The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 696 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what do screenwriters need to know about working with directors? This question is so foundational that producer Drew Marquardt has cut together a new compendium on just this topic. Drew, what are we hearing today?
Drew Marquardt: We’re going to start all the way back in Episode 4 from September 2011. We’re going to talk about working with directors as a screenwriter. It’s everything from that working relationship to set etiquette and all the way through post.
John: I love when we go back to the very early episodes where Craig and I have just no idea what we’re doing in a podcast.
Drew: Craig sounds bubbly in this one almost.
John: Yes. Weird. Yes. Yes. What happened to Craig Mazin?
Drew: What happened?
John: So much happened to Craig Mazin. He’s still fine. What’s the second episode we’re going to talk about?
Drew: Then we’re going to go to Episode 176. It starts as advice to a first-time director. In this case, it’s our own Matthew Chilelli. It’s how to run a set. It’s how to prep your shot list. It’s working with actors. It’s all that good stuff. Then from there, we’re going to look at the perfect director. We had that The Perfect series for a while. This outlines just sort of the ideal qualities of that writer-director relationship.
John: Fantastic. It’s weird that 172 episodes later we’re coming back to that topic. That’s still 10 years ago.
Drew: I know.
John: Just so much time has passed.
Drew: We’ve touched on directors a lot.
John: I think we’ve talked about directors a lot, but we haven’t done sort of special segments on them because I think we covered it pretty well. Now we are unearthing it from the archive and talking about it today.
In our bonus segment for our premium members, you, Drew Marquardt, are just about to be a director, again, yourself. You’re about to go off and direct a project. You suggested we talk about something that you’re experiencing for the first time about trying to cast actors.
Drew: Yes. I got my first round of rejections, like roundly rejected. It’s a strange feeling. I’d love to talk through it.
John: You were an actor before this. You’ve been rejected before, but now you’re being rejected by actors.
Drew: In a totally new way.
John: It’s a whole new way. This industry is mostly about rejection and it’s sort of on one side of the fence or the other.
Drew: Truly.
John: All right. We’ll dig into that. Listen to these two compendium bits from previous episodes. We’ll be back at the end for one cool things and then an other wrap up business. Thanks, Drew.
Drew: Thanks.
(Episode 4)
John: Today we want to talk about directors and how screenwriters deal with directors, and what that relationship is like. Some templates for thinking about how you would work with a director on a project. You’ve had many movies shot and have all of your director experiences been fantastic?
Craig Mazin: No. [laughs]
John: That’s weird.
Craig: No. I mean I think I’ve had more good ones than– I really only had one weird one. Mostly though they’ve been good, I would say. Mostly good.
John: Yes. I’d say most of mine have been pretty good, and some of the good ones were ones where I wasn’t all that involved with the project from the beginning. I just came in and did some work and helped them out. They went off and shot the movie and good luck and Godspeed.
Other times I’ve been on board the project from the very beginning, and a director comes on board. You’re trying to get them up to speed with where you’re at. So let’s aim more towards that from-inception kind of relationship because I think that’s more what our audience is listening for.
Also, we’re talking about movies. That relationship between a writer and a director in television is very, very different. The writer in television has more power but also has responsibility to the overall continuity of the show. The director is there to get what needs to be shot on the page, onto film, and into the episode.
Craig: Yes, in television the director doesn’t have to determine who is going to be playing these roles, what they’re dressing like, what the sets should look like, what the tone of the product is. All those things have been determined already. I mean that’s the massive gulf between feature directing and television directing.
John: Well, all those things we talk about are the crucial things that a director is doing while the director is getting up to speed with the script and thinking about making the movie. So let’s just start talking about all the stuff that a director needs to do because it’s tempting to think about, “Oh, the director is responsible for the story and for getting the story told.”
Yes, that’s one of his or her jobs, but so much of a director’s time as you’re approaching making a move is really dealing with completely different things that have nothing to do with the script itself. So recognizing that you as a screenwriter are essentially a department when it comes to making a movie.
You are going to be one of his meetings over the course of the day, but he’s also talking to the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editors, the producers, the casting directors. As a giant village who’s come together to make this movie, he’s the village chief and you’re one of the villagers. Recognizing that difference is a hard thing to sometimes to get up to speed with.
Craig: Yes, we are very focused in on what we are responsible for. Like you said, that’s the story. As it turns out, that is the most important part of this whole thing. The story is more important than the costumes, the locations, where the lights are going to go, and what the makeup should look like. But all those things flow from the story and are mission-critical to making a good movie.
You have to look at every department as necessary. The story is the thing that’s driving everything. It’s just a question of time. Throughout the day he still has to sit there and figure out what the cars should be in the scene where, okay, and then she pulls up in her car. What car? Here, I got pictures of cars for you. That’s where you want to blow your brains out as a director.
Or we have a scene where there’s a party, and he’s going to crash the party and deliver a speech to the girl. Okay, well, how many people are at the party? What ages are they? Are they different races? How are they dressed? Is it upscale? Is it downscale? The billions of questions that start to bury the director in quicksand soak up so much time, and they all have to be answered. They’re all theoretically part of some cohesive vision.
John: A crucial thing that a smart screenwriter pointed out to me once is that as a screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. So when you approach your first meeting as the director you have to remember that you already made the movie in your head. You can see the whole thing.
The director, he or she, hasn’t seen the whole thing yet and is still trying to figure out what the movie looks like and is starting to answer those thousands of questions ahead of time. If they want to go through every page of the script with you, it’s not necessarily because they have a problem with it. They’re just trying to figure it out.
Your job a lot of times is to almost be like an interpreter as if the script was written in some other language, and you have to help talk it through with them so that it can be understandable in their language and they understand what your intention was, who are these characters in the scene, what is important, and how they’re going to get through that.
Because ultimately the smart directors realize that they’re going to be on the set at four in the morning after very long days of shooting. They have two hours until the sun rises, and that actor is going to come to him and be saying like, “What am I supposed to be doing in this scene?” They have to be able to have an answer.
So the times where I’ve been most exhausted with a director, I’ve always tried to remember that, “Okay, that’s right. They’re trying to figure this all out, too.”
Craig: Yes, and you’re smart because you’re putting the movie first. It’s tempting to put your own ego and what you’ve invested in the screenplay first, but the point of the screenplay is the movie. What you’re talking about is helping the director do the best job they can do in realizing their vision and your vision and your intention. So obviously, part of that is explaining your intention and defending your intention.
