Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There's some swearing in this episode. Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you're listening to Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you honor a genre while still pushing at its boundaries? Our guest today is Robert Eggers, a writer and director whose movies include The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and most recently Nosferatu. Welcome, Robert. Thanks for having me. So reading through those credits, this is going to be your first movie that doesn't have a the in front of it, at least that I've noticed. There's no the Nosferatu. You're breaking new ground here. You've left off the definite article. Yes, it was...
very intimidating. Maybe the Vampyr would have been more appropriate. Yeah. Well, I want to talk through Notes for Raw too. I want to talk through the genre, your other films, but I also want to get into your POV as a writer versus POV as a director and sort of where you're at as you're putting scenes together. Yeah.
Also, I want to try to answer a couple of listener questions we have about historical detail, feeling stupid, and whether writers make bad romantic partners because you've just made a gothic romance. So we want to talk about that.
And in our bonus topic for premium members, let's talk about cycling because that is the thing that you do in your off time that I don't think I've had anyone on the podcast talk about before. So I want to talk about cycling, how you got into it and what role it fills in your life. But let's dig right into it. So Robert, give us some backstory on like how you came to be a writer and director. You grew up in New England. Like where did you start with storytelling and with, you know, movies?
Yeah, I mean, avid movie watcher, like a good American kid growing up in the 80s and 90s and watched...
ungodly amounts of television, which was also perfectly acceptable back then. I did theater growing up, acting in theater, and my mom had a kid's theater company. So we were also involved in, you know, building the sets and doing the costumes. There were, you know, parents who were more skilled in these things, but everyone was involved. And my dad was also a Shakespeare professor.
So even though I lived in rural New Hampshire, like I, you know, I had the opportunity to see things that like a lot of people didn't get to see and, you know, occasionally going to Boston to see a play or go to the ballet or the art museum or whatever.
But of course, cinematically, I was still into more mainstream things to some degree. Yeah, and then talking about Nosferatu, that was a film that I saw when I was young, around nine, and it made a very large impression on me. Max Schreck's performance, of course, but also the atmosphere of the film. And because...
It's not the beautiful restored versions that you can even watch on YouTube that are color tinted and have... You know, you can watch it with the original German inner titles, with subtitles if you want. But this was very degraded and you couldn't see Max Schreck's bald cap. You couldn't see the grease paint on his eyebrows. He felt like a vampire. It felt real. And the atmosphere of that and the reality of that was really inspiring as a kid. And also...
Which I'm sure we'll talk about later, the fact that Mornau and his collaborators and the screenwriter Heinrich Galeen turned Stoker's novel into a simple fairy tale. Yeah. And compared to, you know, the Bela Lugosi version that I was familiar with, that was based on the Balderston Dean stage play, which is pretty stodgy. And so is the Todd Browning movie, if we're honest, after Transylvania. You know, this was...
Kind of crazy for me. Yeah, so I grew up doing tons of theater. And when I was 17, I had the opportunity to do a senior directed play. And me and my friend, Ashley Kelly-Teda, who's now a theater and opera director, we co-directed Nosferatu on stage. And I had been doing also some theater with a theater called the Edwin Booth. And the artistic director was a gentleman named Edward Langlois.
who was the only person who was kind of doing interesting stuff. Like, he wasn't doing My Fair Lady. He was doing The Duchess of Malfi. Yeah. And he saw that, I invited him to see it, but he saw that play and asked if we would want to do a more professional version of it at his theater. And that kind of put me on this trajectory. Like, it cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director, that I, you know, wanted to tell the stories I wanted to, that I was interested in, you know, and...
It also made Nosferatu like something that would always be part of my identity as someone who's trying to make creative work for better or for worse. I want to go back to that high school Nosferatu. So can you describe what that was? Was it one act? Was it two acts? Like what was the texture we're working off of? What was that play you did? It was mostly based on the Murnau film. And of course,
The version that I had was, as far as I understand, an English translation of French intertitles. That would have been the version that Henri Lenglois screened in Paris at his theater. And the Ellen slash Mina character was called Nina Lenglois.
but most everyone else had their Dracula names. And it was kind of weird, but we didn't know it was weird at the time. And we drew on that and also some things from the novel. The Coppola film had also been something that I watched a ton. And there was definitely some inspiration from that
But it was a silent film on stage. So we were wearing black and white makeup and costumes and black and white sets and wigs and acting in a very stylized, expressionist way. There were super titles above the proscenium that would say the text, and there was music playing the whole time. And what's the success? Like, you were doing this as a high school student. Did you feel like, oh...
this was the accomplishment I set out to make. Like, what did you learn while you were doing it? It definitely felt like we had hit on something pretty cool. And in this very humble environment,
environment. You know, it was a it was a successful production, you know, standing room only, blah, blah, blah. So good reviews from the local newspaper. So yes, it was a very satisfying, formative experience for sure. And I have very fond memories of all of us doing each other's makeup and gluing sideburns and mustaches on people and, and all that.
