The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/rian-johnson-returns).
**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has just the smallest bit of swearing. Also, my audio’s a little bit goofy at the start of this podcast, but it gets better as it goes along. You may not even notice, but we pride ourselves on good audio here, so I thought I’d give you a head’s up on that. Enjoy.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 579 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we have a very special guest. He’s the writer/director of Brick, The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Glass Onion, and the upcoming Poker Face on Peacock. It’s returning champion Rian Johnson.
**Craig:** Woo!
**John:** Rian Johnson, welcome.
**Rian Johnson:** Yay. Oh, thank you for having me. This is like sinking into a warm bath, being back with you guys.
**John:** Aw.
**Craig:** Then you open your veins and just slip away.
**Rian:** Just no pain.
**Craig:** No pain.
**Rian:** It just slips away.
**Craig:** Just go to sleep in my arms, Rian. Shh.
**John:** Now, of the three of us, I am the only person who’s not in the middle of a press tour, because Craig, you’re doing your press for your show. Rian, it’s just an endless press tour, because the movie came out, I saw it on a big screen, and yet it’s still not out as we’re recording this, on Netflix. Is your life just press at this point?
**Rian:** Yeah, it’s a lot of press, but I don’t mind it. I actually enjoy it. It’s fun. I like the whirlwind. Travel is really fun. You get to talk to people about the movie. I don’t mind it. It’s been pretty nonstop.
**Craig:** I think if we are lucky, maybe when we do start to ask Rian questions, we can start with the questions we think he gets asked the most, because there are those questions that-
**Rian:** That would be a nice change. People sit down and they’re like, “I’m going to ask you some stuff that no one’s ever asked you before. What was the origin of this movie?”
**Craig:** “What is the origin of this movie?” is my favorite. Sometimes someone will ask a question, and I’ll say, “Let me rephrase your question. How did all this happen?” We will endeavor to do better than that.
**Rian:** I’ll take that over the… What sends chills down my spine is when you sit down and realize it’s going to be a fun interview.
**John:** Oh, no.
**Rian:** They’re like, “We have a little game that we worked up for you.” I’m like, “Oh god, please just ask me how it was to work with the actors. Please.”
**Craig:** “We brought Clue. We’re going to play it with you. We’re going to try and do a speed run of Clue.” We’ll do better.
**John:** Here’s things I know I want to talk to you about. I want to talk about theaters versus watching it at home, because I saw it in both venues. I want to talk about the differences between that. I want to talk about suspension of disbelief, which is crucial for any movie, but also especially important for a movie like yours, red herrings, sequels. I want to talk about ChatGPT. We got some more listener questions I think will be just right for Rian Johnson.
I think we’ll save all spoiler stuff for the Bonus Segment. If you’ve not seen Glass Onion as you’re listening to this episode, don’t worry, you can listen to the whole episode. It won’t be spoiled for you. Then if you’re a Premium Member, you get to stick around for the Bonus Segment and hear all the spoilers where I ask Rian some tough questions about the movie he made.
**Craig:** You make him squirm.
**Rian:** That’s right. That’s right.
**Craig:** I’m just going to make that noise the whole time. John, talk to me about this. We’ve got a situation with our subscribers.
**John:** It is. Our Premium membership goes through supporting cast. Megana and I were talking to them this last week. They said, “It’s strange because 80 to 90% of your members are month to month, but they’re monthly members, so they’re paying us $5 a month,” which is great. Thank you for doing that, but also, you could be saving a lot of money if you were an annual member, get an annual subscription.
**Craig:** A lot is a strong word for what we’re offering them, because if they do this, how much would they save?
**John:** Traditionally, it’s 5 bucks a month or it’s $49 a year. There’s some savings to go to annual. I thought let’s just encourage people to make the smarter, wiser choice. We’re going to do a promo code for the next month, let’s say through January 15th. The promo code “onion” at checkout will save an extra $10. That makes it $39 a year rather than $49.
**Rian:** I see what you did there.
**John:** Tied into Rian Johnson.
**Rian:** Don’t involve me, John. Don’t involve me in your goddamn show.
**Craig:** You are now a deductible in the class-action lawsuit that is going to be coming our way.
**Rian:** I was going to say. Mr. Johnson. I’m going to be like the end of The Jerk, writing out a ton of checks.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**Rian:** 39 cents! It’s a wonderful deal. It’s a wonderful deal.
**Craig:** We’re a company that wants to make less money. I think that’s really what we’re saying here is stop it with all this money you’re sending us. This makes sense. I think people should do that. I like it. Promo code. Also, I have to say, John, I’m so glad that you created the promo code “onion.” Obviously, everyone who listens to this show knows I had nothing to do with this. This is entirely all John’s doing. It’s smart and I love it, because whenever I see that there’s a promo code box and I don’t have a promo code, I feel so mad. When there is one and it works, what a dopamine hit.
**John:** It really is. It’s good.
**Rian:** It’s a satisfying moment, yeah.
**John:** Craig, talk me through the math. $39 versus $60 a year.
**Craig:** That’s $21.
**John:** That’s four months free.
**Craig:** Again, that’s the thing is I can’t say that we’re going to save you a ton of money. Legitimately, our goal is to make as little as possible, so do it. Go for it.
**John:** The best way to save money is to actually not buy it for yourself but to get your parents or your grandparents to buy it for you, because you always have those people like, “Oh, what should I get you, son or daughter, for Christmas?” Scriptnotes.
**Craig:** I think grandparents at this point are young enough to know what a podcast is. They’ve been around long enough.
**John:** It would make them proud. Hey, some follow-up. Rian Johnson, I don’t know if you’ve been watching the World Cup at all. What country is the World Cup being played in?
**Rian:** It’s obvious from my blank stare that the extent to which I’ve been watching the World Cup is passing by televisions where groups of cooler people than me are gathered around them, very involved. I haven’t been paying enough attention to the World Cup. I have no clue, John. I have no clue.
**John:** It’s a Middle Eastern country. It starts with a Q.
**Rian:** It’s Qatar [kuh-TAR], that’s right, because there was the controversy about it. I did read about that.
**John:** That’s what I want to do for some follow-up. We were discussing how to pronounce the name of that country.
**Craig:** I was saying Qatar [KUH-ter], and apparently, it’s not Qatar [KUH-ter].
**John:** The thing is actually there’s not a great place, so I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article by Sarah Lyall for the New York Times talking about the fact that we can’t agree on how to pronounce the name of this country, Q-A-T-A-R, and there’s reasons why there’s no great American pronunciation or English pronunciation for the country, and maybe we should just be fine with however you want to pronounce it. We all know what country we’re talking about, Qatar [kuh-TAR], Qatar [KUH-ter].
**Rian:** How do you say it, John?
**John:** I was originally saying Qatar [kuh-TAR], and then all of the news people were saying Qatar [KUH-ter]. I’m like, “Oh, maybe that’s how you’re supposed to really say it.” In Arabic, it’s just not really either of those things. It’s one of those places that hasn’t been around in English long enough, that we just agree to call Paris Paris [PEH-riss] rather than Paris [pah-REE]. It’s just in the weird middle place.
**Rian:** Got it.
**Craig:** That’s so upsetting. There’s no right answer is what you’re saying.
**Rian:** Yeah. Scriptnotes!
**Craig:** I read this article years and years ago that was just an analysis of the different ways people would spell Qaddafi, Gadhafi, Qadhdhafi.
**Rian:** Oh, wow.
**Craig:** You can put as many Fs or Qs or Ks or Ds as you wanted. It didn’t matter. The only thing people agreed on was that it ended in an I.
**John:** Kabul [kah-BULL] is the same situation.
**Craig:** Kabul [KAA-bl]. Kabul [kah-BULL]? Kabul [KAA-bl].
**Rian:** Growing up in San Clemente, there was a freeway exit just north of our high school that was Calle Estrella [es-TRAY-uh], but everybody in San Clemente, if you were from San Clemente, you pronounced it [es-TRELL-uh]. I hope that’s changed. I hope that’s changed.