Another part of it is recognizing that they have to do it for real. The movie that you saw in your head? That can’t ever be a movie because in your movie people move like they do in dreams. They’re on one end of the room. Now they’re on the other end of the room. Time speeds up and slows down in accordance with the importance of the moment.
But in a movie, time moves at one second per second. [laughs] You can’t speed it up, really, or slow it down. I mean, you can a little bit here and there, but there are demands of production that force the director to, frankly, make a less amazing, wonderful, kind of translucent thing than you have in your brain, which is this kind of shimmering dream of whatever your movie was.
That said, the more specific you are in your head about the movie — Like I wrote a blog piece once that says, “You can’t just walk into a building.” You should know if your character walks into a building, see the building. You may not want to waste a bunch of space on the page describing the building, but sooner or later someone’s going to say, “What building did you have in mind?” It’s good to know.
If you drop your jaw and go, “Uh, I don’t know. A building,” you’re expressing a different philosophy than everybody else in the movie. Because they have a job to actually shoot something. If you start saying, “Ah, who cares, it doesn’t matter,” or implying, “Who cares, it doesn’t matter,” you’ve put this thing between you and them.
John: You should be able to have an answer for any question that comes up. So rather than having generic type of like, “This is a police station.” Well, what kind of police station is this like? Where are we at in the police station?
The very first movie I was involved with, the first movie of mine that got produced, was Go. On that movie, fortunately Doug Liman had me super-involved. I was not only on set every moment, but every moment of pre-production I was there, too.
It was a great experience for us to get in the same brain space about what was important, what kinds of things we were going to see. But I always had an answer. It wasn’t always going to be the same answer as Doug’s, but when asked, or occasionally when not asked, but when I saw something going in the opposite direction, I could volunteer my opinion of like, “This is what the intention of this was.” Always couched in terms of like, “These are the other options I could see being out there, but this is what the actual intention of this thing was.”
From casting, from what locations we’re picking to, just the style of the world. Like how rundown of a grocery store are we at, and where are we at in this grocery store. The script reflected a lot of those things, but you’re not ever going to be able to have all those details on the page. They were in my head, though, like I had filmed it well enough in my head that I could at least give them my answer for how things were supposed to be.
Craig: Yes. That’s important. By the way, that is a help for a director.
Look, I’ve worked primarily with two directors, David Zucker and Todd Phillips — both incredibly different guys, very different filmmakers, different kinds of movies. But they’ve both been very generous with me, and they’ve included me as a partner. One of the parts of that contract that I honor is if they don’t get it — let’s say I express my intention as best I can, and they just don’t get it — it’s important for me to stop and go, “Here’s the deal.”
It doesn’t really matter if I get it. If they don’t get it, I have to figure out something else that they do get that satisfies whatever this intention is, because they have to do it. They’re the ones that actually have to relay it. Just as I think when you are directing, and your actor looks at you and says, “I just don’t get this,” you got to think about how to either make them see so that they can internalize and perform it, or find another way in.
The director has to be an adult enough to sublimate his own desires and ego to make the moment with the actors work, and the writer has to do the same for the director. Everybody ultimately has to be subordinate to the movie.
So when I work with those guys, they’re kind enough to let me on their set — and it’s their set — and they want me there, and I am respectful enough to help them. By help them, I mean help the movie, not the script.
John: Let’s talk about being on the set, and let’s talk set etiquette. I found a range of experiences on being the writer on the set. With Go, I was at the monitor for every shot. I had the contacts on, the little ear pieces on. We had a little hand-held monitor so if I needed to walk away from the camera, I could see what they were setting up and run back if something was not going to work right.
With those, I could always talk directly to Doug, and I had to talk directly to Doug because the camera was on his shoulder. So there really were no private conversations. Like I had to come up to him and say like, “What Sarah did was great. It’s going to be a problem when we cut to this next thing here, because we’re setting the expectation…” I would try to give a note that both validated what just happened, but also explain why I was coming up and talking to him. So that he could then turn to Sarah and say like, “Yes, what he just said,” and shoot the next take.
Other cases, like on Big Fish, first day of shooting we’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Tim picked a really easy day of stuff to shoot, which is a smart choice. A really simple thing where Billy Crudup is coming to talk with Jessica Lange.
So I’m watching on the monitor, and I see one little thing, “Oh, I should tell Tim that, that there’s a little moment, opportunity there.” I go up, I pull him aside, it’s like, “Tim, that was great what she just did. But there’s also the chance here when he’s there, and there might be a little moment here.” And I could see like these garage doors go down in front of his eyes.
Craig: [laughs]
John: I realized, this is not going to be the kind of set relationship we have. He doesn’t want me to be chumming with those notes, and it’s a very good idea for me to go back to Los Angeles.
Craig: [laughs]
John: There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a disagreement, there wasn’t anything like that. But that wasn’t the way he wanted to work, and I wasn’t going to be able to have a lot of input on the choices made on the set.
Craig: Well, surprise surprise, the directors are as different to each other as we are to each other. I mean, David Zucker and I essentially would co-direct. We sat together at the monitor — I don’t think we would ever move on unless we both agreed to move on. Occasionally, he wouldn’t even care if I gave notes to the actors. We walked through the setups together in the morning. We set the blocking together. We very much worked hand-in-hand.
Not at all the case with Todd Phillips, who is a very different kind of director, and certainly a more traditional one. Todd is the captain of the set 100 percent. As he’s pointed out, I think the way he’s put it is, “I don’t need you to be here.” [laughs] “I’ve made plenty of movies without you. That said, if you’d like to be here, it could be helpful.”
So I take that to heart. I mean, I don’t think I maybe…With that relationship, it’s really just about picking those moments where you think I’m going to just say, “Okay, this is something that matters to me that’s really important, and I’m going to share that with him.” Either he’s going to go, “Shut up, stupid,” or, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” But I pick those moments carefully and few and far between. Frankly, he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s the sort of very independent director.
One thing that I want to make clear about directing: so much of it has to do with confidence. You need to feel confident in your own vision. Some directors, their confidence goes up the more direct and obvious help they get. Other directors, their confidence goes down.
I understand that. I’m kind of that way myself. You and I write on our own. We don’t have writing partners. I always feel like I should be able to move this boulder myself. So you have to learn which kind of director you’re dealing with. If it’s a director that likes moving the boulder himself, just pick your moments carefully, and don’t be a nudge.
John: One of the luxuries of being a writer on the set is if you’re watching the monitor and you see something that you can fix and you have a good idea, you can speak up and have a good idea. If you see something that’s not working and you don’t know how to fix it, you can just sit there and shut up.
