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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.

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.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 673 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, let’s get back to basics. Structure, Craig. What is it? Why do writers keep freaking out about it when it’s a fundamental part of storytelling going all the way back to caveman days?

Craig: I think why do writers keep freaking out about it is a perfectly good place where we should start once we get there.

John: Then how do you enjoy a movie? We’ll teach you how not to be so meh about the things you’re watching.

Craig: [chuckles] Be born before 2000.

John: Plus, we’ll answer some listener questions because it’s been a minute. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about the wearables, the devices we wear to track what’s happening in our bodies.

Craig: Fantastic. Let’s do it.

John: First, some news. We had Oscar nominations this morning as we’re recording. We’re recording this on Thursday.

Craig: Yes.

John: As always, I’m so happy for the people who got nominated. I am bummed for the people who didn’t. And it’s all going to be okay.

Craig: Everything will be absolutely okay. Even being considered for something like that is extraordinary. I assume everybody going into that has grown up enough to know that sometimes weird stuff happens. Somehow Conclave got nominated for best picture and best actor, but not best director.

John: Yes, there’s a couple of those.

Craig: Wasn’t quite sure about that one.

John: Wicked also.

Craig: Wicked, best picture but not best screenplay?

John: Yes.

Craig: All right. Not fair to our friend, Dana Fox. There are these strange things that happen but it’s all priced in. At the end of the day, while it is nice to have a trophy, this is all part of advertising. For those folks who did get nominations, I think it’s really exciting that their movies will get more marketing money so more people can see them, particularly for the little ones.

John: But also congratulations, now you get to do six more weeks of work promoting this thing.

Craig: It is a full-time job.

John: You don’t get paid for it.

Craig: No.

John: Drew, tell us about Weekend Read because I think you have all of these scripts in Weekend Read right now.

Drew Marquardt: Every single nominated screenplay we’ve got up from Weekend Read. Should I run down the list?

John: Go for it.

Craig: Yes, please.

Drew: We have A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, which is a really fun read, September 5, Sing Sing, The Brutalist, and The Substance. They’re all in the “And the nominees are…” category and you can read them there.

Craig: That’s great. It used to be five things, right?

John: Yes. Now that we have both adapted and original screenplay.

Craig: Oh, I see. There are 10 best.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m in the Academy. I should know this, right? I vote very quickly. I shouldn’t say that. I vote studiously.

John: I do too.

Craig: But I clearly don’t pay attention to how many people are in the category and I’m voting. There are 10 best pictures, but then everybody else is five. Is that right?

John: That’s correct. Every other category is five. Drew has gone through each of these scripts to make sure they actually work properly in Weekend Read. So I would just say, rather than doomscrolling on your phone, why don’t you scroll through a script and actually read something and read something good?

Craig: Anything is better than doomscrolling, anything.

John: Now, Craig, I know you took a mandate to consume less news and you’re off all the social media. How is that going for you?

Craig: Amazingly well.

John: That’s good.

Craig: I am aware of what is going on in the world. I get my news through the old-fashioned method, which is to pick a couple of periodicals that I find at least thoughtful and look at their curated reportage of what happened the day before. Not what happened 10 minutes ago and with some breath so that there can be some thoughtful analysis and context. That’s it. I do not get my news from the fire hose of insanity and I don’t watch anything with anyone talking. That’s the key. [chuckles] I do not watch talking heads. I do not look at tweets. I do not look at Instathoughts and it is spectacular.

John: During the height of the fires, I was reminded of how useful it is to have local news. It was one of those rare situations where I turned on the TV and actually watched local news as fires were happening. It was useful to see like, “Oh, my gosh, the fires are getting close here. We actually need to start packing up.” I was so grateful to have that as a service, but I do not want that in my veins all the time. I grew up in a household where the TV news was on at least four hours a day, local news and national news. It’s not helpful.

Craig: Local news, in particular, and this is no slight against them, the work that they do when something like the fires happen is extraordinary and people put their lives at risk and they’re flying around the helicopters. But for the most part, they don’t have either enough things to report that they think anyone will watch or they only have lurid things that aren’t worth reporting that they know people will watch. You get a lot of, there was an accident here and there was a shooting and there was a stabbing.

What you don’t get are, say, this bill was deliberated. All the sudden frenzy over why were tanks empty? What was going on with the firefighters? Why didn’t the pumps work? That’s been being discussed for years and the local news reported on 0% of it. It’s not a great thing to have on all day unless there’s something serious happening.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Like a car chase.

John: Like a car chase, yes.

Craig: Yes.

Craig: All right, let’s do some follow-up because it’s been a while since you and I’ve been here in person to do some follow-up on previous episodes. Drew, take us back to 671. We had a How to view a Movie about an IVF mix-up.

Drew: Several people wrote in that there were already movies out there with a similar premise. Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. There’s a Danish movie called Maybe Baby. There’s an Indian comedy called Good News and a Mexican sitcom called Daughter from Another Mother.

Craig: Looks like they’ve covered this one, John.

John: They have covered it. Internationally it’s been well covered.

Craig: Everyone all across the world enjoys this story.

John: Also, we talked in that same episode about a Unabomber movie and several people wrote in to say there’s a series called Manhunt about Ted Kaczynski starring Paul Bettany and Sam Worthington.

Craig: Okay.

John: Sure.

Craig: Done.

John: Done.

Drew: We’ll put links in the show notes for all those.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We also had some follow-up on way back to episode 454. We were talking about erotic fiction.

Craig: That was a long time ago.

John: Yes.

Drew: Jenny in New York City writes, I was listening to that bonus segment of episode 454 where you and Craig discuss but disappointingly do not read erotic fiction. In it, you bring up Fifty Shades of Grey as the prime example of fan fiction that managed to cross over into popular culture. Craig says that Fifty Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something and that he’s surprised that nothing similar followed it. Four-plus years later, we’re seeing the floodgates open. There’s a through line from fan fiction to TikTok or BookTok to the traditional book publishing industry.

A well-known example is The Love Hypothesis, which was originally a Rey and Kylo Ren, or Reylo, fan fiction published online in 2018 and then scrubbed of all the Star Wars references and traditionally published in 2021. A film adaptation is now in development. There are also three Draco and Hermione, or Dramione, fan fictions all slated for major publication in 2025.

Craig: Okay. Wait, but also scrubbed of any–

John: Yes. That’s the thing. Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, was fan fiction that was scrubbed.

Craig: Scrubbed from Twilight.

John: Yes.

Craig: Right.

John: We were correct but just ahead of the curve.

Craig: We were ahead of the curve.

John: Now, BookTok caught up with what we predicted four years ago.

Craig: Yay, erotic fiction.

John: Yes.

Craig: Is there anything less sexy than the phrase erotic fiction?

John: Yes, it’s a —

Craig: Boner killer.

John: It’s not so good.

Craig: No.

John: I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to be positive. This is a movie that we didn’t have in theaters before. The same thing with Fifty Shades of Grey. We weren’t having sexual thrillers on the big screen and hooray.