**Craig:** We live in Los Angeles with Los Feliz [lohs FEE-luss], which is not correct at all.
**Rian:** Los Feliz [lohs fuh-LEES].
**Craig:** In Florida there’s a lake that is Lake Buena [BWAY-nuh] Vista, but they pronounce it Buena [BYOO-nuh] Vista.
**John:** Buena [BYOO-nuh] Vista.
**Craig:** Jesus.
**John:** A thing that always struck me about Los Angeles is that we have two important north-south streets. We have La [lah] Cienega and La [luh] Brea. If you say La [lah] Brea, everyone’s like, “What? That’s weird. It’s La [luh] Brea.” The same La in both cases.
**Craig:** That is weird.
**Rian:** What is that about?
**John:** I don’t know.
**Rian:** We don’t say La [luh] Cienega.
**John:** Rian, I’m sure you’ve seen this in some of your research, but if you look at old movies set in Los Angeles, it’s Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
**Craig:** Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
**John:** Up until 1940 or something, it was Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
Craig and **Rian:** Welcome to Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees], Mr. Fink.
**Rian:** Me and you, buddy.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**Rian:** Me and you, Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN]. Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN] and me, we’re in it.
**Craig:** Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN].
**John:** Rian Johnson, Glass Onion. I saw it in the theater, because you had that one-week theatrical release. It was so delightful to see on a big screen. Even in the first 10 minutes when we have the split-screening, the split-screenings work so well on big screen. They work on TV too, but they work so well on a split screen.
**Craig:** Worked great on my laptop.
**John:** All right.
**Rian:** I was going to say, Craig.
**John:** Craig.
**Rian:** Watched me on your Apple Watch last night, and texting me through the whole goddamn thing.
**Craig:** You were texting back.
**Rian:** “I know who did it. I know who did it.” Yeah, I was texting back, “Stop texting me. Watch the movie.”
**John:** Let’s talk about that social contract thing, because I watched it-
**Rian:** Thank you, John. Thank you, John.
**John:** I watched it a second time with Megana and Nima on the TV. It’s a different experience for many reasons. It’s a smaller screen, but also the social contract is different when you’re watching something on a TV screen. When you’re talking during it, and Nima’s shouting out these theories about things, there’s a social aspect to it that’s just different seeing it on a small screen versus a big screen. I think it’s especially relevant in a puzzle box mystery like you’re creating. I could ask them, “What do you think is happening at this moment? Where do you think the story’s going next?” I’m not going to turn to somebody who’s sitting next to me in a theater during that time. Also, I can pause it and get a drink from the fridge, seeing it at home.
It just is such a different experience. It’s not better or worse. As you sat down to make this movie, and you knew you were going to make this one for Netflix, were you thinking about the form under which people are going to experience the movie the first time?
**Rian:** No, I’m not that smart. I was thinking I was just making a movie. I guess just because is what I grew up with. I just make movies assuming that people are going to be sitting in a theater, I guess, watching it, having the description you described in the theater. I don’t know how you could calibrate. Do you guys feel like there’s a way to calibrate writing for that second scenario you described, John? By its nature, you’re not in control of it. There’s nothing you can to do build in anything, and I feel like it would probably be a bad idea to try to. I don’t know, maybe you guys disagree.
**Craig:** I don’t have any clue of what would be different. When we write movies in the old days, before streaming, when we wrote movies, we were also aware that they were going to end up on tiny little seat-back screens on United Airlines or on someone’s television at home.
**Rian:** Home video.
**Craig:** Home video. It’s always been this way. We’ve skipped a part where it was… That was the thing, the joke people would say, “I’ll wait until it comes out on video.” Now, you don’t have to wait until it comes out on video. It’s out. It ends up there anyway. I think there are two kinds of movies that people these days are saying are worth that theatrical experience more than others. One of them is comedy. Glass Onion is a comedy. I look at it as almost a pure comedy, even though obviously, primarily, it’s the murder mystery genre. I think even more than Knives Out, this one felt like it was designed for a lot of people to sit together and laugh.
**Rian:** Very much so. Very much so.
**John:** It’s also a comedy in the sense that if you met any of those characters in real life, they’d be the most extreme person you’ve ever met. They’re all really big, big, broad, silly people. This ties into suspension of disbelief. You just have to accept this is the world we’re in. Very quickly, you have to establish that as the writer and as the director.
**Rian:** That was a hold your breath and jump type moment for me when I started writing, because the first one was about a family in New England. It was still very heightened and aware of its own genre, but it was still a lot more grounded than this. This one, the moment I started figuring out who and what it was about, the whole thing just very naturally started ratcheting up in terms of the tone into a much more comedic…
I think when I talked to Edward Norton about the script before I sent it to him, I said, “Just to brace you, this is a little different. We go a little more Strangelove with this one. The tenor of the whole thing is just much more heightened.” For me though, that’s just entirely a product, again, of who and what it’s about. The instant I started writing about a tech billionaire at the center of this thing and the natural group of friends that he would have, any time I would try and tamp it down, you would open the news.
If the object was to reflect the nightmarish carnival reality that we’ve all had our heads in, in terms of the pop culture space with these people for the past six years, there’s no grounded version of that, because that defines the past six years in terms of our experience of watching these folks is it just keeps getting more and more garish and huge and nightmarish. Just when you think it can’t top itself, it tops itself. Anyway, all to say there was a natural gravity, and also to say it’s specific to this film. That’s one big thing going forward, because I’m already starting to doodle and write the next movie. It’s not like this is a trajectory of where these are going. This is just what this on required. I’m really excited actually about the idea that each one of them will be different according to the needs.
**Craig:** Even though these characters are pretty pushed, some more than others, I’m still… Kate Hudson is so fantastic-
**Rian:** So good.
**Craig:** … and can play something that… There was a time when her mother, Goldie Hawn, ruled the world as the ding-dong, a slightly daffy, beautiful, but confused person. That fell out of style, maybe because it just got super tropey. Then it comes back. It comes roaring back. She reminded me so much of her mom in this movie, which was so wonderful to see. These characters, their expression is pushed, their expression is broad, but inside, there’s actual, legitimate things going on.
If I were you, and I’m curious if you were you, it would be the same… You have a general sense of what you want to write here, but when you’re designing all the machinery of the murder mystery, are you pulling out what ought to happen from the way these characters relate to each other, meaning do you design the mystery for the relationships that are there, or do you design the mystery and then say, “How should these relationships fit into this machinery?”
**Rian:** I guess it’s the second one, but “when I designed the mystery” is maybe the wrong way of putting it. I would say I designed the story. That may seem like a fine distinction. For me, the difference is just I definitely don’t create a field of suspects and then pick, “Okay, which one done it?” I start like with any other type of movie. I start with structure. Structure contains the mystery within it. The structure isn’t even defined exactly by the mystery.
I’ll avoid spoilers with Glass Onion, so I’ll talk about Knives Out. We will talk Knives Out spoilers, I guess. In the first one, it was the notion of getting a character that the audience actually cares about, doing this false reveal that, oh my god, they actually did do the murder, but still keeping the audience genuinely on their side emotionally, so it’s not like a Norman Bates in Psycho type empathy. It is actually like you want her to get away with it. Then introducing the detective and the tropes of the genre where you know they never get away with it in the end, and then doing the actual reveal at the end of, oh, there’s been a murder mystery hiding underneath this the whole time. The decisions for all the characters were backed into through the needs of making that work.
The character of Ransom, Chris Evans’s character, was very much backed into in terms of, how do I genuinely fake out the audience at the end. It can’t be a sympathetic character. It has to be something that ultimately makes sense. If your first impression of him is, “Yeah, he did it,” and then you think, “Oh, they’re doing a jiu-jitsu, using that against me type thing of, of course the one person you think did it is the only one who is actually on her side against all these monsters,” and then the reveal at the end, nope, he actually is exactly what he seemed at the beginning, that’s going to be satisfying for the audience, because you’re going to feel a balance. You’re not going to feel like we cheated. The first thing we told you is the thing that is actually true. That’s the math that goes into all the characters for me. It is a very character-driven process, but it starts with structure, and then the characters are put in to serve their functions in it, I guess.
**Craig:** I did not expect that.
**John:** As we get to the spoiler section, let’s talk about potential spoilers for the whole career and profession of screenwriting. We got a lot of questions this last week about AI and ChatGPT and other systems that are going to replace us as writers.
