Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-sarah-polley).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 583 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ve got a very special guest. Sarah Polley is a writer/director whose credits include Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell. She’s also the star of my very first movie, Go. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah Polley.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Sarah Polley:** Nice to see you. You look exactly the same, and it’s really eerie.

**John:** Somehow I don’t age. It’s a lot of wearing a hat I think is what does it.

**Sarah:** It’s frightening.

**Craig:** I worry that what’s going to happen is you’re going to age all at once.

**John:** That’s going to be terrifying.

**Craig:** One day we’re going to be like, “Oh, no, what happened? He’s a hundred.”

**Sarah:** I think it’s like a Death Becomes Her type scenario. Actually, this house that we’re recording this in reminds me a bit of Death Becomes Her, so it’s all coming together. Some kind of illegal potion, and Bruce Willis is somewhere.

**Craig:** Yes. We should do a deep dive on that one. I love that movie.

**Sarah:** Oh my god, that’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Sarah:** I’ve seen that movie probably 30 times. There was a period in high school where we watched it every weekend. We just kept watching it.

**Craig:** It’s so good. It’s such a good movie.

**John:** Sarah Polley, I remember you from Go, obviously, because that was my first movie making experience, so it was all overwhelming. You had made a zillion things before that point. I distinctly remember there was a point in which you wrapped, and the next night we were shooting, and there’s Sarah again, and she’s sitting on the floor of this hotel room, in a scene that you’re not in at all, just watching. Do you always know that you wanted to direct? It seemed like you were studying it from the moment I saw you.

**Sarah:** That actually happened as a result of that movie in a way, because I remember meeting with Doug. I remember I was not feeling particularly ambitious as an actor. I didn’t want to make a movie in LA. I remember Doug hadn’t read the script yet. I remember he waylaid me at a hotel somewhere, was like, “Just meet with me for an hour,” before I got on a plane.

I remember him talking about his filmmaking and how he wanted to break the rules and light differently, and he operated his own camera, and rules of filmmaking that he felt were outmoded, that he was going to change. I literally had a moment in that meeting where I just went, “If I can shadow you and learn about what the hell you’re talking about right now, I’m in. I don’t particularly want to act, but I’d really like to spend my time this way.” I loved the characters.

It turned into this kind of apprenticeship where I was watching Doug working and watching you working with him. That became something I suddenly was interested in was filmmaking. Even though I’d been acting for a long time, I never thought of it as something I was interested in before that movie. Then yeah, I was watching a lot.

**John:** I want to get more into filmmaking and writing and directing, but specifically I want to talk about your new movie, Women Talking, which Craig and I both just absolutely loved.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s up for all sorts of awards this season. It’s really, really good. We’ll talk about that. I also want to talk about your book, Run Towards the Danger, which is a moment in your life, but also good general life philosophy advice. I think it’s a generally applicable thing you apply to your life and your career, correct?

**Sarah:** I think that recovering from this concussion, which I had for about three and a half years, and having little success doing so, and then finally finding this amazing treatment program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where the advice I’d been given was turned on its head, so the advice to either rest in a dark room, or the best advice I got was walk and do stuff, but as soon as you start to feel symptoms, come on, go down to zero.

He shook that all up, this amazing doctor, Dr. Michael Collins, and he said, “Look, if you remember one thing from this meeting, it’s this. Run towards the danger. You’re not going to get better at handling the things that are difficult for you with a concussion by avoiding them.” There’s a bunch of very specific exercises and vestibular exercises, but basically, your main treatment is exposure therapy. The things that cause discomfort, you have to do more of. That became this paradigm shift for me that permeated every aspect of my life.

**John:** Great. We’ll talk about that in relation to life but also filmmaking and the decision to make this movie after a 10-year gap. We’ll get into all of it. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I’d love to talk about child actors, because you were a child actor. You have strong opinions about child actors. I watched your movie, and there were a bunch of child actors in it. I’m like, “Sarah, there’s a bunch of kid actors in here.” We’re going to get into that. Craig, I don’t know even what your theory is on child actors.

**Craig:** It’s fraught with danger for everyone. It’s fraught with danger for the children. It’s fraught with danger for their parents and the relationship between the parents and the children, and it’s fraught with danger for the people making the movie or the show, because you can’t help but put your production first. The panic when you’re making something and making your days and all that is just so palpable. You can easily forget that it’s a child. There are so many ways to go wrong, but I think also there are ways to go right.

**John:** We’ll dig into all of that in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members.

**Sarah:** I love the way you articulated that, by the way.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’re now best friends.

**John:** This is a whole bunch of stuff we want to talk about. We might as well start by framing it in the conversation about this movie that you’ve just made, because it was great. It’s based on a book. I’m curious how the book came to you and what the decision process was, like, “Okay, this is something I’m going to choose to adapt and choose to spend years of my life making.” Talk to us about Women Talking.

**Sarah:** I read it when it first came out. I actually heard about it first through a member of my book club. It wasn’t the book we were doing, but she took me inside into the kitchen and said, “Going to tell you the background events behind this novel. When I do that, you’re not going to want to make this into a film.” The book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after. She told me the background, which is of course this devastating story of these series of assaults in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia. I said, “I don’t want to make that into a film.” She said, “I told you you were going to say that. Just wait.”

Then she told me what the film was about, or what the book was about, which was about this incredible meeting between these women, this incredibly rich, dynamic, challenging conversation about how to respond to these series of attacks, whether or not they’re going to stay and fight, whether they leave, whether they stay and do nothing, and this incredibly democratic process and difficult discussion that they have. Really, by the end of her talking, and I already loved Miriam Toews as an author, I was pretty intrigued. I ran and got the book.

Really the day I finished reading it, on my Twitter feed it comes up that Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner have the rights to it. I reach out through my manager, Frank Frattaroli, who’s also Fran’s manager. My email says, “Women Talking, do they have a writer and director for this?” He sends me an email he received within the hour before mine.

**John:** That’s great.

**Sarah:** It says, from Frances McDormand, “Women Talking with Sarah Polley doing these days.”

**Craig:** That never happens.

**Sarah:** It was all very thrilling.

**John:** That part felt like it was meant to be. Reading the book, did you have a sense of how you would make this into a movie? The movie has a really strange form, but did you know it was going to have that strange form from the start? For folks who haven’t seen it, it all takes place really over the course of 24 hours. It’s these conversations between these women that punctuated at different times. They break up and they get back together. We’re all seeing it through the lens of this decision. I guess 12 Angry Men would be one of the early comparisons to it. When did you know it was going to feel like that?

**Sarah:** I feel like what I was excited about was figuring out if this could be a movie or not. I won’t claim that I had a moment where I just knew this is a movie. I felt very tingly about it and very excited about the idea of what an incredible cast could do with a conversation like this.

I don’t think I would’ve embarked upon it without partners like Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand, who could help me hash it out. This was an incredibly collaborative process from the beginning, and a thrilling one, of these conversations with women that were rich and wild and bonkers. This process of figuring it out was a real process. I think what I was excited about was trying to figure out with them if this was a movie or not. I think as we worked on it more and more and I honed the drafts more and more, we realized it was.

**John:** Now, a strange thing about the movie is that there’s not a protagonist in a classic sense. There’s a group protagonist. It’s a group of people arriving at a decision and making a decision together. The storytelling decisions are all diffuse among these different people. How early on did you land on that? Were you writing scenes? What was your drafts and documents along the way that got you figuring out what stuff was going to happen, what people were saying, where stuff would fall.

**Sarah:** It’s interesting what you say about there not being a clear protagonist, because I think my first two films, Away from Her and Take This Waltz, the anchor I held onto was, I am going to make this as concretely from one person’s point of view as humanly possible and stay as close to that character as I can. I think anything I like about those films, that’s what it is, is that we never leave that person whose eyes the story is through.

Then I think when I made my documentary, Stories We Tell, things cracked open for me in a way that made me very interested in what it means to tell a story through a chorus of voices and what does that feel like and what does that look like. There was this real break for me with that form of a singular perspective. I always knew it would feel like a true ensemble. I always knew that I couldn’t lose the perspective of any one character at all, so I had to write multiple drafts from each character’s point of view, as though they were the only character in the movie, just so I could keep the thread alive, even if they weren’t active in the scene, that I was looking at the script from their point of view and really gauging how this was impacting them.

In terms of the documents along the way, the first thing I do when I’m adapting something is, after I’ve done the first read of the book, before I read it again, I write from memory what I think the key points are and the most beautiful images are from the book and that I want in the film. I’m always fascinated to go back for that second read and realize how many of those moments I’ve made up. They’re not in there. You project it on.

**John:** So much of Big Fish, I’m like, oh, I took that from the book. No, it wasn’t there, ever.

**Sarah:** No way.

**John:** There’s no circus in the book. There’s no war in the book.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It’s all creations.

**Sarah:** Were those things that you knew right away you wanted in there that you-

**John:** It was actually while we were still shooting Go, I was reading through Big Fish.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** As I was flipping pages, like, “Oh, the Will character has to have someone to talk to, so I’m going to give him a wife. I think she’ll be French and her name will be Josephine.” On that first read through, you create things, you invent things.

**Sarah:** I think I’m also curious about the things that you just don’t know you’ve invented, like, “That image really spoke to me.” You realize something in your subconscious has mapped something from your life onto the book. I think that’s the really juicy stuff to explore is what’s that distance between you and the book and how are you traversing it in unconscious ways. Unpacking that material of what’s connecting you is super interesting.

**Craig:** One of the things that struck me is that it is an ensemble piece, and you are studiously, and therefore effortlessly, or appearing effortlessly, showing it from all these different perspectives. You can tell you’ve done your work, because sometimes you cut away from the person talking to somebody else, and they’re not simply listening. They are doing things. Sometimes they’re not listening, which is fantastic. Nonetheless, the drama begins to organize itself, as it almost always does, around an axis. For me, it was almost like Rooney Mara’s character was the protagonist and Jessie Buckley’s character was the antagonist. Then at some point you start to feel like, “Wait, maybe Jessie Buckley is the protagonist.”

Interestingly, I’m just curious if this was anything that you were cognizant of, a story about a group of women trying to figure out what is true and what is correct and what is the smart way to do things and changing their minds, that in a reflective way, who we in the audience are attaching ourselves to begins to change and swing back and forth in pretty dramatic ways.

**Sarah:** Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting through the casting process how every actor I met with was really gravitating towards Salome or Ona, because they thought they were the protagonists. I was constantly saying, actually, by the end, the person this actually revolves around ultimately, and she’s not the protagonist, it is a true ensemble, but the more complex journey which I think ends up surprising you is the character Mariche, is Jessie Buckley’s character, who ends up moving towards becoming the person who leads them forward in the direction they’re going to go, which I think is a surprise. I think it is genuinely an ensemble, but I did want it to feel like we could go back and forth in perspective in terms of who we were most connected to, and to be surprised by the end by our connection to Mariche.

**Craig:** It’s pretty amazing to watch. Jessie is such a good actor. Isn’t it a shame that she’s such a bad person though? One of the nicest people.

**John:** One of the stars of Chernobyl, we should say.

**Craig:** One of the nicest people I’ve ever been on a set with, just so lovely.

**Sarah:** I’m going to be honest. They all were. I know people always talk a whole lot of bullshit about the people they worked with and how great they were. This was the most unbelievable community of human beings. They all shared a greenroom. No one had a trailer. They spent every hour together. It was a time where the Canadian women’s soccer team was doing really well. There were all these amazing videos of their team spirit, and when one of them would of them would struggle, how all of them would run and lift one of them up. I just felt like that’s what we were living. Someone would have a great moment or a monologue, and everyone could feel it when it worked. There’d be crazy applause. They’d literally be lifted up into the air.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Sarah:** It was just this sense of collective celebration of each other and connectedness and also challenging each other and pushing each other, but in very, very healthy ways.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the setting of the movie, because I don’t know how much of this came from the book as well. When you say it’s a Mennonite community in Bolivia, my natural assumption is all this should’ve been taking place in Spanish and stuff, but the actual Mennonite community that was there, that was all in German. It was all in low German.

**Sarah:** In Plautdietsch, yeah.

**John:** In Plautdietsch. It was this weird, insular kind of place. When did you know that you were going to shoot it in Canada? When did you know that you were going to do it in English? Were those just fundamental, baked in decisions from the start?

**Sarah:** Yeah. This book was written as a response to real life events in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie takes a little bit of a step from that. While we’re happy to talk about those events, and it’s important to, the film exists more in the realm of a fable. I want it to be placeless. I wanted it to be timeless. I didn’t want people to be able to pin these issues which we’re dealing with in every patriarchal society to some degree or another on this obscure, already misunderstood community. I think it’s really important we talk about that story. For the purposes of the film, I did want it to feel we were basically nowhere.

**John:** There’s a moment at which a 1980s Census taker comes through, 1990s?

**Sarah:** 2010 but he’s playing Daydream Believer.

**John:** Making it clear that we’re not in space, we’re not in some sort of alien dimension. There is an outside world that does exist, but these characters have no connection to it. They have no relationship to it, which is so important as we’re trying to figure these things out.

They’re trying to figure it out in a vacuum, because they don’t have the benefit of having read all the other theory about stuff. As they’re trying to figure out collective action and what we do, these are not literary characters who can do these things, and yet they speak at a level of sophistication that makes it seem like they have had some greater conversations about these things, or at least through their biblical training, have had some elevated level of discourse.

**Sarah:** There is this incredible oral tradition, and especially in communities of faith, where even if there’s no literacy, there’s been an incredible amount of analysis of text and interpretation of text and of thinking about spiritual and philosophical ideas. I did play with the dialog a little bit, because in the book, it’s through August’s point of view, the male, educated narrator. The language at times is more sophisticated than what it would be. I did a lot of work of trying to put it in their mouths in a realistic way. When I started to go too far and make it too pedestrian, I started to feel uncomfortable ethically with that decision.

I had this really interesting conversation with my husband who’s a legal academic. I was like, “I don’t actually want to dumb this down, because I don’t believe that they’re not capable of these kinds of sophisticated ideas and thoughts just because they haven’t received an education. I think they’ve lived in community. They have a sense of the collective and selflessness and faith.” He just looked at me and said, “Why not put the most sophisticated language into the mouths of the most marginalized people you can think of?” These women were incredibly marginalized. There was something that felt like a radical act about that and also that there is a heightened reality to the film that I didn’t want to shy away from.

**Craig:** That comes through beautifully. In thinking about the speech patterns that you’re talking about, it was unique. Listening to them speak, you got the sense that they had been raised to be remarkably articulate. Everyone is speaking very clearly and without many apostrophes. There are not a lot of contractions. It’s very florid but also grounded, and yet some of them are better at it than others. It was interesting to watch how different characters had… For instance, Jessie Buckley, her character doesn’t quite engage on the same structured language level that Rooney Mara’s character engages on, or Claire Foy’s. There’s more structure.

I’m curious if there was a dial that you were turning back and forth in terms of the level of articulation and the level of sophistication or formality of that language, because this is such a dialog-centric piece.

**Sarah:** Absolutely. There’s a reference briefly in the film to something that’s a bigger thing in the book, which is that some of these women like Ona have had access to August’s mother, who’s had this secret schoolhouse. She has brought in some of these ideas and talked about things and had more access to somewhat of an education. There are some differences in terms of exposure amongst the women.

**Craig:** It was a really smart choice to give them that inflection. I really loved it, because it also helped me feel that they were in the center of a religious colony. They’re quoting the bible all the time. If they can’t read, this means that they have been drilled over and over in this kind of biblical instruction, which was remarkable.

Also, just to circle back to an earlier point that you and John were talking about, the fact that you don’t tell us where they are I thought was a fantastic choice, because I’m as afraid as they are when they start to contemplate, “If we leave, where do we go?” because I don’t know where they are. They talk about the city. Where? I felt as insulated as they were, which I thought was such a smart choice.

**Sarah:** Thanks.

**John:** Let’s talk about the script itself a little bit. We printed out some pages here. We’re going to have a link in the show notes to the full script so people can read what you wrote here. This draft we’re looking at is dated April 12, 2021 as the production draft, and then a whole bunch of revisions, double pink revisions on August 16, 2021. This April 12th original production draft, how much does it resemble the movie we saw?

**Sarah:** There are some really seismic changes. All of the films I’ve made thus far, excluding Stories We Tell, you would look at the script, and it’s basically the movie. This one, when they released it publicly recently, I went, “Oh, dear god.”

**John:** I want to talk about that.

**Sarah:** We made huge changes in the editing room.

**John:** Craig and I have a friend who one of his jobs is, when it comes to awards seasons, he has to take like, okay, here’s a shooting script, and here’s the actual movie, and he has to make the script match the actual movie rather than this. I loved being able to see this, because I got to see, oh, I can see why those changes were made.

**Sarah:** Interesting.

**John:** The biggest change of course is, in the draft we have here, the narration is from August’s point of view. I’m not even sure who’s narrating it. It’s a woman who’s narrating it to her unborn child. Is it Jessie Buckley’s child? Who’s narrating it?

**Sarah:** Autje, the youngest woman in the room, the teenager, is narrating it to Rooney Mara’s unborn child from the future colony.

**John:** Great. It completely works in the movie, and it could’ve worked on the page here, but it seems like you didn’t know if that was a thing that needed to happen.

**Sarah:** No. In fact, it’s funny, because I love August narrating it in the book. The narration is so beautiful. Ben Whishaw read it so beautifully.

**John:** He’s a talented actor there, yes.

**Sarah:** He killed it. He killed it.

**John:** He’s Paddington Bear.

**Sarah:** There was no way to think of it as anything but that in my mind. I chafed at some of the… This was a lauded book, and everybody loved it. Some of the criticisms were, “Why would you have a male narrator?” which I just found so boring and beside the point. Actually, it’s also about men listening and taking notes. There is such a thing as a useful presence in a room when someone knows how to be a good ally. There was something about it that just felt so one-dimensional about the criticism. I think I was also quite defensive of the idea of August as the narrator.

**John:** You’re a person who defends the writers’ room’s assistant who takes all the notes in the room. You’re defending that person.

**Sarah:** Exactly. I’m totally defending that person. I just was like, “No, this is amazing.” Again, Ben doing that narration was so beautiful. We cut the film together. The scenes were where we wanted them to be. There was some disconnect. There was some distance between us and the film. Then there was this amazing brainstorming session that we had with Dede Gardner and Frances and with Chris Donaldson. We had another editor, Roslyn Kalloo.

There was this moment where I think it was Dede who originally said, “Should we be looking at the narrator here?” Then the idea originally was maybe it’s Rooney’s character talking to her unborn child. Then I think it was Chris who said actually, “What would be amazing is if it’s the youngest person in the room, Autje,” because we had fallen in love with Kate Hallett’s performance. I’d fallen in love with her. She has a poetry about her and just a way of processing things and going through the world that’s so fresh but also sophisticated.

As an experiment, I asked Kate to send me her notes on her character when she was prepping, because I knew at her age I made these beautiful notes that no one ever saw. Sure enough, there were these beautiful notes, which provided the inspiration for me to go back and write this whole other document, which was me trying to remember what it felt like to be 16 years old, around the age I knew you, and how I saw the world, how uncompromising I was, and fierce, but also there was a sense of poetry and connectedness with my true self and how I was processing things.

I just wrote this stream of consciousness document and would have Kate send back these voice memos to us in the editing room of recording them. We didn’t necessarily know where they were even going to go. We would create sequences around them, or we would take sequences that were there and change them according to the voiceover. Suddenly, we started to find the film. Suddenly, what we started to find actually was the spirit of the book that we had lost by remaining too close to it.

**John:** That’s amazing. Let’s talk about the first page here, because you do some stuff that is so helpful to the reader, but the audience doesn’t get to see. You have this list of the women broken down by family. We see the 11 main characters of the story. We’re introduced to them here, so we can see what the connection is, because later on, you’re going to shotgun them at us, and we’re going to be in a room with all of them and have to sort ourselves out. Visually, when we see it in a movie, we can do that, because you recognize actors.

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**John:** On a page, we would have no sense of what this what. It’s going to get really confusing without this little guide map here at the start.

You also say, “VISUAL NOTE: The flashbacks of trauma will be shot at 15 frames per second and there will be a ‘roar’ over these scenes, animal and/or machine-like.” Early on, you knew that there would be moments where you have to acknowledge these things happening, but you didn’t want them to feel like the rest of the film.

**Sarah:** That’s right.

**John:** You didn’t want the audience to be sitting in them that same way.

**Sarah:** Again, the manifestation of how we created that difference ended up not being what I’ve written there. It was a sense that there would be a differentiating factor. What we ended up using was actually this very, very simple bell that Hildur Guðnadóttir brought to us, in place of my idea of this different frame rate and this roar. Actually, what it boiled down to is something extremely simple. There was some sense in which I wanted the reader to be able to imagine those things.

I think that legend is really important in terms of the characters, because when you’re reading them on paper, I find still as a reader, reading scripts, it’s just this dry document staring at you. It is hard to pull apart who is who.

**John:** The other job of these first three pages is to set up the premise. You get right to it. Right away, we know these things happened. The men are out of the village momentarily, and we have to make this decision whether we’re going to stay or go. I was surprised how little like, let’s set up the world, let’s set up everything else. Nope, you’re going to learn about the world as we’re getting into this decision making process. Is that from the book or that was you coming in to start telling the story?

**Sarah:** It’s me. Also, my first draft of this, there’s about 35 pages cut from the beginning of the film.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** This was the best script note I’ve ever received, which was from Dede Gardner. My first draft had all of August’s childhood and backstory, and we got to know the world. We got to know everyone’s backstory, basically. There were some beautiful scenes from the book that I really genuinely wanted in there.

I remembered my first notes call about this script. I’m used to working with Canadians, where it’s, “Oh my god, it’s so good. I just have one little thing.” That’s not Dede Gardner or Frances McDormand. It’s like, “Okay, let’s get down to business.” The first question Dede asked was, “The beginning of the film, the first 20 to 40 pages, did you write these because you wanted to or because you felt you had to?”

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Sarah:** That was really eye-opening for me in terms of, oh, this gets to be what I want it to be, not what I feel I need to do. That for me then set the tone for every decision I made afterwards.

**Craig:** There is something interesting about a movie that is so much… Let’s say we go back in time, and you don’t cut those pages, and you do shoot that, and it is in the movie. Once they isolate themselves in the barn, that’s where they stay, mostly. We have a couple of brief excursions. If you had gone around and seen their backstories and them as children, once you got them in that barn, there is a danger that you’re like, wait, are we just stuck in the barn now? If you start in the barn and you stay in the barn, then it’s this magical space. I think you made the right choice, certainly.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** What we often talk about, you have to teach the audience how to watch your movie. What’s crucial for your audience is that they understand this is how our movie’s going to work. We’re going to be in this barn largely. We’re going to jump out of the barn at any time for different reasons. We’re going to be in this barn. Our women are going to speak this way. They’re going to speak at this heightened level that’s not quite natural. The first three to five minutes, you have the ability to teach your audience what the rules are. If you hadn’t come out of the gate like that, once we got into the barn it would’ve felt really strange and artificial.

**Sarah:** I also feel that looking back at my first two features, I would love to go back and cut 10 minutes from both of them. I think there’s too many endings to both of them. I think there’s a time somewhere in the middle that kind of lags, and the beginning of Take This Waltz doesn’t really recover, I don’t think. I think knowing that, having this 10-year gap, and going, wouldn’t it be great to create a scenario where I don’t look back in 10 years and go, “I know where that 10 minutes is.” What if I know where that 10 minutes is now?

I had this, and I said it out loud, which committed me so deeply to this, which was my first meeting with Dede and Fran, I said, “I’m not delivering a script over 95 pages, because I know I’m going to regret it, and that’s still going to be too long. I’m still going to need to cut another… ” As it turned out, I didn’t go over that, and we still cut half an hour out of the movie from our first cut.

I just felt like this film really needed to be efficient, especially because of what we’re asking from the audience. It had to be just pulled tight. I’m also just finding maybe since becoming a parent that I’m becoming really impatient with long movies. I just don’t have it in me anymore. I hit 40, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s over 90 minutes. What am I going to do?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a huge commitment. Thinking back to Go, you came back for the reshoots on Go. That was my first movie, so I didn’t know better. I’m always surprised how few movies plan for reshoots and just really look at, okay, what does the movie want to be now and how do we create the scenes that actually best support that movie? People may not know that the jumping-off place where we get to each of the different three storylines, that was all reshoots, and we brought you guys back for that.

**Sarah:** Which was it? What was it?

**John:** In the back of the grocery store where you’re getting evicted and going out with Simon, and then the TV. Those scenes existed, but they were three separate scenes. We had to go back and make them into one scene so we always knew we were jumping off from the same place. On a script level we didn’t know that. On a read through level we didn’t know that. When we actually watch the movie, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s absolutely true. That’s how it has to be.

**Sarah:** That isn’t a function of you not doing your work. You literally can’t know those things until that chemical reaction emerges between all the different elements you’ve brought together. It’s not something that can always be predicted.

**John:** August as the narrator is a thing that you could not have predicted. What else changed? What could you have not predicted until you actually saw the edit and saw like, oh, that was a thing I didn’t need.

**Sarah:** We had more of August’s backstory too. August at the beginning of the film is about to kill himself. Ona comes up to him in a field and says, “No, we need you. We need you to take the minutes for a meeting.” In a way, she does that to give him a function and a purpose. That’s not in there. There are whole swaths of the conversation where any time we felt we were repeating something unnecessarily, we took out.

We took out stuff in the editing room that nobody has noticed. Where all the characters are sitting down, there’s an entire conversation that happens. Somebody comes in, they all stand up. Then they leave. We’ve taken it out. Actually, the people are completely on different ends of the room geographically. We just put in a sound effect of people standing up or something off camera. Nobody notices it. We’ve taken out 30 minutes of the movie. It’s just incredible what you can get away with.

**John:** I’d love to talk about the speeches, because this is a movie where people have to articulate their opinions. There are some long speeches. Page 54, we have a big speech from Salome. This is a thing where I see excerpted as a credit, because Claire Foy does this brilliant job with this speech, but so much of the film relies on us being able to understand what the characters are saying, but why they’re saying it and what their purpose is in trying to communicate that. When you’re writing it but also as you’re working with actors, how are you getting it to feel like it’s in the moment as they’re saying it?

**Sarah:** First of all, I felt like we had to cast this thing within an inch of its life, so I wanted to make sure the majority, the percentage of actors had a theater background, because I think there’s just a certain relationship they’re trained to have with text that was really important for what we were asking them to do in this film.

We had a lot of conversations ahead of time, a lot of family meetings and meetings between people of various relationships. We had a really full-on rehearsal process. We had a week over Zoom of just text analysis and working through the scenes that way, and then we had a week in the actual location before we started shooting. All of that was necessary, because it was really functioning in so many ways as this almost theatrical experience.

**Craig:** I’m curious, just in talking about rehearsals and looking at the cover page of the script, which, in correct fashion, documents when the different revisions took place. You were a busy, busy bee at the end of June and through most of July.

**Sarah:** I love that someone notices this. It’s so satisfying. I was. Look at these dates.

**Craig:** I’m just wondering, was this the result of rehearsals? What was going on there during that? It’s really just one solid month of work there.

**Sarah:** That was rehearsals. It was Zoom meetings. It was rehearsals. I see I have a draft on July 8th and one on July 9th and one on the 10th and one the 18th. It was finding those moments and input from actors and movements within the space and discovering things that I didn’t know.

**John:** Your Zoom rehearsals, obviously you don’t have the same sense of being in a space. When did you first put scenes on their feet? You said you were in a space to be able to do those things. I’m curious really about that main barn set, because I always assumed that it was a one-story thing and they had a ladder down for the stuff that they need that. Looking at production photos, it really was a two-story set. People were really up in that loft, and you had a crane going in there the whole time. It was a set. There was a blue screen behind everything. You had to digitally replace everything around there. That was the space you were able to be in to rehearse?

**Sarah:** Yeah. I have had this thing on every film where I’ve just driven everyone nuts. It drives line producers crazy. It drives the art department crazy. I’m like, “I need the set dressed two weeks in advance.” I need to be able to rehearse in the spaces with the actors, because what I don’t want ever is a crew to be standing around while an actor’s trying to figure something out and for there to be time pressure on that.

I also don’t want to adjust to new blocking in five seconds, because I want to be really thoughtful about how I’m moving a camera and accommodating for how an actor is choosing to move. It allows me to give the actors freedom in terms of their blocking and me time to process that and come up with an intentional way of shooting it.

**John:** A project like this, you can absolutely do it, because there is one main set you’re coming back to. There were also a lot of other, smaller things. I guess they’re not really dialog scenes. Basically, every place else that we’re hanging out during that time, they’re not big, juicy scenes between actors.j

**Sarah:** We actually had quite a few exterior days, because even though the premise of film, so much of it is in the hayloft, there are actually a lot of sequences outside. Those got to be these just visual, beautiful, meditative, poetic moments. Those days when we were out on that farm shooting, we were all so happy to bust out of that hayloft.

**John:** A question about Frances McDormand’s character. I see her in the first scene thinking, oh, she’s going to be the driving force of this movie. It’s all going to be about her. She’s actually a very small role in it. How early did you know that that was going to be a plan?

**Sarah:** It’s funny. When it wasn’t sure that Fran was even going to be in the movie, Fran talked early about wouldn’t it be awesome to get somebody amazing, like a Meryl Streep or someone you expect to be the lead in that movie, and then they just walk out, and you don’t see them again, just in terms of subverted expectations, but someone who you can map enough onto that that perspective stays alive even when they’re not there, because you have them somewhere subconsciously in the back of your mind.

There was something about Fran playing that part that I loved both for that reason but also because she can show you strength and vulnerability in an instant without moving a muscle. We needed to feel something for that character. We also needed to be intimidated by her. We need to feel a million things, and she’s there for so little time.

**John:** She’s definitely intimidating.

**Craig:** That’s something that I think you really balance gorgeously, which is a sense of empathy for everyone. Frances McDormand, when she shows up, she’s tough and she’s not interested in what they’re doing. A conventional story would have her ratting everyone out. You felt like, uh-oh, she’s trouble. By the end, you have successfully managed to instill empathy in her. She’s sad. She’s so enslaved that she can’t imagine being free.