Craig: Not since the ‘90s.

John: Yes.

Craig: There has been a lot of discussion about millennials and Gen Z’s general lack of interest in seeing sex portrayed on screen. I think we’ve talked about it before, possibly because if they want to watch sex on screen, they watch people having sex. They don’t need it or want it in their traditional narrative. But it is part of our life and it’s very much a part of how we relate to each other on very deep levels. It screws things up. It makes things better. It makes things worse. It creates all the people around us and at least most of them. Let’s bring it on.

Also, it is interesting that so much of fan fiction turns toward the erotic. All the way back to– You’ve heard the phrase slash fiction?

John: Of course. Yes, Kirk/Spock.

Craig: Exactly. It began with people writing erotic fiction about Star Trek and specifically like Kirk has sex with Spock or Kirk has sex with McCoy or McCoy has sex with Scotty, whatever it is. It’s not like the stuff that happens now is only because of that. I think it’s always been that impulse is there’s a fandom and they want to write sexy versions of the characters.

John: They do. Also, they’re pining for something that they cannot get in the mainstream version of it.

Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting point.

John: I think the reason why slash fiction is it’s an attempt to take these characters out of their normal molds and use them how they want to use them. There are, obviously, queer writers were behind part of it, but also women, basically. It’s a way of taking control of these male characters and using them how they wish they could be seen.

Craig: Also, if you love those stories, you make a great point. You’re never going to get sex in a Harry Potter film. Of course, you have to wait until they’re old enough, right? Their senior year, you’re still not going to get sex. It’s not how it works. There’s a unsatisfied desire for a certain version of that relationship. That makes total sense.

John: All right. Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is actually prompted by another listener question. This one from Christine. Drew, help us out.

Drew: She says, in episode 662, which was the 20 questions, Craig responded to a listener saying something like, there’s a lot of people who can write glittering dialogue but so few who can use structure well. It had my husband and I fist-pumping. We agree. I certainly can’t do it well. Sometimes it feels like perfect pitch. Either you have it or you don’t. Craig and John, would you talk to us about examples of how you used or struggled with structure in some of your own work?

John: Great, happy to. I think first we should just talk about structure and what we even mean by structure because it’s one of those terms that I think is used as a cudgel against newer writers. Once you actually think about what it really is, it’s, of course, fundamental to every story you’ve ever heard.

Craig: It is story. It’s a fancy word for saying, this is what happens, this is who it happens to, and this is why. That is what stories are. People get excited about the clothing that we put on that stuff because that’s what hits their eyeballs and ears first. What do they look like? What are they saying? The saying, in particular, gets overemphasized. But how do you tell a good story?

Everybody who grows up in any family that’s even moderately sized or even if you just see your extended family at Christmas, doesn’t matter, everybody knows that there’s somebody that’s going to sit around and tell a story that is so boring and bad. But you also know there’s somebody who’s great at it. When that one starts telling a story, everybody leans forward because they know how to do it, how you begin, how you middle, how you end, what’s the point, how it all comes around and coheres together. Poetics by Aristotle.

John: I was a journalism major, and so in journalism, you’re taught to answer the basic questions, who, what, where, when, why, and then how. Structure’s really– John’s talking about the when. It’s like, when do events happen? What is the order of those events? When does the audience learn something? Those are all fundamental parts of storytelling. When you have somebody at a family gathering who is just awful at it and boring, it’s like you did not plan the details and how you’re going to lay out the story and the storytelling in a way that was actually interesting and intriguing.

You’re starting way too early, you’re going way too long. There’s just no clear structure to the story. We know we’re trapped in this endless middle of things. When something is well-structured, you feel beginnings and endings, you feel the closure of moments, you feel that there’s just– There’s a rhythm to it. You’ve recognized what the audience needs and where they’re at and how to move forward. That’s what structure is. What it’s not is some cookie-cutter template. It’s not like, “Oh, here are the magic clothespins which you’re going to hang all your things on. It’s not a thing you impose upon a story. It is the skeleton that’s holding the whole story up.

Craig: I think when you said recognize, that’s where the talent is. Because I don’t know how to teach somebody to recognize something. It might be instructive for people at home to think about Boring Uncle Ron and how Boring Uncle Ron does tell stories because at least you can say, “I recognize why that story stinks.” For instance, he looped back around. He told me something that should have been told earlier. I can’t explain why, except I wish he had mentioned that earlier. It screws up the context.

There was no suspense. He told me what was going to happen before it happened. He just casually said something that he should have milked and understood that I would have found meaningful. There are parts where there are too many details. There are parts where there are no details at all. It doesn’t end. He’s not sure how to end it. It doesn’t have a point. If it doesn’t have a point, it wasn’t the point that the beginning was getting at. There’s no revelation, no purpose, and it is episodic. This, and this, and this, and this. A boring Uncle Ron may be able to teach people more about structure than we think.

John: The other thing that’s important to recognize is that structure is all around you. You just may not be seeing it as structure. Every song you’ve ever heard has structure. There are verses and choruses and hooks and it has bridges. There’s a pattern that fits your brain well. Because there are things like verses and choruses, you can break from them and that surprise us, which is great.

There’s still a sense of what those things are. The equivalents for those are scenes and sequences in movies and TV shows. It’s why learning to write the four-act or five-act structure of a classic one-hour TV show is really, really useful. Even if those commercial breaks are taken out, there’s still a sense of like, “I know where we’re at in this show.” There’s a flow to it.

Craig: There’s a rhythm. It’s a little bit like having a conversation with yourself. One of you is going to tell a story and the other part of you is going to be listening to the story. Part of structure is saying, how does hearing this for the first time me like that? Did I like that? Did that make me happy? Did it bore me? Does it seem clunky? You need to have a relationship with an audience even when there is none because we are performing a service.

Nobody other than Kafka, theoretically, who tried to burn everything he wrote, is just writing to be not read or filming to not be seen and so forth. You have to let the audience in.

You don’t need to let them all in. Your audience can just be you and what you like. You then need to be responsive to yourself and go, “No.” Even though I just came up with that, even though that was my idea of what should happen now and why, the me that’s listening, unimpressed.

John: Let’s talk through our assumptions about the very fundamental structure of a movie or a pilot, the things that are introducing a character for the first time and introducing what it is that they’re trying to do. Early in the story, near the very start, we need to have a sense of who the character is, what they want, what the world is like, what the obstacles in the way that are going to be there, who else is important.
Those are fundamental things. The fundamental choices you’re going to be making, even if you don’t think about it, you’re making those choices by which order you’re putting those scenes in and how you’re telling the audience about those things.

As they’re going off and doing some things, what is the sequence of events that’s happening? What are the choices that they’re making? Where are they going? What are the obstacles along the way? When you see somebody criticize the script for being, “I think you have some structure issues here,” it’s what they’re really saying is like, “I got lost. I got lost in where we’re at, what I should have been focusing on.