Craig: [laughs] Yes, exactly.
John: Versus the director, who every time he calls, “Cut,” there’s 20 eyes looking at him saying, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” And the director has to figure out who he needs to talk with, about what needs to change, has to figure out what wasn’t working about that moment.
Craig: Yes.
John: So giving that person the space to be able to do that and hopefully help where you can help him or her make that next thing happen.
Craig: That’s a good point. I will say — I don’t care who the director is — give them a little bit of time to find it. No director is going to get it on take one. Well, occasionally magic happens. But the point is, if you watch a take and you go, “Oh, no,” after watching that take, it’s for the same reason people would say, “Oh, no,” if they read the first thing you typed in the morning.
It’s beginning. The process is beginning. Don’t overreact. Don’t jump in there and say, “It’s not working. It’s not working.” Believe me, they know. Everybody knows. [laughs] It’s fine. You have all day to shoot two and a half pages, let the director do what they do.
The only times I ever discuss things with Todd, for instance, is if I thought, “Okay, here’s just another way of approaching this.” Someone once said, “Don’t ever show up with problems, just show up with solutions.” Give them an alternative. If they like it, they’ll do it.
John: Another director who I’ve worked with twice is McG. I love McG. McG can be frustrating at times, but I do love McG. What I love about McG is his energy and his passion. It’s hard to connect with McG on a story level often, but it’s easy to connect with him on a, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” level.
I think no matter who you’re talking with as a director, early on in those conversations, have conversations about tone and feeling, and what this is like to you. A lot of times you end up watching other movies with directors or talking about references. With Tim Burton I could just go into his office, and he’ll have water-color painted a lot of scenes from the script. It says, “Okay, I get what this world is like as he sees it.”
Like for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was very specific about a lot of the stuff in it, but like the Oompa-Loompas, how is he going to do the Oompa-Loompas? Then you go into his office, and you see he has this scale drawing of what the Oompa-Loompas are like standing next to all the different characters. You can just see everybody in their wardrobe, it’s like, “Oh, okay. I get what this movie is like to Tim.” Then every other conversation I have can be about supporting that vision of how he sees the world of Willy Wonka versus what I might have had in my head originally.
Craig: That’s a good way in with directors who aren’t also prominently screenwriters. In working with David and Todd, I’m working with writers, because they’re screenwriters in their own right. That, actually, also dramatically changes the way you approach that relationship. Because with both of those guys, I’ve been writing partners.
So I don’t have to do quite as much ambassadorship with the script to them because we all wrote it together. That also takes an enormous burden off of me — or I guess not even a burden, because there’s no burden on me, it’s just a worry that I don’t have to have. Because the truth is I know that they actually sat here and worked through this scene with me. We made it together. They’ve seen it in their heads. It makes sense to them. That’s a big relief.
John: It’s great when you have that opportunity to work with a writer-director who actually can generally understand the writing process on that. I think there’s a misconception that because of the perils of auteur theory is that all directors really come from a place of story, and understand story, and have a great grasp of what the narrative of something is. A lot of them don’t.
Some of the best directors, I think, are the ones who are very upfront about that’s not their strongest suit. Just like we don’t expect every director to be a master of cinematography, we don’t expect every director to be a master of visual effects. There are some who are great at figuring out all the pieces of a story and how to move from the beginning to the end, and there’s others who are really good at getting that story up onto the screen. Recognizing which kind of director you are working with early on is crucial with that.
One of the places where I feel like I think I’m good at, which I think a lot of screenwriters will tend to be good at once they have some experience with it, is editing. We’re often the right people to come into the editing room after there’s a director’s first cut to help talk through, “This is what’s not working, and this is what we may want to talk about changing.”
We talked about that first test screening, which is just incredibly nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re the director, of course, because you’ve been staring at this thing on an Avid screen for eight weeks, 12 weeks, trying to get things to work, and you have no idea if it actually works.
As a screenwriter, you’re watching it a lot of times blind. You just don’t know what movie it is that they ended up making. Where I’ve been most helpful to directors, I think, honestly, is being that first set of notes after the test screening and saying like, “These are the things that were awesome. These are the things that worked great. These are the things we had challenges with, and here are some ways we might want to talk about changing them.” Being that first person with the best notes is a helpful role for a screenwriter, I think.
Craig: I totally agree. To that end, here’s just a bit of practical advice. If you want to be a screenwriter that collaborates with filmmakers beyond just, “Congrats, we’re making your movie. See you at the premier,” you need to understand the process of editing. You can’t approach it like you’re just sitting there watching a show going, “I don’t know. I didn’t get this part,” or, “Why…it’s just boring here.”
You have to understand how editing works, and you have to be able to speak the language of editing. Because ultimately, you need to — if you’re going to give advice, and it’s going to be a solution-oriented advice — you need to be able to say, “In this scene, how about just cutting the head” “How about taking this much off, and just keeping that line there?” “I know that you might have a problem with that because let’s say they’ve been talking up to that line and it’s all one shot, but do you have any coverage where you can establish them quietly and then just go in for that line?”
If you can talk like that, then your advice is usable, and it’s also clinical. Because remember, the director is going to be about as fragile as a human can be when they’re showing that cut for the first time. It’s truly nerve-wracking. So try and get some kind of handle on how editing actually works.
The other thing I was going to add was just when you were talking about directors who write and don’t write, comedy, it’s very rare — I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is — I don’t know any successful comedy, or repeatedly successful comedy directors, that don’t write. I don’t know if you can direct comedy if you don’t write. I’m not sure you can.
John: I’m sure if we spent a few minutes on that we’d find some really good directors who aren’t writers, but all of my favorite comedies I can think of have writer-directors behind them.
Craig: Yes. I mean, if you look at the guys doing it now, Phillips, Apatow– I think Dobkin writes. Dobkin may be an example, actually. Because Wedding Crashers is awesome. I don’t know if he writes.
John: I don’t perceive him as being a writer.
Craig: Yes, well, then maybe I’m wrong.
John: [laughs]
Craig: Look at that. There you go. [laughs] Mazin’s wrong again.
John: We’re out about time, but let’s talk through some general advice for screenwriters dealing with directors. First off, the question of when a director becomes involved. Like, I may come on board this project which it’s the director’s idea. So I would be coming in, working very closely in collaboration with him, which can be really great and exciting, but can also be exhausting, because you feel him trying to shoot the movie while it’s still being-
Craig: Yes, yes.
