, if you’re not Ridley Scott, the least experienced person on set. Because everyone’s making many movies a year, and if you’re lucky, you’re making one every two or three years, and that’s if you’re lucky. You literally have to listen to everyone around you who knows more than you do, but also know when is it the time to reinvent the wheel.

Now, it’s interesting to me sometimes when I talk to screenwriters who aren’t showrunners and aren’t on set very much or even sometimes people in post-production who have incredibly illustrious careers but don’t know how movies are really made. Also, maybe it doesn’t matter if screenwriting’s your thing.

John: Going back to your story on Hansel and Gretel, you watched this film at the film festival, and you could have said, “Oh, I’m an idiot, I should stop this. This wasn’t very good,” and instead you said, “No, no, no, I want to make something much better than that.”

Robert: And look, I knew the movie didn’t work when we wrapped the shoot. I said, “Cut,” and I was like, “We don’t have it. We’re going to edit it, and it’s not actually going to really work, but I have to keep going because I have to learn.”

John: What Emil’s describing is imposter syndrome. He feels like he’s not up to the level of everybody else in his program, maybe. Remember, he only has introspection to himself, so he knows that he feels stupid, but he doesn’t know that everyone else may feel stupid too, or they may be just as stupid, but they’re just not projecting it. So listen, give yourself some grace. Know that you don’t know everything.

It’s also exciting to be a newcomer at something. I love going to do new things that I’m not good at because it just also reminds me of what it feels like to be young and be trying things. If I’m doing a Broadway show for the first time, or I’m doing a different animation for the first time, I love being the guy who doesn’t know how this stuff works, because then I can find out. There’s the opportunity to try new stuff. Emil, you’re great. Just keep working. Let’s try one more question here from A.D.S.

Drew: A.D.S. writes, “Do writers make bad long-term romantic partners? We spend a lot of time alone. We like sitting and watching movies and TV a lot. We’re largely unsuited for gainful employment. Even when we’re not working, we’re still working, interacting with friends and family, but always turning over a stubborn plot point in our heads, always listening for a line or idea we can steal. What types of personalities make good partners for writers? How important is it, reading and liking your work, your favorite genre, jokes, violence, comic books? Do opposites attract? Should you pursue love outside the business? If so, whatever are you going to talk about?”

Robert: [laughs] John? I don’t know why this is– Sjón, who co-wrote The Northman with me in a lot of other scripts that haven’t been made yet, he and his wife, Elsa, have a lovely relationship, and she’s an opera singer. They have things they have in common, they have things that they don’t, and it’s cool. My wife’s a clinical psychologist, same thing. She reads really intense, heavy literature, which I enjoy talking with her about and haven’t read, but it’s inspiring to me.

Then she watches shitty reality TV, which I can’t stand. She’s happy to come and go to watch a bunch of Bergman movies but doesn’t want to sit through a bunch of Hammer Horror movies, and that’s fine.

John: My husband is a super smart, very organized MBA. We have lots of areas that intersect, but we’re not the same person, and we have very different interests and things. I think that can be good, and whether you’re with a person who’s another writer, I have friends who both parts of the couple are writers, and it works great, and another couple of friends who split apart because they did overlap too much.

There’s no one perfect answer. I would say just your choice of profession and what you like to do for a living, it’s important, but it’s not the most important thing in a romantic partner. It’s like, does that person give you energy, give you joy, make you feel like more of yourself? Then that’s the right romantic partner for you. If not, then they’re probably not the right romantic partner and it doesn’t have very much to do with their profession.

Robert: You’re good at answering these questions in a holistic way. I’m very impressed. Anyway– [laughs]

John: Thank you. We’ve been doing this for a while, so it’s always nice to see things. The reason why I tend to focus on early parts of careers is that most of our listeners are in the early parts of their careers, and so that’s something they can relate to more because you can talk about, how do you deal with a studio marketing team for this stuff? It’s like, “Oh, those are problems that people will get to later on down the road.”

Robert: I had the absolute pleasure of being able to call Alfonso Cuaron every once in a while. Pleasure and privilege. I remember I was asking him about some lighting question on The Witch, and he was like, “What you need is you need this pyramid of LEDs that you program and all this shit,” and I was just like, “We’ve got $3.5 million. I don’t know what the fuck is–”

John: Absolutely. This isn’t Gravity here. That’s great.

This is the time of the program where we do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a video I watched this last week. It’s by Max Miller, he’s a guy who does historical foodstuff. He finds old historical recipes and he recreates them, things that would actually be very appropriate for some of your historical movies, like Nosferatu and stuff, what would they actually have been eating? In this case, he made school cafeteria pizza from the ’80s and ’90s. Robert, you probably remember this, remember this steam tray pizza?

Robert: Oh yes. I’m sure it’s illegal now.

John: He found the actual USDA recipe for it, basically how you’re supposed to make it. This liquid crust you use, which seems impossible, but it is a very convincing recreation of the original sheet pan pizza, and it made me nostalgic for it, because it was terrible, and yet I was always so excited for pizza day. A very good YouTube video on cafeteria pizza and how to make cafeteria pizza. Robert, did you have something to share with our listeners, something to recommend?

Robert: I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job of thinking of something to recommend while I’ve been yapping away. It’s gotten some more attention lately, but I really liked Magnus von Horn’s, The Girl with the Needle. I would encourage people to check that out.

John: Fantastic. I haven’t seen it yet. Girl with the Needle is animation or is it live-action? I’m trying to remember what this movie is.

Robert: It’s live-action. Magnus is Swedish, I believe, and he lives in Poland, and the film takes place after World War I in Denmark. It was shot mostly in Poland in some really gritty, excellent locations. It’s a very cool, unique script. It’s actually based on real events. Of course, because I’m recommending it, it’s very dark, but some of the acting is just really tremendous and really nuanced.

We all know very well the feeling of when we’re reading a novel, or reading anything, really, and the author has been able to articulate something that we have semi-understood, but never been able to say. I think when actors are at the top of their craft and the story and the script and the directors are all doing their job, the acting can do the same thing where it expresses an emotional state, another state that is something that is so true that we maybe have never seen on screen before. I think that there’s a few moments that reach that level in this film.

John: That’s great. I will race to see that.

That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week from Zoe Black, and edited by Matthew Chilelli Our outro this week is by Guy Fee. 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. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting.

There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on cycling. Robert Eggers, it’s an absolute pleasure talking with you about Nosferatu and all things moviemaking.

Robert: It was fun. When you were wrapping up the show, I thought, “Oh, this is so lucky. I don’t have to talk about cycling.” [laughs]

John: Now we do.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s talk about cycling. I asked you in the pre-show thing, what does no one ever ask you about? What other things do you like to do? Tell us about cycling. Is cycling a thing you’ve done your whole life? What is cycling to you?

Robert: It’s basically my only hobby that is not directed towards my work. I used to do it competitively as a teenager and was super obsessed with it, but then as I got more into theater and music, I stopped. I also stopped hanging out with that friend group, which– Then during COVID, I was like, “Maybe I’ll get a bike,” because I was living in New Hampshire for a little while. I got a mountain bike instead of just a bike to ride around town, and then I just became totally obsessed with it again.

I have to say, it’s changed my life to be doing it super seriously now. In fact, the more that I ride and the more active I am, the more that I’m actually more efficient in my writing. I’m at my desk less and writing more and writing better because, to sound really dopey, I’m healthier. I think mountain biking is awesome because I can’t think about anything but that or you’re going to die. Then road biking is more meditative.

John: Tell me, how do you plan for it and fit it into your day to make sure it is prioritized? How do you make sure it doesn’t get knocked to the bottom every time?

Robert: It’s tough. Certainly, like we were doing press, we’re doing this tour and I was on the spin bike in the hotel gym, which sucks. There’s a popular app called Zwift where you can virtually ride, which makes it slightly less painful.

John: When you say virtually ride, it’s showing you the scenery as if–

Robert: Yes. You’re a person on a bike. You have a little avatar and you’re actually riding with other people who are riding all over the world. You’re riding through– You can, whatever, be in Southeast Asia or be in Yorkshire or whatever.

John: For a couple of years, I did Peloton. In addition to classes, they also had the virtual things where you can go out and do stuff. I stopped Peloton post-pandemic when I could really run more full-time. I run half marathons and that’s been great, but I do have to really plan and prioritize for that time because if I don’t, it just falls away and then I can’t do it.

Robert: It’s not easy and certainly in production, it barely happens. That’s just a fucker.

John: I had a director who did a pilot for me years ago and was adamant that like, “No, no, the exercise always happens.” Basically, he’ll be at the hotel gym at 4:00 in the morning because he has to do that. If he doesn’t do that, his things fall apart. I get that and also I’m not sure I could get myself to that place where I would always put that in as a priority.

Robert: Again, at the risk of boring people to death, I do need a lot of sleep. I think that if I was also doing that during production, I would be burning the candle at both ends too extremely. I save it for the weekend.

John: I need my sleep too, so I hear that. How do you protect that? If you’re in production, there’s always 19 more questions you could answer and at a certain point, you just draw a line, you turn off your phone.

Robert: Yes, I do, but I think, unfortunately, and I’d love to get to– Look, my shoots are generous compared to what a lot of people get and I’m very aware of that, but it is a time when your life is ruined. That’s just how it is, but you’re doing what you love and so you give yourself to that. I couldn’t ask for anything more.

John: Robert, it’s been great talking with you.

Robert: Same.

Links:

• Robert Eggers
• Nosferatu | Screenplay
• Robert Eggers’ shorts Hansel and Gretel and The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Girl with the Needle
• Making School Cafeteria Pizza from the 1980s & ‘90s
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Guy Fee (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week from Zoe Black, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 672 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do we handle loss? Loss of a parent, loss of a relationship, loss of a home? How do we grieve both alone and collectively? To help us explore these questions, we have a very special guest.

Jesse Eisenberg is a writer of plays, short stories and screenplays, who’s also an accomplished actor and director. He’s the writer, director and star of his film A Real Pain. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Jesse Eisenberg.

Jesse Eisenberg: Thank you so much, John. It’s a real privilege to be on the show and to talk to you.

John: Excited to have you here. Congrats on your WGA nomination.

Jesse: Oh, thanks.

John: Yesterday.

Jesse: Thanks a lot.

John: I want to talk to you about your movie, about the writing of it, the journey to making it into a movie. Also, if we can, I’d like to answer two listener questions that we got in.

Jesse: Sure.

John: One about signature styles and simultaneous perspectives. Then we do a bonus segment at the end and I’d love to talk to you about the radio drama as a form. Because it’s weird, Scriptnotes, we’ve been doing this for 12 years, but we’ve never actually talked about the audio drama. You’re actually a person who has written and performed in those. I want to talk to you about that as a thing.

Jesse: Oh, great. Oh, I would love to.

John: Cool. We’re recording this on Thursday afternoon, January 16th. We’ve just gotten word that David Lynch has died today, which is the writer-director behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, which was such an important thing for me. Jesse, did you ever get to work with him? Did you ever get to meet him? Did you ever cross paths with him?

Jesse: No, I’ve never met him and would definitely have not forgotten that experience. No, I just loved him so much. I think I wrote three different college papers on Mulholland Drive because I was recycling them because I love the movie so much.

John: Yes. I never got to meet him either. I think the thing about writer-directors is they just generate their own work. As a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to enter into his orbit. I was just always so impressed by the specificity of his work and that you have some filmmakers whose names become adjectives and Lynchian is just a thing. You can identify it as a signature style. It’s not even just the visuals, but just the way-

Jesse: The feeling.

John: -his worlds feel. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes.

John: He died at 78, not in the fires, but partially because of the fires. He was evacuated from the Sunset Fire, which was-

Jesse: Oh, is that right?

John: -also affected us. It was headed down our way. Apparently that was part of what set off this last series of things.

Jesse: Oh, I had no idea. Oh my goodness.

John: Emphysema, but when people are in a fragile state and then they have emergency, you’re moving them around.

Jesse: Right. Oh goodness, I didn’t realize.

John: Jesse, I associate you as a New York person. Have you been in Los Angeles much?

Jesse: I’m aware of it. The first times I would go to Los Angeles would be for screen tests for movies. I just developed this horrible Pavlovian anxiety about landing at LAX because I knew I had to go– I was trying to memorize my lines in the car over to some audition. I never got the wonderful LA experience. I shot there and I did a play there actually.

When I’m working there, it’s nice. When I’m not working there, all that old stuff, when I’m there, I have a day off or something, all that old feeling of being out there and, I don’t know, just the anxiety of being out there comes back.

John: Yes. It’s strange that in the States we have these two big cities, big iconic cities. We have many great iconic cities, but the two big ones we think of are New York and Los Angeles. New York though, everyone has a connection to New York. Los Angeles is sort of a place people drop into and out of, but they don’t have that same kind of affinity for.

Jesse: Exactly. Being in the entertainment industry, I always felt like, “Well, if I’m in LA and I’m not working, what am I doing there?” Whereas when I’m not working in New York, it feels like less of a problem because I’m a third generation New Yorker. It just feels like, “Oh, this is where I should be.”

John: This really brought me to this last week in the fire. Watching the national coverage of it, there was good coverage of it. You could see a lot of national interest in it, but it wasn’t the same visceral feeling we had after 9/11, something like that which was so devastating on a national level.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: The attack on 9/11 was an attack on a fundamental piece of America. These fires were more disparate. There wasn’t one center to it.