So you've done stuff on the stage and you grew up with the stage because of your parents and so you had a chance to sort of see that thing. But how did you... And then you were adapting a cinematic work for the stage and trying to pull the ideas of cinema to the stage, the title cards and all this stuff. When did you...
becoming interested in that? How do we do an actual cinematic language? When did you start picking up a thing about, I want to pick up a camera and shoot a film and learn editing? What was that transition? So eventually I'm directing off-off-off-off Broadway theater in New York with my friends. And as I felt at the time, I don't know how I would feel about it if I watched it now, but at the time I felt we did a pretty good job of Othello, also well-reviewed, but nobody saw it. So then we did street theater.
Because we felt like, well, people have to fucking see it if we do street theater.
And that was cool, but it was also like we were working out of a dirt floor basement and it was extremely humble. And so I thought, you know, clearly cinema is the way to go. I sort of half seriously, half just trying things, you know, took some Shakespeare plays that I knew well and adapted them to screenplays as like an exercise. Yeah.
And then eventually I made a short film of Hansel and Gretel that somehow is on YouTube. I don't know how the hell it got on there, but it's absolutely terrible. And it got into like one film festival and on the bus ride home from the Boston Underground Film Festival, I thought I really have to make something that is not good.
So, yeah, yeah. I mean, and then I started working on this short that became an adaptation of The Telltale Heart. And Jaron Blaschke, my cinematographer, and Louise Ford, my editor for the rest of my career thus far, were on that. And that was a very formative experience. It
It also, you know, I basically, I was making my living doing set and costume design for the stage at this time because I had always done it myself.
in New York and I enjoyed it and had an act for it. And so that was how I was making my living. And this also, aside from being a calling card as a director, helped me break into doing art department and wardrobe and film and television and like non-union commercials and stuff like that. And also helped me sort of make a living. You know, I mean, sometimes I'd have a great job. Sometimes I would be a set carpenter or was like sewing curtains. But, you know, in between all these things, I was writing.
and wrote a bunch of screenplays that were all dark and fairytale adjacent, but not in an identifiable genre and thus not commercial enough to finance. And so The Witch was me trying to be more commercial, but being true to myself. Yeah.
Well, let's go back to Telltale Heart because we'll put a link in the show notes to it. It's great. And it's really good. It's a very strong short. And I think we're often talking about on the podcast is people are waiting for permission to do the thing that they want to do. And it looks like with Telltale Heart, you just, you made the short film that you could with the resources you had and the skills you had and the group that you had assembled around you, you were able to make something that was what you wanted to make as opposed to Hansel and Gretel. This was like a
a true representation of sort of what your aims were and watching it now, it's like, oh, that feels like Robert Eggers. That feels like all the calling cards of what you're going to be doing down the road. It has that style. And how many days is that? Like, what did you have? What was your big basket of stuff you could put into this thing? Because there's costumes, there's sets, there's a sense of production value that's way beyond what you might expect from just a short film. Tell me about putting together the Telltale Heart.
I've been saving up my money. At that time, I was waiting tables and then asked friends and family if they would help chip in. It was also before the big financial crisis, so we were able to get donations from people. This was before Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. And so we did lots of fundraising events to try to get some money. So we had some money to work with.
But we found an abandoned house, shockingly, in my hometown. It was a very rural town. And someone in the more wealthy town of Portsmouth in the 19th century decided to build their wife an amazing house out in Lee, New Hampshire. And then, I don't know, something happened. The family lost their money or whatever, and it had been sitting there kind of rotting. And only the kitchen had electricity. And the walls still had electricity.
you know, were horse hair and plaster. It was just like a good old fashioned haunted house. And Ed Langlois-
the artistic director of the Edwin Booth, he came in to help with the costumes and the production design. And we were sort of in there in the freezing fucking cold, like decorating this abandoned house. We, you know, drove up to Maine to get some like fabric that was like fire and water damaged that we could get it. Like it has super heavy discount, but get like a massive bolts of it. But because, uh,
We wanted it to look like shit. It was perfect, you know? And so we got to use that. And I rented some costume pieces from like a costume rental house in New York that I've been working with on stage stuff. But then we had a few things built and some top hats made by someone on Etsy. And were you driving, you were sort of driving all these decisions yourself. So you were kind of producing this yourself. Yeah.