The characters might have great dialogue. It might be really enjoyable to have watched them do their thing, but I didn’t feel any momentum. I didn’t feel like there was anything going there. I didn’t know what to even look for in terms of what’s going to happen at the end. What am I even expecting to happen down the road.”

Craig: Oftentimes there’s a lack of intention and we interpret that as a structure problem. Every time, you’re right. When people say there’s a structure problem, they’re trying to say there’s a problem of some other kind. You just don’t know what the word is. Sometimes it’s as if you’re watching a conductor who doesn’t have a sense of how to alter tempo, create anticipation, where to use silence, as opposed to sound. There’s no shape.

John: Yes, there’s no shape.

Craig: There’s no shape. It’s just there and it’s not picking you up and then throwing you down. It’s not putting its hands over your eyes and then revealing something new. These things get shuffled out as structure problems, which for writers can be very frustrating early on because you immediately then go running to some structure book. The structure books are not going to help you. You do need, I think, to think a little bit how to write a movie. A lot of structure is about the main character and how they change. The story is revolving around that. It’s the nucleus and everything’s revolving around that. That creates a sense of intention and purpose, which in theory, will imbue this story with structure.

John: Going back to Christine’s question, when you talk about examples of how you use or struggle with structure in some of your own work. Looking back at the movies I’ve written, by far the most complicated movie structurally was Big Fish because in Big Fish, you have two protagonists who have their own agendas. There’s two different timelines.

They’re intersecting with each other. They are each other’s antagonist. There’s so much stuff to set up and plates to start spinning. Those first 10 pages have to do just a lot of work to sort of start the engines for things going.

The setup is so important, but then it’s deciding, when am I moving back and forth between these different stories? How is my choice to leave this storyline and go to this storyline progressing both of them? How to make sure we’re really moving forward in time and energy as we’re going through the movie, even though we’re intercutting between these two things?
That was a case where I had an instinctive sense of what the story was I needed to tell, but it literally did have to just like pull out a sheet of paper and work out like, “This is how I’m moving back and forth between these things. Then I had to plan scenes that would make transitions between those things feel logical and natural.” That is the hard work of structure sometimes.

Most movies I write don’t need that, but there are situations where you have multiple plot lines happening at the same time and you are going to have to just do that logistical planning work to figure out how you’re going to do that. TV shows are a great example too. Oftentimes, I guess, Last of Us is much more classically, you tend to follow a smaller group of characters, but you are cutting back and forth between them, and deciding when you’re going to cut back and forth between them becomes really important. With Joel or with Ellie and deciding when we’re going to move back and forth to those things are important writing decisions well before they become editorial decisions.

Craig: No question. Television episodes are I find generally easier structurally to deal with because they’re shorter and there is an understanding and expectation that you will get to have multiple starts and multiple endings. So you simplify a little bit. By simplifying, you get to be a little crazier with structure. Television shows are structured way weirder than movies are. You look at the structure of a season, any season, pick any season of Breaking Bad. No movie is complicated like that. It’s not even a complicated show.

John: Also, in series television, you’re looking at the structure across multiple episodes too. Where’s the audience at? What are we setting up?

Craig: There’s episodic structure, there’s season structure, there’s series structure. Movies are, I find to be really challenging because you get one shot and that’s it. When it’s in, there’s no multiple innings. There’s no, “well, that wasn’t my favorite episode.” It’s one episode, that’s it, the end. I won’t name titles, but I will say that I have worked on things that I’m not credited for that were big pieces of IP and they had a lot of expectations and they also were from different media. It wasn’t like I was taking a movie and remaking it. It was another thing.

In those cases, sometimes the freedom of whatever that medium was made it very hard to structure a movie such that the movie was in movie time. It wasn’t five hours long and it wasn’t 40 minutes long. It was roughly movie time and got you through the movement you needed to get. All the things you needed and wanted were there and the stuff wasn’t. Most importantly, everything made sense because other things, a lot of other things can afford to not make sense for a while. Novels can wander off and not make sense for a bunch of it. Kurt Vonnegut novels routinely don’t make sense and then they do in the end and it’s beautiful. For long stretches, you’re like, “What is happening?”

Musicals can wander off down weird alleyways, do bizarre songs, and then come back and it’s fine. It’s fine because also you’re in a big room with them and they’re singing and it’s cool and who cares? Songs can do this, but movies, it’s harder. It’s harder particularly when you’re doing movies like you and I have done. Logic, as it turns out, is also part of structure, making sure that facts are in evidence that one thing follows another reasonably, and that people aren’t contradicting themselves or their story.

John: You were talking about adaptations and adapting a piece of IP. It’s been my experience is that when I’m adapting a novel, there’s so much you love about the novel and you recognize I can’t just tear off the pages and feed them in the projector. They fundamentally have different engines. I have to have an honest conversation with the author if the author’s around, the engine of the movie is going to be different than the engine in your book. Some things are going to need to happen in different order and different sequences and some things are just not going to happen because it’s a movie and the movie has to be about two hours long.

There’s just expectations and payoffs that are just very different for a movie. Having written three books now, I can say it’s really nice to be able to describe the texture of the streets and all that stuff and it provides such incredible rich detail and it’s immersive. That’s not movie stuff. You got to move on past that. When I’ve been tasked with adapting a piece of IP that’s more like a character or a video game or something like that, one that’s not especially narrative, then you do have a lot more freedom to actually make a movie.

Craig: If they give you a toy, just make sure that the toy is named the toy and that it does the one signature thing that the toy does and the rest is up to you.

John: There’s a liberation to that where it’s just like, I’m not so stuck and beholden on those things. I don’t have all the benefits of the stuff that was in the book, but it’s not so stuck on it.

Craig: It’s almost like the challenge is taking something that has been properly structured for its medium and then telling it again in a different medium. It’s almost like you’ve got to break a lot of bones and then knit them back together because like you get a dolphin and you need to deliver a penguin. A lot of work happens there and some bones just are left behind and it can be messy and it will never really be a penguin and it certainly won’t be a dolphin. It’ll be its own thing. It’s hard, but this is how important structure is really. It’s like we need to be able to tell the story coherently for this medium.

John: Do you have other examples from your own work of things that were particularly challenging to structure or things that surprised you in finding a structure for telling the story? We talked through Chornobyl and figured out where the breaks were in that story.

Craig: Other than the things that I– There were a few jobs where I thought this probably shouldn’t be a movie. There were some things where I thought this should probably be three movies, not one. Famously the Weinsteins had the rights to Lord of the Rings and they refused to let Peter Jackson make three movies. They wanted him to make one movie to cover the three books of Lord of the Rings. Just to be clear, I watched the extended version every year of each of those three movies.

The extended version of each movie is three and a half hours. The theatrical maybe were two and a half. The idea of we’re going to smash all that into one movie is insane. Sometimes you’re running into– I have been in those spots, really when you feel like you don’t have enough runway to either take off or land, it’s terrifying.

John: I will say that when I look back to like stuff I’ve passed on, sometimes it just didn’t spark for me, or the character didn’t spark, the story didn’t spark. There have also been times where this is not a movie or I can sense it’s really fundamentally a structural problem that we’re not going to get past. The audience expectation of when it’s to make it to the screen and what I can actually put on the screen, it’s just not going to match up right because there’s just not time to do it.