John: -while it’s still at a very raw state. It can be great because it can be a really good collaboration. It could just take a lot of time. More often, you will have written something, and now a director comes on board. Your responsibility is to have a meeting of the minds where you can instill what was going on in your head to him or her, and she can communicate back to you like what she sees for the project.
That’s where I’m at right now with Susan Stroman on Big Fish, where I’ve had now 12 years to work with Big Fish in various forms, and she has to process what I’ve done and pull out of me what she needs to make it on the stage.
Craig: Yes. If the director isn’t writing with you, I think it’s best to give yourself a little distance. Just like they need to get takes one through three in before anybody starts yapping in their ear, I feel like the writer needs some space to just write the script.
So if the director’s not writing, as long as everybody is connected on the vision and the rough idea of what the story is, you just…Yes, it’s not a good idea to have them over your shoulder while you’re doing it. Look, even editors get to do an assembly.
John: Yes. They give everyone a chance.
Craig: Everybody needs their shot. Yes.
John: As you get closer to production, you have to accept the fact that you are going to become another department. Whatever close, one-on-one relationship you have with the director, it’s going to be a little bit more distant just because his or her time is going to be divided between a bunch of different people who need answers out of him — line producers, ADs, every department head wants as much time as they can possibly get.
So hopefully most of the big issues have been solved. Hopefully you feel like you really have a movie. If you get a chance to do a table reading, that’s awesome, because it’s the only way you’ll ever know that the actors read the script at least once. [laughs]
Craig: Well, and it’s your chance, too, to kind of…It’s your last shot at rewriting before they start shooting.
John: Yes.
Craig: Start to hear what works and what doesn’t.
John: And if there’s lines that an actor literally can’t say, you have to change them. You can’t make an actor say a line that he or she doesn’t understand.
Craig: Yes. They’re human beings. Use your actors to the best of their abilities. They’re all unique, and they’re there because they can do something we can’t, so make the best use of them. You’re right, as you approach production, understand that you’re a department, but be the best department. Be the department that the director turns to at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Be the safe port in the storm.
You are technically — not technically. If you do it right, you’re really the only person that they can look at and say, “You and I both get this. Everybody else is looking like the blind men at the elephant. They’re feeling the piece of the elephant they feel, you and I can see the movie.” Be that person.
John: Sometimes I’ll have a producer on set who actually has the whole movie in his or her head, but more often, you’re going to be the only person around who has a understanding of what the whole story is, and how this little piece fits into the whole bigger piece.
Craig: That’s right.
John: The classic stories are always like the director decides to, “Oh, I really like that actress. Let’s throw her into this scene, just in the background.” The screenwriter says, “No, no, you don’t remember! She’s already dead!” A lot of times you are that person who remembers that. There’s a script supervisor who’s there, and his or her job is to check for some things like that, but you’re the person who remembers why everything is the way something is.
Craig: Yes. I love script supervisors, but they’re not narrative supervisors. That’s the difference. They’re supervising the day’s work on the page and making sure that when you shoot things out of sequence, “Okay. Show me the Polaroid of what they look like in the scene before so I can make sure they match up.”
John: “Coffee cup right hand, coffee cup left hand.”
Craig: Yes. Exactly. “You should be looking camera left and not camera right.” But we are the ones that technically we should know the narrative better than anybody.
John: We’re the story supervisors.
Craig: So to speak, yes.
John: Then I would say, whatever your function is on the set, you’ll go away for a while, and the director will do his or her cut. You’ll get a chance to see it, and that’s hopefully a time where you can be a real help and a real ally to the director in getting the best version of this movie done. Because you had your shot at making the movie when you wrote the script, he has his shot shooting it and doing that first cut, and that final product is what you’re pushing to.
You’re always trying to write a movie, you weren’t trying to write a script.
Craig: Exactly, exactly. So just let the document go. Once the cameras are rolling, let it go. Every morning you take that piece of paper, the two and a half or three pieces of paper, look at them, love them, and then say goodbye to them. Because by the end of the day, they’re just paper, and now it’s movie. So service the movie.
John: Definitely.
(Episode 176)
John: Our first is a question that comes from Matthew Chilelli who is the person who edits this podcast. So, he wrote this question and I said, you know what, we’ll answer your question on the air and you’ll get to hear it first because you’ll edit the episode that has the answer to your question.
So, Matthew Chilelli and his writing partner are directing a movie that they raised money for on Kickstarter. His question was what advice would you give to a first-time director of his own script. I’m like that’s a great question. I had some thoughts, and I’m sure Craig will have some thoughts, too, because we both directed and we both learned a lot.
My quick bullet points of advice is to remember that you’re not there to throw a party. One of my sort of first real worries about directing a movie is I wanted everyone to be happy. I wanted to make sure that the set was comfortable and that everyone was having a good time. Then I realized, you know what, this isn’t a party. It’s not my job to make sure everyone is having a good time. It’s my job to make sure that everyone has the information they need so they can do their jobs really, really well.
Once I stopped thinking about myself as host and started thinking of myself as the person who is directing the movie, things got much happier and better and everyone was happier.
You will be facing a thousand questions. I was terrified of the thousand questions. Should it be a green shirt or a red shirt? Like this? Like this? Do you want a wider lens, a tighter lens? Here are some things: you will usually have an answer. And just pick an answer. And answers are great. Although you can also say, “I don’t know.” And you can solicit their opinions. You can figure out sort of what the choices really mean.
You can also say, “None of the above.” And if the none of the choices that are presented to you are the correct choices, say none of the above and let them come back to you with more choices.
While you’re directing, always remember what the intention is of the scene and what the intention is of the moment. Because when you’re in the middle of directing a scene and things are going crazy and you’re turning around shooting from one side to the other side and things are just nuts, it’s so easy to forget what the scene is actually about. And so making notes to yourself before the day starts, like the scene is about this is incredibly useful. Like the minimum viable scene will be about this, rely on that.
If you are directing actors, directing actors I find works best with verbs. So, it’s very hard for an actor to be happy, be sad, be angrier. Give an actor a verb to play. So you can say don’t let him walk through that door. Or, you can sort of give them a simile. Can we try that same moment but as if he’s just said the most horrifying thing imaginable to you? That’s something an actor can do. An actor can’t be an adjective. So, those are my quick run throughs of advice.
Craig: All spectacular suggestions. I agree with every single one of them.
John: Cool.
Craig: I’ll only add the following.
John: Please.
