The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 655 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, it is a compendium episode, where we go back through the archives and find great topics and smush them together in one episode. Drew, tell us what you found this week.
Drew Marquardt: This compendium actually came about because I needed it this week.
John: You personally needed this.
Drew: I personally needed it.
John: You selfishly orchestrated-
Drew: Yes. This is just for me. It doesn’t apply to anyone else. But hopefully someone can get something out of it. I’m in the middle of revisions right now. Most of the notes I had were that the stakes were muddy, which I think is code for “I’m bored with this.”
John: They weren’t quite sure why they should continue to pay attention to your script.
Drew: Yeah. “Why am I turning the page?” I was trying to fix it at a structure level. I was hitting a brick wall. Not to make your head big, but I was like, “What did John and Craig say about this?” I went back, and in five minutes, you guys gave me the tools and shifted my perspective and cracked it open. It made me really excited, and I figured why not put it together.
John: Fantastic. Great. I’m glad this helped you out. Hopefully this will help out our listeners as well. Before we get into this compendium, we have one bit of news/housekeeping to handle.
In the 12 years we’ve been doing this podcast, I have learned that our listeners are brilliant and multitalented. When I’m looking for someone to do a thing, I know that I should start first with the people who listen to this podcast. This is one of those cases.
There is a little video game that I would like to make. Technically, genre-wise, it’s a deck-building rogue-like game in the vein of Slay the Spire or Balatro. If you recognize those titles and love them, great. If you don’t know those titles, seek them out. They’re very, very smart and very, very fun.
On paper, the game that we have been mapping out around the office seems really fun. We know the gameplay, the mechanics. But while our team is really good at making productivity apps like Highland or Weekend Read for the Mac and for iPhone, we are not video game developers. This is not our wheelhouse. But someone listening to this podcast probably is. That’s why I’m hoping we can find someone to come in and help us do this project. If you are this person or if you know this person, great. This may not be what you do for a living. We thrive in that space of really talented amateurs coming on board, so you may be the person we want. I have a longer job description written up, which Drew-
Drew: I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. You can apply through there.
John: Absolutely. You’ll see exactly what we’re looking for and how to send in information about who you are and what you’ve done before this. I have a hunch we’re gonna find somebody great. That’s it for the housekeeping. Drew, tell us about the show we’re listening to today.
Drew: It’s only two episodes that we’re pulling from. First is Episode 179, which is The Conflict Episode.
John: Legendarily, people got very nervous in this episode, because it sounded like Craig and I were not doing well.
Drew: We took that part out, but yes. Lots of really great stuff in there. Then we go to Episode 402, which is How Do You Like Your Stakes. That’s stakes from the fate of the world and all humanity, to personal stakes to characters, why it matters to them, down to the stakes of a given scene.
John: Great. Drew, you and I will be back at the end of all this with our One Cool Things and some boilerplate. But for our Premium members, what are they gonna hear in their Bonus Segment?
Drew: For our Bonus Segment for Premium members, stick around. You and Craig talk a lot about this conversation you’re going to have about the conflict in Whiplash, so we’ve saved that as a special segment for our Premium members.
John: Fantastic. I remember loving Whiplash. I actually remember doing that little segment on that, because I felt like the conflict between your hero and the antagonist was so detailed and precise and useful, applicable to a lot of other things.
Drew: And varied too.
John: Yeah. Great. We will start with The Conflict Episode and then get into stakes, and we’ll be back here at the end.
[Episode 179 Clip]
John: Let’s get into this topic of conflict, because you, in our pre-notes, listed seven forms of conflict, which I thought were really, really smart. Do you want to start talking us through them?
Craig: Sure. Yeah. Actually, only six. So we’re already in conflict. Somebody brought this up on Twitter. We hear conflict all the time. Studio executives love to ask for more conflict, but they’re maybe sometimes not sure why. And sometimes I think people who aren’t writers miss the presence of conflict because they’re only looking for a certain kind.
But I think there are six kinds. This is what I came up with. There may be more. The first kind is the simplest: an argument. This is a physical fight or verbal argument. And we all know that conflict when we see it. That is not, however, the most common conflict. Nor is it often the most effective or impactful conflict in drama.
John: The little skit we were trying to do at the start of the episode, that’s an example of this kind of argument. Even if it’s like passive-aggressive, the way I would naturally be in my conflict, you can tell that it’s happening there. It’s really clear. It’s in the moment. There is a disagreement, and people are expressing their contrary opinions in that moment.
Craig: Yeah. They’re fighting. We have one word for both punching each other in the face and yelling at each other. They’re fighting.
The second kind of conflict is struggle against circumstance. This could be as simple as I’ve locked my keys in the car, or I’m freezing and I need to get warm. Man versus nature. Man versus object. Man getting laid off by corporation.
John: Absolutely. In the scene version of it, what you talk about, like a man getting locked out of his car, locked out of his house, that’s a scene. But then, of course, we can scale this up to the entire movie. You have Castaway. You have these big things about a man against a nature. It scales both directions.
Craig: Correct. And you’ll see that in most movies, even if there is one dominating kind of conflict, like struggle against circumstance in Castaway, they will find ways to then work in these other interesting sorts of conflicts, even to the point where you can see a conflict coming between Tom Hanks and a volleyball. It’s very smart.
John: Yes.
Craig: The third kind of conflict is an internal conflict. And I’ll call that unfulfilled desire. Essentially, I want something that I do not have. How can I get it?
John: The scene version of this is the girl across the bar that he’s trying to get to, and he cannot achieve that thing. But the inner conflict is usually driving more a movie level kind of issue. There is a goal in life that somebody has. Hopefully, it’s articulated clearly to us, the thing he or she wants. And that is a thing he cannot achieve.
