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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Whoa, whoa, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 577 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re sitting down the writing/directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, to discuss their film Everything Everywhere All At Once and all the stuff that led up to it. Welcome, Daniels.

Craig: Daniels!

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you guys.

John: Oh my god, hello.

Daniel Kwan: As a longtime listener-

Daniel Scheinert: Congrats, 577.

Craig: Woo!

Daniel Kwan: Wow. I know, it’s crazy. I’ve listened to every episode. That’s not true, but I’ve listened to a decent chunk, so this is very exciting. Thank you for having us.

Craig: A decent chunk is a lot, so thank you.

John: We’ll happily take it. We want to talk to you about Everything-

Craig: Everywhere.

John: … and how you got started, how it all came together. If you could stick around for our Bonus Segment, we would love to talk to you about music videos and other things you guys shoot that are not movies, because somehow, we’ve made it through 576 episodes, and we’ve never talked about music videos and commercials and all the other stuff that writer-directors get to make, which is I’m sure a crucial part of your learning process.

Craig: (singing)

Daniel Kwan: That’s exciting.

Craig: God, I love that music video so much.

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.

Craig: That is a music video that occasionally, if I’m feeling down… If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Turn Down for What. If I’m feeling a bit down, sometimes I’ll just turn it on. It’s instant mood lift.

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.

Craig: I’m sure for the two of you it’s nothing but traumatic memories, but for me it’s instant mood lift.

Daniel Kwan: You have no idea. I’ve gone to so many weddings since that video has come out. Any time I’m at a wedding, someone tells the DJ, “You have to play Turn Down for What.”

Daniel Scheinert: “He loves it.”

Daniel Kwan: Truly, it’s now a traumatic experience hearing that song. Even you jokingly saying that is making me want to leave.

Craig: Good. That’s my job on the podcast is to try and shorten the length of each episode by driving people away.

Daniel Scheinert: I like this.

John: Let’s talk about it. Let’s get into how you guys got started, because I first met you guys up on the mountain at Sundance Labs. You guys were great. You had a crazy script. I don’t think I worked with you guys directly on it, but I hear all these stories about, “It’s a farting corpse movie.” I’m like, “These guys are geniuses somehow.” That’s when I first saw your shorts, but I don’t know how you guys got started. Can you give us the recap of the origin story for you as a team?

Daniel Scheinert: Totally. We met in college, didn’t get along. We were taking an animation class. I participated too much. He thought I was an asshole. He didn’t participate enough. I thought he was wasting his money at film school.

Daniel Kwan: Classic rom-com.

Craig: I love it so far.

Daniel Scheinert: Our Harry Met Sally didn’t take as long. It didn’t take a decade. It was a year before we had a summer job as camp counselors for the New York Film Academy, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but I do recommend as a job. It’s a great job.

Craig: Get paid by them but don’t pay them is what you’re saying.

Daniel Scheinert: Exactly. Most film schools are [crosstalk 00:03:08] as far as how much they cost.

Craig: I love you.

Daniel Scheinert: They’re pretty great as far as who you might meet. We both have camp counselor vibes. We like to make art that way. We bonded and got very jealous of the kids. After work, we started making some short films together that the internet liked.

Daniel Kwan: I think the through line is that our collaboration has just been a series of accidents. We just decided to do a short film together. It was actually just like a quick test. I wanted to teach him aftereffects. He wanted to teach me how to shoot live action stuff. We put it online.

Daniel Scheinert: He had a new camera. Then it was like, “Oh, let’s try out the new camera.”

Daniel Kwan: “Let’s test this out.” We did something stupid together. Scheinert put it on his Vimeo account, and we were put on the front page of Vimeo. We were like, “Whoa, what happened? I’ve been trying to get on the front page for the past eight months, and we just did this thing randomly.” It just kept happening.

Daniel Scheinert: He was so jealous, because it was my page.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly.

Craig: Did you suspect that maybe Vimeo just puts white people’s videos on right away? Was there like a little bit of a, “Hm, hold on a second.”

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, I don’t want to-

Craig: “I’ve been working pretty hard at this, and this guy literally-“

Daniel Scheinert: You were here first.

Daniel Kwan: Vimeo is racist. That’s a whole other conversation, not the Vimeo is racist thing, but just the way our race actually has played into our careers is fascinating.

Craig: We’ll dig into it. We’ll dig into that.

Daniel Kwan: Long conversation for later. I will say that we accidentally started working together. Through this very strange Pavlovian response, we got some rewards, and we’re like, “Let’s do it again.” We just kept doing it. Next thing we know, he asked me if I wanted to help him on a music video. We’re like, “Sure, let’s try that out.” We did that. A month later, someone from London says, “Hey, I saw your music video that you did for free. What if we gave you $12,000 to make another one?”

Craig: Hello.

Daniel Kwan: We’re like, “Sure.” We quit our jobs. I was working at DreamWorks Animation at the time as a low-level designer, and Scheinert was working at a VFX company as a runner. We quit our jobs, went to New York, did a music video. Then another month later, someone was like, “Hey, you want to do it again?” It just became this slow-motion thing where our identities became entrenched and we had to figure out our process. We like to say that the algorithm gave us an arranged marriage. The internet accidentally put us together.

The relevant part of the story is even the leap from music videos to screenwriting, feature-length screenwriting, was an accident. We were finding success in music videos. We got a manager, Josh Rudnick, for anyone who cares. He’s incredible. They started sending us scripts, and none of them were speaking to us. None of them felt like the kind of thing that we would actually feel passionate enough to spend years on.

Even though neither of us considered ourselves writers at the time, we took a step back and we’re like, “Hey, we’ve been writing all these music video treatments for a few years now, dozens. Every couple months, we just write a new idea.” It was like a boot camp. We were like, “What if we just tried doing that ourselves? None of these scripts are going to be the thing that makes us want to direct a feature. Let’s try to write our own way.” We naively jumped into screenwriting, thinking that it would just be like a long music video. Oh boy, we were so wrong, but lots of lessons learned. That was our path.

Daniel Scheinert: One of the lessons that’s fun, it was through writing music videos that we discovered our writing process. We didn’t even think we were screenwriting when we would do this. We would listen to the song. We were usually attracted to a story, not just visuals. We would structure our little short films based on the verse, chorus, verse, chorus of whatever song and designing moments that pop, to try to set them up and create. We were very much like visual screenwriters at first, because there’s no dialog in a music video. We would have to break it down beat by beat and time it out and find the rhythm of the scene. That still informs how we write.

Craig: You’re pulling something out that’s actually quite profound, that I don’t think we’ve actually talked about in our four billion episodes, which is that the very simple structure of a classic pop song, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, is something that provides a fundamental and essential shape to a story, even though we don’t realize it’s happening. We are all taught, and I don’t know why it works. I guess our brains are designed around verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, but it does-

Daniel Kwan: I have a theory that I’ll tell later.

Craig: Tell me.

Daniel Kwan: Continue.

Craig: Tell me now. I need to know.

Daniel Kwan: I had a roommate in college who was a musician, very heady, philosophical guy. He was telling me about this essay about the pop song and why it’s so important to the human experience. It’s because it’s meant to imitate sex, reaching towards climax. There’s the tease. There’s the lift. There’s the comedown, the teasing again. Now you bring it to the bridge. That’s when you’re getting really close. You hit that climax. It feels like this really beautiful, cathartic experience packed into five minutes, which I think is incredible and very narrative. Very narrative. It’s got three acts. You’re right. It’s a really perfect way to think about story. Even when we were just doing music videos, people would tell us that, “Your music videos sometimes squeeze more story into four minutes than some features do.” Some people might say that’s a bad thing. For us, it was an exciting challenge.

Craig: We’re going to get into that. When we start digging into, which I’m sure will happen soon, into Everything Everywhere All At Once, I definitely want to talk about the… You guys call it maximalism? What is the word that you use?

Daniel Kwan: Maximalism, yeah.

Craig: A whole lot. There’s so much. I don’t know. John, should I short circuit things by talking about it? Should I just ask my question?

John: I think there’s actually a very nice segue though between the videos you’re doing… If you looked at Turn Down For What, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Turn Down For What, a tremendous amount happens in there visually. You’re constantly adding new layers to things. You’re literally falling down through the floor, into a new layer, a new layer, a new layer of a story. I want to talk about your short film, Interesting Ball, the 2014 film, which was an ongoing series of vignettes that all tie together and feed into one big thing. What is the process for you guys developing those ideas? You talk about [inaudible 00:09:42] song and then having to figure out what is speaking to me. That’s fine if it’s one person. If it’s both of you, do you have to give veto power over what ideas are happening? What is the process like for figuring out, “Okay, this is how we want to do this thing. This is a story. We should follow on this.”

Daniel Kwan: Before I answer that, I just also want to include Foster the People, Houdini is another one that has a very dense story, and then our Simple Song by The Shins, also way too much story in five minutes, just in case people want to see what we’re talking about. It’s too much. It was great.

Craig: It’s a great song.

Daniel Kwan: The collaboration, like I said, it’s all very accidental. It’s all very organic. A lot of times, we just constantly pitch things back and forth. The things that stick are the things that we chase, which is why me as an individual director and Scheinert as an individual director, we would be making very different things on our own.

Our Venn diagram is so specific and strange that it has to excite us both in order for us to chase it. It’s not fun to drag someone along on a journey that they’re not fully committed to. That really hones and sharpens what the story can be or the potential for what it is. Oftentimes, it is the stuff that scares us the most, because on our own, I don’t think I would be quite as brave. Together, it’s like, “Are we going to bite off way too much? Are we going to chase after something that we probably shouldn’t be chasing after as storytellers? That sounds exciting.” I think that’s something that at least within our relationship, that’s the strongest part of the Venn diagram is that’s risk-taking.

Daniel Scheinert: I think I maybe get a kick out of tricking Dan into making his craziest ideas actually happen.

Daniel Kwan: There’s that too.

Daniel Scheinert: I’ll become the cheerleader for the weird ones. There’s rarely veto power. In fact, in some ways, there’s tons of it. We’re just looking for that thing that makes us both excited. Over the years, we’ve learned to not sweat it if an idea falls flat for the other person and just be like, “Huh, okay. I trust his taste. For some reason, that idea doesn’t sing to him.” Then sometimes it’ll come up again a few months later. There’s a movie idea that I’ve been pitching to Dan for years that just recently got consumed by this other idea that we’ve been working on. I’m like, “Oh, it’s actually happening now.” It took years of throwing this dumb idea against the wall for it to finally find its home.

Daniel Kwan: It’s a slow-motion passive veto. If it gets buried by time, then that’s the veto. I think this is an acting metaphor that an acting coach once told us. The reason why you don’t want to say no is because you want to allow the bush to grow in every direction it needs to grow before you start trimming. Otherwise, you won’t know what shape it can be. I think that’s a part of our process working with actors, but also a part of our writing process is just letting things grow. If it’s meant to die, it’ll die. You never know what the bush could be until you see it in its biggest, most unruly form.

Daniel Scheinert: I love that metaphor.

Craig: There’s something beautiful about the permissiveness of your process, where you do allow each other to say and come up with ideas that maybe other people would reject out of hand. One of the things that struck me when I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, or can we abbreviate it to EEAAO, is that…

Let me back up for a second. John and I, I think, do a decent job of generally educating people about screenwriting. I think in all the time that we’ve spent looking at say the Three Page Challenges and things, I think we are good at helping people get better, but I’m not sure that we’re good at helping people be Good with a capital G. I think that there’s something innate. Obviously, there is talent that exists. Watching your movie, I felt overwhelmed in the best possible way, by quality of ideas. There were not 1 or 2 or 12 fresh ideas. Movies oftentimes give you zero fresh ideas. There were 1,000 fresh ideas.

Daniel Kwan: Wow.

Craig: By the time I got to the Everything Bagel, which I think may be the single best metaphor ever immortalized on film-

Daniel Scheinert: Oh my god.

Craig: … I was just overjoyed by the amount of original thought. I just want to dig in a little bit to ask you guys, are you aware of how original all of these thoughts are? Is it something you pursue very purposefully? Do you worry about losing connection with some of the necessary conventional things, which I think in your film you did not lose touch with? How do you manage this fire hose of brilliant thought?

Daniel Kwan: Oh my gosh, thank you. That is such an incredible compliment. Regarding the bagel metaphor, I feel like Twitter would disagree, but it’s okay.

Daniel Scheinert: [Crosstalk 00:14:40].

Craig: I quit Twitter.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly.

Craig: Fuck Twitter. They’re wrong.

Daniel Kwan: I should quit. The first thing I’ll say is, in college I remember I heard someone say something funny and snarky about success that has always stuck with me. They said if you want to be successful, you either have to be the best or the first. From the very beginning, I was like, “I will never be the best, but I can be the first.” That was definitely a very inspiring moment. That was something that me and Daniel had a proclivity for is just surprising each other. That’s why the duoship works is because half the time, that’s all we’re doing. We’re trying to surprise each other, either with a joke or even with an emotionally resonant idea. How do we surprise each other so that we can surprise our audience?

A lot of it comes out to the fact that I’m realizing now as an adult, I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD, and people with ADHD are novelty seekers. I’m the truffle pig. That’s how my brain is defaulted to think about the world and look at the world. I think a lot of people look at it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is way too much.” To me, I’m like, “Welcome to our brains. This is just how we think.”

I’ve been reading a lot about neuroanthropology, this idea of taking anthropology and going back to ancient traditions and the ways that brains worked back then to decode and understand how we can hack our minds for the modern world or whatever. One of the things they talk about is how important innovation is and novelty seeking is for the human condition.

A lot of people can be like, “Oh yeah, it’s just new for new’s sake,” as far as our movie goes. It’s whatever. It’s just random and fun. I do think that the newness and the freshness of our stories is very much intentional, because I think humans are so fickle. You learn a moral to a story or you learn this beautiful, life-changing idea, and two months later, you’ve already forgotten why you felt that way. I think we were constantly having to remind ourselves, as humans and as storytellers, these very simple, universal truths. Unless we wrap it in something new, it’s hard to penetrate our very hardened, logical, cold brains. Innovation to us is really fun and playful and inspiring but also feels important as a vehicle for story.

John: Innovation and novelty are amazing tools. They’re definitely going to help you find some new territory, but they’re not going to get a movie made. They’re not going to get a script written. How do you go from… You have all these great ideas. They’re great ideas you could’ve had in a dorm room, but you’re not actually getting them to a movie. You’re not getting them to a script stage. What is the process from these great ideas to, “Okay, now we’re agreeing on the words on the page to create this story.” What is that conversation? You have great abstract ideas, but you also have to agree on what is the scene.

Daniel Scheinert: It’s nonlinear. It’s still confusing. We’re still figuring it out. I do think that, back to music videos, we discovered our process on these short-form projects and discovered that we enjoy biting off something ambitious that we would have to keep trying to polish straight up until the final day. That the story wasn’t going to work until the effects were done was a fun way to make a story. I feel like that gave us the courage to write scripts, because we never look at our scripts as a final product at all.

Daniel Kwan: Great advice for a screenwriting podcast.

Craig: Nobody buys screenplays. It’s true.

John: It’s true.

Craig: They’re meant to be transformed.

Daniel Scheinert: They’re meant to be a blueprint to this other thing. That was a really freeing thought, I think, for both of us, because it meant we didn’t have to fight tooth and nail about exactly what the lines were, because we were like, “That’s just the line for now.” It gave us, I think, the courage to just write in a very iterative way, that wasn’t super OCD about the details. We did a ton of outlining, wrote a draft, went back and re-outlined it, drastically wrote a draft.

Daniel Kwan: We should send you guys… My whiteboard has an outline.

Craig: Please.

Daniel Kwan: It’s got 30 timelines across the thing.

Craig: Oh my god.

Daniel Kwan: It’s tracking everything. It’s a mess.

Craig: I would love that.

Daniel Kwan: It’s hilarious. I think that gets back to, process-wise, not only are we looking for innovation on a moment-to-moment and idea-to-idea level, but structurally I think that’s where we find the most inspiration, and that’s how we organize all of it.

With Swiss Army Man, structurally what we wanted to do is we wanted to ask, “What if we started this movie with just the worst idea ever, a man who is farting so much that he’s able to be used as a jet-ski but it’s cathartic and beautiful? What if we started with that image and we still found a way to justify this film’s existence?” It felt like a very interesting challenge to us. The classic line that Paul Dano used to use at all the Q and As was, “It was a film that started with a fart that made you laugh and ended with a fart that made you cry.” It’s a semiotic experiment. It’s very academic. Structurally, that was what we were going for, and everything else was trying to be thrown into that bucket.

With Everything Everywhere, we asked ourselves, “Okay, what if we could create a multiverse movie that went to too many multiverses? What if we took the hero’s journey and deconstructed it beyond anything recognizable, where you had way too many stories, way too many wants, way too many needs?”

Originally, we wanted the whole film to fully collapse. Basically, we wanted the main character and the audience to not care anymore, to actually believe in nihilism, like, “Nothing matters. This story doesn’t matter.” Then we were like, “Okay, but what if structurally we got there, but then we still found a way to pull everything back together and make it make sense?”

When we came up with that structure, we were like, “Holy shit, this is amazing, because this reflects the lived experience right now that everyone… ” Twitter and social media and the constant news cycle that we were experiencing. We started writing this in 2016. Everyone knows what was happening then. This film was very much… That structure was like a reflection of that moment.

To us, we’re like, “Okay, great, we have a lot little, fun, innovative ideas, but we have this very big, structural, big swing that we’re excited to use as a blueprint for us to drop those ideas into.” That structure has stayed the same. I don’t know how many drafts we did, but many, many, many drafts. That structure was always the goal throughout, even though entire characters got thrown away, scenes got rewritten. Everything changed except for that structure. I think that’s something that maybe some people miss in the innovation conversation when talking about this script in particular.

John: We’re looking at a script that you guys sent through. It’s not quite clear what the script is that we’re looking at, because it has side-by-side the Chinese dialog for characters, it has some ADR stuff and other things thrown in. What was the script that you first went out to actors with? What was the first script that you had that’s like, “Okay, this represents our intention of the thing to make.” How long was that script? The script we’re looking at is about 125 pages. It has the end at Page 83. Then it restarts at 86. All At Once begins 124. Was the script you were going out to actors with similar to the script we’re looking at?

Daniel Scheinert: It was relatively similar, yeah. It was an interesting thing when the movie was done and we were like, “What script do we release?” I always think it’s funny when you get these award [inaudible 00:22:30] with a screenplay, and you’re like, “I think they hired a kid to transcribe the finished film.”

Craig: Exactly. It’s usually not a kid, but that is exactly correct.

John: We know a guy who does that.

Craig: In fact, we know somebody who has done that quite a few times.

Daniel Scheinert: We didn’t want to do that. We kept in stuff that got cut out. We wanted to keep in the stuff that changed, like when we did pickup shoots and ADR and stuff. That cracked the movie open. That was part of the writing process. It’s like, “That is screenwriting we did, so I guess we’ll put that in there.” It’s a mix of things.

I was just going to summarize that first we went out to Michelle years and years ago. We met with her right before Crazy Rich Asians came out, which I think was 2018 or something. That was pretty different script. I don’t think that character had a grandpa in it.

Craig: You mean you were Hongless at that time?

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, we were Hongless. [Crosstalk 00:23:25].

Craig: I have a huge problem with that, because James Hong is the greatest actor of all time.

Daniel Kwan: Agreed.

Daniel Scheinert: I think in that one, it wasn’t a Chinese New Year’s party. It was a wedding. Joy, the daughter, was getting married to her partner and hadn’t invited her mom. To Dan’s point, it had the same structure, like about a family, it goes to too many universes, come back, they hug at the end. Then we refined it. Michelle helped us refine it. Going out to different actors… We’d sometimes talk to actors and go home and be like, “Oh, that conversation totally helped you crack why the wedding’s a bad idea,” for example.

Daniel Kwan: The one thing I’ll add is it changed a lot, it changed a lot, it changed a lot, but the most important thing we learned on Swiss Army Man was making sure that the script was good enough before we shot, because we were rewriting as we were shooting, and it was miserable. What we ended up doing with this script is… Even though it was constantly changing up until the shoot day, by the time we were shooting, it mostly remained blocked. It was pretty close to the final thing. The script that you guys got is pretty close to our shooting script. The only difference is we added some ADR and stuff like that. Otherwise, the structure of it, the order of it, what you guys are seeing is basically what our crew saw when we started shooting, which I’m very proud of. It was very important to us.

Craig: I don’t know how you could’ve… I’m thinking about your poor first AD. Literally, I was thinking about your poor first AD while we were watching the movie. I’m in Calgary, watching it in this lovely little theater, and my mind is blown, but at some point, I think it was maybe one of the first super-montages, where we see Michelle Yeoh a thousand different times in a thousand different places, where I was just like, “Is the first AD okay? Did they take care of him?” because the thought of doing that movie without a locked, I mean locked script gives me hives just thinking about it.

Daniel Kwan: I think we knew that, and then we also got lucky, and Rod, our first AD, was also very good at his job and very zen about it.