Craig: When you’re directing a movie that it’s your first time and you’ve written the script, you will have a natural tendency to want to be the person that is defending the guy that came before you, the screenwriter. So, in other situations where we’ve written a script and somebody else directs it we go, oh my god, what are you doing to my screenplay, and it’s bad. And you think, well, when I get in there I can defend this.
However, that’s not the person you should be worrying about. When you direct, the person that you should be solely concerned with is the you in the future who is in the editing room. That’s the person you’re taking care of. That is the person who needs you right now to figure this out.
So, give that person options. When you’re a first-time director, you may think I’ve figured out, I know exactly what I want to do with this. And you may think that’s the name of the game. But sometimes the name of the game is collect options. And then you’re going to find this movie and write this movie in editorial. And Matthew is an editor, so he understands this better than most. To that end, I believe in shot-listing, particularly for a first-time director, and especially if you’re dealing with limited time which typically a first-time director is.
You don’t have a lot of days where you can go, “Yes, we didn’t figure it out today, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.” It doesn’t go that way for you. You’ve got to get the day’s work done. So, shot-list.
As a writer we are obviously absorbed with all writerly things: character, dialogue, theme, scenario. As a director, take a moment to just think about aesthetics. Think about your color palette. Think about movies that look the way you want this movie to look. Think about how you want to move the camera. Do you want long lenses, wide lenses? By the way, if you’re not sure what those things are, pick up a book. There are all sorts of instructional things online now so you can learn.
But really think about how you want it to look, how you want the camera to move and feel, because that is essentially the directorial equivalent of theme for the screenwriter. And without theme as a screenwriter we tend to just wander without some sort of unifying visual concept as a director. You’re just collecting footage and making a big TV show.
So, work on all of those things, but most importantly really, really care for your future self who will be in editorial because that future self is the one who is going to — every director, first-time, 20th time, at some point in editorial will curse themselves for what they didn’t do. So, you want to try and limit the amount of cursing of yourself you end up doing.
John: I think that’s fantastic advice. Let’s talk about what shot-list is, because I think sometimes people get confused about that term. So, there is storyboarding, and storyboarding is when you are sort of sketching out what you think the shots are going to be like to build a sequence. A shot-list is a much more practical thing. It’s literally a thing you’re probably holding in your hand, which is like a bullet point list of these are the shots I need to make this scene.
Craig: Right.
John: And that’s something you probably would do in preproduction. You’d figure out like what the shot-list would be for a scene. But honestly it’s a thing you might do in the morning before you’ve started that day’s work and you’re going to hopefully have people you can trust and talk through that shot-list with.
The people who are so crucial are your first AD. And your director of photography. And I found it to be so useful to like walk through with Nancy Schreiber, my DP, and my line producer, like these are the shots I need in this scene. And she could tell me like, “Okay, well let’s prioritize this and prioritize this because of light.” That was so useful.
Also, when you’re making your shot-list, prioritize within that. Because there are going to be some shots you’re just not going to get. And so you need to be able to tell the scenes, even if you never got that second close-up that you really wanted, okay, but that’s why you put that at the bottom of your list. So, no matter if you’re making a tiny movie or a giant movie, there is going to be stuff that you just don’t get. And protecting that future editor self, you want to make sure you get as much of the stuff you do need and this extra stuff is just gravy.
Craig: That’s absolutely right. That is a perfect description of a shot-list. And what you find as a first-time director is that directing — whatever you thought about directing is wrong. And that a huge amount of what directing is is breaking moments down geometrically. It is literally figuring out how to capture a moment through angles. And the angles could be moving and they could be different sizes, but ultimately you’re fracturing a moment into various geometric angles that will be repeated so that you can edit them together.
And understanding the geometry of your scene is really important before you shot-list, because sometimes if you think about it you’ll say I don’t want to break this down. I actually think this is a one-er. I think that’s how this works. I don’t want coverage here. I want this to be about these two people playing something in the moment together. And if it’s a one-er and you know it’s a one-er, no problem. Everything is a tradeoff, right? You’ll probably do nine takes of that, but there’s no more coverage, so you’re done with it, right.
If you’re doing traditional coverage with two people talking, you’ve got yourself a master, and overs, and closes. Okay. So, you don’t have to do as many takes of each one, but there’s a lot more setups.
So, one thing to do as the first-time director of your own screenplay is to go through your screenplay and start asking yourself this question: how would this moment be best broken down geometrically? What do I want to see and how? It will help you make your shot-list. And then as you said your DP and your first AD will have all sorts of great ideas to add to it and to make it more efficient.
John: One last thing, thinking about that future person you’re going to be when you’re in the editing room, a lot of times as you’re watching a shot happen before you you say like, oh, that was good, but this thing wasn’t good, that thing — like it was almost right, but this wasn’t quite right. If you know you’re going to be cutting it, it doesn’t have to be flawless all the way through. It would be great if it were flawless, where you had that one take that’s fantastic, but pushing for that eighth take to try to get one perfect take through on one person’s coverage is almost never worth it.
Craig: Yes.
John: If you know you have the moments, if you know that I can see and feel what this is like, then you’re wasting a lot of your day to try to get to that perfect eighth take when you have the stuff you need in those earlier takes.
Craig: It’s why you need — before you direct anything you must have experience editing something. You must. You need to know where the scissors come in and where the scissors can’t come in. You need to know when something is married to something else so if one half of it is no good and one half of it is good, it’s no good.
But Matthew happily has that experience, so that’s a huge part of it. It’s how you figure out how to break a moment down very often.
John: Yup. So, a great segue to our next topic which is our Perfect Series. And this time it’s the Perfect Director. So, I want to take a look at the perfect director from the writer’s point of view since we’re a mostly a writer’s podcast. But also from what a perfect director looks like from an actor’s point of view, from different department heads’ point of view. Because how does a director do her job the best and what are the tools and techniques she’s using to make the best movie. So, obviously a very wide topic, but Craig how should we start?
Craig: Well, let’s start with what we’re most comfortable with, I suppose, which is how — what we want from a screenwriting point of view when we work with a director what do we want. And I’m going to dispense with the obvious ones. We want them to be good. [laughs] We want them to know how to shoot. We want them to be visually interesting. We want them to know how to work with great actors. We want them to be really specific, make terrific choices. But, of course, what a lot of screenwriters will say is we want them to shoot the script.
Well, I don’t want the director to shoot the script. I want the director to shoot the movie of the script. But here is what I want most of all: I want the director to presume respectfully that if something is in the script it’s there for a reason. I think the biggest mistake directors make vis-a-vis screenwriters is when they read a screenplay they presume that some of it is just whatever. There’s moments that have to happen, but then there are moments inside of the moments that are like, eh, you know what, I actually would love to do this, or I’d love to do that or it would be more fun if the camera was here, more fun if the camera is there. This just feels like a waste of time.