Craig: And that conflict will drive all sorts of stuff. Rocky is about wanting something, unfulfilled desire. Rudy. A lot of sports movies are about this unfulfilled desire, believing that there is more in you. We’ll see certainly a ton of this in Whiplash. Whiplash really is about two kinds of conflicts: argument and unfulfilled desire.
John: The last thing I want to say about this kind of unfulfilled desire is going back to the Chuck Palahniuk conversation from last week. If that unfulfilled desire is an internal motivation, it’s the writer’s job to find a way to externalize it. To find ways to have our characters take action that lets us understand what’s going on inside their head. It’s the writer’s job to find the words that the characters can say to articulate what is actually happening inside, and to create situations that are little blocks along the way that lets them get closer to or further away from that goal.
Craig: A hundred percent. The worst thing you can do when you have an internal conflict is to have somebody explain it as if the audience is their therapist. Incredibly boring. But I always loved that scene in King of Comedy where you see Rupert Pupkin in his basement, and he’s set up a fake audience, and he is performing as the host of his talk show. What an amazing way to get across this unfulfilled desire. And then in the middle of it he’s yelling at his mother because she’s calling down to him about eating dinner. But you get it. You get the depth of his need and his want. And he’s already at conflict with the world.
John: I’m a hundred percent in agreement with you that we need to avoid that sort of sitting on the therapist’s couch and expressing your inner thoughts and desires. It’s almost always death.
Where that can be really helpful though is, again, that writing that happens off the page. And it may be very useful for writers who – if you’re struggling to get inside a character, write that scene that’s never gonna be in your movie. But write that thing where they are actually articulating their inner desire, because that way at least you have something that you can hold onto to know what it is that the character is going for. Someone who is writing a musical, those are the moments that are gonna become the songs.
Craig: The songs, right.
John: Characters sing their inner wants in ways that is incredibly useful in musicals. They don’t tend to express them the same ways in movies.
Craig: That’s right. And partly because we understand when a character is singing – particularly when they’re singing solo, they’re alone on stage – that we are hearing their inner thoughts. They’re not talking out loud to nobody. That would make them schizophrenic. We’re hearing what’s in their mind.
What’s interesting about conflict is that we often don’t understand the nature of our own inner conflict. Early on in a movie, what a character says they want may not really be what they ultimately want. They don’t yet have the bravery or insight to express what they truly want. At the end, they may sing a different song about or they may say a different thing about what they truly want. And that makes sense, because that’s when the conflict is resolved.
John: Yes. And the best of those songs, while the character is singing their inner thoughts, there’s a transformation and a change happening over the course of it. There is a realization that is happening while they’re singing their song. And expressing it to themselves, they actually have an insight and an understanding.
A good recent example is Emily Blunt’s song at the very end of Into the Woods. She has the song Moments in the Woods, where she actually has all these brilliant insights about what it is that she wants and wanted to have the prince and have the baker and have it all. Or at least have the memory of what it was like to have it all. And that’s a great thing that musicals can do that’s actually very hard to do in a straight movie.
Craig: Absolutely true. Yeah, it’s fun to watch somebody start to sing about one thing and then watch it turn into an “I want” song. Or start to sing an “I want” song and it starts to turn into an “I already have” song. It is fascinating. That’s what you get from that internal rhythm that you don’t get really from movies.
That’s our third type of conflict. Here’s the fourth kind: avoiding a negative outcome. That is, I need to figure out how to do something, but I have to do it in a way that doesn’t get me hurt. So a very simple kind of example of this conflict is I have to break up with this person. I just don’t want to hurt his feelings. That’s conflict.
John: Yeah. It is, absolutely. And this is the kind of conflict that you often see in comedies overall. If you think of any situation comedy, it’s generally one character is trying to do something without the other characters around them knowing that they’re trying to do that. And so it’s classically the I ended up on a date with two girls at once and I’m running between the two things.
You’re trying to avoid something embarrassing happening to yourself, and you’re making the situation worse by trying to just – if you just ripped off the Band-Aid, everything would be okay. But instead, you are dragging it out, and you are causing pain by trying to avoid it.
Craig: That’s right. Sitcoms are always very instructive because they are the most basic of these things. That’s where you get the line, “I should have been honest with you from the start, but I was just afraid that you would be so upset.” There’s a classic ’70s sitcom thing where someone leaves their pet with a neighbor, and then the pet gets out immediately. That’s classic avoiding a negative outcome.
John: Yes. Your next one was confusion.
Craig: Confusion. Right. This is an interesting kind of conflict that happens when – it’s different than struggle against circumstance. This is a lack of information. Essentially, you are at conflict with the world around you, because you don’t understand anything. Where am I? What’s going on? It doesn’t last long. But you can see that in a movie like The Matrix, for instance, where the conflict that we’re experiencing between Mr. Anderson and the world is one of confusion.
John: Definitely. And also, you can see it in movies like The Bourne Identity where he literally has no idea who he is. You can see it in movies where people are dropped into foreign lands and they have just no sense of understanding the rules of the world around them. The fish out of water movies are often cases where there’s just fundamental confusion, and you don’t know which side is up.
Craig: And you will see this in comedies also quite a bit. Private Benjamin, she’s confused. She’s clearly having arguments, and she’s clearly struggling against circumstance, but there is also just that terrible feeling of confusion and being lost in the world around you.
And then lastly, dilemma. Very simple kind of conflict we all know. You have to make a choice. The problem is all the choices are bad. And that’s a great conflict. Everybody likes that one.
John: Sophie’s Choice, of course, notoriously. But really, any situation between this guy or that guy; or Stanford or this; or do I break up with this person so I can have the opportunity for this person? These are fundamental dilemmas, and they feel familiar because we all experience them in real life.
The challenge is a dilemma is hard to sustain over the course of a movie. Dilemma can be like a crisis point, but if you keep your character floating in that in between for two hours, that’s probably going to be a frustrating movie.