Similarly, you do this over and over with the women who are in the hayloft, which I call barn, because I’m stupid, but in any case, where I kept being surprised with how empathetic they were to each other. Look, it’s called 12 Angry Men for a reason. If you put a bunch of men in the hayloft, they’re going to be shouting. Someone’s going to go full Pacino real fast, and then there’s going to be a lot of anger.

Particularly, I loved the way the generations were striated, that the older women would just moderate the younger women through empathy. The empathy was drawn from their religious background, that they were actually, even though this colony and their religious upbringing had led to this terrible crime, they still believed and were using it in the best possible way.

As you’re writing these speeches and as you’re writing the reaction to these speeches, how did you approach the task of making all of us feel empathetic all the time, even when for instance a character like Jessie Buckley’s is being pretty awful?

**Sarah:** I think that that process of writing and rewriting the script from each character’s point of view helped, just forcing myself to make sure I could see it clearly from everyone’s point of view.

One of the things I love about Sidney Lumet as a filmmaker is if you go back and watch all of his films, I’m not thinking specifically of 12 Angry Men although that’s in there too, but he just loves all of his characters. There’s no one that he others, which means he ended up being so ahead of his time on so many levels of these characters, not necessarily because he was the most progressive guy. I don’t know what his politics were.

If that’s your starting principle, that you will love your characters equally and force yourself to do so, and take their perspective no matter what, you’re going to be ahead of your time. Thirty years later, you’re not going to look so bad in the way you’ve represented someone that had an experience completely other than you. It’s funny, I spent a lot of the pandemic rewatching his movies, and I just took that as my operating principle is that I will love these characters equally.

**Craig:** It shows.

**John:** I want to talk about the decision to make this movie. Also, you have a 10-year gap between this movie and your last movie, and the things that happened in between. You had three kids, which is a lot of it. You also had a concussion. It looked like you were going to be knocked out of commission for who knows.

**Sarah:** Ever.

**John:** Forever. Can you tell us about the decision, like, “Okay, now I’m going to step ahead and make this movie,” and what led up to, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m a filmmaker. I’m going to go back and start making films.”

**Sarah:** It’s funny, because I definitely didn’t think I was going to be able to make a film again, because I couldn’t multitask anymore. I couldn’t handle bright lights or a lot of noise, couldn’t handle too many activities in a day after my concussion.

I remember when I did this treatment with Dr. Michael Collins. I’ve been told by doctors before… When I said, “Will I be able to make a film again?” they would look at me sympathetically and say, “It’s a good goal to have.” It was clear they did not think I was going to be able to. I remember my first meeting with him, saying, “Will I ever be able to make film again?” He said, “Let me put it this way. You’re not going to get better until you make a film again, because that’s part of what makes you you. That’s what you’re working towards. That’s what you’re going to have to do. You’re not going to be a hundred percent until you’ve done that impossible thing.” That was an amazing paradigm shift. That for me opened up, for the first time, “Okay, maybe I will make a film again.”

Then this came along. I’m not one of these filmmakers where I have to make a film all the time and I want to have some illustrious career. I don’t need people to tell stories about me being a filmmaker. I make things because I feel like I have to and it’s urgent. I hadn’t felt like that about anything in a really long time. I felt like that about this book and working with these people. I did feel like by the time I embarked upon it, I was way better than I had been, but through the process of making it, all of my headaches went away.

**John:** Let’s talk about the accommodations, because it sounds like you didn’t end up having to make accommodations for disability, because you were actually able to tackle what was standing physically in your way and deal with that, but there were other things that were standing in the way of women with three kids making films.

**Sarah:** Absolutely.

**John:** What were some of the things that you were able to do and your producers were able to do to make it possible for you to make this movie this way?

**Sarah:** The first thing that I said to Fran and Dede was, “I love the idea of writing this. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, like many female filmmakers I know who have made one or two films and then have a kid and go, ‘I don’t want to disappear forever, and so I’m going to write.’ I would love to direct again, but I don’t think I can, because I don’t think I can work those hours. I want to see my kids on a daily basis. This is probably impossible, but is is possible to work way shorter hours so people get home for dinner and put their kids to bed?”

Fran took a pause and said, “Men have written the rules of this film industry, and we’re women talking, and we’re going to rewrite the rules. Let’s just make that happen. We’re going to have to fight for more money to do it and more days. It’s going to be hard, and we’ll do it.”

**John:** What are some of the changes that you made?

**Sarah:** We had 10-hour working days, which in any other industry doesn’t sound that spectacular, but in the film industry, for some reason, that’s incredible.

**Craig:** My god, what a luxury.

**Sarah:** I believe we won the 40-hour work week like a hundred years ago, but in the film industry this is revolutionary. We had a rule that if anyone ever needed a break, they could take one. If anyone needed to take a call from their kid or elderly parent or vet or if they needed to breastfeed their baby or if they needed a break from the intensity of the work, we took one.

I learned that trick from my sister Suzie, who’s a GP, who often will give patients her cellphone number and say, “You can call me anytime over the weekend or at night.” What happens is she rarely gets a call. What she does get is a much less stressed out Monday morning, because people know they could. I think that thing of like, anyone can take a break at any time, people panicked when I said that. It happened maybe once or twice. The knowledge that people could I think just created a safer, more nurturing environment that really helped us.

We had a therapist on set, because a lot of stuff I knew would come up. Some of my crew I knew had come from histories of abuse and from backgrounds actually unfortunately like the women in the film. She was available for harder days if people needed and always accessible by phone. We just tried to build in the presence of care as a basic principle of the working environment, which leads us to the conversation about kids, where for me the basic operating principle with the kids was, “If you’re not having fun, if you’re even a bit bored, you can leave. When we do have you here, we’re basically just going to play. We’ll follow you around and have fun together. If you’re not having fun, you don’t have to stay. We’ll work around that.”

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That sounds like somebody who did in fact work as an actor as a child. There is something nice about being able to retroactively fix some of the crimes of the past. We’ll get into that in our bonus episode.

**Sarah:** I was going to say, I don’t want to give away anything from the bonus people. I’ll keep my trauma to myself for the bonus people.

**Craig:** You’re costing us eights or nines of dollars.

**John:** Talk to us about the plan for making the movie announced to releasing the movie. Did you know it was United Artists from the start? Did it sell at a festival? I don’t even know what the history of this was.

**Sarah:** This is interesting. I originally was going to write it. Dede and Fran had basically raised the money for us to make it with somebody who was going to pay for me to write the script and ultimately make the film or finance the film. There was just a moment early on where I just felt like, not so much in his interactions with me, but just… A couple emails went by with Dede and Fran where I went, “You know what? How about I write this on spec, and then let’s figure out who our partner is?” because already there were caps on budget and all of these things, where it’s like, we don’t have any of this information yet.

I wrote it on spec. Then Dede had a deal at MGM. This was her picture at MGM that year. It both created this incredibly liberating space in which to make the film, but also our partners there at the time were Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, who just absolutely understood the film, believed in Dede and Fran, believed in me. It was this utopian studio experience, the likes of which I am certain I will never have again.

**John:** This is MGM when it was functioning. It feels like a Fox Searchlight movie. It feels like a specialty film thing, so they could see it as, oh, this is a thing we could release theatrically, and they had a plan for it. This is all pre-pandemic, right, when this is being set up?

**Sarah:** Yeah.

**John:** Then a pandemic happens, and everything gets pushed.

**Sarah:** We delayed for a year, and then we went back to it.

**Craig:** It’s Orion. It was so lovely to see the Orion [crosstalk 00:46:23]. It was like, ah, I’m back.

**Sarah:** Awesome, yes, but when we were cutting, we were using the old Orion logo.

**John:** The original one is so beautiful.

**Sarah:** I loved it so much.

**Craig:** I know. What happened?

**Sarah:** I was so sad to see it go.

**Craig:** Do they not own it anymore?

**Sarah:** They do. I think that they were revisiting what Orion was and meant, and they wanted it to be more indicative of that, which I actually think makes sense. Now that I’ve lived with it a bit longer, I’m like, okay. I was having a very eh reaction to it.

**John:** I associate Orion with Robocop. There’s a certain kind of movies. I just loved seeing that Orion logo. It’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s so great, just circling stars.

**Sarah:** [Crosstalk 00:46:58].

**Craig:** It makes me happy.

**John:** We have a listener question I think is actually perfect for Sarah Polley. Megana, you want to read it for us?

**Megana:** JM asks, “I’m a novelist, but I recently wrote my first screenplay, submitted it to Austin, made the second round, went to the festival, without really any idea of why I was there. However, at the WGA party, I met an indie director and producer who were looking for exactly what I had, and now they want to make a film. They had a feature film in the festival in the same genre as mine, and we even are from the same part of Canada, so we’ve met up here too.

“This will be a union job in Canada. I’m a dual citizen, but not a member of the WGA or the WGC. I’m waiting for the option now, but the director did tell me he wants to proceed and he’s putting it all together. I’ve had a literary agent since 2009, but I left him last fall, as we’d run our course, and I have a new novel I’m shopping around to agents now, so I’m also agent-less. Basically, I have no clue how this all works or what I should be doing. Please help.”

**John:** This Canadian novelist screenwriter seems to be in a pretty good spot. It’s just looking for an agent or somebody to help out making the deal. Sarah, what’s your first instinct?

**Sarah:** My first instinct is to get the agent thing sorted out. I do think it’s a dangerous thing to be at this stage with an agent. I think people can really undervalue having that protection and that wisdom around a process. It does feel like if someone’s trying to make your thing, it seems like a perfect time to be doing some very real research about who the good agents would be to approach. You would know more about this question than [crosstalk 00:48:34].

**John:** I’m curious whether you think this person needs a Canadian agent manager person or would a Los Angeles person be okay?

**Sarah:** I think either would be okay. I think it’s about the connection. I would meet with both and figure out who you feel most connected to and safest with. Margaret Atwood always says this thing, because sometimes she’s waited for people like me for years and years to make their thing when she’s had other options. She always says go with the one who loves you. Whether that person has more or less status doesn’t matter. Go with the one who loves you.

**John:** Craig, what are you thinking? Does this person need an agent? Would a lawyer be okay for this point? What do you want JM to be asking for?

**Craig:** I agree with Sarah. I think an agent is extremely important. There’s always one little moment of these questions that makes me go (gasps). The (gasps) moment of this one was, “The director did tell me he wants to proceed, and he’s putting it all together.” I’m like, what about you, JM? You’re the one who’s writing it. I get nervous when someone’s like, “Don’t you worry. I got this.” Someone has to be advocating for you. You as a writer will never have more leverage than the moments right before you sign away the rights to a thing you wrote.

**Sarah:** You don’t do that without an agent, because actually, I just have a friend in a situation, worked on an idea for years, and the series is going ahead right now without his name on it anywhere. Get your agent.

**Craig:** These things happen. I’m not sure how the WGC functions in terms of credit and all the rest. It’s a different situation because Canada does have [inaudible 00:50:14], and they don’t have work for hire the same way that we do. There are also other limitations to being in the WGC. I’m not sure there’s much in the way of residuals there, the way there are for the WGA. There are all these questions. The agent will then get a lawyer on board. The lawyer can handle a lot of the details. Somebody needs to be advocating for you. This is the most pro-Canadian thing I can say, as somebody that just lived there for a year and a half. Polite people get chewed up all the time.

**Sarah:** Yeah, a hundred percent.

**Craig:** Canadians are beautifully and wonderfully polite. Your natural instinct may be to accommodate and bend and compromise. That’s why you need a jerk who’s American to advocate for you.

**Sarah:** I could not agree with this statement more. I’ve learned this the hard way over and over and over again. The other thing I would say that I’ve learned far too recently is that clear is kind. I’ve done a lot in my life of being nice and accommodating and all those things. People in a professional environment, clarity is the most kind thing you can do for yourself and for others. It’s underrated in my country.

**Craig:** Right on.

**John:** Sarah, can you talk to us about the state of Canadian filmmaking? It’s a lot to be throwing at you, but is this film a Canadian film or an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s an American film.

**John:** It’s an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s my first American film.

**John:** Your first American film.

**Craig:** Where did you shoot it, Sarah, just out of curiosity?

**Sarah:** In Canada, so mostly Canadian crew and lots of Canadian cast. Just outside of Toronto.

**Craig:** In Toronto.

**Sarah:** Just outside of Toronto, but American finance.

**John:** Talk to us about the differences between Native Canadian films and American films. Do people try to go back and forth and do both? We have listeners in Canada right now. I’m really asking on their behalf. Should they be focused on trying to make a Canadian film or trying to get someone in the US to try to make their thing? What is your instinct? There’s so much talent in Canada.

**Sarah:** I’m a little bit out of touch with the Canadian system, because I haven’t made a film there for 10 years. I obviously live there and I have lots of friends who are going through it all the time. I think you look for the people with whom you can make your film the most authentic to what you want that film to be. You don’t go for the shiny apple where you have this whisper of huge mistrust, but you know they can get a big platform for it. I think you go with the people who help you make the film the most you want to make it.

In my experience, that’s been more in Canada, because there have been some protections, when you get public money for a film, around your creative vision. However, I will say more and more I hear that it is just part of the process now in Canada that you test screen everything. Nobody’s immune to that. With this film at MGM, with a bigger budget than I’ve ever worked with, I did not have to test screen it.

**Craig:** Oh, joy.

**Sarah:** I would say I had not just creative freedom on this, but enormous help from people, where I wasn’t afraid of their notes. I was excited for their notes. It was an idyllic process. I don’t know if it’s as much Canadian versus American as the specific people you can find to make your film with.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Sarah, you said you had two cool things to share with us. Let’s get you started here.

**Craig:** Overachiever.

**Sarah:** I love the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I’ve read it over and over and over again. I think it had a huge impact on my approach to this film, just in terms of the love and the kindness in it.

**John:** I know nothing about this book.

**Sarah:** Oh my god.

**John:** Now I’m excited, because it’s new to me.

**Sarah:** It’s so beautiful.

**John:** Everyone else may know what it is, but I don’t know, so pitch me.

**Sarah:** It’s written in the form of a letter. This older man who’s a preacher, and he’s writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. He’s dying. It’s about his father and grandfather in the Civil War. It’s about him. It’s about spirituality. It’s about his love of his son. Every sentence is stunning. It gives you some faith in human beings. There was a moment where I just felt I was reading all these great novels, but I just wanted to read about a good person who I might like to be. It’s the most stunningly beautiful book. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s stunning.

I think that a film that I’ve not seen get the attention it deserves this year is Till. I think it’s an incredible film. For me, it’s the best performance of the year, with Danielle Deadwyler. Chinonye Chukwu just is a masterful director. I just recommend everyone go see that movie. Don’t be afraid to go see it. I think people are really afraid. She really protects her audience. She’s very conscious of making it a really fruitful, rich experience to watch it and not a damaging one. I just recommend everybody go see it.

**John:** Protecting your audience feels like that was also a goal in your approach to filmmaking, especially for this movie, because it could’ve been harrowing and terrifying and gruesome, and that’s not what your movie’s about.

**Sarah:** That’s right. We never showed the assaults. We don’t go deeply into that. What we go into is the recovery and the healing and the conversation.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is something that could be a How Would This be a Movie. It could be for that segment that we often do. It’s this article I read this week by David Epstein. It is about this 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She knows she has some form of muscular dystrophy. Her arms and her legs are wasting away. Her torso is normal proportions, but everything else is wasting away and she ends up having to use a scooter.

When she goes to college, even though she wasn’t a biology major, she spends all of her time in the library just researching different things like, “What is it that I could possibly have?” She comes across this syndrome that she thinks maybe she has and maybe her father has in slightly different manifestations.

Where the author, Epstein, gets involved is, she reaches out to him to say, “I think there is this famous athlete, this Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, who is a Canadian sprinter. I think she has the same thing, but slightly different. I think she has the opposite, where her muscles are over-developed in ways that are interesting.” Through Epstein’s help, she’s able to get genetic testing and all of it. It turns out, yes, they basically discovered this one genetic mutation anomaly that is the cause of both of their situations. It’s a good, long read. It’s in ProPublica, but just a fascinating story.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It is movie fodder. Allison Williams is apparently already developing it, because she’d be perfect for it. It’s so inspiring to see somebody who says, “Listen, I know I’m not the person who’s supposed to be able to figure this out, but I want to figure this out,” and she just does it.

**Sarah:** Amazing.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It reminds me of Lorenzo’s Oil.

**Sarah:** Sounds incredible.

**John:** It’s another relationship to it. Craig, what you got?

**Craig:** I feel like we’ve just overdosed on inspiration, so let me bring things down a bit.

**Sarah:** Good for you.

**Craig:** The most mundane possible One Cool Thing. Bo Shim, who used to be my assistant and is now a writer, got me a holiday gift that I am so in love with. I take it everywhere. I’m the worst person to get gifts for, because either I just don’t need a lot of things, and if I do want something, I just buy it. I don’t believe in waiting, because life’s too short. Get the thing you want. She got me this thing. It’s the Mophie 3-in-1 travel charger. It’s like a trifold wallet that you fold back up again. In one part there’s a little tray for your air buds.

**John:** AirPods.

**Craig:** AirPods, not air buds, because I’m stupid. Then there’s a bit for your phone. Then there’s a bit for your Apple watch. It’s incredibly compact and so useful around travel time, because I used to have to fight over who had their watch charger. It’s all said and done.

**Sarah:** I like that.

**Craig:** It just wraps right back up. It’s not expensive. I don’t mean to say that Bo’s cheap. I’m just saying, folks at home, you can buy this. In fact, I’m going to tell you how much it is right now.

**Sarah:** I like this idea a lot, because I’m not a very organized person, unlike John August, whose house I’m in right now, and is terrifying. It’s Sleeping with the Enemy in here.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Sarah:** Everything has been thought of. It’s absolutely terrifying, but these are my aspirations, and so I would like that.

**Craig:** Every room in John’s house is a killing floor. No question.

**John:** There’s a drain in the side, straight down.

**Craig:** Every single room.

**Sarah:** When you open the drawers, everything’s perfect. You know how terrifying that was in that movie?

**Craig:** I want to amend my statement. This was expensive.

**John:** I’m looking at it. It’s $150, Craig.

**Sarah:** You jerk.

**Craig:** It’s $150.

**Sarah:** You got us all excited.

**Craig:** Now I feel terrible but not super terrible, because honestly, it really is great. Sarah Polley, I do believe that if you are looking to slightly upgrade your life organization, pick this thing up.

**John:** I like it. Craig, I was thinking what an air bud charger would be. I think it’s when you plug in your dog. You plug in your dog, air bud, and so he can catch the footballs.

**Craig:** You insert it gently into your dog.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** That’s our show for the week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always.

**Craig:** Yay! What what.

**John:** Outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, sometimes I’m still around Twitter. Are you still on Twitter, Sarah?

**Sarah:** I’m on Twitter.

**John:** You and I DM’ed on Twitter once. Craig’s gone though, so don’t talk to him.

**Sarah:** Are you gone for moral and ethical reasons?

**Craig:** I am gone for moral and ethical reasons, yes.

**Sarah:** Wow. Should I be thinking about this? Is this what’s happening?

**Craig:** I am a fairly low bar, so yeah, I think so.

**Sarah:** [inaudible 01:00:09].

**John:** I’m also on Mastodon and the other things, so I have my backup plans.

**Sarah:** Where am I going? Mastodon, is that where I’m going?

**John:** Yeah, probably Mastodon.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:18].

**Sarah:** It’s so complicated.

**John:** I’m also on Instagram. Instagram’s easy.

**Craig:** It’s so complicated. It’s so annoying that Twitter got ruined. Not like it was just a paragon of loveliness. Still.

**John:** People can 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 weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script for Women Talking, so you can see where it was before it became the movie. If you want to watch the movie though, is it on Amazon at this point? Where can people see it?

**Sarah:** It’s in theaters only right now.

**John:** Theaters only right now. Go to your theater and see the film on a big screen. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on child actors. Sarah Polley, it’s so amazing to see you again.

**Craig:** It was lovely talking with you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** Thank you so much for having me. I loved being here. I love the show. I listen to it all the time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Sarah Polley, you were a child actor. You were in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Sweet Hereafter, which I think is the movie right before Go, the bus crash movie. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that girl from the bus crash, she should play a checkout clerk who’s trying to make a drug deal.” You’ve written to and about Terry Gilliam and your experience on Baron Munchausen. What’s the synopsis of that? Basically, it was traumatic in a way that you felt like hadn’t been acknowledged? What was your feeling about being a child actor?

**Sarah:** In general, my feeling about being a child actor is that it’s not a good experience and that it’s also really hard to untangle what a child’s really feeling from what the expectations are of them, by either their parents or other adults in the room. It’s really hard to get the truth out of a kid who feels the pressure of adults.

In general, I think that film sets are generally populated with people who are not trained or particularly interested in the well-being of children. Craig very eloquently put it, the production is always going to come first. When you put the panic, emergency room mentality around something, a kid’s well-being is going to be forgotten, no matter how conscious you are of it.

I had particularly traumatic experiences, for sure. They were on the extreme end, which led to a whole interaction with Terry Gilliam later when he was about to cast another child actor. I reached out to him to explain how difficult my experiences had been on that set, which I felt very, very unsafe. I felt that things had been very dangerous, scared for my life at times. Again, it was extreme, but I’ve seen child actors with less extreme in terms of the tangible, physical danger experiences, and still, I don’t buy it.

There was a really concrete example of what Craig was talking about on my set, because I had this horror of, I can’t make this religious community that’s doing this whole thing to basically fight for the future generation and build a new world without ever showing children.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**Sarah:** That’s exactly what these women are fighting for. I did a couple things. One was, yes, the kids are going to run around and play. We’re just going to follow them with the camera. I’m going to make an announcement every single day, they can leave whenever they want. It’s no problem.

My kids couldn’t visit set, because of COVID, unless they were gainfully employed by the production. My oldest has always wanted to be an actor, because every button gets pushed by your children. There was this advocating that happened for my kids going, “We’re coming to set. It’s the only way we get to see you at work. You’ve never been working like this since we were born. We’re coming to watch you work, and we’re going to be background performers, and we’re really excited about it.”

My kid’s there. It’s my seven-year-old’s birthday. Of course, it’s a giant crane shot and a drone shot at magic hour. As the crane comes into my seven-year-old’s face, my kids keep looking at the camera and flaring their nostrils. It’s this giant crane shot. Literally, we have five minutes to get the shot. We’re just coming in, and they’re like, “Ha ha, let’s screw up mama’s shot again.” They thought it was so funny.

I literally had this moment where I empathized with every filmmaker who [inaudible 01:04:40] for granted as a child actor, which is why kids shouldn’t be on set, because even me, with my past and my trauma and my own children, I had a hundred people standing around panicking, and this kid was potentially between us and getting the shot, and this is why children should never be on sets. I just proved my own point.

**Craig:** It’s true. It’s true. I had a really interesting, I guess I could call it a revelation or good learning experience, making The Last of Us, because we cast an actor who, I believe he was eight or nine. He’s deaf. The thing about casting a kid who’s deaf is nobody questions how much support is required. His mom is there, but also, he’s got an interpreter, and he’s got a coach, one of whom is deaf and obviously communicates with him through ASL. Then the translator, or the interpreter rather, is helping us back and forth. There’s all this support around this kid.

Then I thought, wait, shouldn’t be there all of this even if you’re not deaf? Any kid being on set should be carefully bubble wrapped. Schedules should presume that the kid is not going to be able to nail the crane shot the first three or four times.

**Sarah:** There you go.

**Craig:** What ends up happening when you’re panicked and running out of money and you’ve got this studio gun to your head, whatever it is that is all of our madness while we’re making these things, is children become these annoying obstacles. They can’t work as many hours. Oh, we get to send him to lunch. Oh, he gets a break. Oh, he has to go to class. School they call it, fake school in the trailer, whatever it is. You’re like, “Ugh.” Now you’re angry.

I’ve been angry at babies. I got angry at a baby once, not to its face. I didn’t yell at the baby. Obviously, I’m in the tent by a monitor. I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe this baby. We don’t have another 20 minutes with the baby?” They’re like, “It’s a baby.”

**Sarah:** I literally had this moment a couple of times on my set, where I was like, “Oh my god, we’re bringing the kids again. Oh my god, bringing the kids again. Oh my god.” I remember the parents all coming up to me and going, “No, we’re okay.” I’m like, “I can’t, because I actually literally wrote this rule.”

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**Sarah:** I wrote this rule in the ACTRA, in the Canadian actors union. I’m not breaking it. I promise.

**Craig:** At that moment you were like, “It was really more of a guideline and not so much a rule.”

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**Craig:** “Got to make my day.”

**Sarah:** Here’s the other thing that should be presumed. The other thing that should be presumed, whether it’s true or not, and a lot of the time this isn’t true but it should be presumed just in case, is that the parents don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Sarah:** That’s a really hard thing to presume, because you always go, “If the parent’s okay. It’s their department.” We have no idea. Whatever face that parent is presenting to us, whatever face the kid is presenting to us, we have no idea what the pressures look like at home. I’ve seen those be two very different things in my own experience of other kid actors I was working with. I would see one face that the parent presented on set and another one that I would see in private moments with the kid. There has to be a third party that is not paid for by either the production or the parent who makes calls that will sometimes fly in the face of what both the production and the parents say is okay.

**Craig:** I think that’s so true.

**Sarah:** I think that person has to be there. I also think kids can’t sign long contracts for series. I’m sorry. There should be a limit on how much a kid could work in a year, maybe one project, maybe two projects a year. I don’t know. I think there have to be some really serious things in place to allow for the fact that as a society we have decided children should not work, but we’ve made this exception for this Wild West of an industry that’s probably the last place that should be given this exception.

**Craig:** You’re on to something there.

**John:** First movie I directed, Elle Fanning was the star of it. Small role, but she was fantastic. She was Elle Fanning before she was Elle Fanning. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re great. I’m going to write additional scenes for you.” We’re shooting exterior. It’s Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, and Elle Fanning. We’re setting up these shots. Elle Fanning can only work a certain number of hours.

The AD goes, “Oh, and this is her stand-in.” The stand-in is some other kid. I’m just like, “Wait. First of all, this kid’s really annoying.” I didn’t like this kid. Also, what is this kid getting out of it at all? This kid is not going to show up on camera. This kid is not acting. This kid is just there just to occupy space and is just working.

**Sarah:** They’re not being treated particularly well. Those kid stand-ins get treated badly.

**John:** The kid was annoying. I said, “I never want to see that kid again.”

**Craig:** Did they murder the kid?

**John:** Yes, they did. “Get her out of my sight.”

**Sarah:** “Take her away.”

**John:** Also, I don’t ever want a kid stand-in. I want to find some other way to do this, whether it’s a little person or some other situation where we can just find a person to do that role. That kid could not get anything out of it.

**Sarah:** No, because they’re not even getting the fun, whatever, toxic coddling that can feel good in the moment.

**John:** Absolutely, as opposed to Elle Fanning, who was clearly a superstar in those little moments I saw her. She’s giant and can do all these impersonations. She was having the time of her life. This other kid was there because her mom wanted her to be there.

**Craig:** John, what if that kid is a fan of Scriptnotes? They’ve grown up. They listen to Scriptnotes every week.

**Sarah:** [crosstalk 01:10:04].

**John:** This whole time.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Apparently, I was annoying.”

**John:** I just ruined things [crosstalk 01:10:09]. The other thing I want to point people to is the second season of Nathan For You is about this experiment where Nathan puts together this house to figure out what it’d be like to have a kid. This woman wants to know what it’d be like to have a kid. They hire a bunch of child actors to be this woman’s kid.

**Sarah:** That’s really funny.

**John:** They go through all this stuff. Later on in the season, it becomes clear, oh, some of these child actors have really enjoyed it and enjoyed being part of the family and this relationship and what is responsibility to child actors. Like all Nathan For You, it doesn’t answer the question at all. It just makes you really uncomfortable about it. It was a good exploration of what it feels like to be using children to be doing this emotional labor.

**Sarah:** The other thing about it is it’s this toxic combination of coddling and neglect. You have on the one hand, everyone’s going to laugh at that kid’s jokes, everyone’s going to tell them how great they are. Everyone’s going to lie to them if they’re behaving horribly and laugh it off. There’s no boundaries on behavior really. No one actually deeply cares about that kid’s well-being beyond what their purpose is on that set. There may be one or two angels that come out of the woodwork. In my case, there were. The kid’s experience is not the priority on that set. It’s getting the day. It’s a terrible thing it does to one’s head of both this superficial ego boost and the sense that nobody cares about me really.

**Craig:** Then on the other side of things, there’s the more modern problem. I know Bella Ramsey’s been talking about this. When she started with us, she was 17, so there was still a K on her number. Then she turned 18 fairly early on. When she started shooting with us, she was still not a legal adult. Then you come out on the other side of shooting, and hopefully everything’s gone well and you’re treated well. In our case, we were also very lucky, because her mom was there, and she was fantastic. Everything’s wonderful. Then the internet has to talk about your face and your body and your this and your that and your hair and your eyes and everything and take you apart.

**Sarah:** It’s a whole other dynamic now.

**Craig:** This is difficult for adults, difficult, borderline impossible for adults to handle. For a child, it’s terrifying to think, I want to really tell this story and I want to make a TV show but am I damaging someone. We talked about it a lot. We still talk about it a lot. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that’s made I think being a child actor even harder than it used to be.

**John:** Sarah, you are a parent of a kid who wants to be an actor.

**Sarah:** I am.

**John:** Let’s say you’re a listener whose kid wants to be an actor. At what age do you think you might allow a kid to start, it’s like, “Okay, you can start doing this.” When do you think that maturity might be a thing where you feel like they have some agency in the situation?

**Sarah:** It’s so fun, because I’ve always had to talk about this in the abstract, and now I can talk about it for real as a parent of a kid who really wants to go into it, to the point where I have almost weakened. It’s so desperate, this need and want.

The first thing I would say is we have loaded my oldest kid up with after-school theater programs, weekend improv classes, to get that creative stuff going, because that’s legitimate. Wanting to create things shouldn’t be held back, but in an environment that is designed to be nurturing and exciting and educational. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve talked about 16 as the age where we can start talking about it if they still have this intense desire to do it professionally. I still think that’s young, but we’re willing to talk about it.

