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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/the-worst-of-the-worst).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 378 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to dash hopes, ruin friendships, and destroy things we love most.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** As we talk about why bad things need to happen to characters we love. Plus, we’ll be answering questions about WGA signatories and old TV scripts.

**Craig:** Well that sounds fun.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s good to be back. I’m so sorry I missed – since I’ve been working and traveling, you’re working and traveling, and then I had some needle shoved into my spine last week.

**John:** Oh, no, not good. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. There was a medical professional doing it.

**John:** All the kids are doing it.

**Craig:** All the kids are doing it.

**John:** Yeah, just inject – first it was Juuls, and then they’re injecting things into their spines.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that was why. Initially it was supposed to happen first thing in the morning and our podcast interview with Phil and Matt was going to be in the afternoon, and then they had an adjustment. So when I got out of that thing I was about two hours away from doing the podcast and just feeling really weird and oogie. So, yeah, but I’m back. I’m back.

**John:** He’s back. He’s no longer oogie. He’s full of boogie. And you can see Craig in person on December 12th which is tomorrow as this episode comes out. We are doing our live show in Hollywood. Our guests are fantastic. Zoanne Clack of Grey’s Anatomy, Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville, plus Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie and the new Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So we are hyping this show, but for all I know we’re sold out and it’s just–

**Craig:** We should be based on that list of people. By the way, Zoanne Clack I think is a medical doctor.

**John:** She’s a medical doctor. So if Craig has an emergency, she’s the person.

**Craig:** We’ll be talking about my spine on that show. But this is an amazing lineup of people. Totally – everybody from different places – well, we do have three representatives of animation come to think of it. All right. All right. Lord and Miller, I mean, boom, Pam Ribon has got this huge movie out. Everybody is famous. And you know what? Why would anyone not want to go to this show? Plus, me and you.

**John:** Well that’s us. I mean, that’s the other celebrities in this whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sometimes we like try to land a big name and then it’s like, you know what, let us be the big names sometimes.

**Craig:** We’re the big name.

**John:** Zoanne Clack, yes, she’s a medical doctor, but what I really want to talk to her about on the show is how she’s transitioned from being a doctor to writing a show about doctors. Because we get so many questions from listeners about like “I am a police detective, but I want to write detective stories.” And that’s an interesting, fascinating transition. She has done it, so she will be able to tell us what that life is like.

**Craig:** Maybe she can also chat a little bit about our episode where we went through all the mistakes that, like the fake medicine on TV. I wonder if she’s ever – well, you know what, let’s save the Zoanne questions for when we’re with Zoanne.

**John:** Absolutely. We also have another live show to announce. I’m very excited to announce that we are doing a screening of Princess Bride and an episode afterwards in which we’ll be talking about the movie we just saw. So, William Goldman passed away this past month. We are going to be doing a series of screenings for the WGA. This is going to be at the WGA Theater on January 27th. So, Craig and I will watch the movie then discuss the movie afterwards with the audience. And so this is I think going to be open up to everyone. So once there are tickets there will be a link in the show notes for that. I’m very excited to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s one of my favorite movies and William Goldman was a giant. So it’ll be nice. It’ll be nice to do that in his memory.

**John:** Absolutely. And so this will be kind of a trial run also because I’d like to do more of these on the whole. So if this goes well there’s some movies down the road I want to do a deep dive on. We’ll screen them and then do a deep dive. So we’ll let this be a test run.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. We have some follow up. First is from Partis about the Start Button. Craig, do you want to take this?

**Craig:** Sure. OK, so Pardis writes, “The problem with the system you outlined on the podcast where the WGA can be the bad guy if you ask them to, calling the studio on your behalf to enforce the terms of your writing agreement is that the studio knows the WGA is only calling because you, the writer, have asked them to. And since writers are more dispensable than directors, yes, you can get labeled as a diva or as a problem child or as more trouble than you’re worth and lose out on future writing assignments as a result. So, what’s the solution?”

Pardis says, “A system whereby the WGA is alerted to commencement on a feature automatically. And a system whereby the WGA checks on progress for all feature products automatically without asking the writer first. That way the studio can’t blame any specific writer for asking the guild to be the bad guy. There’s just automatic oversight across the board. But, how can we put this system into place if the guild isn’t already alerted to commencement automatically?

“Option number 1: Negotiate a meaningful financial penalty into the next contract for studios that fail to file their paperwork for new project with an X number of days of the agreement being signed. That money can go toward covering the guild’s increased oversight and enforcement costs.

“Option number 2: Create a small financial penalty for writers who fail to alert the WGA that they’ve started work on a new project. Option 2, because then the studio can’t get mad at writers for alerting the WGA about new projects because writers have no choice but to inform the WGA directly less the writers be penalized themselves.”

**John:** All right, so let’s take a look at Pardis’ suggestions here and sort of how Pardis is laying out the situation. So, I think what Pardis is suggesting overall have some merit to it. You want the WGA to be the bad guy. You want the WGA to step up and do this work on behalf of writers. And if it feels like the WGA is only calling the studio or only getting involved because the writer complained I can understand that hesitation.

That said, the goal is for this to feel like it is just automatic. It’s like changing the way we’re just doing this on a regular basis. And so that even without a financial penalty for failing to hit the Start Button and report a new project, that it will become a matter of course for writers to do this. And the WGA has increased already the number of enforcement people there are to do that work. And so they are going to be checking up on people anyway. And so regardless of hitting the Start Button or not hitting the Start Button, there’s a lot more outreach to say like, hey, what are you working on, how is this going, and are you being paid on time? Is anything going on? And that is one of the overall goals and functions of the WGA is to make sure that our members are being paid and are treated appropriately.

**Craig:** These ideas, all ideas really, have been discussed ad nauseam since I have been involved in WGA stuff, which is, you know, over 14 years ago or something. But I would say that Pardis you’re not the first person to suggest that we should maybe start penalizing writers. But good luck. It’s not a great idea, honestly, to essentially crack down on writers to solve the problem that is created by studios. We already have enough problems. You’re dealing with writers that are already being abused and now they have to send money to the guild because they’ve been abused? It’s not great.

Can you get a meaningful financial penalty for studios that fail to file their paperwork? No. Probably not. And again when things start is kind of fuzzy. So, the Start Button actually is the best idea I’ve seen to date. And I think it will bear fruit. So I would say, Pardis, patience.

**John:** Related aspect here is that when you are hitting a Start Button or even now if you’re not hitting the Start Button, you are supposed to upload your contracts. And so I have been uploading my contracts. Everyone is supposed to upload their contracts that show all the steps of your deal. When the WGA has this information they can be checking on it independently so they don’t need to necessarily wait for you to say that there’s a problem. They can say like, hey, according to what we have this is what’s happening on this project – is this accurate? And you need to answer that honestly. And so that is a way in which the WGA can become involved, even if you are not reaching out to them to say help me here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hopefully this works the way we would want it to in an ideal situation where the guild is helping you without feeling like they’re bonking you on the head. And in getting in your work process. So, let’s see how it goes.

**John:** Second bit of follow up, a previous One Cool Thing was the show Please Like Me. And last night I was out and randomly bumped into Josh Thomas the creator and star of Please Like Me. And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of what to do when you meet somebody who you’ve only seen their work in person. Because it can be sometimes kind of awkward. So what I did is I said, “Oh hey, you don’t know me, but I thought your show was fantastic and you do great work.” I asked him if he moved to Los Angeles fulltime and is writing here and he is. And then I left him be and let him sort of go on and be about his night.

So maybe we’ll get him on the show at some point and he can talk about what he’s doing here. But as a person who gets approached like Josh Thomas gets approached in that situation I want to talk about sort of best practices when you’re going up to talk to someone whose work you admire, but it’s in a social situation. Because, Craig, you must encounter this, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s not on a daily basis by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen. And mostly people seem to do it well. You know, I haven’t had any weird encounters. Any actor that’s on television has astronomically more of these encounters than you or I. And my guess is just that numbers wise they’re going to run into some odd ducks, probably at least once a day.