Craig: Yeah. We like it when Hamlet waffles for awhile. We don’t want just nothing but waffling. You’re absolutely right. Some of these are better suited to moments. Confusion, for instance, cannot last the whole movie. If it does, everyone will be also in conflict and be angry. And there are filmmakers out there who seem to delight in placing the audience in positions of confusion. Perhaps confusion masquerading as art? But ultimately, the movies that I like the most are the movies that are both brilliant and not permanently confusing.
John: Agreed.
Craig: But yeah, dilemma and confusion are best used in small doses, for my taste at least.
John: For our next section, let’s talk about how conflict works within a scene, because as we read through scripts, a lot of times I will find a scene that says – there is interesting dialogue here. It’s either funny or that smart words are being said. And yet the scene is fundamentally not working. And when the scene is fundamentally not working, one of the most obvious problems I can point to is there is no conflict.
And sometimes you’ll read a scene where literally all the characters in the scene agree on what’s going on. There’s no threat to anything. It’s just a bunch of people talking. And when that happens, that’s probably not going to be the most successful scene. Let’s talk about some ways you can sustain conflict within a scene. I had a bunch of bullet points here, and we’ll see which ones work and which ones stick.
First I want to say is you have to understand what each character wants. Yes, you want to know what they want in the movie overall, but literally what is their purpose for being in that scene? What does the individual character hope to get out of this moment? And if you can’t articulate that, then maybe you need to stop and do some more thinking, or you may need to look at are these the right characters for the scene; is this the right scene for these characters?
Craig: No question. We all know that hackneyed phrase, “what’s my motivation?” And that’s a specifically tuned thing for actors. But for writers, what we have to constantly be asking about our characters is what do they want, because I’m telling a camera to be on them. And everybody in the audience understands inherently that the camera doesn’t need to be on them. The camera could be anywhere at any point. I’ve chosen it to be here. Why? And it has to be, because those people either want something or are about to become in conflict.
One of the fun things about characters that don’t want something is when they’re sitting there and they’re perfectly happy and then you destroy their moment. You have the movie crash into it. And now they want something.
John: Absolutely. They want that tranquility back and they cannot get it.
Craig: Right. The opening of Sexy Beast is a perfect example of this. Ray Winstone is just floating in his pool, happy as can be, and then crash, here comes a boulder. You want that. But sometimes you want to start with the scene where it opens up where somebody really, really wants something. And if you can’t have somebody want something at some point in your scene, that’s not a scene.
John: Yeah, that’s not a scene. The next thing I’ll point to is if you’ve ever taken improv class, one of the first things you learn, probably your first day, is “yes and.” You’re supposed to accept what’s been given to you and build on it and hand it back. And that next person, your scene partner, says, “Yes and,” and keeps going with it.
The real scenes are more likely going to be the opposite of that. They’re going to be “but.” The characters are going to challenge each other. And so hopefully in challenging each other, the information that you want to get out will come out much more naturally.
Sometimes you’ll read scenes that are just exposition factories where, basically, we’re going to talk though all the details of this case or whatever. And sometimes in procedurals you just have to swallow your pride, and that’s just the way it’s going to have to work. But more likely you’re going to be able to get that information out or get that sense of how we’re going to get to the next scene through conflict and through confrontation. Someone says something, and another character challenges, “But blah, blah, blah, blah.” “Yes, however, blah, blah, blah, blah.” The ability to sort of push back against the other characters in the scene is much more likely to get you to a good place than just agreeing all the time.
Craig: Absolutely. And you can use some of these conflict cue cards here if you’re struggling. If you have a Harry the Explainer, if you need an info dump – and sometimes you do – have the person listening be confused. Have them be struggling against circumstance. Someone is talking and they’re trying to escape while the person is talking. There’s always ways to avoid just the people talking.
John: That’s a great example. And I like that you go back to these initial six points about what is conflict, because in that explainer scene, you could actually be explaining the dilemma. Basically, the person, the explainer, could lay out the two – these are the two options and they’re both terrible. That is a way to create conflict through the action of the scene. And that’s going to probably be awesome. So look for that.
Next thing I’ll point to is the struggle for the steering wheel and that usually one character is driving the scene, but sometimes they can be wrestling over who is in control of the scene, this conversation, this moment, where they’re going to go to next. And that struggle for the steering wheel is real. That happens in real life. And it can happen in your scene.
Obviously, if you’re writing a movie with a central character, that central character should be driving most of the scenes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have other strong characters come in there and express their desire for control of that moment.
Craig: Yeah. And you’ll see this primarily in two-handers. It’s funny, I never really thought of it with that phrase “struggle for the steering wheel,” but that’s pretty much what’s going on in Identity Thief for the whole movie.
John: That’s literally a steering wheel.
Craig: I don’t think there’s ever a technical struggle for the steering wheel, but the two of them are just in complete – it’s really a battle for control. And that’s what’s going on the whole time.
John: Sort of a corollary to the knowing what each character wants, but making sure that it’s clear to the characters and to the audience, the if/then of the scene. So if this circumstance happens, then the outcome is going to be this.
Sometimes I’ve come into a scene where I don’t really know what’s at stake. I don’t know what the goal of the scene is. I don’t know what the goal of this conversation is. And so making it clear to the audience and clear to the characters in the scene what it is they’re trying to do and then what the outcome is that they’re hoping for.
Every time that you are in a conversation in real life, you have a sense of like, these are the kinds of things that could be happening next. And you need to have the same sense for your own characters. And hopefully, the characters in a scene don’t all have the same sense of where they’re going to go to. Otherwise, they could just skip forward all those steps and be at that place.
Craig: This very thing, this make clear the if/then, is why a lot of first-time writers screw up. For whatever reason, I feel like they’re primarily worried about trying to write naturalistic dialogue. Everybody is in a panic about writing dialogue that sounds normal. But all of our normal dialogue throughout the day is not if/then. It’s just this. We’re just going to talk about lunch. And they don’t understand that movies are about those days or weeks in someone’s life that define their life. It’s the craziest days or weeks in a human being’s life. So everything is far more important. This is all staked up.