I had a hilarious experience recently. My brother’s a casting director, and he was casting this film with child actors. My oldest was being babysat at the time, last-minute thing. I had to drop off my kid. He was doing these Zoom auditions. My oldest was like, “Just get me on.” My kid goes on, gets the part.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Sarah:** I watched then. I get there. I watched for the rest of the Zoom calls, hidden, and go, “Okay, this woman has cracked the code of how to deal with child actors.” I saw her subvert horrible stage parents who I have worked with and make it a good experience for those kids. This woman was a genius, clearly. Then at the end, I talked to the woman, and she’s like, “I just read your book. It’s becoming part of our model for how we’re going to treat child actors.”

I’m like, “Okay, it’s only four days. I’m free for these four days.” I was like, “Eve, if you’re willing to put up with me being the most obnoxious on-set parent where I’m literally shutting down that production, pulling the lights at the slightest discomfort for anyone.” Eve was like, “Yeah, I’ll deal with that.” We’re about to do it. Eve reads the script. It was a great script based on a great novel, but Eve was like, “This is about a kid with a disability, and I don’t trust that your generation of filmmakers is going to get how to do this in a way that’s not sensitive. There isn’t someone with a disability making this film. I can’t be part of it.” Eve passed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** Eve passed. Eve passed.

**John:** That’s totally Sarah Polley.

**Sarah:** Just like their mom. Just like their mother. All I really wanted to ever do was pass. I never really wanted to work as an actor. I just liked passing on stuff. It was my favorite.

**John:** You passed on Go a bit too.

**Sarah:** I passed on Go. I passed on everything. It was the best part.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I remember one person had to fly you up and walk you through immigration in Canada to get you here to Los Angeles.

**Sarah:** I know, because I bailed at the last second, because customs was a tricky, and I was like, “You know what? I didn’t really want to do this anyway.”

**Craig:** I love that.

**Sarah:** “Forget it.” Chuck Schumer got involved. It was a whole thing. With Eve, they wanted to do this so badly, and they passed. Now, I don’t know where we are, because I finally caved on this that was so intense for me.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s all they needed was just permission.

**Sarah:** I wonder if it was also like they saw this thing was on the others in terms of me having this red line around something and went, “We’re just going to get rid of that and then we can move on.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** On Episode 2000 of Scriptnotes, they’ll come on this show, and we’ll talk to them about what it was like growing up with a director parent and why they are now the filmmaker they are today.

**Craig:** Yes, when their book, I Hate You, Mom, comes out, it’ll be great. We can go through it and really dig in to what happened.

**John:** Sarah Polley, such an amazing pleasure.

**Craig:** Thank you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** This was so fun. This is the middle of a crazy, soul-crushing part of the process of putting the film out, and this was by far the highlight.

**John:** Yay.

**Sarah:** Thank you for the very awesome conversation, you guys.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Sarah:** This was amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** I’ll see you later, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sarah Polley on IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001631/) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/realsarahpolley/)
* [Women Talking](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13669038/) film and [novel](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/562880/women-talking-by-miriam-toews/9780735273979) by Miriam Toews
* [Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688129/run-towards-the-danger-by-sarah-polley/)
* [Find the Women Talking Script by Sarah Polley here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Women-Talking-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein](https://www.propublica.org/article/muscular-dystrophy-patient-olympic-medalist-same-genetic-mutation) for ProPublica
* [Mophie 3-in-1 Charger with MagSafe](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPTA2ZM/A/mophie-3-in-1-travel-charger-with-magsafe?)
* [Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/marilynne-robinson)
* [Till](https://www.mgm.com/movies/till) film
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Lenko ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/583standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/what-is-good-writing-2).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 581 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what’s this?

Why, it’s a clip show. Producer Megana Rao has been working on a forthcoming Scriptnotes book and has found three vintage Scriptnotes segments, in which Craig and I try to answer the question, what is good writing, and how does one do it. Megana, can you tell us what segments you have picked, and more importantly, why?

**Megana Rao:** Great. I picked three segments that talk about the components of good writing and what elements need to be there and what immediately turns you guys off as signals of things you don’t have confidence in the writer in. We start with Episode 239, which you guys recorded in March of 2016. You guys talk about what good writing feels like.

**John:** I suspect that we were talking about good writing involves an element of surprise, confidence. It’s not just the words you’re choosing to describe a story but how much we believe that you are telling a story that we want to keep turning the pages on.

**Megana:** It’s interesting because you guys talk about how these elements function on a sentence level but also structurally. You talk about how you want to surprise and delight your readers in scene description, but also with a plot twist at the end of act two or whatever. It’s cool to see how good writing, that sort of DNA exists in every aspect of a screenplay.

**John:** Cool. Great. That’ll be our first segment. What’s the second segment we’ll listen to?

**Megana:** The next one is Episode 76, called How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, with Aline. That one was recorded in February of 2013. You guys are a little bit younger but really consistent in some of the advice that you give. It’s interesting, because you guys talk to each other about your perceptions of each others’ voices. You talk about your impressions from the first times reading each other’s scripts too.

**John:** It’s interesting, because at that point, Craig was just a comedy writer really. He was only known for the bigger, broader comedies that he’d done. I’m sure it’ll be a good time machine for people to listen to. You say we’re younger, which I’m rather offended by, but it is weird to think we’ve been doing this so long that we were actually younger back in those days.

**Megana:** You’re a full decade younger, basically.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. How about for Segment 3? What’s our third segment?

**Megana:** The last segment is from Episode 432, Learning From Movies. That one, you and Craig talk about your techniques for watching movies. You introduce this concept of mindfulness around movies. What’s interesting is, as you’re talking about the framework for how you analyze a movie, you also teach people what are the key things to be thinking about when you write a movie.

**John:** Great. It’s important to remember that before we were writers, we were all readers, and we were watchers of movies. We have a sense of what is supposed to happen in a movie. We have a sense of what we’d love to see happen in a movie. As writers, we have to be aware that our audience is doing some of that work too. Just as we’re learning from the movies that we’re watching, we are hopefully writing movies that are aware of how they’re going to be taken in, that they’re not just going into a void, they’re meant to be projected into somebody’s brain. We can learn a lot from thinking about how we watch our movies.

**Megana:** I think for newer writers, it offers a useful way of pulling out the tools to see how the sausage is made.

**John:** Cool. We’ll have these three segments. Then we’ll be back at the end of the episode to do our One Cool Things. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will be talking once more about the Scriptnotes book and rumors of industry strife coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for picking these segments.

**Megana:** Thank you. Hope you guys enjoy this craft compendium.

——-

>**239 – What Is Good Writing**

**John:** So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.
And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself.

But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.
I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.
And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.
But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.
And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.
But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.
So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.
And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.
Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.
But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.
I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.’”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

>**76 – How Screenwriters Find Their Voice**

**John:** Absolutely. Well, the reason why I wanted to start off with voices is I thought today we might start talking about when you first discovered a writer’s voice, or sort of your own writer’s voice, and sort of what that process was like.
Because I remember reading books and reading magazines and enjoying them and recognizing that people wrote in different ways, but never really got a sense of what a voice was until I started reading Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, the entire magazine was written with such a specific sardonic, snarky voice. And like that first introductory “Welcome to this Month” kind of thing was written so specifically that I was like, “I want to write like that.” It was the first time I started experimenting writing in someone else’s voice.

But it got really clear when I sort of switched into having a voice of my own. Because I feel like if you read through most of my scripts, there are things I write, they’re consistent, but I’m not quite sure why they’re consistent or sort of how that develops. So, I want to talk about voice and how writers find their voices.

Aline, do you think you have a voice that persists from script to script, or is it different every time?

**Aline:** That’s all I had when I started, really, was just a way that I spoke, or the characters spoke. And, you know, one of the downsides of that is all the characters spoke the same way. And they all sounded like the scene description. And I have a tendency to put the best jokes in the scene description, too.

But, you know, I had a point of view. The other stuff was stuff that was more of an effort — the plot, particularly the plotting stuff, and differentiating the characters. But, you know, even before I became a writer I just tend to have a particular way of speaking. So, that was I would say the part that came to me the most easily. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny. I almost had like an opposite problem. Because the movies I was writing initially were very broad comedies, everything was about jokes. And in the jokes, yeah, definitely, there is a specific kind of joke that my wife will say, “Oh, that’s such a you joke.” And it’s funny — she’s now so good, like she’ll pick them out from trailers or from movies. She’ll just turn to me, “That was you, that was you, that was you.” She knows those things.

But, did I have a voice, like a dramatic voice? Early on, no. And in fact that was something I had to kind of get to. On the plus side, it was helpful to actually… — I never had the problem with characters sounding the same. And in a way I looked at it like it was mimicry, you know, like how does this person talk, how does this person talk, how does this person talk? Because I’m fascinated by the way people talk and I like to do impressions of people.

But over time I have noticed, and lately more so, there is a dramatic expression, maybe is the best way I can put it. There’s a certain way I like the story to unfold that is, I think, kind of like my voice. But it’s funny. It’s not like…

**Aline:** That’s so interesting. Because you have a very distinct authorial voice in your non-screenwriting that’s extremely distinct, your emails and your prose is extremely distinct.

**Craig:** Well, because that’s me. And if I’m writing a character I want them to just be true to them.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And not be me. And sometimes I also feel like I’m, yeah, I guess I just sort of go from that point of view. I’m more interested in other people, so I like to go that way. But some voice-like thing has occurred over the years.

**John:** It’s challenging with screenwriting because when we talk about voice, are we talking about the way characters are speaking? Are we talking about the authorial voice? And when you’re saying in early scripts you didn’t have the technique, you didn’t have the skills, you didn’t have the plot and all that stuff, but you had a voice is, I think, part of the reason I became a writer is I apparently had a voice, and I had confidence on the page. I felt like, you know, people would read through the whole thing. And it felt like it was all of one piece, and it was not just desperate to get to the next thing.

It was enjoyable to read on the page. And it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I had somewhat of a voice people would say, “Yeah, you should keep writing.” And so then I would write more and it sort of developed into that thing. Same way people develop styles or fashions or ways they present themselves, people get reinforcement for the way they talk.

**Aline:** Your voice is kind of badass. I mean, I had read Go and then when I met you I really expected you to be a little bit more of a hipster badass than you are.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, for sure. He’s not what you think from reading your work. Which is cool. I actually like that. You know, I mean, for me because it was comedy, you kind of get a little screwed over in comedy because people laugh. And they go, “I laughed.” But all the work around the laughing, they tend to either not see or not give you credit for, and they certainly don’t reinforce. They don’t teach you how to do it. You’re kind of left to figure it out on your own.

And in a weird way you’re left to figure it out from non-comedies. And it’s the rare comedy like Groundhog Day where you look and you go, “Oh, look how, at least I can see what’s happening around the jokes here…”

**Aline:** But it took me awhile to learn that the jokes don’t play if the scene work and the dramatic structure doesn’t play. And you know that from your own work, and you know that also from going to countless punch-ups where if the scene doesn’t work, or the characters don’t work, the jokes don’t stick.

**Craig:** The jokes won’t work. And, unfortunately, no one tells you early on, “I love this joke because of all this wonderful dramatic context around it, or character context, or the way that it served some moment in the scene to connect to the next scene.” No one ever says that. They just say, “Oh my god, that line was so funny.”

**John:** I was looking up some lines last night for this other project, and so I’m on like great classic movie dialogue lines, a lot of them were from Star Wars. And one of them was like, “You’re awful short for a Storm Trooper, aren’t you?” And that’s actually not that funny of a line, but the only reason it’s memorable is because that movie is really good and the moment worked. And so therefore that line feels appropriate for that moment. So, “Oh, it’s a good line,” but independently it’s not a great line.

**Aline:** Oh, “I begged you to get therapy,” is one of the best jokes in any comedy, and in and of itself it’s not a joke.

**Craig:** Yeah. There you go.

**John:** “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” That’s a great line independent of a really great scene, but so many things aren’t.

**Craig:** Right. I know. And also now the way that we write movies now, they’re a little less written, I don’t know how else to put it. They’re obviously written, but that’s such a written line. You’ll hear sometimes people say, “Oh, that just feels like writing. It doesn’t feel like actual human talk. No one is that witty.”

**Aline:** I love written lines.

**Craig:** I know. I mean, the problem is, it’s like so many times I see them play out on screen and I go, “Yeah, congratulations to me for being clever.”

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that human didn’t say that. And so there’s…

**Aline:** Fine line.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a thing between the audience and the line.

**John:** That’s the luxury of writing a period movie or something that’s set in an alternate thing that’s not meant to be here and now, because you can get away with those lines.

**Craig:** You can.

**John:** There’s probably not a single line in Django Unchained that an actual human being would say, but it’s really enjoyable to see in that context.

**Craig:** Or any Tarantino movie. I mean, everybody speaks, it is understood that we’ve signed a contract with Tarantino that all of his characters are, it’s like it’s opera. I don’t know how else to put it. They speak like the way that recitative is sort of to opera. It’s not human dialogue. It’s awesome.

**John:** I mean, Tarantino is a great person to bring up, because you want to talk about voice, that’s what he had more than anything else. I mean, I think there was interesting plotting and interesting stuff going on, but if you just plunked down and read one of his scripts — I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script when it was just his script. And it was the first script that I ever read to the end, flipped back to page one and read through again, because it’s just a great voice that you love to hear. And it’s not about the dialogue. It’s about everything that’s fitting together, that the world feels.

And I think people can learn a lot of the other things. You can learn the plots. You can learn how to sort of get through the story. But, when you read a sample that has really good writing, really good voice, that’s what you sort of get to.

**Aline:** Can we all say the word “recitative.”

**Craig & John:** “Recitative.”

**Craig:** Is that right? It’s “recitative” is what it is. “Recitative.”

**Aline:** Recitative.

**John:** Oh, “recite-a-tive” is how it’s pronounced.

**Craig:** Yes, “recitative.” Why are you looking at me like that?

**John:** On NPR yesterday, or actually one of the other podcasts I was listening to, they were doing a thing about Les Mis, and they went into the “recitative…”

**Craig:** Recitative.

**John:** And they played a little clip of it. Like out of context with the whole movie it just sounds crazy.

**Craig:** It’s hysterical.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like, why is this person singing, “What’s this? It’s sunny. Where is my hat!” It’s ridiculous. But, you know, once you’re in the middle of it… — I mean, frankly, that is the worst part of Les Mis for me. I mean, when I went to go see Les Mis for the first time I’m like, stop all the sing talking, just talk, then sing the songs. I’d be much happier. I really, really would. Or, just sing the songs, [laughs], and I’ll figure out what’s going on between them. Or hand out a pamphlet and I’ll just read what happens in between them.
I would have been happier. The recitative is a tough one.

**John:** But don’t you sometimes read scripts from people who, like, are aspiring writers and they’re — you don’t know what to say to them other than the fact that like, “You don’t have a voice.” You’re like, “At least I’m not getting any sort of voice from you.” And that’s one of the hardest things; there’s no nice way to say that.

**Craig:** Well, other than to say, “Look, you’re not the only person. And it’s not fatal. Because people have pulled out of that flat spin before.” But if you read something, I mean, you’ve had this experience where you read something and you think, “Yeah, I could write the next five pages just like you did here, in a minute.” Or, anybody could write these pages. There’s no reason I need you to write the rest of this story. You’re not expressing it uniquely.

**Aline:** Right. But some people have a voice in life as they walk around. They just can’t get it onto a piece of paper.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And so partly it’s about learning what your point of view is, what makes you interesting to people, and being confident that that’s going to interest a reader.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing right there. Because I think people are just scared that their natural expression is boring. And what they do is they chase. And everybody has to sort of start like that with rare exception. There are prodigies, but so many people start by copying. You know, that’s how we learn to speak, by copying. So, it’s natural that we learn to write by copying, but at some point you got to kind of take the training wheels off, because all you’ll ever be is a copyist at that point.

**John:** Yeah. It’s having the courage to speak as you actually see the world.

**Aline:** Some screenwriters have been incredibly influential. I would say William Goldman, Shane Black, just in terms of having a very distinct way of writing that people then imitated. I mean, Goldman was huge for a very long time and people would write in that kind of epigrammatic way that he wrote. And then Shane Black, obviously. I mean, I think people are still writing in that tone.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me, it’s the first mistake. It’s the mistake of page zero is that you’re copying. I mean, all it says is it looks like I’m going to have to go get Shane Black, I guess, to fix this script, because I just got ersatz Shane Black.

There is nothing else you can offer as a writer except that which is unique to you. If it’s not unique to you, I don’t need it from you.

**John:** I’ll say it’s useful to look through the writing that you like a lot and figure out why you like it that way. And there may be aspects of that that you can completely use. Rather than sort of aping Shane Black’s short sentences and overuse of periods, find your way of getting that scene description on the page in a way that’s meaningful. Find your dialogue that is useful in those ways.
A writer who we both, Aline and I both — I’m pointing to Aline. Pointing doesn’t do any good on a podcast.

**Craig:** Right. This one over here.

**John:** This one over here. — We both talked about Lena Dunham and how much we enjoy her stuff. And you want to talk about somebody who has perspective and a voice, this feels like, you know, her world and what’s interesting to her being nicely put together on screen.

**Aline:** And you feel like you could see a line — someone could say something in life and you’d be like, “Oh, that’s such a Lena Dunham kind of moment.” You know, she already has, at such a young age, she already has a signature style/way of looking at the world perspective.

I mean, what’s amazing about her is when you see Tiny Furniture, it was all there. It was always all there. And she has such a distinct point of view. And I think, you know, because people do start out often by copying, I think we’re going to see a lot of stuff which is…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**Aline:** …you know, young women in their 20s. She, though, will free other people who have different… — You know, that’s what’s interesting about somebody like a Quentin or a Lena or somebody. If you have a distinct point of view you kind of give other people permission to find their own voice and to be that.

**John:** Absolutely. I get very frustrated by the knocks on Go as being like Pulp Fiction light, but I’m fully willing to acknowledge the fact that it would have been very hard to make Go without Pulp Fiction, because restarting the story twice and our structure, everyone would be like, “Well that’s not going to work. You can’t do that.” And once you’re like, “Well, there’s a very successful movie…”

**Craig:** I don’t think of Go, I mean, I don’t think of it that way. Maybe in the moment…

**John:** In the moment it was. That’s what people compared it to.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s what people do. It’s pattern bias. You know, “Well, that thing just happened so it must have caused this.” But it’s important to know the range of your own voice. There are people that have really specific voices like Tarantino or Dunham, and they write that kind of thing.

But it’s also okay to be the sort of person that is the Jack of all trades, who can kind of move in between, as long as there’s something unifying. It might not be dialogue, but unified in a way you tell a story, how you structure you out, what themes you dwell on. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself, but you have to at least express yourself.

**John:** Now, Aline, most of your produced movies seem to fall into a certain kind of, not even genre really, but a certain kind of mold. Is that because you’ve picked those movies, or those are the movies that have gotten made? What’s the through line?

**Aline:** Well, the first couple movies that I wrote were pretty straight up rom-coms, I would say. And then The Devil Wears Prada is not, and well, 27 Dresses also is a straight up rom-com. But then I wrote a few that were sort of women in the workplace trying to balance their life. And that was just, Prada was brought to me. Morning Glory was something that I wanted to show the first time a woman has real responsibility in a workplace, so that was a different spin on that.

And then I Don’t Know How She Does It is a work/life balance thing. But, it’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being a genre writer, because I don’t think of myself — I think of myself as writing pieces that are essentially dramatic, even if they have jokes in them. Dramas with jokes.

And, so, I sort of — I did We Bought a Zoo, which is a family movie.

**John:** That’s also a drama with jokes.

**Aline:** It’s a drama with jokes. Yeah. So, some of the other stuff that I branched into, I just approach it as sort of characters/character dilemma. So, I never think of myself as a genre writer. But I don’t think anybody does.
So, it’s funny, you know, I’m doing a broader range of stuff, even though I’ll always love — I love single lead comedies. I love romantic comedies. But one of the things I’m writing is a robot movie which one of our samples today is a…

**Craig:** Yeah, a robot movie. So, we’ll get into that.

**Aline:** So, I’m writing a robot movie. And what’s been interesting is working in different genres. I mean, I think I still have a lot of the same concerns and interests irrespective of what kind of material I’m dealing with.

**John:** Because I got pigeonholed right from the very start as a kid’s book writer — the first two projects I got were kid’s book adaptations, which didn’t get made, but I was only being that guy. I’d written Go largely just to break out of that box.

**Aline:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And so I very deliberately, consciously wrote that, saying like…

**Craig:** To not be the Fried Worms guy.

**John:** Exactly. And so with that, the weird luxury is everyone saw whatever they wanted to see in it. And so they’d say, like, “Oh, you are the edgy action movie guy.” “Oh, you are the comedy guy.” “You are this guy.” And so I was able to quickly get a lot of different things.

And I don’t think it hurt my sort of craft, but it did make it harder to sort of figure out what — ultimately what box to put me for other things. Because I didn’t become a brand in comedy, I didn’t become a brand in action. I just became the guy who does the various different kind of things.

What’s weird is that when you sort of take a big step back and look at the movies that actually got made, almost all of them are sort of “Two World” movies, where like there’s a normal world and the character decides to cross into this other world that has special rules, and ultimately sort of comes back out of it. And it’s very much sort of —

**Aline:** Yeah. I would probably, in my own stuff I would play more to thematics and layers than genre similarities.

**John:** Yeah. I described your movies in the previous podcast as want-coms.

**Aline:** I remember that.

**Craig:** The want-coms. Yeah, I’ve been all over the map. I mean, I’ve been very, remarkably uncalculating in my own career for somebody that’s kind of like, I have a tendency to calculate. But really kind of I just like making movies. So, I’ve always gravitated towards what’s getting made. And I had some really rough experiences. The best things I think I’ve ever written haven’t been made.

So, I started to be more interested in just writing movies. I just don’t like writing scripts that don’t get made. It just feels so awful.

**Aline:** My husband calls that the Document Production Business.

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty much. You’re just pushing paper around and then in the end it’s a booklet that no one reads. You know, I adapted Harvey and I wrote a movie called Game Voice at Bruckheimer. I love those scripts. And they meant something to me. And I adapted a Philip Dick short story. These are all really the ones I cared about, and then it just didn’t happen.
So, I started, basically, okay, well what’s in front of me that’s getting made? And I think the downside is sometimes what’s getting made isn’t that great. But, it then got me to a place where now some of the things that are getting made I really do think are great, and I love them. You know, so, I don’t know. I always feel like, I swear, maybe it’s just me — I always feel like I’m just a rookie still. I don’t know how many times… — I always feel like the next ten years are the ten years that count. In any given year, I always think the next ten years are the ones that count.

Until I finally get to retire, which as you know I’m really looking forward to. That’s my big thing.

**Aline:** Yeah. Nobody wants to retire more than you.

**Craig:** Oh, I can’t wait. I cannot wait. So much fun to think about all the things I can do.

**John:** You’re being serious? You’re actually thinking about retirement?

**Craig:** Always.

**Aline:** He’s always talking…

**John:** Oh, god, I never talk about retirement. I cannot ever imagine retiring.

**Aline:** Me neither.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, it’s going to be the best.

**John:** Yeah. I will die mid-draft.

**Craig:** Now, listen, I’m not going to retire next year. I’m not going to retire in five years. But once I hit 50, then I’m going to start thinking about it. And then I’d like to have a nice regenerative breaking down kind of vibe towards 60. And then I’m out.

**Aline:** There’s a good recitative in that.

**Craig:** There is!

**Aline:** [singing] Here I am. I’m a…for 50.

**John:** [singing] But what will you do?

**Craig:** So many things! [singing] Anything I want. [laughs] Why do they do that?

**Aline:** Do you have enough hobbies?

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I have a lot of hobbies, and there are a lot of things I want to learn. Like I want to learn some languages. I want to learn to play the guitar better. There are things I know how to do, just not well. And I want to be able to do them better. So, I’d like to learn things, go places, check stuff out, see my friends, hang out.

And, by the way, I would still write, but I would write for myself. I would write things that aren’t screenplays. I would just do stuff because I wouldn’t be worrying about saving for my kids, and my family, and retirement and all the rest of it.
And also, frankly, I like what I’m doing right now. I do. I just feel like — this is a whole separate therapy discussion — but at some point you have to stop doing what you’re doing. You can’t do it for your entire life. You can’t.

**Aline:** You can if you’re my dad.

**Craig:** I know. You can if you’re my dad, too. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I’m saying you shouldn’t.

**Aline:** He loves it.

**Craig:** Yes, some people do. Here’s the thing: I don’t. Like I know, sorry — I know that I need something new at some point. I get excited when things change. I love chaos and mayhem, basically. And I think I want to change it up. You know, I can feel change coming. You know what? There’s a wind of change in the air.

**Aline:** [singing] There’s a wind…

**Craig:** Recitative. You want to talk about…?

**John:** I want to talk about one more thing before we get into that. I could imagine at some point not writing screenplays, but I’m also sort of — part of me lives like ten years in the future where there’s some movies I’ve already directed. Like I already know, like, well that’s that movie I’m going to direct. And so at some point I’m going to get to that point. So, retirement is always way beyond these other movies that I’m going to be doing.

**Aline:** You have lots of hobbies and interests.

**John:** I have a lot of interests, yeah.

**Aline:** Your hobbies are businesses.

**Craig:** You’d be better at retirement. You love making apps. You’re a little app-making elf.

**John:** But I would never stop my current career to do that. So, I enjoy it, but I want everything to happen simultaneously.

**Craig:** The world needs apps.

**John:** I mostly just want to clone myself and send out the army of John Augusts to do different things.

**Craig:** What a horrifying thought.

**John:** It would be great.

**Craig:** And army of John Augusts.

**Aline:** I think it’s already happened.

**Craig:** It might have. Which one do you think we’re talking to now? Which generation of August is this?

**Aline:** The relaxed fit.

**Craig:** Oh, this is Relaxed Fit August?

>**432 – Learning From Movies**

**John:** So Craig, one thing I’ve done in 2019 which was helpful and I’m definitely carrying it with me into the new year is when I watch a movie I try to take some notes afterwards about what worked in that movie for me. And so this first segment I want to talk through this idea of what we can learn from movies.

So I think so often we’re talking about screenplays or like reading scripts and all that stuff but really what all of us do is we watch movies and we take things from movies. And I want to have a discussion about how to be a little bit more systematic and really thoughtful about what we’re taking from movies as we finish watching a film.

**Craig:** Mindful viewing of movies. That’s a good idea. Everybody that does what we do uses other movies as examples or inspiration. Sometimes we use them as negative examples.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the movies that we love we tend to really think about carefully. It’s a little bit like what you and I do when we walk through one of these movies.

**John:** Exactly. And so we did our walkthrough of Die Hard and that was really trying to look systematically at what the movie was doing and how the movie was working. That’s a thing that people can do by themselves with every movie that they watch. And really if you’re aspiring to be a screenwriter, or you are a screenwriter, it’s not a bad practice to get into with everything. So if you watch a pilot of a TV show or you watch a movie, just take a few minutes and really look at how that movie worked. Because when you don’t do that it tends to be only the most recent thing you’ve watched is the only example you have in your head. And if you do it more systematically it will work for everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my questions I want to ask myself when I finish a movie is what’s working in it, what’s not working for you in it? If it’s not working why is it not working? Really troubleshoot for yourself what didn’t click for you and why didn’t it click. And what could you have done differently in that movie to make it click?

Really you’re trying to focus on the how questions. How is the movie working and how could the movie be working better if you were to have access to the engine underneath it?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this saying that people put out there about social media. Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. And sometimes if we watch movies, particularly ones that we love, and we don’t think about them in a gear-watch-works way then we may suffer from that. We may think, OK, I’m currently sitting here with a pile of tiny little gears and cogs and springs and it’s not a watch. And I just saw the most beautiful watch. I suck.

If you start to really look at it from the point of view of a craftsperson then you can see that they had the same problems and limitations you did. And it’s really helpful I think to start to strip away stuff that isn’t purely writing. Start to strip away the lighting. Start to strip away the music. Start to strip away the performances. And just think about the movements of things that were commanded by text, because that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s start at the fundamental. Let’s start at the hero. Let’s take a look at who the hero is in this story and what the function of that hero is. So, as the viewer do you understand who that hero is? What they want? Both on a macro scale, the overall arc of their journey through the story, but on a micro level. On a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment do you understand what that hero wants? And if you do how is that being communicated? What information are they giving you to let you know what that hero wants?

And that is purely craft. That is the screenwriter’s job is to make it clear what that central character is trying to go after.

**Craig:** And it’s perfectly reasonable to study how people do that elegantly. So Damon Lindelof and his team did Watchmen which I loved and a lot of people do. And one of the things that I thought was so good about it was what I call non-expository exposition. They were so clever – and that is craft – about making the information release interesting and meaningful beyond just you need to know this. They managed to weave it into other things. Really good lessons learned from that. And I think that when we watch movies it’s fair to look at those really hardcore craft things and say, oh, you know what I’m not going to steal the way, like their movie there, but I’m going to steal their ambition. Like they clearly aspire to do better than the usual. I should, too.

**John:** Absolutely. Watchmen is a great example for my next question which is how does the hero fit the story. So thinking about what story do you want to tell and which hero is the appropriate hero for telling that story. The fit between hero and world in Watchmen could not have been better. So you had a character whose grandfather was part of this sort of long story, this long struggle, to get us up to this present moment. So she was uniquely qualified to be the central character in the story.

**Craig:** And you can sometimes struggle when you watch a movie because you’re looking at the wrong person. This is another thing that movies do all the time, we just don’t notice it until we really watch meaningfully. And that is they have us following somebody that isn’t the hero. We think they’re the hero. They’re not the hero.

Sometimes the hero is this side character or somebody we think of as a side character because they’re not occupying this huge space in the story. But the story is really about this smaller – I mean, the most famous example that people kick around is who is Ferris Bueller about? Who is the hero of Ferries Bueller? And it’s Cameron. It’s the friend. Because he’s the only one that has a choice to make. He is the only one who has a problem, who is running away from his problem, who has to confront his problem, and overcome his problem. But he’s not Ferris Bueller. He’s not in the title. Nor is he the guy we watch in the beginning, or the end. It seems like Ferris Bueller is the hero but he’s not. So meaningful watching helps you get there.

**John:** Absolutely. And finding those situations where the central character of Ferris Bueller is not the protagonist. It’s not the one that actually undergoes the transformation, the journey. So really being deliberate to look at sort of who is playing what role in the story. And once you do that figure out how are they introduced. How are you as a viewer first introduced to these characters? And how quickly do you understand who they are and why you should be interested in them. Those initial scenes of meeting those characters we all know as writers are so crucial. Well, how did this film do it? And ask yourself what are the other choices they could have made and why was this the right choice or the wrong choice?