And, not always, depending on the quality of the screenwriter, but I would argue if it’s a good screenwriter 99% of the time that is a huge mistake.
John: Yes.
Craig: It is not a mistake to ask the screenwriter how can we do this differently. It is a mistake to say quite arrogantly, “Some of this isn’t important.” It is as much of a mistake as it would be to open up a human body during surgery, grab a hold of some little gibbet and go, “Eh, this probably doesn’t mean anything,” and just pull it out.
Because we put things in on purpose. Then, of course, what happens is, three or four weeks later, you might get a call like, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense.” Yes, well, because you took that thing out and you didn’t realize, because you hadn’t lived in it the way I did. When you want to change things in a screenplay, and it’s perfectly fine to say, “Look, we’re changing it, we must change it for the following reasons, even if one of the reasons is my directorial taste.” Tell me, how can I change this so that I don’t hurt anything? First, do no harm. That’s what I want from a director more than anything else in terms of how they interact with me. That involves, obviously, a certain amount of respect and acknowledgement that the screenplay isn’t just a suggestion or even a blueprint, which I’ve never understood, but rather is a conceptualized movie.
John: What I’m looking for in a director is that someone who can come in and channel this vision of a movie onto the screen. It’s really a person who can experience the movie internally and then has the skills to be able to put that up on a screen. That is such a unique skill set. There are people who are just amazingly good at it and who can do things that I would just never think of to do. That’s what gets me so excited, is when a director who can just do these amazing things. I cannot underscore enough is that I don’t want this person to make my script.
I want this person to make my movie and make her version of my movie. I want that movie to be fantastic. When there’s suggestions or changes or concerns or things they don’t like, that’s awesome. Let’s talk those through, but don’t try to change them on the set without getting some feedback, because yes, everything that’s in the script was there for a reason. There’s a reason why this whole carefully constructed puzzle fits together one way. There’s other ways it could be assembled, but there was one way it was supposed to work. If you can talk with me about that beforehand, that’s awesome.
In those first conversations, a lot of those first conversations with the director is basically just talking through the whole movie so I get a sense of what the movie looks like in the director’s head. Sometimes that really does mean as a screenwriter, I’m explaining scenes and like, well, I wrote it and now I’m actually talking through the whole explanation of it, but it’s so important that we’d be on the same page, literally the same page written, but also the same idea about what the intentions are of those scenes.
The times where things have gone not especially well have been cases where the director really thought the scene was about something completely different than what I thought the scene was about. It’s fine for us to have a difference of opinion, but we didn’t even have a difference of opinion. He just shot a different scene than what I meant that scene to be. Then that scene no longer shows up at the movie, and there’s problems.
Craig: Absolutely true. The other thing that I think the perfect director exhibits is patience. Now, directing, I’ve said this before many times, directing a movie, a feature film, is the hardest job in show business. Directors cannot be patient with everybody. In fact, most directors really have only a very tiny amount of patience that they reserve entirely for their actors. They must be patient with their actors because if they yell at their actors or are impatient with their actors, they’re getting bad performances.
Of course, this is all about what they’re getting on screen from their human beings, unless they’re all computer-generated robots. I would ask the perfect director to extend that patience to actors, to writers, that we need actually the same amount of patience. The reason I say that is not because we’re sensitive flowers, but rather because you will get a better movie if you’re patient with the screenwriter. Frankly, there are a lot of directors who are least patient with the screenwriter.
They find the screenwriter and the screenplay to be this offensive reminder that this world that they’re creating is not entirely their world. It’s disruptive of their confidence. I understand that. There are screenwriters who get fussy about changes. The perfect director is patient with the screenwriter because they will get better work, and they will make a better movie if they are. I always tell my fellow screenwriters to be patient in return to the director. They need us at our best in order to survive, and we are all in the same boat of trying to make a good movie. A good director is patient with the screenwriter.
John: You talk about how incredibly hard the director’s job is, and I completely agree. It’s like you’re a general leading your troops into battle. The crucial thing is that you have to have the trust of your troops. Your crew has to trust and believe that you have a vision for how you’re going to win this fight, how you’re going to succeed in doing this thing. That means that you had a lot of planning. You really knew what you were going to do ahead of time.
You’re able to read the lay of the land and see, like, okay, on the day we’ve arrived at this location, this location is different than how I expected it to be. I’m flexible enough to roll with what needs to actually happen because the directors who are inflexible, who everything has to be exactly the way that they had storyboarded it, are not going to be able to roll with the changes and roll with the punches. The great directors can also recognize and really remember the intention of the scene.
If an improv moment comes up that’s actually better than what was there, they will be able to incorporate it and be able to both have the version of the scene as it existed, but also recognize this new version is better, funnier, more dramatic. It does something unique and wonderful. I’m so glad I’m going to have that in the editing room as well.
Craig: Right. Yes. That reminds me, just another bit of advice, going backwards for Matthew Chilelli as he approaches his first movie. A good director leads the crew, but also understands that the crew will not be able to tell her or him that they’re making a good movie. All the crew sees are dailies. That’s what they see. They see live dailies going on, and they may see funny moments, and they may see an actor do a hysterical thing or a beautiful thing. As the old saying goes, there’s nothing better than your dailies, and there’s nothing worse than your first cut. They don’t know what the movie is.
John: They don’t.
Craig: Don’t ask them what they think, and don’t be encouraged or discouraged if they offer their opinions. No one except for you and your editor has any sense, really, of the movie that is going to result. You’re the only ones that have seen the completed jigsaw puzzle. You’re just making pieces now, right?
John: Yes.
Craig: Don’t overreact to that whole thing. In comedy, we called it dailies laugh, where the crew just goes, “Oh my God,” and they’ll come up to you at lunch. “That was so funny.” In your heart, you know, “Ah, it’s getting cut out of the movie.” There’s something about those moments, those moments that are so funny in the moment, so often just do not live in the matrix of the put-together film.
John: Yes. Any last bits of summary for our perfect director? I don’t think there’s one– I would say there’s not one perfect archetype for a director, and I’ve worked with directors who I love who are vastly different from each other, and that’s fine, that’s okay. They all have different ways of communicating their vision to their department heads and to me, and to everybody else who has to see what it is. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear to me, I have no idea what you’re doing, but it all works.
