The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Episode 729 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
This week, Craig and I are off on different adventures, so producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a compendium episode. Drew, what do you have for us?
Drew Marquardt: We’re doing endings.
John: Endings? But we’ve done endings before.
Drew: We have done endings before. I didn’t realize we’d done endings before, but Megana did a wonderful Episode 524, which is our first endings compendium. I am going to use a few different episodes, so hopefully you can listen to them both.
John: Endings compendium part two?
Drew: Part two-ish. There’s a few bits from the previous episode. I figured we’d start with Episode 44, which is Endings for Beginners. That’s just a good overview of how endings work.
John: Episode 44, wow, reaching way back there.
Drew: Way back. Then we’ll go to 366 on denouements, and how that works, and the last moment of your film. Then we’re going to go to Episode 648, which is Farewell Scenes. It’s just you and Aline, but it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve done.
John: Great.
Drew: I love it. Then we’ll end on Episode 392, which is about how and why endings change and how to communicate it at different stages of production from your first idea all the way through to the end.
John: This all sounds great. I remember going through the endings chapter of the Scriptnotes book, and these were the episodes we were pulling from to get that material that’s in there. It’s nice to hear them again as conversations.
Drew: That’s my secret. That’s how I’m pulling these topics.
[laughter]
John: You’re like, “What was in the book? Oh, yes, that’s it.”
Drew: Just checking it out. That’s what we’ll do it. We’ll listen to these four segments. You’ll hear the loops between them. Then at the end, in our bonus segment for premium members, we will continue the discussion we had with Drew Goddard recently talking about casting minor characters in your story and particularly writing character sides because a thing that often happens is you have a character who may not have very many lines in the show or in the movie, but you need more material for them to actually audition with.
You write special scenes that are longer than what will actually be in the movie because if it’s just three lines, you’re not going to really be able to get a sense of that character from those three lines.
John: Love it. Great.
Drew: We’ll do that. Join us after these four segments. We’ll do some closing business and then our bonus segment.
John: Thanks, Drew.
Drew: Thanks, John.
[Episode 44]
John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings and let this be more of a craft episode because a lot of times, as you start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.
I thought we’d spend some time today talking about endings and the characteristics of good endings and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.
Craig Mazin: Yes. I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. For me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends because, essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending, everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.
John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader. It’s the same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. You’re saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you a story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. It will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.” The ending is where you won or you lost. It’s the punchline.
It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. So often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on. So many writers, I think, spend all their time working on those first 10 pages, the first 30 pages, that start powering through the script. Those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. Those last 10 pages are just banged out, and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started. Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully, you’re enjoying how it starts.
Hopefully, you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended. My impression of The Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”
Craig: Yes, I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always talk about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this. That ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.
I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. There’s a decision, and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. That is connected. It always seems to me it is connected through all the way back to the beginning in a very different way from what is there in the beginning. That’s the point is that there’s an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision.
There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you’ve promised the audience that they’re going to get to. If you’ve set up a location that they’re going to get to, is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? You could have ended the movie when she got to Oz or when she got to the Emerald City because she was running the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated.
If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.
Craig: I’d like to see that on the movie.
John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. There’s also her need. Her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that she’s with to find some independence. I don’t know. What’s the need?
Craig: That’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith in a choice and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away. At the end of the movie, she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. Essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home, you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away.
You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.” That’s what The Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. Yet, the ending, it’s funny. A lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click her heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.” The point is then, okay, fine. Maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point. The ending is defined by faith and decision.
I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters have decided, “We’re going to cross the streams. We’re going to have faith that we’re going to do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.”
I see it all the time. I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.
John: Yes. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. By the end of the movie, they’re able to do something that they weren’t able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.
Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. It’s a great way of thinking about, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. We look around, and we think, “This character could go anywhere and do anything.” Stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie because, frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.