**Craig:** Introductions are something that I think writers probably glide past all the time and should not. Maybe it’s because they think their “directing on the page.” As you know I’m a huge fan of directing on the page. I think that’s our job. And I think of movies that are delightful and how often their delight is conveyed to us through an introduction of a character. Like so when we first meet Jack Sparrow in the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie he’s on this ship, he is a proud pirate, he seems like just one of those plot armored heroes where no wrong can. And then you reveal that his boat is sinking and he literally steps off the top of it onto a deck as it disappears below the waves. That says so much not just about him but about this world, the tone. It’s delightful.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** In the second movie I believe he shoots his way out of a coffin. It’s another just – it’s surprising. So, another excellent thing to keep an eye on for all movies. And sometimes they’re not flashy like that. The introduction of the family in Parasite–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Just the way that they’re living in a basement sort of, and how their day is consumed by trying to steal wifi. Brilliant.

**John:** It’s really talk about all these aspects, like who are the right characters for the story, how are we meeting these characters, and do we understand what they want? And Parasite is a great example of how you’re seeing all three of those things in one initial sequence that’s really telling you this is their situation. These are the people you’re going to be watching through the course of the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re watching a movie and you feel good at the end of a scene, stop. I don’t mean to say that you should do this the first time you see it. But when it’s time to watch it meaningfully and thoughtfully if the scene works for you stop and then roll back and then watch it again. And just think about the layers and why.

This is so much more important than why – I feel like our culture is just obsessed with people explaining why they hate things. They’re rewarded for it, I guess. It teaches you very little. It really does. I’ll tell you, more than anything when I watch something I don’t like I get scared. I get scared because I think would I have done the exact same thing in that situation? How would I have done it differently? I’m starting to get scared. Better to look at things you love.

**John:** Looking at any of these characters, a useful metric for me is could I describe this character independently of the actor? Do I have enough information about that character at the start and as the story progresses that I could talk about that character independently of the actor who is playing him? So I think Jack Sparrow is actually a great example. Because we think of him as Johnny Depp, but that character is very, very specific independently of the performance of Johnny Depp.
Same with all the family members in Parasite whose names I don’t know. And so they are such strongly drawn characters that I don’t have to fall back on a description of who the actor was playing them to be able to describe them as what they’re trying to do in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Disney, the folks who are running Disney very famously they knew they had hired Johnny Depp and when they saw what he was doing and what he looked like and how he sounded and walked they freaked out, because that was not some sort of inevitable thing that travels out of Johnny Depp. That was something specific and different. And it is a character that could be played by another person. It could be.
Would it have been played the same way? No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I think he was perfect. I really do. But in some alternate universe someone else is playing it and people also love the movie.

**John:** Agreed. So we talked about the hero, let’s talk about the antagonist. How does the antagonist arrive in the story? How do they challenge the hero? And in movies that work well the antagonist is so specific to the story and so specific to the hero that it’s hard to imagine them existing outside of that universe. So we talk about this in Die Hard. We talk about it in almost any of the movies we love, they have a villain or a chief character who is challenging the hero who is so specific to that story. So always look for how is that antagonist introduced and how specifically drawn are they to challenge your hero in the story.

**Craig:** And if it works for you, accept that. You know, you could fall into a trap of trying to fit things into categories and saying, well, sometimes I’ll see people say, “You know, I really liked this movie but it doesn’t follow the rule of blankety-blank.” Correct. It does not. Because that is not a rule. The rule that you just cited isn’t a rule. There are movies where the villain, the antagonist, is the weather. There are movies where it’s a dog. There’s movies where it’s a ghost. There’s movies where it’s fate. There’s movies where it’s the person you love the most.

It’s defined in so many different ways, so start with the fact that it worked. And then say, OK, I’ve just learned a new way of conceiving of what an antagonist is. The word villain, also, a bit of a trap.

**John:** Agreed. So then we have our characters. Let’s talk about the storytelling of the movie. So, how quickly and how well does it establish who is important and what they’re going after? How does the movie move between storylines? And this I think is the most crucial kind of craft question. Obviously there’s multiple things that are going to be happening. How does the movie decide how to switch back and forth between? Does it limit POV to only things that the hero knows? Or does the audience have omniscient POV? How is it working in terms of telling you its story? And how quickly – going back to the Pirates example – does it set up what its tone and genre are really going to be?

And these are fundamental things. And if the movie is not working you’re going to notice it here.

**Craig:** Correct. And that’s why it’s so important to carefully watch a movie that is working for you. Because when it is working it is designed for you to not notice any seams whatsoever. You won’t notice cuts. You won’t notice that one scene has changed to another. You won’t notice transitions. It will all seem inevitable and purposeful and of a single whole.
So take the time to now go, OK, but it’s not. So let’s be amateur magicians that are invited to the magic castle and we’re asking the really good sleight of hand guy, OK, slow it down for me. Let me see it bit by bit, move by move. That’s how you’re going to learn.

**John:** Absolutely. The last bit of technique which I think is so crucial to be monitoring is how does the movie surprise you? Because by this point you’ve watched thousands of movies. You are a sophisticated movie viewer. The movies that succeed are the ones that still manage to surprise you. That you feel like you’re caught up with them and they still have some more tricks up their sleeve. So how do they do that? How did they deceive you in a way that got you to that moment of surprise?
And those are the moments to really go back and really figure out what was the set up that got you to that misunderstanding.

**Craig:** Setups, payoffs, misdirections, but also just as important clues, hints. We will not feel as satisfied if there were no hints. I was watching, so Knives Out, written and directed by our friend Rian Johnson, which has done extraordinarily well and for good reason. I watched it again and there’s a moment that happens during the reading of the will when the lawyer announces that the old man has left all of his stuff, all of it, to Marta, his nurse. There’s one little thing that happens with one character that is a clue. But you sure don’t know it at the time because it’s a clever clue. It’s a smart clue. And I thought, OK, there’s intelligence at work and there’s also an understanding of how fair play actually improves the misdirection and the surprise.

It is, again, a very calculated, careful crafted bit. And at its best moviemaking is about marrying this really hardcore calculating craft with a kind of inspired wild creative abandon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s what good things like Knives Out do.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a crucial thing about Knives Out is to remember like, so Rian Johnson is both the writer and the director. That scene is incredibly well directed, but that moment that you’re describing is a written moment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was very clearly an idea that occurred in the writing stage of this. And so I think it’s also great to have a separate discussion about what works on a directing level, on a cinematography level, on casting, costuming. Think about all those things but as a separate conversation. Really just focus on what is it about the storytelling, about the writing that is working for you so well in this part of the process.

**Craig:** Whodunits are amazing for this. If you want to really study the craft of surprise and misdirection just watch whodunits. Because that’s all they’re about. I mean, they are about some other things occasionally. I mean, Knives Out has a certain commentary about class and what it means to be an immigrant in the United States and inherited wealth versus earned wealth. All of that stuff is there. But mostly it’s about the machinery of who did it. And that’s what’s so satisfying about it.

**John:** Well it’s also a meta examination of sort of the whodunit as a genre, because it ultimately is not so much a whodunit.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s sort of like we know who did it, but whodunit. And I love those movies because they really do instruct you. Comedies, also, I will say comedies are oftentimes–

**John:** Well, there’s setup, payoff.

**Craig:** It’s machinery.

**John:** Yeah, it’s machinery behind.

**Craig:** Study the machinery.

**John:** So we’ve watched the movie and now we’re trying to focus on it. Obviously if you have someone there to go have a drink with afterwards you can talk through all that stuff, which is great. But if you’re watching the movie by yourself what I found to be really helpful and I’ve started doing it much more for the last couple months is just one page of notes, bullet points of like these were the things I learned from this movie. And if it’s a movie that I loved, great. These are some things I loved and some things that this filmmaker was able to do in the writing that really worked for me and things I wanted to remember from this.

If it’s a movie I didn’t love, I find that also to be really helpful. This thing they tried to do just did not work, or I was confused by these moments. This isn’t a review. This is like what is it that you can take from this thing you just watched and apply to your own work. And what you said before about when you watch a movie that’s not working you get that moment of fear. Would I have made the same mistakes? And as I look at the movies that didn’t work, yeah, I definitely see some things where I probably would have tried that in that situation, too. So it’s helpful. It’s a chance to sort of have the experience of having made that movie that didn’t work and learn from it without having spent years of your life making a movie that didn’t work.

**Craig:** How nice is that, right? I mean, it’s hard enough doing these things. So if there’s anything we can do to save ourselves from a trap. By the way, we probably can’t. I mean, if we’re going to fall into a trap we’re going to fall into a trap. But studying other people’s good stuff but help I think but make us better. And if you do see, well, I guess here is how I would put it with the negative things. I do think of these things as relationships. We have a relationship with something. A movie. This is why very, very smart, cultured, tasteful people can have violent disagreements about the same movie. Because it’s not about the movie being good or bad, or you being a good or bad viewer. It’s about this unique relationship that forms between you and it, which is the sum of all of what it is and all of what you are.

So, when we watch these things and we find ourselves in a good or bad relationship, what’s worthy there is it will help us craft something that we have a good relationship with as we write. Because I’ve written things before where I just thought I’m fighting with this thing. I mean, this thing doesn’t want to exist, or it shouldn’t exist, but I’m being paid to make it exist and I am fighting with it. I am at war. And it’s not a good feeling. Figuring out how to have a good relationship with what you’re writing is something that you might be able to be helped to do by thinking about the good relationships you’ve had with other things.

**John:** Absolutely. One unique thing about the time people are living in now versus when we were starting out is that pretty much any movie you’ve really enjoyed you can read the screenplay of. And so if you have questions about how it worked on the page you can go back and look at those scripts. This is the part where you and I come clean and say we don’t read the scripts. We’re not reading those For Your Consideration scripts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But they’re available there for people to read. And it was very important for me when I was starting to write to read a bunch of those scripts. And so definitely go out and read those scripts if you are new to the craft and learning how it all works.

Craig and I tend to watch movies and we can sort of see the script coming through there. So, obviously we don’t know what the drama was and what changed on the set, but we get a pretty sense of what the storytelling was on the page that led to that movie. But if you’re new to this that’s a great place to start. And so I would recommend watch the movie, read the script, and see how it compares. Or if there’s something that you’ve not seen, reverse it sometimes and read the script, see the movie in your head, and then watch the final movie to see sort of how the filmmakers did the job of converting that screenplay into a movie.

**Craig:** I mean, really what you’re advising people to do is their homework.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you homework, people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is a job. They don’t just pay you for nothing.

**John:** And I guess–

**Craig:** You got to know stuff.

**John:** In my taking notes on movies that I’m watching now I’m just sort of trying to do my homework a little bit more. I feel like I’ve been letting it slide for a few years and just like watching the movie just as a fan. That’s why I like to watch a movie just to enjoy it, but then afterwards take those notes. I’m not taking notes during it.

**Craig:** Well that’s a really good way to keep yourself relevant also. I think as people get older sometimes we think of them as losing a step or losing some zip on their fastballs, as we say, but sometimes I think all that’s happening is they’ve just disconnected from the churn of culture and what is relevant and what’s happening around us that is new and different. Because people are constantly kicking over the old stuff.

Like for instance what Rian did with Knives Out. It sort of kicks over the old stuff a bit. And if you’re not paying attention to that you will just make more old stuff. Sometimes I read things, I’m sure you have too, where a studio will say we really like this idea. It’s not quite working. Can you fix it? And you read it and you think, well, I get it. This is a good idea. It feels like it was written 30 years ago.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It just seems like whoever wrote this stopped at some point and you can’t.

**John:** Move forward.

**Craig:** Move forward.

——-

**John:** We are back in 2023. It’s time for our first One Cool Things of 2023. No pressure whatsoever. My One Cool Thing is a blog post that I saw a bunch of people linking to this past week. A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to had it. It’s called the Dangers of Elite Perception by Jarrett Walker. He is an urban theorist, a philosopher, a person who talks about public transit. His concept of elite perception is that the folks in elite positions often believe they actually understand how things work overall. They have this natural bias. They can only see what their experience would be.

The example he gives is that someone would say, “How is this new subway going to help me, a guy with a BMW parked in my driveway?” and not understanding not everyone has access to a car and that it’s not going to be useful for him necessarily. He’s not going to directly benefit but everyone else might benefit.

I think you can really broaden this idea of elite perception beyond just urban transportation to a lot of situations where it’s so easy to get caught up in the solipsism of everything in the world functions the way it functions to me and really stresses the importance of going out and just asking questions and figuring out different people’s perspective and needs and wants, because it’s very unlikely that your experience is the same as other people’s experiences.

That feels especially true for anyone writing stories, anybody who has to really think beyond what their immediate needs are. Just be aware that there’s a lot of other things out there, and just always be asking yourself, “I think it’s this way, but why do I think it’s this way? Is there some other people I can ask about how they really see the situation?”

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. It seems so obvious that if you’re designing public transit, you would be thinking about the people who are already using public transit the most versus yourself who owns a BMW or something.

**John:** I think the same thing can be applied to any industry-wide thing. We have a bunch of different people who are involved in the process of making movies and TV shows. The needs of one group may not match up with the needs of other groups. Recognize that if you’re pushing for one thing that you really want, it may have harmful effects to other people as well. Always good to be looking at what are the needs of the whole and not always prioritize what are your immediate needs.

**Megana:** I love that. I feel like as I learn more about design, it really comes down to asking more questions of people making sure that the design’s actually functional.

**John:** Absolutely. Some of the software stuff that we’re doing, I have persnickety taste, and so a lot of things in Highland or Weekend Read are very much what I want. It’s only when we actually have betas out there that other people can use or people who are trying to use the software for different things than I’m trying to use it for, that we can really see what’s useful. Ryan Knighton, who’s been a frequent guest, tests out our iOS apps to make sure they actually work for blind people, for example. We can turn on the simulators to see what would it be like for a blind person, but we are not a blind person who can use this app. He’s our guinea pig there and really lets us know what he needs.

**Megana:** Great. In keeping in theme of broadening point of view, my One Cool Thing for this week is a book by Gabrielle Blair. It’s called Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. It’s this short, funny, thought-provoking read. You could probably finish it in one sitting.

In the book, she lays out these 20 arguments where she makes the case for why we should move the debate away from legislating/controlling women’s bodies and instead focuses on the role of men in sexual health. I think what she does so well is she takes away some of the political and religious weight that we bring into these conversations, and instead, really roots it in these biological and scientific arguments around fertility. I learned a lot from it. It was a really interesting read. I think it’s an important perspective to consider.

**John:** Absolutely. I think you’re right to tie it into this dangers of elite perception. I think we have this sense when it comes to fertility and abortion and all these things that it’s strictly just a women’s issue.

**Megana:** Really helpful way to frame this conversation.

**John:** It all comes from just an act that happened on one day that has these long repercussions, and that we should probably be thinking about that moment rather than all the other stuff around it.

**Megana:** She really gets into the science of the fertility and the difference between it. These are things that I have known and felt, but to see these arguments written out in this way was just really powerful. I think it’s really smart the way that she does it.

**John:** Great. I’m looking forward to reading it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and two of our segments were produced by Stuart Friedel way back in the day.

**Megana:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always. Our outro is by Martin Kubitsky. 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. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Scriptnotes book and other things coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for putting together this episode.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, this whole episode came to be because you were working on a chapter for the Scriptnotes book. We’ve not had a lot of big updates. We’re still not talking about delivery dates and things like that, when we have to turn it in to our publishers at Crown. It’s been fun going back through the archives and seeing who we were then and what advice we had. I’m sure our writing advice is pretty consistent, but other stuff has changed. What are you finding as you’re looking through things?

**Megana:** It’s interesting to also hear how much more confident you guys are in talking about these things as time goes on. There are kernels of truth that you’ve been saying since Episode 70 of the podcast, 500 episodes ago. That’s really cool, because I think that these lessons that you’re teaching are consistent, but they’re also really difficult to learn, which is why we have to keep talking about them.

**John:** One of the goals of the Scriptnotes book is that it can be a little bit timeless, that it’s really screenwriting advice that’ll be applicable in 2023 or 2043 hopefully. There’ll be things that’ll still be the same. Other stuff does keep evolving and changing.

One of the things that you and I have been trying to figure out is that… Over the next year, we’re going to be coming up on a new WGA contract. There’s going to be all the questions of stuff about what happens around that. That’s a difficult thing for us to do on the show, because we’re not that timely of a show. We record a week in advance sometimes. We can’t be especially responsive. We have international listeners and listeners who are listening just for the fun of it, who don’t necessarily need to know about the intricate details of WGA stuff. It’s not cool for them.

What you and I have been talking about is maybe just doing short little side-cast episodes that are not a full hour, not our normal thing, but are just about WGA topics that come up related to this new contract that don’t have to be about everything else. If you want a normal Scriptnotes episode, you’ll get your normal Scriptnotes episode on Tuesday, but there may be some extra little bonus things that come out not on a Tuesday, about just this WGA stuff.

**Megana:** Absolutely. I think the one common thing of everyone in Hollywood is they’re incredibly dramatic. As we are coming up to some of these conversations, I have been hearing crazy, wild takes. I think it’ll be nice to have a really measured, responsive way of hearing what’s true or not, because you’ve had so much experience with the WGA, at least negotiations, to shed some more light and insight into what’s actually going on.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve been through many negotiation cycles. I’ve been on the negotiating committee. I’m on the negotiating committee this year. I can’t comment specifically about some stuff in this negotiation, because that’s just not appropriate. The only place that you’re going to hear the real scoop from the WGA side is going to be from the WGA itself and from the folks who are in charge of things. What I can hopefully do is offer some just broad frameworks for thinking about the timelines of things, how stuff works, because there’s terminology that is just facts, but it’s not necessarily obvious to someone going through it for the first time. I see here in the Workflowy you have two questions from people who’ve written in already. Maybe we can try to just break the seal with these two.

**Megana:** Chris wrote in and asked, “I’m a new pre-WGA arrival to LA and have been taking some general water bottle tour meetings with execs at various studios and production companies. During my last three conversations, the execs all mentioned that they were concerned about the uncertainty of a pending writer’s strike in May, with two of the three saying they believed it likely to happen. I’ve not heard this possibility discussed on any recent Scriptnotes episodes, and I’m wondering if you can share your thoughts.”

**John:** What Chris is experiencing is probably what Megana’s experiencing, what I’m experiencing too, is that when you have conversations in general meetings with people who work in the industry, film or television, they’ll ask like, “Oh, it’s getting crazy. There could be a strike.” People will weigh their percentage odds on what that’s going to be.

Here’s the very general thing that people are looking at and talking about timeline-wise is that the the WGA works under a contract with all the studios, all the big studios, everyone who makes film and television. That contract is renewed every three years. We have a negotiation to update and revise and renew and approve a new contract with the studios. The existing contract runs out May 1st.

In the time leading up to that, you would expect there to be negotiations with the studios between the WGA and the studios to figure out what that new contract will be. In some years it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a very contentious contract. In some years it feels like a more contentious contract. There’s a lot of discussion this year about what’s going to be in that, but there are no proposals from either side. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. I just think there’s a general feeling that it looks like there’s a lot of stuff to be figured out.

We’re not the only people negotiating contract. It should be noted that IATSE, who represents most of the below-the-line decisions, they’ve already negotiated a contract. The DGA may be in negotiations to work on their contract. SAG, the actors generally go after us. There’s a lot of negotiations happening this year about contracts. It’s very normal for someone like Chris to be hearing these conversations as they go in and have these just general chitchatty meetings about what’s going to happen and thinking about head to if there were to be a strike, what that might look like. Megana, are you hearing these conversations too?

**Megana:** Yeah, and I would say that they’re a little bit further, where people are banking on the inevitability of it. I just heard someone at a party recently saying that they were planning a vacation around when they think the strike would happen, because to me that feels like putting the horse before the cart. Wait, no, that’s where you’re supposed to put the horse.

**John:** The horses generally do go in front of the carts, but you do you.

**Megana:** Putting the cart before the horse. You and I had an interesting discussion about this. I was hoping you could talk about why we shouldn’t presume an inevitability of a strike.

**John:** I don’t think this idea of inevitability helps anybody, because I think what it could do is back some producers and some studios into rushing or making some hasty decisions that they’re going to regret. I also think it doesn’t do well for writers, because if everyone assumes there’s going to be a strike, then maybe the other side isn’t negotiating with best intentions of actually averting a problem. I just don’t think inevitable is a great word to be thinking about, especially when, again, there are no proposals. There’s no deal to be discussing. It’s just a lot of speculation at this point. I don’t think it’s especially great to be doing that.

Listen. All writers I think at some point have this dream list of like, what if there were a snow day and I didn’t have to do my other work and I can just do whatever I wanted to do. That’s natural. That’s a natural fantasy in film. I’m sure executives have that too. Presuming that there’s going to be a giant blizzard and that the school’s going to be canceled for a period of time isn’t a great way to be approaching the works that you actually need to be doing.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh, and it sets you up for so much disappointment.

**John:** I don’t think inevitable is a great word to be throwing around here. I see a second question here from Liliana.

**Megana:** Liliana from Los Angeles wrote in and said, “A few episodes ago, Craig mentioned a potential writer’s strike next summer, and it made me curious what you all think it means for assistants. I currently work for a writer under her overall deal, and she warned me about the strike as well. If her deal ends, I’ll be out of a job. What can pre-WGA writers/assistants do to prepare? What was it like for them in ’07 and ’08?”

**John:** I can’t speak specifically to how things worked for below-the-line staff, writing staff, in ’07 and ’08, folks who were writers’ room assistants, who were showrunners’ assistants. What I will say is that I think given Pay Up Hollywood and our general better awareness of the issues faced by folks who were working in those rooms, there will be some more awareness of how do we keep those people solvent during any sort of work stoppage if it were to happen.

There’s not a lot I can advise Liliana to do other than to be frugal with her money, which is a hard thing for me to say, because I know she’s not probably being paid a lot, to be aware and open, and to be maybe ready to shift to something else if she needs to during a time if work were to ever stop, if there were to be some sort of strike or some sort of other action.

If there were to be a strike or work stoppage or a lockout or anything like that, if there is to be a disruption, it stops for everybody. Studios will look to trim costs where they can, and they will fire people. They will not employ people. In some cases, they are able to keep productions going for a little time, but it’s tough. Liliana could be out of a job for a time. I do recall something from the last strike that I was involved in. Things also ramp up really quickly again. It’s not going to be like the pandemic where you just don’t know what is possibly going to happen. We do know how to get out of these things and how to get back to things.

**Megana:** Resuming production after the pandemic had so many questions, and we introduced this whole new role of the COVID safety officer, but you’re saying that this is like, as soon as it’s back on, it’s on.

**John:** Yeah. After the ’07-’08 strike, the next day, rooms were reopening and things were getting back into shape. Did people need to figure some stuff out? Sure, but a lot of stuff did just resume, pick up right where it left off. Not everything. People did lose overall deals. There were other things that were trims and there were [inaudible 01:32:11]. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but it did kind of get back to the way it was, and just with a better contract. It certainly is doable. It won’t necessarily feel like a dramatic change if there’s a stoppage and then it comes back.

**Megana:** Got it. Basically, you’re saying maybe don’t think on it, but also put more money in your bank from your savings for the first part of the year.

**John:** Yeah. To go back to the storm metaphor, don’t count on a blizzard that’s going to close schools, but you should also have some emergency mac and cheese in your cupboards in case it does happen.

**Megana:** Yeah, or study for the English test that you’re hoping will get canceled.

**John:** That’s exactly it. Somehow I have a feeling, Megana, you were always prepared for those things. Do you long for snow days or do you rue snow days?

**Megana:** I think it depended. I loved a snow day, but if I had a big test, I’d rather just get that over with, because you’re delaying this terrible thing you have to do. We would usually have one really cold week in January where we would just have a week full of snow days, and that is incredible.

**John:** I loved a snow day where it was enough to close school, but I could still get over to my friend’s house and hang out. Those were the ideal snow days for me is the ones where… They were less fun as I got older. I just remember the grade school snow days just felt like, “Wow, this is a thing I can’t even believe has happened.” I definitely agree with your point where there’s times where you’ve crammed for the test and you’re so ready, and if you had to delay and then cram again, it just felt like wasted work, because you knew that you weren’t going to hold onto those facts about chemistry.

**Megana:** Yeah. This is all short-term memory. None of this is being-

**John:** None of this is sticking.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Now, our poor kids these days, they can just Zoom into school or they have to just turn in their paper digitally.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** They don’t get it.

**Megana:** Oh, wow.

**John:** It’s unfair. The world has become unfair.

**Megana:** That is one of the biggest joys of my childhood.

**John:** Hopefully, there’ll be no snow days that derail the delivery of the Scriptnotes book, but that is another thing. We’ll be working on it very hard. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to ship, but we know our delivery day is going to be sometime this year. We have a lot of work ahead for us. I’m not saying I want any sort of labor disruption, but if there is a labor disruption, that’s a little more time we can be working on the book.

**Megana:** I feel like that’s what we just advised against talking about.

**John:** I’m not saying I’m looking forward to it. I’m just saying a writer can’t help but theorize, if something were to go awry, this might be something I would do in that gap period of time and that might be something I’d work on in that gap period of time if it were to happen.

**Megana:** That’s fair. I just feel wizened from the pandemic that I know that that will never happen for me.

**John:** Absolutely. You always think, “Oh, I’m going to have all this luxury free time.” Then it’s like, no, I’m not.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** If there’s a strike, I’ll be marching outside of Paramount like I did last time. Who knows? Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 239 – What is good writing?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 76 – How screenwriters find their voice with Aline Brosh McKenna](https://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 432 – Learning From Movies](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/581standard.mp3).

The original transcript for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/what-youre-looking-at).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 576 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters place things in front of the reader’s virtual camera? That’s right, it’s a crafty episode, where we’re going to take a look at some really nitpicky word choices and how those make movies you can watch on the page. We’ll also tackle a bunch of listener questions on everything from outlining to maligning small villages, Craig.

**Craig:** Maligning small villages, finally. I have been waiting since Episode 1 for somebody to write in about that.

**John:** Absolutely. Those little, tiny villages that you drive past, what if you could just slander them, slander them to death?

**Craig:** Malign them.

**John:** Oh, but Craig, you’re going to really enjoy our Bonus Segment for Premium Members. Sixteen will enter. One will win. Which dessert will come out on top of our first ever dessert bracket?

**Craig:** I don’t know if people know this, but I do love making desserts. I like baking, cooking, mixing, whipping, folding. I love to make a dessert.

**John:** We’re recording this pre-Thanksgiving. Mike and I are planning on making three different pies. Pies are definitely in the entries here.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Overall, in the general categories of desserts, we need to figure out which are the ultimate desserts and which are not the ultimate desserts.

**Craig:** Let’s rush through this shitty podcast so we can get to that.

**John:** I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** That’s what matters.

**John:** Let’s start with some news though, because Craig, Megana Slacked me this new on Sunday afternoon. I could not believe it. Bob Iger is back running Disney.

**Craig:** I could not believe it either. As somebody that owns a small amount of Disney stock, I was thrilled. Bob Chapek was an interesting choice to succeed Bob Iger. That was always going to be a tough gig to succeed Bob Iger. He was in a class of his own in terms of these uber-CEOs that ride over the whole corporation. Bob Chapek came in there and was like, “Watch what I do.” Then he did a bunch of stuff, and nobody seemed to like it. I think Bog Iger must have somewhere along the line thought, “I probably picked the wrong guy.”

**John:** Chapek was a handpicked successor. There was a whole plan for transition. There was a year of overlap. It was all going to be a very smooth transition in theory. Iger left, and then Chapek had a series of missteps and stumbles. The recent reporting we’re reading seems to be that it was really an investor call, that Chapek messed up on an investor call, was the inciting incident that got him out the door over the weekend. Friday afternoon, the call went to Iger. Then by Sunday-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** … evening, Chapek was out and Iger was back in.

**Craig:** What did he do on that phone call?

**John:** The New York Times story, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. The sourcing seems to indicate that he was too sanguine about the really dismal numbers and seemed out of touch.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** His own lieutenants were basically going to the board and saying, “If you don’t get rid of Chapek, we’re going to leave.”

**Craig:** Bob Iger is back. One of the things that was really interesting was he came back on Friday and it’s currently Tuesday, he’s already changed 4,000 things. Look, from my point of view, obviously, you and I, we don’t swim in those waters. Different people do that stuff. We don’t really care about that stuff, only to the extent that it infects us. Bob Iger was always about the content and about making sure that you protected the creative output and made sure that the content was great and that the content would drive everything else. Don’t worry about it. Everything else will just flow from it. It appears that he is hard at work to reinstate that culture. I hope it accrues to the benefit of writers.

**John:** Another thing I’m thinking about this week is just how much CEO quality matters, because so often it seems like these corporations, they just are their own corporations. Many of the times, a well-run corporation is the one where you don’t have any idea who the CEO is. You look at Disney right now versus Twitter, and oh, wow, the person in charge of things can really have a huge impact on how stuff is happening, how stuff’s working. A good CEO can fix things. A bad CEO can break things very quickly, much more quickly than I would’ve ever guessed was possible.

**Craig:** The good news for CEOs is they’ll still make $400 million as they absolutely screw their company into the ground. Twitter, boy, wow. I quit. I’m out. I’m gone.

**John:** He’s out. He’s gone.

**Craig:** I’m gone. Pedro Pascal quit over the weekend. I saw that. Even internally, as we’ve been talking about gearing up for lots of marketing and stuff for The Last of Us, just incorporating the Twitter exodus into the planning. It’s now received wisdom that Twitter is a damaged product if you are not a MAGA troll.

**John:** It is fascinating, because if you’d told me a year ago someone’s going to build a rival to Twitter, it’s like, that’s a stupid idea, because there’s already Twitter. Now it seems like, you know what, you could probably find a bunch of engineers who are available to build you an alternative to Twitter. I don’t know that one thing will ever take off. I don’t know that we’ll ever replace it. I don’t know that Twitter necessarily will go away in a complete sense. It is just fascinating that something we assume, it’s Twitter, it’s always going to be there, can just disappear so quickly.