In addition to having written and directed. I had producers as well, Mike Neal and Maura Anderson. But, you know, like, yeah, I mean, of course, like the big decisions of how this is going to work is like coming from... The hustle with you, yeah. The big creative decisions were me. There was plenty of hustle for everyone. Yeah. But then, you know, so Ed actually, I sent him the script and asked if he wanted to work on it. He said...
It was very nicely written, but it was just fucking masterpiece theater and he wasn't really interested in it. And he said there was nothing exciting about it as finely written as it was. And then...
At the time, this is... I don't know how we're going to get to the rest of my career with talking this long about the Telltale Heart, but it's fine with me. But basically, I had wanted this dying painter who was in his 90s to play the old man. And then I realized that in this horrible location in February, he was probably going to die. Yeah, that'd be a lot. That'd be a lot to kill the man in the Telltale Heart. Yeah. So then...
I was thinking, but, you know, it would be stupid to have someone in a bunch of prosthetic makeup. It would be better, I thought to myself, like on the Chinatown bus, if it was a fucking doll. And then I kind of thought, you know, maybe that's actually really cool if it's a puppet and it is sort of...
you know, there's something death-like about it the whole time and it could be really interesting. Yeah. I shared that idea with Ed and then he said, now that's cool. Now I want in to this. And then my friend Chelsea Carter, who I worked at the same restaurant with, she was working at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in New York. So I did the sculpt of the face, but then she built the puppet.
Great. So what I hear in your story is that you're running into obstacles and you're just figuring out like, well, what resources do I have? Who do I know? Like, what other thing could I do that makes this thing possible to do? You sort of weren't taking no for an answer. You weren't taking the fact that this guy was going to die if you tried to do it. You're like, okay, well, that is a challenge, but it's also an opportunity to do something different and something weird and something special and unique to our movie. And it's the stuff that's
to your approach that makes it exciting for people. It's what gets people to sign on. We're going to do something that's different. It's not just a plus one version of an existing thing that we could have done anywhere else. Not fucking Masterpiece Theater. Exactly. But I want to talk to you. So this guy was complimenting your writing. Why?
When did you first read a screenplay? Because you've obviously grown up reading a lot of plays, but when did you first read a screenplay? Like, this is a plan for making a movie. Do you remember what the first script was you read for a movie? That's a great question. I really don't know. You know, I really don't know. I don't know. But certainly, I read a lot of screenplays. I don't read a lot now, but in my 20s and early 30s, I read a lot of screenplays. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So having read through Nosferatu, I think you actually like screenplays. There's some writers I talk to who clearly like the writing script is only just so that they can actually make the movie, but they actually don't like the screenplay form itself. And you actually seem to sit in there and enjoy it. It doesn't seem like a burden to you. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah. I definitely, I like what a screenplay can offer. So here's your initial description of Thomas in Nosferatu.
She looks across the room. Thomas Hutter, mid-20s, is tying his cravat before a small mirror. He's very invested in tying it well. His back is to her. He's handsome, if not pretty. Kind, determined eyes. He seems unaware of the darkness in the world. Their middle-class bedroom is cute with brand new aspirational furnishing. This is to help disguise his overall shabbiness. There's a lot there in that paragraph, and it's meant for the reader. There's things in there that will be helpful to the reader
everyone else in the other departments, but it's there to give you a sense of what it's going to feel like to be watching this movie. And that's great to see on the page. And your script is full of that. Well, I think that my films, I'm trying to create like a tremendous amount of atmosphere. And so if you don't feel that in the script, then it's hard to believe that it's going to get there on screen. But also I think that I wrote that because...
Because that's what seemed right to me, and it was telling a lot about the situation. I think sometimes, consciously, when I'm describing characters, especially like secondary or tertiary characters, I want to give them a good description also so the actors are like, okay, I can see who this might be, and I might be interested in playing this role, you know? Like, you know, instead of just leaving them high and dry.