**Craig:** Oh, good.
**John:** Being a representative question. Megana, how about Josh’s question?
**Megana Rao:** Josh wrote in, “I’ve been an avid listener for years, but I’ve never felt compelled to actually write in until now. By now we’ve all seen the ChatGPT AI chat bot that, according to Forbes, is able to write college-level essays when given a prompt, boosting concerns that such technology can replace human workers like journalists or programmers in the future.
“A friend of mine who works in tech called me the other day to warn me that AI like this is going to be writing most screenplays for movies in 10 years and that I should get in front of it now by learning how to utilize it. His call was well intentioned, but it sent me into something of an existential spiral. If AI can write technically competent, entertaining screenplays, what’s stopping studios from using AI to generate the screenplays for all of their tent pole franchise films? With the demand for new content higher than it’s ever been, why wouldn’t a mainstream platform use an AI to churn out a hundred episodes that fill time and entertain well enough? Basically, he was saying that it’s going to be near impossible to make a living as a writer much sooner than people think, and I’m frankly freaking out.”
**John:** I had a chance to play with ChatGPT and other versions like it. It’s just really, really impressive. Rian and Craig, have you tried any of these yourselves?
**Craig:** No, I haven’t. When Josh said, “By now, we’ve all seen,” I was like, “Eh.” I got news for you, Josh.
**John:** You guys have been busy.
**Rian:** I’ve seen examples of it. I’ve seen examples of it. I haven’t messed with it myself. I’ve seen the stuff that some people have-
**Craig:** We’ve got a screen share suddenly.
**John:** I’m going to screen share.
**Rian:** Screen share.
**John:** I’m going to screen share here.
**Rian:** Hide your porn, John.
**John:** I have ChatGPT open here. Let’s ponder, let’s think about something that we might try to use ChatGPT for. Should we have it figure out a plot for… You’re starting to work on the next Knives Out. Should we have it start to think about it?
**Rian:** Give me it, man. I’ll take it. God, yes, please. Let’s see what’d happen if we took the franchise to space with the next one. Let’s say Benoit Blanc is taken to a moon base.
**Craig:** Let’s do that. Can we tell it to do that?
**John:** Sure. I’m doing that right now. Give me a plot summary for a Knives Out murder mystery set in space with Benoit Blanc.
**Craig:** That’s all you say is, “Give me a plot for that.” Wow.
**John:** Craig, would you just read this aloud?
**Craig:** “In this futuristic murder mystery set in space, renowned detective Benoit Blanc is called to investigate the apparent suicide of a wealthy space station owner. Upon arriving at the space station, Blanc quickly realizes that the death was actually a carefully planned murder and sets out to uncover the truth. With the help of a diverse cast of suspects, including the victim’s family, Blanc must unravel the complex web of lies and motives to identify the killer. As he delves deeper into the case, he finds himself up against a cunning adversary who will stop at nothing to keep their deadly secret hidden.” Does it do more than that? That’s just basically saying Benoit Blanc goes to a murder mystery.
**Rian:** To me, what’s mostly impressive is just the grammatically correct-
**Craig:** The sentences work.
**Rian:** … structuring of cut and paste of the linear progression of what the movie is. There’s nothing in there that isn’t cut and paste from either fan theories or what people wanted to see or other stuff, although I guess depending on the type of movie you’re talking about, that might be enough. I can think of some big movies that, yeah, that’ll work, but I don’t know.
**Craig:** I love the sentences. I love the way that basically this thing is doing a great job of being a bullshit artist. I have seen this in rooms where people start pitching things and it’s all about cadence and confidence. Then you realize, “They’ve told me nothing.” What’s happening here is ChatGPT, to me, doesn’t seem to be threatening screenwriters. It seems to be threatening producers who go around saying stuff like this.
**Rian:** Good in a room. It’s good in a room.
**Craig:** It reminds me of my grasp of story structure when I was beginning, right at the beginning. Maybe it will grow and get better and better. It’s certainly leaning hard into the expected.
**John:** Let’s do one last push on this. I’m saying, “Okay, this doesn’t feel very space-oriented. Let’s make sure this does a lot in space, with things that can only happen there. Give me a three-act structure.”
**Craig:** Whoa. Here it comes.
**Rian:** Whoa.
**Craig:** First of all, the fact that it understood that is insane. “Act 1. Benoit Blanc arrives at the space station to investigate the apparent suicide of its owner. He quickly realizes that it was actually a carefully planned murder and begins to interview the suspects, including the victim’s family and business associates.” That was Act 1. “Act 2. As Blanc delves deeper into the case, he uncovers a complex… ” They’re just restating the other stuff.
**John:** Yeah, they are.
**Rian:** This is just restating it.
**Craig:** Then Act 3, oh, new, “However, the killer,” in Act 3, “attempts to flee the space station in a spaceship. In a thrilling finale,” that’s a little strong, “Blanc must pursue the killer through the vastness of space in order to bring them to justice.” Oh, man. They blew it at the end. They had me and they lost me.
**John:** They did.
**Craig:** “Along the way they faced very… ” Oh my god.
**Rian:** Yet you can totally see this working in a room. Some asshole gets up on the table and is pumping their arm and pointing at the exec. You can see execs coming out of the room saying, “That was the best pitch I’ve ever seen in my life.”
**Craig:** “I had to dodge meteors and asteroids and [inaudible 00:23:57].”
**Rian:** Starts grabbing the bottled water off the table and throwing it. I can see this working.
**Craig:** ChatGPT is an asshole producer. That’s basically what it is at this point.
**Rian:** Like you said, this is like my initial grasp of story thing. I don’t know, as this gets better, is it going to get better the way that we got better at it, or is this smoke and mirrors, and this is a cut and paste thing from the internet, and it is very impressive in terms of… I don’t know, because I don’t know the mechanics behind it. That’s the weird question. I don’t know.
**Craig:** Also, one thing, Josh, I’m going to try and comfort you here a little bit, because I get it. It’s easy for me to be more relaxed about this, because I’m 51 years old. 10 years from now, he’s done. Wheel him into the old age home. For people that are coming on up, here’s one thing that I think will hopefully save us, and that is actors. Even if they digitize actors, they still have to talk. As long as actors are there to say, “Who wrote this shit and how do I fix it?” there will be a job for a human to come and say, “Sorry, the robot clearly blew it there. Let me see if I can make this better.”
Basically, at this point, there’s… David Erlich, who’s a critic, he wrote this thing of like, anyone that bets against James Cameron is insane, doesn’t matter what the trailer looks like. I think the same thing is true for technology at this point. It’s so drastically changed our lives. Look at what we’re doing now. We’re making a podcast over Zoom. Everything’s changed. I think it’s possible that something that is exhibiting this quiet level of competence could get good.
**John:** Let’s see if it can actually write us a scene here. I’ll say, “Write a scene in which Benoit first meets the police investigator, the police person in charge here, at the space station.” Rian, give me some prompts, something that the scene is about, something to hang this on.
**Rian:** They talk about the clue of a broken air hose on the victim’s spacesuit.
**John:** I love it.
**Craig:** They’re going to compete over this, and one of them is going to be… Then they’re going to work together.
**Rian:** Then they have to work together.
**Craig:** Then they’re going to fly through space. By the way, the third act goes crazy and becomes Battlestar Galactica.
**John:** It’s actually a hundred percent true though, right?
**Craig:** I know. That is what ends up happening when you’re like, “We don’t know how it ends, so we go crazy.” All right, here we go. “Benoit Blanc and Constance Pickering.”
**Rian:** That’s pretty great.
**Craig:** “Blanc is standing over a holographic display of the victim’s spacesuit, examining a broken air hose. Pickering approaches and clears her throat, drawing Blanc’s attention. ‘I’m Constance Pickering, and I’ve been assigned to investigate the death of Marcus Wells.’ Blanc raises an eyebrow. ‘Marcus Wells? I was under the impression that his death was a suicide.'” That doesn’t sound like something he would say. “Pickering shakes her head. ‘Not according to the evidence. The broken air hose on his spacesuit indicates he was suffocated.'”