**Craig:** As a company, I think they always struggle to figure out exactly how to make money. When Elon Musk came along and offered them some stupid amount of money as a dumb, pot-inspired joke, I think, they were like, “Holy shit. Yeah, we’ll take that. Thank you. Thank you for overpaying for this thing that just doesn’t make money.” Now he has it, and he’s just flailing around and smashing it into bits. It’s very strange. I have to say, for something that I used every day for years and considered my main method of communicating things to the world, not only do I not miss it, I feel better. Not a little bit better, a lot better. I feel a lot better. Let’s put it this way. You and I, John, lived most of our lives without Twitter. Everything was fine.

**John:** Everything was fine.

**Craig:** It was fine.

**John:** I was on Twitter before I was doing this podcast, but the boundaries are blurry. I had my website before I had Twitter. I had some other place of truth of John August’s opinion. Twitter did become that, and I don’t know what’s necessarily going to replace that. I guess just the blog. Wrapping up the CEO talk, we have Bob Iger back there in charge. He’s not going to be there forever. He needs to find someone else to take over for him. That’s going to be even probably more difficult, because finding the person who can now do this job, it’s going to be challenging.

**Craig:** John, I have a real question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** What if they said, “Hey, John August, we want you to do it.”

**John:** I’ve been thinking about that, because Craig, I do consider a lot of alternative [inaudible 00:07:07].

**Craig:** That is the craziest answer ever. Ever. That was insane.

**John:** Craig, I have been thinking about it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I don’t think I would do a good job. Here’s the reasons why I don’t think I would do a good job. I know a fair amount about making movies. I know a fair amount about making TV shows, less but a fair amount. I do not know how to manage all the other parts of that company, including the theme parks and the streaming services and all this other stuff. That’s why when I look at who the people are who could potentially take over for Iger, it’s really challenging. Dana Walden is on that short list. Dana Walden is fantastic. I’ve met with her. I think she’s great. She’s really good at making TV shows and entertainment, and that’s not the whole job. Maybe it’s just too big a job for any one person to do.

**Craig:** It’s not. Somebody has to do it.

**John:** It’s not too big for Iger.

**Craig:** Nobody can know everything. You have your lieutenants and people that report to you, and hopefully you do a good job. I think the thing that would get you… I remember the very first time I directed, I was talking to my first AD. First ADs have seen a billion directors come and go in their lives. I said, “What’s the one rookie mistake you can advise me, that perhaps I could then avoid making?” He said, “Honestly, it’s never about any of the technicals.” He said, “The thing that no first-time director ever sees coming is the politics.” I suspect that would be the biggest problem, because you take over, and suddenly, there’s all these people trying to figure out how to assassinate you and take your job. If they could promise me that none of that would happen, I feel like I could probably make a few things up.

**John:** I could make a few things up.

**Craig:** I couldn’t have done worse than Bob Chapek. No offense, Bob Chapek.

**John:** Honestly, it seemed like the politics were a big part of why he didn’t succeed, because he didn’t have the trust of the people that were working for him.

**Craig:** When the Florida thing happened, I could feel myself sweating. I’m like, “What would I do? This is really tricky.” That’s tricky. You’re like, “On the one hand, I have my principles and I have my morals. On the other hand, part of my principles and morals is taking care of the 12,000 people that I employ in the state of Florida. What do I do?” That’s a tough one. I’m glad I don’t run a company.

**John:** I’m glad I’m not taking over for Nancy Pelosi, because I’ve also been thinking about that.

**Craig:** That’s a hard one.

**John:** That’s a hard job. That’s a lot of [crosstalk 00:09:37]

**Craig:** Thank god you’ve been thinking about that. Who do you not thinking about taking over from?

**John:** I’m involved in a project right now, which Megana knows has just an incredibly high degree of cat wrangling. I can do it. You got to think from each person’s perspective, what are they looking for, what do they need to hear. That’s a challenging job. That’s why whoever takes over for Bob Iger or the ruins of Twitter whenever Elon Musk gets bored is going to have a lot to do. Let’s get to some questions. We have two follow-up questions about your outlining process, Craig.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

**Megana:** Neil asked, “I just listened to the episode on writing difficult scenes, and Craig mentioned his go-to on preparation via an outline. I’ve heard his testament to outlines a bunch, but I’ve never been able to track down an actual sample of Craig’s. Are there any available in the archives? I’m an engineer, so less of a pantser and more of a plotter, or maybe a plantser.”

**Craig:** A plantster.

**John:** A plantster.

**Craig:** I don’t have any out there, but it’s possible that maybe after The Last of Us runs through, I might put that show bible out there, because it’s quite extensive. I generally avoid doing it, because as much as I enjoy informing and educating to whatever extent I can, I’m also… I don’t just teach cooking. I also am a chef. I don’t necessarily want to show people how my magic tricks are fully done. A little bit of the process I think should remain opaque.

**John:** Maybe if we can’t see the actual visual, can you describe for an episode of Last of Us or an episode of Chernobyl, how many pages was an outline? Was it paragraphs? How closely were you matching? Were there scene headers? What do your outlines look like?

**Craig:** I don’t do scene headers. It’s basically prose. For each episode, my guess is, I would say probably five to eight pages, single-spaced paragraphs describing what happens, and more importantly, why. That’s the thing, because I don’t write these for myself. I write them for myself and others, so that everybody can feel what we’re doing before we do it. That’s important to me.

**John:** Your paragraphs are largely matching up to what scenes look like. No paragraph is going to cover multiple scenes or it will [inaudible 00:12:05].

**Craig:** No, a paragraph could cover multiple scenes, because I know there are certain scenes that flow together. Two people have left one place. They’re on their way to another. Then the next day they’re there, and a thing happens. Then they move on. Those things could probably be a paragraph where we describe what happens and what’s discussed or why it’s important. I will combine.

**John:** For Neil’s edification, what Craig is describing is actually a pretty common length and size and scale and scope of an outline in television. A lot of one-hour dramas that you’re going to see are going to have a document like that at some point that goes to the producers, to the studio, to other people, to let them know this is what’s going to happen in the episode, and sometimes they’ll get notes off that outline, depending what the process is.

**Craig:** Just as important as those episode outlines, there’s also character breakdowns, and there’s general discussion of theme. I will also sometimes take a moment to talk about, for instance… There are no spoilers here for The Last of Us. I apologize to those of you who are looking for them. In the outline, in the show bible, one of the little sections was a section on violence and what our philosophy about violence was, how we wanted to portray it, and what we thought was important philosophically for everybody to know as we went ahead and writing and then producing the show. It’s your chance to basically get anything off your chest you want, that you want other people to know.

**John:** In some ways, that’s doing what a tone meeting might do, but way in advance. People are looking at documents. Everyone knows going into the project, this is what our goals are here. Then you’ll have very specific notes on individual scripts, individual scenes.

**Craig:** In fact, the outline, the show bible we did, it was very extensive. I think it was about 180 pages. It was also the document that our production team used initially to budget. It was thorough enough that they could essentially get within, it was really close, within actually 5% of what we ultimately ended up spending, because they had a sense of locations and set pieces and all that.

**John:** A follow-up question from Tommy here. He asked, “In the last episode, Craig talked about needing roughly 20 days to write a one-hour TV script. How much of that time is spent before that in the outlining phase?” Is it 20 days after this episode is outlined?

**Craig:** The 20 days is the length of time I need to write the script. The amount of time it takes to outline things ahead of that is considerable. None of that is really divisible by episode, per se. You have to figure everything out together. That process could be two, three months, where you’re really trying to figure out how you’re breaking this all apart and what the episodes are going to be. Then you can spend about a week just writing it all up in one massive document.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Then after that, yeah, it’s about 20 days. For me at least, it’s about 20 days.

**John:** Great. Before we get on to our big marquee topic, we have a bit of follow-up here. Way back when, Craig and I each did episodes with Megana, just Megana, where we answered listener questions and tried to get some good advice to people. One of those people is Ben. He wrote in about some advice that Megana and I gave him. Craig, would you talk us through Ben’s follow-up here?

**Craig:** I will play the role of Ben. He says, “I wanted to give you all some follow-up on my question that John and Megana answered on Episode 543 about my boss’s boss’s boss inviting me to send my script in to the head of the studio that I work at as an office coordinator, and I wondered whether or not I could take a year to do so. I took John’s advice and sent my script to six friends to make sure what I was writing would be worth sending. All my friends loved it, and so I sent it to a couple of other people I made connections with at work, and they loved it too. I was a little skeptical, because I’ve never gotten this type of universal positive response before. I was wondering if telling them I had this opportunity made them forgive certain shortcomings in the script.” I like Ben. I like that he’s nervous about good news.

**John:** Thoughtful.

**Craig:** That’s the way to be. He goes on, “I then checked it over a couple more times and finally end it to my friends who are a little more harsh. They loved it too. Just a few easily correctable notes. I emailed my boss. As John predicted, my boss’s boss’s boss said she couldn’t send it in to the head, but she connected me with a few creative executives, and after signing a release form, I submitted my script for them to review. It took them a month to read, but they got back to me, and they loved it also. It was great timing, as I wrote a family spooky movie,” for spooky season, “and they read it three days before Halloween. The creative executive said my script was a really fun read and very well executed and invited me to the lot to, quote, talk generally. He made it clear that the script wasn’t quite right for their current slate, but he did invite me to have coffee with him. I just got back from the meeting. It couldn’t have gone better. We really hit it off. He invited me to send him another script when I have one ready. He’s a really nice dude.

“All of this to say thank you, John and Megana, for your advice and all the great tips. Also, I want to thank Craig as well,” thank you, “even though he didn’t answer my question directly,” and has done nothing for my life, “but has given me like 600 episodes of advice as well.” That worked out phenomenally for Ben.

**John:** It worked out so well for Ben. That’s great. Craig, you stopped where he said take a year to send in the script, which felt like too long for us as well. I think what Ben did, which is really smart, is really just double check, like, “Wait, is what I’m writing any good at all?” and actually get that feedback to say oh yeah, this is actually pretty good. He went through then proper channels, and people liked it. It sounded like he was doing the right things there. My question for you, and for us to discuss, is what should Ben be doing next, because he’s had this good meeting with a creative executive. That’s lovely, but that doesn’t do anything. What should Ben be doing next?

**Craig:** I think the very first thing Ben should be doing is dropping an email back to his new creative executive friend and saying, “Hey, would love to get myself an agent. Any chance you could slip this script and your general approval and good feelings to an agent that you think might be well suited for me?” That’s the very first thing I would do.

**John:** I think that’s the right choice, so agent and/or manager. “I’m looking for a rep,” is the general thing, and who does this creative executive think might be the right person. The way to think about this from Ben’s point of view is like, “Okay, I know what I get out of this, but what could this creative executive get out of this?” In some ways, there are reciprocal relationships between your agents, certain managers and execs. If this exec really does think you’re a pretty good writer, then sending you to this representative could be a good, sympathetic kind of thing. It could actually help both of them. Don’t feel weird about asking for that ask is what I’m saying.

**Craig:** No, not at all. This is how it all starts. I imagine that the creative executive is probably roughly in the same age bracket you are, Ben. As we all grow up together in the business, we meet each other’s friends and connect each other with people that we like to work with. By this point, I know a whole lot of people in this business that I’ve never actually worked with, but you never know. We like each other, and then they mention something to somebody else. Crazy things happen all the time.

**John:** That’s how I got my first agent was a friend sent my script to a producer, who read it and liked it and said, “Hey, could I take this in to the studio?” I said, “That would be great. Also, I need an agent.” He’s like, “Oh, I think I know the perfect person for you.” That became my first agent.

**Craig:** There you go. There you go.

**John:** Ben, keep us posted a year from now and let us know what’s happened next. Great. Marquee topic here. Julian wrote in with a link to this thread by David Wappel, a writer I don’t know. Wappel’s thread was showing how nouns and sentence structures, when used well, can feel like they’re directing on the page, in the good sense of directing on the page. They really give you a sense of what you’re seeing. In this thread, he’s pointing out the difference between, “Sally reaches into her back pocket,” and, “Her hand slips into her back pocket,” and the idea that the second one, we’re clearly focusing on her hand. We feel like we’re in a closeup there on that.

Another example from this thread is on apples. If I say the stem of an apple, you’re thinking very closely about that stem of the apple. If I say an apple, you’re probably picturing the whole thing. If I say five apples, we move wider. A bushel of apples, a row of apple bushels, you get the sense that we’re pulling out wider and wider with those shots.

Useful there, but in some ways I was like, “Obviously.” I think it’s a thing that I do subconsciously, that I’ve never actually put words to. You and I are doing this all the time. Every sentence, every scene, we’re really thinking about what is the visual idea and how I’m using that visual idea to direct the reader’s attention, but I don’t know if we talked about it so explicitly on the podcast. We probably talked about it in Three Page Challenges. I want to spend a little segment talking about how we emphasize and convey the visual information we need not just scene by scene, but sentence by sentence, word by word.

**Craig:** Which is why, when people say, “Don’t direct on the page,” I just want to slap the world, because what else can we do? If you are visualizing the scene appropriately, visualizing it in terms of, as you said, close, far, up, down, movement, still, then the language ought to flow naturally from that. If you were imagining a closeup of Sally’s hand reaching into her back pocket, slipping into her back pocket, so now it feels a bit furtive, you would never write, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.” Those words wouldn’t happen as a result of the thought you just had. [Crosstalk 00:21:57]

**John:** Craig, sometimes I think people do stop at the very most basic sentence that gets the idea across. I worry that sometimes as we look at Three Page Challenges, we are getting a little bit like, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.”

**Craig:** Then people, stop doing that.

**John:** I want to shine a bit of a spotlight on it, because I think it’s an automatic process for you and for me. I don’t think it’s necessarily an automatic process for other writers, especially because screenwriting is a little bit different. All writing is about word choices and sentence structure, but screenwriting is a little different. As an example, here is a paragraph from Pride and Prejudice, one of the great novels. Jane Austen, really, really talented writer. Let me read this to you, and you can see why it’s not screenwriting.

“Mr. Bennett was so odd, a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserved caprice, that the experience of 3 and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married. Its solace was visiting and news.”

A terrific paragraph. The word choice, every little thing, every comma was deliberate, so smart, and that is not at all how you write screenplays.

**Craig:** No, because this is somebody that is relaying information to you about things that are not happening in front of your eyes-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … whereas in screenwriting, everything is happening in front of your eyes, unless you’re dealing with a voiceover or something like that. In a voiceover, you could do something like this. However, while the voiceover was doing all this, I need to know what I’m seeing.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This would actually be wonderful if I heard this in voiceover and then I-

**John:** Oh my god, a dream.

**Craig:** … witnessed Mrs. Bennett showing “little information and uncertain temper.” Because we are a visual medium and because we do not relay descriptions of things that have already happened, we are always in the business of thinking about what we’re seeing and hearing.

**John:** I think the challenge I want to put to our listeners is, as you’re doing the screenwriting, really be thinking about what is the visual idea of the sentence. Oftentimes, there’ll be a single visual idea in the sentence or a series of visuals that imply motion that gets you from place to place. If you have a sentence that has no visual idea in it, it has to have another really good reason why you need to put it there, because otherwise it’s not doing the job of screenwriting. Not every sentence in your screenplay is going to have visual information, but most of them should. That visual information should probably be at the start of the sentence rather than touch back in at the end of the sentence.

**Craig:** Let’s say that the word screen also encompasses sound.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** We are screen sound writers. That means we are visual sound writers. That’s what we do. That’s the description of the job. When you are putting these little moments together, there is no moment too small to be considering how to guide the mind’s eye of the reader to align with your mind’s eye as the writer.

**John:** I pulled some examples from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is from the very start. “Chocolate pours into a mold, one of hundreds inching along a conveyor belt. Complicated gears tug on oiled canvas ropes, slipping through swinging pulleys.” “With giant scissors, Wonka slices a fat red ribbon. One of the ribbon ends flutters up, obscuring Wonka’s face yet again.” “Wonka’s hand smooths out the blueprint for a massive structure, complete with curvy onion domes and twisted columns.”

Just four sentences picked at random from the script. It’s clear what the visuals are in the sentence. Also, if there’s multiple visuals, it’s clear how we’re moving between those multiple visuals. It’s not just the nouns. The nouns are very specific. The verbs used to convey action and convey meaning are also very specific. They’re tugging. They are pouring. They are fluttering. You could write more basic versions of each of those sentences, but they would not convey the visual information you’re trying to convey.

**Craig:** I particularly like that first one, because if I were handed that as a director, there’s an implication that I’m going to be shooting a closeup of chocolate pouring into a mold, and then I’m going to shoot a much wider shot to reveal that mold is one of a hundred. Perhaps I watch the chocolate pouring into the mold, and then I angle the camera slightly [inaudible 00:26:28] to reveal there’s this line of a hundred that are moving along, and that was just one of a hundred that are exactly the same. There’s all sorts of implications from the way that was written that you would not get if you weren’t considering what you wanted people to look at and see.

**John:** If I say, “A conveyor belt shows hundreds of chocolate bars being produced,” that doesn’t give you the same information, doesn’t tell you what you need to see.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. “One of hundreds inching along” is giving me a sense of speed. I can kind of hear it. There’s a vibe to it. There’s a lot of information there that is producible. As much as you can, if you think about… This is really what the job is. If you imagine a moment in your mind, what is the best way to describe that with the fewest words? That’s the game.

**John:** Its other general rules, I would say, general principles, is have characters doing things rather than things just existing. If you can have a character make a change within the scene, make a change within the sentence, the character is doing something rather than a thing just is, that is helpful. That’s not a condition on avoiding the verb to be. It’s just saying if a character can take an action that is part of the visual, that’s more helpful, and getting back to, again, showing us rather than telling us. Rather than just describing a thing, make it really feel like we are giving you a visual to really show what the thing is, rather than just being narrated to about what the activity is that’s going on.

**Craig:** Those are great rules. I would throw this one on the pile also. Watch out for certain words that mean lots of different things to you but may not mean lots of different things to the reader. For instance, let’s say it’s as simple as somebody smiles. We smile for a thousand different reasons. We smile because we are excited. We smile because we pity. We smile because we’re giving up. There’s so many reasons we smile. If you find yourself using one of those words that have a billion purposes, consider what you could do to relay the more specific aspect of it.

You could say, “John says, dialog, ‘Unfortunately, it turns out we’re not going to be able to offer you the job after all,'” and then in action, “Craig smiles, stands up, shrugs, shakes John’s hand,” or you could say in parentheses, in action, “Yes, as I figured.” You can try as best you can to not rely too much on people reading your mind, because they’re not always going to be able to, especially if there’s ambiguous action.

**John:** Here’s an example from Station Eleven I thought was really useful. “Jeevan faux-waves, straightens up, knows no one at this macabre gathering. He pats his jacket, looking for his phone, not left, not right, not back, not chest, remembers where his jacket is.” Very specific actions that Jeevan is doing, and it lets us know something about Jeevan. Clear visuals. We know what we’re actually seeing on screen. We also know why Jeevan is doing it. We know what he’s looking for. We can connect his thought process there. We’ve been that person, and we understand what he’s looking for. Another example from Station Eleven, “Kirsten’s attention has been drawn to the big windows, so huge they’re like the deck of a space station. She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, looking down at the lights of the pier.”

**Craig:** I could direct that. I know what to do. I even get a sense of alienation. All the things that they would want me to feel here, I understand. They’re just pouring off of these words. Note that you don’t have to say, “She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, a tiny person lost in the world,” blah da da, “separated by glass,” blah, whatever the hell it is. You get it. Any time somebody puts their hand on glass, I know what it means. I also know what to do. I know to shoot the hand. I also know to shoot back through the window at her, which would be great. “Looking down at the lights of the pier” implies I need to see what she’s seeing. I also need to see her seeing what she’s seeing.

**John:** The camera’s going to probably raise up a little bit so we can get the look down at the-

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Then the reverse is a low angle back up. Distance would be great there, to get a sense of scope, because the windows are “so huge they’re like the deck of a space station,” so I need to be really wide behind her. There are all these things clearly implied by the writing there. Weirdly, for a craft where everyone is constantly admonished to not direct on the page, the one thing that will get your script bought, sold, produced, directing on the page.

**John:** This whole conversation I wanted to avoid, the “we see,” “we hears,” the wes of it all, because none of these examples involve the wes.

**Craig:** These don’t need them.

**John:** These are just good visuals, clearly communicated, giving us a sense of what it would feel like to be in the audience, seeing that produced on the screen.

**Craig:** As much as I love writing “we see” and “we hear,” I only do it when I need it.

**John:** In this case, we don’t need it.

**Craig:** We don’t need it.

**John:** Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Yes. Adam asks, “How many montages can my 118-page screenplay have?”

**Craig:** 118.

**John:** Three.

**Craig:** I really do love the idea of a 118-page screenplay with 118 montages.

**John:** It’s all montages the whole time through.

**Craig:** Every page is a montage.

**John:** Everything Everywhere All At Once is honestly probably 118 montages.

**Craig:** It’s close. It is.

**John:** The answer is there’s no answer, but here’s what I’ll say. If you’re using the word montage more than three times in a script, something is probably weird about your script. It feels different. If you’re doing bullet-pointy montages a lot in your script, something is really strange about your script, and that’s worth noticing. Did you write a strange script?

**Craig:** Yeah, particularly if the montage is doing the most tropey of montage purposes, which is some sort of training/growth.

**John:** (singing)

**Craig:** (singing) I include makeovers as part of training and growth. There are certain kinds of montages that we almost don’t even notice are montages. For instance, very common when you’re watching a movie or television show and people are driving quite a distance from one place to another, there’s nothing happening along the way other than the driving, that’ll get montaged. We don’t feel like it’s a montage. It’s not the same thing as someone decides they’re going to start lifting weights and here we go, or the worst of them all, the novelist finally figures out what to write and 40 seconds later, there’s a book.

**Megana:** No, there’s papers flying first.

**Craig:** Of course. First, you have to throw… The wastepaper basket has to get filled up.

**John:** It has to overfill.

**Craig:** It overfills, and then suddenly you’re like, “I’ve got it.” Now, you’re just pulling the paper out, slapping it on that pile right to the right of you, and then threading in the next page, because everybody exists in 1963 when they’re writing a novel, and then clack clack clack clack clack. I hate that so much.

**John:** Getting back to the point of when you use the word montage and when you don’t use the word montage, I feel like I’ve probably used the word montage in my scripts maybe five times in a career. There are a lot of montages in there. Spring comes to the castle. A couple sentences describing what has changed and what we’re seeing. You don’t necessarily need to use the word montage to make that clear.

**Craig:** Agreed. How many montages? Not too many.

**John:** Not too many.

**Craig:** Adam is regretting asking us this question. He’s like, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about?” What’s the next question, Megana? I feel like we’re going to crush the next one.

**Megana:** David asks, “My story takes place in a real town with a small population. After a recent draft, the townspeople have become way more complicit in the evil doings of the antagonist. Is this poor taste, since real people live in this town and are being represented negatively? Should I change it to a fictional town, or is this just part of the storytelling game and I shouldn’t worry about it?”

**John:** Interesting. It’s a real small town. David is writing some terrible deeds happening in this small town that people are complicit in. I don’t know. He’s not saying whether it’s a true story or not. If it’s a true story, then yes, you have to be much more mindful of the fact that people can be mashed together to be in your thing. I really wouldn’t worry about it. You cannot libel a town. You can libel people.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Unless you are making it clear that these are the specific people who are doing this terrible thing, I think you’re in the clear.

**Craig:** I would refer you to obscure author Stephen King, David, who has forced real small towns in Maine to go through all sorts of horrible things, and Massachusetts. As long as the actual people aren’t reading this and going, “Wait a second, that’s me,” then you’re fine. That thing at the end of episodes or movies that say, “Any resemblance to people alive or dead is,” what is it, coincidence? That’s the key. I would not worry about this too much.

**John:** Agree. Megana, it looks like we have a question about shooting scripts.

**Megana:** Yes. CH asks, “I keep being told by a fellow writer that I shouldn’t put things like establishing shots into a script. He tells me that this is something that is done when you write the shooting script.”

**Craig:** What?

**Megana:** “Can you tell me about the process that happens to a script when it goes into production and a director gets his hands on it? What is the difference between a script and a shooting script? Who writes the shooting script?”

**John:** Wow, some fundamental questions here. I also want to point out “gets his hands on it.” Their hands on it? It could be a woman. It could be a person who identifies as a he.

**Craig:** It could be a person without hands.

**John:** By the way, it could be a person without hands.

**Craig:** Just saying.

**John:** I want to start by saying we could probably put a link in the show notes to a previous episode where we talked about some of the things that do change when you move into production. You don’t see numbered scripts until you get pretty close to production, until someone tells you, “We need scene numbers.” Then you put scene numbers in. You don’t put them in scripts up until that point. There’s not a big difference between a shooting script and the script that you’re writing. It’s a mistake to think that they are completely different things or that some other person does them.

**Craig:** CH, here’s what I would like you to tell your fellow writer. You’re wrong, fellow writer. Apologies, but you’re wrong. The shooting script is not a thing. The shooting script is just like, “Okay, we’re shooting now, so I guess this draft is the one we’re working with for now,” but you can revise that one. There’s no special skill to writing a shooting script. There is absolutely nothing other than, as John says, scene numbers, that belong in that script but not in earlier script. If you want to say establishing shot so-and-so, of course you write that into your script. You don’t need to wait for some theoretical day where they tap a magic wand on your document and call it the shooting script. There’s no such thing really. For the legal purposes of figuring out credit, the Writers Guild essentially describes the shooting script as the last one. That’s the last one they got published. That’s it. I guess that’s the shooting script.

I have a feeling that your fellow writer either is not particularly experienced or is just deeply confused. In anything, just for all of you, any time anybody gives you advice that smells like, “Hey writers, know your place,” reject it.

**John:** Here’s where I think the friend maybe got confused is that online you will find screenplays and you will find screenplays that look just like the screenplays you and I would write normally, or you’ll find what are called shooting scripts, which all have half pages and A and B pages and stars in the margins, and they look crazy. They’ll be in different colors if they were originally in different colors. There’ll be weird headers on things. That kind of shooting script is the production drafts that go through multiple series of revisions and stuff. Things can look really strange in those. You don’t want your script to start that way. It’s just a way that we’ve decided to handle additions and deletions to shooting scripts while we’re in production. We don’t have to re-shoot the whole script. We can just re-shoot pages. That is the difference between a shooting script and the original script.

Sometimes it’s harder to read shooting scripts, because they are just messy, and there’s weird one-eighth pages, and things get broken, strangely. You’re not writing that. You’re writing a draft, and you’re writing the script that is meant to be read and goes into production. Don’t worry about the differences here.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh, exciting.

**John:** I have a big One Cool Thing and a very small, little, adorable One Cool Thing. My big One Cool Thing is, previously on the show we’ve talked about the Inevitable Foundation, which is a great group here in Los Angeles that helps match writers with disabilities and people who should be hiring those writers with disabilities. They’ve had a great track record of getting people staffed on shows and getting projects set up. This last week I went to an event that they were doing that was really focusing on their new class but also their concierge service. I want to hype up the concierge service. If you are person who is looking to hire on a writer with a disability for a specific project or if you have a show, and it’s like, “Man, it really would be fantastic to find a deaf writer from a Latin background for my show,” you call them, you [inaudible 00:40:10] them an email, and right away, they will give you a list of some really great writers and samples for you to be reading through.

Shoshannah Stern, who was a previous Scriptnotes guest, was one of the hosts of this event. She’s a great example of somebody who is working today in part because people recognized, “Wow, it would be really great to have a deaf writer to help us figure out how to do this show about deaf characters.”

Just hyping up the Inevitable Foundation. If you are a person who is looking to staff, you’re an executive who is curious about trying to find disabled writers for your project, they are the place you should go to first.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. My small, adorable One Cool Thing is, you can see it in the show notes here, I fell for an Instagram ad which was about these little crochet animals you can make. I bought the little kit. It was kind of difficult but actually really fun and rewarding. I made Pierre the Penguin that you see there, this adorable, little, plush thing that I crocheted just from a bunch of yarn.

**Craig:** This was not something I could have foreseen.

**John:** I’m a crafty person, Craig.

**Craig:** You are.

**John:** You’ve seen me-

**Craig:** You’re amazingly crafty. It’s just the crocheting was something-

**John:** Crocheting?

**Craig:** … that I did not foresee. I love it. It’s adorable. I will tell you… John already knows this. I watched John expertly duct tape the handles of picket signs for our last strike, not to be confused with the one we’re about to have. He watched me absolutely screw up. All I needed to do was just duct tape a wooden stick, and I really struggled.

**John:** It’s all about the angle.

**Craig:** His, it was diagonal, and it was layered perfectly. I have a feeling Megana would also be just amazing at that.

**John:** Megana has great craft.

**Craig:** She looks crafty as hell. I still do not know how to wrap a present. That’s me. This is wild. I love the way this thing looks. You’re a very good crocheter. Speaking of crocheting and crocheters and pronouncing French words, John, you mentioned that the Inevitable Foundation has a concierge service. Have you heard, and I have heard this so many times, people say concierge [said like concier]?

**John:** Yeah, they’re over-applying the language. They’re over-applying the rule. They think a French word, you have to not say the last bit of it.

**Craig:** They don’t understand that if the word were C-O-N-C-I-E-R-T, yes, concierge [said like concier], but concierge, G-E, the word’s concierge. I never know what to say when they say concierge [said like concier]. I don’t want to be that guy, but I am that guy. I am that guy.

**John:** While we’re in a digression about pronouncing things, where is the World Cup being held right now?

**Craig:** Qatar [said like cutter].

**John:** We decided it was Qatar [said like cutter] and not Qatar [said like ka-tar]. I’m fine with it. I’m fine with it, by the way. It’s just interesting that we’ve now all come to agree that we’re going to say Qatar [said like cutter] rather than Qatar [said like ka-tar].

**Craig:** I think we agree because the people from Qatar [said like cutter] were like, “It’s called Qatar [said like cutter].”

**John:** It’s interesting in what cases we decide to use the local pronunciation and not, because we call it Paris, we don’t call it Paris [said like Pari], but some people insist on calling it Barcelona [said like Barselona], which drives me crazy.

**Craig:** It’s too much. Part of it is when we learn these terms. Qatar as a nation is not… As a people, it’s been around forever, but as a nation, it’s relatively new compared to say China. The word for China in Chinese is not China any more than the word for Japan is Nippon. Why don’t we call it Nippon? I don’t know. It’s because just somewhere along the line they said Japan. Then we do change things. We don’t say Bombay. We say Mumbai. What are some of the other ones? Beijing is the best example. It used to be Peking.