Craig: You would need to be, I would imagine.

Daniel Kwan: He was just like, “We got this, guys.” Sometimes I’m like a part-time AD when we’re shooting. I worry about that a lot. I’m teaming up with whoever it is, to just be like, “What was the schedule today? What do we have to get? What are the priorities? If we get behind, what are we going to cut out? Does it matter? If we have time, what’s the fun stuff we’re going to sneak in there?” trying to manage expectations.

Craig: How many days did you guys shoot?

Daniel Kwan: It was 8 weeks, 38 days.

Craig: Wow.

Daniel Kwan: Then we had several days of pickup shoots and stuff during COVID, but they were small.

Craig: If by several you don’t mean 14,000, I am amazed. It’s really amazing how much you did in the time you had. Question for you. You’re making this movie. From your point of view, I hope you felt that you had covered all these brilliant bases. You had written this really interesting story full of very specific… We always go on about specificity. I can’t think of more specific writers than the two of you. It’s not just hot dog fingers. There’s cheese inside of the hot dog fingers.

Daniel Scheinert: Oh, cheese.

Craig: Every single thing has been thought through. I hope it was cheese. Maybe it was something else. Was it mayonnaise?

Daniel Kwan: Mustard.

Daniel Scheinert: Mustard.

Craig: Oh, it was mustard. I thought it was cheese.

Daniel Scheinert: That says a lot about you, actually.

Daniel Kwan: It’s whatever you want it to be.

Craig: It had that American cheese color. Fair enough. Mustard. See, even specific enough that it was mustard. You also had these incredible costumes. Stephanie Hsu, who I became obsessed with after seeing your movie, is in like 400 costumes that are each brilliant. At any point, or perhaps at lots of points, did the two of you look at each other and say, “Either we are going to succeed fantastically or this is going to be pointed at and laughed at for all time?”

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you’re getting at our sweet spot.

Craig: Good.

Daniel Kwan: It’s the big swing. It’s the disastrous, ambitious… I don’t want to speak ill of other movies, but I actually love these films. It’s films like Southland Tales.

Craig: It’s funny, I was thinking of Southland Tales, because we’re big Richard Kelly fans here.

Daniel Scheinert: Totally.

Craig: I really like that movie a lot, but it’s out there. That one, people didn’t quite connect with the way that they did with your film.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly. I think I find that film so inspiring, more inspiring than most other films, because he just went for it and he put everything in it. It was trying to be political and funny. It was way too ambitious.

Craig: Weird.

Daniel Kwan: And weird. Films like that, they were our North Stars for this film. We were like, “We want to do what they did, but can we stick the landing? Can we stick the landing in a way in which our mothers might actually appreciate the film?”

Daniel Scheinert: A lot of times, we’ll pick something bonkers and something really broad as our two North Stars and be like, “Oh, can we land somewhere in the middle?” It was It’s A Wonderful Life and Southland Tales. Those are very different movies, but it’s fun to bounce between them.

Craig: Incredible. That’s a fun way to walk into a pitch at A24 and say, “Southland Tales.” They’re like, “Goodbye.” That’s awesome. The bravery is really just something else. When you say stuck the landing, it’s a wonderful phrase, because I do feel like the way I feel when I watch Olympians do really complicated things. If they don’t stick the landing, they’re probably just going to break their neck and die. I feel like you guys are so brave, braver than I am. That’s for sure. You’re just like, “Here we go. Might not live.” Amazing.

Daniel Scheinert: We also have a bag of tricks we’ve collected over the years that make it not as scary for us as it would be for other filmmakers.

Craig: Tell us about those.

Daniel Scheinert: You mentioned Interesting Ball. That was an experimental film that we made for almost no money. Part of the experiment with that one was the script was five short films that we thought would be fun to intercut. We didn’t actually know what would cut to where or how it would work. Even on the day, some of them were too ambitious, and we only shot some of the script. There was a whole sequence with these broformers where a bunch of dudes hug and turn into a big mech warrior made of dudes. That’s a hard thing to photograph. We ended up shooting only pieces of the script and being like, “I don’t know, let’s see if it works in the edit.” That one, we spent a long time in the edit. It was very hard finding this flow. It was wild to see just how much you can fix in the edit. It was part of the experiment of that short film.

We held onto that while making this. In this case, we designed how it would cut. It was in the script, so that we wouldn’t overshoot it or have to figure it out on the day. We did know in the back of our heads, we’re pretty good at montage, we’re pretty good at finding music to guide an audience through a scene that isn’t good. We’ve fixed our movies in the past a lot. We had some crutches that made a scary screenplay not as scary for us as it was for the producers.

John: It sounds like you guys have a good faith in Future Daniels. Writer Daniels have good faith in Director Daniels, and Director Daniels have good faith in Editor Daniels. You’re going to do your very best at that moment to give Future Daniels what they can use. You know that in the future you guys are going to be able to solve some of these problems and you’re not catastrophizing things on the day. If you can’t get that shot, if your shot list doesn’t get completed, it’ll work out. You’ll find a way through it.

Daniel Kwan: That’s such a wonderful way to put it. You’re collaborating with past, present, and future versions of yourselves. I think that that trust comes from the fact that we’ve gone through the process so many times in a very quick amount of time. I recently calculated. I think we’ve done about a dozen commercials, a dozen music videos, maybe close to a dozen short films, seven or eight TV episodes, and then of course we’ve done three features between the two of us.

Because we were able to do that so quickly, we really quickly understood what our strengths were within each other’s sections, the pre-production, the production, and the editing, in a way that… Even in the writing process, we always say that we want to start writing a movie that we have to grow up and mature to become the directors who can direct that movie. Right now we’re working on another film that is way too big, way too ambitious. We are not good enough directors to make that movie yet.

Craig: Yes, you are.

Daniel Kwan: That’s what you think.

Craig: Do it. Do it.

Daniel Kwan: That’s the fun of it.

Daniel Scheinert: It’s aspirational. We’re like, “Oh, I’m excited to become the guy that can do that.”

Daniel Kwan: Who can do that one day.

Craig: The reach is part of the process for you guys.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Also, the other thing that we have in our back pocket is, if something doesn’t work, we can just turn it into a joke. It’s such a cheap trick. Within the context of our films, so much stuff doesn’t work at first. We have all these different ways to repurpose it or recycle it, or worst-case scenario, we just cut it out, because like what you said, Craig, we have so many ideas that if something doesn’t work, we’ll be like, “There’s plenty of other things, so get rid of it.” The first cut is this crazy monster of a film that has all these appendages that are wonderful and beautiful but so bloated and so confusing. Our process has always been throw everything at the wall. We don’t know if it’s going to work, but at least some of them will work. Some of them will work really beautifully, and that’s enough for us for now.

Daniel Scheinert: With this movie, more than ever before, like Dan said, we really wanted to like the script and have something locked before we shoot. Some of that was being better writers, and some of it was a mental exercise. You just have to tell yourself, “Turn off the writing and focus on the filmmaking.”

Swiss Army Man, Dan and I had this argument, we’ve been having it ever since, about how much of it was not a good script and how much of it was just bad process on our part. We just shouldn’t have been rewriting it as frantically as we did. It wasn’t good. Shot listing might have been a smarter move with our time. This time, in addition to liking it, the scriptwriting process was so helpful in helping us figure out the priorities. The format of a screenplay forces you to essentialize. You can’t describe every costume, or else it becomes a 200-page script. We were constantly having to make hard decisions to get the page count down. It helped us know what really mattered. It was like, “We have all these gags, like with Raccacoonie, but they’re not essential to the story,” and so we’d cut them out.

Craig: Oh, Raccacoonie. It is essential to the story.

Daniel Scheinert: We’d remember them and be like-

Craig: Raccacoonie.

Daniel Scheinert: Stuff would rise back in.

Craig: God.

Daniel Scheinert: It’s essential to us. We knew these details were why we wanted to make the movie. The screenwriting process really was about killing darlings a lot of times. It was about like, “No, we have to focus on the family. We can’t get too enamored with what Jobu’s costumes are going to be. We’ll figure that out later. For now what matters is where’s our character at.”

Craig: Tupaki. The discipline that you guys applied to what seems like an absolute chaotic wellspring of ideas is why the movie works. You just mentioned Raccacoonie, and that brings up a question that I wanted to ask you guys. My grandparents were immigrants, and they lived with us. I grew up in a house where Raccacoonie type mistakes would happen all the time. I’m just interested in… The movie is so much about existentialism and what it means to survive and love in the face of what I think is true, which is none of this means anything, but at the same time, so much of the movie’s built around the immigrant experience, in a very honest way, a very eyes-open way. I’m curious how you came about smashing these two pretty disparate themes together in such a gorgeous little blend.

Daniel Kwan: A lot of it, I like to say that me and Scheinert are very naïve writers. We do things that we don’t have a plan for sometimes, or we don’t overthink it, because we’re drawn to it. We’re like, “We’re drawn to it. Let’s put it together. Let’s see what happens.” Oftentimes, what happens is some of the things don’t work. As you live with a script, that gets thrown out.

With the immigrant experience and the multiverse, as we were working on it, we realized, oh, these two things are actually a fascinating pairing, because both the immigrant story and the multiverse are talking about multiple worlds. Our parents and our grandparents, they live in-

Craig: Interesting.

Daniel Kwan: … different existence, very different point of views. This is what the multiverse is actually in real life. It’s just having a completely different outlook on life and that collision of those things. All this intergenerational immigrant narrative stuff is about the collision of the past, the future, and everything in between, as far as traditions and whatever goes.

Then also, a lot of the multiverse and the immigrant story is a questioning of life paths and decisions and asking yourself what if. When I talk to my mother about her past, a lot of it is like, “What if this happened? What if that happens?” The only reason why she came to America is because her family got the money together to send her there, as almost like a backup plan. They’re like, “Okay, if the family business in Taiwan doesn’t work out, you’re going to go to America. You’re going to get educated.” She was almost like the test subject. Then when the family company went under in Taiwan, her whole family moved over to Pennsylvania with her.

The whole immigrant experience is about this ever-branching list of possible life paths that you could’ve taken. It’s things like that that I love, where the pairings don’t necessarily make sense or the contradictions of what you’re trying to put together don’t make sense, but the longer you live with them, things get revealed.

I like to think of all of our scripts as these filters that we carry around with us, these fishnets. As we’re walking around through life, it’s going to catch real moments and real ideas. True emotions are going to be caught in that net. You won’t know what you catch unless you live with it. I think that’s one reason why our scripts take so long is because we want to live with them, and we want to see what we watch. People who are able to write a script in seven days I am so jealous of. Also, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to catch the things that I want to catch with it, because seven days isn’t a long enough time to live with something.

Craig: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you.

John: Daniel, what you’re describing is a phenomenon I always felt when I’ve been working on features, but especially in the times I’ve been working on TV. I was working on a show that was supposed to be a 22-episode season. The workload was so great that I felt like my life became just about grabbing things in the air and saying, “Is this part of the show? Is this part of the show?” I was the net. I would catch anything that could possibly wrangle them into the show. We heard a song, it was like, “Oh, how does it fit into this thing?”

Daniel Kwan: Totally.

John: You make a very good point, that I don’t know that that’s healthy or a great way to make great art, because your whole existence just becomes transferred into being the person who channels reality into the show. I felt like I was living for the show rather than living my actual life, which is so frightening.

Daniel Scheinert: I feel like the worse thing is the opposite, if you’re working on art that has nothing in common with your life, and so it just becomes a reflection of maybe something you read once or you’re just mimicking a movie you made sometime, but if it can intersect with your life, then ideally it can be a really good therapeutic project, to be like, “Oh, I’m going to work through some real things. This is going to come from an honest place,” as long as you’re not a workaholic, you don’t go crazy.

Craig: These guys are healthier than we are. Don’t you feel like they’re the healthiest versions of us? They seem so put together.

Daniel Scheinert: I was just thinking what inspired this movie. You bringing up Raccacoonie made me think about our producer John’s dad. The movie’s dedicated to him, Alexander Wang. He loved movies but could never remember the names of them. Originally, it was just a joke about how Mr. Wang always got movies wrong. Also, Mr. Wang passed away right after Swiss Army Man came out. I think this movie was inspired a bit by his funeral. It was also inspired by Dan’s wedding and also inspired by Dan becoming a father and also inspired by Dan going into therapy and all these huge life events. You can trace back pieces of this movie, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that a hundred percent affected the journey of the Wang family in the movie,” each of these real-life journeys we’re going on.

Craig: Amazing. I could talk to you guys all day. Let’s kidnap them.

Daniel Scheinert: Let’s do a four-hour podcast.

Craig: Everyone loves a four-hour podcast.

John: Daniel Kwan, I want to make sure to circle back to you, because early on in the conversation you said you wanted to talk about the experience of being Asian and working in the film industry. Is there anything more that you wanted to get into about that, or is the immigrant stuff more what you wanted to talk about?

Daniel Kwan: This is such a funny, unromantic way to look at our relationship, me and Daniel, and why I think we’ve been resilient through the fact… The industry’s constantly changing. The past 10 years, every few years, something has really shifted. Yet somehow we’ve managed to make a path through it all despite the fact that so many of our very talented friends and whatever have been having a harder time, if we’re being honest. The independent film landscape is just not a fun place right now. It never has been, but right now it’s definitely feeling… Especially now that even streaming is being turned over again. The whole thing is precarious.

They talk about in genetics, oftentimes when you take two people with very different backgrounds, it actually creates better genes. You become more resilient, because you’re actually knocking out things that… That’s why pugs look the way… They’re all inbred.

Craig: It’s why my children can drink milk. I can’t.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Oh my god, that’s so funny.

Daniel Scheinert: Wow.

Daniel Kwan: It’s a long-winded metaphor for the fact that when we first started, I didn’t think I was going to become a director, because I was an Asian dude. I was very quiet, very reserved. I wanted to go into animation, because I thought, “Okay, I can still create things, but I don’t need to be the leader or whatever. I can make things on my own.” Scheinert was a very confident white man who had been directing things since he was like 12. He came in, saw something in-

Daniel Scheinert: I was the kind of kid who was like, “Yeah, I could see myself going to film school. I could see myself becoming a director. Those dudes look like me.”

Craig: Wow.

Daniel Scheinert: It didn’t require much imagination.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Daniel Kwan: I also think having him interfacing with the record labels and interfacing with the bands or whatever in a way that I was not ready for, I did not have the confidence for early on, all those things made it so that we… I could sneak in on his back. It’s genetic hitchhiking a little bit, where I was able to navigate this world and learn. In some ways, our duoship and his whiteness was my training wheels. I learned so much from that process.

Then suddenly, #OscarsSoWhite happened, and the whole paradigm shifted, and everything changed. I remember distinctly the moment when we started getting scripts, and they weren’t necessarily for Scheinert, they were for me, if that makes sense. People started sending us projects that were very specifically Chinese. We were being invited to events because I was Chinese. Suddenly, the whole thing switched. Suddenly, he was on my back.

We talked very frankly about this, because again, it’s very unromantic. I feel very grateful that he found me when I did, and I was able to be ready for this moment. The fact that our relationship has been going on for 12, 13 years now, and we’ve been able to make the things that we do is in part because there’s two of us. We have very different backgrounds. Honestly, our belief systems were very different. Our upbringings were very different. Our inspirations were very different. We have very different ways of looking at the world. I think that makes us more resilient, both in just the race of it all, the race conversation of it all, but also just in the types of things that we make.

Daniel Scheinert: Hopefully, 10 years from now, as the world shifts, we still have something to offer, but who knows what that’ll be. Hopefully, we find something that we-

Craig: When the world shifts to white supremacy in the next couple years, it’ll be great.

Daniel Scheinert: Oh, sick.

Craig: You’ll be back again. Don’t worry, Scheinert. It’ll be your time in the sun soon.

Daniel Scheinert: They’ll trust what I look like, and then I’ll sneak in and I’ll rip it apart from the inside.

Craig: Not to overextend the analogy, but John and I are also very different people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different all this stuff. It is the vive la différence. It is something that makes it work. I don’t listen to podcasts, but I have noticed that a lot of them seem like they are hosted by four clones.

Daniel Kwan: Totally. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Craig: Differenceness is good.

John: I’m the Whoopi Goldberg. He’s the Joy Behar. It’s what makes The View The View.

Daniel Kwan: That’s amazing.

Craig: That’s exactly what I was thinking.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: I’m going to start with mine.

Craig: Great.

John: First, it’s a plus one on Craig’s previous recommendation of The Past Within, which is a very cool video game. Two people play separately but together in ways that… I was not expecting it to be so smart about how it works together. Recommendation on The Past Within, the Rusty Lake game. I have two movies to recommend. The first is The Territory, which is a documentary by Alex Fritz about-

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god. Sorry. We just met Alex last night at an event, at the Gotham Awards. He was incredible.

John: I bet he’s incredibly sweet.

Daniel Kwan: He is.

John: So smart.

Daniel Kwan: He might be listening right now.

Craig: I hate him.

John: [Crosstalk 00:46:36].

Craig: No, I don’t.

Daniel Kwan: Different walks of life.

John: Alex Pritz. I said Fritz. It’s Pritz. Such a smartly done movie. It’s about indigenous peoples in Brazil fighting to save their territory, their land from encroachment. So smartly done. You can imagine the bad, eat your vegetables version of this movie a thousand different ways. It managed to navigate through all that. It’s so smartly done. You can find that on Disney Plus. Check it out, The Territory. Second is My Year of Dicks, which is written and produced by our own Pamela Ribon.

Craig: Pam Ribon.

John: Directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir. So smart. It’s up for an Academy Award, Best short. People should watch it. It’s really, really cleverly done. Based on Pamela’s book about her teenage years and trying to lose her virginity. So great. If you like Pen15, you will definitely love this animated short. It uses animation in such a smart way to be able to show you what otherwise you could not see.

Daniel Kwan: Wow.

John: I really recommend My Year of Dicks.

Daniel Kwan: A great title too.

Craig: Best title ever.

Daniel Kwan: Incredible.

John: You guys will love My Year of Dicks. [Crosstalk 00:47:39].

Craig: “You guys will love My Year of Dicks.”

Daniel Scheinert: It’s a great sentence.

Craig: It is. Continuing the theme sort of, at least etymologically, my One Cool Thing is spatchcocking. If you’re not familiar with spatchcocking, to spatchcock a turkey, you remove the backbone, then you flip it over, and then you push down, and you flatten the whole turkey out. Now, removing the backbone of a turkey, as it turns out, is incredibly hard to do unless you have-

John: It’s brutal.

Craig: … special poultry shears, which I did not have. For about 30 minutes, I was just in this war with a dead animal, almost lost, but finally won. The whole point of spatchcocking is if you keep the turkey on one flat level and put it in the oven, it will cook together at the same time. It will all cook at the same temperature. It will cook way faster. A 15-pound turkey took 1 hour and 10 minutes to cook.

Daniel Kwan: Wow.

Craig: It was perfect.

Daniel Scheinert: Wow.

Craig: If you do like cooking and you are responsible for the turkey in your family, strongly recommend. If you have a butcher that you bring the turkey to, they will often just say, “Yes, yes, we will spatchcock it for you using our spatchcockers.”

Daniel Scheinert: It sounds disgusting. When you said spatchcocking-

Craig: Of course.

Daniel Scheinert: … the last thing I thought was that I was going to want to eat whatever you were about to describe.

Craig: Spatchcocking sounds like something you would need to do to jump to a different timeline. I’m hoping that somehow, at some point, you guys do at least include a little bit of spatchcocking. I feel like if somebody asks a typical filmmaker, “Hey, can you include something in your next film?” they’re like, “No,” but you guys…

Daniel Kwan: I like a challenge.

Craig: What’s one more thing?

Daniel Kwan: Exactly.

Craig: What’s one more thing? Get the spatchcocking in. That’s all I’m asking.

John: Craig, last year we did spatchcock the turkey and, like you, had the same experience. It was so hard to remove that thing.

Craig: So hard.

John: Then it ended up working out much better. This year, we decided the only way to win the game is not to play, and so we did duck confit, duck legs instead of turkey.

Daniel Kwan: Whoa.

John: So much better.

Craig: Honestly, one of my favorite things in the world is a little duck confit. It is so delicious.

Daniel Kwan: Fancy. We did something similar, except for we went really far away from the tradition. We ended up doing a Chinese hotpot. It was amazing.

Craig: That does sound pretty good.

Daniel Kwan: Also, honestly, there’s very little prep too, so you’re not spending the whole day cooking. Usually, we’re on our feet, trying to get the turkey ready with the mashed potatoes, everything. It’s literally a nightmare, but some people love it.

Craig: Everybody’s basically chasing the French in Western cooking. The French just made cooking the most arduous possible thing. You’re just like, “There’s 4,000 steps.”

Daniel Scheinert: I know.

Craig: It’s the same ambition that you guys have for making films, I have that for cooking. I’m like, “Give me the recipe that no one else will want to do.”

Daniel Kwan: That’s great.