**Rian:** Oh, wow.
**Craig:** “‘This was clearly a murder.’ Blanc considers this for a moment. ‘Interesting, and what leads do we have so far?’ Pickering crosses her arms. ‘As of now, we have a list of suspects but nothing concrete. I was hoping to discuss the case with you and see if we could combine our efforts.’ Blanc nods. ‘I think that’s a splendid idea.'” Even though we were competing for about .1 seconds, let’s work together and see if we can’t crack this case wide open. By the way, I am available for looping if Daniel Craig is not.
**Rian:** That’s pretty darn good.
**John:** It’s pretty good.
**Rian:** I was going to say. You’re hired.
**Craig:** Wow. Jeez. This is terrible actually.
**Rian:** This is really bad.
**Craig:** It’s not consistent. “Rewrite this as a screenplay.” I like the fact that John is just this brutal taskmaster and chat bot’s like, “Okay, I’m trying.”
**John:** We don’t need to read through this again, but basically, the first version of this was actually in prose form, and I just said, “Rewrite this as a screenplay scene.” It’s doing exactly what [inaudible 00:28:06].
**Craig:** It’s actually terrible. Really, profoundly terrible. Blanc is staring at this thing. She comes in and says something terrible. All the dialog is awful. Blanc seems stupid. Then she says, “Not according to the evidence. The broken air hose indicates that he was suffocated. This was clearly a murder.” There’s nothing to support that whatsoever.
**John:** Here’s what’s surprising and impressive to me is the fact that this large language model understands that a murder in space could be about a broken air hose and suffocation would be a thing.
**Rian:** Absolutely.
**John:** That’s surprising to me that in 2022-
**Rian:** That’s incredibly impressive that-
**Craig:** It’s pretty cool.
**Rian:** … from the prompt you gave it, it drew this out. Absolutely. Not a good scene, but very impressive.
**Craig:** This chat bot is now better than most people. I’m being serious about it. Screenwriting is hard. The average person, if they wrote a scene, it would not be this good. This is still a bad scene, but screenwriting is hard. What chat bot has to do is become the best in the world to defeat the Rian Johnson’s out there. The only rooting interest I have in ChatGPT at this point is defeating Rian Johnson.
**John:** Let’s go back to Josh’s questions and fears. I think one thing to give him hope, and I think we’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, is that screenwriting is about pushing words around on the page, which ChatGPT is getting better at doing, but it’s also about being able to be with people and communicate what the vision is for the thing and being able to respond and address their concerns. It’s being able to talk to Daniel Craig about why his line is that way and how to treat the line, if it’s that the line is not fitting that actor right or fitting the moment right.
So much of the job is not just the words on the page but also the communication about the story on the whole. That’s the thing that computers have a much harder time doing. It’s the subtle, have to be there in person, have to be there in the flesh to do stuff. That’s not going to change.
**Craig:** Or…
**Rian:** The robot dog with the little reading glasses.
**Craig:** At some point it may just be Wall-E. We’re just sitting there in our chairs, and they’re making movies for us. We can adjust the movie as we’re going. You get to the end of Glass Onion, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s who did it? I don’t like that. Fix it.” The movie starts over.
**Rian:** I want to see a robot on set just throwing a script down, like, “Your motivation is your fucking salary.”
**Craig:** “Get out of the trailer, you piece of shit. We are paying you $800,000 an episode.” Then another robot’s like, “I asked for almonds. These are cashews. I’m out.” I like that idea. I like that they’re harassing each other. If we’re going to teach them to be like us, I’m just saying, they’re going to end up being like us.
**John:** It needs to do a behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of the actual production, so the reboot, behind-the-scenes thing, so we see how it’s all put together and made.
**Rian:** There you go. I like it [crosstalk 00:31:17].
**Craig:** Oh, wow.
**John:** I don’t think there’s a thing to do about this. I don’t think there’s legislation that’s going to happen. I don’t see there’s a way to protect ourselves from this necessarily. I think it’s making peace with it and recognizing that some of it is going to be transformative. Some of it can be really helpful, in the way like we moved from typewriters to word processors, we actually got more done, can do some more stuff ourselves. It’s going to be a change. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s going to be there.
**Craig:** There are some movies where the plot is AI gets out of control, and then there’s a war. I think the backstory of The Matrix is, or between 1 and 2 or something, that there’s this whole robot war. The whole fundamental backstory of Dune is that civilization got into a war with their own AI and had to destroy them. Now AI is illegal. That’s why you have Mentats, the human computers.
**Rian:** Is this the point where we reveal that John has been an AI for the past year of Scriptnotes? Suddenly, he just pixelates, and the real John steps out and says-
**Craig:** “I’ve been just sitting in my room. I wrote this.” I think it’s much more interesting if I end up being the AI. I think I’m actually easier to program. I’m way more predictable, just like, “Oh, there’s the umbrage subroutine. Oh, there’s this stupid [crosstalk 00:32:37].”
**John:** Hey, Craig, do you remember when we did-
**Rian:** Run disgruntled.
**Craig:** Run disgruntled guy.
**Rian:** Disgruntled subscripts 23.
**Craig:** Go to 10.
**Rian:** Go to 10, semicolon.
**John:** Back at the live show we did with Melissa McCarthy and folks, we did a thing where I plugged in all the Scriptnotes transcripts into this Markov chain generator, and we had a conversation between you and me that was all computer generated. That was only three or four years ago, and things have just progressed so much more.
**Craig:** They have. What’s happened is they’ve gotten way smoother with the stuff that’s rules-based. The grammar is spectacular. The punctuation I’ve loved, and also the complexity of the sentences with interior clauses. This thing’s actually a good writer. It’s just that it doesn’t have any ideas of its own. It’s clearly just puking out stuff. It certainly knows how to choose wisely. It really is as good as most producers. I’m not joking.
**Rian:** The thing that it’s doing absolutely none of is things that don’t make sense for the characters to do in a completely linear thought type way. It’s doing, “Here’s the bad idea.” It’s just doing the bad idea.
**Craig:** It’s the bad idea.
**Rian:** The notion of something that’s genuinely unexpected, but people acting like actual people in real life, doing stuff that makes no sense, and then it reveals why they did it, that’s interesting. Are you about type [crosstalk 00:33:58]?
**Craig:** Yep, he is.
**Rian:** Are you about to type in, “Do something that doesn’t seem like it makes sense.”
**Craig:** He’s asking it to translate the scene to French.
**Rian:** Translate the scene to French. That’s easy.
**Craig:** (speaking French)
**Rian:** (speaking French)
**John:** This is something I think might actually be an opportunity though. What this could really open up is writers whose native language is not English, who want to write English scripts. I think it’s a chance for them to actually have natural, native-sounding English, even if they don’t actually have that themselves.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** That ability to rephrase and to write in English, even though it’s not your native tongue, I think will be a lot better, because there’s definitely people who can read in English really well, and they know what that is, but they can’t do it themselves. That will be interesting to see whether more international writers can do it.
**Rian:** I don’t know if it’s actually what you’d define as AI technology, but in the Google Translate apps and all that-
**Craig:** That is AI.
**Rian:** You can see how that’s going to be transformative in the next decade. It’s going to be like in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish in our ear. It’s kind of exciting to think about that aspect of it, because it’s getting so good.
**Craig:** Didn’t Microsoft advertise… There’s a great article I read about how Google Translate was based on this old, very formal way of doing it, and then they did go into this fuzzy logic AI world and it just made it so much better, so much faster. It’s getting better every day. People are working on the put it in your ear and it hears what people are saying and translates it live in real time. That’s the thing I’m waiting for. That’s just going to be such a joy. It’s just going to make ordering in restaurants a little bit easier, and that is what it’s all about.
**John:** I’ve also seen demos of real-time subtitles, so basically glasses you wear, and it’s subtitling life in front of, which could be effective as well.
**Rian:** God, I wish Douglas Adams was still around and on Twitter.
**Craig:** I know, for a lot of reasons, yeah.
**Rian:** What would he make of all this? No kidding.
**John:** It’s time for one of our favorite segments, which is…
John and **Craig:** Megana Has a Question.