**John:** Peking.

**Craig:** Now it’s Beijing.

**John:** Those were cases where it was like our colonialism had forced a word on there and we were like, “Oh, that’s not the real name for things, so let’s not call it that.”

**Craig:** Then other places, we have no problem forcing our colonialism on. It’s like, “Fine. You’ll just be called this or you’ll be called that.” Korea’s not Korea. That’s not the name for Korea in Korea. I don’t think it is.

**John:** No, it’s Hanguk.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway.

**Craig:** Any who.

**John:** That’s a digression. Anyway, the Woobles are adorable little things. I think they’re largely sold out. I can’t believe I’m hyping something I found on an Instagram ad, but I enjoyed it.

**Craig:** You’re hyping it. My One Cool Thing, this one’s expensive, folks. This will be more expensive than the Woobles. I use a Yeti mic for this podcast. I can’t remember what my headphones are, but they’re nice. I enjoy them. They’re nice. I had them brought to my house, because I was at home sick with COVID, and I’d left them there, of course, because that’s me. Here I am in the office, and I need to plug headphones into my mic so I can do this podcast.

As luck would have it, our amazing editor, Tim Goode, had gotten our amazing producer, Jack Lesko, a pair of new headphones, because she didn’t have really good reference headphones. I’ve immediately stolen them for this podcast. I will give them back. I promise I will give her her headphones back, but they’re awesome. These are AKG headphones. The model is K702. They are reference studio headphones, open back, around ear. What I love about these is they are incredibly comfortable and I can hear my own voice not solely through the microphone, if that makes sense. I’m hearing my own voice much more naturally, which is really nice. My ears don’t feel quite so stifled. In terms of actual sound reproduction, these I think are state of the art. I don’t even know what they cost. Should we dare to look it up and see?

**John:** Let’s dare. We’ll take a moment here.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Megana:** They’re not crazy.

**Craig:** What are they?

**Megana:** It looks like they’re on sale for 289.

**Craig:** That’s not horrible. We are heading into the holiday season. They are a joy. I’m getting myself a pair of these for sure.

**John:** Craig, I’m guessing that the headphones you’ve been using have been the Sony MDR ones.

**Craig:** I think they are.

**John:** They’re the classic-

**Craig:** I think that’s right.

**John:** That’s what Megana and I both use. They’re great. They’re the standard. Obviously, if you have something that you like better, go for it.

**Craig:** These feel better. I’d say they feel better and they sound better, to me. If you are looking for some reference studio headphones that feel comfortable and reproduce sound nicely, and you’ve got a little dough to spend, or perhaps you want to shower somebody with luxury this holiday season, AKG by Harman, K702.

**John:** K702. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yay yay, woo woo!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig’s not on Twitter anymore, I’m @johnaugust for the moment. We’ll see. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I think you can still probably get them in time for Christmas if you order today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the dessert bracket. Which is the ultimate dessert-

**Craig:** Ultimate.

**John:** … that will beat all others? Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is inspired by several things. First off, it’s the Great British Baking Show just resolved, or Great British Bake-Off if you’re British, which was always a delightful show to watch. They were always making great, delicious, tasty desserts and some other tacos [said like tack-os] that they should not be trying to make.

**Craig:** Tacos. Taco [said like tack-o].

**John:** Tacos [said like tack-os].

**Craig:** Their pasta [said like pass-ta] and their tacos [said like tack-os].

**John:** Oh my gosh, don’t get me started on the pico de gallo [said like gall-o] and pico [said like pike-o] de gallo [said like gal-o].

**Craig:** I know. Come on, British people.

**John:** It’s also the holidays, which means there’s lots of good desserts out there. I thought we would actually just take a moment and really figure out which is the best dessert possible.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** In this bracket, we’re going to have 16 different desserts competing. I want you to imagine the best possible version of a thing. It can be a thing you make yourself or a thing you got from that one fantastic place. It’s the ultimate version of it. Don’t worry about the mediocre ones.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** We will start with the fruit pies. Which is the winner, apple pie or cherry pie?

**Craig:** Apple.

**John:** Megana?

**Megana:** Apple.

**Craig:** It’s apple. It’s apple, for sure.

**John:** I don’t think there’s really a [inaudible 00:49:15] question. Cherry pie is delicious. Again, vanilla ice cream elevates both of them. Apple pie is the one you want to go for.

**Craig:** The only way to really make cherry pie is to over-sugar and glop the cherries. The cherries themselves become kind of gross and not really cherry-like, so yeah, it’s apple pie.

**Megana:** It’s just not as versatile.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Apple pie also you could have for breakfast the next morning. It’s delicious.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful.

**John:** So good. So good. Next the battle of the breads. We’ve got banana bread versus bread pudding.

**Craig:** That’s actually tricky, because you’re asking me to imagine the best possible version. If you were going for just average probability of happiness, you’d go with banana bread, I think, but the best possible version of bread pudding destroys banana bread.

**John:** That’s where I’m coming too as well. Megana, what’s your feeling on the breads?\

**Megana:** I am bread pudding all day every day.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I’ll pick a bread pudding at a restaurant almost any day, so let’s go for it.

**Megana:** I’m just going to say it. I think banana bread is over-hyped.

**Craig:** It’s fine. You know what it is? It’s a dessert that anyone can make, and so it gets over-made. That said, somebody did recently give me, as a gift, a wonderful banana bread.

**John:** Did it have walnuts in it? Should banana bread have walnuts?

**Craig:** It should not, and it didn’t.

**Megana:** I just think it’s a place that we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s good so we don’t feel guilty about our brown bananas and doing something with them. Let’s just end this charade.

**Craig:** It’s one of the most annoying things. Melissa’s like, “I’m making banana bread.” I’m like, “You’re rotting food on my counter. That’s what I’m seeing.” Next, we have cake.

**John:** We have cakes.

**Craig:** That’s a big one.

**John:** Which do we prefer? Do you want a chocolate birthday cake or a poundcake?

**Craig:** I’m going to be the unpopular one here. I don’t love chocolate cake. I find it to be cloying. It’s too much for my palette. I’m not a huge chocolate person. Actually, I think a good poundcake, a really well done poundcake can be fantastic. I’m actually going to go with poundcake.

**John:** Is the poundcake frosted in any way? Is there a glaze to it?

**Craig:** No, I would not do frosting or glaze. I’m a purist.

**John:** Megana, what are you thinking in this cake battle here?

**Megana:** I knew that Craig and I felt the same way about chocolate birthday cake, so I am also going to go with pound cake.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** I would generally go for chocolate birthday cake, but I will go with the majority here, so poundcake is the winner.

**Craig:** Poundcake.

**John:** Now we’re going to worldwide here, international. Crepes Suzette versus baklava.

**Craig:** Can I throw one other one on there?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Tiramisu.

**John:** Tiramisu’s also really good.

**Craig:** With that, my answer is tiramisu.

**John:** Again, we’re trying to only picture the ultimate versions of tiramisu. I’ve had some really shit tiramisus. I think I’m still leaning towards baklava.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Megana, help us out.

**Megana:** I know I’m taking this way too seriously, but this is incredibly difficult for me.

**Craig:** I know. You’re stressing out. I love it.

**Megana:** I’m going to go with crepes, just to mix things up.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Now what do we do?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:52:27].

**Craig:** I think what we have to do is maybe rank choice this, even though Sarah Palin does not like that system.

**John:** Absolutely, rank choice voting. Craig, rank them. Crepes, tiramisu, baklava.

**Craig:** I’m going to go tiramisu one, crepes Suzette two, baklava three.

**John:** I would go baklava one, tiramisu two, crepes Suzette three.

**Megana:** I’m going crepes one, baklava two, tiramisu three.

**Craig:** Oh god, did we just [crosstalk 00:52:54]?

**John:** Good Lord, I think we completely broke it.

**Craig:** Oh, no. Did we break our whole system?

**John:** We’re going to circle back to that. We’re going to cleanse our palette with other ones and circle back to the worldwide.

**Craig:** I’m happy to defer to crepes Suzette. It’s not that I don’t like baklava.

**John:** It is one note. It is one very sugary and honey sweet-

**Craig:** Very sugary. I don’t tend to like Middle Eastern dessert profiles, whether it’s Israeli or-

**Megana:** It’s so syrupy.

**Craig:** It’s so syrupy. Exactly.

**John:** It is syrupy. We’ll go for crepes Suzette. It has fire. Fire is exciting.

**Craig:** Fire is exciting, and it’s French.

**John:** Alternative pies. We have pumpkin pie versus key lime pie.

**Craig:** Wow. Oof. Man. You’re kind of catching us at a weird time in the calendar here.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Going for the best possible version, the ceiling on pumpkin pie is higher than the ceiling on key lime pie.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** I would go pumpkin pie.

**John:** I’m going to go pumpkin pie too. Megana?

**Megana:** Yeah. That was a great analysis.

**Craig:** We think we’re on CNN.

**Megana:** Or ESPN.

**John:** The only ting I’ll say is, two bites of key lime pie, and wow, this is really great, but my 10th bite of key lime pie, I’m like, “I don’t want anymore,” whereas pumpkin pie, I can keep eating it.

**Craig:** I’ve made them both from scratch. They’re both excellent. By the way, tip on key lime pie, never use key limes to make key lime pie. They’re disgusting.

**John:** Just use normal limes.

**Craig:** They’re tiny and bitter. Mediterranean limes, which are the ones you would imagine in your mind, those make a much better key lime pie. This has been confirmed by the excellent people in the test kitchens at Cooks Illustrated.

**John:** Love it. The cold round, cheesecake versus ice cream, any flavor, including hot fudge sundaes.

**Craig:** This is an easy one.

**John:** Are we going for ice cream or cheesecake?

**Craig:** Best version for me, cheesecake all day long.

**John:** I’m also going to go with cheesecake. Megana, what are you thinking?

**Megana:** I imagine this is what it would be like if you asked me to pick between me children.

**Craig:** It’s Sophie’s Choice. This is your Sophie’s Choice. One of them has to die.

**John:** One of them will come with you. The other one will just melt out on the sidewalk.

**Craig:** You’re actually crying.

**Megana:** God, my first love is ice cream, but I’m going to go cheesecake.

**John:** Something about it. I love a hot fudge sundae, but cheesecake, the best.

**Craig:** A great cheesecake is a great thing.

**John:** Pure Americana here, chocolate chip cookies versus s’mores.

**Craig:** I would go chocolate chip cookies myself. Megana?

**Megana:** To Craig’s earlier point, the ceiling on chocolate chip cookies is just higher.

**Craig:** S’mores are required to be one thing basically.

**Megana:** Unless you’re Paul Hollywood.

**John:** S’mores are exciting in a camping situation, like oh, this is pretty good for around a campfire, but I’m never reaching for a s’more.

**Craig:** No. It’s actually very annoying to eat. God help you if you have a beard like I do. You can’t.

**John:** Crumbly?

**Craig:** The marshmallow just begins to embed itself in your face.

**John:** Lastly, some summer fun. Peach cobbler versus rice crispy bars.

**Craig:** Megana, I want to hear from you first on this one.

**Megana:** Rice crispy bars.

**Craig:** That’s where I was going, and here’s why. Peach cobbler can be excellent, but rice crispy bars are not only one thing. You can kick them up. You can mess around with them. You can do some interesting things. They have a unique texture. No other dessert can have what rice crispy bars have. I’m going to go with rice crispy bars.

**John:** Rice crispy bars are rice cakes with syrup on them.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I do not enjoy rice crispy treats. I will eat them. I will eat them, but I won’t enjoy them the way that I will enjoy a great peach crisp. God, summer fruits, stone fruits are incredible.

**Megana:** I knew it. I knew it.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, the rice crispy bar people have spoken.

**John:** Fine. Now, we get to the next bracket here. Lead a battle between apple pie and bread pudding.

**Craig:** Bread pudding for me.

**John:** That’s bread pudding for me too. Megana, how are you feeling?

**Megana:** I’m going to go apple pie, but I guess I lose.

**Craig:** You have lost.

**John:** Bread pudding made it through the round, although now we have no fruits left in the competition.

**Craig:** Great. Good. Fruits are garbage. Let’s get to the real stuff.

**John:** Poundcake versus crepes Suzette.

**Megana:** Can I switch over to tiramisu?

**John:** You can switch to tiramisu.

**Craig:** If you switch to tiramisu, then I’m going with tiramisu for sure.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** In that case, this is hands down tiramisu for me.

**John:** I think tiramisu deserves it. It’s a weird stacked dessert. It’s a trifle. It’s got come coffee in it potentially.

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** Perfectly made [crosstalk 00:57:36].

**Craig:** Required. Mascarpone cheese, delicious.

**John:** Pumpkin pie versus cheesecake.

**Craig:** I would probably go cheesecake. It’s just more versatile.

**Megana:** You could have a pumpkin pie cheesecake.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. You can have a pumpkin cheesecake. Bingo.

**John:** You can have a cheesecake pumpkin pie, but you would still call it cheesecake.

**Craig:** You would call it cheesecake.

**John:** I think cheesecake’s going to win this one. Chocolate chip cookies versus rice crispy bars. No competition.

**Craig:** It’s chocolate chip cookies there.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s an easy one.

**John:** Final four. Bread pudding versus tiramisu.

**Craig:** Tiramisu.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m pretty much a bread pudding. Let me see if I can sway you to bread pudding. Bread pudding, it’s coming out hot. It’s coming out with little bits of chocolate melted into it, maybe some caramel melted into it as well. It’s like French toast. It’s a little bit eggy. You got to eat it with a spoon. Maybe it’s in the middle of the table and you’re sharing it.

**Megana:** Yeah, and some caramel.

**John:** Or maybe it’s in a little cast iron pan.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Now let me try and sway you to tiramisu, because I recently made it.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Delicious espresso coffee. Ladyfingers have soaked it all up, this delicious, spongy yumminess. Then you’ve got a mixture of cream and Mascarpone cheese adding a little bit of tang, lots of sweetness from sugar. Then the whole thing is dusted on top with a little bit of cocoa powder. It all just blends together. Each bite has five things going on.

**John:** Megana, it’s coming down to you. You have to decide between tiramisu and bread pudding. Your vote decides everything.

**Megana:** I’m going bread pudding.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** He got me at it’s hot.

**Craig:** I hope the nation of Italy visits its vengeance upon both of you.

**Megana:** Don’t put them on me.

**Craig:** You’re a racist.

**Megana:** Where does bread pudding originate from?

**Craig:** It feels Englishy to me.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Any time the word pudding is in there and it isn’t a glop, I think it’s English.

**John:** Cheesecake versus chocolate chip cookies.

**Craig:** Cheesecake.

**John:** I’m debating. I’m thinking of the ultimate versions of things. Maybe it’s because chocolate chip cookies, while they can be dessert, they’re not really an end-of-meal dessert. They’re a treat to be eaten other times.

**Craig:** You can eat them after lunch.

**John:** The same reason we haven’t [inaudible 00:59:55] blueberry muffins, which are delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re not really dessert.

**John:** Megana, you agree with us?

**Megana:** I don’t, but you guys win.

**Craig:** We win.

**John:** Make your case. Are chocolate chip cookies as dessert as the dessert winner here?

**Megana:** I don’t know. They’re just my best friend.

**Craig:** That’s not what we’re talking about though. We’re not talking about what listens to you talk.

**Megana:** They’re all the time. They are just a universal, delightful treat for any time of day, year, season, whereas a cheesecake is an undertaking.

**John:** What I was saying is it comes down to the definition of dessert. If it’s something that’s uniquely a dessert versus also a snack, is that a difference?

**Megana:** Yeah, because a chocolate chip cookie is like a treat.

**John:** It is a treat.

**Craig:** It’s a treat. I made a cheesecake recently for the first time. It came out beautifully. It’s fun to make. A cheesecake, when you bring it out at the end of dinner, people are like, “Oho.” You bring out a plate of chocolate chip cookies, they’re like, “Oh, you don’t care about us.”

**Megana:** Yeah, “He phoned it in.”

**Craig:** “He phoned it in.”

**John:** That’s fair.

**Megana:** I guess we’re going cheesecake.

**John:** Cheesecake. Final round. This is actually a surprise. Not what I would’ve predicted.

**Craig:** Startling.

**John:** Bread pudding versus cheesecake. I’m astonished apple pie didn’t make it through to here.

**Craig:** We’re not that American, I guess.

**John:** We’re not. Bread pudding versus cheesecake. What’s going to win?

**Megana:** Cheesecake.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s cheesecake. I know. I know. I know. I know.

**John:** I think it’s the effectiveness of presentation. Would I have a stronger impression of cheesecake, would I enjoy cheesecake more if it weren’t for the Cheesecake Factory? That is what definitely has soured me.

**Craig:** The fact that they put the word factory next to it is pretty brutal. The whole concept and experience of Cheesecake Factory is upsetting from the very moment you walk in. The faux Italianate design.

**John:** Yeah, oh my gosh.

**Craig:** The menu that appears to be a phone book. They are terrible at night but good at nothing. Then the cheesecakes themselves, they’re stupid. They’ve gotten so far afield from just the simplicity and elegance of a New York style cheesecake.

**John:** We’ve not even discussed the Basque cheesecake and the rise of the Basque cheesecake.

**Craig:** The Basque cheesecake is-

**John:** Burnt.

**Craig:** … fantastic.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s glorious. That’s another great vote in favor of cheesecake is that there are different families.

**John:** I think a thing that’s also been pushing it over is because there’s been recent innovation, at least within America, the popularity of Basque cheesecakes.

**Craig:** Discovery.

**Megana:** Watch the cheesecake space.

**Craig:** Watch this cheesecake space. I’ve always loved the combination of sugar and cheese in a dessert. Even a cheese Danish is delicious to me. Cheesecakes are not easy to make. Bread pudding is easy. It just is.

**John:** Yeah, true. Anyone could do a bread pudding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun dessert bracket.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye, guys.

Links:

* [Bob Iger Back As Disney CEO, Bob Chapek Out](https://deadline.com/2022/11/disney-bob-iger-returns-ceo-bob-chapek-out-1235178223/) on Deadline
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-john)
* [David Wappel’s Twitter Thread on Anchoring Nouns](https://twitter.com/davidwappel/status/1202287786998390785?s=20&t=xSSMDkDRYaft-MmoMKhE5w)
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* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/any-given-wednesday).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 578 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often when we have guests on the show, I am meeting them for the first time right before we start recording. My guests today I’ve known for almost 30 years, which is impossible, Al Gough and Miles Millar, the writer/producers known for Smallville, Shanghai Noon, Into the Badlands, and a zillion other movies and TV series. Their latest is the Netflix hit series Wednesday. Welcome Al and Miles.

**Al Gough:** Good to see you.

**Miles Millar:** Absolutely. Great.

**John:** We actually went to film school together a thousand years ago.

**Al:** Yes, we did, 1992.

**John:** 1992. I want to get into a little bit of that. Maybe in our Bonus Segment, let’s talk about film schools, because Craig hates film schools. It was actually incredibly important for the three of us. I think we can get the other side of film school and whether we would do it again.

**Miles:** I think the answer for all of us is yes.

**John:** I think it would be yes, but I might do it differently this time. We’ll see when we get into that. That’ll be our Bonus Segment. For you guys right now, I really want to start by contrasting… I remember as your whole career began. Usually, this would be the point where I would ask you to do an origin story. Let me see if I can give the origin story, Al and Miles, see how much I get right and what stuff I get wrong. Al Gough, before you came out for film school, you were working some place in the East Coast. You went to Washington University?

**Al:** No, I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

**John:** Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Something like that. You came out to Stark with the intention of becoming a producer.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** Miles Millar, you came from the UK. You had been working in London before that?

**Miles:** Yep.

**John:** You came into the program, the Stark Program at USC, with the intention of being a producer, or did you also know you were going to write?

**Miles:** I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was my excuse to get to America. That was really the reason. I loved the idea of film. I’d been obsessed with film my whole life. That was my dream. I didn’t really know how to navigate Hollywood. The program felt like a grab bag of you figure it out.

**John:** That’s honestly very close to my experience there too. I knew I could write in a general sense, but I had no sense of how Hollywood worked. It was my introduction to everything. We should explain to people listening what 1992 was like. It was pre-internet, basically.

**Al:** It was pre-internet. Also, we say the party was over, but the after-party was starting. Corporations buying movie studios was just becoming a thing. I think Sony had bought Columbia. I think at that point, Matsushita had bought Universal.

**Miles:** Turner had bought-

**Al:** Not yet. That wasn’t until ’94.

**Miles:** It was a gold rush era.

**Al:** It was a gold rush era.

**Miles:** It was incredible.

**John:** It’s important for how we all came up and rose into it, because it was definitely a period of great expansion that we were coming into it. You guys met in our very small film program. Only 25 students per year in that group. How quickly did you hit it off as friends and then did you start thinking about writing together? That’s where I’m not quite clear, because it was in that first year you must’ve started writing together.

**Al:** We were friends almost… I think we met the second day of film school.

**Miles:** Yeah, we had that cocktail party. USC film school had this bizarre, brutalist architecture. It had this garden well, where there was a bad cocktail party we had for students.

**John:** It was a kegger really.

**Miles:** Exactly right.

**Al:** A kegger, yeah.

**Miles:** We met there. At the end, I gave Al my phone number. I’m terrible. I’m the worst with numbers.

**Al:** Terrible.

**Miles:** I gave him the wrong number, so he couldn’t get in touch with me. A few days later, he said, “I tried to reach you.” I was like, “Oh, whoops.” We did hit it off immediately.

**Al:** Miles is terrible with numbers still.

**Miles:** I have to copy his-

**Al:** I do the WGA dues, and then I take a picture of it and send it to him.

**Miles:** I’m always [crosstalk 00:03:44].

**John:** You guys eventually hit it off. In our first year of Stark, we were writing scenes. We had a class taught by Bobette Buster. We were writing scenes for that, and we were writing individual scenes. You guys were separately trying to work on some stuff together?

**Al:** No, because remember, she partnered us up.

**John:** Did you?

**Al:** I think we all did an outline and 30 pages.

**Miles:** It was the outline and the first act of a screenplay. You had to partner up with someone. I love this story, by the way, because we had to partner up. I partner with Al. My story was the worst story. It was a very commercial idea, but found out later on it was the worst story as a professional writer, which was a story about a cop and an orangutan, because they were buddies, called Mango. Al lost faith in me pretty quickly and tried to bail. Luckily for us, the head of the program, Larry Turman, who is the producer of The Graduate, told him he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bail on me, and so he was forced to work with me. Lucky he did, because…

**Al:** Then that led to Mango, led to the first sale.

**John:** What was crucial to understand about this origin story is that you guys wrote this project together. You had the initial idea, but you end up working on it as a team. In our second year of Stark, you end up selling this spec script for a lot of money.

**Al:** That’s another thing too, which we tell young writers. Again, it was a different era. Where now we’re in the era of IP and everything, there it was literally the era of spec scripts. It was Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas and all of that.

**Miles:** Every day you’d go to Variety and you’d read five scripts sold for a lot of money, and they were high-concept stories, and first-timers breaking in every day. It really was this gold rush mentality of you just needed to get the story out, and people would buy the idea. It was really amazing, all of us, the three of us to launch at that point as writers, because it allowed us… We always talk about the [inaudible 00:05:36] to learn how to write. Without that sale, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was all about the gift of that era.

**John:** As we all know, Mango got an immediate green light and went on to make $200 million. It was a giant hit that made your whole career. No, Mango did not get made, and yet it did start your career. Let’s talk through that, because going from a sale, which doesn’t really happen so much… A spec sale of a script doesn’t happen that often anymore. There are scripts that get attention, and then people go off in meetings. That’s really an important next step for you guys is not that Mango happened, got shot as a film, but you guys were taken seriously. You got agents and managers, got started with a career.

**Al:** Exactly. As Miles was saying, we sold Mango. It was the week after Ace Ventura opened. Some of it, you hit the right moment. People loved the concept. They liked the writing enough. What we found is then you go for these general meetings at Disney, at New Line, Warner’s, and they’re offering you animal comedies. This is not what you want to be known for.

**Miles:** It was literally our very first script. It was total beginner’s luck. We didn’t know really the craft of writing yet, so we spent the next three years working every day. We’ve always had a really good joint work ethic. I’m sure John does too. It’s all about not the grind, but it’s really about treating it as a profession, that there’s never a day when we’re not writing. That’s something that’s I think stood us well in terms of we just keep on working. We’re workhorses, and we’ll always do that. Even when it’s hard, we’ll still work.

**John:** It’s also important though to think back to that time and the expansion of the industry. It’s not just that there were spec scripts selling. The reason why there were spec scripts selling is because they were trying to make so many movies.

**Miles:** Correct.

**John:** That was also an era where Disney was trying to do 40 feature films a year.

**Al:** Yeah, each division, Disney, Touchstone, and Hollywood Pictures were each making 25 movies a year, because it was also the era of DVDs. Basically, even if a movie didn’t make all its money back in theatrical, the DVD aftermarkets were huge. A lot of them got made.

**Miles:** There’s a similar era now in terms of content. The streamers desperately need content. It’s not dissimilar. I think for writers, it was a better period when we started out, just in terms of you could hit the jackpot, literally.

**John:** Coming off of Mango, what was the next big step in your career? I was trying to [inaudible 00:08:03] is there another big thing, like, “Oh, that’s a shining beacon,” before we get to Smallville?

**Al:** Oh, yeah. We wrote a couple more specs. The next one we sold was a political thriller called Favorite Son. We sold it to… It was a producer named Leonard Goldberg. He was Aaron Spelling’s partner.

**John:** Absolutely. He did Charlie’s Angels.

**Al:** Exactly. We sold it to Laura Ziskin, who was a producer we all had as a film school teacher, who was then running a division of 20th Century Fox. For us, that was the first script that was… It was a great sample, and it opened different doors. I think that’s the great thing about being a writer is you don’t need permission, and you can always write yourself out of any corner. Finally, with that script, we were able to do that. It just got us out of the animal comedy cul-de-sac.

**John:** Absolutely. I was pigeonholed as a guy who’d do movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas, very soft family things. Then Go was the thing that got me out of that.

**Al:** Go, right.

**John:** People could read it for whatever they wanted to do. You have written Favorite Son. That gets set up at Fox 2000?

**Al:** Fox 2000, yeah.

**John:** From that, you’re taking other meetings. Are you getting any rewrite work? What’s the next step?

**Miles:** We’ve been a little bit in the rewrite business but not really. It’s never been something that we’ve had time to do or focused on, because then we pretty quickly got into TV. We had an agency change. We changed agencies and went to William Morris, and then they put us with a TV agent as well as a feature agent, because we’d done… Our first TV credit was this British BBC show called Bugs. That was our first-

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forgot about Bugs.

**Miles:** It was a really obscure but fun BBC show.

**Al:** It was an action-adventure series. The reason they liked us is because Miles is British and I was American. They couldn’t find British writers who could write Mission Impossible type stories, which is what these were.

**Miles:** That got us when we went to William Morris. They’re like, “Oh, you do TV. You should have a TV agent.”

**John:** Because it was a UK show, you were not in a room with a staff writing that show.

**Miles:** No.

**John:** You pitched an episode, wrote an episode.

**Miles:** We used to fax the pages to them in London. That’s how old we are. It was a great experience. Then that led to our interest in TV. Then we started staffing on TV. We met some writers. They said the way to be successful in television is, just fair enough, you have to learn the hierarchy, and you’ve gotta go up from staff writer to story editor to the various stages of TV writer. We did that. Our first TV credit in America was Timecop, which is based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

**John:** ABC show? I’m trying to remember.

**Miles:** ABC, yeah.

**Al:** ABC.

**John:** Did it run for a season?

**Al:** No, I think it ran for eight, and then it was out.

**Miles:** It was an era they thought TV drama was dead, but sitcoms were the king. The idea of doing that show… You have to sign a three-year contract. It was like, “Oh my god, if we do this for three years, I will literally die.” It ran for eight. We were heroes on that show, because there was such infighting with the young guys on the totem pole. We ended up writing… Was it three scripts?

**Al:** Yeah, we wrote three of the eight.

**Miles:** Three.

**Al:** One of ours became the new first episode, because ABC hated the pilot episode of the show. With writers too, we call it the “fuck you, I’m doing Nazis” approach. When they were pitching the show, ABC said, “Whatever you do in Timecop, don’t have them go back to Nazi Germany, because Germany’s a huge market for us, and we don’t want to do it.” What did they do? They go back to Nazi Germany and stop something. That started.

There was no room on that show. You’d go pitch to the executive producer. We did, and then we wrote the script. He came in, and he goes, “Yep, this one’s going to be the first episode.” Timecop. Then we got our first pilot at ABC from that, which got made but didn’t go to air. Then we staffed on a show that Carlton Cuse created called Martial Law.

**John:** That’s right.

**Al:** That’s the TV side of the story. Then meanwhile, on the feature side, we had done some work for Joel Silver and Dick Donner on these low-budget genre movies, which led to Lethal Weapon 4.

**John:** I remember visiting set with you on a movie you’d written that starred Heather Locklear.

**Miles:** That was called Double Tap. That was our very first feature credit. It was directed by Greg Yaitanes, who is now a huge TV director. He just did House of the Dragon.

**Al:** House of the Dragon.

**John:** That’s right.

**Miles:** It’s weird we’re all still here. Those were really cheap movies, but we learned a lot doing those. We never said no. That was also our thing. We always just said yes to anything, and still do. That’s part of our problem is never saying no. We’re not as selective as John.

**John:** There’s also two of you, so you can get twice as much done. Are we almost caught up to Smallville at this point?

**Al:** Yes. On the TV side, during Martial Law, we got a deal at Warner Bros, and we did this show from Lethal Weapon 4 with the producer, Joel Silver, called The Strip, which was an action buddy thing set in Las Vegas. We’d sold it to Fox. They had a regime change. A thing that did happen in 1999 was you’d sell a pilot to another network. They sold it to UPN, which was another network that no longer exists. Because it was on UPN and was so under the radar, they let us run the show. We really hit it off with Peter Roth.

**Miles:** He was the head of Warner Bros.

**Al:** He was the head of Warner’s Television, just retired a year or two ago. They made an overall deal with us. The Strip ran eight episodes, got canceled.

**Miles:** First-time showrunners, we had no idea what we were doing. I’ll say for the first three pilots, we had no idea what we were doing. Then it began to click in terms of what we needed to do and be set forward. There’s always this thing about showrunning, which is you’re basically two guys in a garage writing scripts, and suddenly you’re in charge of a huge business, and they expect you to know what you’re doing, and you don’t.