Craig: There have also been situations where I found as I was going through it, that the other people involved, be they a director or producer or star, felt that the value was more in some other aspect of it. The pure storytelling was just don’t worry about that because we’re going to do this and it’s going to be cool. I think sometimes action movies fall prey to this. We all love Die Hard because it’s so perfectly structured, but a lot of action movies you can feel them going and we have to have this cool thing so just make a lot of convoluted reasons why it’s going to happen because really people are there for the action.

If you miss that thread of story, like so our friend Chris Morgan who works on the Fast and Furious movies, they found a smart way to create a simple structure, family. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated because they’re smart. They know people are coming for the cars, but that’s why they think they’re coming. The reason they keep coming back is for the characters and the relationships because you could just watch cars doing crazy stuff on YouTube if you want. It’s also important to have partners who recognize we’re going to tell everybody this is about the cars privately in this room. We do know it’s about basic fundamentals that we have to get right.

John: I completely agree with you in terms of family was a central unifying core idea. I would be nervous about conflating that with structure.

Craig: It would have to be an argument, right?

John: It’s a central argument. That’s the central thing we’re always doing.

Craig: Family is worth more than blank.

John: Then as you’re looking at what are the events of this movie? How are we going to structure them? How is this all going to feel and tie back into it? It’s making sure that you are able to remind the audience and remind the characters that it’s all about family, that it’s all going to tie back in there, making sure that of all these set pieces you’re building, which is these things are musicals, but with explosions.

Craig: Exactly. What is the fundamental difference between the structure of one of your favorite Fast and Furious movies and one of your favorite Pitch Perfect movies? Both universal films, oddly enough, family, right? A bunch of people come together. One of them is not, is a loner of a sort. The other ones need them. There are villains that must be overcome. They all find that they are more powerful together and they face their fear and they win through performance of some kind, be it driving or singing a cool song.

John: Absolutely. Those writers as they’re looking at how they’re going to structure their stories. They’re looking at these are the singing moments, the big action set pieces. These are how we’re going to do it. Looking at the note card layout, which is the way they think about like– I don’t actually lay out cards, but you used to do that. You just don’t need cards anymore.

Craig: I now do more whiteboard.

John: As you’re looking at the big whiteboard map of where the story is, that’s what we’re really talking about, structures. It’s making sure that they’re not just individual things but they’re connected in ways that are meaningful and actually provide value.

Craig: And if you’re looking at structure in that way, when you put up a card that says a big race or they sing, you have to know why. They race, but the point of this race is he disappoints somebody and feels horrible or he chickens out or he realizes that he’s better than he thought he was. Why do they sing this song? Because this song shows that they’re all thinking about themselves only and not about each other. That’s why those note cards happen. That’s structure.

John: You’re asking, why is this happening now? What is the effect of this happening now on the stuff before and afterwards?

Craig: How does this change what comes next?

John: We say you’re asking yourself, but that’s one of those cases where having the writer’s room, if you’re in a TV situation or having a writing partner, we know a lot of partners who one person is the person who’s better at sensing this overall map of story and another person is really good at the execution details.

Craig: David Zucker, when I first started working on Scary Movie 3, he didn’t know me. I was shoved in there, right? It’s week one and he has no idea who I am and he’s like, “I don’t know this guy.” He was like, “You’re like structure boy.” I was structure boy. Then it was funny. It was funny. He didn’t mean it as an insult. He actually really respected structure. He was obsessed with note cards and he was a big believer. I’m talking about him like he’s dead. He’s perfectly alive. He would appreciate that I’m talking about him like he’s dead.

He was very rigorous about logic. Actually, he was quite grateful that structure boy was there to help because I think he had real problems with that in his part– He had been trying and there is a great structure to like, for instance, Naked Gun, fantastic structure, but it was hard for him. It took him a lot of work. It was useful to have a structure boy.

John: Just thinking back to last week’s conversation with Jesse Eisenberg, he was talking about like an idea and needing structure in order to actually have the idea make sense. He was talking about how originally he had this approach for the movie and he realized the big reveal happened at the end of act one and he just didn’t have an act two or an act three because things just happened too early. He needed to change everything around and he needed to change the premise so that he could actually have a structure that made sense for the course of the movie.

Craig: Therein is the difference between good writers and not good writers. Good writers will make a mistake and then go, “Oh, that’s a mistake.” Bad writers will make a mistake and go, “This is awesome.”

John: The bad writer might just spend a sec, “Oh, but I’ll figure it out later.”

Craig: No one will care.

John: Or they just give up.

Craig: They give up. I think the biggest issue is it’s that having that other you that can just be the audience with its arms crossed going, “Yes, that’s fine.” What’s worse than hearing that’s fine? I’ve said that to myself before and I’m like, “Oh boy, let’s not do that.”

John: All right. On the topic of that’s fine, let’s talk about the meh. This comes from a newsletter that somebody sent me, it’s written by Sasha Chapin. He writes that, “I believe one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. It’s not that I don’t have critical judgment or favorites. The ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high too.”

He runs through some of this advice for enjoying things. I thought they applied really well to enjoying a movie because what I do find is I feel like people have, some of it’s just as you age up, but there’s a cynicism and it’s like, ehh, that I feel happening more. I just want to remind people of ways to enjoy a movie. Because sometimes if you’re sitting and watching a movie, you’re like, “I could just look at my phone.” No, there are other things you can look at instead.

Craig: I think sometimes people say they didn’t like a movie because there is a risk of saying you like something you can be sneered at. No one will sneer at you for not liking something. If anything, you can be like, “You all cretins. You’ve taken delight in this, you idiot.” It’s hard to say you like things. People will sit through a movie silently watching the entire thing. Then when it’s over, go, “I mean, it was okay.” What else gets you to sit there silently fixated upon it for two hours? Nothing.

John: While you’re staring silently at a thing, wondering whether you like it, some of his advice first is look at the other part. He’s saying, move your attention beyond the part that you’re immediately focused on. For his example, it’s like, listen to the baseline in a song and listen to actually hear what the bass is doing, which can be fascinating. For me, sometimes if I’m not fully enjoying that, but I can then I can look at the sets, I can hear the score, I can just appreciate the world in which the story is in. That’s okay. It’s okay to not maybe be enamored by everything in the movie that you’re experiencing but to focus on one thing, one part of it is also okay.

Craig: Sometimes people think that unless a movie is perfect, it’s bad. Movies will make a mistake. That mistake is not an objective mistake. What it is a disruption in your relationship with it. You are on a great date with a movie and then it did something and you went, “Oh, no, I don’t like that thing.” Well get over it because, like dates, movies will have flaws for you. Other people might enjoy those. You didn’t like it, accept it as part of the process where nothing is perfect, and then get back to liking it. Don’t just go, “There it is.” You know what? The movie had me until this person said this thing and then I was like, “Oh, this is garbage.” That’s stupid. That’s how stupid people talk.