Craig: Hotpot’s just fun.

Daniel Kwan: Literally, give me some materials. I’ll dip it in the water myself. It’s the laziest. I love it. My One Cool Thing-

John: One Cool thing, Daniel Kwan.

Daniel Kwan: There’s this podcast that I’ve been obsessed with for the past couple years called Your Undivided Attention. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with-

Craig: You know I’m not.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly.

Daniel Scheinert: Two clones.

Daniel Kwan: Two clones talking to each other.

Daniel Scheinert: Two clones named Aza and Tristan.

Daniel Kwan: It’s Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. They’re both ex-Silicon Valley people who were very much at the forefront of Twitter and Facebook and all those things. They realized their invention was slowly destroying our ability to communicate with each other, social media. One of them even is the guy who invented the infinite scroll. Now he’s trying to figure out what to… They have a very beautiful, clear-eyed vision of what’s wrong with social media and also what they think are some solutions to it. They bring in all these incredible guests who are thinking about the world in a completely different way, because there’s the social media level of animal conversation. It’s all about that limbic system, what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what will keep you engaged.

I think so much of the discourse about how to save the world exists in this plane of animal fury. I think this podcast tries to rise above it and think about things very much from a system standpoint, an incentive standpoint, instead of just from emotions. To me, it’s been really healing, and I’ve been learning so much. Go listen to Your Undivided Attention. I’ll say a couple of episodes. Audrey Tang is an amazing person you should listen to, Daniel Schmactenberger, Jessie Wheal. I won’t tell you what they’re talking about. These are people that I’m-

Daniel Scheinert: Isn’t it Jamie Wheal?

Daniel Kwan: I’m sorry. Jamie Wheal, yeah. I went a little too fast. A big fan of Jamie.

Daniel Scheinert: That way they can Google it.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly. If you’re someone who thinks about everything that’s wrong with the world and how we can fix it and you feel lost, for me it’s been a really good starting point for me to at least feel empowered in a world that does not want to empower us.

Craig: What about you, Scheinert?

John: Nice.

Daniel Scheinert: A bunch of my friends pitched in to buy my friend a stripper pole, because she’s been taking these pole dancing classes. It’s gotten her in touch with her body, her sexuality. It’s exercise. When we gave it to her, she taught me some of the moves. I had so much fun.

Craig: Really?

Daniel Scheinert: I’m on the hunt for some good heels. She’s going to teach me some more pole dancing.

Craig: Oh my word.

Daniel Scheinert: I just can’t wait to dress up in drag and do some more pole dancing with my friend. Just for anyone out there, just try cross-dressing. Try pole dancing. Just get in touch with another side of yourself. You can just go in the privacy of the garage. Also related is watching pole dancing. There’s a reason that’s the most popular thing at a strip club. There’s a way to do it respectfully, guys. You go and you pay well to watch someone who’s an incredible athlete. I’ve been going to one with some friends in L.A. and having a blast at Jumbo’s.

Craig: Can we ask where you go?

Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, Jumbo’s Clown Room.

Craig: Jumbo’s Clown Room, the best name for a strip club ever.

Daniel Scheinert: You’ve gotta tip well. If you go and you don’t tip, you’re a loser.

Craig: Yeah, don’t do the stupid $1 bills dumb thing.

Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, or just try it in your friend’s garage. Big cosign on the pole dancing.

Craig: You do look like you’re in excellent shape. If I tried pole dancing, I’m just sure that I would end up in the ER. I would end up in the ER with a wig on.

Daniel Kwan: That sounds great.

Daniel Scheinert: Step one is real easy. You just put your hand on the pole, and you just really slowly, confidently walk around the pole. That’s it. You just gotta work on your strut. Anyone can strut.

Craig: This is the problem is my confidence level. You know what? Something to discuss with my therapist. That’s awesome. Those were great One Cool Things. Those were Two Cool Things. Thank you for that. Incredible.

John: We like it.

Craig: Thank you, Daniels.

John: Daniels, thank you so much for being on the show.

Daniel Scheinert: Thank you for having us.

Craig: Oh my god, it was a joy.

Daniel Scheinert: It’s our pleasure. Thank you for helping us write our script. We listened. We took notes. It was helpful.

Daniel Kwan: We ignored half the advice, but it’s so-

Craig: Thank you.

John: That’s the crucial thing.

Craig: That’s almost as important. What to disagree with is very important.

Daniel Scheinert: Totally.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: Woo!

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re actually running a little short on outros, so we need some more outros there, folks. You can send your longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. Craig’s no longer on Twitter. I still am there @johnaugust for the time being. How do we reach you guys on the social medias? Are you guys there at all?

Daniel Kwan: Instagram’s good for me. Instagram, it’s @dunkwun, Dun Kwun.

John: Dun Kwun.

Daniel Kwan: Dun Kwun.

Craig: Dun Kwun.

Daniel Scheinert: My Instagram’s private, just for my friends. I’m sorry if you want to keep track of my life. Social media makes me super anxious.

Craig: I feel that.

Daniel Scheinert: Go check out our movie. I’m so proud of it.

John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find links to transcripts and our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on music videos and other things that people pay you to shoot. Daniels, thank you so much for a great show.

Craig: Thank you, Daniels.

Daniel Kwan: Thank you.

John: Congratulations on your film.

Daniel Scheinert: Pleasure.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Daniels, so in the bulk of the episode, you were talking about writing for music videos. Can you talk to us about what you were actually writing? As you were proposing to do a music video, what does that look like? What are you turning in as a document? I’ve seen some proposals, but I don’t think our listeners have ever encountered that as a written form. What are you writing up if you’re trying to get a music video?

Daniel Kwan: Normally, it starts off, and a record label or a commissioner or sometimes an artist will reach out direct, and they will send the brief over. They’ll say when they need to shoot it, when it needs to be done by, what the budget is, and a rough idea of what the band wants. Usually, it’s not enough money, not enough time, and the ideas are super vague. That’s where it starts off. Usually, the prompt is like, “Okay, the artists don’t want to play music, but they also don’t want to act, but they also want to be in it, but also they want it to look cool. Make cool stuff happen around them.” It’s the most frustrating thing to get sometimes.

Craig: Sounds easy.

Daniel Kwan: Also, it’s like, “We need a treatment in two days.”

Daniel Scheinert: Or sometimes it’ll be like, “Drake’s really into Hawaiian shirts lately. $100,000.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s run with that. Let’s see what we can come up with.”

Craig: That’s an interesting exercise.

Daniel Scheinert: It is.

Craig: Narrows down the paths.

Daniel Kwan: It was film school for us. You talk about how we have so many ideas in our movies. It’s because we were forced by this industry to pump out fully formed ideas within a day or two. They’d be like, “We need a treatment in two days. Come up with a whole idea. Pitch us… ” Usually, they want a treatment, which has reference images, execution ideas, and a rough idea of what the concept is going to do.

Daniel Scheinert: Can I talk about the Maroon 5 renaissance?

Craig: Yeah.

Daniel Kwan: Great. Do it. Do it.

Daniel Scheinert: Right when we were starting out in music videos, our first thing we pitched for money got green-lit, turned in, and turned out well, which is a miracle. It turns out we thought, “Wow, music videos are easy.” Then we proceed to get rejected for eight or nine months straight. To his credit, Paul Hunter, who runs the company that had signed us, was like, “Hey, Maroon 5 wants me to do a music video. Do you guys want to help me come up with an idea? You could maybe ghost direct some of it and get paid, because I know you guys are getting rejected all the time.”

Craig: Starving, yeah.

Daniel Kwan: Exactly.

Daniel Scheinert: Then we listened to the song. It was bad. We’d try to come up with ideas. We could not stop coming up with joke ideas that were just making fun of Adam Levine.

Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god.

Daniel Scheinert: We would laugh our asses off at these things, being like, “There’s no way we could do that, but it sure is funny.” We were really struggling to come up with something that we actually thought would be good. A lot of those ideas that we did not pitch to them, that started as just us making fun of the band and the song, became ideas that stuck in the back of our brains, that we loved, that we actually ended up making. Over the next 10 years, we’d be like, “Oh my god, we’re doing one of the Maroon 5 videos again,” because there was one where their music’s so good it gets women pregnant, and we ended up making that.

Daniel Kwan: For Chromeo.

Daniel Scheinert: There was one where their music’s so good the floor falls apart and they fall down into a bar mitzvah, and then the floor falls apart, and they fall down into a rave. That turned into Turn Down For what.

Craig: I love that that’s the weird [inaudible 01:00:04] wellspring of all Daniels work is just that three-week period where you guys were just destroying Maroon 5 in your minds.

Daniel Scheinert: You never know if this is productive or not. We were laughing. Our favorite one that I’ll pitch, that way the people who came for this 20 minutes feel really rewarded-

Craig: Oh, good.

Daniel Scheinert: We sort of made this. The idea was that there was a huge crowd. They’re all chanting, “Maroon 5. Maroon 5.” Then a stagehand comes out and says, “Hey guys, I’m so sorry, this show’s canceled. There’s been an accident. I’m so sorry. They’re dead. Their bus went off the road.” The fans are starting to cry. The stagehand’s like, “I’m sorry, what? Oh, wait. Oh, I’m sorry, apparently I’m wrong. Here they are, Maroon 1!” Then smoke starts to pour out. This weird Weta [ph] puppet comes out in smoke, and it’s all five of them smushed into one weird, mangled creature. Then out of a crevice comes Adam Levine’s face. Then Maroon 1 becomes more famous than Maroon 5 ever was. They rocket off to superstardom and stuff.

Craig: They should’ve done that.

Daniel Kwan: The bridge is they are so successful that every other band wants to recreate their magic.

Craig: Oh my god.

Daniel Kwan: Metallica gets in a car crash.

Daniel Scheinert: They start wrecking their tour buses.

Daniel Kwan: Sum 41 gets in a car crash. Everyone’s just trying to… Whatever. They’re all dying.

Craig: Oh my god.

Daniel Kwan: Also, I think it ends with Adam Levine opening up his shirt, and he has six nipples, and he starts breastfeeding [inaudible 01:01:41].

Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different idea.

Daniel Kwan: That was a different idea.

Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different one.

Daniel Kwan: We still haven’t made that video yet.

Daniel Scheinert: One of our Foster the People videos started with the band dying and then the record label puppets their corpses.

Craig: See, it’s all there.

Daniel Scheinert: Then that led to Swiss Army Man.

Craig: See, everything comes… If people aren’t paying the $5 a month to Scriptnotes to hear this stuff, they really should start. That alone was worth $80 as far as I’m concerned. That was awesome.

Daniel Scheinert: I feel like we never actually answered your question though about what does a treatment look like.

John: What is the document? Is it a pdf you’re setting up that has all the images embedded in it, or is it a deck? What are you sending over these days?

Daniel Scheinert: A lot of directors do different things. The process we discovered was that we would collect a lot of images. Kwan was very graphic design savvy and could mock up some really lovely pdf treatments that would set the tone. For the first few years, each page would have five or six photos, and then I would end up usually writing a persuasive essay, because Kwan was a little too long-winded. The longer you talk about a music video, the harder it gets to wrap your head around it. I would write my attempt at a concise essay, and he would collect images and put it into a thing. We would always get bored try to reinvent it after a while and try to stay interested. Sometimes we resorted to gift treatments, because we found out collecting gifts was really fun and helpful. We started making much longer documents that were 10 or 12 pages and just putting 1 or 2 photos on there, because that became a nice way to break up the different ideas.

We have one friend who shoots videos of himself and edits in clips and photos because he just finds that that’s fun for him. Also, he’s a really charming British man, and so the record label will be like, “Oh, he’s so cute.” It helps him book the music video.

It’s pretty cool that as a writer, we didn’t have to follow Final Draft screenplay format. We started off with this very experimental writing process of just write whatever document you think will get you hired. Just try to be persuasive, whatever tools you have at your disposal.

Craig: It worked.

Daniel Scheinert: The bummer is you do a lot of these that just get rejected. Then you spend a lot of time writing. We never thought of it as screenwriting, but we’re basically writing spec scripts.

Craig: Yeah, and you’re practicing.

Daniel Scheinert: Constantly.

John: You’re a writer going out for an open writing assignment. It’s the same idea. They want to make this thing. Nineteen people are going in and pitching their take on this.

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, except for we’d be doing three a week. Literally, we’d get three different projects, and we’d have to pump them out.

Craig: That’s amazing. That you could do that at all is just I think really a testament to the fertility of your minds. You guys really are special. It was such a special experience watching your film. It’s been special watching your music videos. I really am just in awe of… There’s the whole quality and quantity thing. Typically, as quantity goes up, quality goes down, and somehow, you guys manage to keep those lines in lockstep. It’s amazing.

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.

Craig: There’s more and more of it, and it’s still good. That is just so special and rare.

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.

Craig: I tip the hat that I am not wearing to you.

Daniel Scheinert: Thank you. Sometimes we feel like we use quantity as a crutch, where we’re like, “If there’s enough ideas in there, they’ll like a few of them.”

Craig: If they’re good… When it’s suddenly like, “Oh my god, there comes [inaudible 01:05:26]. Oh my god, there comes this. Oh my god, there goes that.” It’s everything, everywhere, all at once!

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you did it.

Daniel Scheinert: He went for it.

Craig: It’s really good.

John: You did it. Oh my god.

Craig: I did it, and it just works. I’m really impressed.

Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.

Craig: I hate everybody. I gotta be honest with you. I just really hate everybody.

Daniel Kwan: Oh, wow.

Craig: I love John.

Daniel Scheinert: Me too. Let’s do a podcast about that.

Craig: By the way, if you want to do a podcast about hating people, girl, I’m there. We’re gonna do it, and it’s gonna be awesome. We’re gonna be canceled literally-

Daniel Kwan: Don’t tempt Scheinert.

Craig: We will be canceled in the middle of the first episode. We won’t even make it to the end of the first episode.

Daniel Scheinert: Let’s go back and forth. Who do you hate? Who do I hate?

Daniel Kwan: This is the bonus bonus.

Craig: Bonus bonus bonus.

Daniel Scheinert: Bonus bonus.

Craig: Our first episode is 14 hours long. Amazing.

John: Gentlemen, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you guys.

Daniel Scheinert: Thank you.

John: Pleasure talking with you guys.

Craig: [Crosstalk 01:06:19].

Daniel Kwan: Really exciting to be here.

Links:

• Daniels on Twitter, Dan Kwan on IG
• Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon, Houdini by Foster the People, and The Simple Song by the Shins music videos
• Interesting Ball short film
• Everything, Everywhere All at Once
• The Territory
• Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks, directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir
• Spatchcocking
• Jumbo’s Clown Room
• Your Undivided Attention podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Jordan (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/who-can-you-trust).

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

**Craig Mazin:** M-Y N-A-M-E I-S C-R-A-I-G M-A-Z-I-N.

**John:** Impressive.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** This is Episode 582 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Who Can You Trust, an expert? What is expertise? Is their success an indicator that they know what they’re talking about or were they just lucky? We’ll dig into that as it applies to writing advice and general life stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions, Craig, because we’ve got a lot of those. So many questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, it’s a disaster. We’ll talk about the various natural disasters that could befall Los Angeles and how to think about them.

**Craig:** What? Easier to talk about the ones that won’t befall Los Angeles.

**John:** I could say we shouldn’t have cyclones, but sometimes we could have cyclones.

**Craig:** At this point.

**John:** Anything could happen.

**Craig:** Anything.

**John:** Anything could happen. One thing that will happen this week is your show will come out, Craig, finally.

**Craig:** It’s coming out, yeah, because this show… Yep, that’s right, technically the first day of the following week. It’s Sunday night, January 15th. Finally. By the time this episode comes out, I think I will know my fate as far as reviewers and all that goes. Then shortly after that we’ll see if people show up and watch it. I hope they do. I think it’s a really good show.

**John:** I’m excited to watch it. I’ve seen not a frame of it, other than the little teaser things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I haven’t seen anything more. I’m coming in as just a viewer. I’m excited to watch it and to see it. I deliberately did not play the games, because I downloaded them, and I realized, you know what, I’m going to watch Craig’s show really soon. I’d just rather watch Craig’s show.

**Craig:** You know what? It’ll be a very interesting thing for you, if you do watch the show, to then go back and play the game, because Naughty Dog, the company that makes the games, released a remastered version of the first game, The Last of Us, for the PlayStation 5, and so I played it. I played it after we had produced the show. It was really weird, because it was like, “Oh yeah,” but sometimes, “Oh,” and sometimes, “Oh.”

**John:** I forgot about that.

**Craig:** Sometimes just, “Oh, we went a very different way there.” Then sometimes you’re like, “Wow, that is eerie. It’s like I’m back in the show, but I’m not in the show.” It’ll be interesting to see what you think about the process of adaptation, because there was quite a bit of adapting going on.

**John:** I’m sure there was. I’ve talked before on the podcast about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wrote the whole script, and we started shooting the movie. It wasn’t until we started shooting the movie that I saw for the very first time Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the original version of it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Just to see, wow, the same source material, and we made some very different choices along the way.

**Craig:** I can’t believe you hadn’t seen that one. (singing)

**John:** At some point, I’m going to discover that I was locked in a room for a period of my childhood, because there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I should’ve seen, that everybody saw. It’s fine. H.R. Pufnstuf? I have no idea what H.R. Pufnstuf was.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** People talk about it. No idea.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We’ll get into that. There are a couple of things I did want to mention.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** In regard to the show, I just saw a few things circling around on the internet, and I figured, hey, I’ve got a podcast.

**John:** You can just talk about it.

**Craig:** I can just talk about them. The first thing was, Neil Druckmann and I were featured in an article in the New Yorker. There was a quote I had that some people have aggressively taken out of context.

**John:** Bad faith?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was a little strange. I was talking about how in a video game when you’re facing certain enemies, NPCs essentially, you’re facing NPCs and you die, and you get sent back to the beginning of the encounter. Those NPCs are back, and you now know a little bit more about them. You know that they’re basically moving in a certain pattern. If you struggle with a section, at some point the NPCs really just become obstacles that you’ve got to figure out your way around, which is part of the fun of gaming.

I said watching those NPCs – I meant to say NPCs, I just didn’t say NPCs – but watching those people die shouldn’t have the same impact as watching people die, say in a television show, except pixels is how I referred to the NPCs. It’s very clear that that’s what I’m talking about, but then they left out the NPC part and just said, “Oh, pixels.” In case anybody’s wondering, watching characters, actual characters in The Last of Us, the real characters that we’re invested in, die is incredibly moving. That’s why I wanted to make a show of it. That’s one thing.

The second thing is there is a quote that I saw circulating around being attributed to me where allegedly I say something like, I don’t know, “Video games, you put a quarter in and then you smash people on the head.” Anyway, I never said-

**John:** Oh, wow. Wow.

**Craig:** They just invented a quote and then said I said it. Internet!

**John:** Craig, how dare you? How dare you say that?

**Craig:** Talk about literally manufactured outrage.

**John:** Now in the transcript for Scriptnotes, people can selectively pull that quote out of the Scriptnotes transcript.

**Craig:** Exactly. They can just pull individual words.

**John:** Anything’s possible.

**Craig:** Anything is possible.

**John:** Hey Craig, is there a companion podcast for The Last of Us?

**Craig:** There is. The companion podcast, it’s with me and Neil, and it is hosted by Troy Baker, who has a podcast of his own, but he is most notably the voice of Joel in the video game, the character that Pedro Pascal plays.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** John, you play video games. Troy Baker is the voice of almost every male lead in every video game. It’s astonishing.

**John:** It’s either him or it’s Nolan North.

**Craig:** Both of them, they work together in The Last of Us, and they work together on Uncharted.

**John:** Nice. We have a video game question later on in the podcast.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** That’s a teaser for that. Only other bit of news is we’ve had the promo code for ONION for people who wanted to sign up for the yearlong subscription to Scriptnotes Premium. Thank you to everyone who did that. A ton of people did that, which was fantastic and great.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** One thing we didn’t anticipate is that some people had problems switching their monthly over to an annual subscription, so they’d email Megana at ask@johnaugust.com, which you could do, but she would just then send you on to help@supportingcast.fm. If you’re trying to swap over from monthly to annual, good job. You’re saving yourself some money. If you have problems with that, go to help@supportingcast.fm, and they can get that all switched over for you.

**Craig:** I wish you would say the promo code one more time.

**John:** The promo code is ONION.

**Craig:** ONION.

**John:** ONION.

**Craig:** ONION. Such a weird word.

**John:** Such a strange, strange word.

**Craig:** Onion.

**John:** Onion.

**Craig:** Onion.

**John:** Craig, you had some time off. You had a vacation. Did you enjoy your vacation?

**Craig:** I did. I did enjoy my vacation. Went with the family to London, and then the wife and kids peeled off to go visit a friend of hers in Edinburgh. I took that opportunity to zip over to Ireland to visit our script supervisor and his husband. I think you’ll enjoy this, John. No matter where I go, in this case it was Ireland, escape room, and this time, escape room on a boat. It was quite good.