**Megana:** I have a question about variable frame rate. I saw this tweet by Eben Bolter about Avatar: The Way of Water.
**Craig:** Eben Bolter, by the way, just to interrupt, one of the cinematographers on HBO’s upcoming television series The Last of Us.
**Megana:** Oh, wow.
**John:** That’s nice.
**Megana:** Maybe you can explain this to me.
**Craig:** Yes, please. Sorry, Megana. Sorry for the interruption. Just wanted to say Eben Bolter is a wonderful and very, very smart guy. You would love him, Rian. He’s a scientist. I know you like a scientist-y piece.
**Rian:** I like a good scientist.
**Craig:** All right, Megana, apologies.
**Megana:** That’s my question. In this tweet, Eben says that he saw Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D and that it was projected at 60 frames per second, but Cameron’s actually moving between 60, 48, 30, and 24 frames per second, shot by shot. I was confused by what that meant, because it challenges what I think about frame rate.
**John:** Rian Johnson, you’re a person who makes movies. Can you tell us about frame rates as they exist in 2022 and what we’re used to and what the options are?
**Rian:** For most of the modern history of cinema, we’ve been watching movies at 24 frames a second. When you watch a film, it literally means that every second there’s 24 distinct frames on the screen. Also, through the history of cinema, there have been people who have messed around with, what if we made that frame rate higher? Is it Douglas Trumbull who was-
**Craig:** He was trying to do 48 or…
**Rian:** Yeah, he did. He was trying to push it up. There have been historic precedents for trying it, but it’s never took. Recently, there has been a new push. Peter Jackson I think is the one who’s done it on the biggest scale in his Hobbit movies.
**Craig:** Ang Lee also did it.
**Rian:** Ang Lee has experimented with it. It’s just bumping it up to more frames a second. What that does, it takes out an element of stutter to it. It takes out an element of smeariness to it. It makes everything incredibly crisp and clear. If you’re used to watching stuff at 24 frames a second, it feels very, very odd. You get lots of people making the analogy, because it’s mostly where we’ve seen non-24 frames a second thing, to an iPhone. It looks like it was shot with an iPhone because it doesn’t have that stutter to it.
You can get into philosophical questions of, is it just what we’re used to, or is it something where the human brain actually does… It feels odd. The process is real. The notion that higher frame rates actually more duplicate what we see with our eye in real life, not really, I don’t think, because your brain is processing it. The fact that it looks weird to us tells me maybe no, but I don’t know.
Multiple frame rates is exactly that. It’s that Cameron can actually make the movie so that in the action scenes, when there’s tons of stuff moving around, suddenly it’s at, whatever, 120 frames a second or whatever it is, so that it’s not smearing and you can see all the individual things. Then when it’s in the dialog, more intimate scenes, you can dial it back down seamlessly to 24 frames a second. Suddenly, it feels more natural. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m very curious to see it. I generally have not been a fan of high frame rate stuff that I’ve seen already.
**Craig:** Same.
**Rian:** I’m an old grumpy man though.
**Craig:** As well. Look who you’re talking to. What’s fascinating to me is, first of all, one of the strange things about frame rates is that because it started with film cameras, and 24 frames per second was essentially about the fastest they could go with intermittent motion and the sprockets pulling the frames down. Also, 24 frames per second was enough to satisfy the need for persistent motion, that the eye couldn’t tell that it was looking at a lot of pictures. Our brain could fil in the gaps, and it seemed smooth to us.
When television came along, because of the way electricity works and the way television was operating by scan lines and frequencies, 30 frames a second, or 29.98 [crosstalk 00:40:24] is how television works. Now what happens is we have to figure out how to go from 24 frames per second to, okay, we’re going to air it on television. That’s where you got this whole telecine 3:2 pull down thing where they would duplicate a few frames here or there or actually split frames up into two frames because of the scan lines. Now, here we don’t have that problem per se. He’s projecting at 60 frames per second. I get where, okay, this scene, let’s say I shot at 30 frames per second, all I’m doing is duplicating. I’m just duplicating frames in there, I would presume. I don’t know. You’re not inventing new frames in between.
**John:** I read up on this. There are theaters that are equipped to actually change the frame rate. The projectors can actually change.
**Craig:** The projection changes.
**John:** There are theaters that do that. For theaters that can’t do that, he is basically just cheating.
**Craig:** Duplicating.
**John:** Essentially, it’ll stay at 60 frames per second, but for things he wants to be at 30 frames per second, he’ll just put the same frame twice or do other-
**Craig:** Going from 30 to 60, that’s the simplest math in the world. 24 to 60, you can’t duplicate every frame, so which frames do and don’t and-
**John:** There’s some math. There’s some way you interweave those things to make it work.
**Craig:** Like Rian, I am not a fan of these high frame rate. They feel soap opera to me. Of course, motion smoothing, which is something that Rian and I turn off wherever we go, including Best Buys if we can, that is creating a fake-
**John:** Artificial.
**Craig:** … artificial up-framing. I do enjoy sports at 60 frame. If I see something like that, it’s awesome, because it’s supposed to be live, so I don’t mind it as much. As I said before, don’t bet against James Cameron. I’m wondering if he just very smartly was like, “This is basically sports right now. You’re going to want to feel like you’re there. It’s going to be way more interesting at that rate.” Then when two people are just talking around a fire, let’s just dial it back to 24, because it’s a good old-fashioned chat.
**John:** In three hours I will be able to tell you, because I’m seeing Avatar at the Academy screening this afternoon. I’m excited to see it.
**Rian:** You fancy.
**John:** I’m fancy.
**Craig:** You are fancy.
**John:** Apparently, the 120 frames is a lot of the underwater stuff, which I could imagine exactly where it’s perfect, because it is such a different experience. We don’t have a great sense of what underwater necessarily needs to feel like, and so I suspect that’ll work great there.
**Rian:** The 3D is almost the more interesting thing to me, because the first Avatar launched a whole thing. Suddenly, we had to release all these big movies in 3D. The fact that it’s gone away, the notion of what is this. Is this going to be another resurgence, or is this going to be like a, yeah, this movie does it, but then people are not actually-
**Craig:** Yeah, just let James Cameron do it.
**Rian:** It feels like 3D, it feels like it didn’t take. I’m all in for Cameron to do it. It doesn’t seem like people generally stuck with it, I guess. I don’t know.
**John:** Rian, I forget, did Last Jedi have a 3D release?
**Rian:** It did. We did a 3D. The technicians who did it were wonderful, and they were very, very cool. I felt bad that I was slightly grumpy about doing it, because I don’t like 3D. If you like 3D, they did an absolutely… They put a lot of work into doing an absolutely fantastic job.
**Craig:** It was nice that you could ruin my childhood in 3D.
**Rian:** That’s right. I’d like to come right at you and put my hand through the screen and poke you on the nose.
**John:** Slap you. For the 3D you did for that, that was all post. While you were on set, shooting the film, you did not need to worry about the 3D.
**Rian:** No.
**Craig:** Helpful.
**Rian:** Not a lick.
**Craig:** No one wants that.
**John:** Hey, let’s get to some normal listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?
**Megana:** Sarah asks, “In last week’s episode, 576, Craig recalled advice he got on his first directing job that suggested it was politics, not techniques that was the biggest challenge for new directors. As someone with no experience on Hollywood sets, can you give a sense of what you mean by navigating the politics? Does it boil down to conflict management or something more specific? How does one train for that kind of thing?”
**Craig:** I guess, Sarah, I could give you a sense of what I thought it meant at the time, which was you are caught. This was relevant really to studio, not necessarily independent film, but for a studio production. You’re caught between executives above you and sometimes actors who are vastly more famous and better paid than you are. You have producers that are managing your budget and appear to be working with you and yet are also directly employed by the people at the studio who want them to produce the budget. Everyone in Hollywood is adept at lying. Also, there is this thing that happens when you’re a rookie director, which is everyone presumes you are going to fail.
Coppola told this great story about on his second or third day of shooting on The Godfather, they started with the wedding sequence. He went into where they had their bathrooms set up. There were stalls. He was in a stall. A couple of crew guys came in and didn’t realize he was in there and were just talking about how Francis Ford Coppola was an absolute idiot, the worst director ever, and any one of them could be doing better. He was like, “I think they’re right.”