John: We are talking about movies, not TV shows. A movie is really a 2-hour or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, on one section of a cinematic world. You’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we’re seeing so we can meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end, what’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world, and why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?
You will change your ending just as you change your beginning, but you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.
Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing, frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. To me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.
John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment. It makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process, while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it.
I’m not writing those last pages in a panic and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision. Then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.
Craig: I have the OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all, but I won’t start writing until I know the ending. What I mean by “ending,” I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make. Then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind? When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack.
If you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life. Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. It’s funny because I really started thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. I was watching Up, and they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back.
I liked that, but I thought that’s not quite that difficult of a test. Then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say, “I have moved on,” is to let that house go. They design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid. That’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with boy scout, flying talking dogs, and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.
John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two storylines. The implied contract with the audience is, you know the father’s going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it, like the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father’s going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended? Quite early on, I had to figure out what is it that the son can–
The son is really the protagonist in the present day. What is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. Knowing that that’s going to be an incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel all that, knowing that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? You’re really working backwards to, “What are the steps that can get me to that point?”
It’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories against Jenny Hill that fills in this missing chapter and why that chapter is missing. It’s backtracked into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present-day storyline back to the beginning.
Craig: Exactly. John, there has to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out because I can talk specifically about how that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. The decision meant something, and it was interesting, and I liked that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully, people will like it.
John: This talk of endings reminds me of, I met John Williams. He was at USC. The scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and they were talking about the movies they worked on together. John Williams made this really great point. It was that the music of a movie is the thing that you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s like the one thing you, as an audience member, get to recycle and play in your head is that last theme.
As I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. It’s like, what is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? That’s your ending. We’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to you.
Craig: Sure.
John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.
Craig: Yes. In fact, when people are testing movies that have absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98, and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up. If you ask these people tomorrow or the next day, would they pay to go see it? You might get a different answer. Similarly, when you end on a bummer or on a flat note, it’s just like the air goes out of the theater. People will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when, in fact, they just didn’t like the ending.
John: Yes. I want to make sure that people are listening. We’re not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point. It’s one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end. That’s absolutely fine. As long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.
Craig: Yes. Maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside, in fact, he was awful. In a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We sickly root for it. Then he goes back home. It basically says he just died alone.
Yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all that, the final images of him alone on his farm putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll, is somebody that he truly loved and was good to. There is a bit of hope there.
[Episode 366]
Craig: It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end when we say, “How’s the movie end?”
Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. The real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it. This is the moment after the climax. When things have settled down. There’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. It’s an important thing. I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films.
They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.
John: Great. Dénouement is a French word. Dénouer is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because when you think about it, they’re tying everything up. You also think about it like undoing all the tangles that your story has created. It’s like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re matching the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct, Craig?
Craig: Yes, absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something. We’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene, but there’s something to let you know this is the denouement. In that sense, I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement to say, okay, what is the difference here? The climax, I think, we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. All of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.
In the climax, you save the victim, or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the money, whatever it is that the plot is doing, that’s what happens there. The climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. The test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needs to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. At the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has, in fact, transformed into character 2.0.
The denouement, which occurs after this, to me, is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person, this is the new reality.
John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge, they have succeeded in that final challenge, generally, and we’ve come out of this. Was it just a one-time fluke thing? Are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? That is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes, is to show that this is a thing that is really resolved for them.
Craig: That is why so many denouements will begin with “six months later,” “one year later,” because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is, “Right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed.” She says, “Okay,” we need, six months later, one year later, to know, yes, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple, so they have this new reality, but it is lasting, and their love is real.
We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, all right. Did they make it or not?” Now, that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant, and then the credits roll, and it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. That smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment, and when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.
John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gotten back to the car at the end, and the main and final question is, “So what are we doing for New Year’s?” It’s establishing that they’ve been through all this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing before. That was the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.
In Big Fish, certainly, the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral, and they see all the real versions of folks. The actual denouement, as we’re describing right now, is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who’s now born and saying, “Oh, did all of that really happen?” The father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, you see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.