Jesse: Exactly. I’ve been really eager to talk to people about the fires because I was in LA a few days before. I have so many friends and colleagues there. I know several people that have lost their homes. And in New York, I’m finding it’s more difficult to connect with people about it because it’s really not on their radar as much as I would have expected.

John: Yes. Update from where we are here, as we’re recording this, the fires aren’t out, but they aren’t growing. They feel like they’re largely under control. We have thousands of homes burned, people displaced, and we’re just starting to get a handle on what we’ve lost and what happens next. I and a bunch of other writers donated to the Writers Guild Member Fund, which is through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is helping out people in the industry affected by this.

Obviously at Scriptnotes and individually, we’re going to be doing a lot of donations and fundraising for folks impacted by these fires and the work of rebuilding the city and the parts that were lost. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to resources for writers from the WGA for if you’ve been impacted, places to go first to look for some help here.

Let’s get to talking about you and what you’ve been working on. It’s just so fascinating, this intersection between you as a writer and you as an actor. I want to talk about where things started because looking back through your history, it feels like you were doing both things at the same time. You were never an actor who then decided they wanted to write or a writer who then got put into some things. They were simultaneous interests for you. That started as a kid, I’m guessing.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. I would always write. I started just writing jokes and then I would be writing scenes. When I was 16 years old, I wrote a movie about Woody Allen. That was like a young version of Woody Allen in modern society, but it was about him changing his name to Woody Allen from his real name. I got a cease-and-desist letter from his lawyers once they finally got the script.

John: I want to put you on pause there. Once they finally got the script, so that means that you hustled your way into getting him to read this script.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Because I wanted to film it on a little camera. I was just trying to do all things at all times. As you know or maybe you don’t know because you’re a very successful screenwriter, but as an actor, you always feel like you’re one job away from never working again. I felt that way even when I was 17 and auditioning for things. I always felt like, “This all feels like you have to win the lottery to get a part in something.” I was just doing anything I could in the arts, which included just writing scripts in high school and trying to send them to anybody who might read them.

Then I started getting parts in movies when I was 18, 19, 20. I started getting good parts in movies that people actually saw. That helped me, because I got an agent, that helped me to get my screenplays that I was writing. I was writing commercial style screenplays. That helped me have an agent to get them into company’s hands. Some of them got optioned by like Depth of Field, which is the Weitz Brothers company.

I was 20, 21, and I would rewrite these scripts. I had like three or four of them at the time. I’d rewrite these scripts. I never got paid for an option. It was always just like they were at these companies. I’m not complaining, nor I should not have been paid for these, but I just mean it was not like I was a success. It was basically some companies had taken these scripts and agreed to talk with this nice kid for once every six months. That was the thing. At some point I realized these are never going to get made.

John: I want to unpack a few things there. You were talking about the difference between an actor and a writer. The writer can just go off and write a new script. You have an agency as a writer that you don’t have as an actor, because as an actor, you’re asking somebody to put you in their thing. “Let me be a part of your thing,” versus like, “Let me create the thing behind it.”

Jesse: Exactly.

John: And yet as an actor, you have a lot more access to different filmmakers and different styles of doing things. Because by the time you were 20, 21, 22, you’d been on a bunch of sets. You’d seen how a bunch of different people worked. You were also reading a ton of scripts. That’s a great education.

Jesse: It’s unbelievable. I don’t think I would be able to direct a movie had I not been on so many sets as an actor. I’m on sets as an actor, but really, as you know from being on these sets, you spend the day just watching things happen. If you’re a curious person, which I’m a curious person, you can ask the people and usually people are happy to tell you about their jobs and why they’re doing what they’re doing and why the dolly should go this way and not the other way. That was really helpful.

It also helped me as a writer too, because I’d been in so many– on the micro level, I’d been in scenes that just don’t work. You’re like, “Why does this scene not work? Why is it not playable?” is the word we would use as an actor. “This scene is not playable. My character says this thing and then two lines later says this thing and it makes no sense. There’s no psychological jump.” And so as a writer, I just don’t do that stuff. That’s not the difference between a good movie and a bad movie, really. It’s just the thing that actors like to do versus what actors don’t like to do. So that was really helpful.

Then just because I’m writing things that are character based generally, it’s like, I feel like I have a good sense of what actors like to do, because that’s always the thing I come into conflict with. I just did this movie, we just finished, it was Now You See Me 3. It’s this big Hollywood thing. It’s an ensemble movie, there’s eight characters in it. But I really do have to say my character has a consistent voice from beginning to end. It’s just great. I love doing it. Even though the movie looks like maybe this movie that wouldn’t be emphasizing character stuff too much. For me, my character has a distinct voice from beginning to end and I just love doing it. It could happen in any level of movie.

John: Let’s go back to those first scripts you were writing, the ones that the Weitz Brothers were not paying you for, but to sort of bring in. What is the first screenplay you remember reading? The thing that made you think like, “Oh, this is actually a form I understand. This is a form I want to work in.” Do you remember?

Jesse: Oh, wow. God, that’s a great question. Yes. God, it must have been something. When I was younger, I was auditioning for things, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.

John: Yes, and often you’re probably seeing sides, you’re seeing the pieces of a thing rather than the full-

Jesse: Exactly.

John: -work.

Jesse: I auditioned for the movie The Squid and the Whale when I was like I think 19, I ended up filming it when I was 21 because they got on hold for two years because of budget whatever, but I definitely remember thinking, “This is amazing.” It was amazing. It’s funny and emotional in a way that just felt original and that tone just seemed really cool.

John: And The Squid and the Whale, it’s a spare script. It’s not a play, but it’s not a big cinematic. There aren’t car chases. It’s not the camera doing wild things. It’s just characters in a situation creating their own issues.

Jesse: Right, so it’s easier to read. It’s harder to read a big action thing and understand actually what it’s going to look like and be, because there are just so many moving parts that are not able to be explicit in a script. But for a movie like Squid and the Whale, or the first movie I got to do, Roger Dodger, they were great scripts, the dialogue was great, and you could see on the page that the thing was going to be great. It didn’t require directorial or technical flourishes that you couldn’t see on the page.

John: Yes, but the first script I read was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was one of the first things that was printed that we had to buy at a bookstore and read.

Jesse: Oh, wow.

John: It was just the realization like, “Oh, everything that’s happening in the movie that I’m watching on the VHS copy, it’s just reflected here.” Realizing that there’s a standard format that makes sense for explaining what’s going to happen in this movie, just on the page.

Jesse: And it was a good read?

John: It was a great read.

Jesse: It was accessible read, right.

John: A hundred percent. Again, it’s spare because it didn’t need a lot of flourishes, but just the sense of like, “Oh, this is how we’re going to introduce a character on the page,” which is not necessarily going to match exactly what you’re going to see on screen. It tracks well. You can hear characters’ voices being distinct even before those actors are being cast in them. That’s a crucial thing.

Jesse: Do you find that there are a lot of movies that just don’t read well, but you know are going to be great?

John: There are. Some of the cases I’ve run into are directors who’ve written things, they have a vision for what it is, but they just can’t get it on the page very well. I know this filmmaker’s going to be able to make something great, it’s just not there yet. I’ve worked a lot at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and sometimes you have these filmmakers coming in who are working on, generally, their second movie, and so the first one they just made, and the second one, they really are trying to put it all together. Sometimes they’re struggling with the form, but you know they have a great vision there.

Jesse: You know that because they’ve made that other movie or just from talking to them?

John: They’ve made another movie or in the conversation with them, you see what it is that they’re trying to do and they’re just not quite able to find the-

Jesse: Translate that?

John: Yes, they’re not able to evoke that on the page for what they’re going to try to get to at the end of it all.

Jesse: Right.

John: There are definitely times where I’ve read scripts that I thought, “That is just a really tough read,” and yet, in talking with a filmmaker, you see like, “Oh, yes, they have a vision. They’re going to be able to make something really cool out of that.” My job as an advisor is just to be– I describe it as like, “I’m your friend with a pickup truck who’s going to help you move from where you are to where you need to be. I’m not going to change anything, I’m just going to help you get there.”

Jesse: That’s a nice way to think about it. The alternative thing is scripts that read really well that don’t make good movies, and I’ve been able to figure out what those are too.

John: Tell me.

Jesse: Well you know, it’s the kind of script that has really flashy dialogue, funny dialogue and things that are like– What I find most of the movies that I’m thinking about that are fun to read, but I know they’re not going to make good movies, are ones that are really quirky, where the quirk factor is turned up, where people have odd names and everything. Stuff that is funny to look at, but doesn’t translate to when you’re watching human beings take on those things, and now you have to follow them. I’m not just saying you have to relate to everybody, but just things where they’re really cutesy and quirky on the page. Usually, those things are just not translating to 3D imagery.

John: Also, I think what you’re describing is sometimes things could be like, “Okay, that little moment was funny, but it’s not the kind of funny that’s going to continue out through two hours of a movie experience.” The difference between sketch writing and longer form writing is the ability to really go on a journey with these characters and want to see them as it continues.

Jesse: Yes, and not be too funny. Sometimes scripts are too funny, and you’re like, “Yes, I get it, this is really funny, but you’re constantly undermining the gravity of the emotions of the characters.” It’s a good sketch, but you can’t actually engage with these characters in an emotional way.

John: Speaking of sketch, you’ve hosted Saturday Night Live.

Jesse: Oh, yes.

John: What was that experience like? As a person who’s usually going in with full preparation, usually you get a chance to really think everything through, and suddenly you’re in sketches. Did you enjoy it? What was that like for you?

Jesse: Oh, it was terrible. I’m an idiot. It’s my fault entirely. What happened was, when I was 18 and I got an agent and everything, I had put together a packet for Saturday Night Live to write. I’d written tons of sketches. I loved that format. Even as an adult, I could look back and say, “Yes, they were good sketches.” It wasn’t like a teenager writing. It was like somebody who had a voice and whatever, and the concepts were funny and varied.

When they asked me to host the thing, I didn’t want to because I only wanted to write for the thing and I didn’t want to be an actor coming in. They put the wig on an actor and parade you around. I wanted to be a writer. I spoke to somebody there before and they said, “Yes, no, you can do that. Yes, that’s fine. You can bring your scripts in. That’d be great.” I didn’t realize that they were just being nice to me. That was not the way it works. There are writers there, they all come from the Harvard Lampoon, and they are competing with each other to get sketches on, and the celebrity actor that comes in, because they’re in a popular movie that week, doesn’t get to write the things.

But I didn’t know that, and so I spent the week trying to have my scripts infiltrate the planned sketches. There was a table read, and I think I did like two sketches at the table read, and I could tell increasingly over the course of the week, people were not happy with me. But I didn’t realize, and I was just so desperate to be a writer. If I went back on the show, I wouldn’t do that again, and I was an idiot, and I guess I must have come off really obnoxious or something. I was just so eager to write comedy since I’m young, and that felt like an opportunity for me to do it.

John: Let’s take it back to the 20-year-old Jesse Eisenberg. If I were to sit you down for an interview then, and say, “Jesse Eisenberg, what do you want to do with your life? What is your goal?” What would you have identified as your aims? What were you shooting for?

Jesse: Oh, The Onion. I would have just wanted to write for The Onion. To me, it’s the greatest thing in the world. During the pandemic, they allowed me to do six weeks on a probationary period. I did not make it past the six weeks, but I had great stuff and I just wouldn’t get it voted in at the end. I was also not one of the core writers. I was on this probationary thing. My headlines and stuff would not be prioritized. That to me still feels like the whale.

John: Oh yes.

Jesse: To me, it’s the greatest comedy writing in the world. I aspire to it and feel shamed that I didn’t get in there.

John: Yes, so instead you’re just making movies and starring in things.

Jesse: To me it’s so much easier, like the head writer from The Onion saw the movie A Real Pain and he complimented me on it and I immediately sent him back a headline because I was so desperate to just have something in The Onion. To me, if I had a non-byline Onion headline, no one knows it’s me, and it came out in one of 100 headlines that week, it’d make me happier than any movie script.

John: Incredible. I want to talk to you about your movie, A Real Pain, because this is your second feature as a director. For folks who haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to give the shortest logline, but then I want to talk to you about what the movie’s really about. It follows two cousins, David and Benji, who are on a group tour in Poland to visit important Jewish cultural sites, including a concentration camp, and to learn more about where their grandmother grew up. That’s sort of the logline version. Was that the actual movie you set out to write? What was the actual intention behind sitting down and starting to write this movie?

Jesse: Yes, thank you so much for saying that in your question, which is the first time I ever was asked it in that way, is quite spot on. Because the log line was the vehicle. The log line was the way to get them– what is the actual screenwriting term? MacGuffin? Is that the thing? What is the thing?

John: Sure. Well, MacGuffin would be sort of like a plot device. It’s just like the mechanic. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly, yes. My background as a writer, after sketch stuff didn’t work out, my background was playwriting. I’ve had four plays in New York, one of them transferred to the West End, and some play in other places. I had written one character in a play, it was named David, the play took place in Poland, the play was called Revisionist. It’s similar to my character David, who I play in this movie. My third play, which is my best play, was called The Spoils, and I played a character named Ben, who is this charming, maladaptive guy, like Kieran’s character in A Real Pain.