There’s just this weird thing where everybody’s desperate to invest confidence in the captain of the ship, and yet at the same time they’re all gossiping about how the captain of the ship stinks. You have to just figure out how to get your legs, how to earn people’s trust, and how to navigate the way that some people are actually not working in sync with you and get them to work in sync with you.
How does one train for that kind of thing? There is no training. You just get thrown into the piranha tank and start figuring out how to live with the piranhas. That’s what I meant, at the very least.
**John:** Hey Rian, what advice would you give to Sarah in terms of, she’s directing her first feature. What does she need to think about in terms of the group dynamics, politics, whatever you want to call the stuff that’s not about the words on the page or what’s in front of the camera, but everything else? What advice do you give her?
**Rian:** I’ve been blessed in that I have an amazing producer that I’ve been working with since the start of my career, Ram Bergman, who’s kept me… I just read that Godfather book, the most recent one. I’ve never been in a situation like that where I am alone on an island, surrounded by sharks, trying to just… I will say though, even the best-case scenario, there’s always some degree of… A big part of directing is managing people and is management, that element of getting the team on your side, maintaining their trust in you. The thing is though, if I heard all of this before I directed my first movie, I would be so petrified, I probably would never step on a set. This sounds so scary to me. I do want to say it sounds a lot scarier than…
I guess my advice is, know the movie that you want to make. Go in there with a strong vision of what you want, but also bringing people into the process with open arms and making them feel like you’re all working towards getting the same vision. Just all the Pollyanna-ish stuff, that’s what you go in there armed with. Then it’s like just jumping in the pool. You’re going to be swimming. You’re not going to be thinking about the mechanics of how you swim. You’re just going to be swimming to stay above water. It could be hard. It could be tough. When you’re in the middle of it and actually doing it, there’s an element of intuition that kicks in, in terms of how to deal with the stuff. It’s not like sitting down and doing math. It’s much more like jumping into the pool and keeping your head above water.
**John:** There’s that aspect of it’s a group project and everyone’s trying to do their best work. I’ve found just how to have the conversations with people that got them to do their best work and allowed for different opinions. At the same time, you’re trying to steer everybody together to make your vision of the thing possible. That’s tough. Especially coming out of mostly having been the screenwriter in those situations, I’m just trying to solve multiple problems. I’m trying to solve for multiple variables, like the actor who really wants this one thing, but the producer who needs this budget down to a certain thing, a director who wants this one thing.
When you’re the director, in theory you are running the whole thing, it’s all your choice, and yet there’s some bigger stuff around that you have to always be aware of. It’s tough. I thought maybe we’d ask the AI one last time to see if they have advice on this.
**Rian:** Oh my god, you love this so much. You like this more than you like us. John, [crosstalk 00:49:25].
**Craig:** Unquestionably. Are you kidding me? I’m off this podcast.
**Rian:** Oh my god.
**Craig:** The second this thing can be his cohost, I’m gone.
**John:** Here was the prompt I tried. “Write a Scriptnotes podcast transcript in which John August and Craig Mazin ask Rian Johnson for his thoughts on how to answer this question from Sarah.” I just verbatim put in the question from Sarah.
**Craig:** Whoa.
**Rian:** Oh, wow.
**John:** Craig, it’s just transcript, so we’ll just read what’s here. I’m literally just reading off the screen.
**Rian:** Oh my god. This is a lot.
**John:** “Hi, welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I am John August.”
**Craig:** “I am Craig Mazin.”
**John:** “On this week’s episode, we have a question from Sarah, who asks about navigating the politics on a movie set. Sarah said… ” There’s a question from Sarah. Craig?
**Craig:** “Good question, Sarah, and to answer it, we have a very special guest with us today. Rian Johnson is a writer/director/producer known for films like Knives Out, Looper, and the critically acclaimed Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” That is AI for sure. “Rian, welcome to the show.”
**Rian:** “That’s right. Thanks for having me, guys. It’s great to be here.”
**John:** “Rian, when you talk about navigating the politics on a movie set, what do you mean exactly?”
**Rian:** “I think there are a few different aspects to it. First of all, there’s the politics of working with a large group of people with different roles and responsibilities. As a director, you’re the one ultimately responsible for making the creative decisions, but you’re also working with a lot of other people who have their own ideas and opinions, so it’s important to be able to listen to those ideas and incorporate them into the overall vision for the film, while also being able to assert yourself when necessary and make sure the final product is the best it can be.”
**Craig:** This is the worst Rian Johnson ever.
**Rian:** It’s really bad.
**Craig:** “What about dealing with conflict on set? I know that’s something that can come up when you’re working with such a large group of people.”
**Rian:** “Absolutely. Conflict is inevitable on any movie set, especially when you’re working on something as complex and collaborative as a feature film.”
**Craig:** Wait, wait, wait, hold on. I gotta stop that. That is an insane sentence.
**John:** It is, yes.
**Craig:** “Conflict is inevitable on a movie set, especially when you’re on a movie set.” Go on.
**Rian:** “It’s important to be able to handle those conflicts in a way that doesn’t derail the production or damage relationships. That can mean anything from having a difficult conversation with a member of the crew to mediating a disagreement between two actors to managing your own stress and emotions when things get tense.”
**John:** We can stop there.
**Craig:** Terrible.
**John:** I don’t think Rian’s answers were in Rian Johnson’s voice.
**Rian:** I don’t think it was terrible.
**Craig:** That’s the problem. The answers themselves were great, because they were drawn from the big book of generic answers. Rian and I are both in the middle of press. Because you get asked the same question a million times, you do start to come up with some pretty… You shake it up a little bit but-
**John:** Canned responses.
**Craig:** There’s some canned responses. When you’re doing press, you naturally will push yourself more towards the middle of polite, reasonable answers. The answer that AI gave there was essentially the polite answer. This is great training for people who don’t know how to answer.
**Rian:** I don’t know, reading it though, I will say this. There was absolutely nothing in that that was any kind of even simulation of experience-born advice. It was all just a complex version of restating the question, which is though what Craig’s saying. That is like when you’re on hour four of a string of five-minute interviews, that’s something your brain defaults to a little bit. Reading it out loud, it’s absolutely content-less in that regard.
**Craig:** What the AI would be fantastic at is answering questions on behalf of athletes, because athletes are infamous for not knowing-
**Rian:** Yeah, that thing of like, “I think we just want to get out there and give our best game and pull for the team.”
**Craig:** “I’d say the most important thing is that we get the win. Four home runs in a game feels pretty good, but at the end of the day, it’s all about winning.”
**Rian:** I think an AI could probably do better.
**Craig:** That’s what I think they should… Let’s just get into that, and then we’ll come around to movies.
**John:** One thing I do want to acknowledge though is that I did not tell it how to start a Scriptnotes podcast. Clearly, it was trained on our transcripts, because it did give the, “Hi, welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.” It knew what that was. It knew how a Scriptnotes podcast starts. I feel good that we are part of the corpus of words that it learned how to talk about Scriptnotes.
**Rian:** You feel good about that?
**Craig:** I’m horrified.
**Rian:** That’s just a little creepy.
**Craig:** That’s the difference between me and John. I am horrified that they know we’re here. I would’ve much preferred to have been under the blanket of obscurity, but apparently the eye of AI Sauron is upon me.
**John:** We’re not going to ask it for its One Cool Thing. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what do you have to share with us?
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is an enormous cool thing called Brazil.
**John:** Tell us about Brazil.
**Craig:** I was in Brazil for CCXP, which is the world’s biggest Comic-Con. I think they had something like over 300,000 people move through this thing. As big and as crazy as San Diego is, CCXP is like, I don’t know, double it and so wonderful, because it draws people from all over Latin America, mostly South America, and of course, largely from Brazil. We were in Sao Paolo.
The energy level and enthusiasm and love and positivity was so refreshing. It was so wonderful. You look on Twitter, and every 10 minutes someone tells you you’re a moron. Then you go to a room full of thousands of people, all just in love with culture and art and pop culture and pop art. It was wonderful. They were lovely people. I really enjoyed my time there. I would love to go back. Hopefully, I will be able to one day. To all the people who came to see me and Neil and Pedro and Bella and Gabe and Merle at the CCXP thing, I just say thank you, thank you, thank you. We loved it.