**John:** Yeah. So I would just say I would encourage – if there’s a person who is doing great work and you want to say like, oh, I really like the thing you’re doing. It’s good to say that, because sometimes it’s just good to hear that you’re making stuff that the world appreciates. But I would say if you’re going to make that approach plan for an out that’s going to get you out of that conversation within 30 seconds to a minute, because they were going about their life before you interrupted them. And so you want to be able to say what you need to say and then like let them go off and do their thing. If they want to keep engaged, they can engage. But make sure you’re giving them the release to get out of the conversation.

**Craig:** And take a look at their face before you walk up to them, because listen, everybody is a person. Everybody is going through stuff. Sometimes we’re in a nice happy mood, sometimes we’re in a neutral state of mind. Sometimes we’re concerned, we’re running late, we’re sad, we’re nervous. And then we don’t want anyone talking to us. Anyone, by the way. Much less people that we don’t know. So, just take a look. I know it’s hard because – and again, this isn’t something that I think anyone has towards somebody like me – but when people see a movie star in their minds they think you know what it doesn’t matter how they’re feeling and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. This is my moment to shake Tom Cruise’s hand and I’m doing it. Because the rest of my life I shook Tom Cruise’s hand, right? I had that moment. And he’ll get over it and he will. He will. But, you know, it’s not that big – who cares? I guess that’s my whole thing is like who cares.

**John:** My ground zero for getting recognized, well of course Austin Film Festival I get recognized a lot there, which is – I sort of go there knowing that’s going to happen. The lobby of the ArcLight I get spotted a lot. And sometimes at the Grove. And there was one time I was walking through the lobby of the ArcLight and this guy goes, “Wait, you’re that writer guy. You’re good.” I’m like, OK. I guess I’m good. Thank you, random stranger. That’s nice.

**Craig:** You’re that writer guy. Well, that’s pretty much right. This is one of the nice things about living in La Cañada is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. They don’t care.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic which is bad things and bad things happening to the characters that you love. This came up for me this morning because I was working through the third book of Arlo Finch and I was looking at my outline and just looking at how many bad things happen, which is just a tremendous number. I think partly because it is the third and final book, so if something could happen this is the last place where it could happen. But also the character has grown to a place where he can handle some things that he couldn’t otherwise handle. So, there’s a lot of serious stuff that happens in the third book.

But I want to talk about it because I think there’s this instinct to sort of protect our heroes, protect our characters, and it’s hard to sort of get us over the hump of like, no, no, no, you have to – not just allow bad things to happen but make bad things happen to your heroes in order to generate story. And this is really very much probably more a feature conversation than a television conversation because in ongoing series there will be conflict within an episode, but you won’t destroy everything in their life every week. But in features that’s a really important part.

**Craig:** It’s a huge part. And, yes, you’re right. In television you need to make sure that people come back the next week in roughly the same shape you found them. So there will be little mini ups and downs. But in movies we feel narratively like we have to see people torn apart. And this goes all the way back to the bible.

**John:** Oh, the bible.

**Craig:** The story of Job.

**John:** Tell me the story of Job.

**Craig:** I will. And I should mention I don’t believe in anything in the bible. However, the bible is evidence of something. And it is evidence I think of deep seeded instinctive narrative patterns in the human mind. They are expressions of these things that are in us. They are not always sensible or logical, but they are there. So, that’s how I’m going to take a look at the story of Job. It’s a very simple story. Job is a very pious guy. He believes in God. He’s just super godly. And God therefore rewards him with a fortune and health and, I don’t know, bountiful crops, or I don’t know, whatever God would give people. And God is hanging out one day with Satan, as he used to do, and Satan says, “You know, Job only loves you because you reward him.” And this is a general moral conundrum that has been dissected over time. You watch The Good Place, right?

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course, so they refer to this as moral dessert. The idea that you behave well so that you get your reward from whatever metaphysical/supernatural deity you believe in. And God says, “No, no, no, no, no. Job loves me because he’s a good guy. And I’ll prove it. I will remove my protection from him and you go ahead and do whatever you want to him. And you’ll see. He’ll stand by me.” And so that’s what happens. God removes his protection and Satan begins to torment Job – torment him – torment his health, and ruin his crops, and scatter his children. It’s just awful. Like every bad thing you could do to somebody he does to Job. And Job just stands by God.

And in the end, you’re the winner Job, and God rerewards him and gives him even more crops and frankincense or whatever they had back then.

So, why am I bringing up the story of Job? Because there’s a moral inherent to it that I think is why we need, narratively, to torture our characters. And the idea is that our goodliness or our growth or whatever you want to call the evolution of our selves, the betterment of our selves, it doesn’t count to other people unless it is perceived to come at terrible cost.

Now, is that actually true? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to become a better person without suffering. But when it comes to narrative it seems like we need it or we don’t believe the change.

**John:** Yeah. We didn’t see the work. We didn’t see the struggle. We didn’t see sort of the cost and it doesn’t feel like it was merited.

**Craig:** Exactly. So what we like to see is somebody that has experienced a trauma and they’re going to get over the trauma but only by facing it in the most hard and difficult way. They are going to repair a relationship with somebody by that person leaving them. They’re going to appreciate what they have because they lose it all. So, every character starts with this flaw and then we as the writers we torment them and force them to confront it through a series of increasingly difficult trials the way that Satan did to Job. And through that there is this falling apart. Break you down to lift you up. And we call this the low point.

The low point in a movie is the low point because the writer has tortured the hero to the point where they give up. They finally give up. That’s what you have to do is – you’ve lost your, whatever your ego is, and your hubris, and you give up and from that you will rise back. But those moments are so notable. And one of my favorite versions of that is the Team America puke scene which is just perfect. It’s perfect.

**John:** Let’s play a clip from the Team America puke scene.

[Clip plays]

So this scene classically is a character who has lost everything and then sort of loses more and in this case is literally vomiting up the last they have left. But let’s talk about some of those things that a character can lose and list off some of those classic things you’ll see characters losing here.

Some bad things might be to take away their home. So you might literally burn it down, or you might cast them out of society. You might take away their support system, so taking away their friends, their family, the institutions, the organizations that they’re a part of. You might have the rest of the world see them as the villain. And so you have a hero who is being perceived as the villain which is horrible. Incarcerate them. I have a note here sort of incarceration, also the weird case of Paul Manafort at this moment. So as we’re recording this, this is a guy who is going to probably be in jail for the rest of his life and he’s acting really strangely which leads me to believe that there’s something else he could lose, which is always fascinating to speculate on that. There’s something worse than being in prison for all this time and so he’s acting on behalf of that. So figuring out what that is.

You can kill a character. You can lop off a limb. You can force them to act against their own beliefs, so classically they have the daughter kidnapped and so therefore they have to do things that they can’t believe. You can sew tension and conflict between their allies. You can destroy the item they love most, so it’s like he finally gets that car he’s been hoping for his all his life and you destroy that thing.

So, those losses are bad things you’re doing to your character and they’re pretty crucial. If you don’t do some of those kinds of things over the course of your movie it’s probably not a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, what you’re doing is burning away what needs to be burned away. And it’s unpleasant. And we need it to be unpleasant. We need to see this character suffer. What is it, hamartia I think is the Greek word for suffering. And then catharsis is essentially vomiting. Which is one of the reasons why I like that scene so much because they just did it.

Humiliation is something that we see all the time. The writer creates circumstances in which the hero is humiliated. Where they lose all sense of self-worth and pride. We can kill or harm the people they love the most. We can make them feel terribly guilty and confront them with the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s good because it’s tortuous.