**John:** You also had very few opportunities for mentorship, because you’d been on some sets, with Double Tap and things like that, I guess Martial Law. You have seen some of it. Was Martial Law shot in Los Angeles?

**Al:** It was, yeah. You’re right, you don’t really get that much-

**Miles:** You’re stuck in the writers’ room.

**Al:** You’re stuck in the writers’ room. We had a deal. At that point, I always tell people there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe. The later iteration of Superman had been Lois and Clark. The last iteration of Batman had been Batman and Robin. This was like the Nadir of superheros. Warner’s, who was like, “Sure, TV, you can have Superman,” they didn’t care.

Peter Roth came to us and said, “I have the rights to do Superman, and I want to do kind of like a Superboy show. We were like, “We don’t want to do Superboy.” We came up with the pitch for Smallville, which was no flights, no tights, making the parents younger, introducing the idea of the meteor shower and all these different things.

Then we went out and sold… We only went to Fox and to The WB. What was funny at the time is The WB and Warner’s Studio did not have a good relationship. Peter was brought in to smooth it over. They had just pitched them the idea of like, “Oh, we’re doing a Superman in high school show.” They’re like, “Eh.” They weren’t interested.

**Miles:** This is the era of Dawson’s Creek.

**Al:** Dawson’s Creek, yeah. We went to Fox, and we sold it in the room to Gail Berman. Then that afternoon, we had to go to The WB, just because they’re corporate siblings. Peter’s like, “Just go in. Pitch it. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to sell it to Fox.” We go in and pitch it to The WB, to an executive named Susanne Daniels. It’s one of those things, you could tell during the pitch. In the beginning, it was a little like sitting back, and then as they heard the pitch, they were like, “Oh, this might actually be good.” Then by the end, we left, and we’re like, “Oh, that went better than we thought.” Peter’s like, “We’re going to Fox.” Then three days later, we were at The WB, which is where it should’ve been.

**Miles:** The great story there is that the other executive in the room, who’s a friend of ours, we’d had lunch with the year before, and she’d told us point blank, “You guys aren’t WB material. Sorry.”

**Al:** “You do buddy action,” because at that point we’d done Lethal 4 and Shanghai Noon. “You’re buddy two-hander guys.” Then the next year, we’re at The WB.

**John:** I want to compare and contrast that experience, taking an iconic piece of property, a piece of IP that people know, Superman, and turning it into a teen show, to Wednesday, which is, again, an iconic piece of property everybody knows, and taking the character from that and putting it at the center of a teen series. On the surface, kind of similar, but actually, the way we make things now is so vastly different between the two of them. I want to contrast the two of those experiences. Let’s talk through the pitch on Wednesday Addams. How does Wednesday Addams come into your universe?

**Al:** It was 2018. We had just finished doing this show called Into the Badlands, which we did for AMC for four seasons. We were, frankly, looking for our next thing, and knowing how IP-obsessed everybody is… The Addams Family seemed to be… We knew MGM had the animated movies, but Paramount had done movies.

In a similar way that Smallville tells an unknown chapter of Clark Kent’s story, it’s a story nobody’s ever told. We wanted to do Wednesday, but we’re like, “Teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school.” That was really the eureka moment. We sat down. We knew we wanted it to be a supernatural murder mystery. We talked about do we just put her in a normal high school or do we do something different. We realized if we just put her in a normal high school, it becomes a very one-note show.

**Miles:** She goes home to her family at the end.

**Al:** She went home to her family. The opening of the first episode is her in a regular high school. She gets expelled, and then she goes to Nevermore, because it gave us the Addams ethos without being the… It’s like if you took the Addams mansion and the Addams vibe but then you put it in the school. Then it was the school where her parents met. Literally, we had the idea. We came up with the whole pitch.

**Miles:** We did it on spec.

**Al:** On spec.

**Miles:** We wrote a 20-page bible.

**Al:** Bible.

**Miles:** Then we approached MGM, said to the head of the studio, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and he loved it. It was the first step. It was the first step with us coming up with the idea. It wasn’t like they approached us.

**Al:** Nobody approached us.

**John:** There wasn’t any notion, like, “Hey, let’s do a Wednesday Addams show.”

**Al:** No, it wasn’t.

**John:** [inaudible 00:18:40].

**Al:** In fact, they didn’t even know if they had the live-action TV rights. We were like, “Does Paramount have those?” We pitched the head of the Addams Foundation, who controls the estate. He loved it. That’s how it all got started. It was very different. Smallville was like, “We have this idea. Can you guys crack it?” This one, we brought them something they didn’t frankly even know they had.

**John:** Great. In both cases, the idea is now set up. Was the idea set up at Netflix, or did you have to write a script first?

**Miles:** Now it seems like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t at all. It’s been a three-and-a-half-year journey to get to this point. We’d written it. They loved it. In terms of the pitch, we went out and pitched it around to all the different streamers, to Apple and Amazon, Netflix. Actually, Netflix bought it. This is great.

**Al:** This was fall of 2019. This was this time 2019.

**Miles:** They couldn’t make a deal, so it fell apart.

**John:** It fell apart. They couldn’t make a deal because of underlying rights or your rights or just everything?

**Al:** Basically, whatever Netflix was offering, MGM said, “That’s not enough.” This was basically January of 2020. They had already basically given us the go-ahead to write the pilot script. They’d written that. We thought it was kind of dead. Then Steve Stark, who was the head of television at the time-

**Miles:** At MGM.

**Al:** … at MGM, convinced MGM to basically fork over money for a writers’ room, for a mini room, and said, “We’ll write a bunch of scripts, and then we’ll go back out with it,” which to be honest with you, is a terrible idea. Most streamers aren’t going to buy a show that they had no hand in developing. We were like, “If it keeps the project alive, great.”

**John:** That said, Station Eleven was a similar situation.

**Al:** Was it really?

**John:** He came on to talk through the Station Eleven process. Paramount did put together a mini room for that, so they could write scripts. It ended up working out really well for them.

**Al:** Same here.

**John:** At this point, there’s a pilot, and you have a room together. How many scripts are you trying to get out of this room?

**Al:** We’re trying to get another seven scripts out of the room.

**John:** Which is the whole season.

**Al:** The whole season, because we had the bible for the whole season, and so we were breaking it. Of course, we had to push the room a week, because it was literally the first week of lockdown. The pandemic started. We did it fully on Zoom.

**Miles:** Which I think was a really great… No one had ever done a Zoom room. It was actually incredibly efficient, because often my beef of writers’ rooms is everyone sits around talking about war stories. It’s so inefficient, whereas a Zoom, it’s actually much more focused. It can be exhausting, but we got an incredible amount of work done in a limited amount of time.

**Al:** Yeah, we did. We did. It was spring of 2020. Before we went out, we wanted to package it. Tim was always our first-

**John:** A natural choice.

**Al:** A natural choice.

**John:** Tim’s always wanted to do an Addams Family story.

**Al:** We’d heard. Of course, everybody’s like, “He’s not done television. He’s not going to do it.” We’re like, “If we don’t ask, the answer’s no.” Steve’s partner, Andrew Mittman, got the script to Mike Simpson, who’s Tim’s agent at WME. Mike read it and really loved it. We heard all this later. He sent it to Tim, and then four days later, we get a text, “You’re not going to believe this. Tim read the script. He really loves it. He wants to talk to you guys.” Tim lives in London. We thought, “Okay, great, so his assistant’s going to set up Zoom?” He’s like, “Nope.” Mike goes, “I’m texting you his number, and you’re going to FaceTime with him tomorrow.” It was Memorial Day weekend 2020. We called. We FaceTimed with Tim. He was in Oxford.

**Miles:** Oxford. He has an amazing house in Oxford with this beautiful garden with these life-size dinosaur models. He was out there wandering around in this garden talking to us about Wednesday Addams and how she would’ve been his girlfriend in high school. It was really, really great. He was a bit nervous, I think, about launching to TV, but also really intrigued about doing extended storytelling. Long-form storytelling was something he’d never done. It was really something that he thought would be a great challenge. He’d always loved the Addams Family, and Wednesday in particular.

**Al:** What we did know, the opening of the script, it opens with Wednesday terrorizing the water polo team. We didn’t know Tim played water polo in Burbank.

**Miles:** At Burbank High.

**Al:** He must’ve been reading the script going, “What is happening?”

**Miles:** That’s how it happened.

**John:** I want to also flash back to Smallville though, because bringing on the pilot director has always been a big thing. That’s a big deciding factor of which pilots get ordered is what kind of director you can get on board, but they’re never the iconic name that a Tim Burton is.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** It’s never that level of [inaudible 00:23:23] directors. It’s always like Michael Dinner. It’s some person you’ve never heard of.

**Miles:** Michael Dinner, yeah.

**John:** Normal people don’t have that. It’s such a change from this. Also, in a classic way you pick pilots to make, it’s on a casting. For Smallville, talk through the casting on that, because I remember my WB show, the way you had to bring in actors to audition in the room in front of Susanne Daniels and everything else was a very specific, scary, terrifying process. I want to contrast it with now. Talk us through Smallville casting, and then we’ll go to Wednesday casting.

**Al:** Again, this was in 2000. We sold it in the fall of 2000. When we sold it, it’s interesting. In old-time network television, they usually didn’t let you cast a pilot until they green-lit the pilot. Here they bought the project and they said, “We’re going to let you start casting.” We hadn’t written the script yet.

**Miles:** We hadn’t written the script yet.

**Al:** This was actually a great exercise, which we’ve done. We don’t really do it in features, but we do it in television. We wrote a bunch of the scenes from the pilot that they could audition with. It’s good, because you realize you can give them handles. We always call it secret lines, where if they get that right, it’s like, “Oh, they understand it.” We wrote a Lex and Clark scene.

**Miles:** All of which ended up in the show.

**Al:** All of them are in the pilot. It was a Clark-Lana graveyard scene, which is in the pilot. There’s a Lex-Clark fencing scene, which is in the pilot, the parents, which was great, because when we went to write the pilot, we had a bunch of scenes written already. They let us do that. We actually got to spend about four months casting. The other thing was, we knew exactly who we wanted to direct the pilot, which was David Nutter, who certainly at the time-

**John:** He was [inaudible 00:25:08] him or Michael Dinner [crosstalk 00:25:09].

**Al:** David was the Steven Spielberg of TV pilots. His track record of getting-

**Miles:** He’d done a lot of great… Not The X-Files. He’d done a lot of X-Files to start off with.

**Al:** He’d done X-Files to start off. I think he’d done Roswell the year before.

**Miles:** Dark Angel.

**Al:** He’d done Dark Angel. What’s great is Peter Roth, who had just come over from Fox, knew David very well. He literally got on the phone, pitched him, sent him the same-

**Miles:** David was a huge Superman-

**Al:** He was a huge Superman fan.

**Miles:** It was the perfect marriage. The process, as John suggested, it’s so awful, which is the person, or they have to sit in the room outside, and have to come into a room with probably 15 people watching them, which is the most artificial experience for TV performance, and have to perform like they’re auditioning for a school play, in front of these people. It is the most nerve-wracking experience. For example, Zach Levi was our top choice for Lex Luthor. He came in and was amazing. Then he came in to do this network audition, and he really just didn’t click. Then we ended up with Michael, who was fantastic. It was just the whole process and the idea of having to perform in this really bizarre way for a TV show.

**Al:** It was always very weird. It’s stressful all around.

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** So artificial.

**John:** Also, we have to remember that back in those days, these truly were pilots. They were going to shoot a bunch of pilots and only pick up certain series, as they were trying to figure out what are the elements that are going to be useful in this show versus that show. It’s not the same situation with something like Wednesday, because it’s the first episode, but how that first episode goes is not going to determine whether the rest of the series shoots. You’re going to shoot the whole series.

**Al:** Correct. We even had this on our last couple shows. Everybody now does it online. They self-tape. I think actors must think it’s great, because they can do as many takes as they want until they get the one they like.

**John:** They don’t get the feedback.

**Al:** They don’t get the feedback, but they get that.

**John:** Also, we’re seeing what do they look like through a lens.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s really what it is.

**Miles:** That’s the point, exactly. It’s the old-fashioned screen test is how you should do it. On Wednesday, I’ll say we did do chemistry tests over Zoom. We’d all meet with the actor, talk to them, and then our screens would go black, and then we’d watch the audition. Then we’d give notes and Tim would give notes. I think it was intimidating, because it was the first time they met Tim, and over Zoom. The first time we did it, Tim just gave them one chance. They were so nervous.

**Al:** We did it once, and it was a disaster. What’s great about Tim is Tim Burton doesn’t realize he’s Tim Burton. We’re like, “Tim, here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll introduce them. We’ll introduce you, let you say hi. We’ll do it twice, so you can give them notes in between. Even if you don’t have notes, let’s just let them do it again.” Then he was like, “Great.” Once they got over the initial shock of the Tim Burton part, then they could ease in and do it. Even on the Brady Bunch screens, you could at least go, “Oh, okay.” You see what they look like side by side on camera.

**John:** Which is crucial. I want to back up in the process a little bit here, because you’d been in writers’ rooms before. You’d been in a writer’s room for Martial Law. You had that experience. This time you’re running a writers’ room on Zoom for your show. How did you go about thinking about who you wanted in that writers’ room with you? It was a mini room. Was that the only room you ever got together?

**Al:** That was a mini room. We frankly picked two writers, Kayla Alpert and April Blair. We knew.

**John:** Experienced.

**Al:** They were like, “We’re going to pay for a room. You can only have a couple writers.” It’s like, “We need people who we’ve worked with before, who we know are good, who can be helpful.” Obviously, we wanted the female voices in the room too. We heard a lot of Zoom room horror stories, but I think because it was a bunch of people who have never worked together, so I’m sure it was a lot of bad first date theater. We had that room. It was a 10, 11-week room. That was the only room we had.

**John:** What was your schedule? What was your writing process? How long were the rooms going for? What were you trying to get done in a day’s work in a room?

**Miles:** I think first it’s having a very clear idea of where the trajectory of the season’s going. We just had the first episode, so they had a sense of what the show was, which is important.

**John:** It’s crucial to set up… That first episode, you set so many plates spinning in terms of who these characters are, and each of them is going to have a thing. You had a sense of where they were going. You had to actually track out where that information would go. Those were the first weeks. You were just figuring out all the rest of those-

**Miles:** Yes. I think the first season, we certainly had ideas. I guess because we’re old-school TV people, every episode, unlike some binge shows, conceptualized. One episode’s about the school dance. One episode’s about Parents Weekend. Each one feels like a complete chapter of a book, rather than just… Sometimes shows are like mud. You couldn’t identify what the-

**John:** It’s like an eight-hour movie.

**Miles:** For us it’s much more compartmentalized. It’s figuring out the beginning, middle, end of each episode so it feels complete in itself, although it still leads on and has this propulsive energy, which is always something that we aim for, that it’s never boring. That’s our motto in terms of story breaking, that it has to keep going so it’s propulsive and delicious and you want to keep consuming. You want to be able to not turn it off at 3 a.m. in the morning and finish. That’s our goal as storytellers is that it has to be relentless. Then it’s really working out the beats and where are the characters going, so what’s the arc over the course of the season and how will that person get there.

The first week is just figuring out big ideas, what a great set piece is, where do you want to see these characters, what are the scenes you want to see with them. That’s something we learned from Carlton Cuse, which is what are the scenes you want to see in this episode, between these two characters. That was something that we always do, and just like, “What are the craziest ideas we can put Wednesday Addams in?” That’s something. It’s just an exercise. We always ask people when they first come to the room to bring a lot of ideas. I want to see a list of 50 ideas. Where could she be, what’s funny, and what situations or locations she could be at or just concepts for [inaudible 00:31:27].

**John:** What documents are you trying to get out of this? Ultimately, you’re going to get to scripts. At what point are you generating outlines? Are you generating beat sheets? How much are those shared outside of the room or just for your purposes?

**Al:** We do cards.

**Miles:** The first thing we do is we break out the stories. We do the little paragraphs.

**Al:** Paragraphs.

**Miles:** By the end of probably week two, we have eight one-page ideas for what each episode’s going to be. It has to be really quick and fast. You can adjust.

**John:** Is that a Google Doc, or how are you sharing that among your team?

**Miles:** It’s Google Docs.

**Al:** It is a Google Doc.

**Miles:** We have the writer’s assistant who takes notes every day and assembles that. We split up to write the one-pagers we call them, which is just each episode, so we have a sense of what the season is, because you can’t spend too long conceptualizing. We just need to start really thinking about the stories.

**Al:** We did the one-pagers. Then we do beat sheets. Those have, here are all the scenes.

**John:** The scenes.

**Al:** They’re in skeletal form. The other thing, we had never done a closed mystery, a cards down mystery, where you don’t know, it’s the whodunit.

**John:** Absolutely. We have the same information as the audience as Wednesday does.

**Al:** Exactly. We knew how it ended. Then it was working backwards. Then it was do we have enough red herrings. Even when we were shooting it, we’re like-

**Miles:** Oh, gosh.

**Al:** … “Oh my god, is this going to be too obvious?” It’s all the red herrings. You have to play by the rules, so that if you go back and did a re-watch, it’s… I remember there’s one thing we caught in the first episode. We’re like, “Oh, that character could never be there at that time, so we can’t do that.” You’re doing the math of it. There was that aspect. Then once we broke them out, then I think we verbally pitched out to the studio at that point, just to get their feedback.

**John:** The studio being Netflix.

**Al:** No, actually at the time, just MGM.

**John:** Just MGM, that’s right, because [inaudible 00:33:26]. You’re pitching them to make sure that they understand what the vision is for the things.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** They’re not reading things.

**Al:** Not yet. Once we got their thoughts and sign off, then we went and we did 10-page outlines.

**Miles:** Our whole philosophy always is to, I’d say overshare. There’s no surprises is our thing.

**Al:** I think they got the one-pagers. They got the one-pagers.

**Miles:** For us it’s always about we have nothing to hide. If you try and hide things or keep people at bay… We’re really looking for great notes and not guidance, but it’s great to have some… You’re stuck in a room. Even if it’s a Zoom room, you’re stuck in this little bubble. To have some outside viewpoint about what you’re doing, for us is always very helpful. It’s true with the whole process in terms of what we do. We’ll take a good note from literally anybody.

**Al:** Because everybody’s a viewer. Even if it’s their job, everybody’s still a viewer.

**Miles:** It doesn’t mean we’re going to take it.

**Al:** It doesn’t mean we’re going to listen.

**Miles:** We’re incredibly open and say to the actors, to everybody that we want feedback and need feedback. It’s always about the best product. That process goes all the way to the end, to ADR, to the post, to everything. It’s always about evolving until you finish.

**John:** Let’s run through the documents again. We’re starting off with these one-paragraph synopses of episodes. Then it goes to a beat sheet. Then it goes to a 10-page outline. Then from 10-page outline, those are assigned to a writer to write the full 60-page script.

**Al:** Correct.

**Miles:** I will say before that as well, we have the bible, and then we usually do a look book as well, so they have a sense of what [crosstalk 00:35:02].

**John:** Before they got there, they were looking through that.

**Miles:** Yeah, so they have a sense of what the show will look like in our minds. We shared that with Tim. It’s always about the communication, and everyone’s on the same page about what we’re doing. It’s always about that clarity of vision, “This is the show we’re going to make. This is what we’re doing,” so there’s no confusion, and keeping the lines of communication open between every department, which is hard.

**John:** Are all these scripts written by the time this room finishes?

**Al:** No. I would say four of the eight were written, and there were four that there were drafts for.

**John:** Great. Let’s take a moment and contrast that back to Smallville, because this was not at all the schedule on Smallville. Smallville, you’re shooting, rather than 8 episodes over the course of however long it takes, you had 22 episodes to shoot.

**Al:** 22 episodes.

**John:** These are 40-page scripts probably?

**Al:** I think Season 1, they were probably 50-page scripts. Probably they were too long.

**John:** They were long. You’re responsible for delivering basically one of these a week.

**Miles:** It was an absolute nightmare. The first season of Smallville is a total blur of insanity and sleepless nights and just us hammering away. Also, in the middle of this, we had 9/11, and we didn’t stop shooting for that. It was just a really crazy time. That’s where we really learned how to run a show. The first season was absolute chaos. The writers hated us. We used to write all day, turn up at work at 6 p.m., work until 12. It was just [inaudible 00:36:29] horror stories of writers’ rooms, that first season was like, oh my god.

**John:** That was you?

**Al:** Yeah, that was us.

**Miles:** Yeah, because you don’t know. It’s like a freight train, and then it becomes a hit, so you have this added pressure and then the studio. It’s just overwhelming.

**Al:** You have a process that moves twice as fast, but you have two levels. You have a studio giving notes and then a network giving notes.

**John:** The other crucial thing though is you are also not writing these scripts in a vacuum like you were in this mini room.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** You were trying to write these things while you’re actually trying to produce the show.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re dealing with all the fires happening on set while you’re doing this and dealing with the post. In this case, you had the luxury, you had these… How long was your mini room? Was it 10 weeks, 12 weeks?

**Miles:** Yeah.

**John:** To just focus on the writing and not focus on anything else.

**Miles:** I’ll say the difference is that I think [inaudible 00:37:13] on a streaming show, on a show like this, is every episode has to be a Faberge egg-

**John:** Wow.

**Miles:** … whereas on network, you know you’re going to have some clunkers. You know that not every script’s going to be great. It doesn’t take the pressure off, but it’s impossible to have 22 amazing episodes of network TV.

**Al:** What was interesting too with Smallville, it was the era where TV on DVD was starting to become a thing. We would say Wednesday is chapters of a book, where Smallville is short stories in a world. You have some mythology episodes and some bigger ideas that then tie the whole season together, because they tell you an avid viewer of a network show watches one in four episodes. There’s a certain amount of repetition, at least in the first season, where you’re starting, where you don’t want people to be like, “I watched the pilot, and then I’m coming in an episode. What the heck’s happening now?”

**Miles:** It’s not a sausage factory, but it kind of is, in terms of there is that repetition. Then once you get into the rhythm of a writers’ room, it’s still incredibly difficult to turn out 22 good episodes of TV. It becomes a machine. That’s certainly what we aimed for and achieved in subsequent seasons in terms of the writers’ room and everything else became a machine.

**Al:** We trained people. It’s another thing too. It sounds weird. The show tells you what it can and can’t do. I think in Season 1, we had to break so many more stories that didn’t work to get to the 22 episodes that did.

**Miles:** [inaudible 00:38:41] in terms of what it wants to do. Everything’s always too big.

**Al:** It’s too big, and I get blamed.

**John:** You’re learning what your cast can do. You’re learning what your crew can do.

**Al:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re learning, “Okay, we can do two stunts or whatever it is for your thing, so how are we going to budget our two stunts for this?”

**Al:** Exactly.

**Miles:** Exactly right.

**Al:** Exactly right.

**Miles:** You have to figure out what’s the pattern of what you can do. The first season of Smallville, we were resisting a pattern. It was like, “No, we’re going to do four stunts an episode. Then second season we’re going to make lives easier for ourselves. We’re going to find the pattern, then we’re going to do it.”

**Al:** We did, because at a certain point, a TV show either runs like a TV show or it implodes. Two of the Smallville stars are doing a podcast where they’re re-watching all the episodes. They had us do one. We watched this episode in Season 1, which literally four directors worked on, then we had to shut down for a week just to finish it. When we watched it back, it was actually a pretty good episode, but we’re like, “We were insane.” I’m like, “What were we thinking?”

**John:** Smallville was shot in Vancouver. For this show, you wanted to keep it nice and close and local, clearly.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**John:** You wanted to keep making life easy for yourself. Where did you choose to shoot Wednesday?

**Al:** We shot in Romania.

**John:** What was the decision for Romania?

**Al:** There’s a couple. One was, there was literally no studio space anywhere else in the world. We looked in Ireland. We looked in the UK.

**John:** If you were shooting this at the peak of coming out of pandemic…

**Al:** The studio wanted us to go to Toronto.

**Miles:** Toronto.

**Al:** The thing with Tim is, it’s the sets. You need the sound stages to be able to build these amazing sets.

**John:** Size.

**Miles:** It’s size. You’re looking at Tim’s work. It’s all about giant sets and physical sets. The studio was obsessed with us going to use The Handmaid’s Tale sound stages, but the roof with those sound stages is 12 feet or something.

**Al:** It was 19 feet.

**Miles:** 19 feet. [inaudible 00:40:37]. It was like, “We’re not going to do that,” because what you want with a Tim show is to have built sets. They also never accepted that. The show was budgeted like a CW show. As soon as you get Tim Burton directing the show, it’s not going to be a CW budget. They never understood that. The big fight with that show was always like, you don’t hire Tim Burton and give him that budget, because he’s not going to do it.

**Al:** We also said Tim doesn’t show up and go, “I’ll do the discount TV version of Tim.” Tim shoots as Tim shoots, one camera, very efficiently actually, but-

**John:** Romania.

**Al:** We ended up in Romania, because they actually had massive sound stages. There’s no tax credit there, but they do have crew. If you drew a longitude-latitude line from New England across, it actually hits Romania.

**Miles:** There’s an abandoned Soviet era studio, which was phenomenal, with huge sound stages. Then it had an area next to it of woods and a lake.

**Al:** Right outside the gate.

**Miles:** Then it had an area where you could build this huge town. It had these amazing architectural gems in the city of Bucharest, which we used as interior sets, with these beautiful decrepit villas. It just had such texture and reality to it. I went on a location scout with Tim. It was completely obvious we had to shoot there, and we did.

We’ve shot all over the world, in New Zealand and Ireland, Canada, but we’ve never shot in a country that didn’t speak the same language, the crew. It was challenging, and in the middle of COVID. Then we had the war happen in Ukraine, which neighbors Romania, which freaked out most of the cast. It was a very, very challenging shoot.

**John:** We were talking about the phases of getting things made. You have your writing phase. That’s all day. You have production phase. Challenging. Mostly done in Europe. Are you posting at the same time, or you’re waiting for all the post when everything’s done being shot? Were you shooting sequentially or were you cross-boarding the show?

**Al:** A couple things. We shot the show in blocks of two, but we didn’t go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

**Miles:** Unfortunately.

**Al:** We did one, two, five, six, three, four, seven, eight.

**Miles:** Makes total sense.

**Al:** Part of it is because Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman, who play Gomez and Morticia, are in Episodes 1 and 5, and we needed them to come to Romania once. Secondly, Tim was doing two blocks and needed time to prep.

**John:** A prep break.

**Al:** He wanted to do the first four. It was challenging, especially when you’re doing a mystery show and you’re trying to keep everything straight, and the actors are trying to keep their emotional arc straight. That was definitely a challenge. Tim’s editor was on site in Romania with us. We do all of our post at a place called Take 5 in Toronto. We’ve done that for the past three shows. What was interesting, even compared to our last show, is just all the technology.

**John:** It’s gotten so much better.

**Al:** It’s amazing.

**Miles:** Oh my god. In our last show, which is Into the Badlands, it used to be you go to a special studio and do a cineSync. It actually never worked. You’d talk to your editor live in Toronto, but the feed you’re getting back was slightly out of whack. It was never coordinated.

**Al:** Then you would have to go up for a week too.

**Miles:** I’d go up to Toronto.

**Al:** Just to sit in the rooms and finish everything.

**Miles:** Constantly fly up to Toronto. We were doing a show in New Zealand and Ireland at the same time, and then I’d fly to Toronto. It was an absolute nightmare. This was a dream experience. It’s completely synced up. You can talk to your editor.

**John:** You’re watching it on your laptop.

**Miles:** You’re talking to your editor on Zoom, watching the cut on your laptop. You can give notes in real time. It works incredibly well. The only thing you have to go for is now the sound mix. You go to a place in Hollywood, watch the sound mix. None of us went to Toronto. If we had to go from Romania to Toronto in COVID, you’d have to come back and spend 10 days in quarantine. It just wouldn’t have worked. Now technology is so… It’s really advanced in four or five years. It’s ridiculous.

**Al:** It was pretty incredible.

**John:** Great. We have some listener questions. I thought maybe you guys could help us out with some of the listener questions.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s start with Hilary’s question.

**Megana Rao:** Hilary in Los Angeles asked, “I mentioned a feature idea I’m working on to an executive friend at a production company, and he said that if I tweak one insignificant bit of it, it’s exactly what they’re looking for for their new deal with a major streamer. He asked me to send him a one-pager of the feature and said that the streamer is paying for outlines and scripts. Is this different than No Writing Left Behind or is this essentially the same no-no, in that this executive could then use my one-pager at their will and cut me out completely?”

**John:** Let’s talk about No Writing Left Behind and when it’s appropriate to give somebody a written document versus not giving somebody a written document. You guys, you’re big on sharing. You’re big on showing stuff. In this case, it feels like Hilary’s written this original things, so she owns it and controls it. It feels pretty safe for her. What are you guys thinking?

**Miles:** I think maybe we’re dumb and naïve, but we always share. We have no problem leaving anything behind, because we’re fearless about what we have next. The chance of someone stealing something and executing something is minimal.

**Al:** I think again, she has the paper trail. The other thing too is you can always register with the Guild first so you have that stamp. Does that work?

**John:** It doesn’t really work. Let’s talk registering with the Guild, because obviously, I’ve followed the WGA for a long time. You can register your document with the WGA. Basically, they stick it in an envelope and say, “We sealed this envelope on this date.” It proves that it existed at a certain point in time. That’s no more meaningful than actually-

**Al:** Do it yourself.

**John:** … doing it yourself or showing an email that you sent it to somebody. It doesn’t do any more than that. It doesn’t provide an extra protection. I worry it’s basically what people feel good about, but it doesn’t necessarily do a thing. A situation where Hilary probably would not want to leave something behind, let’s say she’s one of six writers going in on a project, and you’re going out with your pitch, don’t leave them that pitch.

**Al:** Do not leave behind, because that’s when things can get used in the studio for parts.

**John:** Your details got moved into their thing.

**Miles:** That’s true.

**Al:** We have seen this, where you do have younger writers who are working with producers or a production company or a studio, and they’re just doing all this free work.

**Miles:** It’s just a bigger issue.

**Al:** You gotta stop. That’s just where it’s-

**Miles:** We worked with one writer. She hasn’t been paid. We’re supervising her. We were asked to come in for some producer friends of ours. She’s been working on this thing for three years. The pitch keeps getting delayed.