**John:** Fantastic. Rian Johnson, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
**Rian:** Yes. A lot of my knowledge of whodunits comes from growing up reading Agatha Christie. Now that I find myself on a longer sea voyage, it’s like Gilligan’s Island, suddenly I’m stuck on the island with the genre for a few more movies. I’ve been trying to expand out my knowledge of it. I’ve been trying to read more of the golden age of detective fiction authors.
One person I discovered recently is John Dickson Carr, C-A-R-R. He was actually an American, but he lived in England a big chunk of his life. He writes mysteries. They’re fantastic. They’re so much fun. First of all, he’s just a hell of a writer. He’s an incredibly fun writer to read. One of my favorite of his detectives is this guy Gideon Fell, who’s this massive man who walks around on two canes and is modeled after Chesterton. He drinks beer and smokes cigars constantly and is just an asshole. It’s just absolutely delightful. Carr was very adept at doing much more than Christie. She had an engineer’s brain of doing these locked door mysteries. Also, he always has an almost Poe-like, macabre element to his mysteries.
I just read recently, it’s Gideon Fell’s first mystery. It’s called Hag’s Nook. It was delightful. Also, The Mad Hatter Mystery and The Crooked Hinge. You can go down the rabbit hole. If you’re into Agatha Christie mysteries and you want to broaden out, I’ve really been enjoying John Dickson Carr’s novels recently.
**Craig:** Fantastic.
**John:** Cool. I have two short One Cool Things. First is this blog post by Daniel Huffman about airplane maps. If you guys want to click through the link on that, I just texted it to you, Rian. You’re only used to, in the back of the airplane magazine, that map that shows all the different routes people could fly to. This was just a blog post talking through how he went about making one of those maps for a company and just the silent decisions you go through to figure out how to have all those arrows land where they need to land but also be clear and understandable.
**Rian:** Oh, wow.
**John:** I just liked it as a design discussion. Take a look at that.
**Rian:** Cool.
**John:** My second thing is a LEGO Star Wars movie called The Phantom Limb, directed by Aaron Legg. I’m actually here because Matthew Chilelli of Scriptnotes did the music for it, and he did a fantastic job.
**Craig:** Awesome.
**Rian:** Nice.
**John:** Matthew Chilelli, very talented editor and composer. Take a look at The Phantom Limb. It’s very clever LEGO stop motion, literally stop-motion LEGOs that must take years to do, but impressively done.
**Craig:** Fantastic. Well done.
**John:** Great.
**Craig:** Congratulations, Matthew.
**John:** That is our show for this week.
**Rian:** Very cool.
**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** What what.
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** What what.
**John:** Let’s use some of Matthew’s music from the Star Wars LEGO short as the outro music.
**Craig:** That’s smart.
**John:** 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. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. On our website, you’ll also find 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. Don’t forget to use the bonus code, what, Craig?
**Craig:** Onion. We’re finally real podcasters now.
**John:** We have a real podcast.
**Craig:** We’ve become absolute shills.
**John:** Shills to save 10 bucks.
**Craig:** Tell me about Squarespace.
**Rian:** Don’t involve me. Don’t involve me.
**Craig:** Rian Johnson, you built a website out of Wix.
**John:** Absolutely. When you need some mental health help, do you go to Better Help? Is that where you go for your mental health help?
**Craig:** Do you sleep on the-
**John:** Casper mattress?
**Craig:** … mattress or-
**Rian:** Casper. Got my Casper mattress. When I have to go to the post office, that’s the worst, as you guys know, but luckily-
**John:** Stamps.com.
**Craig:** Use our code Casper.
**Rian:** Use my code.
**Craig:** Onion. It finally happened.
**John:** We’ve become that. We’ve become that.
**Craig:** We’re saying the same things that every other… There’s a law that every podcaster must say, “Use the discount code,” once a year.
**John:** Rian Johnson, thank you so much for coming on the show.
**Craig:** Thank you, Rian.
**Rian:** It’s been delightful. It’s great to see you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Now we can actually talk spoilers for Glass Onion, because Rian Johnson-
**Craig:** Finally.
**John:** I loved your movie. I have questions. My first question is, what do you have against the Mona Lisa? What did the Mona Lisa do to you?
**Rian:** There’s a great interview I read years ago with John Cleese where he’s talking about in A Fish Called Wanda killing the dogs. There’s that great sequence where Palin’s trying. They asked him, “How do you get away with that? How do you not have the audience just hate you?” He leaned back, and he was like, “It has a lot to do with the casting of the dogs.”
That was the deal with the Mona Lisa. It couldn’t be anything else. It was this perfect thing where it’s famous enough to where it is a sacred cow and it’s going to get that little oh my god thing. It’s so famous in that way. It’s more famous for being famous than it is almost as people reacting to it as an actual work of art. I think audiences get the joke. Daniel was very nervous about it. He was like, “Are we killing the puppy by burning this?” I was like, “I don’t think so. I think it’ll be okay.”
**Craig:** It was funny. There was this natural weak human instinct that I had, which was like, “Then they reveal that it was fake Mona Lisa.”
**Rian:** We shot an end credits thing, which we did not use, just for a Get Out of Jail Free card, in case we screened this thing and people were actually like, “Screw you for burning it.” It was a cute little scene, but it was pretty lame, and so we were never actually going to use it, I think.
**Craig:** I think the thing is ultimately you know the Mona Lisa’s fine. It’s okay, because we all have this weird desire to protect the Mona Lisa. It just feels like, oh my god, as everything else around us crumbles… Much of what the movie digs into is the stupidity of disrupting and what that means. We want the Mona Lisa to be okay. You know what? It was punk rock. It was punk rock, man. It was as punk as Rian Johnson gets.
**Rian:** A big part of that whole last sequence was the idea that it plays out exactly, it’s structured exactly to match up with Miles Bron’s disrupter speech, basically, so the idea of the last step being to destroy the thing that nobody wants to destroy.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**Rian:** You had to go there a little bit.
**Craig:** Once he revealed in the first act or beginning of the second, whatever you’d call it, that there was a release for it, I was like, “The Mona Lisa isn’t destroyed.”
**Rian:** No, it’ll be coming back.
**Craig:** “I don’t think this movie’s ending with the Mona Lisa.”
**Rian:** “Don’t tell the insurance guys.”
**Craig:** I was like, “Poor Mona Lisa.”
**John:** I danced around it at the main podcast, but the ad I saw, which is an LA Times ad, shows Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monae’s character behind bushes, looking together. They clearly feel like they’re in cahoots. Obviously, in the movie we learn that they are in cahoots. She’s not in rich bitch mode. She’s just in her adorable, approachable mode. That was my question. That was a big thing for you to keep secret the whole time through, to not talk about, or is it? Is it one of the biggest twists you’re trying to hide?
**Rian:** Yes and no. Also, it’s fucking hard, because at this point, the movie is getting out there. We’ve had the theatrical release. It’s about to come out on Netflix. The reality is how many people actually are going to see that specific ad or whatever. Also, I’ll tell you what’s really hard for me, and why I think I’m like, with something like that, “Let’s go with it,” is I want people to start knowing about… I want to push Janelle. I think that she’s so good in this movie.
**John:** She’s great. She’s really, really good.
**Craig:** Remarkable.
**John:** Her performance is fantastic. I want to give your cinematographer, I want to give hair and makeup and everybody… She is stunningly beautiful. You photograph her in ways that she just has these… She just occupies these astonishing frames. On top of her performance, she looks amazing.
**Rian:** Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, the costumes that she [inaudible 01:05:09] and Steve Yedlin. They all did absolutely fantastic work. It is also really hard to point a camera at Janelle Monae and not have her look stunning. With all of that adding into it, there are just some frames in that that are incredible. All to say that a big part of what is great in this movie with her performance is her chemistry with Daniel and the fact that they’re in it. For something like that, it was like… If you haven’t seen the movie, even if you see that they’re going to be… You don’t know the actual twist of the movie, that it’s the midpoint thing.