There’s that scene, people of our age always remember this moment in the second Superman movie from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s where Superman willingly gives up his power so that he can marry Lois Lane. And he gets beaten up by some guy in a bar. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing because you see someone brought low. I remember seeing that scene in the theater and feeling terrible inside. And it was the same feeling I had when I watched the animated The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe when all the evil Snow Queen and her minions shave the mane off of Aslan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Take his hair away and reduce him to just this pathetic wretch. And, yeah, it’s – you need it. You need it or else when they come back you don’t feel anything.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the timing of when these bad things happen, because there’s a couple different moments over the course of a movie where you see these things happening classically. So, the first is the inciting incident or whatever you want to call that moment early in the story that sort of kicks this story into gear. And so, you know, in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a story where a change has happened. This is the village is raided and the hero’s parents are killed. This is a big change has happened that is starting this story with this character.

Often the end of act one. So you’ve arrived at a new place. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The hero’s house has burnt down. We’re entering a new world. There’s a big change and the hero has lost something. They may be excited about what they’re headed towards, but there is a loss. They’ve crossed into a place where they can’t get back to where they were before.

There’s a lot of times, moments in the second act that are going to be losses, where allies turn on them, where new obstacles arise. There’s a plan that fails, seeing things that were important to the character that we were hoping for for the character don’t come true. And then classically the biggest of these losses, which is probably the vomit scene from Team America, is the end of act two, sort of the worst of the worst, which is you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve lost everything. It should generally be the character’s lowest point, or at least the lowest point in this character and how they’ve evolved over the course of the story. That thing that looked like it was potentially in their reach has been taken away from them. And that’s classically the end of the second act.

**Craig:** It’s the end because there’s nothing left to lose. You, the writer, have beaten it all out of them. They have no pride left. They have no resources. Or whatever it is. You’ve removed the stuff that they were relying on. Their crutches are all gone.

It’s important to note that when you visit these bad things on your character you must do so sadistically. It’s not enough to just have some bad things happen. You have to do them in a way that is deeply ironic and miserable. Especially miserable. Because then oddly the more exquisite the torture the more we feel positively when they overcome it.

So, the example I always think about is Marlin at the beginning of Finding Nemo. He’s a happy fish and he’s there with his wife and their hundreds of little babies. And they’ve found a place to live. And then his wife is eaten and all of the babies are eaten except for one. And that is very bad. But then Pixar understood it’s not bad enough. They have to make that little one disabled. They have to give him a bad fin so that he will need even more protection. And then that’s not enough. He is the one that goes missing. And so you have to go get him. And that’s not enough. In the end you have to let him go into more danger to save a friend. And then that’s not enough. You have to feel like he died there. And in that moment where Marlin thinks that Nemo is dead, he flashes back to holding him as a little egg and if you’re human you cry. Because the torture has been so exquisite. And therefore the relief and joy is beautiful and our appreciation for how far Marlin has come as a character is real.

They earned it. Did I ever tell the story of Jose Fernandez, the pitcher?

**John:** No. Tell me.

**Craig:** So this sort of goes to what I think of as the essential ingredient of character torture is irony. It’s not enough to just sort of make bad things happen. You have to do it in a way that feels ironic, as if the world had conspired against them.

So, it’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. Like a lot of baseball players he came from Cuba. So he had to escape from Cuba and he escaped on a small boat with – it was one of these crowded boats full of refugees and at some point on the voyage the boat gets tossed and turned and someone says, “Someone has gone overboard,” and without even thinking Jose Fernandez just jumps into the ocean to save whoever that person is. And he does. He grabs them. He brings them back on board. He pulls them up. They live. And it turns out that the person he saved was his own mother. He didn’t even know it.

He arrives in the United States and he becomes a baseball player. Not just a baseball player. He is an amazing pitcher. He plays for the Marlins. He is fantastic. He is going to earn many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So, just the kind of dream come true for somebody that had to escape Cuba on a small boat and rescue his mother from drowning.

Unfortunately, two years ago he died. He died in an accident. And if I told you that he died in a car accident you would think that’s bad. But he didn’t die in a car accident. He died in a boating accident.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** And that is ironic in a terrible way. It implies that the universe was doing something. It had its thumbs on the scale so to speak. It is tortuous to think of. And when we write our terrible tortures for our characters I think it’s important for us to think of that. Because – and it’s a sad thing of course – but the worse it is and the more ironic it is the better the ending feels.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about sort of how those bad things come into the story. Because I can think of three main ways you see those bad things happening. The first is an external event. So that’s the earthquake. That’s the world war. In Finding Nemo that is the – is it a shark who eats the fish originally?

**Craig:** No, he gets grabbed by some fishermen who are looking to capture fish to sell, like for aquariums.

**John:** No, but at the very start of the movie where–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it’s like a barracuda or something like that.

**John:** So that’s really an external threat because that – so barracuda is not the primary villain of the story. I don’t remember Finding Nemo that well. That barracuda itself never comes back.

**Craig:** Correct. It was just nature.

**John:** It’s nature actually. So some external force that you cannot actually defeat comes back. But sometimes it is the villain itself who is the character who arrives who is the one who is causing the suffering. So, every James Bond movie. Many fairy tales. Die Hard is an example. So, there’s a personified threat. A villain who is doing the thing that is causing the suffering. That is beginning the suffering.

But in some of my favorite movies it is the hero themselves that is doing the action that is causing the problem. So if you look at Inside Out or Ralph Breaks the Internet or Toy Story, it is the hero who is causing the problem. The hero who is ultimately responsible for the suffering that the characters are going through. And that’s often great writing. Because it gets back to the idea of like what is the character’s flaw and something about that character’s flaw is causing the suffering. And we see them having to address that flaw in order to stop the suffering.

**Craig:** No question. It’s very common with Pixar movies. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Pixar movie where the bad stuff is majority villain driven other than Bug’s Life, where Kevin Spacey, a real life villain, portrayed a villainous grasshopper. But typically in Pixar films – and sort of I guess in The Incredibles, but yeah, mostly they bring it upon themselves because it is more interesting.

**John:** I mean, in The Incredibles movies there’s sort of an attenuated thing where it’s like it’s because of past actions, it’s a boomerang effect that sort of comes back in, but it’s not a thing we saw them do at the start of the movie. It’s not generally responsible for most of the suffering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But movies are about consequences and if characters are allowed to freely make choices and then have to suffer the consequences of those choices, that is good and appropriate and compelling storytelling, especially for a feature which is something that is designed to happen just once.

So, a television show theoretically should be able to repeat itself ad nauseam. A feature is sort of a one-time journey for a character. And so that one-time journey is going to about big steps and big swings and big failures when they happen.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So some takeaway on this idea of bad things happening to your characters. I would say really as you’re breaking a story you have to be thinking about what are the biggest worst things that could happen. And when I say the biggest worst things that are in the universe of your story. So, obviously you can’t stick a tornado in space. But within the context of your movie what are those and what are the character effects for it?

I think so often when we get notes about like well the stakes feel light here, sometimes the proposed solution is to make it be – it’s the end of the world. Like if we don’t do this then everyone else around us dies. I think that sometimes that’s mistaking the bigger scale for more personal consequences for the things that the characters are going through. So, making sure that it feels like a punishment very specifically tailored to this character that you’ve created.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you don’t have to – you don’t have to substitute volume of badness for quality of badness. In the beginning of John Wick the bad guys basically kill his dog. Which in and of itself would be like OK that’s bad, except it was the last gift he received from his deceased wife. That’s all it takes. I’m good.

And, you know, it doesn’t have to be this massive visitation of problems. Sometimes it’s just the cruelty of it really. Little bits of cruelty.

**John:** The Wizard of Oz, she’s trying to take Toto away at the start. That horrible woman is trying to bicycle away with Toto. That’s horrible. And that’s absolutely the right scale of problem for that movie so before the tornado comes that is what we’re experiencing. We can see it from Dorothy’s eyes like this is one of the worst things she can imagine ever happening.

**Craig:** A lot of times I do think about The Wizard of Oz when people start harping on stakes in meetings. Because I’m like what are the stakes exactly? What are the stakes?