They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking like, “The characters are on trajectory I want them to be on.”
Craig: Yes. The climax of Identity Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s something she does. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her. The denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later, and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” What’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby, and everything’s okay.
He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. He then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name because she doesn’t know who she is. He found her birth certificate and found her real name. You get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. It could have. She was a criminal, but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on. Then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie.
It is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full-circle moment. In Identity Thief, you have both. She, at one point, says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. The way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. Here she’s going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change, but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy. Both of those things are full-circle moments.
In the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full-circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.
John: Yes. A crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally, is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.
Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore, it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. For instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life, but the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. If your problem is, okay, my character is Vanessa, and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie.
I apologize to Vanessa. At the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success because then I start to wonder, “Okay, what was the lesson here?” Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp, and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes, and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.
John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place and a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have questions about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all this thing. By changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life, and see that, and just make that one change going forward.
Craig: Yes, exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent, and permanent in a lovely way. Very often, the denouement will dot, dot, dot off the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big, dum-dum, da-dum, and that’s your end. You can do that. Some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Elsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over.
Everything’s finished. Then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Therein is a dot, dot, dot. They just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. You understand more adventures are ahead, but for now, everything’s okay.
John: Yes, it’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now. Here’s the counterexample. Imagine you’re watching this film, and you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason, the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.
There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place, and I’ll deposit you back safely where you started.” If you’re not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. That’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often, what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.
Craig: I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. For me, it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from, is the denouement.
John: All right, so let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationships, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?
Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit, whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie, they will, in their minds, add on the following words, “And thus, it shall always be.” If you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time.
The Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this, [vocalizes song], and it’s very jaunty, and he’s on a roof, and it’s silly. Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “This is like our life is hard and it’s tricky. We’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms, and they are trudging off to a new home, and the fiddler is the last person to go. He plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. The denouement is to say, “And thus it shall always be.”
Meaning, we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka, and whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be. It doesn’t always have to be, “And happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be, “And sadly ever after.” The point is, it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.
John: Yes. Everyone’s going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. Whether it’s a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.
Craig: Yes.
[Episode 648]
John: Today, I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye, presumably for the last time. We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also what are the characteristics of a farewell scene? This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. Big Fish, of course, it’s obviously a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there, too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart.
Maybe buddies who’ve come to, they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there. I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?
Aline Brosh McKenna: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada, where they see each other on the street, and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. Then Meryl says, “Go.” I say, “Meryl,” because in the way it was scripted, actually in the scene description, it said she looks at the driver, “Go,” was in the scene description. They had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver.
It snaps you back into her actual MO. It’s funny because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing and that has a finality. You need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca, and then they ran into each other in a bar two days later. It needs to feel– and the same thing with rom-coms, if it’s end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back. You don’t want to feel like cut to four days later, where it’s like, “This is insane.”
You leave your pants on the floor. What is this? How do you make any ending feel like it’s stuck?
John: Yes. That’s why I think, because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing, regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time. Let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s going to be the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end.
The location that they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.
Aline: Oh, that’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Oh, the irony.”
John: Yes. It could be the location rhymes that we’re back in the place we were before. The dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes the thing that happened before. Looking through these examples, we’re going to see that there’s a bunch of non-verbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these, and that’s honestly the characteristics of these, and that’s why sometimes we’re not going to be playing the audio for this because there’s a lot of people not talking.
Aline: I hope you’re going to put these up on the website because this is fantastic. This is fantastic. This is really good. Now, I did send you that funny– there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big that he goes back to class, and there’s a girl named Susan in his class. They wink of like, “This is going to be Elizabeth Perkins,” but they drop that, and so they’re never going to see each other again.
I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. Then you have E.T. is probably one of the– and as we had discussed, I think Past Lives is people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of they’ve been separated for so long, and this is another separation, possibly permanent.