Then I had written a short story for a tablet magazine where I took those two characters from the two separate plays, and I put them in the same room as childhood friends who go to Mongolia. These two characters that are pretty similar to the characters in this movie. Then I thought I would adapt that to a movie. I was adapting the Mongolia script and I thought it’d be cool to shoot in Mongolia and I’d never seen it before in a movie, et cetera. It was just not going well. I didn’t have a second act. It’s okay to talk in jargon, right?

John: Oh yes, a hundred percent. Jargon is very much welcome here.

Jesse: Okay, great. Basically, I had this amazing setup of these two guys who were childhood friends and they had all this funny, fraught history together and then they got to Mongolia and this big thing happened there. The problem is it happened the first day they get there so there was no second act. Basically, it was a first act and then it jumped to this big, tragic reconciliation of their past. I didn’t have a second act.

I was sitting there, I was so frustrated because I knew there was potential with these two characters. I loved them so much and I loved their banter. I knew there was potential in a road trip of these guys. I was banging my head against the computer when an ad popped up for Auschwitz Tours, and then in parentheses, with lunch. Auschwitz Tours (with lunch). I clicked on the ad, even though I already knew what it was, which is that, it takes you to a site for advertising English speaking tours of Holocaust sites. I thought, “That’s the movie.” That gave me the vehicle.

I can set these two guys who both have their own internal pain against the backdrop of objective, horrifying pain. Suddenly I could just implicitly make this bigger commentary on what pain is valid? Is my OCD character’s pain valid? Is Kieran’s pain, who has much darker demons than my character’s pain valid? Or are we just individual grains of irrelevant sand on the beach of Polish trauma, in Holocaust history? Once I came up with this Holocaust tour, it just seemed like this is a great vehicle to have a movie with these two characters.

John: The choice to make them cousins makes a lot more sense now that you talked through the history of this. Originally they were best friends, but that really wouldn’t make sense for why they’re going on this tour together. If they were siblings, you’re dealing with all the sibling stuff of it all. Cousins is the in between place.

Jesse: Exactly. Originally when I thought about the Holocaust tour, I thought they have to be family. I thought they’d be siblings. Then I realized, no, it’d be so much more interesting to make them cousins who just lost a grandma because what that would do is allow them to basically not have a relationship anymore.

If you’re siblings, you’re always connected by your parents. There’s just expectations that you should always be in each other’s lives. Cousins who lose a grandparent, which is their only link, really have to make a decision in some ways, unconscious, implicit decision on if they’re going to remain really close. That’s what’s going on with these characters in this movie.

John: Jesse, as you sat down to start writing this script, did that you were going to star in it? Did that you were going to direct it? Was that always an intention from when you started writing the script?

Jesse: No, not really. I write all the time. This was just the next thing I was writing. I wasn’t exactly thinking that I would act in it. I guess I wanted to direct it because I want to direct because I feel like the film industry is so fickle with actors that I feel like I need to have some control. I don’t have your skill set to write the way you do these really big, wonderful movies. I can write my small personal things. And if I direct them, it gives me a little more agency in this industry that I find is really unstable. I thought, “Okay, I could direct this. This could be something. It’s a character driven movie. It doesn’t require a technical mastery.” Then in terms of acting in it, I didn’t really think about it.

John: Because it sounds like you’ve actually played both characters.

Jesse: Yes. I did. I did play both of those characters. I always think of my acting as quite separate, in terms of movies, because I’m in other movies and other people’s movies. I wasn’t exactly thinking of being in it. The weird thing happens, and God, you could probably relate to this in a roundabout or maybe the other side way, which is that, when I send people a script, it’s just much easier to get something made that has an actor attached to it, even if it’s an actor they don’t really like. Even if producers don’t really like me, just the fact that an actor seems to have, theoretically– you’re at a higher level in this, but at my level, with writing, there’s an actor engaged on a $3 million movie, it already seems like it’s possibly real.

John: No, Jesse, I assure you that at my level, and it’s sort of at every level, having an actor attached to something is really helpful. I think it anchors in people’s minds like, “Oh, I can picture the movie, I can sort of picture Oscar Isaac in that thing.” It just makes life easier if there’s somebody attached.

Jesse: Exactly. And it also seems like validated by a non-writer, that seems helpful too. “Okay, this is not just a literary thing. This is validated by somebody attractive.” Once I started sending it out to financiers, independent investors, whatever, I just put my name on it, basically just as a shorthand that it’s going to hopefully be made soon.

John: As folks started to read this, they were reading this as like, “Okay, this is something that Jesse wrote, he’s going to be starring and directing in it.” They’ve seen that you can direct a movie. They know you as an actor. It must make it easier because there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I get what this is and it’s not going to be a crazy expensive movie.” What was the process of going out and finding the money? Was it all independent investors? Did you have a plan? Because you ended up selling it at, was it Sundance or where did you sell it?

Jesse: We sold it at Sundance. Yes. No, it was really hard. Really hard. We were passed up by everybody in the first round of who we went to. It was ultimately produced by this great company, Topic. They’re certainly not a second-round company, but the people we had gone to for a higher budget essentially, all passed on it. A24, who did my first movie, didn’t do this one.

It did feel a little bit like a really uphill battle to the point where I was writing to German reparations funds who give some money to Holocaust themed movies. I was able to get a little grant from them that I thought could be seed money to make this. I didn’t know how I was going to fund it. I know that must seem strange to maybe some listeners who know me as like a Hollywood actor and it seems like, “Well, why don’t we just go make it?” The way these independent movies are made, it’s difficult. A lot of people want to make movies at this level. It’s competitive.

John: Yes. You were able to find producers and financiers. How early on in the process did you list some sort of line producer, somebody who could come up with a budget, come up with a schedule? How early did like how expensive it was to make the movie?

Jesse: Oh God, that’s a great question. Pretty early we did that because, okay, so I should also say, because I don’t want to seem like I’m asking for pity that it was a real struggle. It was a real struggle to find investors, but my producers are great. They’re Emma Stone’s company called Fruit Tree. It’s Em, her husband Dave McCary and their partner, Ali Herting. They were great. When we were looking for actual investors, that was the struggle.

We had a budget done, I think pretty early, but it was a bit amorphous because the budget is partly dependent on getting money from the Polish Film Institute and you don’t know if you’re going to get it. In our case, actually, we lost, I think it was like– we were a three and a half million-dollar movie. I think we lost $850,000 two months before because we were expecting it from the PFI. Then for a set of technical reasons, we didn’t get it. We thought it would cost five and a half. We ended up having to make it for three and a half, which meant cutting out days, which meant cutting locations. It was scrappy. It was quick. Every day felt like something would go wrong.

John: Yes. That’s really challenging. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the screenplay that’s being published, the For Your Consideration script. How close is the script that we’ll be seeing to what you went into production with? Because it’s always hard to tell with For Your Consideration scripts, how much they’re just conforming to the final movie versus what the original shooting script was. What changed?

Jesse: Oh, wow. What a nice question. I haven’t even thought about this stuff. We cut two scenes from the movie, which are not reflected in the For Your Consideration script. We cut the two scenes. Otherwise, maybe it’s word for word. It’s that close. The two scenes, one of the scenes, I put in at the very last minute. It was a scenelet. The big scene we cut was just the beginning of the movie. You see my character at home with his wife and kid. The actress was great, Ellora Torchia, she’s a brilliant British actress. She played my wife. My child played my child. Wasn’t happy to be cut out. The scene felt too formulaic and just standard issue for the pace of the rest of the movie.

John: Absolutely. The way you’re starting now makes a lot of sense because we see we’re in New York, we know we’re headed to the airport. I suspect what you found in the edit was that seeing the wife and family made you want to see them more over the course of it. That really wasn’t the movie you were making.

Jesse: Exactly. It was not helpful. Actually, you just want to– God, you probably know this better than anybody. Audiences pick up on shortcuts to characterizations really quickly. You see me in a taxi cab now in the beginning and I’m calling my cousin. It’s a funny little scene, but it just says everything you want to know about who I am, who that character is, the cousin who I’m calling. It’s a funnier scene and it’s more original. Audiences are so aware, they just know, “Oh, that’s this person. Let’s see how this person unfolds now.”

John: Yes. I want to talk about a showcase scene in the script right now. It’s eight pages long. It’s pages 64 to 72, which is the restaurant scene. This is where we’re at a restaurant, Benji’s being very prickly. He leaves the table. David apologizes for him, explains what sounds like bipolar disorder.

Two of your lines here, basically, “I know he’s in pain, but isn’t everybody in pain in some way? I know my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” Sort of central thesis that you’re getting out there.

Jesse: Right.

John: It’s also the revelation to this group that Benji had attempted suicide six months ago, which is new information for us as the audience. Can you talk about the writing of that scene? Did you always know it was going to be a turning point in the movie that would be a showcase scene? What were your feelings going into it, not just as a writer, but also then as the actor and the director?

Jesse: I hope it’s okay to admit this, but I didn’t have that line in the first draft that Benji tried to commit suicide. There were little droppings within the movie that indicated that this guy’s pain was far more, was darker than mine. My instinct was to not put something so explicitly detailed like that. The reason I put it in, again, I hope it’s okay to talk about this stuff, because it’s inside baseball-y a little bit. But the first movie I made wasn’t received that well.

I think the reason it wasn’t received that well is because I assumed that the audience would totally understand how I felt as a director about my characters, and they didn’t. They thought I maybe had contempt for them, and I didn’t. I was in love with them, but they were not being their best selves in the movie. It was really hard to read harsh criticism of the other movie. For this, I just wanted to make sure the audience understood what was happening and that, yes, you could imply in 10,000 different ways and looks and lies of omission and all this stuff, indicate that that character may have done something like that or tried to hurt himself or kill himself, but I needed to be more specific.

John: Yes, because we’re seeing this as an audience. We’re approaching it only with the information that we’re seeing on screen. You as the writer or director you know the facts. You know things that we’re not necessarily able to see.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: We don’t know whether this is typical behavior for Benji or atypical. Is he always just an asshole? What’s going on in this moment? What I like about the revelation where you put it is that it re-contextualizes the scenes that we’ve been thinking about beforehand. The same way that we as an audience are doing that, the other people around the table are like, “Oh, okay, the stuff we saw before…” It actually does provide just really good dramatic fodder for figuring out what happens next. It makes us appreciate both you and Benji differently for now knowing this information.

Jesse: The scene used to end– the kicker at the end of that monologue was not this revelation that Benji tried to kill himself, but the kicker in the– kicker is such a sleazy word to use for something emotional. The great ending prior to that, it was that our grandparents survived by a thousand miracles to get us here. The ending of the monologue was, “And I know we were born on third base. I know I was born on third base and I feel so lucky, but it feels like Benji is just constantly trying to run back to second.” That was the ending line. It was this guy who had everything and was trying to make his life so much worse.

John: Yes, and that’s such a great line. It’s not supported by the scene that’s there beforehand. I can understand why it changed, but it’s such a great sentiment. I want to drill into this aspect of it because what’s interesting about your movie is that it’s hard to make a dramatic comedy, comedy drama, something that walks that line. It also goes to the fact that this movie has to become quiet at moments.

It has to let the concentration camp be what it is and then find a context for it. Because you’re talking about the loss of a grandparent and your own personal pain in this environment of just unspeakable, catastrophic, unfathomable loss. And trying to hold the balance of that. And the shame you feel of feeling bad when others have it so much worse around you.

Jesse: Right, exactly.

John: Talk to me about the rest of the people in that group and how you thought about those characters and the tour guide, Will, and how you thought about putting together the rest of the folks who are going to be surrounding them.

Jesse: In a macro way, after I read up a lot on what these Holocaust tours mostly are, they’re mostly suburban, middle, upper-middle class Jews who are doing their responsible trip. Instead of going to Rome this year, they go to this place. It’s very well-intentioned. I don’t mean to sound flippant about them. No, it’s wonderful that they’re doing that and exploring that history. Basically, I knew I couldn’t have 15 people on the tour that were all basically my parents. It would just be monotonous. I was trying to think of who could be on this tour, realistically, that is just a little more interesting than probably what most of these tours offer.

For me, that meant, I wrote a character based on my friend, Eloge. I met this guy named Eloge in real life. He survived the Rwanda genocide, converted to Judaism. If you look up his name, the first video that comes up is him talking about going on an Auschwitz tour. He’s my most religious Jewish friend. I asked him, “I think you’d be a really interesting character.” I told him what I was writing. I said, “Would you mind if I used your life story in this?” Not only did he agree to it, but helped me with casting and wardrobe. It was wonderful. That was interesting.

I had a neighbor, Martha. She’s the basis of Jennifer Grey’s character, Marcia. She was divorced and she was curious about her roots in Hungary. I just put the story together in my head of how interesting it must be to be going through a divorce and trying to find grounding in your own family’s history, even if that means Holocaust history. That was a character.

Then in terms of the tour guide, I thought it’d be interesting to have a character that is– there’s a term that Jews use called a philo-Semitic. Anti-Semitic is a hatred of Jews. Philo is of course a lover of Jews, but it’s a weird– the word is not used exactly. It’s kind of derogatory. It’s basically used to describe somebody who fetishizes Jewish culture. Like, “You guys are so, and I love the food,” that kind of thing. I thought it’d be really interesting to have a character as a tour guide who is an academic so that he can represent just the cold facts of the tour because I wanted somebody–

Basically, I was just trying to create people that Benji could play off of, that Kieran’s character could play off of. I knew if I had this guy that was overly academic and intellectualizing this tragic history, I knew it would just create some tension for Kieran. As I was writing it just proved to be true because once they got to the cemetery and they’re looking at this oldest Jewish cemetery, Kieran just goes nuts on him.