And so when you are in a situation where there are high stakes, then every moment should have an if/then. Every moment. Because you are constantly moving toward your goal and away from pain; or mistakenly towards pain and away from your goal. There is no relaxy stuff. People draw all the wrong lessons.
John: Very much related to that is to really be mindful of where you’re coming into a scene and where you’re exiting a scene, because in real life, conflicts will rise up, and then they will diminish. If you wait long enough, every conflict is going to taper off and everything is going to get back to normal. But your job as the writer is to figure out, how do I get out of that scene before all the conflict has resolved. How do I think about coming into a scene where the conflict is already there?
By figuring out where you can first turn on the camera in that scene and where you can exit the scene, that’s going to get you to the heart of your conflict. The part of the scene you really want is generally that hot spot, that flare right in the very middle of it.
Craig: Yeah, exactly. If you’re going to let a conflict peter out, it better be for comedy sake, because it’s a lie, it’s a misdirect. Otherwise, absolutely; nobody wants to watch people make up over and over and over throughout the course of a movie. We need conflict. We must have it.
John: Next point. If your characters are not in conflict, then the external conflict better be really apparent and right in their face. If your characters are getting along fine, then the thing they’re facing should be right there. Literally, the lion should be right in front of them.
If there’s a lion in the distance, or there’s a roar you hear in the distance, your characters in our present scene should still be bickering or fighting with each other. It’s only when that thing is right in front of you, then you can drop the conflict right between those two characters that we’re looking at.
Craig: Yeah. And you might say, why? If there are two people and a lion is far away, why are they arguing about who is going to have to take care of the lion? Why can’t they just work it out like friends? And the answer is because they’re bad people. I hate to put it that way. But characters in movies should be bad people. I don’t mean bad like evil; I mean bad like they’re not finished.
John: Yeah. They shouldn’t be perfect.
Craig: Right. They’re not idealized. They are messes who are struggling with something that will be overcome by the end of the movie. But because it is by definition not the end of the movie at this point, they have these flaws. And the tragic flaw of any of these characters is going to manifest itself through conflict that should otherwise probably be avoided.
Look, let’s go back to The Matrix, because it’s such a basic fairy tale. The whole point of The Matrix is you’re the one you have to believe. When you start believing you’re the one, you’ll be the one. His tragic flaw is that he doesn’t believe. His tragic flaw is that he is incapable of faith in self. If he doesn’t have that tragic flaw, they come to him, and the guy says, “You’re the one,” and he goes, “Great.” And then the next scene, he does it, and we’re good. And then they have a party on the ship.
The conflict is driven entirely by the fact that he’s not finished baking. That’s why your characters must be arguing with each other, even if you like them both, about who is going to handle the tiger. I’ve changed it to a tiger.
John: Tigers and lions. They both work really well. You can mate them together. You get a liger. It’s all good.
Craig: The liger. The liger.
John: I’m going to circle back to what you were talking about with The Matrix, because I think that was a great example of – if Neo had just accepted his fate from the start, like, “Oh, I’m the chosen one? Okay, great. Let me do this thing,” the movie would have been 10 minutes long.
I want to talk about that in context of how do you sustain conflict over the whole course of a movie, because there have been times where I’ve read scripts that I’ve really enjoyed the writing, but I felt like, “Okay, on about page 50 we’re done. Everything that needed to happen happened. Okay. I guess we have another 50 pages to read through, but I don’t know why we’re reading through these things.” Let’s talk about some ways that you sustain conflict over the length of your movie.
First off is the question: are you resolving the central conflict too early? If there’s a thing that the character wants, are you giving them what they want too early? That’s sort of an obvious thing. You’re not going to find that all that often. Usually, people have a sense like, oh, I need to actually wait until near the end of the movie for the person to win the championship boxing prize.
But as Lindsay Doran often points out, the real nature of victory in these kind of movies usually is not winning the championship match; it’s resolving that conflict with your wife. It is the achieving this inner vision for who you need to be in your life. And if that happens too early, that’s not going to be a good experience to sit through the rest of the movie.
Craig: Yeah. And you can really see this with biopics because biopics are stuck with facts. And when you see a bad one, you’re watching somebody go overcome their conflict and then now they’re famous and stuff. And then you can feel the movie trying to manufacture conflict and struggling to do so, or manufacturing the same kind of conflict over and over.
That’s why one of my favorite biopics is What’s Love Got to Do With It, because it’s got this incredible conflict going through it that changes and builds and crescendos and finally is resolved. And that’s what we want. That’s why in biopics in particular you can see how the external successes are meaningless. That’s the whole point. Oh, all you thought it was just fun and games and fame, but look what was really going on. We like that sort of thing.
You definitely don’t want to make the mistake of the bad biopic. You don’t want to reward your character too soon. You want to hold back. There should be really one reward. That has to land essentially 10 pages before the movie ends. I don’t know how else to do it.
John: That sounds so formulaic, but it’s absolutely so true. And the success of writing is finding ways to get to that place, so when that moment comes, it feels like a tremendous reward that you didn’t quite see coming that way. That it’s still a surprise to you. That you may not even as an audience quite recognize what it is that you wanted them to achieve, but then they achieve it and that’s fantastic. Or if they don’t achieve it and that’s tragic. Yet, that is the point of how you’re constructing your movie.
Craig: Yeah. In Up, Carl wants to make good on his promise and take the house and land it on the place where his dead wife wanted to be. And in the end, he’s changed that, as we knew he would, and he finally lets the house go. And when he lets the house go, we understand. Maybe there’s five minutes left? Maybe eight or nine. I don’t know how much we can bear.
But the point is if that in your creation is coming at the minute 30 mark, you have a short film. Just know you’ve got 10 minutes after that thing. That’s it. And then stop.