John: I think what’s important about Past Lives is a good example of this is that you’re closing, hopefully, two characters’ arcs. It’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey, too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that. If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate, but I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.
Aline: Can I ask you a question?
John: Please.
Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?
John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating, and also as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that there was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all, and then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did? That sounds weird.” It felt like it was more of a–
Aline: Of a cheek moment.
John: Yes, cheek moment rather than on-the-lips moment, and I was like, “Ugh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.
Aline: Yes, lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple of friends who were lip kissers, and I feel like, which was always like when you start coming towards you and time slows down, and you’re like– because my lip-kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to, that’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you, and you’re like, “Uh, slow motion, turn the page.” I think post-COVID.
John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.
Aline: Can you imagine if I lip-kissed John on the way out here? Drew would be so uncomfortable, or if I lip-kissed Drew on the way out here, it would be so weird.
John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.
Aline: So weird. I mean the French–
John: Yes, but it’s the cheeks.
Aline: The cheek. Yes, and it felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker. We don’t do that in America, but I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not. You’re saying it’s a full lip kiss. Interesting.
John: Of course, we can look at the video.
Aline: What do you feel about not knowing what he said?
John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?
Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has sort of a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think it suits Sofia Coppola’s vibe. I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that like, people are layered and mysterious, I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.
John: We, as an audience, need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us, unless we’ve seen that the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do. Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it. Because oftentimes, in these things, one character is being stoic and sort of holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves, but we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.
Aline: Something I think about a lot is that– because if you have a quieter movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. ET, interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. Like, the enemy is Keys, it never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be a shootout, an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.
I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge. I would put this up there with Casablanca, for me, in terms of a merely really meaningful goodbye. I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. In the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.
[Episode 392]
John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. This came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so that she flew off into space with some other characters. It was an important change in sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
It got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last bit has changed from the pitch, to the screenplay, to the movie. I want to focus on why that moment is so important, and also why it tends to change so much.
Craig: Interesting. It’s funny, because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it actually rarely doesn’t change. It doesn’t change much for me, but that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.
John: I start with it too. As I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end bit. When I pitched it to Disney, and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry. That last line, the last image of that last moment, it’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed the ways that things change.
I would say even movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, we shot the script, those last moments, and sometimes the last image, really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s delivered it to. Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.
Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms: somebody rides off into the sunset, so the last shot really is about sunsets, but of course, it’s not. For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.
We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s TED Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships, and how when– She would cite how sometimes she would ask people, what was the last image of some movie, like Karate Kid? A lot of people don’t remember, it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel, and then Mr. Miyagi, looking at each other, and there’s pride. Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be, and you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.
John: Yes. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to someplace. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. That destination is generally that last bit, that last moment, that last image, and so of course, you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up? Way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question, and someone asked us, “I have a couple of different ideas for movies, and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” My answer was, you should pick the one with the best ending, because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.
If you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it, or get really off-track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of, this is where I think the movie lands, is crucial. It’s like, “The plane is going to land on this runway.” It tells you, “Okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately, I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place.” You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.
Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said, “You need to draw a circle,” and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have like a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?
John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson. It’s like, how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?
Craig: No, absolutely horrendous. If you asked me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. The reason I bring this up is because, to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place, and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course, we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning, and the beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle. If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where I think people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story is developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, [unintelligible 00:48:02]– they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd’s The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” Then at the very end, they’re playing the song, and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” That’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind. [chuckles]
But also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.
John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle, and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about a story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how, in general, a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases, they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed.
Just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s that the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way. So, it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. That’s what we’re talking about. Like, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.
Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable,” right? Where we begin is the control, our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. Sometimes it’s very profound. I mean, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.
John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, okay, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended, and that there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy, and it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we’ve been on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. Yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space, and has a different appreciation for what’s happened. As I’ve been able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last bit and how the last bit has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character in their journey.