**John:** Oh, I like that.

**Craig:** It was quite good.

**John:** Very nice. I took a vacation too. I was up in Wyoming with my family. I was texting with Aline, and she said, “Every writer I know is not taking vacation. We don’t talk about how writers don’t get vacations.” I felt guilty, because I was just totally on vacation. I wasn’t doing any work. It sounds like you weren’t working.

**Craig:** I wish that were the case. I did have to do a number of music approvals and visual effects approvals. The business does shut down. We had built in this time where we knew we actually had to get stuff done aggressively, quickly, because once we hit the holidays, it was going to be rough.

**John:** Starting December 6th, the town does shut down. It’s hard to get answers on anything.

**Craig:** In terms of the effects vendors, they’ll work with you all the way up to Christmas Eve, and then it’s like, “Hey, we need a little bit of time off here. We’re people too.”

**John:** Let’s jump ahead to this question from Alex, which is about video games.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Megana, could you help us out?

**Megana Rao:** Alex asks, “I had some time off recently and decided to play the new God of War and absolutely loved it. While it was a blast to play, I was really impressed by the writing, and not just the cut scenes and big story moments, but the little bits of dialog between characters as you ride your sled or sit in your canoe. This got me thinking, how does someone become a writer for a video game? Do they hire film and TV writers? Are there writers that specialize in writing for games, or do they just get one of their level designers who took a creative writing class in college? I know you guys aren’t designated video game writers, but I thought your shared interest in games and Craig’s work in adapting video games to TV and film might give the Scriptnotes team a unique perspective on the matter.”

**John:** Alex, there are definitely video game writers. It’s a real job.

**Craig:** Oh yes, of course.

**John:** Neil would be one of them.

**Craig:** Neil Druckmann for sure. There are writers for video games. Of course there are writers for video games. We’ve been talking about it actually for a long time, going all the way to the Writers Guild trying to maybe organize some companies. The primary creative director of God of War is a guy named Cory Barlog. I presume there are quite a few writers on the game. There are a number of writers on all games. For The Last of Us 2, the writers were Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross. Now, how do you become a writer for a video game? I gotta be honest. I don’t know.

**John:** That’s a question I think we can try to answer. I think it should be our goal for 2023 for Alex is we’re going to try to get some video game writers on to talk about the job that they’re doing and how they’re getting started writing in video games.

**Craig:** Listen, we can crush that goal.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** If that’s our goal for 2023, we can just go ahead and go dark for February through the end of the year, because we’re going to crush that.

**John:** What I’m mostly curious about on Alex’s behalf is what the form is for writing in video games, because I have a friend who’s just moved. He’s an established screenwriter who just now started working full-time for a video game company. He’s learning the differences between writing standard, normal scripts and writing for this, in which you have decision trees and there’s bits of dialog that could come or could not come, and there’s whole story things.

You’re trying to tell a story that both feels like you as a player are in charge of it, and yet there’s a story also happening. Jordan Mechner, who’s a friend and also a video game designer and writer, often talks about that challenge. It’s like, how do you make it feel like the player’s really driving the story rather than spectating as the story’s happening around them.

**Craig:** There’s certainly a creative concept there that has to be figured out. Interestingly, I know from Neil at least that the script for The Last of Us and the script for The Last of Us 2 I think was primarily in Final Draft. It wasn’t like there was a specialized form. I talked to him about not using that anymore and switching. Depending on the kind of game you’re writing… Very different kinds of games require very different sorts of writers.

**John:** If you’re playing a Skyrim, that open-world game isn’t going to have one script for the whole thing, because there’s not just one linear flow through everything. Each of those characters has to have stuff written for them to be able to do and some development. That’s very different than the things we’re doing, and yet they’re similar skills. Let’s get some people on who can talk to us about that.

**Craig:** Again, if that’s our goal, I’m telling you…

**John:** I think that we’re setting low goals for this year and just knocking them out.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Just finish off by Jan. 20. I like it.

**John:** I see another follow-up bit here, a writer who is new to the plot twist game. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** This writer wrote in and said, “In Episode 574, a listener asked about pitching a script that contains a big twist, do you give away the twist in the pitch or keep the mystery? You suggested not giving away the twist. My question is, if you’re not going to give away the twist, what exactly do you say in the pitch?”

**John:** If you’re pitching The Sixth Sense, Craig, do you give away the twist? Would you say it in a log line? What would you say in the room?

**Craig:** I would absolutely give away the twist in a pitch. Did I say we shouldn’t do that?

**John:** According to Megana, we said you should give away the twist.

**Craig:** I think you should give away the twist. I don’t know how to pitch something and be like, “Then you get to the end and that’s it. Please validate my parking.” You gotta give it away.

**John:** What form of the pitch do you give it away in? In the three-sentence version, you might not give it away.

**Craig:** Definitely not.

**John:** If you’re really giving the person the whole experience of watching the movie, then yes, you do need to give away the twist. A sit-down pitch would have that in there, but the very short log line-y pitch would probably not have that twist in there.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m talking about a standard Hollywood style pitch, which is very different than the sort of pitching that people do in contests and conferences, where you sit in a room, you have an appointment, the meeting is set for an hour, there’s 5 or 10 minutes of chitchat, and then you dive in. In about 20 minutes or so, you’ve spelled out the whole movie. Then there’s some questions and some discussion, and you go home.

**John:** In the old days, you would drive across town, you’d park in a lot, you’d find your way to the building and do this. Now you log into the Zoom. The executive’s about two minutes late, so you’re talking to the junior executive for a little bit. Then you can re-pitch. Sometimes you have a deck. It’s nice. I love it. Craig, you proposed the topic for this week, which doesn’t always happen, so I was really excited.

**Craig:** That’s so nice of you to phrase it that way. How about we phrase it accurately, which almost never happens?

**John:** Talk to us about this topic of who should you trust in expertise. What gets you thinking about this?

**Craig:** There was a tweet that had been circulating around. Somebody screenshotted it and sent it to me. Without going into who it was, it was somebody that charges money as a screenwriting consultant, and you know how I feel about that. This is what that person said. Quote, “We suffer too much from success bias in this industry, especially with writers. Those who have great success must know what they’re talking about and be heeded, and therefore those without major successes must be wrong, but I cannot effing tell you how often this isn’t the case.”

This got me thinking. On the one hand, how dare you? On the other hand, fair point that just because you have had success, it doesn’t guarantee that you know what you’re talking about, because you and I both know very successful writers that we wouldn’t trust talking about anything. Success is not a guarantee. However, I think it’s also fair to say that the implied converse is not true either, which is failure doesn’t make you any more likely to be right either. Probably quite a bit less likely.

I thought it’d be an interesting conversation to have, since you and I have put ourselves out there as experts who ought to be trusted. What do we think makes somebody trustworthy? Who should we be looking to for authority, and who should we be suspicious of as we make our way in the world?

**John:** I think these are all great topics. Going back to the tweet, I’m struck by “success bias,” which is probably another way of saying survivorship bias. Basically, the people who have made it through to the end made it through to the end, so therefore they can feel like, oh, what I did must be the reason why I was successful, when it could’ve just been pure dumb luck that got them there. There’s not necessarily just a reason. Maybe it wasn’t their actual skills that got them there. It could’ve been some other factor. Fair point. You could see that in all sorts of different industries.

Let’s talk about whether you and I are experts and how you can determine whether you and I are experts. I guess we have credits. We’ve done this for a time. We have a body of work. We’ve not just had one success. We’ve had a string of successes and a string of failures. We’ve actually seen both sides of these, of the coins.

**Craig:** True, true.

**John:** We know how it all works. That feels like an important marker. I’m also questioning an expert on screenwriting or an expert on the craft of screenwriting, an expert on the business of screenwriting. I feel I’m much more qualified to talk about what it’s like to be a screenwriter and not necessarily, these are exactly the ways you should be putting your words together on the page. I feel like there’s a range of opinions on that. In terms of how to actually do the work of screenwriting, my experience is partly what makes me an expert there.

**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say that if somebody has had little to no success in our business, that it is not likely that they are going to be a very valuable expert when it comes to advice seeking, because advice is practical. It’s, I don’t know, hard to trust somebody giving you practical advice if they themselves do not appear to be succeeding, because isn’t that what the advice is for?

When we’re asking for practical advice, we’re saying, “Hey, what do you think about this situation? I’d like to succeed in the following: how to make a better contract for myself, how to improve my chance of selling this, how to improve my chance of getting casting, how to navigate successfully between a studio and a director and an actor.”

We’re talking about success. If someone hasn’t had any, I’m not really sure why they would feel entitled to or even encouraged to act like an expert when it came to advice giving, although that certainly doesn’t stop people. I do think that your success and my success is not necessarily directly connected to our theoretical success as advice givers.

**John:** Agreed. I think you and I could’ve had the same kinds of careers and actually give some really terrible advice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You and I both know writers who have good track records. You could look. You can point to what they’ve done. It’s like, “Oh, that should be great.” You’ve actually talked to them. Sometimes we’re on panels with them at various conferences and like, oh god, don’t do what he says, because they’re only relying on what their experience has taught them, and they may have a perspective that is solely shaped by their experiences.

I think one of the things that’s good about us and that’s really good about this podcast is we’re continuously bringing in other people to talk about what their experiences have been and trying to learn things, rather than pining just strictly based on what we’ve done before. In 2023, we’re going to have some video game writers on to talk about their job rather than just speculate on what their jobs are.

**Craig:** There’s a little bit of humility required, and that I suppose also implies a certain amount of good faith, that the reason you and I are giving people advice is because we legitimately want to help them. We are not giving them advice to feel really powerful or important about ourselves.

There are people who give advice as a performative act of self-reassurance. “I am giving you this advice. Therefore I’m awesome.” You gotta keep your antennae up for those people. You don’t take advice from people who are puffing themselves up. This is a bad idea.

I still think that there was a bit of a slippery false dichotomy here from the original tweeter, because while it is true that those who have had great success don’t necessarily know how to give advice, I think that has nothing to do with the odds of getting good advice from people who simply have had no success at all.

**John:** I wonder if we can distinguish at all between advice, which is what we give on this podcast, versus teaching or leading. There are people who are good English teachers who are not good writers. I’ve definitely learned from that. Definitely there are incredibly successful football coaches who are not good football players and never were good football players. There can be a difference between the person who is leading a discussion on something or organizing a group to do something. That means it’s different from being the expert on actually doing the thing.

**Craig:** That is true. I think that when it comes to critical analysis, you don’t need to be a writer to understand how to analyze writing. It’s a different discipline. One is creating and the other is taking apart, examining, and critiquing. English teachers, and I’m talking about once we get past grammar and so forth, pretty much exclusively are teaching you how to analyze and think about writing.

Now, there are creative writing classes. I know for instance at Princeton, they have a pretty amazing creative writing program. When I was there, James McPhee was teaching a class, and Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. You got a pretty good shot there, because they’re good. They know how to write. They have had tremendous success as writers, and so at least there’s a decent chance.

It’s a little bit tougher when… For writing, you can’t define success as just brilliant writing, because there’s a lot of brilliant writing that isn’t commercially successful. If you’re trying to do what you and I do, which is write movies and television for a mainstream audience-

**John:** Things that get made.

**Craig:** Things that get made. It’s really hard for me to see how people who have had no experience with that whatsoever are going to be able to help you get that. I think they might help you with scene work. They might help you with this or that. I think that there is something special about people who do it and have proven that they can do it. They must know something in certain cases. Now, whether they’re able to give that advice out reliably, that’s a matter of character.

**John:** Let’s think about why people might listen to somebody who doesn’t have credits, who doesn’t have any track record of real success. I think a lot of times it’s that they project a confidence. It may be an unwarranted confidence. Particularly newer writers, aspiring screenwriters, they want answers. They want a clear guide to, “This is how it works. You should definitely not use we sees. You should definitely do this, not do that.”

I think you and I both have strong opinions on certain things and clear lines, but we also recognize that there’s many ways to do things and that sometimes you can’t know what the right answer is. The right answer is what’s right for you in that scene, in that script, in that project you’re working on.

**Craig:** Which I think is a kind of humility. Do you watch Barry?

**John:** I did. I’ve watched all of it, Barry. It’s great.

**Craig:** It’s a wonderful show on HBO. Henry Winkler plays an acting teacher. The whole joke is that he’s not a good actor at all. In fact, he can’t get any acting jobs, and he behaves poorly. He’s neither good nor a reliable and professional actor, but he behaves with his students as if he is the fount of all wisdom, and he is not. That’s part of the joke.

There are a lot of people who, in lieu of getting where they think they ought to be or getting where they want to be, simulate the kind of respect and admiration and success they were looking for in this area by cultivating it as an expert, a self-anointed expert. A lot of people fall for it.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who can’t really help. Just for everybody, I’ve been giving this bit of expert advice for years. Take everything with a grain of salt, and really just be a critical thinker. If anybody puts themself forth as the fount of wisdom or behaves as if they know things, when there doesn’t appear to be much justification for that, maybe you should think twice or thrice about taking that advice. Oh, that was a beautiful rhyme.

**John:** I really liked the “twice or thrice.”

**Craig:** “Taking that advice.”

**John:** I’m trying to apply this advice to my own life and trying to think about where am I looking for experts, where I don’t necessarily know if I’m seeking the most qualified person. I can’t immediately link to mine, but I’m sure there have been cases where I’ll reach the person who is accessible, the person who I can easily find on Twitter, and assume they’re an expert on a topic because I just don’t know it, like economics or macroeconomics. I just don’t know, and so I will tend to believe a person who can passionately defend their point of view, even if I don’t have the broad experience of even being able to judge whether they are an expert or not.

**Craig:** There’s a little danger there, because passion is not necessarily an indication of correctness. It’s just conviction. So many other careers and industries have credentials. Credentials themselves can be extraordinarily misleading. There are plenty of people with a PhD after their names who don’t deserve it or aren’t any good at anything.

If you are looking for an opinion on health, exercise, economics, politics, clothing, anything, in a lot of industries you will find some sort of credential that might help. If somebody is a professor of economics at Wharton, they probably know a bunch. At least you wouldn’t be an idiot for thinking they did. If somebody random on Twitter is going on about, “Here’s an incredible thread you need to hear and need to read, because this will make everything make sense. 1/323,” then you’re like, “Oh god, maybe not.”

**John:** It’s tough. I do find myself gravitating towards folks who have not only had a consistent opinion for a long period of time but clearly are curious, and they’re actually still trying to explore and not even defend their opinions but challenge their own opinions. I hope that we’ve done some of that on this podcast, because I think if you go back 10 years, we’ve been consistent, but we’ve also grown and changed on some opinions.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** You had written no television when we started this podcast.

**Craig:** That’s right. How many times did I say that the Academy would never let me in?

**John:** Hey, you were wrong. Craig was wrong.

**Craig:** I was just flat out wrong. We have changed our minds plenty of times. I’ve changed yours, and you’ve changed mine. We also, I think, do a pretty good job of trying to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and interrogate our own internal biases and the natural slants that we may have in our own mind that would perhaps lead us a bit astray. We’re not perfect in that regard, but we’re trying. I’ll just come back to that word again. It’s humility. You have to be somewhat humble when you give advice.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing I will say I’ve noticed is expertise fades after a time. We both can think of screenwriters who really were genuinely top of the game. You talked to them, and it’s like, “Oh, you don’t know how things are going right now,” and they’ve lost the thread. One of the things that I think has been good about us doing this podcast and continually talking to the new folks who are doing this job is we’re staying a little more current on where things really are at.

**Craig:** We do try, and we are helped by all the people who come on the show, but it’s also just as important for us to say, “I don’t know.” People ask me a lot about writing rooms, and I’m always very quick to say, “I actually don’t know.”

**John:** No experience.

**Craig:** I just don’t know. It’s not the way I do it, so I’m not going to give you an opinion. People ask me about mini rooms and span and all the rest of it. I’m like, “I’ve gotta put my hand up. Not an expert about that.”

**John:** In the episodes you missed this last year, I asked a lot of stuff about rooms, just because I was so fascinated the different ways people were running their rooms. There’s not one right answer. There’s a bunch of different ways that work. The consistent thread I got from showrunners was you need to pick the way that it’s going to help you create the show you need to create.

**Craig:** Simple as that. It’s good advice.

**John:** I see on the Workflowy here that Megana Has a Question, which is my favorite segment.

**John and Craig:** Megana Has a Question.

**John:** What’s your question, Megana?

**Megana:** My question is, how do you guys unwind or go to sleep after a good writing session or when you have that sort of rare moment of creative inspiration?

**Craig:** I love the amount of mistaken premises in this question. There’s like a hundred mistaken… For instance, the idea that I ever go, “That was a good writing session.” That never happens.

**Megana:** To give you some context, this past week, I feel like I finally figured out something, and the experience and how exhilarating it was so exciting to me, I could not get to sleep for hours.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** I imagine that you deal with that a lot.

**Craig:** No. Here’s what I deal with. I deal with misery, and then when I have that moment of inspiration and clarity, it just gets me back to where everyone else’s normal is.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** There is no high.

**Megana:** Do we have a wah-wah sound effect?

**Craig:** We can. Ready? Wah-wah.

**John:** That was very well done.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You’re your own sad trombone.

**Craig:** I’m a human sad trombone.

**John:** Megana, I totally recognize what you’re going through, so ignore Craig.

**Craig:** You’re healthy.

**John:** Even this last week, while I was in Wyoming, I had that moment of creative inspiration on this project that’s been maybe 15 years percolating in the back of the brain. I was like, “Oh, that’s how I do it.” It’s 3 in the morning. I wake up, and I know how to do this thing. It’s tough. I was up for a long time.

What’s helpful for me is, I think I just open the notes app on my phone, vomit it out as much as I could get out there, just so it was out of my brain. Once it was out of my brain, I didn’t feel responsible for keeping it circling, then I could go back to sleep. Respect that something’s trying to get out of you. Get it out of you. Then you know it’s there, and you can be joyful about it in the morning, but you can go back to sleep.

**Craig:** I find these days the only thing that apparently helps me unwind and go to sleep after whatever my day is half of an edible, five milligrams total.

**John:** This is a thing you learned over the course of 10 years.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Megana:** Craig, maybe you don’t feel that after a writing session, but your show’s about to come out, and I can already tell there’s going to be a great reception. There’s going to be so much excitement around it.

**Craig:** Oh god, [inaudible 00:30:57].

**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood, which will solve all of that superstition.

**Craig:** Fair.

**Megana:** How are you going to go to sleep after that? Because I already know I’m not going to be able to go to sleep after watching the first episode.

**Craig:** First of all, that’s very flattering. You might fall asleep in the middle of the first episode. You don’t know. Boy, I’m bad at self-promotion. I’m certainly looking forward to it coming out. I think if I’m at a lot of jangly adrenaline, that may be a night where my good old friend Ambien comes to tuck me in, because boy, that’ll just cut through any tension. It’s all anxiety for me. It’s just anxiety, because I have anxiety. It’s the way it goes. I’m very jangly. I’m a bit scared right now, even though I love the show and HBO loves the show and everybody so far that’s watched it has been really happy.

**John:** Megana, one thing that’s really helpful that Craig’s doing right now is he’s labeling the emotion. He’s labeling his anxiety. He’s labeling exactly what he’s feeling. As you’re up and you’re not able to get to sleep, try putting some words for how you’re feeling, so not just excited. What is it that is causing you to be up and ah? Is it anxiety about the thing? Is it excitement? Is it joy? What is it?

**Megana:** That’s a good question. I guess it’s a fear that I will never have that feeling again.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** That’s insightful.

**Craig:** Now this I understand, finally. I was waiting for this, because normally, I feel like Megana and I are both-

**Megana:** We do relate emotionally totally.

**Craig:** We just wade around in the misery pool and then bump into each other every now and then, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re still here.” That I totally get. Believe me. Listen.

**Megana:** I just don’t want this to stop, because I’ll probably never have a moment of clarity again.

**Craig:** That’s a great fear. I get that fear completely. Completely. Right now, I’m afraid about writing another season, because I’m like, “I love this season. How am I going to do that again?” I don’t know. I don’t know.

**Megana:** Exactly. Not that I can relate to that.

**John:** I totally hear what both of you are saying. I totally get that as valid. It’s just not been my experience at all.

**Craig:** No, you’re much happier with yourself. You are.

**John:** I am.

**Craig:** You are.

**John:** While we were doing the Big Fish musical, we had these talk backs on Wednesday after the matinee. It’s all the old people who come to the matinee. Then there’d be a talk back. Some of the actors and some of the people involved in the production would talk to these old people afterwards. We were talking about the show. I’m there. I can picture two actors who are behind me. This woman raises her hand. She goes, “Why are you so confident?” I was like, “Because I am.”

There’s a moment in Bros. There’s a really good speech in Bros where Billy Eichner is basically [inaudible 00:33:58] why are you confident. It’s like, because I’ve had to fake being confident for so much of my life that I just get good at it, and I somehow convinced myself to be confident, like, “Oh, it’s going to work out. I’m going to be able to solve this thing. I’ll be able to write that scene tomorrow. It’s fine.”