Absolutely. Another thing I noticed looking through your scripts is that uppercase characters names a lot. And so if a paragraph starts with the character's name, it's almost always uppercased. And it's not a shot list, but paragraph by paragraph, you can sort of feel like, oh, this is a shot, this is a shot. You definitely can sort of see what the camera's going to be looking at based on your paragraphs, which is great and works really well for you.
My question, though, is as you're writing a scene, so let's say you're writing this initial scene between where we're meeting Thomas and Ellen in this room, right?
Are you as the writer sitting in the room with the characters, watching them go about their things? Or are you sitting back and sort of watching in the frame in the Presidium? Like, where do you, Robert Eggers, fit in that world? It depends scene to scene and screenplay to screenplay. I think very often I'll start out, usually I want the beginning to be very clearly seen.
sort of shot listed in my mind as I'm writing it, whether I describe it as shots or just in prose without describing what the shots are. But I think that as I get deeper into the story and there's problems that I need to solve and like then it just becomes like...
the worst fucking TV coverage to just like tell the story, you know, and then I have to work on making it classy later. The most recent script that I wrote, however, is for like 80% like this is a shot, this is a shot. And I'm saying like, it's the shot we cut to this. And yeah, I just wanted to write a script like that for whatever reason, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Well, going back to your experience in theater, though, of course, theater doesn't have shots. It doesn't have cuts. In theater, you're in a space with characters. And as you're writing a piece for theater, you might be thinking kind of about the blocking and sort of where people are. But you're really about what is the reality within the scene because it has to – there's people in a space and you're just with those people in a space. Talking about street theater, like you don't even control sometimes the environment. You don't even control the POV on things. Right.
So I'm just curious, like with Nosferatu, when you're in those moments, how often were you thinking about this is what the camera's seeing versus this is the reality of being in the space with those characters? I mean, I would say like it was mostly about being in the reality of the space with Nosferatu. And then there's sort of like a final moment
step of writing that is the shot listing and this storyboarding with, with Jaron, where very, where oftentimes we're actually like reorganizing the beats so that it will flow better cinematically. And, and I will like very often like rewrite the scene to match like how we've sort of simplified it or found the essence of it.
That's great. When is the shot listing process most helpful for you? Is it way in pre-production? Is it closer to the day of shooting? Like what, what makes sense for you? Now, anyway, we're like storyboarding the whole damn thing. Like it's, we don't really finish until,
until a little bit into the shoot. But in a perfect world, it would all be done like well in advance in prep. But with Nosferatu, Jaren and I moved to Prague much earlier than anyone else and were in my kitchen, in my apartment, you know, like planning the shots, you know, hoping to get... We got a head start, but we were still, you know, a couple of weeks into production, still storyboarding. And...
So how much of Nosferatu was storyboarded? Because obviously there's going to be big sequences where you're going to have visual effects. You're going to have to put stuff in the background of things where you would need to storyboard it. But for dialogue scenes, were you thinking about, were you drawing those out? Some of the dialogue scenes were shot listed instead of storyboarded. But if we had had it our way, we would have storyboarded every single thing. And we did storyboard the vast majority of the film. We just simply ran out of time. So for some of the dialogue scenes, we shot listed instead. Yeah.
Who gets the storyboards? Because I know the Coen brothers, for example, will share with the actors, here are the boards for what we're going to shoot today, the scenes we're shooting today. What are the edges of who sees storyboards for you? Everybody, you know, everybody. I mean, like, I don't, yeah, everybody. Cool. Well, talk to us about, like, the journey for Nosferatu, the movie, because you had intended to make this earlier on in your career, and it sounds like other things came before it.
But was this always the first movie you wanted to make? Where did this fall in the... If I were talking to Robert in his early 20s, would he have said, like, this is his next movie? Like, when did the idea of the Nose Fraudging movie happen? Yeah, I mean, it was after The Witch and talked a little bit about it. And then I started developing a medieval knight movie.
Called The Night. And... Can't see it. Another The movie. Yep. Yeah. And basically, I was just so naive about Hollywood and we worked for almost a year on it, not really realizing that myself and the studio were like on parallel courses making two different movies, which was...
you know, nobody's fault but my own naivete. So, but when I realized that that's what was going on, I said, look, you know, let's push pause on this and why don't we do Nosferatu? I'm telling you right now, it's like, it's a more commercial version of The Witch. We know what word, what that is and let's go for it. But,
But, you know, I ultimately, like, I'm really, really, really glad that it didn't work because I've grown a lot as a person and a filmmaker. I'm much more fluid with my collaborators. We're further extensions of each other. And it's, you know, easier for us to get our collective vision out of our brains and onto the screen the way we see it. And I don't think it would have been, you know,
accomplished at the level that it's at, whether that's good or bad, had it been made back then. So did you write a Nosferatu script back then?