John: It has to be done. Next thing I want to point out is sometimes you’re hitting the same note too many times. You are trying so sustain the conflict, but if you’re just sustaining the conflict by having the same argument again, or having the same fight again, then you’ve lost us. Because we need to see each time we revisit that conflict, revisit that theme, it needs to be different. There needs to be a change that has happened. If the same characters are having the same argument on page 80 as they did on page 20, that’s not going to be successful.
Craig: Agreed. Again, What’s Love Got to Do With It is a good example of this, because the actual nature of domestic violence is incredibly repetitive. A man beats up a woman. The police come. She doesn’t press charges. They go away. A man beats up the woman. And this happens over and over and over and over and over. Tragic, but not movie tragic.
The problem is, and it’s terrible to say, that in narrative form what happens is we become numb to it. We become numb to narrative repetition. What that movie does so well is it changes the nature of the abuse subtly but almost every single time. Whether it’s I’m going to say something to you, I’m going to be cruel to you, or I’m going to control you. Now I hit you once. Now I’m on drugs and I’m out of control. Now I hit you a lot.
Now the problem is now you’re having an argument with somebody else about why you don’t want to leave him. Now you’re having an argument with him about him cheating. We’re starting to change the arrows. You really can’t do the same fight over and over and over. You’ll start to feel very, very bored, unless you have a simple adventure movie where – martial arts movies oftentimes really are just a video game of increasingly difficult battles until you face the boss, and that’s okay. That’s what people are going for.
But even in those, there should be some sort of internal conflict.
John: Yeah. Generally in those cases, those conflicts, there will be dance numbers that are like a different kind of dance number, so each of those fights is a little bit different, so it feels like you have made forward progress. There’s a video I’ll link to that takes a look at Snowcatcher. Snowpiercer, sorry, Snowpiercer. Foxcatcher/Snowpiercer.
Craig: I want to see Snowcatcher.
John: Yeah. It’s basically the guy who catches snowball. He does such a great job. But then his snowball catching coach is really creepy. It’s pretty great. And it’s post-apocalyptic, too.
Craig: Of course.
John: In Snowpiercer there’s a video that shows left or right, which is the fundamental dilemma of the movie. But essentially that movie is completely linear. It literally goes from the left side of the train to the right side of the train, from the back to the front. It could have that quality of just being a grind, like fight after fight after fight, and yet it’s able to make each of them different and actually change how the Chris Evans character is facing each of these battles, because he’s questioning his own choices along the way.
Craig: That’s right. Each successive conflict point should change the character. It doesn’t have to change them for better. It doesn’t have to change them necessarily for the worse. Sometimes it just changes them sideways. Sometimes they just learn information. But it’s always about character.
And you have to remember through all of these conflicts that the people watching the movie without knowing it are constantly doing this computation of connecting the character’s conflict and tragedy to their own. Constantly.
We’re coming up on our discussion of Whiplash. Very few people are jazz drummers. I don’t know how many there are left.
John: There are probably more screenwriters than there are jazz drummers.
Craig: There are probably more screenwriters than jazz drummers. But that’s okay. We can all do the computational math to connect it to the analogs in our life.
John: Yeah. Going back to this idea of sustaining conflict across the nature of the movie, you pointed to this in your last discussion here, is that you’re looking for ways that these conflicts are changing the characters and basically how do you make it worse for your hero.
There are certain tropes that I sort of fall back on, but they’re meaningful. And to me it’s burning down the house. How are you making it so it’s impossible for them to go back to the way they were before. How do you make it so it’s impossible for them to get back to a place of safety? How can you have characters betray each other or betray their own visions? How can you pull characters away from the other characters that they love? You’re looking for ways to make things worse so that the conflict actually increases and doesn’t get resolved too early in your story.
Craig: To use The Matrix as an example, what we’re talking about I think is the genesis of one of the smartest choices in that movie. They didn’t need the Oracle character. What they had was a screenwriting problem if you think about it. Laurence Fishburne, Morpheus, is saying, I’ve been looking around. I’m really smart. I’m essentially the smartest person in the world based on what the movie is telling everyone. And I believe you are the one. I’ve been watching you. And I think you’re the one.
Now, we have no idea why. The answer to that question why is because they don’t know either. Nobody knows. It’s just let’s just take it as a given. He’s watched him. He’s smart. You’re the one. The problem then is Keanu Reeves doesn’t believe he’s the one, but I know he’s the one, so I guess I’ve got to watch this jerk not believe what I already believe until he finally believes it. And that’s brutal. That’s just brutal. I’m way ahead of him.
Enter the Oracle character, a brilliant idea from the Wachowskis, who is going to confirm that this is the one – Morpheus. It’s just a little check to make sure. She says, “You’re not.” She actually doesn’t say, “You’re not.” She says, “But you know what I’m already going to say.” And he says, “I’m not the one.” She says, “Sorry. It’s not all good news. Have a cookie.” Great character. And that was really important, because what that did was start us all running other computational math. And then it made the revelation later – she told you exactly what you needed to hear – impactful. By the way, that comes up in Whiplash as well.
John: It does. Absolutely. Before we get to Whiplash, I want to talk through one of my favorite movies of all time and sort of how it does conflict and how it sustains conflict over the course of the whole nature of the movie, which is of course my dearest most favorite movie, which is Aliens.
Craig: Game over, man.
John: Oh, my god, it’s just such an amazingly good movie.
Craig: Why’d you put her in charge?
John: Within each and every scene, there is terrific conflict. And Ripley is always in conflict with characters. Sometimes she’s arguing. Sometimes she’s disagreeing with what they’re doing. Sometimes she just doesn’t want to go on the mission at all. And she’s sort of forced into going on this mission. In every moment within each scene, if she’s not driving the scene, she is your eyes on the scene and she is your way into the scene. And she is in conflict with everyone around her basically the entire movie.