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** Oh my god. They would have never asked. They would have been like, “What’s wrong with you? Are you okay? Do you need a hug?”

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. Be born a gay, closeted child, and then all your problems will be solved.

**Craig:** I wonder what happens when you’re born a gay, closeted Jewish child, because then it’s like the war begins.

**Megana:** I do think this gets back to who should you trust, because the distinction that you make sometimes, Craig, between core pride and core shame, which I really like, the people who are so tempting to trust are people who have core pride and can just say these things really confidently, whereas you and I are up all night being like, “We’ll never write again.”

**Craig:** It’s true. I also think, Megana, sometimes that the people who have, I don’t know if it’s core pride, but sometimes there are people who know how to trigger your core shame as they’re doling out advice. In fact, that’s their con artistry. Then anyone that can trigger your core shame, you’re trying to make them happy now.

**John:** Cult leader.

**Craig:** I am as susceptible as anyone to somebody who says something bad about me to me. They already become way more valid in my mind than anyone else. That’s not right. That’s incorrect. I know enough to know to not go down that path and let that happen to me. My instinct, inerringly, is to over-reward people who are critical and under-reward people who are praising. I’m not John.

**John:** That’s true. Wow, what a therapy session this has been.

**Craig:** “Why are you so confident?” I love that lady. Was that my mom? That was probably my mom.

**John:** “Why are you so confident?” I think it was your mom, actually.

**Craig:** “What’s wrong with you?”

**John:** “Don’t you know this is all going to fail and burn?”

**Craig:** “You’ll end up dead.”

**John:** “You’ll still die.”

**Craig:** “You’ll still die.” That was a great question, Megana.

**John:** Yeah, nice question.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Megana:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Let’s return to some listener questions. How about James? He has a question about raising kids in LA.

**Megana:** James is an aspiring screenwriter currently working as an editor to pay the bills. He says, “My wife Alex and I have been living on the west side of LA for about five years now, but we’re thinking of starting a family. It’s time to move to what will hopefully be our forever home. Alex is pitching that we move to New York to be closer to her family, but I’d prefer to stay in LA. It goes without saying that there are myriad fundamental differences between living in New York versus LA, but I’d like your advice about parenting in particular.

“One point of disagreement between me and Alex is the idea that our children will be significantly impacted by what city they grow up in. Alex believes that East Coast culture inherently shapes children into more grounded, worldly humans. She fears that children brought up in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, and materialistic. She also feels it’s harder to forge truly deep and meaningful friendships here.

“While I think Alex is being reductive, I can’t say I fully disagree with her. I believe there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, namely those who work in the entertainment industry, who reek of superficiality and who don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking. If those people are sending their kids to the same school as our kids, then our kids will be exposed to their values, right? John and Craig, what has been your experience raising children in Los Angeles?”

**Craig:** Lot’s to go through here.

**John:** Lots to go through here. I don’t know that we can fully resolve the LA versus New York battle, because that has never come up before. First competition to ever happen between LA and New York and which is a better place to raise a family.

You can raise great kids in either place. Are you talking New York City, the city itself, or somewhere out in the suburbs? They’re very different experiences. Are you talking about staying in the west side or going to the Valley? Because those are different experiences too. I think you’re right to be thinking about where do you want to move to have kids. My advice would be, wherever you go, if you could move someplace where your kid can go to the public school, you’re going to get rid of a lot of your worries about the superficiality and grossness of the place.

**Craig:** James, I’m going to go backwards through your points one by one quickly to get to the one that matters the most I think to me as I read through it. First, I raise my kids in La Cañada. It’s in LA, basically. It’s between Glendale and Pasadena. My kids went to the public schools here. It is not like West LA. Very few people in the entertainment business in La Cañada. It’s mostly just lawyers and some financial industry people and just various people.

There is an emphasis on raising kids in a healthy, nurturing, kind environment, where there are just decent pro-social values. I don’t mean to say family values. I mean legitimately, it’s progressive. They’re trying to do the right thing. I like that. It is doable. There are other places doing it. It’s not just La Cañada.

I grew up in New York. My kids grew up in LA. I have a little bit of the benefit of that perspective. I can tell you that, you think there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, reeking of superficiality and don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking, and I will point right to the entire industry of finance in New York, which is horrifying. It’s horrifying. Apologies to everybody in it, but the culture of that industry is pretty brutal.

You want to talk about reeking of superficiality. At least in the entertainment business, we’re making stuff for people to watch. In the financial industry, they’re just making money. That’s it. Their job is to just make money. To me, you make money to do the thing, but they’re like, “No, the thing is to make money.” There’s an enormous amount of superficiality in all that.

If you’re around the superficial people, it’s going to happen. New York, full of them. LA, full of them. I disagree with Alex when she thinks that children in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, materialistic. I went to school in Manhattan for a couple years, and oh boy, I met some winners.

Here’s the thing that you said that I went, “Oh.” Alex says she wants to be in New York to be closer to her family. I gotta tell you, if you are starting a family and having a child or maybe prospectively having more than one child, being near an extended family that you can get along with, and I’m assuming that you do, is a huge bonus.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It’s a massive bonus. It will help you and your wife tremendously. It’s definitely worth considering, just for that alone. While you may engage in the progressive male feminist fantasy that you are going to be as much of a nurturer as your wife is, I doubt it. I just doubt it. I think that what will happen is, without you even trying, you’re going to naturally just imagine that some of this stuff is going to be more on her shoulders. I’m not accusing you of anything, James. I’m just saying it’s going to happen, and then she’s going to need the extra help, not you.

My suggestion is to think less about what’s going to happen to your kids, because if you’re good people, and you can put your kids near good people, they’ll be good people. I would think more about who’s going to help you as you raise these kids.

**John:** I think the accessibility of your wife’s family could be a huge boon and probably a reason for considering New York over Los Angeles. I agree with you there. In terms of you’re an aspiring screenwriter just working as an editor right now. You can do that in New York. You’ll get a job. It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, completely.

**John:** We should say though, Craig, you’re proselytizing La Cañada, and you loved it, but you are moving out of La Cañada.

**Craig:** That’s right. My youngest is in her senior year of high school. She’s going to be going to Berklee College of Music in the fall.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** In Boston.

**Megana:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** I didn’t do it. She did it. I salute her.

**John:** You made a James and Alex choice to move to a neighborhood you wanted to raise kids in, and now you’re done.

**Craig:** We raised kids. We’re done, and now we’re leaving, because somebody once joked about La Cañada, you don’t move there for the nightlife. We have friends obviously in La Cañada. Most of my friends are more near where you are, including you. That made sense to do a little switcheroo and head down there.

**John:** Borrow a cup of sugar from Aline. She’s right down the street.

**Craig:** It’s more likely that she will have to borrow the sugar from me-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … because everybody knows that my pantry is well stocked with the staples.

**John:** Gotta have them all.

**Craig:** Megana, if you need a staple, you come talk to me.

**Megana:** Like flour and sugar?

**Craig:** Oh, it goes well beyond simple flour and sugar. What kind of sugar? Confectioner’s sugar, dark brown, golden brown, light brown, demerara? Yes, I’ve had them all.

**Megana:** I’m excited that you’re moving closer to us.

**Craig:** You need rice? Basmati, short grain, long grain? What would you like? I have it all. Just come on over. Knock knock.

**John:** Fantastic. I think this was good advice. I don’t want to jinx us, so let’s go right ahead to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, I actually have two of them, the first is a video by Erik Grankvist, who’s a Swedish kid who moved to the wilds of Sweden and spent three years building a log cabin. It’s great. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s so good. I watched the whole thing. There’s no dialog in it the whole time. Craig, you probably read My Side of the Mountain growing up, didn’t you?

**Craig:** I love that book.

**John:** I have tried to get the rights to it several times. I’m honestly not sure it needs to be a movie now that this movie exists.

**Craig:** Tough movie. It’s a tough one.

**John:** Honestly, this video is probably better than the movie would be, because this guy, he just starts building a cabin on his grandparents’ property, which is really basically the plot of My Side of the Mountain. Instead of getting a falcon, he gets a little puppy. He sees puppy grow up into a full dog while he’s doing all this stuff. It’s really impressive. I’d recommend this. Honestly, Megana, if you have trouble sleeping sometime, you’re going to watch this. This is going to make you feel happy about things. It’s anxiety-relieving.

**Megana:** Oh, nice. Thank you.

**Craig:** Megana, have you read My Side of the Mountain?

**Megana:** I thought I did, but I think I’m confusing it with a different book, so no. I feel like I’ve absorbed it.

**John:** There’s a book called Hatchet which is actually similar.

**Megana:** Did you say Hatchet? I was thinking of Hatchet.

**Craig:** I think you should read it.

**John:** A kid runs away.

**Craig:** It’s survivalism. It’s teenage survivalism. I love that stuff.

**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s good.

**Craig:** What else you got?

**John:** My other thing is, I have to do a lot of screenshots for stuff, for work stuff, but screenwriting stuff, but also a lot for the app development stuff. I have this utility called Skitch that I love, which is really good for taking a screenshot and being able to send it to somebody or do the little annotations on it. It basically became unsupported, and I really missed it. I found something that was much, much better, and it’s absolutely free. It’s called Shottr. Shottr.cc is where you get it. It’s a Mac utility. You just want to take a little screenshot of a piece of your screen and send it to somebody or-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** … drag it into something, so, so good. It’ll tell you what colors are in the selection. It’s really, really smart. I salute the makers of Shottr. Everyone should use it, because it’s just so much better than the built-in screenshots on Mac OS.

**Craig:** Damn. I love this. I’m going to check this out for sure.

**John:** Do you screenshot things often, Craig?

**Craig:** Constantly, yeah.

**John:** Do you find yourself [crosstalk 00:45:57]?

**Craig:** I’m basically a Command Shift 4 guy. That’s fine.

**John:** Replace your Command Shift 4 with this. Basically just map the same thing to that and it’s better.

**Craig:** It’s just better. It’s more functionality.

**John:** More functionality, and also it won’t litter your desktop with a bunch of screenshots that you don’t want anymore.

**Craig:** Oh god, tell me about it, although I did remap my screenshots to a different folder, which you can do.

**John:** You can do that in this too.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a simple article this week in Wired, one of my favorite publications, with a headline that grabbed me. Oh boy, it was like it was designed for me. The headline is “Humans Walk Weird.” It should be weirdly, but fine. “Scientists May Finally Know Why. Humanity’s peculiar gait has long confounded engineers and biomechanists, but it might be one of nature’s clever tricks.”

It’s stuff that I never thought about, because I didn’t really understand. There is this weird thing that we do when we plant our leg, before we swing it to the next step, our leg bounces twice. It bends and extends when our foot touches down and then again just before take-up. Why do we bounce twice? Never been clear until now. Scientists at the University of Munich may have found an answer. It all basically comes down to our foot, which is really weird. Really weird. In the Animal Kingdom, it’s on its own. Of course, all this connects to evolutionary biology, as you would imagine it would. It’s a short article, but it’s a really interesting one. I haven’t thought about it as I’ve been walking, but I want to, because it’s just a very strange thing to think that our walk is weird. Even our walk is unique among the animals.

**John:** I’m sure the folks that listen to this podcast who work in animation are familiar with how strange people walk and how you’ve built a believable walk cycle for a character you’re trying to animate. I love evolutionary biology, because you recognize humans are strange for so many reasons independently of our big brains and our ability to speak and think and organize societies. Our hands are just so remarkable. The fact that we can swim so well, as primates we can swim so well, and if you’ve ever read the book Born to Run, we can just run so fast and so long, so much more than any other primate, but really most mammals. We just have these physical abilities that are so special and strange. It’s not just our brains that got us here.

**Craig:** No, but it’s our brains that keep us here. That’s our show.

**John:** That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. It features an ode to Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** What? Who? Who did you say?

**John:** Nica Brooke?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Sexy Craig?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** I’ve got an outro.

**John:** That’s also the place where you can send questions.

**Craig:** You like outros?

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting.

**Craig:** Inneresting.

**John:** It has lots of links to things about writing.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments.

**Craig:** You like back-episodes?

**John:** Remember to use the promo code ONION to save a ton on your annual subscription.

**Craig:** I’ll give you a promo code.

**John:** Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** A useful, therapeutic episode.

**Craig:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig and Megana, I had to break this to you, but Los Angeles will at some point suffer a huge disaster, a natural disaster, and I don’t know what to do about it. I kind of know what to do about it, just not a lot. Obviously, one of the things that could befall Los Angeles is the big one, a giant earthquake. Looking at the stats, within the next 30 years, probability of a big, big earthquake, 60%. That would be an earthquake measuring 6.7, which is Northridge, 46% earthquake measuring 7, which is big, really big. I heard that gasp. A 31% chance, basically a one third chance that an earthquake measuring 7.5, which is really big, can happen in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** That’s scary, but let’s also point out that when they say an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.5 in the Los Angeles region, the Los Angeles region is enormous.

**John:** LA is giant.

**Craig:** It’s giant.

**John:** It’s giant. I love the maps that show the population of LA County is bigger than almost the entire rest of the United States. It’s crazy how many people live in Los Angeles versus everywhere else.

**Craig:** It is a sprawl. It is a geographic sprawl. Having lived through the Northridge earthquake, I do know that a 6.7 thrust quake, as we experienced there, was very frightening to ride out near the Beverly Center, which is far away from Northridge and right by Megana’s house, but we survived.

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** Very few buildings fell down. One apartment building in Northridge collapsed. One. Now, there were some overpasses that fell down. The 10 overpass by La Cienega and I believe Fairfax fell down.

**John:** There was also one on the west side. It’s past the 405 freeway basically, because I was living in Palms, and suddenly my commute to Santa Monica got actually faster because no one could get on the 10 freeway except for me right by the 405.

**Craig:** Right, because you’re in between the trouble. Chunks of the Beverly Center fell off. I remember that.

**John:** [crosstalk 00:52:17].

**Megana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** If the Northridge earthquake hadn’t happened at 4 in the morning, a lot more people would’ve died.

**John:** It would’ve been bad.

**Craig:** Even then, you think about the amount of buildings in Los Angeles, which is just insane, for so many of them to make it through and for so few people to be seriously injured, we’re fairly well prepared.

**John:** I think that part of the reason we’re well prepared. Because we’ve had these earthquakes, we actually have building standards that are actually pretty good.

**Craig:** Really good.

**John:** A giant earthquake could do some crazy, crazy, damage, absolutely 100% true, but we’re actually built for the Northridge earthquakes.

**Craig:** Yes, we are. New construction is very well designed for earthquakes. Our very tall buildings downtown, quite a few of them are on rollers, so they’re able to move back and forth, which will be very scary when you’re on top floor, because you’ll be, “Whoa. Whoa.” What isn’t happening is the bottom isn’t fixed where the top is swaying, which is what ends up toppling buildings. I will be scared during an earthquake, but I’m not scared of earthquakes.

**John:** Now that we’ve made it through the earthquake fears, my new fear from this last week, my friend Miles quote tweeted a thing about ARk floods. Craig, are you familiar with ARk floods?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This is the new thing to be worried about. It’s a real, genuine thing. These have happened before in California. Essentially, what happens is two big storms. One comes from the north. One comes from the south. Basically, the river of moisture comes from the south, and they get jammed up over California. It just rains and rains and rains and rains.

If you look in the Workflowy, you’ll see ARkstorm flood areas, which is basically what happened in 1862. There were inland lakes. Basically, the whole central part of California got flooded. Those canyons, they became a landlocked sea for a time. There wasn’t as much of Los Angeles at the time, but it got wiped out. I think it’s worth thinking about that, because I know the same degree we’ve prepared for earthquakes, we haven’t really prepared for floods in Los Angeles as much, because it just hasn’t happened to us recently. I think it’s causing me some concern as it rains so much this season.

**Craig:** That’s scary, but what are we going to do about it? I’d love to know.

**John:** Craig, what are you doing right now for emergency preparation? You’re obviously moving to this new house. Are you thinking about how many days of water and food and stuff like that?

**Craig:** Yes. I have a decent supply of canned goods that I always make sure we have on hand, along with some basic emergency supplies, knives, strike-all matches, tarps, blankets. In La Cañada I have a generator, which runs on natural gas, but if that gets disturbed, it also has a backup propane tank. At the new place, I’m not sure where I’d put the generator, but I’m thinking about it. I do also have large 50-gallon storage bins for drinking water, and I have water purification tablets.

**John:** In both places you have a pool, which you can use for water as well for a time.

**Craig:** The name of the game is how can you survive comfortably for a week. That’s what you’re going for, a week, because if emergency services, FEMA, the government can’t help you after seven days, you’re screwed. It’s over.

**John:** As I even put this on the Workflowy, I realized that the first time we talked about COVID was in a Bonus Segment. I don’t want to somehow manifest an ARk flood by putting it-

**Craig:** Oh, you thought that’s how that worked?

**John:** That’s how it works. We are the reason COVID happened, that it became what it did. One difference I would point out though, Craig, is that with an earthquake, we’re always prepared, like, “Okay, you’re going to bunker down. You’re going to stay there until things get better.” In a flood, you may just have to leave, because your house may be underwater.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right.

**John:** Preparing to get out is a thing too. I’ve never thought about having a boat, a canoe. I guess there might be some parts of Los Angeles. I’m up on a hill, so I don’t think about it so much. There’d be some parts of Los Angeles where it wouldn’t be the worst idea to have some sort of inflatable raft someplace.

**Craig:** You’re not on a significant hill, meaning if you have a massive flood that is turning areas into lakes, the fact that you’re maybe 20 feet above the street may not be enough to save you.

**John:** Thanks. Thanks.

**Craig:** You’re saying you’re going to keep a canoe?

**John:** Megana [crosstalk 00:57:03] come over here.

**Megana:** That is my emergency plan. Now that Craig has this pantry-

**Craig:** I was going to say, I have all the staples.

**Megana:** I’m just going to be swimming from Craig’s place to John’s place.

**Craig:** Which actually is adorable. I love that.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** There won’t be any internet, so I can write notes to John, and you would just swim them over to him.

**John:** To end this on a happier note, I will say one of the best memories of the Northridge earthquake was that power went out. Everything was out. That was pre-internet. Phones were out too. I had just started dating a guy. My car, I got it out of the garage. I drove it over to his place. He was there. I could check in. He was fine. We just hung out for that weekend and saw his friends. We were sitting on rooftops watching transformers blow. It was kind of romantic in a snow day kind of way, so I do have some good memories from it.

**Megana:** That’s horrifying.

**John:** No, it wasn’t horrifying. It was kind of romantic in a way that-

**Megana:** It is romantic, but you were just watching transformers blow?

**John:** The end of the world. Yeah, they pop.

**Craig:** I’d like to point out that you said that’s horrifying and John’s rebuttal was, “No, I repeat it was romantic.”

**John:** Romantic.

**Craig:** “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. Clearly, I said… ” I can see how that’s fair.

**John:** I don’t mean to invalidate your feeling there. I would say in my experience it was romantic.

**Craig:** I can see that. I remember that sound actually, if you watch the first episode of The Last of Us.

**Megana:** How do you know that it’s okay to travel though if you don’t have your phone?

**Craig:** We used to just do it all the time, Megana.

**John:** We just did it.

**Craig:** Megana, literally every time anyone traveled anywhere ever, it was without a phone. Ever. Anywhere. Everyone.

**Megana:** I deserve that.

**John:** We grew up in a time where there weren’t phones.

**Craig:** Everywhere.

**John:** Everything will be okay. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s going to be fine.

**Craig:** Everything will be okay. Now John, just to be clear, because I want to understand this, you’re saying that you’re going to keep a canoe or some sort of kayak on your property so you can just get out there?

**John:** Mike has not heard this yet. That’s why I was thinking something inflatable, just so that we can use it if need be, but store it in this giant storage closet that holds our giant bucket of food and our canned goods.

**Craig:** The food bucket. Megana, I don’t want to be a downer, but it does concern me a little bit that you’re going to be swimming back and forth between my house and John’s, because a lot of the water is going to be contaminated with raw human sewage.

**Megana:** John has a pool float.

**John:** The pool float, yeah, it’s [crosstalk 00:59:34].

**Craig:** As long as you can float down shit river, you’ll be thrilled. So much fun.

**John:** We need to figure out a plan for chemical toilets, because in a flood situation, toilets won’t flush anymore.

**Craig:** In a flood situation, the toilet is the world. That’s what the toilet is.

**John:** All the world is a toilet.

**Craig:** Just go ahead and jump in the water, wave hi to Megana, take care of it.

**Megana:** Wow. Wow. I’m not going to be able to sleep after this conversation.

**John:** I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** You will. You will. You’re going to be fine. Megana, don’t worry.

**John:** If you click through the links, you’ll find that La Cañada Flintridge is singled out as being a very dangerous place in a flood scenario.