John: Another bit of advice, let the intensity in. He’s talking about how people don’t generally like heavy metal because it sounds like an assault on their ears.

Craig: Yes. An awesome assault.

John: Sometimes a movie will do something like and I’ll just cringe on its behalf. Sometimes you just let the movie be the fullest version of itself and try to appreciate for what the movie is doing, even if it’s not necessarily your taste, just watch it enjoy itself.

Craig: Yes. And if a movie is doing what it was intended to do and you can feel they wanted to make a large macaroni and cheese and I just got a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese. Who love macaroni and cheese? What do you mean? Yell at the macaroni? They did what they would. Really absolutely appreciate at least this is for macaroni and cheese. They cared. They delivered it. What else could we ask for them?

John: 100%.

Craig: I feel like comedies in particular get judged so harshly for this. Again, if it’s not Tootsie, it’s no good.

John: “That joke didn’t work for me.”

Craig: What about the 5,000 other words? You laughed a bunch of times and you’re not even in a comedy club where everybody’s drunk. Do you understand why? The two-drink minimum is the reason 70% of comedians have a job. Everyone’s a little toasty and it’s fun and you’re all together and somebody’s doing it live and adapting and feeling you out and saying, “You don’t like this joke. You’re going to– Oh, you like that one? I’ll give you more of those.” Movies are stuck. They’re only going to do the one thing. That’s it. You could be alone in the theater and you’re like, “Eh, yes.”

John: Next bit of advice. Develop a crush on the creator. Allow yourself to be transiently infatuated with the person who produced the work.

Craig: Who likes that idea? Sexy Craig. You’re infatuated with me.

John: Think about the artist’s intention —

Craig: He wasn’t even giving any of that. He’s so horrified by Sexy Craig.

John: Here’s what I’ve learned is don’t acknowledge it.

Craig: You just turn away from it. At the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, she turns her back on Freddy Krueger and he disappears.

John: That’s my hope.

Craig: You keep hoping.

John: Thinking about intention, why did this creator do this? What are they trying to achieve? Actually, it can be useful to stop and if you’re not enjoying this moment right now, think about the actual person making it or what the intention was behind the thing can get you reengaged in what they’re doing.

Craig: Give people the benefit of the doubt. Now, there are times where you will watch a movie and you will think, “Oh, this is just poorly done.” In those circumstances, sometimes I will think to myself, “Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, something went wrong here.” Rather than me presuming that everybody sat down and said, “This is exactly what we want to do,” did it, showed it to me, and it was a mess. What if I think to myself, “What was this supposed to be? What, who, how, what went wrong? What collided with this?” That in and of itself is interesting, to allow something to be bad without saying and it was intentionally so. It is almost never intentionally so.

John: Even if something isn’t bad, but it’s just mid or meh, it’s like–

Craig: Mid or meh is the worst. I am so frustrated with this mid or meh. No, it’s not. It’s not mid or meh. The only thing that I find mid or meh is the usage of mid and meh, which is the most mediocre thing you can do, just repeating a blase indifference that 1,000 other people have repeated in the last five seconds.

John: What I do find, I try to stop it myself, but I see other people doing it as well, is I feel like people are writing their letterbox review while they’re watching the movie.

Craig: Oh, the worst.

John: To this whole exercise, I’m just trying to remind you to be present for the movie that’s actually in front of you. Don’t try to anticipate your reaction afterwards.

Craig: You bought a ticket, give yourself to it. You’re giving it your time, give it your time. Everybody grew up on 1,000 film critics and they all want to be a film critic. By the way, that’s a job that I guess everybody feels like they’re going to just do for free. It’s so strange. It’s as if people go to a restaurant, have a great meal, they hate on it, they call it mid, they go home, and then they make their own version of it. It’s just, don’t be a critic. That’s a job, which is already questionable.

Just give in and just watch it honestly. There’ll be time enough. How many times have you seen something, and then four days later, you went, “You know what? I actually love that. I was wrong. It won’t leave me. Now I realize I just needed some time.” You don’t give yourself time if you immediately go home and start, letterbox.

John: Here’s the other thing I think is, letterbox, you’re rating it one to five stars, and you’re also giving a thing, but just move beyond like or dislike and just appreciate something he says in his articles, like begrudging enjoyment, or like– There are multiple ways to experience a thing.

Craig: Flavors.

John: here’s things like, I don’t want to watch that movie again, but I’m glad I watched it.

Craig: I’ll give you an example.

John: Please.

Craig: I went to go see a movie called, I believe it was called The Island by Michael Bay.

John: Oh yes. I remember that.

Craig: Remember Michael Bay’s The Island.

John: Scarlett Johansson.

Craig: Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. It wasn’t a movie that I thought after when I walked out, “That was awesome.” I didn’t have that feeling. There were a lot of things I remember thinking, a lot of this doesn’t seem to add up. As I was going along, I would keep getting jostled out by logic convolution.

But there is a car chase in it that is so spectacular. For me, that was worth the price of admission. I marveled at it. I still marvel at it. I don’t understand how they did it. It is so incredible to me. When I see things like that in movies that I otherwise maybe I’m not enjoying, I go, well, there. You know what? I’m still talking about– Do you know how many movies I saw that I was like, it was really good? I don’t even remember seeing them. But I remember the car chase in The Island.

John: Last bit of advice here that he gives us is, notice how your body enjoys it. What are the physical reactions? Again, we’re talking about being present for it and actually looking at your own feelings. When I’m watching something that is genuinely scary, that’s part of the reason why I’m watching it, so I actually get that physical sensation. When I’m watching something that’s so funny that it hurts, that’s why you go. Just acknowledge and clock that because I think so often you forget afterwards like, “Oh yes, it was actually so funny that my stomach hurt.”

Craig: It was so funny that I laughed. That’s a physical response, just laughing of any kind. It’s so hard to make people do. I love that aspect of it. I find that the physical response that I notice the most when I’m being dislodged from the experience is a wandering. My mind begins to wander and I feel myself returning to my body. It wanders away from the movie, back into my skull. When I’m in it, whether it’s a show, I’m gone.

John: Yes. You’re not physically there.

Craig: I’m not there.

John: You’re inside the world.

Craig: What an amazing trick of the mind.

John: All right. Some advice about movies, TV shows, I would say just let yourself be entertained by the things you’re choosing to watch and see and listen to.

Craig: Be brave enough to like things. It’s actually a more mature and more enlightened state of being when it comes to interacting with art.

John: Agreed. Let’s turn to questions. First, we have Elizabeth in Brooklyn.

Drew: Elizabeth writes, “How does a screenwriter for hire best work with a director? I find that more and more I’m coming on to studio and streamer projects where a director is already attached. Every director is different, obviously, and I’m finding that a good many of them are not story people. They don’t have a sense of the necessary scaffolding or how to build a character’s journey.

Craig: Structure.