John: Yes, so you’ve assembled sort of this group of folks who are traveling through this place. At this point, you’ve cast Kieran. How much time did you have to figure out the relationship between you two guys? Because I can imagine if you weren’t also the writer-director, you were just the two actors, you might find some time to get together and figure out what your dynamic was. How much time did you have to spend with him to figure out how to play things? What was the process of working with him?

Jesse: Insane. I had no time with him and that’s more having to do with Kieran than it is anything else. Kieran is the most unusual person. Every writer listening to this, hire him in your movie, but don’t expect to have any conversation with him. Don’t expect him to know what scenes you’re shooting during the day. Not only is he the main character in this movie, he’s the focus of every scene in this movie.

First of all, he showed up to Poland a day before we shot. He didn’t want to talk about it with me on the phone ever. We did a 15-minute rehearsal. Basically, he showed up to Poland the day before we shot and I had a three-hour rehearsal planned. It was the scene where he calls up all these characters to this monument to take pictures and he just bringing the group out of the shell.

I thought we’d had a three-hour rehearsal. Kieran, he was late to rehearsal. I’m criticizing him only because I’m about to compliment him. He came to the rehearsal and he didn’t know what scene we were rehearsing and he didn’t know any of his lines. He said, “Can I look at the script for a second?” I showed him the script. He looked at it for 30 seconds and then was word perfect and did the scene once so perfectly that I said, “Let’s not rehearse any more. Let’s just shoot it.”

Then he would come to set during the days and I would say like, “Hey, are you okay?” He’s like, “Eh, I’m okay.” He said, “What scene are we doing today?” I would say, “It’s the scene you have five pages of dialogue on a train and it’s moving quickly.” He goes, “Oh, I remember reading that scene. That was funny. Can I take a look at the script?” I would say, “You don’t have your script?” He’s like, “Oh no, I don’t know if I brought it.” I give him my script. I’m sitting there panicking that this guy doesn’t know his dialogue and we have eight hours to shoot on this train scene. Again, he looks at the pages for like a minute and he’s word perfect and brilliant.

He’s just the most unpretentious actor but he’s doing all of the work. He’s just not doing it in a way that’s performative. We found out from his hotel towards the end of the movie that he had been sleeping on the floor and his room was a mess. His mattress was on his floor and he was living– I don’t know if he was eating at night. He was living like Benji, the character in the movie. He was just not telling anybody about it. I contrast that to the actor that comes to set every morning and says, “God, I was just going over the pages last night and it just reminded me of Lear.” This bullshit pretense that adds nothing to the movie but just makes you realize that this person is doing their work or whatever. Kieran’s the exact opposite. I would love to work with him again and again but he doesn’t make the director comfortable or the writer comfortable.

John: I want to talk a little bit about directors here because a thing that I was thinking through this morning as I was getting ready for this is there’s some actor directors who’ve directed themselves incredibly well. I was thinking like Bradley Cooper directed himself great in A Star is Born. Lena Dunham did a great job directing herself in Girls. Yet there’s other, I won’t name names of the people who didn’t do a great job, but people who are really good actors who are good directors who don’t direct themselves well. How did you make sure that your performance is working as an actor when you’re also worrying about everything else as a director? What are the challenges there? Do you have any hints or tips?

Jesse: Yes, I guess from the outset, because I’ve been writing so long, it was not like I was an actor trying to make a vanity project for myself where I was putting so much emphasis on my performance because I had written it for me to show the audiences that, “Hey, I can do this dark thing. Look, I can play homeless.” That was not my intention with the script.

I’ve been writing for myself for years. I’ve been in my plays and I don’t know who or what you’re referring to when you say it doesn’t work, but my sense is that probably those are intended as not vanity pieces, but trying to show something that they’re not often cast in and those things just go wrong for the reasons because the initial intention is off there.

For me, I just didn’t have that and I’m sitting at the library writing the scripts and I’m crying when I’m writing because I’m feeling all the emotions and then I’m on set, it’s an extension of that. So it’s coming from a real place. I’m probably an unusual writer, actor, in that I’ve started out doing plays and stuff and so I just never think of the extravagance of a movie being something important for me to act in. Yes, maybe that helps.

John: We have two listener questions that I thought we could take a crack at together here. Drew, can you help us out with a question from Tate?

Drew Marquardt: Tate writes, “I’ve written about seven scripts now and I found that a specific central theme always seems to wriggle its way into my stories. The characters, the narratives, the settings, they all vastly differ, but this one thematic question can’t help but rear its head. Is this a problem? Where do you draw the line between crutch and signature when it comes to a screenwriter’s overall work? At what point does something shift from being a unique, constant quality of a writer’s work to a laziness that the writer continues to rely on?”

Jesse: I’m expected to answer this?

John: Together we can answer it.

Jesse: Okay, great, because like, gosh, I couldn’t possibly. Yes, no, please.

John: It strikes me that we’re trying to answer this question on the day that David Lynch died and David Lynch had very common things that kept appearing in his stuff. They felt like of a consistent piece and so I wonder whether Tate is just actually recognizing what their style is and what interests them. I think if you look at a lot of my movies, generally it’s about a person crossing from one world into another world, having to learn the rules of it and survive within it and get back out at the end.

Go is that movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that movie. A lot of my movies have those same themes in them, but they’re all very different where sometimes people become a crutch and they say that they’re a hack, they’re basically doing the same scene again, movie after movie, they have one way to go to. Jesse, talking about the plays you’ve written, the two movies you’ve made, they’re consistent and of a piece, wouldn’t you say?

Jesse: Yes, they’re all based on my preoccupation of why do I have a good life when other people have a bad life? All my plays are exactly that theme. My first movie is that, it’s about a woman who works at a domestic violence shelter and resents her son because she’s raised an upper middle-class son, and so she tries to parent this kid at a shelter.

The thing you said though, you used the word interest, that seems great. You’re finding the things that you’re interested in. Well, that’s great. That’s really great, and you could repeat forever and ever, because if you’re interested in them, maybe it feels like maybe perhaps you haven’t found the solution. When you don’t have a solution for something, that’s always the best thing to write about because it has an unanswerable tension.

John: I fully agree. Tate, I think just as you’re looking through the seven scripts you’ve written now, which is great, you’ve written seven scripts, you have a sense of what it is that you like to do, those are things you’re writing for yourself. Down the road, if you’re going to be a writer who’s working for other people, you may be writing stuff that’s not that. You may be using your skills at putting scenes and words together to do a very different thing, and that may be a great opportunity for you. The same way that Jesse gets to act in movies that are not his movies, and he gets to play different people too. It’s not a problem that the stuff you’re writing for yourself is of a piece, it’s you.

Jesse: Yes, it means you have a voice. To me, it sounds actually great. When I read writers and you can recognize that it’s theirs, it’s wonderful.

John: Drew, next question.

Drew: Victoria writes, “One of the things I struggle with most is handling sequences where I’m relying on multiple perspectives to move the action forward. The problem isn’t one of plot or emotional outcomes. I know story-wise and emotionally where the characters will be, but more of rhythm and fragmentation. It’s a filmic problem. At this point, I’m almost ready to start using storyboards and diagrams to augment my process. How do you guys make directorial choices for sequences like these? Should I think in terms of shot coverage, where I outline each character’s full action in the timeframe of the scene, and then edit them together? Is there another good way to look at this? Do you have any specific directorial techniques you use when writing these action sequences?”

John: Whether it’s an action sequence or any time we were moving between two different things in a movie, that’s one of the great wonders of cinema, is we can cut between two different things. It’s how do you make it that feel like every time you’re cutting back and forth between them, you’re gaining energy that you’re actually moving the story forward in a way that it all fits well together. It’s just honestly so different than what you do in a play. A play is a continuous space and time, generally, and this is so different. Jesse, what’s been your experience? Because I would say that I can’t think of moments in A Real Pain where you’ve had to sort of intercut between two different things that much.

Jesse: Yes, to me, I couldn’t even imagine doing that. I’m so impressed by this questioner’s ambitions. I was just thinking, “oh wow, yes, notecard sounds like a great idea.” I’m the last person that should be asked about this. I just finished acting in this movie, Now You See Me 3, and to me, the writers are great. It’s like, to me, they built the Empire State Building. I have no idea how they put this thing together. They’re accounting for an ensemble, they’re accounting for tricks, they’re accounting for studio notes from a big studio. To me, it’s like they built a building. It’s that far afield from the thing I know about.

John: Yes, and so, listen, I think, Victoria, if you’re writing stuff that involves intercutting between that stuff, reading a bunch of scripts that do it is going to be a real help to you. Look through the For Your Consideration scripts. We have them all up on Weekend Read. Just read the scripts of the movies that you like that do it and see what that looks like on the page, and you’ll get a sense of it.

The most challenging script I had for intercutting was probably the first Charlie’s Angels, actually, in which you have the three different angels in different parts of this castle. You have your villain, you have all this stuff that’s happening and all is fitting together, and that had to work on the page before we started shooting it. What I wrote is very much the cut that there, and it’s making sure that every time you’re moving from one thing to the next thing, you’re remembering where it was there, but also you’re getting energy out of that cut. It’s a skill to learn. If it’s something that you like writing that kind of stuff, it can be really exciting.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is this little website, gamey kind of thing called Network of Time. It’s networkoftime.com if you want to go there, it’s free. It’s basically doing six degrees of separation between two famous figures. You put a person on the left, a person on the right, and it figures out like, okay, how are they connected through what other people are they connected? Not just the names, it actually connects them through photos. It shows you the photos that put all those people together.

I’m going to go to Network of Time here, because I think you are a person in here. I’m going to try Jesse Eisenberg. What other famous person should I put you into? It could be any historical figure as long as they lived in some time of photography. Anybody post-Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Shakira?

John: Shakira, a hundred percent. I suspect Shakira will be a link through some other actor or a talk show host. Let’s see, because you’ve probably been on the same talk shows.

Jesse: Oh, got it. Okay, so that’s an easy one.

John: It’s loading up now.

Jesse: Oh, wow, you’re right.

John: Talk show. Four photos. All right, so the connections are Jimmy Fallon. You’re both on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show. There’s a photo of here with Fran Lebowitz, all right? Jimmy Fallon, then Donald Trump, Jimmy Fallon and Donald Trump, then Donald Trump and Jennifer Lopez, then Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

Jesse: Oh, this is amazing. Oh my God. This is amazing.

John: Before we started recording, I did one to figure out how many steps between you and Abraham Lincoln. For Abraham Lincoln, it goes to Jimmy Fallon, Paul McCartney, Queen Elizabeth, George V, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Robert Lincoln, was Lincoln’s son, and then Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Got it. Oh, I see, that’s interesting. I could see this website is Jimmy Fallon and probably the British royalty are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

John: They are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, presidents do a lot there. What’s weird about it is it has a limited set of things because if I try Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, it’ll go through Jimmy Fallon. It’s like, “No, no, no, there’s photos of you and Kristen Stewart.” You starred in two movies with Kristen Stewart, at least.

Jesse: I see. Okay, got it. It sticks to its own game.

John: Absolutely. Jesse, do you have something to share for us? One cool thing?

Jesse: Yes, sure. One of my favorite shows of all time– God, when did I first learn about it? Probably when I was 14 years old? I’m 41, so do the math. It’s called Floyd Collins. It’s a great musical by Adam Guettel, my favorite composer. It’s coming back to New York. It’s a musical that’s basically every college kid’s favorite musical, but it’s never been produced on Broadway. Now it’s coming. It’ll be in New York, I think, pretty soon. I just recommend it to anybody who can go. It’s just the coolest music.

John: Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel. Tell me the story of Floyd Collins, I don’t know it.

Jesse: Actually, you probably would know the Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole. It’s about a caver in Kentucky in 1925 who gets stuck in a cave, and then this circus forms around him. Ace in the Hole, I think, follows the reporter. In this, you’re following the guy who gets stuck in the cave, and this just circus forms around the cave of he turns into a novelty and he dies. This is a true story of the guy stuck in the cave. Come look at the guy stuck in the cave. The guy died, he couldn’t get out. It’s just this really dramatic irony and tragic true story and the musical.

John: That’s awesome. Floyd Collins.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies.

You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about in the newsletter you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on audio dramas. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: Thank you so much, John. What a great honor to be on your show.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Jesse, I want to talk to you about audio dramas because you have written a few, you’ve starred in some. Talk to me about that as a form and what interested you about them and how you do writing that you know is only going to be heard and never seen.

Jesse: I like writing fiction. What I mean by that is prose. I like writing. I’m not a very good writer when it’s not about characters. I can write voices really well. I wrote this book called When You Finish Saving the World and it’s three characters over the course of 30 years. That for me was my version of a novel because I can write those characters really well. It’s all first person. That’s as good as I can get at prose, which is essentially monologue form. Stories are being told and characters are shifting and changing and it takes place over 30 years. Things that are seeds that are planted in, when was it, 2002, come much later. That for me, I loved. I loved and I would do that all the time if I could.

John: So in writing something for an audio drama or performing in one, you’re just reading a script like a play, but you also have to think about creating the space. I don’t listen to a lot of fiction podcasts, but the way that you establish, ‘Where are we? What’s going on around us?” You’re in a black void without any visuals to establish what’s happening there.