I did, and it hasn't really changed much since then. There was a lot more exposition when I had left it, and so it was mainly getting rid of exposition and tweaking things back and forth for budget and historical accuracy, both in the minutiae of German stuff and in the folklore. But ultimately, that first good draft is the same film.
So it sounds like you kind of knew what you needed to do as a writer, but you didn't have, as a director, you don't think you were ready to make the movie you were able to make now? Completely, yeah.
And it was interesting. And in the process of writing it, I wrote a novella, which I've never done before or since. But because this was an adaptation of a piece that's important to so many people and myself included, I needed to find a way to like get ownership of the world and the characters and writing this overly long novella that was filled with things that I knew would never be in the movie, like helped me tremendously. Yeah.
Let's talk about genre in the bigger sense and the genre of whatever you want to put this into, whether it's gothic horror or how you perceive the movie. Nose for Autism is a story that existed before, but you're making your own version of it. So what was the balancing act between, you know, staying true to what had come before versus putting your own stamp on things?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, it's a question of taste and it is subjective, but I tried to, like, run it on a parallel course and have all of my choices be some kind of extension of things that came from the Murnau film. So...
One of the first things I did is open up Lotta Reisner's biography of Mornau and the Galeen screenplay is in the back of that. Read that, go through it, check out Mornau's notes carefully, and really try to understand where that team was coming from creatively and understand that Alpen Grau, the producer, was an occultist practicing like occultists and...
I don't know that he actually believed in folk vampires, but he almost certainly believed in astral vampires as a reality, you know? What is an astral vampire? So we have to tell us about that.
People who can, or potentially elemental spirits, but who can sort of send their astral bodies like psychically to like drain people of energy and stuff like that. Sort of what we see Orlok doing at the very start, the sense of this mystical figure that comes to Alan. Yeah. But okay, so you try to understand all that stuff, great, you know.
It was always striking to me that Ellen becomes the heroine by the end of the film. Yeah. And I thought, well, this is sort of taking the inspiration from the original and running with it. You know, what if it's her movie? You know, what if we see it through her eyes? Like, perhaps there is the ability for the film to have more emotional and psychological depth this way.
And in the original film, she's called a somnambulist and sleepwalkers in the 19th century were believed to be able to see into another realm. And that became like entirely inspirational into, first of all, understanding the Mordau film a little better, but then also understanding who this character could be.
And as much as I love Max Schreck's iconic makeup design, and so does Planet Earth, what is that thing? And it certainly isn't actually a vampire as folklore would have it. And I wanted the vampire to be scary, scary.
Obviously, with my interests, I turned back to folklore and the early Balkan and Slavic folklore. These folk vampires were emulating corpses that looked more like a cinematic zombie. That seemed very exciting to me.
So then the question is, like, you know, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? So then I go from there. He still has Max Shrek's fingernails. He still has a bit of Max Shrek's profile and hunch to, like, take a nod back to the original. And because he is...
in this putrid state, he is a bit of a monster the way Max Shrek's vampire is a monster. Yeah, because I think we're used to modern vampires being romantic figures in the classically sexual sense. Like, we're used to the Byronic vampire who's charming, who comes in, and this is a more old-school, just actually terrifying monstrosity of a character who's coming in here. And while there's still a sexual element to him, he's...
this ancient old guy, he's not Robert Pattinson. He's timeless demonic force. Yeah. Yeah. A big angry erection with a mustache. Yeah.
So talk to us about the tropes of gothic romance and tell me if there's other genres you feel this fits into. When I think of gothic romance, I think of that sort of ruin and decay, which you definitely see in your movie. You see the darkness, the suffocating. I always think about suffocating collars, those Victorian collars that are like choking people. That sense of doomed romance that there's fate. And it's like, it's a sense of permeating evil that is...
specific and different from like a Cthulian or a Lovecraftian kind of darkness or horror. It's something primal, but also understandable by humans. There's something mortal and physical about it that just feels so specific. And what were the things as you were writing and then as you were sort of thinking about production design that you needed to call in there to make sure that we were feeling this world of gothic horror? Yeah.