Drew: “They obsess over the weeds without zooming up to see the whole landscape. The real problem is those who don’t know what they don’t know. They want to do script brainstorming sessions with me, which is actually them just excitedly pitching contradictory suggestions or plain old bad ideas. They fight me on beats that the studio loves. Should I be thinking of this relationship where you don’t speak the same language?

Sometimes they’re infuriating, but you need to be patient and respectful so that you can create material that suits them and so that the relationship endures. Or is it okay to set up boundaries so that you can go off and write your draft without being subject to many unhelpful brainstorming sessions? When the director doesn’t want me to write something studio has approved, which master am I supposed to serve?”

John: All right. Craig, you and I actually know this writer who’s writing in. Congratulations, Elizabeth. You’re at a point now where you’re dealing with directors on projects and you’re–

Craig: The way we have a million times.

John: Yes. This is all so familiar. I just say like, big giant hug around you. I know how hard this is. Craig is shaking his head.

Craig: If you listen to that question and you put it in the context of any other business when she gets to the point of, should I just be really patient? What? This happens all the time because our business has overindulged directors in film for some reason. It’s a little bit like a history teacher is paired with a history student to write a report on history and the history student is put in charge. That’s what it’s like.

John: To me, it’s like you’re any software engineer who has to talk to Elon Musk.

Craig: That also works. [chuckles] You realize the authority is backwards. It is not earned. I want to be clear about something. There are directors who are brilliant at this. You know how you know that a director is deserving of the authority they have? They are deserving of the authority they have. They earned it. They demonstrated it either through their own writing o– With somebody like Steven Spielberg, he works with screenwriters all the time and he is so good at it that he brings the best out of them. He respects what they do and then does what he does so brilliantly.

We have a situation where somebody’s been writing for 30 years. Let’s give them a couple Oscars while we’re at it. Let’s say that they’re paid $4 million to work on this. The director is a first-time director. Why would you put that one in charge of that one? What do you do? I’m a big fan of boundaries and I’m a big fan of remembering that you do work for the studio. The studio, which bends over backwards and is all worried about directors, needs to know. Otherwise, you just end up writing bad things to make a conversation go better. That’s not going to help anybody, particularly you.

John: What I want to draw the distinction between is the conversation and the writing. I think sometimes, Elizabeth, you just have to like– It’s almost going back to this conversation we just had about how to enjoy a thing. It’s like all this stuff is coming your way from this director and you just have to take it in and feel it. You get much better at like, I hear what you’re saying there and it feels like that could match up with this thing we were talking about earlier.

You get a sense of how to feel that stuff and how to make it all work. But some of what you’re getting paid for, and I hope you’re getting paid well, is just to exist in those rooms and hear that and make people feel heard and then still be able to go off and write a freaking great script that they’re going to be excited to do. The other thing, which originally I was really nervous about, but I became clear that they won’t remember all the things they pitched at you.

Craig: Oh, no. They won’t be delighted by anything more than a good script, regardless of what all the conversations were because they’re not writers and they don’t know. I’m assuming that this is a non-writing director. I’m also assuming that this is not a director that has earned his or her stripes through achievement and success. It doesn’t sound like that. There are directors that you and I know of who are just bananas. Everyone knows they’re bananas. Their thing is when they capture footage and work with actors, their bananas-ness sometimes gets great things. The script has to be the adult in the room.

You and I have talked about ScreenwriterPlus. It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to have a great work ethic. You also need to be extraordinarily diplomatic and shrewd. You are being hired to manage, sometimes, to manage that person. To deliver a good script that the actor will like and the studio will like without the director blowing up and going crazy.

Don’t overindulge the director and don’t be too afraid of them. If that director has so much authority that they can boot you off the movie because you’re not writing down their insane stuff, then you don’t belong there. Then you’re writing a different movie anyway.

John: Going back to Spielberg, I was lucky to work with him on three different projects. He is so smart and is also not a natural writer. He does have the understanding of what he wants to do in a movie and how to make movies. He knows how to do it and he’ll pitch you things. But it is your responsibility to find out how to go from that thing to what actually needs to happen in the movie and the script. Recognizing that people can be awesome at certain things and not be as good as other things. That’s great. That’s true. You also can’t design costumes. You can’t do other things.

Craig: Neither can we. We know how to do it. I write and I direct and I produce. You know what I don’t do? I don’t light. I don’t know how to light. If you put a gun to my head, I know what a bounce does and what a flag does. That’s part of how I tell stories. When I’m working with my cinematographer, I look at something and I’m like, okay, here’s what I think about this and why, or here’s what I want to achieve and why.

Then they execute it with a level of technical prowess that will never fully be understandable to me. There’s a lot that’s going on invisible under the surface that I don’t notice. I just see the end product. And I appreciate them for that because I can’t do what they do. That’s how a great director will work with a great writer, by understanding they need to go do their thing and I’m going to give them a good target to hit. I acknowledge there’s a lot of stuff under the surface that’s happening that I’m not aware of.

The ding-dong directors will casually kick things around like drunken toddlers with no understanding of what they’ve just unraveled and done. It’s very frustrating. [laughs] You know what you’re hearing is the 25 years of working with directors, some of whom I deeply love. I love working with Todd Phillips. I love working with Denis Villeneuve. There’s so many directors that I really enjoyed working with. On my show, there are directors I love working with, even though it’s a different circumstance and I’m the authority. But man, ooh, John, you and I both have been in some rooms where we are just like hostages to a madman.

John: Yes. That’s reality. Let’s do a simple question. Let’s do one from Tad. He’s writing about point of view.

Drew: Tad says, “I get confused about how to return from a point-of-view shot. If I use a his POV slug line, do I need to use another slug line when I leave his POV. If I use John as the next slugline, then I’m trapped on John until I get to the next scene heading, or else I get into a string of sluglines as I jump from character to character.”

John: I understand what Tad is running into here, and I think it’s the assumption that once you put in an intermediate slugline like his POV, they were trapped in there forever, and you’re not. Sometimes is good to signal to the reader like, “We’re no longer in POV.” In my own scripts, I’ve done end POV, or it’s not that, it’s a separate slugline.

Craig: It’s lengthy. Then I think it’s reasonable to say, we begin this person’s POV, and then there’s multiple paragraphs of what they’re seeing, what they’re seeing, and then it says end POV if it’s like a section. If it’s just one moment, I think the next paragraph, John’s POV, Brenda enters the room. On Brenda. You can do that.

John: Yes, totally. That also work.

Craig: Walking into the restaurant.

John: It’s also good to remember the intermediary slugline is really useful, breaking up stuff on the page and give you a sense of how stuff flows. If you’re just popping into POV for one shot or something, you can put POV as part of the paragraph.

Craig: Always. I don’t think I ever break it off on its own because it feels so technical. I want people to just be in the POV rather than being in, now, the POV you’re portraying, and then the POV. I just want them in it. You can be informal about that completely.

John: A case where intermediary sluglines can be really helpful is, let’s say you have a scene that’s happening and then you have characters who are breaking off and they’re having their own little side conversation. That’s a situation where it feels like it’s a scene within a scene, and that’s useful for that. In those situations, it’ll probably make sense that you’re just sticking with those characters and then you have to get us back over to the other shot.