But if you look at the movie macro overall, it does just a brilliant job of not ever letting her get out of conflict. And actually, each point along the way she is getting herself more and more into more immediately dangerous physical conflict with either soldiers she’s sent on the mission with or with a group of aliens or the Alien Queen. The movie is so smartly constructed to make sure that the conflict is continuously escalating up through the very, very, very end.
Craig: Yeah. He, Cameron had this really – I don’t know if this was quite this conscious, but he created this situation that was remarkably frustrating. Frustration is a great feeling to inspire an audience.
She knows. She’s the one person who has experienced this thing, these things. She knows and everybody else is being either arrogant or duplicitous. And it’s incredibly frustrating to watch her continue to say this is bad and have nobody else really care, or think that it’s not that bad. And then it’s more frustrating when the truth emerges and all the arrogant people are now cowards, or at least one notably is a coward who is saying, “We got to go. We can’t win.” And she’s saying, “No, actually you can. I’ve done that before too.” And now she has a kid.
The conflict of frustration is wonderful. It makes us angry. And anger is a terrific thing to inspire an audience, as long as you can eventually release it with some kind of final triumph.
John: What Cameron was so smart about recognizing is that the audience had the same information as Ripley. And so we and Ripley both knew that the aliens were incredibly dangerous and this was an incredibly stupid idea to go on this rescue mission to this planet.
And he was able to let her articulate exactly what we’re thinking, like, “No, no, don’t go there.” And yet we all had to go there together.
And it was a very smart setup and a very smart change along the way, because we would make the same choices Ripley made, or at least we hope we would make the same choices as Ripley made, to go to try to save Newt, to save the other soldiers, to do what she could.
Craig: Yeah. Also, brilliantly, he understood, and I think Cameron has always understood this: that beyond all the hoopla of the effects, and the light, and the noise, and the monsters, we will always care about the person more than anything. And so we don’t care about the monsters.
I bet so many directors saw Alien and thought, wow, it’s about the monsters, man. And it’s not. It’s never about the monsters. We’re the monsters. We’re the problem. Whoa, dude.
John: Whoa dude. Just to delay Whiplash one more moment, as we were preparing our outline of notes for this thing, I started thinking back to my own movies and I wanted to quickly go through my movies and figure out which ones had conflict that basically drove it, and which ones didn’t so much.
My very first movie, Go, it’s a conflict factory. Everyone is in conflict at all times. Ronna wants to make this tiny drug deal happen. She sets off this series of events. Claire keeps trying to be the voice of reason and keeps getting ignored. The second section, the four guys in Vegas, every one of those guys is in conflict the entire time. And sometimes it’s just bantery conflict, but then it gets much, much worse throughout the thing. And in the final chapter, Adam and Zack, they seem to be at each other’s throats. We’re not sure why. We find out that they’re a couple and that they’ve been sleeping with the same guy. So, that whole movie is a conflict thing.
But compare that to the Charlie’s Angels movies, and one of the real frustrations of the Charlie’s Angels movies is the Angels kind of had to get along. They’re supposed to be a team, they’re supposed to be sisters. They weren’t supposed to fight with each other. And so we had to create a lot of external conflict just so you wouldn’t kind of notice that they were getting along so well.
That’s one of the challenges of that kind of movie is if they’re supposed to be a team that gets along great together, well, it’s hard to have it introduced in a scene. Somebody else has to show up to make there be a problem.
Craig: When they’re not in conflict with each other, sometimes it’s hard just to figure out who’s supposed to talk next.
John: Absolutely true. I was reminded by Max Temkin, who created Cards Against Humanity, one of the guys behind that – he had this great blog post this last week about how to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 hours. And so he basically gives you a viewing list to go through the whole series and understand what made that series so great. But he points out that Roddenberry did not want there to be any conflict between the characters at all.
Craig: That’s right.
John: So those first few seasons, he didn’t want the characters to disagree with each other unless they were possessed by some other force or something else. And so it became really hard to write those characters in scenes because they had to get along. They had to follow orders.
Craig: It’s strange. I never really thought about it that way. I love that show. I watched every episode of that show. And it is true. You sort of began to see them all as vaguely people, but really more — you were waiting for them to fight someone.
John: Yeah. And so season three, like after Roddenberry was gone, it did change. And you started to see some conflicts between each other which were useful. It never progressed as far as later science fiction shows would take it, but there was some real —
Craig: Yeah. Worf would get all grumpy.
John: Big Fish. Big Fish, there’s not a lot of conflict in the Edward flashback scenes. It’s sort of his story. Because it is idealized. It is happy and wonderful. But the movie is structured around a central conflict between the father and the son. And in my 15-year journey of making different versions of Big Fish, that’s always been the hardest thing is how to have that conflict feel real and meaningful, and yet not have the son become completely unlikeable and not make the father so overbearing that you kind of want him to be dead. And that is a fundamental challenge of that movie.
Craig: And that was certainly something that we went around and around on with Melissa’s character on Identify Thief.
John: Oh, absolutely.
Craig: Melissa and I and Jason all felt pretty strongly that the only way it was going to work was if we just took all of the safety belts off of her character and let her be awful. Just let her be awful. But the very first scene had to show – it’s like the planting the seed of redemption. There’s a difference – even Darth Vader. Before we really get to see Darth Vader going bananas and being a jerk, Obi Wan says, “Darth Vader was a pupil of mine. He was great. But then he turned to the dark side.” And we go, okay, well there’s a good guy in there somewhere. So when he turns, we think, yes, finally, he has returned. He’s not turned; he’s returned.
When you have these awful characters, you need to set up the return fairly early on. Some sign that they were not just simply born psychopathic. Otherwise we won’t believe the return. For me, all of my movies have conflict, because comedy is conflict. That’s all it is.
[Episode 402 Clip]
Craig: Listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?
John: Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?
Craig: Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story, and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.
“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them, and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”
John, what do you think?
John: Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question, because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.