**John:** There aren’t stakes in a classic way. It’s not like the Lollipop Guild was being horribly oppressed. It’s not like there was – she ended up changing the world but kind of by accident.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the stakes were that she would get killed or something. I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s really more about how closely we empathize with the character and the stakes are whatever is stakey to them. It’s about what makes them feel. And if you make me feel what they’re feeling, those are stakes. That counts.

**John:** Absolutely. In a previous discussion we talked about want and want versus need, which I think is a false dichotomy. But when characters express their wants they have a positive vision of the future. So they can imagine a future and in that future their life is better because they have this thing that they want. And that’s a positive vision. Fear is a negative vision of the future. And so they are afraid. They’ve seen the future and in the future their life is worse because this thing has happened or has been taken away from them.

That’s really what we’re talking about with these things we’re trying to – these horrors we’re trying to visit upon our characters is that those things that they feared or those things they didn’t even think they had to fear, those are happening to them now in this story and they have to figure out how to deal with it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. First off is James in Napier, New Zealand. I assume it’s Napier, but maybe it’s pronounced a different way. It feels like one of those words where it could be Napier, or Napier.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably Napier.

**John:** Napier. James writes, “How in god’s name do you make sure a TV script is the right length? There’s a lot of flexibility in how feature film scripts can run. I know the one-minute per page rule is a rough guide when you’re writing. TV and radio are much more time-constrained so how do you make sure the script is exactly the right length to start with? And how do you keep it that way during production?”

Craig, you just went through TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re doing this right now. Don’t panic over here, James. It’s no big deal. Generally speaking, you know, we’ve got this rough 30-page/60-page guideline for half an hour or an hour. But the truth of the matter is it’s all guess work. The pages don’t really conform clearly to one-minute per page. Things are going to get cut. Some things are going to be expanded.

The good news is that we don’t really live in the world where the vast majority of television is constrained by rigid time formats. Everything is far more loosey-goosey now which is nice. If you’re writing for network television, different story. But with that point I would say, again, don’t panic. You can edit. And you can speed things up or slow them down editorially. So just generally, you know, get roughly in that zone and that’s what it will be.

And, you know, my experience at least with Chernobyl so far is that the scripts – at least for the first four episodes – are around 59 to 63 pages and they’re all timing out to be about an hour.

**John:** It does work that way. I was talking with Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and iZombie and other shows and Rob hates the one-page-per-minute rule because he feels that sometimes networks try to value it too much. And so the way he writes it doesn’t really match up that well. He believes that you could probably actually do a word count that would more accurately reflect how long something really will take to fill.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. The truth though is that once you start making a show, so iZombie or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or any of Derek’s Chicago shows, they know. Ultimately they get a sense of like, OK, our scripts need to be about this length because this is what the episodes cut out to be. And even then there will be episodes that are running long for a while and they have to find way to get two minutes out of it. And when we had the Game of Thrones creators on, Benioff and Weiss, they were talking about how in the first season their episodes were too short. They didn’t understand sort of how long stuff was going to play. And so they needed to add additional scenes to sort of fill them out because they just didn’t have a sense of how long an episode was going to be based on the script page.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Joe has a question. He writes, “I am a WGA member. I have an offer on the table from a reputable Middle Eastern production company looking to produce a more Western style show. The offer is about 15% less than WGA minimums. They won’t go any higher because they say lower budgets and the Arabic-speaking portion of the MENA territory,” Middle East, I don’t know, “simply doesn’t support it. I asked the WGA and they said flatly I cannot work for any company who is not a WGA signatory.

“I asked my reps and was told the WGA does not have jurisdiction here and becoming a signatory should not be what stands in the way of signing this deal. To be honest, the WGA response rubbed me the wrong way because it felt like they were using me to gain signatories when they didn’t have anything to lose and I did. A job.

“That said, I owe a lot to the WGA. I’m eking out a meager living as a writer and I recognize the WGA is part of that. But I don’t have so much work that I can just turn stuff down willy-nilly. So, does the WGA actually have jurisdiction here?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think there’s probably some situation in which you can be hired by a foreign company as a WGA member and they don’t have to pay you minimums. But this is probably not one of those situations. I know there’s international working rules, essentially one of the things the WGA needs to make sure never happens is that international companies sort of come in and sort of scoop up American writers to really write American things but try to pay them less than that. So I think that is why the WGA’s response is that.

But, Craig, you know more about the rules. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, I have an understanding here, but it will be interesting. I would love to get the WGA’s official position on this. My understanding is that the WGA here is correct. The issue is that Joe is here and the WGA’s jurisdiction covers the United States. It is chartered by the Department of Labor. So, if you are a member of the WGA and you are writing something here in the United States it has to be for a WGA signatory. You cannot go lower than that. Period. The end. Assuming that there is an applicable collective bargaining agreement which obviously there is here.

So, no, you can’t do that. Listen, Sony, right, owns Columbia. We call them Sony now. Well obviously Sony is a Japanese company. So why wouldn’t Sony just start saying everybody who works for Columbia Pictures, we’re actually employing you under the Japanese branch of Sony, so you don’t have to do WGA. No. That doesn’t work that way. At all.

**John:** So I suspect that where we could get to with Joe is if this company was willing to fly you over to the Middle East and put you up there and you were doing your writing services there–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** They could pay you less than that and that would not be a great situation for you. So not only are you giving up 15% of this money, which by the way 15% of scale is not a ton of money. I just feel like they could find that money for you. But, you are giving up your credit protections. You are giving up kind of all the stuff. Health and pension. You’re giving up much more than you sort of think to take that job. So that is why we have protections like this so that you cannot be undercut by a foreign thing.

So could this company form a WGA signatory? Yes they could. It would be great if they did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the WGA, by the way, Joe is using you to get this company to sign up as a signatory. I don’t think they care about this company. I think they care about everybody else that’s in the WGA and the value of our minimums not being degraded. So, what I would say here is you can say to them, listen, this isn’t me asking you for anything. I’m not allowed to do this. And, by the way, company, if you come here to the United States you can’t get anybody in the WGA to do this. None of us will be able to do this. You’re going to have get a non-WGA writer.

So, you know, which generally speaking won’t probably be as good. So, that’s where they’re at, Joe.

**John:** All right. Kofi from Woodbridge, New Jersey writes, “My question pertains to the release of completed scripts after a television show has aired or a movie has been released to the public. Who decides whether or not the completed script will ever be released? I’d love to read the script for every episode of my favorite shows, but usually only the scripts for the pilot and episodes selected for awards are available. Movie scripts can be hit or miss, too. Why isn’t every script made available to be read for educational purposes?”

**Craig:** Well, there are certain circumstances where the writers actually have the publication rights over screenplays. If you have separated rights in feature films that means you have a Story By or Written By credit then I believe you have the right to publish your screenplay.

But, look, by and large they don’t do it because it takes time and it costs some amount of money and it takes some tiny bit of effort and they’re just not willing. It’s no one’s job. It’s a massive company and they can look around and who wants to be the person responsible for scanning and posting 4,000 screenplays. Nobody wants to do it. And there isn’t really a huge clamoring for it, which, you know, is a bit of a bummer. That said, there are plenty of kind of underground swap meets for these things online. I’ve seen them around.

So, yeah, it would be nice. But it comes down to sheer laziness and lack of interest, I think.

**John:** So, the situation is actually a lot different than it was 25 years ago when Craig and I were starting. I remember when I arrived at USC for film school they had a script library. You could go down and could check out two scripts from this library and they were literally printed bound scripts. Not even brads in them, but these special posts that sort of like are sturdier than brads. You could check them out and read them and take them back in. And it was a great experience for me to read all of these scripts from classic movies I loved but also things that had never been produced and it was a really good experience.