Jesse: Exactly. What I did with that book was I created three mechanisms for these stories to be told, because it was all real audio, it wasn’t like a narrator. Basically, it was all audio that would have actually been recorded. The first story took place like five years ago. I played this character and it was a guy who was having trouble connecting to his emotions and they recently had a baby and they went to a couple’s counselor and the couple’s counselor told me to make a recording for them once a night where I try to talk about my feelings about the baby, where I can really talk about feelings, try to emotionally connect to the baby. Basically, the first set of tapes were just me on the iPhone messages.

Then it jumped 15 years in the future and this kid is going to therapy and it’s a therapy bot. It’s essentially like a ChatGPT therapy. You’re hearing him talk to the therapist. Then it jumps 30 years in the past and it’s a young woman and it’s the mother of the boy and the wife of me but in her past and she is making tapes for her boyfriend who is deployed overseas to Uzbekistan right after 9/11. Anyway, once I came up with the mechanism for it and you slip in as much exposition as you could possibly put in briefly and entertainingly to just establish where they are and what they’re doing and why they’re talking, then you’re good to go.

John: Just like for your movie, you had to provide a context for why we’re on this Jewish cultural site tour, but you had to provide a context for why are we hearing this audio.

Jesse: Right.

John: This is audio that would have been recorded at that place, that time. That makes sense.

Jesse: Yes, and what I’ve discovered by being in movies and writing plays and stuff is, once you just like establish that thing, audiences go on the ride because they’re no longer– as long as you make it seem relatively reasonable that they would be doing this, then they’re into the emotions and the human stories. Then you can, basically, have free rein.

John: I went to go see this play, I Am My Own Wife, which is a great one man show.

Jesse: Yes, I love it.

John: I went to see it at the Geffen here in Los Angeles and this older couple was in front of me. The woman leans to her husband and says like, “It’s a woman, but I think it’s a man in a dress. He’s all alone on stage.” I’m like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” It took me a while to realize like, “Oh, the guy she’s sitting next to with is basically blind.” She basically had to provide a context, but then the rest of it, you didn’t need to see things.

Jesse: Not in that play.

John: A radio play made sense for that viewer there.

Jesse: Do you work in that genre at all or media?

John: I really haven’t. I’ve done the Big Fish stage musical. I’ve gotten a chance to do that, but I’ve not done the audio drama. Other than Scriptnotes, the only other audio format thing I did was called Launch, which was about my Arlo Finch book series. It was the whole process of putting that series out into the world.

Jesse: Oh, interesting.

John: I had to learn the ways of establishing, “Where are we at this time?” Literally finding audio that grounds us in a place where this conversation is happening. If we had to do audio mixing to get you back and forth from that place to this place, this time to that time, it’s just so different than the one-on-one conversation that we’re doing right here, right now.

Jesse: Right, of course. Yes, exactly. That’s interesting. I wonder if you’d find it interesting or liberating to basically just be able to write long monologues.

John: I think it would be great. It sounds really appealing. It also sounds like something that probably more of our listeners should try to do because it’s very producible, and it’s just a good writing exercise in terms of how do you convey this information out there and not worry about all the rest of prose that has to happen there.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: I get frustrated sometimes by screenwriters who say like, “Oh, I could never write a book.” It’s like, “Wow, it’s just words?” Yet I recognize that people have different skill sets and there’s things that are interesting to them or not. You’ve also, I think, acted in some things that have not been stuff you’ve written for audio, is that?

Jesse: Yes, that’s right. Yes, I’ve done books on tape and stuff like that.

John: Do you enjoy the process?

Jesse: Not really. Doing a book on tape is actually like the most physically strenuous thing of all the things I do, including big action movies where you’re shooting overnight. Doing a book on tape, just sitting there reading for like eight hours is mind numbing and really tough vocally. I’m constantly surprised because I always forget, like the pain of childbirth. You forget like, “Oh, I forgot. Last time I did this, it was miserable. It was really hard to do.” It’s hard to do. It’s not really the performance I like. I’ve done a few like radio plays. Those are better. Books on tape is not my thing. I think some actors are really great at it and have the stamina. I have too much, whatever ADD and weak constitution to–

John: My friend Graham is a narrator and it’s such a different way of living. He gets to make choices every sentence about how he’s going to do things. He gets to find a character’s voices that feels really appealing if you’re good at it.

Jesse: Right no, he’s probably great. That’s probably, he’s figured out a way to be really performative and great. I just didn’t have that skill.

John: We’re facing the question of what’s going to happen with the Scriptnotes book. We have a Scriptnotes book coming out at the end of the year.

Jesse: Oh, cool.

John: Probably should have an audio version of the book, but Lord knows I don’t want to narrate it and I don’t think Craig does either. We’ll have to find the right choice for that.

Jesse: You could also do a thing where you have multiple voices.

John: Yes, that’s probably the way to do it.

Jesse: Especially you, because you have so many contacts of performers that would love to do it, I’m sure.

John: We’ll find somebody good to do it. Maybe we’ll draft you in for a short chapter because I know you don’t like to do it.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. I’ll do the titles.

John: Fantastic. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: You too. Thank you so much, John.

John: Congratulations on your movie.

Jesse: Thanks so much.

Links:

• A Real Pain | Screenplay
• Jesse Eisenberg
• WGAW Wildfire Resources
• David Lynch
• Mongolia by Jesse Eisenberg, Tablet Magazine
• Jesse’s plays The Revisionist and The Spoils
• Network of Time
• Floyd Collins the Musical
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads and Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 667 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most screenwriters dream of getting their first movie produced. Today on the show, we are joined by a guest who just had his first two movies produced and released this year. Justin Kuritzkes is a screenwriter behind both Challengers and the upcoming Queer. He’s also a novelist, a YouTuber, a playwright. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honor to be on here.

John: It’s so nice to have you here. I want to talk about this past year because a bunch of stuff has happened this last year, but clearly, the last year is only the tip of the iceberg and there was a bunch of work that went behind that. So I want to get into the work that got you here. I also want to talk about working with a director, sex on screen because both of your movies are very sexy and notably more sexy than a lot of things we’ve seen recently, and get a little granular with what’s on the page, if that’s okay.

Justin: Great, yes.

John: In our bonus for premium members, I want to talk about your videos because, in addition to this screenwriter in front of us, you were an early YouTube personality person. You had a character you played. I want to talk about sort of how that tied into the rest of what you’re doing or if it even does tie into what you’re doing.

Justin: Amazing.

John: Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s get the back story on you because I’m just meeting you for the very first time. You grew up here in Los Angeles?

Justin: Yes, I grew up in the valley partially. The first couple years of my life, I was in Encino and then my parents split up and my dad moved to Santa Clarita. So I spent a lot of time there. Then my mom moved all around the West Side.

John: Parents not in the industry, what was your sense of the industry growing up in town?

Justin: No. It was kind of a weird thing in that my immediate family, like my nuclear family, is very square, which I say lovingly. It’s a family of doctors and lawyers from Queens on both sides. But I have an uncle who’s a screenwriter and a producer in features. Probably the thing that caught on the most was this movie called 3000 Miles to Graceland with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. It was like about Elvis impersonators doing a heist in Vegas.

John: All right. Nice.

Justin: I kind of, through him, saw that a creative life was possible from an early age. But then also just growing up in LA, even though my parents weren’t in the industry, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were. So the industry was not something that felt abstract. It was very clear to me early on that movies were made by like actual people who went to Ralphs and bought their groceries.

John: Definitely. It feels like if you’d grown up in DC, you’d be surrounded by politics all the time.

Justin: Exactly.

John: If you grew up in Nashville, you’d be surrounded by country music. Even if it wasn’t your family’s business, it was part of the atmosphere that you are in.

Justin: Exactly. Yes.

John: So when did you first get a sense that movies or writing for movies was a possibility because you were writing other things, but when did movies enter into the equation?

Justin: Movies were kind of my first love. The first thing I was a fan of was movies. I was a cinephile before it was anything. Then in high school, I started writing plays because my school had like a one-act play festival with student-written stuff that other students would direct and act in. Through that, I all of a sudden became a playwright and then was just doing that all through college and for 10 years afterwards.

Then accidentally found myself writing a novel, which I thought was like a monologue at first, because that’s the way I would start a lot of my plays are just have somebody start talking and follow the thread of their voice until I wanted to have somebody else interrupt them. This guy just kept talking for 60 pages and nothing had happened. There was no story yet, but I liked the guy. So I wrote that as a novel.

Then I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book when I got the idea for Challengers. That’s kind of how I started writing screenplays.

John: Before we get into Challengers, I want to put together some pieces that are along the way. You mentioned writing plays in high school. You went to school here, that was Harvard-Westlake.

Justin: Yes, I did.

John: Which is a good, very– I don’t want to say aggressive. Very academic. A top school.

Justin: I think aggressive is an accurate description. Yeah. In every way.

John: The reputation I always hear about Harvard-Westlake is if you don’t have one thing you excel in, you’re going to get sort of lost in the system, and the churn of Harvard-Westlake. Is that fair?

Justin: I don’t know. I really found dramatic art there. I found performance there. I don’t think I would have necessarily gravitated towards it if I’d gone somewhere else. But I think really through that, one-act play festival, and through the teachers in the drama department, who really became early mentors for me, yeah. For me, I had that, and that was what pulled me through it.

John: That’s great. Now you’re applying to colleges where you’re applying specifically to the thing. I’m like, “I’m going to go write plays,” were those the programs you were looking into?

Justin: I knew I wanted to write plays, but I wasn’t applying to theater school, or film school, or anything like that. I went to Brown, just as a liberal arts degree. I think I majored in philosophy. I was doing a lot of theater while I was there because I knew that that was the life I wanted to live.

John: We haven’t had a lot of people on the podcast talking about theater through college. We have a lot of people who like went, “I know I’m going to write movies. I know I’m going to write books,” those kinds of things. What is it like to be writing plays in college? Are you put into little groups to put on your one acts? What stuff are you doing as a person doing plays in college?

Justin: At Brown, there was this real tradition of student-run theater. There’s this place called Production Workshop at Brown, which has had people like Laura Linney and Richard Foreman and a lot of these iconic people in film and theater move through it. I was on the board of Production Workshop. And we were really left to our own devices. We had our own building on campus. They gave us a really small budget that we had to fight for every year. Then we just could do whatever we wanted, basically. So that was a real early view into producing too. The scrappiness of that was definitely something that got ingrained in me.

John: Now, someone who’s curious about studying film or studying television, they can just go out and see all the movies that are made, all the TV series that are made. How are you learning about plays? How are you learning about other plays that were happening out there? How are you learning about the form?

Justin: That’s such an incisive question because it is this really weird thing when you’re studying theater. You’re studying it all on the page, for the most part. Most of the plays that were inspiring to me or that I was taking my cues from artistically were things that I had never seen. They were things that I was just reading. I think something that stuck with me from those years of reading a lot of plays was that, in theater, there’s a standard formatting that you get taught at some point about how a play is supposed to look, but you realize when you read a lot of plays that nobody follows that.

John: No, nobody.

Justin: Every play has an instruction manual on how to read that play. Every play is developing its own vocabulary and is almost operating as a way to evoke an idea in you about how to stage something rather than a step-by-step guide. That was something that originally really daunted me about screenwriting because the form can feel so rigid and official. There’s something very strict about it. But I realized that part of the work of learning, for me how to write screenplays, was learning how to find my own language in it, and like treat each screenplay like I have to teach the reader how to read this one.

John: We had a Greta Gerwig on the podcast talking about her coming out of the mumblecore movement, which was a very under-scripted way of making a movie, of telling a story where like the improv and the figuring out as you go along was part of the process. When she actually got to write in screenplay format and realize like, “Oh, actually, I’m responsible for all these things, but I also get– it’s cool for me to actually describe in full detail what these things are like and what a character is wearing,” and kind of what the point is. Put the boundaries on things in a way that plays sort of don’t.

As I read through plays right now, I do just feel lost in terms of where are people in this space. I’m having to imagine this all myself because it’s just basically the dialogue in so many classic plays.

Justin: Yeah. A lot of my plays wouldn’t even have stage directions. They would just have characters start talking. You can’t do that in a screenplay or else people will just put it in the trash bin.

John: Absolutely. Talk to us about your first attempts to write in screenplay format. Challengers was your first attempt to write a script?

Justin: Challengers was the first script that I finished that I felt good enough about showing to anybody.

John: Let’s talk about what you’re lighting there. There you had other experiments with a form. What was it about the form that you found challenging, interesting? What broke your brain about it at first?

Justin: Maybe a really concrete example is I wrote this book called Famous People, which is my novel. That book is all written in the first person through the language and the voice of this young pop star who’s never named because he just he’s writing his memoir and we’re reading the first draft and he just assumes everybody knows his name so he never says it. And then I was turning that into a television pilot. That was one of the first attempts at writing screenplays as an adult.

John: I can imagine that’s a really daunting process because all the stuff that worked about that on the page as a book can’t translate directly.

Justin: No. You realize really quickly that so much of the experience of being famous, which is this character’s life, is that people are screaming your name at you all the time. I didn’t want to give him a name because that was thematically important to me that he’d be this every man, that he was like this idea of a pop star. I had to figure out ways in that pilot to plausibly move him through the world that he would inhabit without having people scream some name at him. That was a challenge. Often those kinds of unreasonable challenges end up forcing you to write in an interesting way.