The directors who I admire as a viewer, I don’t necessarily know what they’re like on the set, but if people are working with them again and again, there’s probably something that they’re doing that’s really, really good. They’re probably treating their crews with respect. They’re probably able to communicate what it is that they’re trying to do, so people can do their very best jobs. They’re able to inspire the best work out of people, and that’s how you make great movies.
Craig: Yes, I think that frankly, the best directors, the directors that I love, as I run down the list in my mind, they’re either writers or they really respect writers. The directors that I find ultimately are disposable, who disappear or who just make stuff I don’t like, are directors that are notorious for not giving a crap about the script, that the script is a ha-ha-ha, I’m a director.
[music]
John: All right. We are back in 2025. I had to actually think about what year we were in.
Drew: It’s a weird year.
John: It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is also very nostalgic-driven. Way back in the day, I loved HyperCard. I’ve probably talked about this on the show before, but, Drew, you’re probably too young to remember even what HyperCard was.
Drew: I don’t know what HyperCard is at all.
John: HyperCard was not a programming language. It was a thing that came with Macintoshes for a certain number of years that you could build these things called stacks, which were– Before web pages, but they were things you could build to do cool things. You could build games out of them. You had buttons and fields you could drag around. It was how a lot of people got started understanding programming, and also the sense of objects that had scripts. It was a really foundational, important way of how I got to appreciate computers.
Drew: Now that you say that, I think I was there when you and Jordan Mechner were talking about HyperCard.
John: Fantastic. HyperCard was great. There’s a new app called Scrappy, which is a web app, which reminds me a lot of the things I loved about HyperCard, because in the back of my head, I always thought like, “Oh, it would be fun to build something that was like a new HyperCard.” These folks went out and did it. It is a very bare-bones, but surprisingly clever demonstration test project that talks through things you might want to build in Scrappy that are just one-purpose, one-time things. It’s a fun little toolbox.
Drew: Oh, I love these things. These are the things that I feel like, especially for kids, getting the sort of foundational building blocks of working with computers, and more than just pointing and clicking kind of thing. I am terrible at this, so I should probably do it.
John: One of the things I loved about HyperCard is that the distinction between building a thing and using a thing are very minor. It’s not like you have to commit to a build, and then you run it and see if it works. You just click on either your pointer, like a finger, or your arrow. Either you’re editing it or you’re designing it, you can do both at the same time, which was a thing I loved so much about HyperCard.
Drew: It’s the computer equivalent of potato clocks.
John: Yes. Oh, yes, great, simple. Fun things to play with. If you’re nostalgic for old school programming or just feel like something to spend some time on, Scrappy, and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.
Drew: I love it.
John: What do you have for us?
Drew: I, last weekend, went to Mount Wilson for the first time, which, if you’re in Los Angeles, Mount Wilson is an observatory that– It feels high above us and far away, but it’s actually really close, and it’s really, really cool. It’s where all of the early physics discoveries were made in the early 20th century. Einstein was there and all that stuff. It’s a place that I’ve heard about so many times, but when we had the fires earlier this year, it was severely threatened. It was one of those places that, actually, I ended up only thinking about when we would have fires, being like, “Oh, I need to go to Mount Wilson before that’s gone eventually.” It’s so cool.
John: Talk to me about the experience of visiting Mount Wilson. Did you have to get tickets because there was timed entries or anything like that?
Drew: There’s timed entries on the weekends. They said to get there early that they sell out. We didn’t have any issue with that. You don’t get to look in the telescope for the weekend tours. Those are specific nighttime tours, and those ones you have to be hawkish and look online, and that kind of thing. We’re going to do that now. They just do tours of the grounds on the weekends, and it’s a working research facility still. One reason, though, that I would encourage everyone to see it is because of all the cuts to the NSF.
They’re hurting for money a little bit, even though they’re basically a national park with these incredible telescopes and towers and working scientists. One scientist just has her dog sitting there. There’s a lab dog, and you just get to go through, and they get to talk to you about space and the universe and all that stuff.
John: How many people that were touring this place were adults versus families with kids?
Drew: It was mostly adults. There was one family with kids. It was the best tour group I’ve ever been with. It seemed like a lot of people who had jobs at JPL-
John: Oh, sure.
Drew: -or local scientists, so people were curious and asking really good questions. I think part of the reason I had such a great time is because our tour group was actually adults, and it wasn’t just like awe and clap. It was thoughtful, and it was considerate, and it was really cool.
John: One thing I often forget, but I think people outside of Los Angeles may not even be aware of is that in addition to Hollywood, Southern California is also the home to the aerospace industry, and so we have JPL and other big manufacturers of satellites and things like that, so we also have a bunch of smart people here, and it’s fun sometimes going to see smart people in their domain.
Drew: Yes, going to that space. Also, so Mount Wilson does movie screenings up in their things, so they’re showing Contact soon and all sorts of stuff. There’s fun reasons to go up there. I think they have musicians come up and do stuff. I just loved it, and I’ve been here for a decade and never made my way up.
John: I’ve been here for multiple decades, and I’ve never been up there, so we’ll put that on the list. It’s worth the trip. Cool. Drew, thank you for putting together this compendium episode.
Drew: Of course. It was really fun.
John: It’s Scriptnotes. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt, with segments this week produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions that we often answer on the show. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, just search for Scriptnotes.
We have t-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. As always, we really do appreciate our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Drew and Matthew, and everyone else to do this show every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on casting as a director, as opposed to being an actor–
Drew: Getting very rejected.
John: Drew, thanks so much.
Drew: Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Drew Marquardt, you’re about to head off and shoot a short film. It’s a short film that I’ve read the script of. It is delightful. You have two lead roles in this short film, and you are trying to cast them. Talk to us about the process of casting a short film in Los Angeles.
Drew: The first thing we did is we hired a casting director. You can go out to breakdown services yourself if you’re doing it. The main mistake I did is I didn’t take your and Craig’s advice of writing to the things that I have, and I wrote a short film about two elderly people, basically. Which was exciting to me because it felt like a thing I hadn’t seen before, but I don’t have those things. I think first thing is, if you’re in Los Angeles, write for your actor friends and don’t go out and cast.
We hired a casting director, partly because I had hoped to get names, or faces if not names.
John: Actors you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them in things.”
Drew: That person.
John: Yes.
Drew: Great character actors. Sure. Because there’s so many great character actors, especially, so I’m looking in the 75 to 90 range, and I was like, there’s so many of those people around.
John: They won’t do the nudity required in the role.