**Craig:** That’s why we’re moving. La Cañada is generally not considered at all a flood problem because we have flood channels and we are 1,600 feet above sea level. However, mudslides could theoretically be a problem for certain areas, and they have been. Our street is not a mud flow problem area, because there’s a rather large valley between the hills and where our street is. There are other areas west of us that got absolutely hammered. Homes got wiped out by some mudslides when we had severe rainstorms a few years ago. It’s definitely a thing.

**John:** Craig, would you ever live in the Hills? Would you live in the Hollywood Hills?

**Craig:** Never. Never, ever, ever.

**John:** We have friends who live up there. I would never do it.

**Craig:** Forget earthquakes and the ARk floods. Forget all that. How about just I cut myself badly chopping vegetables, I need an ambulance. They’re going to have to squeeze through the narrow thing going up. You ever notice in the Hills it’s like, “Oh, I live on Waterton Place. It’s off of Waterton Avenue, which connects with Waterton Street.” You’re like, “What? Why?”

**John:** If you want to have a party in the Hills, just give up, because no one will be able to park anywhere.

**Craig:** No, you can’t park. It’s brutal. I understand why people live there. I truly, truly do.

**John:** Gorgeous views.

**Craig:** Melissa and I have always been in absolute lockstep on this. Never would we ever live in the Hills.

**John:** Megana, you’re going to parties in the Hills all the time.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** Would you live there?

**Megana:** I have also made the mistake of driving to parties in the Hills. Also, you don’t get any service there, so it’s not like you can call an Uber or anything either.

**John:** That’s the problem too. We have friends who will say, “Oh, we’re wrapping up here, so time to leave.” They’re like, “Oh, great, I’ll call an Uber.” They’re like, “Oh god, you’re going to be here another hour, because someone will refuse to come get you.”

**Craig:** Look, I’m from New York. Again, I like a nice grid system. Streets at right angles are lovely.

**John:** They are. Plus, the Hills always burns. It’s always fires.

**Craig:** They burn. They burn.

**John:** Where you are in La Cañada, that could’ve theoretically burned too. How close did the fires ever come to you guys?

**Craig:** Very. There was the station fire. Oh jeez, that was, I don’t know, maybe 13 years ago or so. We were evacuated. Our home was never threatened by fire, but the smoke was unbearable. You couldn’t even see. I did go to the very top of my street, because my street is on quite a steep incline. Like I said, my house is about 1,600 feet above sea level. There’s probably another hundred feet of elevation or more to get to the very end of the street. When I got up there, I did see… You know when there’s a utility pole and the steel wire that goes to the ground on an angle to it, to anchor it? That steel wire was partially melted. The fire got that close.

**Megana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** We definitely had to leave. You know what? I think it was more like 15 years ago, because I remember we were like, “Okay, we’ve got an hour to just start packing crap up. In case our house burns down, what do you bring?” At the time, Melissa just started packing these large photo albums into our car. I was like, “Photo albums? Who cares?” Now there’s no photo album. There’s no nothing. Just take your laptop. You’ve got everything on your laptop. Everything. Megana, we used to have photo albums.

**Megana:** I know both of those words separately.

**Craig:** I know. Imagine a book, a big, huge, massive book, and on each page, it’s just blank cardboard and then this nasty plastic film that you would peel back and it’d go sss, like that.

**John:** That eventually gets yellowed.

**Craig:** That’s what it would sound like. Then you’d stick your printed photos on the page and then lower the plastic back down.

**Megana:** Wait, but I do know what a photo album is. I was just kidding. I’m not that young.

**Craig:** Megana, let me explain again.

**John:** Craig, I gotta say-

**Craig:** I don’t think you get it.

**John:** Your sound department must love you for the Foley, because clearly they’re just like, “Craig, we need you to come in and do the Foley for the show.” You’re just like, “I’ll make it all with my mouth sounds.”

**Craig:** I’m going to tell you. I will tell you. I will give this podcast an exclusive story about The Last of Us following the completion of its airing. I will say I’m all over that thing.

**John:** He is his own Foley.

**Craig:** When you hear it, you’ll be like, “What?” I’m not talking about my voice. I do have an appearance by voice at one point, but sound effects-wise, when it’s over, just you wait.

**Megana:** I can’t wait to see that in the credits.

**Craig:** It’s not in the credits.

**Megana:** It’s just right there.

**John:** Only Scriptnotes Premium Members know about this.

**Craig:** Exclusive to Scriptnotes.

**John:** Love it. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Last of Us](https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us) premieres on HBO 1/15/23 at 6pm!
* [Can “The Last of Us” Break the Curse of Bad Video-Game Adaptations?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations) by Alex Barasch for the New Yorker
* [Use PROMO code ONION for $10 off an annual Scriptnotes Membership](https://scriptnotes.net/) email help@supportingcast.fm if you run into any issues
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 574: Difficult Scenes, Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-574-difficult-scenes-transcript)
* [Erik Grankvist’s Video of Building a Log Cabin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtiaSn5iCg8)
* [Shottr](https://shottr.cc/) screenshot app
* [Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why](https://www.wired.com/story/humans-walk-weird-scientists-may-finally-know-why/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_31383010-6a51-4efd-ba74-12b85959c72f_popular4-1) by Katrina Miller
* [The Big One – Probability Earthquake Will Occur in Los Angeles](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-occur-los-angeles-area-san-francisco-bay-area)
* [ARK Storm](https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-an-arkstorm-could-wreak-havoc-on-los-angeles/) and [The Great Flood of 1862](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nica Brooke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/582standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/telling-real-world-stories).

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

**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 580 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a How Would This Be a Movie case study. I’ll be talking with screenwriter William Nicholson about his script for Thirteen Lives, following the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. We’ll get into issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view, cultural sensitivity, and what happens when you and the director don’t agree about what kind of movie you’re trying to make. Craig, it’s a really good conversation. I was sorry to not have you there, but sometimes the one-on-one things are better when it’s just one on one.

**Craig:** What I’m hearing is that it was a really good conversation because I wasn’t there.

**John:** It was a good conversation. Also, I saw the movie. I think I was vaguely aware of the actual real-life rescue. You remember that one when it was happening, right?

**Craig:** Of course. I remember when it was happening. I remember Elon Musk doing what he seems to do on a daily basis now, which is say something incredibly stupid, so there was that.

**John:** There was that.

**Craig:** They got the kids out, which was great.

**John:** Yeah, which is great. I knew that the kids got out. We did talk a little bit about knowing the ending of the movie. Before we sit down and watch it, you know the kids get out. The specifics were actually a lot different than I realized or than I heard reported in the moment. It was really a question of point of view. Do you talk about it from the family’s point of view, from the kids inside the cave’s point of view? At what point do you reveal the kids inside the cave are alive? How do you reflect the balance of worldwide attention versus the actual very small, local story on the ground? It was a good conversation about the choices he made but the other choices that could’ve been made.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about our non-work goals and aspirations for 2023. We are canonically not a resolution show. We’re not going to promise to do a thing. I always like to think about stuff we’d like to do more of or less of.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s be thinking about that for a Bonus. We’re going to ask Megana too.

**Craig:** As long as we’re asking Megana, then we’ll be fine.

**Megana Rao:** I have to think of something.

**Craig:** Get going, Megana.

**John:** Some follow-up from last week. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We were answering a question about variable frame rates. I said that I was going to watch Avatar right after we record it, and I would be able to tell you what I thought of the variable frame rates. They mostly worked for me. The times that you go into really high frame rate stuff, it tends to be underwater. There’s a lot of underwater. The underwater stuff is amazing and beautiful in the movie. There are other moments where I did notice things were shifting, but it’s also hard to tell, because it’s a 3D movie, so everything’s a little bit weird anyway. I don’t know, if I was watching a 2D movie, I might not have had the same experience with the high frame rate stuff.

**Craig:** How are the glasses these days? Feeling good?

**John:** So much better.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** The glasses are pretty lightweight. This is my first time wearing them with a mask as well. A little trick for people is that if your glasses start to fog up, just pull your glasses a little bit further away, further down the bridge of your nose, and they won’t fog up so much.

**Craig:** That’s a good tip, or get Lasik.

**John:** I’m talking about the 3D glasses.

**Craig:** Oh, the 3D glasses. You have to wear the 3D glasses. I guess that makes sense. It would fog up. Maybe in a movie like Avatar, the fog might add a little something.

**John:** No, the fog will not add. James Cameron does not want you to have fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** He will come by and he will wipe off the fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** He does seem like somebody that would more likely just smack the mask off your face.

**John:** Interestingly, he was supposed to come to the Q and A after this, and all the chairs were filled and-

**Craig:** He got COVID.

**John:** He got COVID. He got COVID 20 minutes before. [inaudible 00:03:33] positive test 20 minutes before.

**Craig:** That’s very convenient COVID to get, by the way. There have been times where I’m like, “Come on, COVID.”

**John:** Craig is scratching a little line with a little thin Sharpie there like, “Oh, sorry, can’t go.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “I don’t want to do this thing. Oh, dammit.”

**John:** I really enjoyed the story in Avatar 2. It didn’t feel like three hours. I think what impressed me most is it’d been a long time since I’d seen a 3D movie, because I just didn’t really care about 3D. This was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that didn’t make me go blind at a certain point. There’s something that happens to me in 3D movies where my brain just stops being able to process what I’m seeing. In this, it didn’t happen. I felt like I could see everything [inaudible 00:04:14].

**Craig:** That’s good. There is a diminishing return. Watching 2D stuff, you begin to forget pretty quickly that it’s just a flat thing on a screen. Your mind turns it into 3D basically. Similarly, your mind turns 3D into whatever the 2D version of 3D is. It all just in my mind turns into the same experience, unless they’re doing the tricks, like something flying at your face. Otherwise, meh.

**John:** I think Cameron obviously couldn’t do whatever he wants to do, because it’s all virtually filmed and stuff, so that he could build shots after the fact to work properly to brain in 3D, which is helpful, because so much of the 3D we see these days was really shot to be 2D and then they do it in post.

**Craig:** They do a conversion.

**John:** It’s not the same. Let’s talk to smaller screens. The big news this past couple weeks has been how many shows got chopped off of HBO Max, and things that were already shot, things that were already on the system.

**Craig:** Gulp.

**John:** Old things, they’re gone.

**Craig:** My show’s still there. Yes!

**John:** Craig, are you checking Chernobyl every moment to see whether-

**Craig:** I am not checking Chernobyl every moment, but listen, who knows? I don’t understand it. I legitimately don’t understand it. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like there was some sort of tax benefit to merging companies and then offloading some assets or something like that.

**John:** That one was an example of that, where you could take a big write-off on it and just bury it. It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily going to bury all these things. Patrick Somerville, who came on to talk about Station Eleven, he said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He keeps checking to see if Station Eleven is there. He promises that he will project it on a rock in the Mojave Desert if he has to. These other shows, they’re off HBO Max for right now, but it looks like they’re going to try to put them on some sort of ad-supported system that’s maybe not HBO Max. That could be someplace else. I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s something we haven’t really gotten into a lot on the show. Megana, I think there’s a question we could frame this with.

**Megana:** Andy from Seattle asked, “Once a show gets sold from HBO Max to a free, ad-supported streaming television service, will writers and actors start getting residuals as the property starts making active money?”

**Craig:** They sure will.

**John:** They will. They’ll get some residuals. It’ll just be a different system for it.

**Craig:** Yes, but it will be a better system. We will make more money this way.

**John:** We’ll make more money depending on how it’s set up, because I can imagine two scenarios, which we’ll just set up. First off, HBO could sell it to a place like Pluto or one of the other existing services, in which case there’d be a license fee. That might be good.

**Craig:** There’s always that. That’s the only way we make money off of residuals. HBO made Chernobyl. Let’s say they put Chernobyl on CBS. The only money HBO gets is the licensing money. The ad money goes to CBS. We don’t get any of that. We just get the licensing money that goes to HBO. That’s the gross. Then the producer’s gross is 20% of that, because we lost many, many years ago. Then we get a percentage of the 20%.

What’s interesting is right now if you make something for a streamer, there is no licensing fee ancillary market. The residuals we get are these weird, imputed things that are not necessarily connected to anything real. You and I are old enough where we wrote movies, and then those movies ended up on TBS with ads in them. We would get pretty decent residual checks from the licensing of those movies to TBS. For writers and directors and actors, this could revitalize the dwindling residuals stream. Creatively, as we’ve discussed, it’s a little disconcerting that you can make a show and it just disappears from something like that. I think it’s gotten everybody a little wigged out, and for good reason. I’m curious. Is Station Eleven available on DVD?

**John:** Station Eleven does not have DVDs right now.

**Craig:** How does he have it?

**John:** I think he’s talking about whatever cut he has off of the non-linear editor. His actual tweet was, “If Station Eleven ever disappears, I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave Desert and just play it on a loop projected on a rock forever.”

**Craig:** We’re going to have to download some of these things.

**John:** I’ll check into it. It’s entirely possible that DVDs were cut for that show. So many of these HBO Max shows have no DVDs. There’s no other physical way to see it. That creative fear is huge. Circling back to the issue of residuals, Chernobyl that’s on HBO Max, you’re still getting residuals, but those residuals right now are based on a declining fee per every year that it’s on the service and based on a certain fixed price. It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual success of the show. It’s just basically from the time it was made it just declines in value after that time. Chernobyl could in theory make more money being licensed someplace else and therefore create more residuals for you.

**Craig:** It would. It would. I don’t want people to watch it with ads in it, but yeah, it would. It’s really interesting, because what’s happening, this is again financially not necessarily bad news for artists, creatively potentially bad news, is that streamers are suddenly asking the question that all of the rest of us have been asking for a long time, which is, so wait, how do you make money? I know you sell a subscription, but okay, if they’re subscribing, why do you need to make anything more, or do you need to make this much more, or how much stuff do you need to have there, because where does money come from, because in the old days, if you could convert stuff to ad-supported or home video of any format, there was your reason to make more stuff. There’d be additional revenue streams. If all it is is streaming, that’s it. You’ve basically curtailed your own revenue stream as far as I can tell.

**John:** Your revenue stream is based on the monthly subscribers and the idea that having these vast libraries was going to keep them returning as monthly subscribers.

**Craig:** Sure, but that is the only revenue stream you’ll ever have, whereas in the old days studios would have ticket sales, airplane rentals, home video, and then eventually pay TV, licensing it to HBO and Showtime, and then eventually ad-supported television on TBS. Let’s just presume everything goes to TBS if it still exists.

**John:** A thing I’m always confused about when these announcements are first coming out is… Free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST is the abbreviation you’re going to see for that, it’s the same thing as AVOD, so advertising-based video on demand. The difference is that we usually talk about AVOD for things like The Office. If The Office was showing on NBC, and so you’re watching it there, but then a few weeks later it was showing on nbc.com, that was AVOD, and so where studios would show their own things on their own websites.

What’s different now is of course there are streamers that are doing that [inaudible 00:11:18] TV. There’s existing things like Pluto. There’s probably going to be new things presumably coming out of Warner’s that are going to be a service like that. I think figuring out what the appropriate licensing fee is for HBO Max to be selling it to their own service will be an issue.

**Craig:** That kind of self-dealing has been litigated many, many times before and will continue to be litigated now that it seems to be coming back. Making sweetheart deals with yourself is tricky. You need to sell it for what would be a legally supportable market price. You can’t completely jam people. It will be interesting. I feel like the wheel is turning back in time. We’re heading backwards in time. It’s funny.

Silicon Valley was so behind the explosion of streaming, if you consider Netflix. I consider Netflix to be Silicon Valley-esque. I guess the idea of just the new way of doing things, new media we called it. Meanwhile, what were those companies in Silicon Valley doing? Selling ads on everything. Google is an advertising company. YouTube, which Google owns, is an advertising company. Facebook is an advertising company and so on and so forth. Currently, the aforementioned Elon Musk is flipping out, trying to get more people to advertise on Twitter, because it’s an advertising company. They’ve always been ad-supported, and then somehow we got hoodwinked over here into being like, “No ads. No, we don’t need that. That’s old-school stuff.” I guess if you want to make money, ads.

**John:** Ads.

**Craig:** Ads.

**John:** The answer to the question is, what’s going to happen, hopefully this will be more residuals for the writers involved, but of course, those things actually have to be distributed someplace. I think it’s potentially good news assuming that they actually are putting those things someplace and not just burying them in a hole, which is I think the worry we had originally.

**Craig:** I could be wrong, but it seems like the things that are getting buried in holes are things that had very low viewership numbers. They’re pulling Westworld off of HBO Max. That’s going to land somewhere. That is be on another platform.

**John:** That was the marquee property of HBO two or three years ago.

**Craig:** There’s no question about that. It will be figured out one way or another. I think some of the things that got completely removed were probably… They had said in some article some of the… They mentioned one show. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was animated. Something like only 400 people watched it in a year or something. It was like, okay, I guess-

**John:** There were back-episodes. They had the whole catalog of Sesame Street. There were some episodes of that show that just no one had watched in-

**Craig:** No one had watched.

**John:** Yeah, because who wants to watch a 20-year-old random episode?

**Craig:** It makes me feel good sometimes to watch Sesame Street.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to our main centerpiece of this episode, which is the conversation I had with Bill Nicholson. This is part of a Writers Guild Foundation event. We’ve done a lot of events for the Writers Guild Foundation over the years. There’s going to be a link in the show notes to the video of this whole Zoom interview we did. William Nicholson, Bill Nicholson, is great. I’ve never had a chance to talk to him before. Credits include Everest, Unbroken, Mandela, Les Mis, Elizabeth, Gladiator, going back many, many, many years, starting out as a playwright. We really got to talk about the whole process of figuring out from someone coming to him with like, “Hey, would you want to do a movie about this cave rescue?” to all the changes and drama along the way, shooting this during the pandemic, and then shooting it for Amazon, which couldn’t release it the way they wanted to release it. A really good conversation and just a really great writer. Enjoy this. Craig and I will be back afterwards for our One Cool Things.

It is my absolute pleasure to be talking to you today, Bill, about Thirteen Lives but also I’d love to talk about screenwriting in general and your career and many other things. Where are we talking to you today from? I see it’s dark there.

**Bill Nicholson:** I’m in South England, in Sussex, in the converted garage where I do all my work in the lovely English countryside.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s start with Thirteen Lives, because I just watched it last night. I’m really curious how you came into the project, because I remember the story as it was happening in real time. It felt like, okay, obviously there’s going to be a movie coming out of this, but what was your entrance into this as a movie?

**Bill:** Like you, I remember it from when it actually happened. I wouldn’t say I followed every deet, but obviously, I did follow it. It was very moving, and then I forgot about it. Sometime later, as is the way of these things, a producer got in touch with me and said would I be interested in writing the screenplay. I was initially a little reluctant, because I thought maybe it was an oversimple story. Guys go down in a cave, get stuck. It’s all terrible. Then they get out and it’s okay. Of course, they sent me some research. They’d had a lot of research done on it. That amazed me and I realized what a rich tale it was. It moved me in a whole different way actually. I really like writing very emotionally valid and powerful pieces, so I said yes. The simple answer is I got asked.

**John:** That’s great to be asked. I’m not surprised you were asked. If you look at your credits and look at the movies you’ve written and going back to Gladiator and Shadowlands and those things, but more recently, Everest, Unbroken, other true stories, and finding the ways to tell these historical true stories in ways that are compelling. You seem like a very great fit for it. I guess my question is, when they came to approach you to write this, how much did they have? Off and on Scriptnotes podcasts, we get these questions about like, “Oh, what rights do I need to do to tell a true story?” People will see producers jockeying for rights, locking up this person’s life rights or this person’s life rights. As they came to you, what were they coming to you with? They had some original research, but what else?

**Bill:** You’re completely right. It was a writer’s nightmare. Lots of other projects were in the mix. There was another team that had the rights to the Australian doctor, Harry Harris. We did not have the rights to the Thai kids at all. The Thai government controlled that. The key rights, which are the British divers, those were the ones that my producer had obtained. That was the core of the project. The rest we had to… You know the process. We had to use material that was in the public domain. It’s worrying when you’re [inaudible 00:18:06]. It’s worrying on all sorts of levels. It’s worrying also because I’m dealing with real people’s real lives who are still there, especially the Thai people. I think we had a superb level of research, which fed me absolutely as much as possible. I just did my best to give a fair crack to all of those individuals.

**John:** You say you had research. How much of that was coming to you in written form versus your ability to talk to these divers? What was your ability to reach out and ask specific questions, or did you have to go through levels to get there? What was your connection to these characters?

**Bill:** With the two main divers, I went and visited them and talked to them and subsequently made very good relations with them, was able to check a lot of things with them as I went along. All the rest was [inaudible 00:18:58]. This was in COVID times. A superb researcher had amassed an enormous amount of material, mostly remotely, particularly on all the Thai details. I was supplied with that when I began, because the producer had also produced the documentary, which is called The Rescue. They’d done all the research for that. I was given all of that, and I was able to ask the researcher to ask the researcher to follow up whenever I wanted. I was very well supported.

**John:** One of the fundamental decisions you have to make as a writer is how you’re going to tell the story and when you’re going to start the story and what details are going to be at what point. How early in the process of the conversations with the producers about coming on to do this did you have an approach? Did you have a take for how you were going to tell the story?