John: We often say that it’s the restrictions that provide the shape and the boundaries for what the specific story is you’re trying to tell.

Justin: Yes. You have to give him a name for his dialogue. I ended up just calling him “the kid.” But even doing that felt like a betrayal.

John: Absolutely.

Justin: It felt wrong to me, but I had to compromise on that level.

John: Yes, absolutely. You had that experiment. Was that something you were just doing for your own kicks and giggles or had someone asked you to try to write this as a pilot?

Justin: A little bit of both. I was writing it on spec, but it was a producer was interested and I was trying to put it together. It was mostly for myself. It ended up being something that was really useful and just getting in the rhythm of writing screenplays.

John: You said you were starting to work on your second novel and when you decided you got this notion for Challengers and you put the book aside and started working on that, is that accurate?

Justin: Yes.

John: What was the spark idea in Challengers? What was the thing, like, “Oh, this is the central idea. This is a movie rather than a book,” shat was it about it that caught your attention?

Justin: It was 2018 and I just happened to turn on the US Open. It was in the middle of it. There was this match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in the final. There was this very controversial call from the umpire where he accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Up to that point, I had not been a massive tennis fan or a sports fan even. Tennis wasn’t a big part of my life. I just happened to turn this on.

Immediately that struck me as this intensely cinematic situation, that you’re alone on the court and there’s this one other person in this massive stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do and that’s the person you can’t talk to.

John: Wow.

Justin: Immediately it just clicked for me, “Well, what if you really needed to talk about something, and what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was about the two of you and what if somehow it involved the person on the other side of the court?” That all came like right away, but I didn’t sit down to write the movie for a long time. For a couple of years, I was doing other stuff. In that time, I became a legitimate obsessive tennis fan.

Originally I thought I was doing research, but then it morphed into just a new fandom. There’s a lot of exciting energy about being a fan of something for the first time. It felt like discovering movies for the first time.

John: Yes.

Justin: Just like when you meet a young cinephile and they’re like, “Have you heard of this movie, The Godfather?” or something. I was watching Roger Federer and Djokovic matches from Wimbledon and being like, “This shit is amazing.” I was doing a lot of research that didn’t even feel like research. It just felt like fandom, to the point that I almost didn’t even want to write the script because I knew it would ruin it.

John: Did it ruin it?

Justin: Of course. Yes, it did. I still watch the Grand Slams, but my love for tennis is not as pure as it once was.

John: For sure. When did you start writing the script for Challengers and how did you start writing it? Did you outline it? Did you know what the movie was and just sat down to create scenes?

Justin: I knew a lot about the movie. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to move. But I knew the structure because– The impulse to write the movie in the first place was that I was watching a lot of tennis and I started asking myself this question, which was, “What could I write that would be as good as tennis?” Because tennis was so good.

Then next to that, there was this question of, “What would make tennis even better?” For me, the answer to that question was, “It would be better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody.” If I could have somebody whispering into my ear, “Here’s why this point matters so much.” From that, the structure of dropping people into a tennis match and then gradually revealing why these people were looking at each other like this was so serious, even though it was this low-stakes thing, technically. That all felt like a natural outgrowth of my desire to write the thing in the first place.

John: You’re focusing on that moment between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. What was actually really happening in that moment? You couldn’t know, but as the storyteller, you could figure out motivations behind what was really happening in that match.

Justin: Yes. Of course, what happens in Challengers is nothing to do with Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. The more I read about actual athletes, the more I’m convinced that they’re very boring people, in the most part, just like writers are very boring people for the most part.

John: Yes, absolutely. But from when you first started, you knew that there was going to be a central match that we would be pinging back and forth into.

Justin: Yes.

John: Did you have a grid outline of, “This is how we’re moving forward in time,” or did that all evolve organically?

Justin: Yes and no. I knew the container of the time period. I knew that it would be roughly from 18 to mid-30s because that’s the lifespan of an athlete. If you think of an athletic career as a mini life, it starts when you’re born, when you’re 18 and you’re dead when you’re useless, when you’re 35, or 40 if you’re lucky. So I knew that would be the timeframe of the movie, but I didn’t know when I started writing exactly where I would jump back to when.

John: Let’s take a look at some stuff on the page. This is from the very first page of the script. We’ll start with this one. This is a script we found. It’s labeled 2021, but this could have been earlier than that. This is the one that ultimately ended up on the blacklist.

Justin: Yes, this is the first draft.

John: First draft. When you say first draft, this is probably the first draft of something you would actually show to a person.

Justin: Yes. This movie was weird, in that I wrote the first draft of it towards the end of 2021. Then the distance between that and us being in pre-production was five or six months, which is crazy. That’s because I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor. They quickly sent it to Zendaya because they had made all the Spider-Man movies together. She said she wanted to do it. She needed to make a Dune: Part Two in June so we had to make it before then.

John: Little window there.

Justin: There was no development process. We went into pre-production with this first draft and then ended up having what would have been the development process during pre-production.

John: Well, great because we’re going to talk about some scenes later on that changed a lot.

Justin: Great.

John: I really want to get into this. Let’s start with, we often do a three-page challenge on the podcast where we talk about the first three pages of listener scripts and talk through what’s working and what’s not working on the page.
Yours, it starts with Set 1 at the very top. Donaldson 0-0, Zweig 0-0. Exterior, a tennis court in New Rochelle late afternoon. Would you read us through the character descriptions for these three main people we’re going to be here?

Justin: Sure. Yes. Tashi Donaldson, 33, Black, a former player, sits looking out at the court where two men stand across the net from one another, looking like they are about to fight to the death. Patrick Zweig, 32, Jewish, scrappy, ranked 201 in the world, has the face of a man who’s been beaten down by this sport one too many times. He wears a mishmash of clothes from different companies. He’s got no sponsorship deal, though he has somewhat haphazardly ironed to his shirt the name and logo of a random Italian company, Impatto. Art Donaldson, 33, Wasp, good-looking, is the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. His shocking presence at this rinky-dink tournament is the sole reason why the modest venue is packed with locals, tourists, and anyone living in the vicinity of New Rochelle who is even remotely interested in tennis. He wears a pristine Nike outfit that practically glistens in the hot summer sun.

John: Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this page that we’re talking through. These three character names, they’re all bold-faced. People can see right now, these are our three main characters. I think it’s the only bold-facing you’re doing of characters in the script, basically.

Justin: Yes.

John: This is your trio. This is who you’re following here. These are chunky descriptions, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that’s not filmable, and yet feels really crucial. We often talk on the podcast about what’s cheating and what’s not cheating. There’s stuff here that we can’t quite know. We can’t know that he’s the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. We can’t know that as an audience watching this but we’re going to find it out soon enough. It’s going to become clear as we go through stuff.

You’re also giving us physical details that do help us see the difference. We can see Patrick’s scrappiness. We can see the difference in clothing level here. We get some sense of what this is.

Let’s jump ahead to the For Your Consideration script because you’ve made some tweaks to this. You were talking with Amy Pascal, Luca, and other folks here, and you maybe made some adjustments about what you’re really going to see.

The first description of Tashi is she’s two years younger. She’s wearing sunglasses now, which became iconic, became very, very important. The description of Patrick is a little bit different between the two. He’s now ranked 271 in the world. We’ve gotten rid of the, “Beaten down by the sport too many times.” We still have this idea that his clothes have no sponsorship deal. In both cases, he’s ironed on this logo for Impatto.

What else do we notice the difference between? Art is pretty much the same here. You’re still giving us this story of why people are here that’s not quite filmable, but we’re going to figure that out over time. Looking at these two pages, do you remember typing any of these changes?

Justin: Every one of them. Yes, of course. It’s the difference between– I think a screenplay is always two things. It’s always supposed to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience, but then it also becomes this very practical document that serves as an invitation for hundreds of different people to do their jobs.

John: Yes.

Justin: When you get into pre-production with a script, you’re really starting to realize that you have to put everything in there that someone’s going to create. Then that gets informed by the knowledge and the artistry that everybody else is bringing to it. For example, the sunglasses. By the time I had done these changes, we had already done the costume fittings. Jonathan Anderson, our costume designer, and Luca had put Zendaya in these amazing sunglasses for this opening scene. So I wanted to put that in the script to make sure we didn’t forget that those were going to be there because she was also going to have business with them and take them off and signal where she was at emotionally through what she was doing with her sunglasses. In a way, it was like this armor that she had.

John: Yes, 100%.

Justin: I made them all the same age for a number of reasons. I think it’s a tricky movie to cast in that the characters have to go from teenager to 30, and we didn’t want to cast two sets of actors. That idea was floated for a second before even Luca came aboard, Amy and I talked about it. We quickly realized we shouldn’t go down that road. Making the ages slightly lower made it so that we could cast people plausibly.

What else changed? 271 in the world, that’s a note from our tennis consultant, Brad Gilbert. If you follow tennis, he’s a legend in the tennis world. He used to be Andre Agassi’s coach. Most recently, he coached Coco Gauff when she won the US Open. When I explained to him and when he read the script, the position of Patrick in the world of tennis and how down on his luck he was, Brad was like, “Well, 201’s not that bad, but 271, then you’re getting into the territory that you want this guy to be in, where it costs more to drive to the tournaments than it does to win the tournament.” That was really the scrappy world of the lowest rungs of professional tennis that I wanted to show with Patrick.

John: Talk to us about your tennis expert here, because reading through the Blacklist script, the tennis is good. I totally believe the tennis. It’s probably written as a person who’s been watching a lot of tennis, but what were some of the things that the tennis expert could say about the 201 versus 271? What are some other things along the way that became important?

Justin: There’s countless things, but I’ll tell you some of the ones that are at the top of my mind. For example, I had in the Black List script, the first draft, that two weeks before the US Open, Art was at the Winston-Salem Open, and Brad read the script and went, “The schedule wouldn’t work out. It’s too close. Atlanta would work, but Winston-Salem, he wouldn’t be able to drop out and get a wild card in this other tournament.” Stuff like that is big.

Then probably the most useful thing that I did with Brad is that before we went into pre-production, Brad and me, and this guy, Mickey Singh from ESPN, went through every point that gets played in the script. Mickey’s job is to notate highlight reels. He breaks down points as a script, basically, so that the editors for the highlight reels know what to do. Mickey went through the script with me and broke all my points. Brad would critique them and go, “He wouldn’t go inside in there, he would go inside out,” or, “He’d go down the line,” or stuff like that.

John: Now, were these people also involved on set in terms of figuring out the tennis that was being played and the simulation of the actual matches?

Justin: Brad was essential for all of that because Brad was also the person who found us our tennis doubles. He was the person who brought those guys to Boston and then had real tennis pros play through the points so that Luca, our DP, and me could go around and Luca could shot list. We really treated the tennis in the movie like we were shooting fight sequences, like an action film. When you watch the movie and Luca’s doing 100 setups for a tennis point, that’s all storyboarded. That was only possible because we had these real tennis pros playing through everything. Brad was amazing for that.

Then also connecting us with real lines people and umpires. Everybody you see in the movie who’s working the match, that’s their job.

John: Great. That helps. Let’s go to a scene that didn’t change as much between the two drafts, but it also, I think gives a good example of you have a scene on the page, but then actually as you shoot it, things just drift and change a bit.

Justin: Great.

John: Here we actually have audio that we can play.

Justin: Amazing.

John: This is a scene early on in the movie. Patrick Zweig is trying to check into a hotel and his credit card is being declined. Let’s take a listen.

Patrick Zweig: I’ve been driving all day. I’m exhausted.

Motel Receptionist: If we gave out a bed to every tired person who walked in here asking for one, we’d be a homeless shelter, not a business.

Patrick Zweig: Listen, I’m a tennis player. You know the tournament down the road?

Motel Receptionist: Oh, that thing at the country club.

Patrick Zweig: Right, you get $7,000 if you win and you get money just for qualifying. I need a place to stay tonight so I can rest before my first match.

Motel Receptionist: I’m sorry. I need a card on file.

Patrick Zweig: What if I signed a racket and gave it to you?

Motel Receptionist: Sir? Sir, I don’t know who you are.

Customer 1: Look at this guy. He’s a disaster.

Customer 2: I don’t know. I think he’s kind of cute.

Customer 1: Carl. He smells.

Patrick Zweig: The racket alone is worth like $300.

Motel Receptionist: We need a card that works.

John: All right. We’re looking at a scene. It’s on page 10 of the original script in the blacklist version. Could you read just this Scene 13, give us a setup for where we are?

Justin: Yes. The actual–?

John: Yes.

Justin: Interior roadside motel, New Rochelle, same time. Patrick is standing at the reception desk in a soul-crushingly sad motel lobby, the kind of place you pass on the highway and wonder who stays there. It’s about as far as you can get from the fancy hotel room we just left. His card has just been declined.

John: Fantastic. Really great descriptions of what this feels like. You’ve, of course, broken the cardinal sin. You said the word “we” in the scene description, which we fully applaud. People will say that you should never say “we”.

Justin: Yeah, I never got that memo.

John: “We” is fully appropriate. We as an audience, as a movie, we’re just at a place and now we’re here. Craig and I both strongly believe in saying we here, we see, we are.

Justin: Me too.