So, I think reading scripts is fantastic. But, now there’s the Internet and now there are PDFs of screenplays. And so while Kofi can’t find all the screenplays he wants to read, he can find a ton of them. I mean, even just in Weekend Read we have hundreds of scripts. Things that are going for awards, those are posted online and those things are easy to find. It’s harder to find the scripts for movies that are not sort of award contenders. But, you can kind of find them.

But Kofi’s more interesting point is he wants to read the episodic scripts. Those are harder to find. You tend to find pilots or just those marquee episodes of things. And it’s great to read the normal episodes. That’s one of those things where it actually is much easier to do if you are in this town. Because then you just have networks and assistants at places who can get you copies of scripts. They’re not really under lock and key. They don’t have a lot of value in and of themselves. You can’t do anything with the scripts and so no one is trying to sort of keep them from you. But what Craig said is like it’s no one’s job to publish them or post them. That’s why they don’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s why they don’t happen. Well, keep looking. And by the way, Kofi, spent a lot of time in the mall over there in Woodbridge myself, so just waving hi to you back there in the old country.

And we’ve got one more question here from Cory right here in LA who writes, “I’ve got an award-winning short film and I just hired a screenwriter to adapt it into a feature. Though I’ve come up with much of the story, he will be hitting the keys to bring the story and script together. I am a one-man production band with a small production company. I’d like to make sure that I am setting both he and I up for success.” That should be him and I. Setting both him and me. Yeah. Because, right. Anyway.

“I’d like to make sure that I’m setting both him and me up for success and possible WGA membership or eligible points toward. First, should or must I make my company a WGA signatory? Second, since I or rather my company is self-financing his writing of the screenplay do I need to adhere to WGA payment standards to allow him eligibility? Finally, if I’m the creator of the original work and I’ve come up and will be credited with Story By is there an opportunity for me to earn WGA points or is that just for the screenwriter?”

Oh, excellent list of membership questions there, John. What do you think?

**John:** Absolutely. So, I don’t have all the answers but I will tell you that you’re not the first person to encounter this and I think the WGA has done a much better job over the last ten years dealing with these kinds of situations. I think Howard Rodman deserves a lot of the credit for that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re describing is probably a low budget independent film. And if you go to the WGA website there are resources there to talk you through what happens with low budget independent films. Classically these were done outside of WGA jurisdiction. But recognizing that some of the best work was happening there and this was obviously writer’s first work they set up these low budget agreements so that you can do this kind of stuff. That you don’t have to pay people the full amounts for writing services and other things but still allows for things like credit protections. It allows for other parts of what you get with a WGA package for these productions.

So, I suspect you will click through on the site, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and see what you need to do and how you sort of put the script into a place where it’s eligible for these low budget agreements. And I don’t think you will have to become a full signatory. I think there’s just ways you can sort of use an associate membership to get you started here. So, it’s good you’re doing it. It’s good you’re thinking about this now. But just read the stuff and then make the thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely you want to take a look at that low budget independent film agreement. To become a full-fledged WGA signatory there are quite a few hoops to jump through. I mean, it’s not trial by fire or anything, but for instance you need to show that you have enough financial resources to be able to cover your residuals obligations. So in this case because it’s just you and this is just one independent film I think that’s the way to go. Take a look at it.

In terms of credit, the original work will be considered source material. It was written outside of the WGA so it will be based on a short film by blah-blah-blah. If you want proper WGA story credit, on the title page of the screenplay it would need to say Screenplay by Jim, Story by Jim and Corey. And that, of course, requires Jim to agree. The truth is the story in the original film is essentially akin to the story in a novel. The novelist doesn’t automatically get WGA credit for the movie of it. They have to actually do some work. So in this case what you would need to do to warrant Story by credit or Shared Story by credit is to work up a written story for the new movie that you’re talking about, either on your own or with the screenwriter that you’re hiring, and then that is now part of this chain of title of the work that’s leading up to this film that would be covered by the independent film low budget agreement.

Hopefully that makes sense.

**John:** I think it makes sense.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like a Craig One Cool Thing, but it’s the story in the New York Times by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and it’s about how emergency rooms and other medical professionals are starting to examine ketamine as a suicide prevention or a suicide drug for dealing with people who show up suicidal and it seems like it is potentially a quick life-saving drug to be using for people with severe suicide ideation.

So, it’s a really nicely written up story about the potential of a drug which we only think of in sort of bad context possibly having some really good uses.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a fascinating article. Totally my kind of thing. Ketamine is one of these drugs that’s been around for a long time and it’s kind of one of those – I think the World Health Organization has their list of essential medicines, like if you were building your doomsday locker of medicines you’d want ketamine in there. It is a sedative. It is kind of a tranquilizer sort of thing. It can be used anesthetically, you know.

And what they found, and I didn’t realize this, but in this article they are saying that very small doses of ketamine can almost stop suicidal ideation in its tracks. So you have somebody coming in who is in severe distress who was just taken by the cops off of the side of a bridge and brought to the emergency room and you give them this tiny injection of ketamine and suddenly they don’t have that anymore. They don’t want to jump.

And, now, that doesn’t last obviously, right? So then there’s work to be done after that. But what they’re pointing out is that suicidal ideation, kind of underlying depression, to reverse that pharmacologically with say serotonin reuptake inhibitors takes weeks. Maybe months. Same thing with talk therapy. But if you need to make sure that someone doesn’t hurt themselves over the two, three, four weeks, this may be a viable deal.

Now, part of the issue is that it can be used recreationally and if there’s a certain dosage you start to have hallucinations and, you know, psychoactive effects. So, that’s why I think in general people are a little, you know, but we have to kind of get over some of this stuff. You know?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Doctors in the emergency rooms are pretty good at figuring out who is there because they’re actually suicidal and who is pretending to be because they feel like getting a ketamine dose.

**John:** You look at sort of this work, you look at work on LSD, you look at work on ecstasy, these are clearly drugs that should be studied for what they can do in a clinical setting and sort of what good can come out of them. But instead they sort of become demonized because of dangerous uses of them recreationally.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t use them recreationally if they didn’t work on some level. So, yeah, obviously how much we use and all the rest. So, anyway, that was really promising. So you did that and I went the other direction. I went all the way over into computer world. So I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, and I want to call out the people that worked on the environment because it’s so good. It’s the best environment experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame.

There was a moment where – it’s not just the detail of the appearance of things, which is quite extraordinary. But it’s the way it interacts sort of synergistically. Just sort of trotting along on my horse and I’m going through sort of a path with some trees on either side and the wind kind of blows and leaves rustle off the trees and kind of swirl in the air around me and then fall to the ground. And I’m like, what? This is getting good.

The wind people talked to the tree people. And then the tree people decided, you know what, some leaves come off when wind blows but not a lot of them, not all of them, and how do they come off? And what happens when they go? And it’s perfect. It’s really amazing how well they did with those little things. And you and I know because we work in movies and television how much work goes into making something look effortless.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** God only knows how many hours were spent trying to make the wind make the leaves go just right. It’s really well done. So, tip of the hat. My One Cool Thing this week the people that did the environment in Red Dead 2.

**John:** Very nice. Those leaf physicists, they did God’s work there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

But short questions are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the links in the show notes for the things we talked about, so that’s at johnaugust.com. Just follow through to the links there. Or if you’re listening to this on most of the players swipe and you will see a list of links there.

Come see us at our live show tomorrow night if there are still tickets. But also January 27th is our big show for William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Looking forward to that.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there, leave us a review. Those are lovely. We need to read some of those reviews aloud so we’ll try to remember to do that.

Transcripts go up within the week and so you can find transcripts for all the episodes back to the first episode. You can find the audio for all our episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes and bonus episodes, too.