Craig: Sometimes I just use capital letters to do the same job. I might say, OFF IN ONE CORNER, all in caps, then dash, and then spacebar, dash, spacebar, stuff happens. Off in one corner will tell me the story.

John: Totally. All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is a good blog post article by Maggie Appleton called Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks, which is just talking about what she learned during her first pregnancy here. She’s about to have a baby. A quote, I’ll read from it. “After decades of existing in a culture that worships rational, modern scientific knowledge, preferably discovered within the last 500 years, it’s been humbling to realize how much the pre-modern animalistic parts of me know and are capable of, and how much of me feels innately, subconsciously designed to want this and feel perfectly equipped to do it.”

What I like about the post as it goes on longer is that it’s recognizing that, oh yes, I’m an animal who’s doing this thing. It’s not even in my control. It’s just like, this is just a thing that’s happening. I’m just a passenger to it. Also, that sense of, so many people will tell you there’s one natural right way to do a thing. She brings up the example of that organic banana you’re picking, bananas exist only because we made them. The banana in the wild is not a thing at all. Just to recognize that you’re living in this messy place of like, yes, it’s fully human and natural, but it’s also a cultural system that we’re in and just you got to float in that.

Craig: “No genetically modified organisms in this.” It’s all genetically modified. It’s called mixing the strains. What are they talking about? No genetically modified stuff in this tangelo.

What’s fascinating about what Maggie says is because her body is designed to do an extraordinarily complicated thing, she is now in the mix of that, discovering how much that is part of who she is and how weirdly not in conscious control we are of it.

Over on the other side of the aisle, simpler, dumber people, like say a lot of men will be horny, angry, violent, hungry, where we’ve always been in touch with that. We just called it horny because of the different way it works. Our culture, boys will be boys, indulges this notion of, they’re not really in control of all these things. We are, but there are aspects of it that are underpinned by subconscious things way beneath this level. It is interesting how a complicated person doing a very complicated process can suddenly discover this.

John: We have a new baby in our life and it’s been so great to be able to have a baby around and to be babysitting and just to have this small human. I was just watching my daughter hold a baby and feed a baby. She’s like, “Oh my God, it all kicked in.” She really felt all this —

Craig: Oh my God. Are you going to be a grandpa?

John: No, not anytime soon. But that sense of like, oh yes, it’s like a primal physical thing that happens.

Craig: That’s why we keep making more people. It is primal and people will laugh about it, but it’s real. Absolutely. It’s not for everybody. There are plenty of women that pick up a baby and go, “Get this baby away from me.” Perfectly fine. The biological clock syndrome and all that stuff, it’s just science. It’s just hormones.

John: This is me talking out of my ass, but I do wonder if some of the population decline is young people’s decision like, “I don’t want to have kids.” Maybe it’s because they haven’t been around– They’ve just not kicked in because they never got to do that. Because there are fewer babies, there are going to be fewer babies.

Craig: That may be true. Being around babies makes you like babies. Although being around babies casually makes you like babies. That’s why grandparents are like, “Give me, make me a grandparent so that I can show up for an hour and be like, oh, it’s crying now. Bye.”

John: I’m getting the grandparent ability to hang out with the kids.

Craig: You and I have parented our own babies.

John: Still, I’d recommend it.

Craig: Yes. The ride of a lifetime, the ride of a life. There ain’t nothing like it. You want to talk about like when you watch horror movies to feel scared? I’m kidding.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Now you know what fear is.

My one cool thing this week is the 2024 rules of D&D in a different aspect. I finally got to play.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I’m in another campaign where I play. It’s the first campaign I played where it was D&D 2024 rules from the start. It works great.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It works great.

John: What are some surprises, the things you didn’t anticipate? Because we talked through some of the changes.

Craig: Sure. Character creation is a little bit tricky if you are well versed in the old method because the old method honestly was a bit simpler and a bit stupider when it came to your abilities. It was all tied to are you a dwarf? Are you a gnome? Are you a human? You get plus two strength. You get plus one wisdom. That’s it. Boop. The end. Now it’s not tied to that at all. It’s tied to backgrounds. Each background gives you a chance to add one point to three different things or two to one, one to another, but the three different things are different for each background.

They’re very clever. It’s never the three that would work together in the most min-max way. It’s a little complicated in the beginning to do some math. Once you get through that, and of course you get to, it’s very customizable. The flow of the play has been greatly improved. Every single class gets some fun choices to make. For instance, I’m not a rogue, but another character is. Rogues are notoriously boring to play because even for Arcane Tricksters, mostly they hide, jump out, shoot or stab, go back into the shadows. If they get sneak attack, you roll a bunch of dice. Whoop-dee-doo.

One of the things they’ve done is for at least this version of the rogue, you can trade some of those. If you get sneak attack, you can pull some of those dice out and use them to do other things. You’re always facing those interesting choices as you’re playing. A lot of options, so many options, but they don’t seem cumbersome. It’s just smooth and it’s fun. I have not run into one thing yet where I was like, even the things that nerf stuff a little bit, like Divine Smite’s a little nerf now, but who cares? It’s better, honestly. It makes more sense. Let’s put it this way. Having done it, I wouldn’t want to not do it.

John: We’re finishing up a campaign right now, which is using old rules, but next campaign we’re already planning to use 2024.

Craig: I will encourage everybody to dive in. Honestly, you don’t have to read the whole damn book. You just learn your one thing. D&D Beyond is particularly good at teaching you by helping you build your character. Roll20 doesn’t teach you a damn thing when you build your character. It’s a mess.

John: You would recommend people, even if they’re going to play in Roll20, build your character out in D&D Beyond, then just transfer it over.

Craig: Yes, because D&D Beyond is laid out so much better. Every step of the way, you can click on things and it will tell you, this is what this means. This is what this means. This is what this means. You can go back easily and rejigger it easily. It’s so much simpler.

John: One of my previous One Cool Things was this book on sort of role-playing game history. It’s basically starting with D&D, like going up all the way through where we’re at now, but like all these games I’d never heard of. I’ve loved just buying some of these games that I’m sure we’re never going to play. As I’m watching the evolution of the systems and how things fit together and what this game took from this game, it’s just interesting to see a whole form evolve.

Craig: It really has. Hats off to those guys. They did a great job.

John: One of the games I just was reading about was Fiasco if you remember.

Craig: Oh, yes, sure.

John: A few years ago. At the Kelly Marcel episode.

Craig: That’s right. Fiasco. Poor John. [laughs] I don’t even remember what happened. I just remember that we did terrible things.

John: Yes, absolutely. It was a Coen Brothers movie.

Craig: It was a Coen Brothers movie, and you were like Brad Pitt in it.

John: Yes. [laughter] That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Guy Fee. 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 Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, you’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau.

Craig: Oh, drinkware.

John: You can 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 all our premium subscribers.

Craig: Yes, thank you.