**Bill:** Not immediately, but you’re completely right. People think if you have a true story, because you take down what happened. Of course, you sort of do, because you have an obligation to the truth. My job is finding the emotional through line and also the mini emotional stories within the overall one, because nobody is going to watch just to hear another fact. They watch because of what you make them feel about the characters, what the characters want, what the characters fear, and what then happens to them. It really is a kind of crafting of real events to create emotional drama. Of course, there is emotional drama once you’ve got kids threatening with death.

You’ve really got to do a lot more than that. I looked to the material. I drew up a timeline of my own, the peaks and the troughs. I looked at that very early on, because obviously, the producers, when they asked me to do it, they didn’t just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They say, “Tell us what you will do before any contract gets signed.” That’s fair enough.

I give them I suppose my pitch really. I said very early on the obvious thing which anybody tackling this story would say, which is, “We cannot afford to make this be a white savior story, so how are we going to deal with that? We’re going to look at all of the Thai stories. We’re going to look at what they did and the complexities of that and how much we can weave that in.”

I made the decision very early on that this was in a way not the story of the boys. This was partly because I did not have their rights, but it was also partly because they’re stuck. They’re in a cave. You have a choice. Are you going to keep cutting back to them inside the cave getting hungrier and hungrier or not? I said, “My way of doing this is we’re going to see them go in, and then we’re not going to see them again until they’re found.”

**John:** It’s 45 minutes into the film before we see them again. We see, oh, they are actually alive. This is a real open question. Obviously, as an audience who has some knowledge coming into it, we know that they’re alive in there, but everyone on the outside doesn’t. You set up a good expectation that maybe they are going in to find bodies ultimately. They don’t know where they are, how far.

**Bill:** It’s very interesting the way you can tell a story by being able to know the ending and still make it tense. I think it’s because as people watch, they accept that they’re within that moment. One of the reasons that I took the project on actually was because one of the things that really struck me, after the divers found the bodies, there was this ecstasy throughout this enormous camp, real cheers. The boys are there. The boys are alive. That was simultaneously experienced with the divers knowing that the boys are going to die, that there is no way to come out.

I find that sort of crunch very powerful. When I saw that, I go, “Actually, we have got a story here.” Of course, if you can communicate to the viewers sufficiently, this really is an insoluble problem, and then you proceed to find a crazy solution, which against all the odds works, and you have a story.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about decisions of classic characters and themes going through stuff. You have actors we recognize who are doing certain things. Also, what I was really impressed by with the movie, and you talk about making sure that the Thai people in their efforts are centered in this, for a lot of the start of the film and really throughout the film, we’re seeing the rest of the efforts from the Thai perspective. These are competent people who are doing their very best. It feels very documentary in a good way. It feels very matter of fact. You don’t see a lot of speechify. You don’t see people stopping to explain something about Thai culture and history and stuff. It’s very much focused on the moment.

Did you know from the start that you were going to have so many characters and that we as an audience might not even really know their names? I’m thinking about the engineer on top of the mountain who’s trying to divert the water. We recognize him, but we know very little about him. Do you know that from the start, that you’d have this wide array of characters?

**Bill:** Yes, in the sense that I had to place my heroic British divers in this much bigger context. I think the first thing that I thought when I looked into all this story was an enormous number of people volunteered. There was this great mass, like 5,000 people just gave their time or their equipment for nothing. I love that. It runs counter to the kind of story that we’re being told all the time, which is that we live in a competitive world where people will only get off their bottoms for money. I’ve wanted to celebrate that very much, which meant locating as many of these stories as possible.

There are very many stories. You simply don’t have the space. In that sense, you color code the characters so that people recognize them visually rather than knowing their names. You also give them each a little kind of trick so that you can spot how they’re likely to… You can only do that to a very small degree, because you’re juggling so many characters. You talk about it being documentary. Yes, it’s documentary in the sense that it did happen. We’re not grandstanding with it. We’re not trying to make out some sort of opportunity for people to make their own speeches.

I actually think the grand sentiments come over much more powerfully if you throw them away, if they’re not asserted, you ask the audience to find that for themselves. That’s a conscious decision, particularly with the main divers who really led me into this by their own characters. I was picking up from what they told me about themselves, which is, “We don’t do this for money. We’re amateurs. We’re not interested in publicity.” They’ve got a rather delightful… There were so many that got cut out.

When they were first asked to come, Rick, the Viggo Mortensen one, said, “How are we getting there?” John says to him, “They’re giving us business class flights.” Business class, I’ll fly anywhere. I love that. It’s very British, very undercutting heroism and grandiosity. I was working from the characters.

I also think it means that you can feed your actors with a role where they have very few words but a lot of emotional moments. Those emotional moments, they are going to act on. They’re going to be on their face. If you’ve correctly structured the emotional trajectory, the audience knows what they’re thinking and feeling, looking at their face. They don’t need words. That is what screenwriters do. It drives me nuts when people say… Somebody said to me, “Oh, you didn’t have much to do for the first 20 minutes, did you?” I say, “I wrote the damn thing. Every feat is written.”

**John:** Absolutely. What is the camera pointing at, what are we seeing, what are we living.

**Bill:** Exactly. Not just that. Ron and I talked a lot about structuring the dives, because too many dives are boring. Each dive has to have its own character, its own emotional little story. I literally listed them all with the emotions that accompanied them.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotional trajectory of the Viggo Mortensen character, because he’s the one who I think… I would say your characters don’t protagonate a lot. They’re not going through this classic giant character’s arc where they come in as one thing and leave fully transformed. It’s small and it’s subtle but it’s there. Viggo Mortensen’s character’s probably the easiest one to see that. He’s initially reluctant to necessarily go on this dive, to even join on his trip. Then when he’s there, he’s skeptical a lot along the way. What were the beats you mapped out for yourself? Were they literally in an outlined form? How much were you thinking about how his character progressed over the course of the story? How did you chart that for yourself?

**Bill:** That’s kind of fairly simple really, because he starts out not wanting to go, doesn’t like kids, as he says. He gets there. He’s pissed off, because we then have all the beats about the local Thai divers don’t rate them, which is fun to have that. They’re old guys [inaudible 00:28:12] which gives him something to resent. Eventually, they do get allowed to dive, and it goes wrong. They pull out the pumping guy, and it all goes wrong. Then they’re stuck, and he wants to go home. I got that beat.

All the time, you’ve got John beside him, acting as the antagonist, his protagonist in a way, saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to stay.” John, who knows, and I like this, John knows that Rick really wants to save the boys even though Rick says he doesn’t. That helps me a lot. I can write those little moments.

Of course, the big beat with Rick is that they find the kids, and he’s depressed. He goes down instead of out. Then you’ve got the interesting question of… This I had to argue out with both John and Rick, who had the idea to use anesthetics. I got it wrong the first time round, because it worked in my structure to have John suggest it. The real Rick said to me, because we’d shown them the script. This is no secret to them, of course. I always do that, by the way.

When I’m dealing with real, live people, I will say, “You can see anything I’m writing at any time.” Of course. It’s their life. I said to them originally, “You’re going to find this really peculiar, because I’m going to invent two characters, Rick and John. I have to.” They were really good about that. They got it. Then lots of stuff I just made it. They said, “That’s fine.” He did say, “That was my idea.” I restructured that beat.

Then you bring in the next group of divers. In the cut version, they come very abruptly. I wrote several scenes that introduced them, but it’s a long movie. Something has to go. You have the relationship with the incoming divers, which again reflects on Rick, because Jason is the one who thinks Rick’s a little bit [inaudible 00:30:19]. You then realize Rick is the leader. He has gone along with this idea. The failure will be his failure. We’re now emotionally engaged on his behalf, not just the boys’. That then takes you through the various beats of finding semi-failure along the way, until the moment when they’re sitting in a group and they’re just laughing. You can feel the release of the nervous tension and at the moments when he’s resisted contact with the families. I had so many moments I could track. There he is hugging families or being hugged I should say, because he doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s a gift really to just track all this. I did give him a little speech, which is not in the film, right at the end when they’re in their minibus and they’re going back to the airport. He’s saying, “You know what? This is something that should not have worked. This is like a one in a thousand chance that it worked, but it did work. You know what [inaudible 00:31:18] make a movie out of it, and everybody else think it’s easy.” I rather like that, but no, it didn’t come to pass.

**John:** The movie probably wanted to be over before they would’ve had a chance for that moment. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s in the movie and the dialog that’s not in the movie, because they both help in form. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s not in the movie, because there’s not a lot of talking. We have our characters mostly doing the work that they’re there to do.

There’s this misconception obviously that the screenwriter just writes the dialog and the director does everything else, but it sounds like if I’m reading the script, I get a very good sense of what those characters are, what’s going through those characters’ heads, even as they are silently observing, moving their way through the cave, stopping to get abreast.
I’m thinking back to Colin Farrell’s character half freaking out because his kid has woken up. There’s all those moments. Those were all scripted. I think it’s crucial that we remind people that those moments are in the script from the start.

**Bill:** That’s right. You’re right. If you were to see one of the drafts towards the end, you’d get a lot more dialog. It’s not so much more dialog, because there are several scenes, basically dialog scenes. This always happens to me. I guess I overwrite. I’m always writing dialog scenes which I think really help to get us sympathetic with the characters. They’re too long, and in the end the whole thing goes. The people along the way read them. Your point is correct. That feeds into their understanding. The director reads them.

I have no complaints about what is cut out. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve had the embarrassing experience of writing scenes that seem to me to be vital, having them cut out, and realizing they weren’t necessary. Each time, I think, “When am I going to learn? When am I going to write the 90-page script that they shoot instead of the 120-page script?” I don’t know why I don’t learn, but that’s the process. I’ve worked with some actors.

A million years ago, I wrote a film called First Knight with Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Sean Connery sat me down in his hotel room in London with a scene, and he said, “Look, I want to go through the scene with you. I’ll do my lines. You do the other person’s lines.” I did the other person’s lines. I would do the line, and Sean went, “Ah.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” He never spoke a word. It all made perfectly good sense. He said, “Would you mind if we just [inaudible 00:34:01].” Maybe you have to start with more and hone it down.

You are dependent on the actors, because once you start dispensing with the words, you’ve structured it so that the audience knows what the actor is likely to be feeling, but the actor has got to deliver that without the acting. In my opinion, acting has become so sophisticated now. Actors are so extraordinary, film actors. You can see what they’re thinking. I can think of moments like the little scene where Harry Harris is being asked to use his skills [inaudible 00:34:46]. He’s saying no, and the other two, Rick and John, are disagreeing on how to deal with him. There aren’t many words, but that little trio, you can see what each one is thinking right the way through. There’s a couple of shots at the end that are just faces saying nothing. That’s also very skilled directing, of course.

**John:** It is. There’s a moment in Worst Person in the World, a film from last year, where a woman makes a fundamental life decision, and we see it completely on her face. It was the screenwriting that got us from her leaving a party to standing at that place and being able to think. The natural instinct would be for her to say something to someone to make sure we understood that, and yet the power of a camera and a really talented face, we can see all that information. It’s a great lesson to learn.

Let’s circle back to you say you overwrite and you need to learn how to write the 90-page version of a thing. Also, it’s just recognizing that the process of making stories is always going to be too much. There’s going to be a process of discovery there, so giving yourself permission to overwrite there a bit and recognizing and hopefully having good collaborators who will see, “Yes, there may be too much here, but we need all this too-much-ness in order to find the movie that we’re also going to want to make.”

**Bill:** I would definitely agree with that, yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about your relationship with Ron Howard. At what point did he come into the process? Was he there from the start or only after you had a draft? What was his involvement in the film?

**Bill:** He was not there from the start. It was pretty much completely written. What happened was the producer, PJ, hired me. At that point, he had an arrangement with another director, a very good director. I worked on it with that director. I did I guess speed drafts. We kind of ran into a problem of how we saw the movie between me and the director. I have huge respect for the directors that I work with. I tried very hard to deliver the kind of tone that he was looking for, but it ran counter to my instincts. I argued it very strongly with him, but he was very clear what he wanted. There came a point when I said to PJ, “I have to leave the project. You must get another writer who’s in sync with your director.” They had a big think about it. The director had a big think about it. To his enormous credit, he said, “Look,” because PJ and Gabi Tana, the other producer kind of liked my take.

He said, “Look, I’ll withdraw. It’s not a problem.” He withdrew. I then proceeded with my version, which was, to put it very, very simply, more emotional. He was much more action and repression, which is a great way to go. I’m a very warmhearted person. We proceeded in my version. I did several drafts until both the producers were thinking, “This is good. We will shop it.” They then took it to their agents in LA. That is when it went to an agent, and that’s when Ron picked it up. Ron then came in, and I then worked with Ron for several more drafts.

**John:** We both had the experience of an existing draft and a director comes on board. It’s both a conversation with the director about what movie they see versus the movie that you wrote and what they need. You’re trying to explain what your intentions were with things. They’re trying to explain what they think they actually need from a movie. What guidance can you give to a writer listening to those conversations with the director? How do you approach that in a way that both sides benefit?

**Bill:** The first thing is you have to not be defensive as a writer. We writers have a very tough time, because we are not in control. That is the reality. If you want to be in control, be a writer-director, which I have also done. You are not in control. The director is going to have to make this damn movie. It’s no good, you demanding the director executes your vision. He’s going to execute his or her vision. Don’t be defensive. What you do is when the director says, “I think they need more of this or less of this,” what you’ve got to think is, why is he saying that? What’s happening here? Is there a valid point here? If there is, how can I enact it in a way that fits my vision? I’ve had some bad ones, but mostly they’ve been good. My experience has been that it improves when you do this.

I always tell people, and this applies to development as well, if you get notes, don’t obey the note. If the note says, “We think the dog should jump over the cliff,” don’t say, “Okay, I will write it.” Say to yourself, “Why did they say that? Haven’t I got a better way of giving them what they want?” because you will have, because you’ll understand the whole thing. They’re probably looking just at that beat. That’s the problem you have with some directors. Some directors aren’t good at overall structure. I’m talking now about really emotional storytelling. They’re good at a scene. They know that they can make a scene work. They can make that scene work when the guy comes in and we don’t even know what he’s seeing and he’s incredibly scared.

[inaudible 00:40:23] how that impacts down the road. What you have to do is say, “Okay, they want an emotional high point, which I have not delivered. I’ve got to find a way to deliver it, and then they’ll be happy at that point.” If you have a problem, I have had this with some extremely famous directors who have said, “I think there should be a scene like this here.” I’ve said to the team, “That will make no sense. That will wreck the whole flow.” They’ve said, “The boss has asked for it. You’ve got to do it.” I then do it. In my experience, always those the projects that don’t get made, because the director hasn’t understood what the story is, but the director is too powerful. There are too many directors, unfortunately, who never get anybody telling them boo. It’s just extraordinary to me.

I’ve said to the team, “Just tell him it doesn’t work.” They said, “You don’t do that. He’s our boss, literally our boss in every way.” [inaudible 00:41:25]. Mostly, you should be able to collaborate with the director in such a way that the director feels really safe with you as a writer, that the director can say, “I want more here and less here,” and you go, “Yes, fantastic, let’s do this. We’ll find the way together.” That is really exciting.

I have to say, with Ron, he was extremely respectful. I think he had taken on a highly developed script. It had been through many processes. His attack, it was a combination. It was very process-driven. He really wanted to understand how he was going to film the process and what impact that would have. A lot of his changes related to that. Other changes were he wanted more of a particular element. For example, he wanted more of the guy called the water guy, Thanet, who is up on the mountain diverting the water. Let me think. What else was there?

We did talk quite a lot. We played around quite a lot with changing some of my structure. We talked, and I was willing to, but in the end, we stuck with it. He will say that the last time we were on a giant Zoom together to talk about this at this stage, he said that the thing about the screenplay he received was that the structure was there already. He didn’t have to really mess with that too much. He’s a very nice guy.

**John:** He’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects. He’s lovely.

**Bill:** He’s just amazing. I just wanted him to be able to do what he needed to do. Then the other thing that happened was he started shooting it, and I was not present on the shoot. I was in Australia. He was on the phone to me or on the email to me quite a lot, saying basically for budget reasons, we can no longer do this scene or that scene, “Find a way to write the beat that happens there somewhere else in another way,” or, “Could you please add it in to the existing scene?” There was quite a lot of that, which I was of course completely willing to do. I think you need to be in that sense a kind of craftsman who is there. “We’re now sailing the ship and it’s leaking. Please could you plug that gap?”

**John:** Absolutely circling back to this, in the first time you’re talking with the director or really anyone else in the project, a friend always reminds me that as the screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. You see the whole thing there. You have everything that’s on the page, but you also have a whole movie in your head. Sometimes those initial conversations are really just aligning what movies is the director seeing in their head and trying to find the overlaps there and fix the things that aren’t overlapping quite right.

In those conversations, it varies director to director for me, but sometimes you are spending three days talking about the color of the paint on the walls, but that’s really the process for just trying to align your visions for what things really look like and what’s important to them or what’s important to you. You never know what it’s going to be as you start the process.

**Bill:** I don’t get into those sorts of conversations. I’m happy for him to paint the walls whatever color he wants really. What I want to know… I say I want to know. I don’t have any power over this person. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I would like to know that the director sees the same movie as me, but to be honest, I never know until it’s done, until it’s actually being shot, because people do the oddest things.

**John:** bill, you’ve made your living as a playwright and as a film writer and director. Do you have any experience running television shows or doing any of the series where the writer would be more in control, the writer would be telling the director what to do? Have you had that experience?

**Bill:** Not in the modern form. I’m doing a Netflix TV series right now, writing it. You’re right, it is very, very different in power terms. Back in the day, when I was working with BBC, I did I think four TV movies. The interesting thing about the BBC and television then is my name was the name that was in the newspapers, to the rage of the directors. It was William Nicholson’s latest. I really of course liked that.

I really disliked the filmed by thing, where directors act as if they’re created the whole thing. I’ve softened over the years. I used to be quite militant about this. I’ve done two movies myself as a director/writer. That has taught me to respect directors very, very highly. I do realize I need them. I just wish that the world out there understood what screenwriters do. I don’t know why this hasn’t got through. We need a movement like Cahiers du Cinema, which elevated the directors. We need a movement.

Maybe you’re right. Actually, it’s happening. It’s happening in TV. The people who create the great TV series are the writers. Our day is coming. That’s fantastic. You get astonishing things like Succession, which I don’t know who’s the hero of that, whether it’s Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Prebble, or whoever, I don’t quite know what’s going on, but somebody is doing something completely brilliant there. They’re also superbly directed, I have to say. Again, let’s all try not to quarrel over who gets the credit and be grateful if we can together do something good, because most things don’t quite work.

**John:** Circling back to Thirteen Lives, so much of the film is in Thai. It’s in a very specific Northern Thai dialect. I’m guessing you don’t speak it. At what point in the process did you need to think about how much of the film was going to be in Thai versus how much was going to be in English and what the balance was going to be. Did you need to interact with any of those language experts or did that process come later down?

**Bill:** It came much later. I knew all along that a large part would be in Thai. That was all part of respect for the people we were filming and not turning it into an outsider attack. I write it all in English, and it goes on the page in bold italics, meaning translate this please. The team making it under Ron then bring in Thai translators, but not just Thai translators, Thai filmmakers who are also Thai, who tell me about the culture. Back comes the message. You have this scene where this Thai Navy Seal speaks to his boss, his captain, in a quite strong way. They would never do that. That does not happen. We have total respect for authority people. You’ve just [inaudible 00:48:20] I change it. I just simply rewrote. That happened quite a bit.

I had a whole lot to do with the governor here, who had actually a very interesting story. I originally made him a rather ironic, wry guy, who was constantly saying, “They’ve set me up for the fall here.” There’s a little bit of it in the movie, but I had quite a lot more. I was told he would not speak of his superiors in this way. Even though he thinks it, even though it’s true, he just wouldn’t, so out it went.

**John:** Probably both choices about how that character would respond but also what the movie wants to do. The movie is so focused on the question of will we be able to get the boys out, anything that feels like it’s not to that point is going to be on the chopping block. It’s hard for it to last in the film. You made choices about how much we’re seeing or are aware of these characters’ personal lives before they get involved. Basically, the moment anybody shows up Thailand, we’re never seeing their homelands again.

Basically, we’re only going to stay near the caves here in Thailand. Talk to us about decisions to show Colin Ferrell’s home life and what you were trying to do there, the few glimpses we had outside of Thailand. Were there more scenes? What were your decisions about showing their life before they get to Thailand?

**Bill:** No, there were not more scenes. I knew that I wanted to just tell you enough about them to give you some anchor for how they were going to make their emotional journey and then just show you enough at the end to remind you where they’re come from and what it means. They’re two different stories, obviously. With Rick, Viggo Mortensen, he lives alone in this chaotic, machine-filled space. You would kind of sense that the guy’s asocial just from the images of him. Also, there was quite a bit of dialog there when he’s talking on the phone to John.