**Craig:** So cheap.

**John:** So cheap.

**Craig:** So cheap.

**John:** Craig, I will see you tomorrow for the live show.

**Craig:** See you tomorrow for the live show, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Tickets](https://go.wgfoundation.org/campaigns/8810-the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) are on sale for the Holiday Live Show!
* The Team America: World Police [puke scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKqGXeX9LhQ), with some bad language
* The opening of [Finding Nemo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3L98NFyro)
* Aslan’s sacrifice in [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6VAGyhWXM)
* [Can We Stop Suicides?](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/opinion/sunday/suicide-ketamine-depression.html) by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for the New York Times
* The environment in [Red Dead Redemption 2](https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_378.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/double-ampersand).

**John August:** Hey this is John. And Merry Christmas to those folks who celebrate Christmas.

So today’s episode is a short one. It wasn’t really even meant to be an episode originally. What happened was I got invited to do a Q&A with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens for Mortal Engines, the movie they were promoting. And it was a great conversation. So I asked for the audio and this is the audio from that conversation because it’s Peter Jackson.

So, the movie you may have seen, you may have not seen. There’s no huge spoilers in it that’s going to ruin the experience for you. But I thought their conversation about the writing process, especially the writing process with the three of them, was actually kind of fascinating. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you have a great end of 2018 and we will see you again in 2019.

My name is John August and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this screening and our three writers are here with us and I want to talk to them about their movie. So if we can please welcome Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, and Philippa Boyens. Come on down.

So, welcome to the WGA Theater. Welcome to the United States. You guys just got here recently right?

**Fran Walsh:** Yep. Yesterday.

**John:** Can you talk to me about the origins of this movie? Because I wasn’t familiar with the books, but you read these books years ago. How did these books come into your universe? Whoever wants to take it – Fran, do you want to start? What was the start for you guys?

**Peter Jackson:** Well Pam Silverstein, who works for our manager, Ken Kamins, she mentioned that these books were pretty great. And I hadn’t heard of the books, but by the time we read them there were four in the series. So we were able to sort of like binge read, like sort of a Netflix show. Read the first book, and then the second, third, and fourth.

So, I mean, I got really excited because I could just imagine, you know, great films. And you’ve just seen the first of potentially four. But the books are really the life story of Hester Shaw and Tom. And I just thought, you know, wow, this would be pretty cool. Because they’re fantastic characters, you know, complex in a way that you don’t normally see in these types of stories. And a world that was completely new. So, yeah.

**John:** But when was this? How long ago were you reading these books?

**Peter:** 2008?

Female Voice: No, it was earlier, because I remember 2007 we met with Philip Reeve in London.

**Peter:** That’s your – OK, so about 2006 or 2007 then, yeah.

**John:** And so you were just waiting around. You weren’t doing anything else in the meantime? You were just killing time?

**Peter:** At that time we were finishing up Tintin and District 9. So couldn’t jump into it straight away. And then by the time we began to do work on it we began to do sort of some previs and some visualization, starting to think about the script. And then The Hobbit came along. And that was six years of working on that. So Mortal Engines got shelved basically for six years because I’m not really one of those people that can work on two things at once. I’d like to, but I just–

**John:** You were making three giant movies.

**Peter:** Yes. Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about the work that you guys together because you are the only double ampersand team that I can think of. And you’ve made two trilogies. You’ve made other movies. What is it about the three of you working together that works? Because I’m curious what is even your process? Are you in the room together? Are you at a giant whiteboard breaking stuff? Are you dividing up scenes? What is your process for figuring out story?

**Peter:** That’s the right term. I haven’t actually heard that before, the double ampersand. It’s like an Orson Welles, The Magnificent Double Ampersands.

**John:** They’re going to find another lost Orson Welles, The Double Ampersand.

**Fran:** We don’t really, I mean, we don’t think of it as a process particularly. Usually we just write and rewrite and rewrite, and we’re in that mode all the way through production. And our general motto is just write the bad version, so that’s what we do. Just write just such a terrible draft. The first draft is always embarrassing. And then you kind of get to the point where you think we’re going to shoot that. We’ve got to revise it. And then it becomes about saving the scene before it gets shot.

Often there’s pages under the door at midnight to the cast, some of them are good about it, others complain.

**Peter:** Others have no choice but to be good about it.

**Fran:** But they complain to the producers which is us.

**Philippa:** So, anyway, we blame you.

**Peter:** But we also start though with a white board and just working out the basic plot, you know, the structure and the plot. And that can go on for a few months before we actually go out and write anything.

**Fran:** Yeah. I just think, with the writing, nothing is ever good when you start. It’s just not. You’re finding your way through and you don’t even really know what it’s about particularly. You have to – you kind of have a better sense by the time you’ve got one draft done and then you think there’s so much to fix. And then it becomes – we all have different strengths in that area.

**John:** Philippa, talk to me about this. What was on the whiteboard originally? Because there’s so many characters clearly in this story. Was it figuring out whose stories you were going to follow? What elements of the book? And I haven’t read the book, so how faithful is this to the actual details of that first book, or how much is it in the spirit? What were the priorities for you as you were figuring this out?

**Philippa Boyens:** Are there any Mortal Engines fans in here of the book? They can probably answer that. No, it is different to the book. It had to be. We always start with the premise that you have to at some stage set the book aside. The book is the book. The film has to work as a film. And the whiteboard is interesting because Fran is very visual. And you love staring at it. And sometimes you’ll just keep staring at these things. And I think what’s she doing? And then you’ll get up and you’ll rub something off and put something back in and then we’ll look at it and then we’ll go, yeah, that’s looking, yeah, that’s starting to get a balance to it.

And so my thought process of structure has taken on that visual imagery, almost a visual imagery like if we’re looking at it as a three-act structure or something like that. That’s how I’ve started to see that process, if you want to call it process, in my mind. But we do try to nail the structure.

**Peter:** What we sometimes do is we take each character’s story and create its own little three-act structure for each character story, separate to each other, and then sort of blend. So there might be three or four of those, you know, each character or relationship has its own little three-act structure. And they get sort of simpler and simpler as the characters get sort of more into the minor characters. And then we just take those and collapse them and blend them into one – don’t we? Sort of one general shape.

**Philippa:** What do we do?

**Peter:** I can’t remember. I have no memory.

**John:** Well, I mean, Fran in this one it felt like certain themes sort of surfaced up and how early did you know that? There are terrible fathers making terrible choices throughout the course of this movie. At one point did you recognize – did you always feel, like Shrike to me felt like some lost universal monster who was just remarkable. At one point did those elements surface? Or are you only looking at the individual stories originally? When did you feel like you had something that was a movie?

**Fran:** I think whenever you really connect with the story it’s because of the ideas underneath it. And you think that’s an interesting idea. It’s something that engages you in an exciting way. So that even if you don’t write it very well, the ideas are still exciting and still – you still want to express them in some way. And you feel that they’re worth perservering with.

And that was one of the ideas underneath the script was this notion of the corrupt father and the one with the pure heart. So one was human who was really at his soul corrupt. The other one had most of his humanity stripped away, but he still had that lift, a connection to Hester, and a love for her.

So, I thought that was an interesting dynamic in the story. And I mean it’s a texture if you like. It’s not really the driving force of it. Although the other kind of father element is Katherine having to kind of come to terms with the fact that her dad is not who she thought he was. So the things underneath the story are the things that engage me.

And it was about the world. The idea of this world and what we could become, or where we’re going. The idea that we could end up eating ourselves literally, hunting each other around this sort of barren globe. And so in some ways it’s very fanciful but in other ways you feel that we’re in some place at a tipping point where we are going to go blindly into that place, you know.

So I think that’s an interesting thing to have in your story.

**John:** We often think of world-building in a sort of visual sense. And this movie has beautiful visuals, but underneath there there has to be some story logic. And how did you guys first think about how you were going to introduce like this is what happened to the world, this is the way the world is now? Was there ever a feeling of like, OK, we’re going to have to have an extended voiceover. We’re going to have to start the whole thing back, you know, a thousand years ago and bring us forward. At what point did you end up with this way of telling the story?