Craig: Yes. I mean, reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer-
John: No.
Craig: -but he does, and that’s–
John: [chuckles] It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.
Craig: Well, it is, but then when you look back, you go, “Oh, yes, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that [unintelligible 00:51:29]. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next– Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not bad [crosstalk]–
John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.
Craig: Yes, you should do it.
John: Yes. I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books, about his assassin.
Craig: Oh, yes, Silver Bear.
John: Silver Bear, Dark Finch.
Craig: Silver Bear, Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric–
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this, but what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel in the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is, I think my favorite feature script, and so, of course, it hasn’t been made. [chuckles] They make the other ones, not those.
The last shot, to me, was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story, and the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you, and that’s– I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion,” and I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-
John: For sure.
Craig: -and it often changes frequently. This is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here’s how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well, you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this, let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny. Let’s make it–” and the intention is gone. Then you get to the movie, and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending–” And you’re like, “Yes, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” [chuckles] You see how it goes?
John: Yes.
Craig: It’s freaking brutal.
John: Yes. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously, we’ve talked about in pitches that– I always describe it as like, you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So really, you’re talking a lot about the characters, and how it starts, and you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff, but you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last bit, because you’re really talking about, what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who’s watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.
In the pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the reader to take away from reading the script.
Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is, ultimately, I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot– For instance, let’s say I’m in a room, and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “In our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid– I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about The Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he could maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last, he knows who he is.” See? Like some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.
John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write the scene that gets you that moment. As you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at like, what is the medal ceremony like? Who’s there, what’s said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there? Actually, painting out the world so we can see, “Okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way.” This is clearly the intention behind the scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end. In the script stage, what was sort of a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.
Craig: Yes. I always wondered– I hate being the guy who’s like, would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this? The last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony, right? Then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. I always wondered, what would happen if the last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man, and kind of starting a new hope. That vibe of returning, I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that, though, it would just feel like one more bit. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal, and you had the swell, and you had– Whether the journey was, this is a kid [unintelligible 00:57:17] all on his own, who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was, it wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory, so–
Craig: Dead family.
John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement, rather than sort of the– I would imagine the music would be very different if he’d gone back to Tatooine. [crosstalk]–
Craig: Yes. It would be [unintelligible 00:57:38]– No, you’re right. I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”
John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and you’ve– 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written as on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. As people are embodying those characters, things just feel different.
Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around, and where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up, and so you have to make some change there. In some cases, it’s re-shoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene, and you realize that this was not the moment that you thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it’s just a matter of like, this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on?
You talked about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried a bunch of different ways. It would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice. Thinking about like, what does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here? The music’s going to be a big factor, so there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie, and you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.
Craig: No question. This is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention. Because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan, but if we know the intention, and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end, you require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. If we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.
In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my God, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. Okay, so now we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.” The ending can never be just, “You know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.
John: The danger is, a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, “Okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little bit, or like an extra thing.” Generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion, and that’s the challenge.
Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling, is the biggest.
John: Sometimes, though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film, and he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh, that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I’d seen before, I was like, “Oh, yes, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.” It was really like talking about like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place, and so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations, and change what we’re following over the course of the movie. Because doing that, you could land at that place, and it would feel really meaningful.”
Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning, right? If something’s not working in that where your circle’s supposed to connect at, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong, but it’s usually one or the other. It is, I think, tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and this thing sits on top of the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” John, you’re absolutely right, sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.
John: Yes. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.
Craig: Right. Match them to where they’re going to arrive.
[Boilerplate]
John: That is our show for this week. Thank you, Drew Marquardt, our producer, for putting together this compendium, which was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can go back and read the endings chapter and see what we pulled from these conversations into the book. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes, and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware, you’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers, you make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on casting minor characters. Drew, thanks for putting this episode together.
Drew: Of course. Thanks, John.