But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes, but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.
I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of a failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?
Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?
Craig: No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking, and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.
John: Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions, and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often, I think especially in our blockbusters, we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world, and they probably shouldn’t be so often.
If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?
Craig: Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet; now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive, which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”
But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there are people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day, because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up. It’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose, and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.
John: That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes, our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters, and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws, there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem, there could be issues.
I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing, the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened, these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out, because if we do let this get out, then there will be a panic. Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.
Craig: Yeah. For some characters in the show, the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people, the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to, then there’s going to be chaos. Everybody had their different competing interests.
For instance, in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes. One guy is, “I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that, because if I don’t, I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat.” And the other character’s stakes are, “That’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.” Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.
John: And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, okay, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes, and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.
But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes, which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.
But for most characters in most movies, it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture, and that’s the risk that they’re taking.
Craig: All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes, I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest, because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.
John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you, but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.
John: So Craig, let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes. And obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes, which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. We see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back, and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark, and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution, because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time, was really smartly done.
Craig: Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe, they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals. What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important.
I just think these broader stakes of “something is going to blow up” is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.
John: It doesn’t matter.
Craig: I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s what I’m hoping for.
John: Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices, the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels movies fundamentally – will this family be torn apart? Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.
It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?
Craig: Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes, and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people, but you understood watching it – and you may have to adjust – that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important, it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.
It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all,” quote unquote, and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.
John: Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich, which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, the dynamics of her life.
So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing, they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but that it is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.
Craig: Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us, like, “What are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.
In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same, and the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel, my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.
In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s okay to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that, but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.
John: I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that, where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases, it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.
When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that, which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question, you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff, it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other. So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.
Craig: Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank, then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally, there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing, there are stakes. So it’s always there.
[End of Clips]
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article from this past week from The Guardian all about whether it’s appropriate to apostrophe-S to the end of Kamala Harris’s name when you’re using it as possessive. It’s a complicated situation, because AP Style Guide says if a person’s name ends in an S, you just add an apostrophe, and not the apostrophe-S.
Drew: That’s what I was always taught.
John: But that’s not actually how most places really do it. AP Style Guide says one thing, but in most cases, they’ll say you should actually do it the way you pronounce it. We say “Harris’s.” We say the apostrophe-S. Most grammarians, most word nerds would say you should really add the apostrophe-S. It’s an ongoing debate.
Drew: That makes sense it’s a debate, because my defenses went up. I was like, it’s an apostrophe at the end of the S, and that is final. I’m interested to read this.
John: It’s one of those situations where there’s no perfect answer. Benjamin Dreyer, who’s one of the more practical grammarians out there, says it’s not worth worrying about so much, and because it’s not worth worrying about so much, probably apostrophe-S makes the most sense, because it just disappears for people.
Drew: I can see that written out too in my head like “Harris’s,” apostrophe-S.
John: Fine.
Drew: I’m open to it.
John: Drew, what do you got?
Drew: I have two this week.
John: Please.
Drew: They’re both food related. If you’re in LA, The Heights Deli and Bottle Shop in Lincoln Heights. It’s my new neighborhood. I just found it. It’s great. They do sandwiches. They have cans, like you can have beer, and they have wine. That’s it. It’s just very barebones. But the sandwiches are delicious. They’re huge. They’re 11 to 13 bucks. The wine is really nice, really cool stuff, like pét-nats and stuff like that, but priced well. If you’re going to a friend’s party and want to show up, but you don’t want to spend more than 20 bucks, The Heights Bottle Shop has you covered.
John: How does this compare to Larchmont Wine and Cheese? Which naturally, people are going to have it as a reference, because that’s an iconic brand. It’s a wine store on Larchmont Boulevard that for some reason sells sandwiches.
Drew: Such a good question. They sell the same things, basically, but totally different. The way Larchmont Wine and Cheese is, there’s lots of different pieces to it. They have olives and things like that. It feels very lived in and worn. Heights Deli and Bottle Shop feels much more like The Bear. It’s much more stripped down. It’s just fridges running with some beer, wine in the middle, and sandwiches on the side. There’s not that kind of curation that Larchmont Wine and Cheese has, or at least with all the little pieces. I feel like they’re less cheese enthusiast at The Heights Bottle Shop.
John: I guess the store is Larchmont Wine and Cheese, so the cheese is a big part of it.
Drew: It hinges on the cheese.
John: The cheese stands alone. What are these Cheerios Veggie Blends?
Drew: Cheerios Veggie Blends, brand new cereal. I had sworn off cereal. I’m back. They are delicious. They’re really good for you. They’ve got a quarter cup of fruits and veggies. I don’t know if that’s real. I had a high school chemistry teacher who broke apart why all cereal marketing is lies. But they’re delicious. They’re really good. They’ve brought me back to cereal. They are Cheerios Veggie Blends. Worth giving a shot.
John: If we’re hyping cereals, I will say that my new go-to has been Fiber One, which is an iconic good cereal, a high-fiber cereal, but you add in a little bit of the Special K Zero. Special K Zero is a very low-carb cereal that if you were to eat a bowl by itself would taste kind of weird. It doesn’t work by itself, but that on top of some Fiber One, delicious, love it.
Drew: Is there any sweetness to the Special K Zero?
John: There is. It uses some magical process to create a thing. It’s probably soy based. It’s actually not a grain-based thing. It has the texture of cereal without actually being cereal.
Drew: I feel like I’m at this point in my life now where I’ve pulled back on sugar so much that even that little bit of memories of sugar does it for me.
John: Delicious. Drew, thank you so much for putting this episode together. That is our show for this week. These segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is now produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, as always.
Our outro this week is by Tim Brown, has a good Western theme. 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. If you are curious about the game person we’re trying to hire, there’s a link in the show notes, so click through to that. Don’t send it to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s a whole different place you apply for that.