**Peter:** You always have the conversation at some point of do we have a roller at the front, I guess it’s the hangover from Star Wars, really. And that conversation always happens – it happened on the Tolkien films, on these films. But ideally we try to avoid doing that because it just seems to us a bit – we try to have the story itself organically tell the history. And there’s a limited amount of history you really need to know. Because that’s the other thing is you have a story to tell and it’s the story of Hester Shaw and what happens to her during the course of the movie. And you really want to try to just limit the amount of history if you like or backstory to what you absolutely need to tell that story. And you’ve also got to make sure that people aren’t frustrated by the fact that they’re asking questions about how did the world get to this place and we’re not giving any answers. So we try to just sprinkle in a few clues.

But certainly the books, I mean Philip Reeve’s books have a lot of the detail. If anyone is frustrated or interested in learning how the world gets to this place, in his books they certainly fill in all the gaps. I think the idea is to do as minimum amount as you can in the most sort of elegant way that you can. Try to sort of hide it and bury it in the ongoing narrative and action of the film if you possibly can.

**John:** Your film asks us to make one sort of giant premise conceit that there are these moving cities, but everything else sort of extends through that. There’s not a second ask, there’s not a third ask. There’s not an extra magic thing that happens. Once you sort of buy the central premise of it, these cities are on the move, everything else sort of follows from that.

**Peter:** Yeah. And you’re trying to – at that point you’re just trying to make it feel real. Because that’s the other thing is that it’s incredibly fantastical, but you want to somehow believe that it’s real. And that’s important because your characters have to believe that it’s real. And ultimately the story is obviously the story of the characters. If you don’t fundamentally believe in the world, or the audience doesn’t believe in the world, then you’re leaving your characters high and dry really. Because they believe in the world. They live this world. It’s a daily life. And all the decisions that they make in the film is based on the world that they’re in which is obviously very, very different from ours.

So, we try to make it feel as believable as we can so we don’t leave them high and dry up there.

**John:** Philippa, can you talk to us about sort of the terrible things that happen to characters in this movie because one of the things I love about these films and also the Tolkien films is that terrible things happen to our characters. And we relate to them because we see them persevering through the terrible things. As you’re looking at that whiteboard and as you’re going through those early drafts is that something that’s in your head in terms of are we making this difficult enough for your characters?

**Philippa:** Yeah. That’s interesting. Tone is always important, of course, but some of those things, you know, we made a decision early on that we were going to show the moment that young girl gets that scar. These are some of the things that you think do we just gloss over it, but no, we wanted to show that. We thought it was important. Because it informs her so much that moment. And also to see the mother that she lost was going to be really important. Instead of just talking about this person, Pandora Shaw. All of that was a story choice that we made really early on.

But you have to trust your audience, I think. You know, talking to – this connects to what Pete was saying with world-building. Often we get notes back, sometimes, and I understand why, because the studio if they’re reading it can get a bit nervous about the terminology that’s in there because things like – we reference something obscure like the Nomad Wars or the Lazarus Brigade, or things like this. And you just have to trust your audience. They know that it’s part of the world. So not being afraid to do that is really important.

We had two of the characters speaking in this language that Philip created called Esperanza. That’s enough. It was great. It was a perfect moment to make that choice because it made it feel real. Made the characters feel real. So often I think what happens is, you know, just going back to that question about the darkness, it’s like what is the engine that’s driving the story. And we don’t put anything in there that’s not relevant to that process to engaging with the audience and driving that story forward. And every moment has to be earned. It can’t just be – I mean there’s lots of stuff in the book I would have loved to have just shoved in there. But you have to stay focused.

**Peter:** Yeah, I mean, as we were saying earlier, I think establishing a history for a new world is important, even though you don’t explain what the history is. You just refer to it. Because any period of time, and this is supposed to be 3,000 years in the future, any period of time – people always refer in conversation to something that’s gone on in the past. I mean, if it was us we could refer to the Bay of Pigs or the Depression or the First World War. And you don’t stop and explain what that is. But the characters are, it’s a reference, and it just makes it seem real. And so there’s no reason why in a world that’s set into the future that they shouldn’t be referring to a history that we don’t understand. But it just makes it feel – those little things that make it feel slightly more authentic.

**John:** Before we move on I just want to acknowledge a thing that happened here is that you said when the studio gives you notes, and all the writers in the audience they’re like, ooh, the studio gives them notes, too.

**Philippa:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Even you get the notes. When do you first show stuff to people you trust? When does it leave this circle of the three of you and you start showing things to other people? And what are you looking for? How are you getting feedback on the thing you’ve written or the vision you have for this thing? What is the first step for you guys? Who do you show this to first?

**Philippa:** It usually goes to the studio first after we – because we’re usually right on that deadline.

**John:** They have deadlines, too! It’s all so exciting. So, the first people outside of this group is the studio who are theoretically going to make this?

**Philippa:** Occasionally that changes. You know, like if there’s somebody very specific that we’re working with like a designer for example or something like that that you know is going to be part of creating that world. But generally you want to get it to the studio because you want to know where it’s sitting. We actually wrote this first, the script, and then it went to the studio.

**Peter:** I was just going to say because the first people to come on board were MRC who were fantastic to work with. And I thought we did the deal with MRC before we finished the draft.

**Philippa:** Yes you did. Yeah.

**Peter:** But MRC have to partner with a studio, so we did the deal with MRC based on the book and then we wrote a script, showed it to MRC, and then we went out and pitched it to every studio in town, just like you were doing. Just walked in and pitched the film. Had done artwork to show them. And ultimately Universal were the studio that came onboard at that point.

And so they had the script, too. They had the script to read as well as some artwork to do.

**Philippa:** But it has to get past the three of us first. I mean, that’s one of the good things about working as double ampersand is that extra ampersand makes all the difference. And so it has to – we kind of know I think now where it’s sitting and like Fran says it’s always like a place where we – it’s great to get feedback and it’s good, but we kind of know what that feedback is going to be. We’re pretty familiar with how it should be working.

**John:** You’ve done this a few times.

**Philippa:** We have.

**John:** You’ve made some giant movies together. So you get a sense of when this working and when this is not working. What it is that you set out to do.

**Philippa:** Fran is very good, because you have got quite an acute instinctive of how something is working. I like to paper over the cracks like nobody is going to notice, don’t worry about it. And you’re like, no, no, no.

**John:** You’re the spackler

**Peter:** You’ve also got to be – when you do get notes from the studio you have to filter them. Because a lot of the notes are based on fear. And so you have to kind of – somehow we have to create a filtration system where we’re able to – because it’s also important to respect the notes. Because you want your partnership with the studio to be a good one. Absolutely nobody wins if it’s a bad – it’s just a miserable, miserable experience. And yet, you know, so you have to somehow have a filtration system in your minds, the three of us, where the notes are coming in and we filter out the notes that are based purely on fear. And so the ones that are left are often good. And they’re often worth serious consideration. But you just can’t accept all the notes because some of them are driven by the wrong things.

**John:** The movie that opened last week and those kind of things.

**Peter:** Yeah.

**John:** Fran, you had mentioned slipping the new pages under the door for your actors. Why does that happen? What comes up? Is it something that you’re seeing as stuff is coming in and you’re like, oh, or this is a new opportunity? It’s tomorrow’s work. What is it that generates those pages?

**Fran:** Well sometimes it’s the actors themselves because you don’t really know their strengths until they’re in front of the camera. So you have to kind of figure out what are their strengths. What do they play to? And how to get the best out of that person, you know, that actor. And so that required, we were revising for cast and story. And that did mean, and plus we were dealing with scripts that needed more work. It was a lot.

**Peter:** There’s one Lord of the Rings story, if you remember in the first Lord of the Rings film there’s a Council of Elrond–

**Fran:** Oh god.

**Peter:** Which is about a 10-minute scene of them sitting around in chairs in a circle talking about what they were going to do. Now we suddenly the night before, because we shot it over about five or six days, but right in the middle of it we decided that Boromir, as Sean Bean, had to deliver a long big speech about going into Mordor. He says you cannot just walk into Mordor. Because we hadn’t had that in the original script and we just suddenly thought, well, this is opportunity to paint a picture of something that we’re not going to actually see ourselves until the third film. This is the first movie. But nonetheless we thought it was worth doing.