[Outro by Eric Pearson]
[singing]
My name is John August, I am captain of the Scriptnote
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[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Drew. In our conversation with Drew Goddard, we were talking about his time on Buffy and Angel, and how it was often the job of the most junior writer on that staff to write up character sides, which I wasn’t clear was a thing that staff writers did, but makes a lot of sense.
Drew: I had no idea either. From my time as an actor, I’m thinking back to all those sides I got through that I was like, “oh, that’s why it wasn’t ever something that was in the show or in the movie.”
John: Talk me through this. Because you were often auditioning for shows, you were in the UK doing a lot of this, and you would get sides that had scenes that were not necessarily in the finished product.
Drew: Yes. Sometimes it’d be dummy sides from other shows or other things. Weirdly, the one that I can remember most is not one that I auditioned for, but a friend was doing a movie with a kid, and they were auditioning for this weird show that was going to be on Netflix about kids, and it’s like ’80s, and that kind of thing.
John: Oh, yes–
Drew: Yes. It was Stranger Things, and we were doing these sides with Anthony, and they were very specific. I remember watching Stranger Things and being like, “This wasn’t the scene that we did, but it’s close enough.” It’s like, oh, well, things change in production, but maybe it was something completely different.
John: Yes, and so the idea behind this– and this is a thing I’ve done in features a fair amount, is you will have a character who may only have three or four lines in a thing, but they’re crucial. Like, the camera’s going to be on them. You want to cast the right person, but if you just gave them those three or four lines, there’s no runway. There’s no building up.
There’s no beginning, middle, end. You’re not seeing a range in there. They have a face, they have a body, they can say these lines, and it’s really hard to do. And so what you’ll end up doing is writing longer scenes that actually give you a chance to hear their voice, really get to see what they can do. I’m thinking right now for Go, the character of Manny, who’s played by Nathan Bexton in the movie, he’s in a bunch of scenes and has important things to do, but he’s always the third most important character in those scenes. And so, I needed to give him basically a monologue where he could just do the character as himself.
Drew: For some of those characters, is it more important to see if they can hit the big beats that you need them to, or to see how they handle the shoe leather of it all, kind of?
John: What I need, if they’re just a functional role, so if they’re like the police officer in a thing, give them some yada-yada– do I believe them as a police officer? Otherwise, it’ll not work. For something like Mannie, you needed to see like they had a personality– How he could fit in that car with those two women, what is that vibe going to be like? I needed to give him just like much more space, and so give a sense of humor, what’s driving him, what’s motivating him. In a weird way, you’re also kind of helping that actor if they get the role, have a sense of who that character really is beyond the borders of just that one little scene that they’re in.
Drew: I feel like there was recently– Someone put out their audition tape, and then– it was a woman. She auditioned for a thing, and then she showed the finished product. She made bigger choices in the audition tape than I felt like she was doing in the thing, which they’re two different skills, aren’t they? Like, auditioning and showing what you can do there. Are you ever like, “That was a really great choice, and I’m going to adopt that”? Or is it usually like, “Great, they can go that far, but we know exactly what we want”?
John: Honestly, they’re two different things slightly, because there’s the audition tape where it’s just the actor without any coaching just delivering a thing, and that’s a situation where playing big is probably the right choice. Because if you play small and you’re not getting them where they want to go, they may not reach out to you again. They always feel like they can reign you back in rather than make you get bigger.
Drew: That makes sense.
John: It’s harder to negotiate bigger, but a lot of these scenes that I was writing, especially with Go, we had people coming in and physically auditioning in front of us, and giving more space there meant that we could actually direct you towards this thing versus that thing. There was a show that I was doing with Jordan Mechner that we never ended up shooting the pilot, but we went through a lot of casting on it, and the sides we built for that showed two different aspects of the character. It gave us enough space where we could say like, “Could you try that with your real accent? You’re trying to hide a British accent there, try to hit us with your real accent.” It just gave some space there. If it was just story, story, story, that’s not going to be helpful.