**Craig:** It’s a midpoint thing. I’ve been asked over the last week four million times, when you’re adapting something, a preexisting story that’s out there, what do you do about the fact that people may know what happens to this character or that? My thing is, I don’t care, because some people won’t, and it’ll not be that experience. Journey. Journey. We made movies out of novels all the time. We know that the Titanic sinks. James Cameron wasn’t like, “We can’t make it because people know.” I think it’s sometimes overstated a little bit about what those… It’s so much more fun to see it unwind. I’m not as interested in the fact of their team-up as how you expressed it, how you pulled the trickery of fixing your shoe and all that other stuff. That’s the art.
**John:** A question for you. You talked about cheating. There’s a moment in the film where Edward Norton has a glass that he either hands to Dave Bautista or does not hand to him. That becomes a major plot point. I remember seeing it in a theater, thinking, “Oh, he did something weird there. I think he handed him that drink.” I clocked it. Then you show us, no, he sat it down on the table, which was an imagined thing. Can you talk me through that? It’s a trick. It’s a cheat. Yet it also feels very much in keeping with the me. Can you talk me through that decision and the decision to show both ways?
**Rian:** It’s a cheat but it isn’t. That was almost the central moment of expressing the entire, whatever you want to call it, theme or what have you of the movie, in one exact moment, the notion of something being absolutely in plain sight and obvious, and when a rich dude tells you it’s something else, you believe him. You see it with your own eyes. You know exactly what you just saw. Then Edward Norton as a billionaire says, “Oh my god, this just happened,” and says something different. In your brain, you then let it go enough to where a murder mystery can still hinge on how did that thing happen. In that regard, we play it completely straight. When you’re seeing it the first time, you see exactly what happens. You see him just hand the glass. It was a nerve-wracking thing to bake into the central moment of the movie. Then 30 seconds later when he retells his lie of the moment, you cut away to his lie version of it, which is an entirely different piece of film than what was in there initially. In that way, it’s playing it absolutely straight.
There’s a lot of things in that that we do. That’s another reason actually I’m excited for it to get on Netflix, so people can start digging into it. We play incredibly, frighteningly fair in terms of that first half and what is just on screen. You can see Edward stealing the gun. You can see Duke’s phone. It’s a black phone sticking out of the back pants of his white pocket for half the scene. It’s all just there.
**Craig:** You’re relying on the fact that traditionally when people are watching a Rian Johnson movie, they just don’t care or pay attention.
**Rian:** Yes, that’s exactly right.
**Craig:** They’re bored.
**Rian:** They’re like, “Gotta disengage.”
**Craig:** They never notice any of the details.
**Rian:** Just on their phone [crosstalk 01:09:06].
**Craig:** Exactly. They’re not really watching.
**Rian:** Exactly.
**John:** When I saw the movie for the first time in a theater, I couldn’t stop and rewind to see, wait, no, it was different the first time through, because the movie’s just going to keep going forward at 24 frames per second. Nima, who I was watching with, like, “Wait, rewind. It was different the first time I saw it.” We didn’t stop and rewind it, but I think the fact that you could do that is the difference between the two kinds of experiences, is one, you have control, and the other you don’t.
**Rian:** I guess so. I don’t know. If someone wants to experience the movie that way, that’s fine. That’s great. I don’t think most people will. I think most people be just along for the ride. They’re not going to stop and in their first watch go back and watch it or something. That is an option that is available to you.
**Craig:** One of my favorite moments in the movie, and this is a very Rian Johnson thing to do, and I loved it in spite of the fact that it was a very Rian Johnson thing to do-
**Rian:** This is teeing me up here for-
**Craig:** … is that Miles Bron has this fake murder mystery planned for the weekend, and Benoit Blanc spoils it instantly and walks everybody through and just ruins it. What I loved about it was it was a great character moment for him. It was wonderful to see his mind at work and to be reminded of how… Proof of concept, because you can actually forget that he’s good because of his super fried chicken accent and Foghorn Leghorn way of going through the world. Then he’s brilliant. Also, it was like, spoilers are part of this. Part of the genre is people ruining it for you. It’s fun. I thought it was hysterical and pretty brilliant of you to do that. It put everything in this wonderful place. It also put me on notice, because I did not expect that at all. It put me on notice that I was in safe hands even as I felt unsafe.
**John:** Rian, I have one last question for you. As the writer on set, who’s also directing the movie, you have to have answers for all the questions that actors might come up to you with. What was your conversation with Edward Norton when they first arrive at the island and Edward Norton sees Janelle Monae’s character? What’s in his head? What is he thinking when he sees her there?
**Rian:** Luckily, we’re able to leave it slightly ambiguous. The thing that made sense to us, given what we know about Miles, is that he would see her. If you think about the method of murder, Blanc says [inaudible 01:11:40] they don’t even see her die, Blanc says, so the notion that she somehow survived-
**Craig:** She got better.
**Rian:** … and that she woke up. No, because he drugs her, but the drug is not poisonous, to put her to sleep, and then he puts her in the car, so she actually dies of asphyxiation. The notion that maybe she didn’t give her enough or she woke up and stopped the car and got out, I think that’s what’s in her head is doing the math of, oh shit, Andi survives, and she’s come back now to, in this big public way, out him in front of all the disruptors and get her revenge or something. I think that’s what we landed on the math in his head.
**Craig:** I want to add one thing before we go. This was something I was texting with Rian about. My friend Heather Kennedy, who is an excellent puzzle solver-
**John:** We did puzzles with her in Austin.
**Craig:** We did an escape room with her in Austin. She has spotted something that Rian did not intend, but it’s excellent, or maybe he did.
**Rian:** Yes, I did. This was central to the mystery.
**Craig:** Of course it was. He had no idea. What kills Dave Bautista? Do you remember, John? Why does Dave Bautista’s character-
**John:** Pineapple juice.
**Craig:** Pineapple juice. He is allergic to pineapple juice. The compound in pineapples that people are allergic to is a chemical called bromelin. If you anagram Miles Bron, you get bromelins. It was there the whole time.
**Rian:** That’s right.
**Craig:** He was born-
**Rian:** That’s in keeping with the theme of the movie.
**Craig:** Of course.
**Rian:** That’s why I decided… I thought hm, just for the Heathers out there.
**Craig:** What a genius you are, sir. What a genius.
**Rian:** I’m so happy. I’m so happy you unpacked that, Craig. You’re one of the first, I have to say.
**Craig:** You win the glass onion.
**Rian:** We have a winner.
**Craig:** You can have my entire fortune.
**Rian:** You get a yearly subscription to Scriptnotes. Oh, boy.
**Craig:** Oh, man. Rian, you’re the best.
**John:** Rian, thank you so much.
**Craig:** Thanks, Rian.
**Rian:** This was a blast, guys. Thank you so much.
Links:
* [Glass Onion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Onion:_A_Knives_Out_Mystery) on [Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81458416), December 23, 2022!
* [Sign up for a Scriptnotes Premium Membership]()! use the PROMO CODE: ONION for four months free on your Scriptnotes annual membership. (Valid through 1/15/23)
* [The 2022 World Cup is being hosted in Qatar, which, as everyone knows, is pronounced…](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/21/sports/world-cup/how-pronounce-qatar.html) by Sarah Lyall for NYT
* [Eben Bolter’s Tweet on Variable Frame Rate](https://twitter.com/ebenbolter/status/1600630975989518339?s=20&t=qevw57OoaJb4EwpTxzykeg)
* [ChatGPT](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/)
* [On Airline Mapping](https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/on-airline-mapping/?mc_cid=9e80c8cf81&mc_eid=8952ca1075) by Daniel Huffman
* [LEGO Star Wars: The Phantom Limb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDYGT7Ucpag) short film by Legg Animations, score by our own Matthew Chilelli!
* [Comic Con Experience — CCP in São Paulo, Brazil](https://comic-cons.xyz/event/comic-con-experience-ccxp-sao-paulo-brazil/)
* [John Dickson Carr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickson_Carr) mystery novels including [Hag’s Nook](https://bookshop.org/p/books/hag-s-nook-john-dickson-carr/6429454?ean=9781601870599) and [The Mad Hatter](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-mad-hatter-mystery-john-dickson-carr/12381403?ean=9781613161333)
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* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
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