John: You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gadgets that tell us what our bodies are doing.

Craig: Yes, wearables.

John: Wearables. Great. Thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, so for the holidays, I got myself an Oura Ring, which you can see I’m wearing right now.

Craig: I see it on you right now.

John: It’s a little black ring. I’ve worn an Apple watch for a long time, which is also keeping track of healthy things. Friends who had Oura Rings liked them, and so I got one, and it’s impressive. It feels like an Apple product that does not come from Apple. It’s smartly done.

Craig: Does it feel like it will rule them all and in the darkness bind them?

John: Maybe.

Craig: Have you thrown it in the fire and looked for the black speech of Mordor?

John: You know what? I haven’t unlocked that aspect of it yet. Maybe that’s a subscription bonusy thing.

Craig: It must be cast back into the fires from whence it came.

John: The reason I got it is I don’t wear my Apple watch to sleep. It’s actually really good at sleep tracking. Last week, it’s like, “Oh, you’re cold. You’re sick.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I am sick.” Then it actually anticipated.

Craig: Or were you sick?

John: Was I sick? It’s like a somatic force had been there.

Craig: I’ll tell you why I stopped wearing. It was very comfortable. That part I was fine with. I stopped wearing it because what would happen is I would wake up, feel perfectly refreshed, look at my phone. It was like, “Oh-

John: Oh, you slept so poorly.

Craig: -you slept five minutes.” I’m like, what? Then there are times where I’d wake up like, “Oh my God…” It was like, “Great job!” I’m like, either you’re guessing or my brain isn’t working right. Either way, I would get like, oh, I guess I didn’t sleep that much. I don’t want to know. I didn’t want to know. If I’m feeling okay, I slept enough.

John: I was talking to Julie Turner about this last night. It’s that issue of what metrics do you actually want to know and when is it actually helpful for you. Right now, it’s feeling helpful, but there’s other stuff I’ve stopped doing. I was like logging food for a while. It was easy for me to do.

Craig: It’s tedious.

John: I wasn’t getting insightful information out of it. I want to talk about your wearable because you actually have something that you need, which is tracking your glucose.

Craig: Yes, so I wear the FreeStyle Libre from Abbott Pharmaceuticals Corporation. It is a continuous glucose monitor. I don’t have to do the finger sticks. This is for people with type 1 diabetes, but also for people with type 2 diabetes. It’s basically anybody that has any blood sugar issue, it’s very helpful.

I just read that they are now starting to make a version for non-diabetic people to help with weight loss and things like that. One thing that’s amazing about it is it does connect you to what is the impact of the food you eat. Writing down what you ate and then weighing yourself the next day, it’s kind of useless. Could be water, could be poop. Who the hell knows why you weigh what you did that morning?

I’m going to eat something and look at my phone 45 minutes later and go, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that. That’s not working well for me.” It is extraordinarily valuable feedback and I check it all the time. I had a piece of birthday cake. Let’s see how I did. You’ll see it on here. There it is. See it?

John: Oh wow, right up there, yes.

Craig: I had it. This is right when I had it. Now, the good news is, also the arrow is very important.

John: It’s coming down.

Craig: Happily, it’s only in the yellow. It’s not in the red. I try and live my life in the green. Mostly I’m 90. It tells you what your range is. I live 91% in the green, which is amazing.

John: Great.

Craig: The key is that arrow. When you see a high number and the arrow’s straight up, go outside and walk. Walk real hard because there’s problem. If you’re low and the arrow’s pointing down, eat something.

John: How often is it just a surprise to you? At this point, you can just anticipate where you’re at.

Craig: It is rarely a surprise. The only time I get surprised is if I eat something that I haven’t eaten before. With this, I remember the first time I had sushi, I just was like, “It’s just sushi, it’ll be fine.”

John: It’s white rice.

Craig: Oh no, it’s not just white rice. Sushi rice has a lot of sugar in it. There’s something about rice plus the sugar in it that just sends my blood sugar skyrocketing as opposed to say, whole-grain bread. The surprises are only the first time. Day-to-day, I could have told you that was going to happen. That’s not even that bad.

John: My Oura Ring does know if I had a drink. It’s like, “Oh, it sounds like you had a drink.” It does know that you don’t sleep as well when you have a drink.

Craig: I sure don’t and I don’t need an Oura Ring to tell me that. I know I don’t. If I had some trouble sleeping and then I hit Saturday and it’s like, we’re going out to dinner. I’m just like, it would be great to have a drink with people and be social and stuff. I’m not going to because I’m in trouble right now.

John: I’m enjoying the ring for now. I don’t think I necessarily need it for all things. I don’t swim with my Apple Watch, so it’d be useful for that. We’ll see where I’m at down the road on it, but I’m enjoying it.

Craig: It’s a good thing. It just was bumming me out.

John: Don’t stick with things that bum you out.

Craig: No, I want it to be useful. Also, it’s a very after-the-fact thing like, “Oh, you’re having a drink.” Yes, I know, I drank it. “Oh, you didn’t sleep well.” Yes, I know, I’m here. I just woke up and I don’t feel good. It’s like an I told you so ring, which is like not as useful to me as, oh, you shouldn’t eat this next time kind of thing.

John: It does nudge you to go to bed, but I have plenty of other things that are not telling me to go to bed.

Craig: Like the clock.

John: Yes, like the husband.

[laughter]

Craig: The husband, exactly. Is Mike a go-to-bed-early guy?

John: No, actually, I’m generally the person who goes up the stairs first and I’m the person who closes the curtains and turns on the humidifier and puts the dog away.

Craig: Do you need to go to sleep before he goes to sleep?

John: It’s good I do, but it’s not mandatory. Sometimes in D&D nights, I’ll be second, yes.

Craig: You’ll be second.

John: I definitely have a sleep window and if I am not in bed by 11:00, I’m awake again and it’s hard for me to get to sleep.

Craig: I have some windows like that too. Melissa falls asleep so easily and she naps. Sometimes it’s 8:15 and she’s out, and I’m like, “All right, no problem.” We’ve always been on different sleep schedules.

John: Even though we have no kids in the house anymore, we wake up at 7:20 every morning to get Amy off to school and even though she’s not here anymore.

Craig: It’s just the biological clock.

John: Yes. Which is fine. It’s a good time to be up.

Craig: 7:20 is a great time. Listen, having been in production for so long, 7:20 sounds like a luxury. Wake up a lot of times at 5:10.

John: Brutal.

Craig: The worst. Especially when you wake up and it’s dark.

John: In Canada.

Craig: Then you go to bed and it’s dark and then you wake up the next day and it’s dark and you’re like, oh. Going to work in the dark is such a heartbreaker.

John: Not good. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Weekend Read on the App Store
• Oscar nominations 2025
• IVF Mixup movies: Parallel Mothers, Maybe Baby, Good Newwz, Daughter from Another Mother
• Manhunt
• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
• How to like everything more by Sasha Chapin
• Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks by Maggie Appleton
• 2024 Player’s Handbook
• 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 and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.