**Al:** It keeps getting pushed down. We’re like, “Guys, she’s been doing… This isn’t fair. She needs to be able to pitch this.” That’s incredibly frustrating.

**John:** Hilary should definitely, if she feels like writing up a one-page and sending it in, great, but if the guy keeps asking for more and more details-

**Al:** Do not. Do not.

**John:** … that’s when you start getting into problems.

**Miles:** That’s when you gotta say no.

**John:** Also, she has a whole script, so at some point just share the script.

**Miles:** Is it a script?

**John:** Yeah, she says it’s a script, or it’s a feature idea.

**Miles:** If it’s a finished script, then she’s fine.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** Mike from San Jose asks, “For someone who’s equally open to starting a career in either features or TV, does it even make sense to write spec feature scripts in the current environment? What I mean by that is, it appears that the vast majority of professional work nowadays is on the TV side of things. If a writer was to write a great feature spec, at best, it might lead them to an increasingly narrow field of work that appears to be getting narrower at a rapid pace, whereas a strong television pilot may perhaps help open the door to a much larger field of work opportunities. If equally interested in both, why would someone choose to write a feature spec in this current marketplace?”

**John:** This is a great question for where we were at 30 years ago versus where we’re at right now, because some people are writing TV spec pilots, but not really 30 years ago. Now, if you’re trying to staff a show, you might read a spec pilot, you might read a pilot, but you’d also read a feature. You’d read whatever, right?

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** Yeah, but I think it seems a sad reality that features are dying. I would never recommend anyone writing a feature, starting out now. I’d definitely aim at TV. That’s not a badge of shame anymore. We have Tim Burton directing now a TV show. It’s really changed everything. It’s an amazing opportunity now, what has happened. I think writing a 90-minute movie or a feature script is not the way to go, starting out.

**Megana:** Would you guys read a feature spec as a sample for a writers’ room?

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** It’s not like what he’s saying.

**Al:** No, it’s not even church and state. We’d read it. It’s just the writer might have more opportunities with a spec pilot script to sell versus a spec feature script to sell. We read both.

**Miles:** Also, in terms of it takes half the time to write. It’s not as strict as a… It’s an easier option. It’s definitely I think the way to go. There’s more opportunity just for employment in television. What’s great, when you’re looking at a stack of scripts to read when you’re staffing a show, the shorter scripts are attractive. It really is.

**Al:** It’s true.

**John:** Although somebody could read the first half of the feature script and say, “Listen, I know this person can write. I want to meet this writer.” There are examples of TV pilots that are just… People read a random pilot, and they say, “I want to make this show.” Severance is a case of where it was just a great script and they said, “Let’s make this into a show.” That’s really rare from a person who has no TV experience, where they wrote a spec pilot and suddenly they’re shooting a show, where some movies can get made in different ways. There’s always cases of… Go was a spec script, and it sold and got made.

**Miles:** It’s just that I think the market for movies has shrunk and is shrinking. I think you have more opportunity in terms of selling, or even if you staff on a show and you have written three spec pilots that you can bring out and say, “Hey, I got this spec pilot that I wrote four years ago,” and present it as a new thing. It feels like there’s opportunities for your war chest of scripts.

**Al:** That’s where TV has gotten a little more like features, because it used to be with networks you’d write pilots every year. Then if that pilot didn’t go, it was like the pilot never existed. They didn’t go, “You had a great version of this last season. Why don’t you just do that pilot again?” Nobody ever did. Now it is more like you can have it in your drawer, because there’s not that machine of you’ve got to pick everything up in May, be shooting in July to be on the air in September. That whole system is gone with the wind.

**John:** One thing I think listeners may not understand is that… Let’s say you staff on a show. Let’s say you staff on Wednesday or staff on some other show, on a streamer show. You may have writing credit on some of those episodes, but those aren’t necessarily going to be good things for people to read, because they don’t know what you did on that versus someone else writing on that.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** They may look at your work history and say, “It’s great that you worked on this show,” but they want to read something that’s original to you.

**Miles:** Hundred percent. That’s something that’s important. Usually, we like to read an original piece of work. In the old days, we also used to write spec episodes of shows that existed, which is a less-

**John:** Very uncommon now.

**Miles:** Yeah, but it was actually useful, because they could see if they could imitate your voice. That was something that I think has been lost. You can hire somebody who’s an amazing writer, but they have no aptitude to write our voice, because that’s what you want when you staff people is that they have that facility to be able to mimic you, which is an odd thing for some writers to do.

**Megana:** Jack says, “I’m Jack from England, and I’m a screenwriting student. I wanted to ask you about procrastination. I love writing. I’ve written several shorts and two pilots. I really want to take the next step and write a feature. I keep putting it off, and I know why. I’m terrified of it being terrible and discouraging me. Instead, I find myself procrastinating, and I’m stuck in a terrible place. Do you guys have any tips of squashing procrastination and finally getting around to starting that project?”

**John:** We’ve talked about procrastination a lot of times on the show. Episode 99, we have a big segment on it. I’m curious, the two of you together probably is a good barrier to procrastination, because you hold each other accountable.

**Al:** Exactly. We can also get together and kick around ideas, and it gets that process going, because a lot of times when people are like, “I have writer’s block,” you probably have story block, and you’re trying to work through things or you just hit something. I can see that getting in that cycle of like, oh, is it going to work or not? I think that is the nice thing about a partnership is you do… We always treated it like a job, so you do hold each other accountable.

**Miles:** If we get, as Al says, story blocked, we usually go get pie or doughnuts.

**Al:** Sugar’s great.

**Miles:** Sugar’s great. We just figure it out. The ability to talk it out with someone is often… How you get motivated is usually with a writers’ group or someone who can help you work through the story issues.

Also, often, it can mean that your story isn’t fully formed yet, so spending longer on the outline, making sure that works, so you haven’t written 40 pages of your script and realize the story’s not working, which that leads to depression and starting again. It’s really not launching too early. It’s always wanting to start too soon before you’ve actually… The heavy lifting is the story break, so making sure that you feel confident and you’ve pitched the story to people so you know the structure’s working. Once the structure works, then everything else should be much easier in terms of flowing.

**John:** Advice for Jack, what I hear Miles and Al saying is that having someone who you can work with is incredibly useful. If you don’t have a writing partner, having someone else who can be on your side or just hold you accountable to getting stuff done could be great to get you over the procrastination.

Jack’s also worried about, “The thing I write is going to be terrible,” and it’s going to be discouraging to him. Maybe try approaching it from the opposite way, like, “This is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. This is going to be awful, but I’m going to just do it anyway. It’s going to be bad. I’m going to learn from it.” Try to get yourself started that way, but don’t hold yourself to some impossibly high standard. Hold yourself to actually a pretty low standard [inaudible 00:54:58] to get the work done. You’ve already finished two shorts and two pilots. Great. You know you’re able to actually get stuff done. A feature’s a longer thing, but you can get a feature done.

**Al:** We were talking about this the other day. When we got Lethal Weapon 4, and it was our first big thing, and then you’re like, “Oh shit, how are we going to write this?”

**Miles:** You’re overwhelmed and intimidated.

**Al:** Overwhelmed and intimidated, because movies you loved in college and things like that.

**Miles:** Mimi Leder had written an article actually in Written By, which is the Writers Guild magazine, about this movie Deep Impact and how she got through that. She got through it one scene at a time. It’s really not thinking about the big picture. It’s thinking about every scene is a building block to something. Really, what got us through that script was just focusing on the scene where it was ahead of us and just writing that. We just accumulated scenes.

**Al:** It got you past the intimidation of the-

**Miles:** You just needed to get through a page and a half of a scene, and then you’re fine.

**Megana:** I really like that distinction of story block. Is that something that you’re encountering when you’re going from outline to scriptwriting phase?

**Al:** Our outlines are pretty detailed. When we look at the paragraphs for the scenes, sometimes there’s dialog in them. In some ways it’s kind of a little like a first draft, because you’re trying to work through… We say if it’s a roadmap, it’s giving you all the interstates, so that when you sit down to write, it’s like, “Oh, I can go off to this back road and try this.” It actually frees you up to I think be more creative when you’re actually writing the scenes and not be worried about the math and the architecture, and just being able to focus on writing the scene and knowing it works, so if all else fails, you can go back to this. It does give you opportunities.

**Megana:** You’re figuring out more of that before you even start the outlines.

**Miles:** Absolutely. That’s the key element, that you don’t start before you’re ready. It’s knowing when you’re ready. We’ll spend weeks, months, years sometimes working on just the architecture before we launch in, because you don’t want to launch in and realize, oh, that’s where the story block happens.

**Al:** That’s a lot of what you’re working through in the writers’ room. This was interesting, because we love Zoom rooms, and it’s great when you got the big picture stuff, but then sometimes when you’re writing and you’re getting into the more granular pieces… We’ve said this a couple of times, “I wish we’d all just get in a whiteboard, and we would totally figure this out in a couple hours.” I think there’s that element of it as well.

**John:** The two of you, what is your process for that early stage stuff? Are you guys index carders? Are you whiteboarders? Do you have a thing you go to, or is it just conversation and notes?

**Miles:** A lot of conversations at cafes. We go to the [inaudible 00:57:37] and sit upstairs and eats doughnuts, just sit there for hours talking through the store.

**Al:** We’re like, “Let’s write this down before we forget.” It’s a lot of that. Again, we’ve been writing together for nearly 30 years. I always know if we get together, whatever kind of problem or block we’re having, we will ultimately figure it out. Might not figure it out today. Might be two days from now. It takes a lot of talking through it.

**John:** Either you’ll solve the problem or you’ll realize that you’re trying to answer the wrong questions and figure out something different.

**Al:** Exactly right. You’ll, exactly, do something different.

**Miles:** It is just hours of talking.

**Al:** Even in the writers’ rooms, like we said, we really want the outlines. Everybody knows what it is. The writer knows what the scene’s about. It’s not just the logistics of the scene. It’s what’s the scene about.

**John:** Let’s talk through the last stage of what the scene’s about is really that tone meeting discussion. The script’s been written. It’s there. Everyone can agree on what the words are that are going to be said. The actual approach to how you’re going to shoot the scene and how you’re going to edit the scene, that last conversation is really important too. Can you just talk us through, working with Tim or working with any of your other directors, what is the tone discussion going into a given scene or a given day’s work?

**Al:** What’s interesting is what we… Tim is different than obviously the directors, because what we would do with him… We worked this out, because he’s obviously never had showrunners before. We wanted to respect his process but be available, because it’s keeping a bigger story in your head. What we would do is, we would meet with him in the trailer in the morning and go through all the scenes. He would ask any questions he had. he would then say, “Are there certain things you want to make sure that I hit?”

**Miles:** That’s right.

**Al:** He was also like, “You guys are keeping the big mystery, and so I want to make sure I’m getting all the… ” We’d say, “This is important. That’s important.”

**Miles:** He was amazingly collaborative in all stages, except when he was directing, when he got into his whole directing… He was different in terms of he got into…

**John:** I knew that from Big Fish. I was really curious what that was going to be like on the set, because on Big Fish, it’s like this garage door goes down in front of him.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** He doesn’t want to have that conversation.

**Al:** There were a few days of a pre-shoot so the crew could get their feet. We realized on the first day, we’re like, “We gotta figure out… ” It was a little awkward. We went to him and said, “Look, we want to figure out a system so that we’re respectful of you.” He was like, “I’m glad you guys talked.” He said, “Let’s do it this way.” In the old days, we would just have one big, long tone meeting with the director, and they’d go off and shoot. Then what we started doing, I think it was on Shannara, is we would meet with the director on the weekends, because it’s a block. It’s actually two episodes you’re shooting.

**Miles:** There’s a long-

**Al:** It’s a long-

**Miles:** It’s like 35 days.

**Al:** To keep in your head. We’d go and meet with him and just go through the week’s work when it was a Sunday afternoon and there was no meter running.

**Miles:** They’ve now worked with the actors. Also, we’d sit there and say, “These are the actors’ strengths and weaknesses. This is the crew’s strengths and weaknesses,” just so they have a full picture of what we’re doing. Then we also talk about how we want the scenes shot. We usually have a specific way we want them shot and understanding the visual effects element or whatever it is. It’s making sure that’s communicated so it has a consistence. It’s all about consistency, so every episode feels like it’s the same vision rather than five different directors. That’s always the goal.

Each thing you do, I’m sure John would agree, you learn something new about the process. You never get there. It’s always like, “Oh my gosh.” This one was all about the camera operators, how important they were. It’s always a fascinating learning experience.

**John:** The most difficult people, the most dangerous people you’re going to meet in this business are the ones who’ve had some success and will never change from the way they’ve always classically done things. Those are the situations where you cannot convince them otherwise. The ship can be sinking, and they’re going to stick to their plan, because that’s what’s always worked for them.

**Al:** Exactly right. It’s so true. The other thing too, on this one specifically, is the other directors got all of the dailies. They got to watch all of Tim’s dailies, just to see his process.

**Miles:** [Crosstalk 01:01:59] to match the style.

**Al:** To match the style.

**John:** Great. You have an ongoing crew that’s going to help with everything else, but still, you want to make sure they’re making the same choice about how you’re coming into scenes.

**Al:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s not just about lenses. It’s really what the approach is.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** Great. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you guys have things to recommend to our listeners?

**Al:** My One Cool Thing, because I have a one-track mind, I’m reading a book. It’s called The Way They Were, which is about the making of the movie The Way We Were. It is a fascinating look at the studio process in the ’70s. That movie is a total studio movie. It’s not an auteur movie.

**Miles:** Say what the movie is.

**Al:** The Way We Were.

**John:** The Way We Were.

**Al:** The Way We Were.

**John:** The Redford, Streisand movie.

**Al:** Redford, Streisand, Sydney Pollack.

**John:** I remember that there was a poster of that in our Stark classroom.

**Al:** Yes, there was, because Ray Stark, who was the benefactor, it was his movie. I always forget Art Murphy, who was the first head of the Stark Program, who used to review movies for Variety. He met Ray Stark when he wrote a review of The Way We Were, which he didn’t like. His first line of the review was, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Anyway, it’s a fascinating book just looking at an actual studio movie getting made. It was rewritten by every top screenwriter in town in the ’70s. You had Sydney Pollack as the director, who was a classic studio prestige movie director. It’s a great read, because everybody talks.

**John:** The nice thing about a movie with that much time going past, no one has an ax to grind.

**Al:** Exactly.

**Miles:** Mine’s a little more practical, which is I always use a Moleskine notebook, which is lined, for just jotting down lines or observations or lists, just so it’s actually not just a random thing, so it feels special. I always keep it with me. I think it’s a really good writer’s tool, that you actually physically write stuff, not just note it down on your iPad or iPhone, so it really feels like you’re writing. I think that’s something that’s very useful and I’ve really come to love as a tool.

**John:** Let’s get very Moleskine-specific here. What you’re talking about is about six inches wide, eight inches tall?

**Miles:** Yeah. It’s the hardback small book.

**Al:** It feels like it’s a book.

**John:** Are you a both sides of the page or one side of the page?

**Miles:** I’m both sides.

**John:** You’re both sides of the page. Do you date the pages?

**Miles:** I don’t.

**John:** It’s just continuous going through it all. When you’re done with the notebook, what do you do with it?

**Miles:** I keep them in a stack.

**John:** Are they labeled on the spine, or how do you find them?

**Miles:** No. I got five of them. They’re all full.

**Al:** It’s like a serial killer book.

**Miles:** Each one’s a horrible memory of a different production. They’re sitting there like scars. They’re incredibly useful. I think that’s a really valuable tool, just the physicality of writing what you need to do. That’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Absolutely. I use the notebooks for actually taking notes, not just my to-do list kind of stuff, but for taking notes. I’ll find it’s really useful in meetings just to note who said a thing, and a lot with WGA stuff, who made a point, and so you can go back to it and remember that person was actually a smart person. I have found that being able to go back through and actually find my old note has been really, really useful.

**Miles:** I always do that with casting, when I’m looking at Zoom stuff. I can write all the people down, because sometimes you don’t get the person you want. Just having that physical book rather than just a piece of paper, you can go back to refer to. Even years later you can go back and say, “I like that kid,” or, “I like that actor. What was their name?” You’ve starred that person. It’s really a great tool that’s been lost. I think that’s something that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, because the casting sheets we always used to get were two or three sheets of paper stapled together. You don’t hold onto that. You might take little notes on it, but you’re not going to hold onto it for a while.

**Miles:** The person you like is the one you pick. There could be three other people that are actually pretty good. Also, you don’t necessarily get the first person you want. People can evolve. It’s really I think useful.

**John:** I remember Josh Holloway, who became Sawyer on Lost, came in for a pilot of mine. He was supposed to be playing this Alaska State Trooper. He’s the least Alaskan person you’re ever going to meet. I think I said to him in the room, “You’re not right for this, but you’re fantastic. You’re absolutely going to kill it.” I was right. Those are the kind of people you star and you remember and you keep-

**Miles:** Who did we have? Rachel McAdams came to see us.

**Al:** Rachel McAdams.

**John:** Wow.

**Miles:** For Lois Lane.

**Al:** Lois Lane. This was in Season 3 of Smallville. We didn’t get Lois until Season 4. We met with her, and she had just done a pilot for ABC.

**Miles:** She hadn’t got it, remember?

**Al:** Nancy Drew. Was it Nancy Drew?

**Miles:** She was up for Nancy Drew and she hadn’t got it. We said, “You know what? That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you, because you’re going to be a movie star. Don’t worry about it.”

**Al:** You said, “This has been a great meeting. A year from now, you will not be here.”

**John:** I’m sure you’ve had this experience where the network of the studio will have an actor they absolutely love, and they’ll send them to you, and you’re like, “I don’t understand what you see in this person.”

**Al:** A lot.

**Miles:** A lot.

**Al:** We got a lot of that from The WB.

**Miles:** We’ve put people in the show as well. I won’t mention names. It’s like, “Oh my goodness, what were we thinking?” We want to play ball. Whatever happens happens. We don’t really now take that pressure, do we?

**Al:** No. Also, shows are different. Obviously, ’22, you had a lot of guest stars. You had a lot of those, more opportunities.

**John:** We’ve all been there. My One Cool Thing is incredibly self-serving. For Scriptnotes, we have our Premium subscriptions where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record. People can sign up for that scriptnotes.net. Also, scriptnotes.net, you can click on the Gifts tab, and you can buy a $29 gift pass for Scriptnotes Premium for six months or $49 for a year. You might want to give that as a gift.

Actually, I think the more clever thing to do, as many of our listeners have done, is… You know how you always have that parent or that grandparent that’s like, “I want to get you something for Christmas. I don’t know what to get you,” and you’re like, “I have no idea what to get me.” Ask them to get you a Scriptnotes Premium subscription, because you’ll actually learn something about screenwriting. They’ll feel happy that they got you something that’s going to advance your career. You’ll be happy because you’ll get to hear all the Bonus Segments and Megana laughing at the things we’re saying in the background. If you would like a gift subscription to Scriptnotes or just general Scriptnotes Premium, scriptnotes.net, and there’s a Gifts tab at the top. Al and Miles, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Miles:** Thank you.

**Al:** Thank you. It was great.

**Miles:** Great.

**John:** It was really great. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Locke Norton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig is no longer on Twitter, I’m still @johnaugust for the moment. Are you guys on Twitter or any of the social medias?

**Al:** Not on Twitter, no, on Instagram.

**John:** We’re going to probably take this out of the outline, because no one’s on Twitter anymore. You can 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 weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes, the Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on film school. Al and Miles, thank you so much.

**Al:** Thank you.

**Miles:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The three of us met in film school. I applied to the Stark Program coming from Iowa. I knew nothing about the film industry. I knew what I’d read in Premiere magazine, and that was it.

**Miles:** Premiere magazine.

**John:** I miss Premiere magazines.

**Miles:** I know.

**Al:** Me too.

**John:** Oh my god, it was so good. We all showed up here. We knew nothing, and we came. This was an era before the internet. One of the reasons why I loved USC film school was it had this giant script library. I remember checking out scripts in the library and learning so much. [inaudible 01:09:55] had her own script library. You could check out two a week. It was an invaluable resource. Now that’s just the internet. Any script you ever want to read, it’s there.

Let’s think about recommendations for people who are thinking about film school, pros and cons, who should, who should not be thinking about it. Would the three of us go to film school in 2022 if we were similarly situated? Would you, Al?

**Al:** I probably would. We all have now college-age or almost college-age kids. I don’t think I’d go to film school undergrad.

**John:** I wouldn’t either.

**Al:** I think that’s kind of a waste. I think that was great about our program was it was 25 students. They were all type-A personalities. It was like a reality show before reality shows. I think a lot of these schools cater to the graduate students. I certainly felt like we got all of the information, equipment, everything we needed. It did open doors. We all had internships. We were able to really learn the business. I only wanted to go to film school in Los Angeles. I only applied to USC and I applied to UCLA, both to the producers’ programs, and got into USC, thank god. That really was the entrée in, because we were all coming up together. None of us knew anybody.

**Miles:** Or anything.

**Al:** Or anything, because like you said, it was pre-internet. I would still do it again.

**John:** Miles, would you do it again in 2022?

**Miles:** I would a hundred percent do it again. I would be absolutely nowhere without that experience at film school in terms of a career. It was really what launched us totally, utterly. We still have friends who employ us every now and again from that experience.

For me, it was literally a kid in the UK, “How do I get to Hollywood?” because I had no interest in making films in the UK, because that sensibility was not mine. It was a way to come to America, which was a huge deal as an international student. That was great. I always loved Hollywood movies, so being in LA, that to me was like… It makes sense to come to LA, because that really is still the center of this business. I know there are great film schools all over America and all over the world. I always wanted to make Hollywood movies and be here, so for me it made total sense.

Then I also didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do within the business. Our program in particular was like a grab bag of writing, directing, producing, all of it. I think looking back now, I would like to have directed a lot more. Would I like to have gone to a directors’ program? Probably. That’s what I should’ve done. I’m not complaining about my writing career. It’s an interesting thing.

What I didn’t realize before I came to film school and what I learned very quickly at film school was writing is the essential element of this business. Without a script, without an idea that is executed well, there’s nothing. Writers really are kings. I think that’s amazing that we’re still so undervalued and underappreciated and our lives are hell most of the time. It’s still true. That’s still the lesson I think I learned, which is a revelation when I came, because I always thought the director was everything. Oh my god.

You read the scripts, as John says, from the film library, and you see everything is in the script. You read a great script for everything. There it is, written down, interpreted and executed by the director, but it actually comes from the mind and imagination of the writer.

**Al:** It’s funny, I thought that was interesting. The Oscars I think a couple years ago put the page all the description and answered the question, which we all get, “Do you guys just write the dialog, or do the actors just make that up?” No, they do not.

**Miles:** Exactly. It’s, “What do you guys do?” It’s like, you work it all out.

**John:** Miles, would you go to undergrad for film school?

**Miles:** I wouldn’t, no.

**John:** I agree with you both. I don’t think undergrad film school makes a lot of sense. I think if someone who is an 18-year-old is super into films, great. Go get a liberal arts degree in something else that you also really enjoy. Makes film on the side. Do a bunch of stuff. That should be your complete hobby is making films and learning about films, but it doesn’t have to be your main focus of those four years. Maybe save some money in those first four years. Go someplace that’s not super expensive.

If you really want to go to film school, go to film school for grad school, because that is where you’re going to meet a group of people who are trying to enter into this business at the same time, because as much as I learned in my two years of Stark, it was my classmates.

**Al:** Totally.

**John:** 100%. It was you guys being successful and incredibly competitive at the start. It was all of the drama and all that stuff. It was really helpful.

**Miles:** Of course. Absolutely.

**John:** Of our 25 students, 12 or more are major players in the industry now, because we all rose up together. You guys read my stuff. I read your stuff. Finding a core group of people was essential. I could not have this career without it.

**Miles:** That’s right.

**Al:** Agreed.

**Miles:** It is always a class of 25. 12 of us have been very successful. I feel bad for the others, because it’s a big financial commitment. Nowadays, obviously, you can sit in a room and make amazing stuff on your computer. You have an iPhone, which is incredible. If you want to be a director, there’s no excuse. You can go make a movie tomorrow, five minutes or an hour. Whatever you want to do, you can… The technology is there, and it’s dirt cheap. That’s a difference from our period. You can put it online. It can go viral. It’s amazing what people do. The guy Wes Ball, who did Maze Runner, it’s all from his thing he did in his computer at home in his basement. It’s huge opportunity. I think film school is great in many ways, but that networking element for us was critical.

**John:** I want to circle back to something you said, Miles, because you said as a person coming from the UK. Our program that we went through is now mostly international students. If you are a person who wants to get to Los Angeles, who wants to get to America just to learn about doing stuff, getting into a college is a way to get yourself into the US. You wouldn’t have been able to get a work visa to come here and do stuff.

**Miles:** No, it’s impossible. It wasn’t my motivation for coming, but in terms of coming to Hollywood, it was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t believe I got in, for one thing. It was a dream come true to come here to the epicenter of the movie business. It was a big deal.

**Megana:** Would you choose to do a producing program again?

**John:** It was the right choice for me because I didn’t know anything about anything. I think I imagine myself as a 22-year-old in 2022 who has listened to Scriptnotes and knows that I want to be a writer, maybe I would’ve done that. I may have done a more true production program. I’m sometimes skeptical of the pure writing programs in that it’s a lot of theory and you may not actually get a lot out of it. The nice thing about the program we were in or a production program is that you’re around people who are making stuff and that you’re seeing, “Okay, from what I just wrote here, this is the scene that actually come out.” You get [inaudible 01:16:55] a lot more.

**Al:** Also, I think what the Stark Program was was incredibly practical. Very few of our classes were actually at USC. They were out at Sony. They were at lawyers’ offices. They were at different things. You were just immersed in it right away.

**Miles:** From what John said, a lot of writing programs are navel gazing, over-intellectualized. That’s great if you want to make arthouse movies, but if you want to make commercial Hollywood movies or TV shows, that’s not a great place to start. You’re always going to be resisting, like, “This is my personal story.” It’s like, “That’s great, but that’s not going to be a global sensation or it’s not going to travel. It’s a small movie.” I think for us, USC was about commercial, like Spielberg, George Lucas. That was the goal, wasn’t it?

**Al:** Yeah.

**John:** The other crucial thing people need to remember is that unlike law school or medical school, how you’re doing in your classes does not matter at all. I have no idea what grades I got. I’m sure I did great, but I don’t care.

**Miles:** Remember the documentary class?

**John:** Oh yeah. Classically, people who don’t know the stories, we had this documentary class. Mitchell Block I think was who was teaching it.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** He was so great and so dedicated about how you make documentaries, really about how you raise money to make documentaries. I remember one night he was talking through about PBS grants and how you can get up to $6,000 from PBS for this kind of thing and talking about how you cobble it together. Net to me, our friend Jen, her cellphone goes off. You should not have your cellphone in a classroom. Her cellphone goes off. She runs out into the hall. She comes back, she says, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” Poor Mitchell Block then had to go back to saying how you could get $9,000 from this other little-

**Miles:** Remember he had a great thing about, “You can become your own church and get a grant.”

**Al:** That’s right.

**Miles:** It was like, what are you talking about?

**Al:** I know.

**Miles:** You can’t be serious. Oh my god.

**Al:** So funny.

**John:** The other thing which I would say was really helpful that I got out of Stark, which I would never have really learned otherwise, is that budgeting and scheduling class. It was a drag. I did not enjoy doing it. The fact I can actually read a budget and a schedule and understand what those choices are how to make them… I don’t ever want to do that again, but I can actually understand. I would’ve had a hard time learning how that all worked if I hadn’t had a class that really just walked me through the whole thing.

**Miles:** That gave us a global view of everything, didn’t it?

**John:** Yes.

**Miles:** In terms of the TV thing and the legal element, which is really useful in terms of contracts. It was really a great thing. I think the issue for many people though is just owning what you want to do. Sometimes you don’t know it. I want to be a writer is a hard thing for someone to say and admit, because people will think you’re… Like, “Really?” How do you prove that? It’s like I think declaring you want to be a director. Then you’ve gotta direct and do something, which you can do on an iPhone. If you want to be a writer, you’ve gotta write. It’s not talking about writing. You’ve actually gotta do it. I think that’s something that is difficult for people. I understand why it’s difficult, because it’s really a declaration of your life, a life choice. It’s hard.

**John:** Let’s think through some of the below-the-line skills as well. If you want to be an editor, should you go to film school, if you want to be a cinematographer? I’d say maybe. The pros of it is you’re going to be taught by people who actually have some theory behind stuff, which is great. You may make relationships with people who will actually make a lot of movies down the road too. That could be great. You could DP on their things while they’re in film school, and they keep you around. There are people who have been building whole careers out of that. Yet that’s still not the same kind of practical experience you’d get just working on a set. Being a PA might teach you more about what that all is than [crosstalk 01:20:37].

**Miles:** I agree. The best experience is practical. There’s also a wealth of production now. I think if I were in the UK right now, this is the dream period. There’s so much production in the UK. It’s like, why to go film school? You can work on a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show. It’s about persistence. It’s about the hustle. That’s a great lesson.

I love this lesson from film school. We had this really aggressive producing instructor. He was an old-school Hollywood. He drove this huge Mercedes. He came to his class and said, “I was just pulled over in Beverly Hills speeding to this class. It was the best lesson I’m going to teach you right now about producing, which is beg. When the cop pulled me over, I said, ‘I’m going to get out of this ticket. You know how I’m going to do it? Beg.’ That’s what Hollywood’s about. You beg until they say yes.”

**Al:** Is this Jack Brodsky?

**Miles:** Yeah, Jack. He said, “Guess what? I got no ticket. I bluffed my way out of it, and no ticket.” It’s like, oh my god, that is such the Hollywood hustle.

**Al:** It is true, yeah, because that’s the thing sometimes I think writers forget is that you are an entrepreneur. You do have to really generate your own material. Again, you can change the perception of you with one script. It’s always that. You can’t wait for people to hire you or put you on staff or rely on agents or managers. You really do have to do it yourself. Then the rest comes from that.

**John:** Great. Thanks.

**Al:** Thank you.

**Miles:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Al Gough](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0332184/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/goughalfred/?hl=en)
* [Miles Millar](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0587692/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/milesmillar)
* [Wednesday on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81231974)
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