John: Yes. It makes sense. The scene that is in the Blacklist, it’s the same basic content, but it’s not the same lines. Things are in some different orders. Why I picked the scene is because it’s clear that this is– Is your film a comedy?

Justin: I think it’s funny, yes.

John: It’s funny but it’s not hilariously ha-ha funny. It’s not joke funny but it’s funny. This is an example of the movie is funny. You’re putting people in situations that are familiar and uncomfortable. Getting your card declined, we understand what he’s trying to do and we also see the comedy around it.

Justin: Right.

John: This is the original version. Now let’s take a look at the for consideration, which is not quite the scene that we just heard either. There’s some changes that must have happened after that point.

The addition of the guys who come in,–

Justin: The couple.

John: The couple who come in later on, which in the for consideration, they don’t have dialogue, also they got some dialogue on the day.

Justin: It’s insert dialogue. It was stuff that I had written for them on the day or before the day. I don’t know what your philosophy is with putting that stuff in a script. I think for the flow of reading a script, it often doesn’t feel right to put that stuff in there because it’s not the main drive.

John: What’s so interesting is that because we’re pulling this out of the For Your Consideration script, it’s a question of should the For Your Consideration script accurately reflect the actual movie that’s on the screen-

Justin: Totally.

John: -or what the intention was? There’s no clear consensus on what it’s supposed to be.

Justin: It’s a very particular fake document, right?

John: Yes.

Justin: Because a shooting script is a script. It’s a practical document in some way, but that doesn’t often translate to the best reading experience.

John: 100% because there were scenes that were added or omitted. There’s all these blank little pieces.

Justin: Yes, there’s stars all over the place. It’s gross.

John: Yes. But then if you think of the ideal sort of For Your Consideration script would reflect– If scenes moved around, those scenes should move around in the script too so it reflects that. In this case, that couple that was added in or the other changes that happened, what do you remember about why those things shifted and how they shifted?

Justin: The couple was something that– Luca is always trying to give texture to everything. Even in a relatively straightforward scene in any of his movies, there’s always five things going on. He shoots a lot of inserts of a prop or of a piece of set dressing that you wouldn’t think should be highlighted. Then because it is, it all of a sudden puts the whole scene into this different context. Those guys, when we were building the world of that motel, we were talking about who could be populated in there. He offhandedly said there should be a gay couple road-tripping across America. I took that and wrote those lines for those guys with it.

Then, I think I had COVID when they shot that scene so I wasn’t on set. Then when they were editing it, I wrote some more like ADR lines for them for when they’re off-screen where they’re complaining about, “This place doesn’t look like the description online,” and all of that. It’s like a little pocket of a movie where you remind yourself that there’s a world going on that doesn’t care about these characters. For somebody like Patrick, that stuff is especially important because so much of his experience of moving through the tennis world is that nobody gives a shit. He’s always inconveniencing people with his existence because that’s what it’s like to be ranked 271.

John: Let’s talk about the scene and its importance overall in understanding Patrick and his motivation. It feels like it’s a scene you could cut. But if you did cut it, I would understand less about him. What’s nice about the scene is he has a clear motivation. He’s trying to get a room for the night and it ties into his bigger motivation, which is basically, “I need to be part of this tournament. I need to win.” He’s already envisioning himself winning this thing, or at least placing high enough that he’s going to have the money to do this thing. It tells us a lot about him in a short as a one page, and change scene.

Justin: If it’s a movie about two sides of a rivalry or two sides of a match, where those people are coming from is really important in establishing what’s at stake for each of them, and the texture of them ending up facing each other. I think also with Patrick, at this point, you don’t know that he comes from wealth either, it’s a bait-and-switch in some way in that you think, “Oh, this is a really down-on-his-luck broke guy.” Then you learn later on that, actually, he could end this misery in a second if he just called Mom and Dad.

Maybe this is true for you too, that you get inspiration from unexpected places and the genres that you wouldn’t think about when you’re– With this movie, even though it’s a sports movie, with Patrick’s story, I was thinking a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis.

John: Oh, yes.

Justin: I was thinking of Patrick as Inside Llewyn Davis of tennis.

John: First time I saw Oscar Isaac was in that movie. Yes, so good.

Justin: There’s something about that guy because he has so little of a handle on his own life, he’s always like pissing off everybody who shows him kindness.

John: You mentioned Inside Llewyn Davis, but what other movies resonated for you with this? Because I was thinking Broadcast News in the sense of there aren’t a lot of movies I can point to that are three-handers where it’s not just this main couple, but it’s the interplay of the three of them. What were the other things that were touchstones for you?

Justin: Carnal Knowledge and just Mike Nichols’ work in general was a real touchstone for me with this, Closer to some extent. Then there’s the great history of movies about love triangles like Y Tu Mamá También or The Dreamers or Band of Outsiders, or Jules and Jim, which came in to some extent.

In terms of sports movies, I think the ones that ended up meaning the most to me when I was thinking about this movie were movies like He Got Game, where, if you think about the final game of that movie, it’s a game between two guys who, if somebody was walking by on the street and they saw them playing, they would think this was just a pickup game between a father and son, if they even knew that much. They would have no idea that their whole lives were at stake.

I think for me, that’s always so much more interesting and dramatic than a movie about the NBA Finals. If I wanted to experience the drama of the NBA Finals, I would just watch the NBA Finals and it’s going to be better than a movie about the NBA Finals. Stuff like that. Bull Durham.

John: Bull Durham, another great reference because you have–

Justin: And another great three-way triangle movie.

John: Absolutely, there’s a sexual component to it that feels specific. Let’s talk about three-way sexual encounters. A scene that’s not in your Black List script, but it’s sort of iconic in the movie itself, which is the teenagers all get together in the boys’ hotel room and they have their kiss. What is the origin of that scene?

Justin: So Luca read this script. Amy was on board, Zendaya was on board. Luca was like this dream director for us. We sent it to him and he read it and we talked on the phone towards the end of 2021. Then like a week later I was on a plane to Milan to just spend some time with Luca and see if we could be in the trenches together right away because we knew that was how we were going to have to make this movie. We were going to have to really be comrades right away.

During those first days in Milan, we were talking about the script and one of the first conversations we had was that Luca said this thing that was really phrased beautifully, which is that, in a love triangle, all the corners should touch. When I heard that initially, I thought, “Well yeah, they do. These people are all very involved in each other’s erotic, emotional, and psychological lives. They’re really deep in each other’s shit, all these people, so they’re touching.”

John: But literally touching.

Justin: Yes, exactly. Luca was like, “No, no, no, literally.” The moment I heard that, I was electrified by it, I thought it was an incredibly exciting idea. My task then became finding a way for that to happen that felt organic and earned and that felt like it was coming out of the characters and the situation that was already there and not like something that I was imposing on them, for sensationalist sake or something. Then it became a process of figuring out where, how, and what kind of runway I would need to give that so that it felt like it had always been in the movie.

John: I thought it had always been in the movie. As I was reading through the blacklist script, I kept waiting for, “They had this scene at the party and this, and why did they omit that?” It felt missing. It felt like you already had the runway there. You just hadn’t put the plane on there to take off.

Justin: That came out of lots of conversations with me and Luca and then with our producers. Eventually, when I landed on putting the scene there and having it be an outgrowth of when they first met each other when they were kids, it felt so natural. It was a 20-page addition to the script.

John: It’s about seven pages is the actual scene-

Justin: The actual scene.

John: -but it becomes a hugely important part of a big chunk of the early section of the movie. We should note that your blacklist script is 128 pages, but the final shooting script is quite a lot shorter. Obviously some stuff got cut, but this was a huge addition. Let’s talk through this addition. Did you just go off and write up a scene and send it through and say this is the plan? What was the conversation?

Justin: when I was in Milan, I wrote a first pass at that scene in a different place and Luca and I were both really excited about the scene, but the more we looked at it, the more we realized that where I had put it, it’s like a bomb that you’re dropping in the movie and it can really throw into a disarray the delicate structure of the rest of it. We knew we didn’t want to change that. We wanted to keep the structure of the movie as it was. I needed to find a place to put this that didn’t throw everything out of balance. This finally felt like the right place for that.

John: Great. Had you tried to put it earlier or later? Where were you trying to slide it?

Justin: Later.

John: I could see why that wouldn’t work. It feels like what’s good about the scene is that it has that teenage energy. It has that each of them on the time, be an energy, which is they’re very horned up. There’s a woman here who’s willing to be there with them.

Justin: What’s important about it being where it is that they don’t know, or they don’t have the tools to know the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t know the implications of what this is going to do to their lives together. Because it’s coming from this place of innocence and from this place of genuine excitement and curiosity about each other. They don’t have a sort of adult judgment of each other or of themselves.

It was also exciting realizing if I put the scene here, because part of my hesitation with having the scene in the movie, even though I was excited by the idea of it, part of my hesitation with it for people who’ve seen the film is that I always thought of the ending as the consummation of their relationship. That that was finally the moment when they all come together. I didn’t want to take the wind out of that. I didn’t want to zap the energy out of that. Every other place I thought about putting this scene felt like it did, but somehow putting it at the very beginning made that feel like a return.

John: It makes it feel foundational, like part of the journey that they’re going on.

Justin: Yes, exactly.

John: They had this thing. The scene itself feels like a play. It feels like you could actually stage this as a little one-act, one-scene thing because it’s just the three characters in a room. They’re having a conversation. There’s builds, there’s developments, there’s things that happen along the way. At any point, someone could pull the rip cord, but they don’t pull the rip cord. It feels like your playwriting background kicks in there. It’s also just a really long scene. Did you get any pushback from movie people or from the Amy Pascals of the world of, “This is a really long scene”?

Justin: No, Amy was amazing in that respect. She really wanted the scene to be as whatever it had to be. Strangely we had no pushback. Then I think the way that Luca ended up shooting the scene, it’s still intensely cinematic.

John: Oh yes. This is your first collaboration with Luca, but then you ended up going on into doing Queer. Talk to me about the transition between Challengers and Queer and how those two things came to be.

Justin: We were on set for Challengers and working very closely together, me as the writer and him as the director. One day Luca gave me the book for Queer and just said, “Read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me.”

John: It’s a novella. It’s a short and it’s–

Justin: It’s about 100 pages, the book.

John: It’s a Burroughs book that was published much later than it was actually written. It’s set in 1950s Mexico, but came out in 1985?

Justin: Yes, exactly. He wrote it in the ‘50s, it got published in the ‘80s and Luca had read it in the ‘80s when it came out in Italy, as a teenager and he had been wanting to make this book into a movie since then. I felt this tremendous honor, but also this tremendous responsibility to write him the movie he had been dreaming about. Which was heavy.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Justin: I read the book that night and immediately said yes. Then after saying yes, figured out how I was going to do it.

John: Those are good experiences when you know you have to do a thing and then you figure out as you’re doing it, you’re building the plane to do it. What was the writing process for that? He loved it. He must have come in with some ideas of what was important for him, but he also needs to give you the space to actually write a movie, movie. What was the process?

Justin: It was really different from Challengers, obviously, because that was a movie I wrote on spec before I knew Luca and before I knew any of the people who made it with me. Queer before I even started putting pen to paper, Luca and I got to talk about it a lot because we were on set together, we were hanging out a lot and we would just talk about Queer and the cinematic possibility of the book. We got to work out a lot of the vision for how this was going to be different from the book and how it was going to honor the book before I even started writing. Then I started writing the bulk of the scenes while we were on set for Challengers and then really finished it right after we wrapped.

John: Like Challengers, it had a lot more on-screen sex than we’re used to in movies these days. I want to talk about that because in both cases we’re sort of used to seeing sex on streaming series. We’re used to seeing sex on our own TV screens. We’re not used to seeing it in a public place. Seeing Challengers on the big screen with an audience, it was fun because people are gasping like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that this thing, this thing is happening.” There’s that nervousness of like, “Oh my God, sexy things are happening on this big screen while I’m around all these other people.”

It’d be so uncomfortable to see it like with your mom sitting next to you.

Justin: I was at the premiere next to my stepmom.

John: Absolutely. It’s good stuff. It’s perfect. Was your stepmom also at Queer, the screen–

Justin: She was, yes, but I didn’t sit through.

John: That’s a challenging one. Talk to us about like what your, what your instincts are about terms of showing sex on screen and, in both cases, there’s– what I liked about what you’ve done in both movies is that you’re showing us the awkwardness and the transition moments between we’re all in our clothes and now we’re actually doing this thing. It’s not cut two and now we’re underneath the sheet.

Justin: I grew up starting to really watch movies in the ‘90s when there was a tradition in action movies of the sex scene would happen and the music would start to play and it would have no dramatic point.

John: A little saxophone.

Justin: A little saxophone, or take my breath away or whatever. It’s sexy and almost just felt like it was a montage that was a placeholder. That feels completely cinematically dead to me. In the case of both Challengers and Queer it was really important to me that any intimacy that was on screen was always revealing of character. That drama was happening there. There was something at stake for people there because then it feels essential, it feels like the movie is still going on, you’re not watching a break from the movie. As long as that’s the case, then anything is worth taking the time to show, but otherwise, it’s not.

John: Some of my movies have sexual content on the go, have some sexual content and that’s fun. It’s always so awkward to write and discuss and have the conversation about this is what I see happening here. This is how it’s all going to go into play. Then you have to have a conversation with the director about it and then with the actors about it, how this is going to play. What I think is so important about what you’re describing is the characters have agency within the scenes. The characters are making choices within the scenes. It feels like it’s a natural thing that would have happened next, and yet they’re still alive. They’re not these robots going through it. That’s tough.