You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You’ll love them. They’re at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to feature on the conflict in Whiplash. Drew, thanks so much.
Drew: Thanks, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: We’ve delayed long enough. Let’s talk about Whiplash. Whiplash is a movie made by Damien Chazelle. I quite enjoyed it. The script for it you can find in Weekend Read. Sony finally published it on their site. We’ll have links to both the pdf version and the Weekend Read version of it. It’s slightly different than the one they actually sent out to us, which is strange, but that’s just the way it happens sometimes.
I was actually fascinated by the way that Whiplash is essentially a two-hander, and it’s just a conflict machine. It’s basically the story of Andrew and his drumming professor, his jazz teacher, professor, and their conflict throughout the course of this movie.
Craig: There’s so much to talk about with this movie. Because we’re running a little long here, I’m wondering should we maybe move it to the next show, because not only is it a great study of how to portray conflict and to escalate conflict and change conflict, but also, it’s got this whole other discussion about art and being an artist.
John: I think we should move the art discussion to the next one, but let’s just talk a little bit about the conflict, so we can wrap up this episode to be super conflict-y.
What I think is so smart – and I’m going to use one of our favorite words again. I apologize in advance that we use this every episode. It’s specificity. I completely understood what each of the characters was doing and why they were doing it, even though I don’t know a damn thing about jazz bands or drumming. I don’t care about jazz bands or drumming, and yet the specificity of it made me believe that the filmmakers understood it, and every character in this thing loved it and was obsessed with it.
When you have characters who deeply believe in their worlds and deeply believe in their world visions who come into conflict, you’re going to have potential for great stuff. I thought it really achieved that. I understood what Andrew wanted. I understand that he had this vision of himself as being one of the greatest drummers of all time. I had this vision that Fletcher saw himself as a kingmaker of sorts. He saw himself as the gatekeeper between you are just a jazz student and you are one of the greats. Yet the movie asked me to keep asking the question, is this guy trying to inspire his students, or is this guy just a sociopath? That was really, really well done.
Craig: It’s funny, I made my list of conflict types before I saw Whiplash. As I look through this list, I realize Whiplash has done all of them. It has physical arguments and verbal arguments. It even has struggle against circumstance. There’s a sequence where the bus that Andrew’s on breaks down, and he’s late, and he has to figure out how to get to the auditorium on time.
It certainly has unfulfilled desire. The movie’s soaking in it. He desperately wants to be great, and he doesn’t know how to be great.
It’s got avoiding a negative outcome. He’s trying to not be punished at times. There’s a scene where he breaks up with a girl and is trying to not hurt her feelings.
There’s a wonderful scene that’s based entirely on the conflict of confusion, where he is asked to play something in front of an audience that he doesn’t know.
John: There’s actually a couple great moments of confusion along the way, where he’s not sure, like, wait, did I get invited to the band? Did I show up late? What’s going to go on here? Wait, why am I not playing this? There’s the rate of confusion throughout.
Craig: That’s right. He’s told to show up for practice at 6:00 a.m. sharp. He wakes up at 6:05 in a panic, runs, falls on his face, gets up, keeps running. Finally gets there at 6:10 and sees outside that actually practice starts at 9:00 a.m.
John: He has that weight of confusion, like, “Wait, was I too late? Was I too early?” and what do you do.
Craig: Why did he tell-
John: It was the whole experience. It was incredibly specific to his situation, his moment. It was universal, because we’ve all had that thing of like, I don’t know if I just made a horrible mistake or what.
Craig: Right, is this my fault or is it his fault. Then lastly, dilemma. It’s got a huge dilemma in it. That’s articulated between his relationship with him and his father, and that is, is this worth dying for? Do I have to die to be great?
John: There are small dilemmas along the way too, which basically, do I send the letter talking about what actually happened, or do I not? That later becomes the confusion of, does Fletcher know what I did, or does Fletcher not know? The revelations of Fletcher’s actual motives comes onstage in a brilliant way. Interestingly, when you look through the screenplay, it happens differently in the screenplay, or it’s tipped in the screenplay.
I think we should come back to Whiplash next week. Maybe more people will have read the script, so we can get a little more specific about what is on the page. Because the movie has a lot of action sequences without any dialog, and it does a great job, I think, of doing that.
But also, you can look at the great example of what changes between a script and what changes in a movie. There’s little small things, little razorblades that went in there, and cut stuff out. I think they made for a stronger movie. That said, I’m not sure I would’ve changed anything in the script, because I think maybe you needed to have that stuff in the script so you would understand what was going on there. But you sometimes don’t need that in the final movie. The change between what was on the printed page and what showed up on the screen is really fascinating.
Craig: There are some big razorblades that came in too. It’s a very comforting thing. A lot of times we watch a movie, and we think, how am I supposed to write a script that’s as good as that? You’re not. The guy that wrote that movie also didn’t write a script as good as that. That’s the point. You’re going to make mistakes.
It’s funny; as I read through the script of Whiplash, I would occasionally get to a bit that wasn’t in the movie. It would read like a mistake, and I would also think, I know why he made that mistake. I make that mistake too. It’s a totally normal mistake. Sometimes that’s the thing. Sometimes it’s not a mistake.
John: Some of the things that get taken out of the movie, I can totally see why they would’ve worked, or maybe would’ve worked with different actors. Maybe you needed to have that moment just to play this thing. But because it’s a movie on a visual stage, we get the relationship between those characters. We don’t need any of the words that they just said.
Craig: Exactly.
Links:
- John’s Video Game Job Posting
- Episode 179 – The Conflict Episode
- Episode 402 – How Do You Like Your Stakes?
- Snowpiercer – Left or Right by Every Frame a Painting on YouTube
- Star Trek: The Next Generation In 40 Hours by Max Temkin
- Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds from The Guardian
- The Heights Deli & Bottle Shop
- Cheerios Veggie Blends
- Special K Zero
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel 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.