With John, with Colin Ferrell, all I needed to do was show that he’s divorced and he’s got a kid. Obviously, he’s going to identify the kids in the cave with his cave. I don’t need to say that. You just plant that, and that’s there.

In the early versions, there was another thread. They had a kind of office, the British Cave Rescue Council. There was a woman there who fed information back all the time. We did think whether to have her in England, but I really decided no, this is one of those stories where you need to maintain the pressure cooker, get them into the pressure cooker and keep them there. That was a very conscious decision, which is why I didn’t want to go into the home life of any of any of the Thai characters once the pressure had begun. I think it’s sort of like Aristotelian unities. It’s a unity of time and place, and they’re up against the clock, and just hold it there. Don’t play games. Don’t do cutting around with time. Give us a sense of the passage of time.

**John:** [inaudible 00:51:29] your theater background, it did feel like once you created the space of the camp outside the cave, that was your main set. That’s where everything has to happen within the space and within this place and time, which I guess helps answer the question of your decisions about which of the Thai parents we were going to follow, which ones we were going to identify and have some ongoing relationship with. You pick one mother, one father who we come back to more often and we [inaudible 00:51:55] which kid is —

**Bill:** And a boy. The boy, I made him up. That didn’t happen [crosstalk 00:52:00].

**John:** The smallest boy, yeah.

**Bill:** The smallest boy did happen.

**John:** That’s right, the boy [crosstalk 00:52:05].

**Bill:** The one who doesn’t go into the cave and who was out there. I wanted one boy who represented [inaudible 00:52:11]. That didn’t actually happen. They all went into the cave. The smallest boy, that was a real thing, because I had that in the research. Obviously, the mother is a competent mother, the father is a competent father, etc. All their names are changed.

**John:** Let’s talk about structure overall, because you have a time structure, which is very natural for day one, day two, and seeing the progression. With each day, there’s a change that has happened. Sometimes it’s the weather. The way that the weather is a huge villain in the course of the stories is really interesting. You also have the decision to overlay the map and show where things were and how far deep we are into things. Was that a decision that was made on a script level or does that come later on in the filmmaking process, the literal, how deep we are into the cave system structure.

**Bill:** That was not me. That was in the cutting room, in the final stages. That was Ron and his team doing that in the final stages, looking at it and saying, “It is really important that people know how far in we are.” In the longer version of the script, I’d incorporated that information in the dialog and things like that. That didn’t survive. I thought it was really good.

**John:** I think it’s a really smart choice.

**Bill:** It was really smart. In a kind of clever way, there was more information you could take in, but it didn’t matter. You got a visual sense. That was not me.

**John:** I think it’s another thing taken probably from some of the great documentaries of the last 10 years in that sense of as you see somebody climbing a peak in Yellowstone or a peak in Yosemite, seeing how far up they are, and it was just the right choice to give us that sense of-

**Bill:** It’s a very interesting challenge. How much does the audience realize? How much have they picked up? How much do they know? What do they need turning? On the whole, you’ve got to be ahead of your audience. If they’re left saying, “We’re underwater. I have no clue where I am,” which of course is the case. How could they? What we did was, and this was in the script, I characterize stages along the journey. I said, “This will be the stalactite one. This will be Chamber 3. This will be the T-Junction.” The T-Junction was what they called it and Pattaya Beach was what they called it. I gave a description of each stage so that when they built the sets, they would look a little bit different and would give us a bit of a sense that we’re not just always in a bath. We did think about that ahead of time.

**John:** You said you’ve written the script. You’re heading into production. Obviously, casting has happened. Was there a table reading? Was there any chance for everyone to get around tables to read this together? It doesn’t seem like it would have been necessary for this, but was there some sort of [inaudible 00:55:01]?

**Bill:** I simply don’t know, because it all happened in Australia, and I wasn’t there. They all had to fly out and go into quarantine for two weeks, and then they were in their bubble. I would say about this table read, which I’ve had on every film, I absolutely hate them.

**John:** Tell me why.

**John:** There’s a couple of reasons. For some reason, the person who reads the directions is the third AD, and he can’t read. That sounds like an illiterate monotone, which is awful, and I’m dying. I learned after a bit to say, “Let me read the directions, and I’ll put some [inaudible 00:55:37].” The second reason is the actors find it very, very difficult to know whether they’re performing or not. On the whole, they don’t want to perform. They don’t want to perform, because why would they? It’s a weird set of circumstances. The confident ones don’t want to perform because, “Why should I?” The un-confident ones think that they’ll perform and be found wanting. People will say, “Why did you cast him?” The whole thing is awful for everybody. I’ve come out of every reading thinking it is a disaster.

I wasn’t present at the readthrough of Gladiator. I was involved in the project. It was such a disaster that they practically pulled the whole thing. That’s when I came on board. I think they’re terrible, these readings. They do have a function, because I almost think you should get a whole team of completely different people to do the reading. The tech people, they need to know a little bit what this thing feels like. The actors, it’s hard.

**John:** I will make a mild case for the opposing view. I’ve had table readings that have gone as badly as Gladiator’s table read, where it’s just like, wow. Everything you’re saying about an actor choosing not to perform, the risk of performing, definitely been there, seen it. My argument for them is that it makes it clear that all the actors that have at least read the whole script once, because so often, actors, they’re reading, they’re focused on their part. It’s a chance to say, “Oh, you know what? This scene actually pertains to the scene before this scene.” It’s the whole thing feeling together chronologically for once, because movies are going to be shot out of sequence and it’s going to be hard to tell what things are where. For one moment, everyone was together.

The other thing, if anyone’s listening and this is helpful, I will tend to do, if there is going to be a table reading, I will make a special version of the script that is just for the reading, that greatly cuts down the scene description so it’s just getting you right into the dialog there, and it’s all clear. If we’re going to summarize things, everyone’s looking at the same page. I hear you there.

**Bill:** That is very smart. I think you’re quite right. The table reading should be treated as a kind of performance in its own right and thought about and almost directed. Each of the actors could be told, “Don’t worry about it. Just do it clearly. That’s all. You don’t need to emote if you don’t want to.” I have been at readings. When Shadowlands was done as a reading, it was amazingly successful, and it made everybody feel this is going to work. I just wish that happened every time.

**John:** My movie Go had a great table reading, and some other ones haven’t. Of course, in theater, the idea of a reading is actually super common, and those are ways you get financing and get to the next level. Everyone understands that it is a form of a performance there, but with movies it’s a special thing. Really, you have to ask yourself, who should be in the room for that? Is it just for the filmmakers and the actors? Do producers need to be in there? Do financiers need to be in there?

**Bill:** I really like your idea of having a special text for the reading, because that’s great, because you want to maintain the pace. I’ve sat there while somebody reads through a whole page of directions in a [crosstalk 00:58:53] tone where it needs to be tightened, performed, and move on so that we can get the feeling of it. I hadn’t thought of that. If it ever happens to me again… It’s quite a lot of work though, isn’t it, doing your own-

**John:** For you or for me, maybe it’s two hours of time to take and cut it down. If it saves a lot of drama down the road, I’ll do it.

**Bill:** Do you read directions yourself?

**John:** No. We’ll find somebody who’s actually a talented actor who’s not in the production to do it.

**Bill:** Good. Good.

**John:** My friend Dan Ethridge is fantastic at that, so I will draft him whenever possible.

**Bill:** You’ve thought about this much more than me. You’re smart.

**John:** During production, obviously this is happen in Australia. At most, you’re having a phone call or Zoom with Ron, so you’re not super involved in that. At any point doing post, do you come back in? Do you take a look?

**Bill:** Yes.

**John:** Was there anything for you to do?

**Bill:** Yeah. This is entirely at Ron’s discretion. He’s a nice guy, and he’s also a smart guy. It was cut in London. He said would I please come in, see the first assembly, talk about it. We talked together. I came in and saw the shorter version, and we talked about that a lot. I wouldn’t say that I did anything tremendously significant, but I was certainly there watching it and talking about it with him.

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** I was incredibly grateful for that. A lot of directors are frightened of writers, because they know the writer knows more than them what’s supposed to be there. They don’t want the writer on set. They don’t want the writer in the cutting room. They didn’t want the writer getting too much credit. Ron is not like that.

**John:** That’s terrific. This movie came out theatrically limited but then also on streaming. Did you have a chance to see this with an audience?

**Bill:** Not really. As you know, MGM, who financed it, got bought by Amazon after we finished the movie. It didn’t get the screen life that we would’ve liked. I’m old-fashioned. I like cinemas. I like theaters. They did put on a… This was in London. There was a premier in LA, which I didn’t go to. I was obviously invited, but I chose not to make the journey. There was a good screening in London. We were in France. We got the train back for that evening, and the train was delayed three hours in the Channel Tunnel, to my fury, so I actually missed about half.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Bill:** We got into the theater. I haven’t seen it much with an audience. Now it’s seen as a streaming event, and people see it separately. I’ve got this odd feeling. I don’t really know how people have responded to it.

**John:** I watched it again. I watched it last night at home, streaming it. My instinct though is that there’s going to be some big cheers when the first kid is brought on the stretcher up through the pulley system. That was a really emotional moment for me is seeing that the kids are getting out but also that everyone is there pushing the sled out together. I feel like that’s the moment where you’re going to get some cheers in the audience. I’m frustrated that you didn’t get a chance to hear those cheers, because I feel like it’s going to be a great sound. Bill, can you talk to us about what’s next? Are there any things that you’re working on that we can discuss?

**Bill:** I’m always a little bit shy, for the simple reason that I never know they’re actually going to get made.

**John:** Same.

**Bill:** That’s the life we lead. I’m doing a cinema movie. It’s with a very good director right now. It seems to be going a bit slowly. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I’m waiting for my next instructions on that. I mentioned I’m doing a TV series for Netflix, which is about the crypto scam. It was a podcast actually called The Missing Crypto Queen-

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** … about a Bulgarian woman who created a crypto coin. It’s a wonderful story.

**John:** I think we actually maybe discussed that on our podcast in terms of How Would This Be a Movie. I’m excited that you’re doing that, because she’s a really flamboyant character if I remember correctly.

**Bill:** Exactly. It’s wonderful. It’s all about why do people believe what they believe, which is central to our current experience everywhere, politics everywhere. I’m just doing the first two episodes of that. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. I’m also doing a small British movie about a guy, which is a true story again. You see, these are all true stories. I don’t like adapting novels. I don’t do it, because somebody else has [inaudible 01:03:41] the characters and invented the story.

Real life is a complete mess, so it needs people like me to come in and turn it into craft, something out of that. That’s what I like doing. I’m doing a small movie about a person who goes mad. The fun of it is, it’s kind of implying that madness is a choice, which actually serves a purpose. He thinks he’s a secret agent saving the planet. He ends up being sent to hospital and given heavy drugs and so on. You realize that being a secret agent saving the planet beats his real life. You kind of get why a guy would do that. Essentially, it’s dealing with the fact that all of us are prone to picking up clues around us and creating a narrative of our life that enables us to feel good about ourselves.

**John:** Absolutely. You are the story you’re telling about yourself.

**Bill:** Yeah. I’m doing that. There’s a couple of other longer-term projects. Those are three that are actually on my desk right now.

**John:** That’s amazing. Bill, an absolute pleasure talking with you and meeting you here. Congratulations on the film. I’m really excited to see these next projects as well. A delight. Thank you so much.

**Bill:** It’s a great pleasure for me as well, talking to somebody who gets these things, a fellow. I love it. Thank you so much.

**John:** Thank you.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Have a great night. Bye.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Craig, we are back in this moment. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two TV shows to recommend to you and to our listenership. First is Andor, which everyone says it’s by far the best Star Wars series. It’s just phenomenal. It’s just really, really good. Craig, I was thinking about you as I was watching it, because there was this scene, I think in the maybe second or third episode, where the Empire, or what will become the Empire, is having this board meeting, just planning meeting. It’s in this big white room. It’s just so smartly done. It’s everything you always talk about how you admire the Empire for its efficiency and for its organization. I thought of you. If I could find the clip snippet of it, I want to send it to you, because you will just love that when you get a chance to watch it.

**Craig:** Obviously, I always root for the Empire. I’m just so confused after all these movies. How do they keep losing? It just doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone so scared of them? All they do is lose.

**John:** I’ll say that the whole premise of Andor is basically how does the revolution start, how does the rebellion start. It’s really smartly done. It’s no surprise. It’s coming from Tony Gilroy, who’s a great writer and is running this show. Just so, so smart. Everyone tells you to watch Andor. I’m just the 19,000th person to tell you to watch Andor, because really, it’s worth it.

The other thing is Fleishman is in Trouble, which I don’t hear people talking as much about. So good. As I recognize the names going past, Susannah Grant, who is of course fantastic, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote the book and she wrote almost all the episodes of the series. It’s so smartly done. The POV storytelling on it is really, really great. Fleishman is in Trouble, another great thing to watch. That is on Hulu in the United States.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is an article. It is in Wired. I don’t know if you’re going to need a subscription or not. Maybe Wired does a couple of free articles a month. This one is called Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira. It’s a really interesting story about this class of workers called digital nomads, who work entirely virtually, and so can work anywhere, but they’re alone. These are a lot of people who don’t have families, etc, so they’re stuck alone in their homes. They want to go places. They can go anywhere.

This Portuguese island basically on the southern coast of Madeira created what they call a digital nomad land. It’s basically like we built some homes and some work areas for you, communal work areas. You can come here, live here, and you’ll have a community, instead of being alone. Theoretically, this would also be great for the actual island itself and the people who live there, because it would help the economy. It doesn’t work exactly the way they were thinking, but it’s really interesting, because I never considered this is a new way of building a community. All of our legacy communities are built around decisions that were made god knows when, based on there’s a lake nearby or there’s a river or whatever.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** This is like, “Ah, it seems like a good spot to put a bunch of people with laptops,” so a new way of creating communities. Check out Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira in Wired.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week and our show for this year. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Again.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Still.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Michael Lane. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segment. Reminder to use the promo code. What is the promo code, Craig?

**Craig:** Onion.

**John:** Promo code onion to save $10 on your annual subscription, but only through January 15th, so do that.

**Craig:** Onion. Onion. Onion.

**John:** Onion. Onion. Onion. Stick around after the credits, because we’ll be discussing our non-writing aspirations for 2023. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, I sprung this on you. We didn’t have time to prepare any sort of plans for 2023, but not work, because obviously you’re going to have a very busy work 2023. Maybe I’ll start with some of mine, and you can think of what some of yours are going to be for 2023. I’m excited to be DM’ing again. It looks like we’re going to finish up the campaign that you’ve been so generously hosting for the last three years.

**Craig:** It’s a long one.

**John:** It’s a long one.

**Megana:** Wow.

**John:** When you finish up, we’ve discussed in the group, I’m going to try to run a much, much shorter, not going to go three years, kind of campaign. I’m excited to get back into that and look at who our group is. We have a large group, but not everyone can come every time, so trying to plan for things that will work will if people are just gone, so their tokens aren’t just sitting there idly, that we can actually do things every week with the people that we have on hand.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2023.

**Craig:** I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to just play again. I guess that’s not really an aspiration. It’s going to happen. It’s an inevitability.

**John:** It’s going to happen. We’re going to finish. We’re going to finish the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and then we’ll do something new.

**Craig:** Yes, we will. When it comes to non-writing aspirations, I don’t really have specific ones, or at least none that are tied to a new year. I have an ongoing project, which is to catastrophize less, take deep breaths, put anxiety in its proper perspective, and remind myself… Am I allowed to curse in this Bonus Segment?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Everything will be fucking okay. That’s great.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:11:27].

**Craig:** That’s what I’m working on. Megana, I feel like you and I are very similar in this regard.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Tell me, what do you do, or first of all, is that part of your non-writing aspiration for 2023? If it is, how do you go about it?

**Megana:** I think it is. I am also trying to stretch more in 2023 because I’m getting older.

**Craig:** That’s nice. Yeah, you are.

**Megana:** I am. I think that getting myself to a place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out,” and moving my body in some way is always incredibly helpful. That is a new tactic I’m taking for 2023.

**Craig:** I like it, stretching.

**Megana:** Instead of just panicking alone in my room.

**Craig:** Right, and tightening up in a little stress ball.

**John:** Stretching also one of the things that you can do while you’re doing something else. You can stretch while you’re watching TV. Increasingly, I will just not sit on the couch. I will sit on the floor and try to stretch while watching Andor or Fleishman is in Trouble, because I can still fully enjoy the show, but I’m also hopefully getting my hamstrings a little less messed up.

**Megana:** I have a standing desk, but if we’re being honest, I don’t stand at it very often.

**Craig:** You mean your sitting desk? That’s your sitting desk, Megana.

**Megana:** Now it’s going to be my stretching desk. It’s going to be my stretching and less panic desk.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Megana:** Do you have a standing desk?

**Craig:** I do. Like you, it’s really… Look. Here’s the deal. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do. I know what I might do. Part of everything is also just giving myself a break.

**Megana:** You deserve it.

**Craig:** I do a lot. You know what? I don’t want to use the standing desk. Screw it. I don’t want to.

**John:** If listeners are looking for things to help them think about their year and they want to try a book, a book that actually was genuinely useful for me was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which really talks about how the best way to change your habits and get rid of some bad habits and start some good habits is just make them unavoidable. It’s literally like putting your running shoes by the door so you’re going to be tripping over them if you don’t do it. It’s making sure you’re setting yourself up for success. If people are looking for a book or something to read over the holidays, to make them think better about what they want to do in the new year, how to get that achieved, that’d be a good bet, Atomic Habits.

**Craig:** If your New Year’s resolutions or aspirations are to read less and sit more, I just want you to know I’m your patron saint.

**John:** We’re going to support that. Craig, a thing I’m going to try to not do in 2023 is recreate Twitter. I’m not going to try to, because obviously, Twitter is going to… It’s not dead, but it’s not going to be the same thing it was. If it’s around six months from now, six years from now, it’s still not going to be as useful to me as it used to be. I’m not going to try to find the new Twitter. I just don’t think that’s going to be a goal. I’m going to find other ways to encounter the ideas in people that I used to encounter and stumble across on Twitter. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be. I can still miss the things that were great about it. I’m not going to try to look for the next version of it.

**Craig:** Which is totally fine. I think you probably won’t have to try too hard. I think that there are people right now salivating and rubbing their hands together, going, “We sense a vacuum.” That said, Twitter never really made money. I don’t know if anybody necessarily… They’re not going to want to recreate Twitter either, but they’re going to make something. Something’s coming. You remember the fantastic opening credit sequence for Silicon Valley?

**John:** Oh yeah. Great. The constantly churning, 3D, top-down view of all these companies building up and exploding.

**Craig:** Exactly. They would change it over the seasons to reflect other implosions and new risings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know change is afoot. It just doesn’t stop. The churn doesn’t stop. Something new is going to come along that’s going to take over our lives soon enough.

**John:** What it has started doing more of as Twitter’s been declining is just going back to my RSS readers, the blogs I follow and stuff like that. That was actually really good technology. RSS is what’s actually powering podcasts like Scriptnotes to let new episodes come out there. People can use that for posts as well. I’m going to try to do a little bit more blogging on johnaugust.com. The thoughts that I used to try to cut down to 280 characters to fit on Twitter, I will expend a few minutes to make a longer blog post.

**Megana:** Nice.

**Craig:** Been a lot of that going on.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a very good 2022. I’m so excited to be doing more Scriptnotes with you in 2023.

**Craig:** Oh wait, we’re still doing this? Oh my god.

**Megana:** Wait, Craig, was that your answer for your resolution?

**John:** Catastrophize less?

**Megana:** Catastrophize less?

**Craig:** Yeah. What did you think it should be?

**Megana:** No, I think that that’s great. I also think that you deserve more vacation in 2023.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s very sweet. I don’t love vacations. I know I’m supposed to.

**John:** Maybe a different definition of vacation. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a beach someplace. It could just be like, Craig, for the next week you just get to play all of the video games.

**Craig:** I do love that.

**John:** I think we both wish a little more of that for you.

**Craig:** Thank you. You guys are very sweet. I wish you guys to have a wonderful and happy new year, no matter what it brings for us, which will be fascinating, no doubt.

**John:** It will be a fascinating year, I’m sure.

**Craig:** We will, as always, look back on this and go, “Aw, you guys didn’t know. You didn’t that the space weasels were coming.”

**John:** So naïve we were.

**Craig:** From the Planet Weasel. Yeah, they’re coming. We didn’t know. Until they do come, let’s have some fun.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [William Nicholson](https://www.williamnicholson.com/) on [IMdB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0629933/)
* [Watch the conversation between John and William here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ22OXQEyos)
* [Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!](https://www.wgfoundation.org/blog/category/FYC)
* [Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Welcome to Digital Nomadland](https://www.wired.com/story/digital-nomad-village-madeira-portugal/) by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
* [Fleischman Is In Trouble](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fleishman-is-in-trouble) on Hulu
* [Andor](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Lane ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/580standard.mp3).