Drew: They won’t do the nudity for the role. [laughs]
John: I’m kidding.
Drew: My casting director reached out to them, and I wrote cover letters for all of these people who I’ve seen for decades. Another factor here is we don’t have any money, and short films don’t have any money. I’m learning that all of these confluences of factors really play into it, because I had naively thought like, “Well, what else are they doing?” This is just a good weekend thing, and it would be hours towards SAG Health Insurance or something like that. We could come at it from that angle. In reality, I think they’ve got nothing to prove. They’re very comfortable, and getting them interested is a little bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be.
John: Yes. You had come at this from the other side. Back in the day, you were auditioning for things, stuff was coming your way, and you were passing on some things. As an actor, what were things you would pass on? Is it things like, I don’t want to go to [unintelligible 00:56:22], I don’t want to–
Drew: [laughs] No, I think at the time, I would’ve loved to go to [unintelligible 00:56:26]. I think it was not being confident in the director. It would be usually someone– I’m going to flatter myself and say young, like me, but who might be slightly inexperienced, and wondering where the funding was coming from, especially if it’s low-budget. I did a few low-budget things because I liked the script so much.
John: How did they turn out?
Drew: They turned out okay.
John: Yes, I’m realizing now, I’ve never actually seen any of your cinematic work.
Drew: Can you imagine? It was just all very bad. There was one I did for a bunch of students in Bournemouth in the UK, and at the time, they had a producer from The King’s Speech attached on the stuff, and the script was really cool. It felt like a young Trainspotting-y thing. Then, it turns out that they just loved smoking pot, and we shot a whole thing all summer, but it morphed into something. They lost that producer, so there wasn’t a ton of money, and we just had like a Canon D5, or whatever they were shooting stuff with, and there was all the enthusiasm, but…
I think just the thread of the story got lost. It’s out there, the scenes make no sense, sort of, it’s just a jumble of things. That one was probably one of those ones that honestly felt like a cautionary tale, because I’d come at it with this enthusiasm, then you see how it falls apart, especially if people don’t have their shit together. From that point on, I was weary of everything that came across my desk, so to speak, that felt like that. Yes, I understand people’s reticence with a smaller project like this.
John: I think about casting on short films I’ve done. The first short film I shot was beyond film school, but the first real short film I shot was God with Melissa McCarthy. Melissa was someone who I had seen in an early cut of Go. She was cast in a very minor role in Go, and I’m like, “Wow, she’s phenomenal. I need to write something for her immediately.” I wrote that for her. We talked about writing for what things you feel like you can control, and that was, I think, I could control it, and I could cast around her with other very smart, funny people.
During the first writer’s strike, I shot a short called The Remnants. Both of these are online, we’ll put links in the show notes to both of these. The Remnants was an interesting case where I wrote this thing not for any specific people; we actually had to cast it. I went to a casting director, Robert Ulrich, who I’d worked with on some TV projects, and we just cast it, but it was a weird time to be doing anything because it was during the strike, the WGA was encouraging other weird little indie short films to shoot, because why not?
We got together a really good group of actors, but it was weird to have written this thing without having a sense of who was going to be playing these parts from the very start.
Drew: God, I’m sure. That one seemed to come together pretty well, too, because I feel like you had locations and stuff, reading the script on that, and then also seeing the short. It feels like it was pretty similar.
John: On the outside, it does seem similar. They’re both written for mostly a single location and all that tracks, but the first one was literally in my apartment, so I could shoot it there. The second one, I didn’t have that apartment, so I was just finding somebody’s apartment we could borrow for the two days it took to shoot the thing.
Drew: I will say, so with this project that I’m working on, other than casting, it’s been pretty charmed. We’ve had a lot of people donate some really wonderful stuff, and with Film Independent giving us fiscal sponsorship. There’s been a lot of wonderful things coming in.
This is what I wanted to ask you about. Another thing that a casting director does really quick is they send out an avail check to people, saying, “Are you available for these dates?” For everyone, they’re like, “Yes, and we’re ready to work.”
We said, “Here’s the script, and here’s how much money we have,” and they said, “Never mind.” It’s teasing apart for me what’s the problem– I don’t want to compromise the idea of the short, and that is its own thing. But do I take this as feedback or not?
John: Oh, I would not take that as too much feedback. I think it may be a sense of– I think you have the right internal model for what some of these actors are saying no to. I think they’re saying, “It’s not worth it for me to go do this.” You only need two actors, and the right two actors will be out there and will be the right people to do it. The whole tech avail versus not actually available check is fascinating because I’ve also heard that happen in Broadway, where we’ll reach out on tech avails for people, and then you follow up, and it’s like, “Oh, but they really don’t want to play that smaller part.” That becomes the issue.
Drew: Sure. That makes sense. Once you get the details, it changes how things go about that.
John: The other thing I would keep in mind is that sometimes actors may say no because they’re trying to keep themselves open for another thing, like a TV thing that will actually pay some money, and you get that.
Drew: Totally.
John: As you get closer to the dates, in a weird way, things may open up a little bit.
Drew: That’s helpful. Yes, I think when you don’t get the people in your head, do you feel that changes things for you down the line, into production? Do you feel like–
John: Yes, sometimes you have to adapt with the batch of people that you’ve cast and what their abilities are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, whether you believe them in that part, but I don’t know. You didn’t write Yeti. These are really recognizable Midwestern humans. I don’t think it’s going to be a challenge for you to find these people down the road. If not, I’m reaching back to the Robert Eggers episode because he was talking about his short film where they had a puppet-
Drew: Puppets.
John: -[crosstalk]. Maybe it’s just puppets. Maybe that’s really the secret that we didn’t consider. Some Henson folks who come in there and give you some puppets.
Drew: I keep having fantasies. I’m like, “I should just do this animated.” I’ll just animate it, and then I can get someone in a booth for a day to just give a couple lines and don’t have to worry about it.
John: Yes. Right now, people are crashing their cars and saying, “Animation is not easier.” [crosstalk]
Drew: No, it’s not.
John: It takes so much of your time. I think aiming a camera at these things will be the right choice, but puppets are pretty great, too.
Drew: Puppets will be fun.
John: Well, good luck, Drew. We’ll obviously keep the Scriptnotes listenership posted on updates as the show progresses.
Drew: Thank you so much, and thanks for your help.
Links:
- Episode 4 – Working with directors
- Episode 176 – Advice to a First-Time Director
- Scrappy
- HyperCard
- Mount Wilson Observatory
- John’s shorts God and The Remnants
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- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Segments produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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