So on the day we’re going to shoot it we arrive with this long speech, sort of page long.

**Fran:** Poor Sean.

**Peter:** For Sean. And so if you remember, you may or may not remember, but if you watch it Sean Bean has got his head down. He says, “You cannot just walk into Mordor.” And this is because the lines–

**Fran:** The lines are right here.

**Peter:** The lines are on his knee. And due to his incredible skill he was able to sell the idea that he was reading his lines – “You cannot just walk into Mordor” – as if he’s tormented enough he’s got to stare at his knee the whole time.

**Fran:** Oh my god. He was a really good sport about that.

**Peter:** He was. But he was great. Some actors are really good, because at the end of the day I always take the view that an actor might get a bit annoyed about getting the lines at the last minute. But however if they’re good enough lines and the actor can usually see that it’s worthwhile and it’s going to improve the movie and so they ultimately become pretty good sports about it. They don’t have a lot of choice anyway, but.

**Philippa:** And also, no they don’t, this is not a democracy. No, I’m kidding. Also, in this film, cast, when Hugo got cast it actually changed the story, because we had had this conceit and in the end we realized it was just a conceit that we could fool you guys into thinking he was a super good nice guy. And then it became a sudden shock.

**Fran:** I wondered what movie you were in.

**Philippa:** Right, sorry, this one. Oh yeah, because he’s in both. That’s right. He is nice. But, you know, that we could hold on to that moment and then when he pushes him off that would be this shocking revelation. And Hugo was the one who questioned that. He said I can do that, I can do that, but why. Because he wanted to know what it was buying his character? And the fact that he thought it was going to be more interesting, especially given some of those lines that we’d written such as “they’re playing with fire,” which we thought would be a throwaway, teasy kind of light thing. But Hugo just like gave it so much more.

And then we went, oh yeah, it’s just a conceit. And it’s not necessarily adding to the storytelling. So that went out the door. And that meant a bit of restructuring had to happen.

**John:** Let’s talk about, so Hugo Weaving is one of the only actors I recognized in the movie, and almost everybody else is brand new faces to me. Was that a conscious choice early on or is it just how the cast developed? What was the thinking going into this with sort of all new faces, so we’re not applying our expectations to them?

**Peter:** Yeah. I mean, I think generally with these types of movies we sort of favor – if you’re trying to build a new world or a futuristic world and have an audience believe in what they’re seeing and then to be distracted by someone that you saw in a movie last week just pulls you out slightly. So it’s a bit of a balance, because it’s also good to have some really solid sort of veteran actors if you like to sort of anchor a new cast. And so having a new cast is great, but also having those veteran kind of old hands if you like just to give it the weight in the right places is a balance.

But, you know, but of course you’re buying yourself a big casting job if you want to find newer faces. Because they are there, but you just have to audition hundreds and hundreds of people to find them.

**John:** You guys, as a writing team who has done so many things, I’d be remiss if I did not ask you sort of are you writing a new thing? Is there another thing we can look forward to? Is there a genre you haven’t tackled yet?

**Fran:** Oh, the religious epic.

**John:** A religious epic. Sure.

**Fran:** I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

**Peter:** Very unlikely.

**Philippa:** I think I could write a religious epic. No.

**Fran:** We’re all working on different things actually.

**John:** Oh fantastic. And when there are projects that it’s all of you together though, you all have to sort of fall in love with it. Sometimes it’s hard for me to really – something comes into my orbit but it’s like, yeah, but I don’t really love that. Or I have to sort of remind myself. With the three of you is it ever hard to sort of find that thing that you can all three connect to? Or has it just been lucky that’s it’s always worked?

**Peter:** It’s a good question. I mean, it hasn’t been a problem so far, I guess. I can imagine how it would be a problem, but it hasn’t. In practical terms it hasn’t really been something that’s been an issue, has it?

**Philippa:** No, we all loved this. This was such a cool project. We always hoped it was going to happen.

**John:** We have time for maybe two questions from the audience. So if you want to raise a hand, I see a hand over here.

**Philippa:** That’s such a good question.

**John:** That’s such a good question. So I’m going to repeat the question, but this is also why you come to the Writers Guild because they ask really good questions. So his question is with the rise of these amazing television shows what makes an idea one of these big television ideas versus a movie idea? And where do you think the boundaries are between those two?

**Philippa:** I mean, one of the obvious things I guess is spectacle. And it’s not just visual effects. It’s actually, I don’t know if you felt it or heard that incredible score from Tom, but also when that city starts rolling, it’s just one of the best sound mixes I think our guys have ever done underneath this. And to feel it, it gives it that extra weight and, I don’t know, that sort of visceral sensation that you get as you watch a movie in a big space that I don’t know that the technology is there yet that you’re going to have it in your own home, in your own theater. Maybe it will be in some way. Maybe it will be delivered right into our brain. God knows, I’m terrified.

But what I do know is that you’re always going to need story for sure. And storytellers. So I guess we’re the people who are going to end up answering that question as to how long this genre is going to last. And is it eventually going to fade out and become stuff shot for streaming.

**Peter:** It’s an interesting question but it goes to the heart of this mixed up time that we’re in now. Because the film industry, whatever you want to call it, is in a very strange state. I mean, to answer it personally, the things that I like watching at the moment and enjoy watching are the long streaming shows, the 10-episdoe shows, or the six-episode shows we have all the time. That’s what I really enjoy watching.

But in terms of making, I guess I’ve just got films in my blood and my DNA. So I’ve never really thought about doing anything other than films, although films are not what I enjoy seeing so much now as it is a really good 10-part show. So it’s a little bit screwed up right now.

**John:** One more question, right here. Let me repeat the question. In your process are you guys just doing it yourself or are you bringing folks in to do a read aloud of your script?

**Philippa:** Fran and I do all the characters.

**John:** All right, you’ve got to do this. That’s great. You’re printing it out and you’re going through the whole thing and just hearing it.

**Philippa:** Sometimes we have to sell each other, don’t we?

**Fran:** Yeah.

**Philippa:** We really do, on the lines.

**Fran:** But we do do round tables.

**Philippa:** Yeah, we do. We do. We do readings.

**Peter:** Yeah. But you do the round table once the film is cast, of course. So, yeah–

**Philippa:** Do you mean when we’re writing?

**Audience Member:** I mean when you’re writing it.

**Peter:** Mainly Philippa and Fran do most of the dialogue together.

**Philippa:** But we do speak it aloud. I think you have to get it off the page. Because certain things have a certain rhythm to them. And that’s what I mean.

**Peter:** Once the film is cast you do a round table with the – because once the film is cast, in order for the film to be cast it has to be green lit. As far as we’re concerned the script writing is still a fluid thing. I mean, just because you get a green light doesn’t mean that the writing stops. It just carries on all the way through the shoot and into post at times. You never stop writing. Never.

**Philippa:** When we cast Robbie Sheehan who plays Tom, he has an extraordinary sense of comic timing that’s just all of his own that can lift a line and make something funnier. And the line, “Anna Fang, you’re an idiot,” was because we’d cast Robbie and of what he was bringing to the role. So sometimes those lines are just completely organic and on the day and those sort of things.

**John:** Thank the three of you so much for coming all the way here just for this one screening. And thank you very much to the Writers Guild. And have a great night. Thank you.

Links:

* Thanks to [Fran Walsh](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0909638/), [Peter Jackson](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001392/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) and [Philippa Boyens](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0101991/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1)!
* [Mortal Engines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuL5yXsOAIA) is in theaters now.
* Mortal Engines is based on the [book series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines_Quartet) by [Philip Reeve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Reeve).
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