Justin: In terms of writing the description of it, I agree. It’s completely embarrassing to write that, but at a certain point, you have to feel like, “I’m going to ask people to perform this, and I’m going to ask people to light this and there’s going to be a guy holding a boom mic for this, and Luca’s going to have to shot list this.” So if I’m asking all of those people to very practically make this happen, I can’t take comfort in being vague on the page. It’s not just cowardly, but it’s irresponsible.

John: It is.

Justin: It’s really irresponsible to give people a vague sex scene and go, “Have at it.”

John: There was a script I was handed early in my career to do a rewrite on and it was a movie that had cars throughout it. There was a bunch of car racing and car chases in it. At a certain point, halfway down a page, the screenwriter of that script would say, “Now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. I won’t bother describing it because it wouldn’t do it justice, but it’s really, really awesome.” I’m like, “You have abdicated your fundamental responsibility here.”

Justin: Yes. It’s like, “Fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? We have to go into production with this.”

John: Yes, absolutely. We need to know what is actually happening here. I think both in your tennis and in your sex scenes, I respect that they’re telling you what’s really going to happen. Obviously, everyone can bring their own expertise to it, but you get to see what is actually going to be happening on screen.

Justin: Yes, but that’s the dance you always have to walk in a screenplay, which is give enough information that people can see the movie in their minds when they read the script because the movie is happening visually. If you don’t put that information in, you’re not writing the script. But also leave it open enough that people can bring themselves to it and their own artistry. That’s a thing that took a while for me to figure out. It is something I’m always negotiating every time I’m writing something.

John: We have one question from our listeners, which I thought was especially appropriate for you. Drew, could you help us out here?

Drew: Yeah, of course. Jeremy writes, “A frequent conundrum in my writing is when I need characters to talk through a conflict. I’m decent at knowing my character’s objective and having their actions work towards those objectives, but I struggle having them navigate towards those objectives via dialogue. I’m not an elegant debater or salesman, and it makes sense that my characters, by extension, are not either. My absolute worst-case scenario would be writing a character trying to seduce someone. How do you get your characters to employ social graces or charms that you yourself don’t have?”

John: I can think of both in Challengers, there’s a lot of discussion debate, and trying to pull persons to one side or the other. Then also in Queer, Daniel Craig’s character is trying to seduce Drew Starkey’s character and fumbling at it and really having a hard time knowing where he’s at with that. Think about what are the challenges of figuring out that negotiation from inside a character’s point of view. How are we doing that?

Justin: With Challengers, I think it’s a movie that essentially only has three characters, which I think was a carryover from my experience being a playwright for so many years. You get it ingrained in yourself that you should only write parts that you feel really great about asking somebody to show up 100 times to perform, which is why there are so many plays with only three or four characters. So when there’s a movie with only three characters, the whole movie operates on the different ideology and philosophy and way of moving through the world of those people and how they rush up against each other, and sometimes, sympathetically and sometimes antagonistically.

I think ideally before you even start writing dialogue, you know enough and the audience knows enough about where everybody’s coming from so that by the time they open their mouths, we already know their point of view. We already know what’s at stake. We already know why they’re in opposition. For me, that’s why I spend a lot of time describing what somebody’s wearing in the opening page of a script, because you get a lot of visual information for free in a movie, right at the top that sets you up so that when a character opens their mouth, even if they’re saying something as banal as the kind of things you have to say in tennis like, “Let’s go,” or “Come on,” because that’s the limit of sports vocabulary because you’ve done all this work that’s not about dialogue, that dialogue means something and you know where they’re coming from when they say that.

I think it’s really tough in a movie to work through who somebody is through dialogue as a starting place because you just don’t have the space for it. Ideally in every scene, by the time somebody is talking, that’s the last piece of information we’ve gotten about who they are.

John: I think you’re exactly right. It’s that you can’t know what the dialogue is until you actually really know what’s happening behind the scenes. What are those inner gears that are turning?

Way back when, when I did my very first TV show, which was a disaster, mind you, but an exercise I did for myself, that was really helpful was, of the five main characters, I would write paragraphs about how they thought about a certain topic. I would give a topic and I’d just write in their voice how they thought about that topic. It gave me a sense of how their brain works, what their priorities are, what their intentions are when discussing a thing, and got me closer to what their voices are, what their speaking voices were like because I understood what their philosophy was like behind the scenes.

Then when I have the characters in scenes together, it felt natural for them to be going back to their principles and how their brains work that’s creating that dialogue. The challenge is you both want it to feel completely understandable how they got there and still surprise your audience. You still need them to say things that are interesting and provocative and surprising. It’s making sure that people don’t just feel like they’re on their rails, but they really are live in that moment, and that that’s the balance that Jeremy, I think, is struggling to find.

Justin: That’s what’s difficult about screenwriting.

John: That’s the hard thing about screenwriting.

Justin: I feel that’s something I think every screenwriter is always dealing with. You don’t get to choose which parts of it come easily to you. I think screenwriting is one of those forms where it’s all right if some part of it is really difficult for you because everybody has one part of it that’s really difficult for them and they’re all equally important. I think dialogue is actually less than 10% of a screenplay. For me, I’m thinking a lot more about structure than I am about dialogue. Maybe that’s because structure is harder for me and dialogue is easier.

John: We’ve had a lot of people in your seat who are in the same situation or they can write dialogue all day, but they really struggle to figure out how stories fit together. Other people have got really good puzzle pieces fit together, but it’s harder for them to individualize different characters’ voices. It sounds like Jeremy’s in that second bucket, but that doesn’t make you a bad screenwriter. It just means that some stuff’s harder for you than others.

Justin: Not at all. There are moments writing where I would trade a great dialogue scene for being able to figure out a structural problem that’s been plaguing me for three weeks. We don’t get to choose our fate in that way.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a really unimportant, but this is something you may have noticed as you were driving around Los Angeles this week is, sometimes you pass by a strip mall or mini-mall and the signs look like they were on fire. It looks like they’ve been burned. They’re brown and yellowed and like, “What happened?” I got curious, and so I Googled and it was actually hard to find the answer, but I actually now know what’s happening is that it’s not the lighting behind it. It’s the actual, the vinyl, and the plastic that they’re printing on. They’re printing on a cheap plastic.

I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this Australian article that’s talking about what’s actually happening to the signs. Basically, it’s just sunlight damage that is breaking them apart. Now that I’ve mentioned it, if you were in Los Angeles or some other sunny environment, you’re going to see this constantly. Where it’s cheap signs and it’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon. If you, like, signs that have been up there for 10 years–

Justin: The way they used to make signs was more craftsmanship.

John: Absolutely. They swapped out to sometimes a cheaper plastic and it’s just disintegrating. Now you know what’s happening with all the weird burnt-brown signs in Los Angeles.

Justin: I feel like that’s a really real thing that the way things used to be built was better. I think that’s been true forever, but that’s just a product of globalization.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think somebody found a cheaper way to make those signs. It was like, “Oh great, it looks really good,” not realizing like, “Oh, it’s going to fall apart in a year.”

Justin: Of course. But then they’ll have to order more signs. Keep the gravy train going.

John: Justin, what do you have for us?

Justin: My one cool thing is a podcast that’s run by some friends of mine called Know Your Enemy. They’re pretty left-leaning journalists guys. They do deep dives on conservative thinkers throughout the years. Sometimes it’s very contemporary people who are a part of making really major decisions that will have big ramifications for people right now. Sometimes it’s really far in the past and doing a deep dive on the theory of some important conservative thinker. I’ve found that really useful for myself.

John: Know Your Enemy, a podcast.

Justin: Know Your Enemy.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for a weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on YouTube and other video things. Justin, thank you so much for coming in.

Justin: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Justin, so one thing we allotted in your description of all the work that you were doing before this time is in addition to all your writing, you were also doing these little YouTube videos. The first one was Potion Seller. Talk to us about this character and what the idea was behind these.

Justin: Those I started making when I was in college, I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis, which ended up being the first play that I did off-Broadway. I was working really hard on this thing and treating it very seriously. Then at night when I was exhausted from that, as a way to blow off steam, I started playing around with the photo booth app on my Mac. And I noticed that if you use the facial distortion thing, you could do more than just one goofy face. You could actually create multiple characters. Coming from the world of theater, that felt to me like it had some relationship with mask work or improv.

I just started messing around on it and then was uploading the videos to YouTube because that was the easiest way to share them with my friends. Then–

John: What year would this have been?

Justin: This would have been 2011 is when I started and I was doing it all throughout that year and then would keep doing it every once in a while. They caught on in a very small way among my group of friends and their satellite of friends. Then a year after I posted one video called Potion Seller, it ended up on a Reddit forum or something. It all of a sudden went semi-viral. Then all of a sudden, millions of people were watching these videos. At that time when that was happening, I had just moved to New York and I was an off-Broadway playwright who was working for months or years on things that if I was lucky, a couple hundred people would see.

The dream that– you’re doing great if 100 people see your work as a playwright. Then I was making these things in five minutes and uploading them that night and they were being watched by millions of people.

John: Was it inspiring or dispiriting?

Justin: No, it was really freeing. It was really amazing because it put everything into perspective for me and made it also simultaneously impossible for me to take myself seriously as a writer or an artist or something because there was this stuff online that was going to be there forever, that completely threw a wrench into that. I really embraced that and made a decision very early on that I was never going to make those videos on any schedule or I was never going to make that into work. That that was never going to be a job. I was never going to cultivate my online content.

John: You were coming into online content manufacturing at a time before there was the TikTok, before there was all those things before it became really possible to commercialize what you were doing. Therefore you’d never had to think of it as work. It was just this thing that you were doing off-on. It was just a side project and a way to blow off steam and just do your own thing. If you were starting now, do you think it’d be easier or harder to put those characters out there in the world, and what would be different?

Justin: What’s funny about those videos now is that sometimes people will reach out to me about them and they’ll talk about when I started making those as the golden age of YouTube. For me, I’m like, “That was only 10 years ago. It’s not that long ago,” but the life of the internet is really fast.

John: It is.

Justin: I think part of the freedom that I felt in making those was that YouTube at that time was like the Wild West, kind of. It felt like the early days of the internet.

John: People didn’t know what to do with it. The first YouTube video is a visit to the zoo.

Justin: There were plenty of people who were doing really interesting things with video online since the beginning of streaming video online.

John: I know Ze Frank, Ze Frank was doing those very early explainer things in the pre-BuzzFeed era. It was himself, but it as a character talking about things. But it was all new.

Justin: It felt like there was no expectation and there was no standard of professionalism. Now there’s a sort of sheen that a lot of the content has. There’s conventions of how those forward-facing videos-

John: Absolutely.

Justin: -work and look and how they’re edited. None of those conventions mattered at that time.

John: Absolutely. Your Potion Seller, it would be a vertical video now. It’s just horizontal because that’s what it was on your laptop.

Justin: It would be vertical. You would keep it under one minute so it can get in TikTok and be on the algorithm or be a YouTube short or whatever.

John: What I do find fascinating is I think there’s– you talk about the conventions, there’s storytelling genres that exist only in an online video and that sense of the space within this one video, but how it pertains to everything else in your grid and how it pertains to this ongoing character is really interesting or reaction videos where it’s like, this is my reaction to what this other thing is or me building upon this other thing. It’s fascinating to watch all those things grow. We have this instinct that we want to tie them back into what we make in film and television. And I think that’s probably the wrong instinct.

Justin: There was a moment when like in a very well-meaning way, my reps would be like, “Make a pilot about the world of Potion Seller or something.” I would like, think about it or try and then quickly realize that’s exactly not the point. The point of this thing is that it’s doing nothing for me professionally, and the point of this thing is that it’s not polished. It exists only in the space that it occupies.

John: Two friends from very different parts of my world. One of whom works with a bunch of online creators who are so good at being able to talk to their audiences and make really amazing things super cheap. They just have all this vocabulary for doing what they do and another friend who has made classic big film and television and the guy who does the online videos, his creators want to bridge over into that space and to tell more sophisticated stories, longer stories, and all that stuff. I’m trying to get them to talk and interface with each other so that they can learn from each other.

But I had to warn both of them, you have completely different words for the same thing. Just make sure you’re defining everything clearly at the start because your instincts, while it’s both telling stories with a camera, everything about it is different. The nature of how you’re approaching this stuff is different. They’re not used to having any gatekeepers at all. It’s so challenging to get them to be on the same page about what it is that they’re trying to do. Yet the online people have a ton of money and so they can do a bunch of stuff.

Justin: For me, it’s all part of the same impulse, I really try not to think of them as separate categories of a creative life. I think they’re all– I enjoy being that confusing to people and to myself. I think it’s a good antidote to a lot of the dark possibilities for the heaviness of this kind of work.

John: For sure. Cool. Justin, thanks so much.

Justin: Thanks for having me.

Links:

• Justin Kuritzkes on Instagram and YouTube
• Challengers and Queer
• Justin’s novel, Famous People
• Challengers – Production Draft
• Challengers – First Draft
• Queer by William S. Burroughs
• Potion Seller
• 3000 Miles to Graceland
• Why does my sign look like it has been burned? by Perth Graphics Centre
• Know Your Enemy podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.