Drew: I do feel like finding the right people for those smaller parts is so important. Me and our friend Nima Yousefi were talking– he’s rewatching Mad Men, and I’ve seen that show a million times. We were just talking about it, and he has a theory that Mad Men doesn’t work without the character of Joan, and specifically, if Christina Hendricks is not cast as Joan. And I think he’s right. Like, she’s obviously a huge part of the series. She starts out sort of as a peripheral character, and I don’t think it has the same– it’s not the same show without her.
Whereas some of the big leads, the Jon Hamm characters, anyone could play that. It’s hard to think of someone else doing that, but that’s a type you can get a strong leading man, and even the Peggies and stuff like that. This is being very specific to Mad Men. Those smaller characters, getting that right, I think informs the tone and the flavor of your movie or your TV show in a way that it’s fundamentally different without them. I don’t know, is that overwhelming at all that you’re trying to find the right person, or do you just [crosstalk]?
John: Yes. I mean, this is going to be the first year where we have the casting awards for the Oscars, and casting is so fundamental. As writers, you’re creating these characters in your head, and you’re putting them on paper, but then they get assigned off one by one to people without your control a lot of times. And so, if you have the ability to write scenes that are designed to showcase what is special about this character, what it is that is going to be unique about this character, it’s another opportunity to steer the ship in the right direction from the page.
Drew: Yes, that makes sense.
John: Yes. I love it when people share their casting sides, you know. Listen, I’m not a fan of actors showing their auditions for things when someone else got it, or their better auditions for things. That’s not helpful, but I do love seeing the process behind it, and it’s great to see, this is the person’s audition tape, and this is them actually doing the part. That, I think, is really helpful. If it’s smaller than their audition, it’s probably because they were directed smaller, or because it’s just what actually fits in the story overall. As an actor coming in, you often don’t know what the whole shape of it is. You’re just getting these pages, and if those pages can give you some sense of who that character is beyond just those lines, that’s helpful.
Drew: My favorite pages I ever got was for when I did Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Part of it is because David Koepp wrote that script, and that script was fantastic, but it was very active. My character was like going through boxes, and you’re trying to find a needle in the haystack with papers. It just gave me something to do, and I feel like that was such a gift. I feel like most things are just talky, and I think if you can do that for actors, you’re going to get a lot cooler stuff.
John: The other thing I would stress, and this is a thing that casting directors will often put together their scene, they’ll do like cut-and-paste versions of scenes to get this down, is to minimize the other person talking. And so, the theater lines, just to get rid of that, so it’s as much as possible, the person auditioning is driving the scene. Yes, there should be some moments where you’re seeing them react and listen, because active listening is important, they’re not just waiting for their time to talk, but they need to be the main person on camera, or main person in the scene, because they’re the only ones we’re supposed to be paying attention to.
There’s that cliche which happens in a lot of movies you see, where it’s like, oh, this person came in to read lines opposite somebody, but then they got cast as the thing. Sure, it happens some. I’m sure that there’s some anecdotal [unintelligible 01:12:09] truth to that, but that’s not the point in well-written scenes that the off-screen person, you wouldn’t have heard very often.
Drew: Yes, it can make a huge difference, whether those sides are good or just words.
John: Yes. Even if you’re just writing something small for yourself to shoot with people, it’s a good idea to be thinking about, what are the casting sides that are going to help me find the best actors for this? It could just be a weekend short film, it still helps.
Drew: Thanks, Drew Goddard, for bringing that up, and to you for talking more about that.
John: Yes. All right. And thanks, Drew, for putting this episode together.
Drew: Yes. Thanks, John.
Links:
- Our first endings compendium, Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
- A video essay of our farewell scenes discussion with Aline Brosh McKenna
- Episodes 44 – Endings for beginners, 366 – Tying Things Up, 648 – Farewell Scenes, and 392 – The Final Moment
- Dan Harmon story circle
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell, Drew Marquardt and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.