I mean, the thing that struck me is that this is a demon lover story and there's plenty of that in Victorian fiction, but Wuthering Heights was something that I turned to pretty quickly in the writing process to sort of explore Ellen and Orlok's relationship dynamics. Something that I had all
All my heads of department read was The Fall of the House of Usher, which I'm sure they've all read before multiple times. I don't think there's ever been anything better as far as the description of gothic atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, there are so many little things, but never turning off the fog machine is a big help. I'll say that. Yeah.
I mean, look, the production design is very clear about what it's doing and the desaturated color palette is very clear about what it's doing, but it's something that was also just essential and was really the only thing that Focus features was a little bit like
please God, like, no, was that I would, they were so supportive, but it was, but I just, I insisted on only shooting when it was gloomy to keep that heavy atmosphere. And also when you finally see the sun after two hours of not seeing it, it has more of an impact, you know?
Yeah. Can we talk about night? Because night is one of those really challenging things to visualize on film. Basically, there's no one perfect way to do it and everyone has to make different choices. My first movie, Go, was almost entirely night exteriors and it killed me. I realized as a writer, like, oh, night, and then you're actually out having to shoot night. Like, oh my God, this is the worst thing possible. I think what you don't really appreciate until you actually have to aim a camera at something in the night is like, wait, how are we seeing this thing? Our eyes are not...
the same as what the camera's going to see. What were the choices you made for night in this versus Northman versus The Witch in terms of how we're visualizing night and where the light is coming from? How much is it subjective to the characters? What are some of the choices you're making and having conversations with your collaborators about night?
So with all of the films, the lighting is a, like a very sculpted version of what light is supposed to be actually doing. And all of the, the light sources, you know, if it's candle lit, like it's coming from candles. Uh, if it's lamp lit, it's coming from a lamp. If it's,
coming from a window. Like, you can better believe that there's no movie lights, no Kino flows, no nothing, just lights coming from the window with a tremendous amount of bounces and frames and shit all over the place. So that's the approach and it can become, you know, with the Northman, some of those really wide expanses at night were very challenging to shoot. Shooting the rafters
rather lovely lit crossroads in Nosferatu was a little simpler because Jaren just had like a strip of light that he needed to get his helium balloons over. But something sort of odd that we did on the Northmen and honed on this, but it seems to confuse a lot of audience members, so maybe it is not the best choice, is basically we don't photograph any...
of the color red and it's basically, and it's, it's virtually a black and white image that you're seeing, which is how mammals eyes work at night. Yeah. But we know the color of our sneakers and the color of a tree. So we, you know, imagine seeing it even though it's not there. So maybe because we're imagining it there, maybe it should be there, but we decided to not have it. And I think it is very beautiful, but it does sometimes, I don't know how many times people come up to me after screenings and,
and asked me like, what does it mean when it's black and white? You know, and I'm like, it means that it's moonlight. Yeah. You know. Really, I would challenge any listener, next time you're
outside at night, like outside of the city, when you're actually just out in the middle of the woods at night, recognize like how you're not seeing color. You actually are seeing basically black and white. And you don't think about it because it's not your top of your mind, but you really cannot tell colors apart. It's just how our eyes work. And I think we've been conditioned by so many other movies that are basically sneaking lights in places to give you a sense of like, oh, this is what night looks like, that it's not truly what night is.
And so there's both the aesthetic concern, but it's also the real practical concern. If you are a production that has a lot of night exterior shooting, that's going to have a huge impact on your crew and your ability to get work done. It's just, it's a challenge. And so making smart choices is important. I've definitely also, I mean, the next thing that I'm likely shooting has so many nights, so whatever. But I find that shooting nights as I get older has become a lot harder. Yeah.
a lot harder. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have a kid now. And so you recognize like, oh, sleep is good. Sleep is an important aspect for folks. And so, again, every production is going to make its own choices. But if I were to make a TV show that had a lot of night shooting, if I were to submit that, I would, from the very start, think about what are the choices we're going to make that are going to look best on screen and keep us alive while we're doing it. Because that just feels important.
as I've learned about, you know, how Jaren works, like I'm like now when I'm writing something, I'm kind of talking early on, like, well, are we going to do, we think with the vibe of this, we're going to want fast film or, or, or not like,
okay, like, oh, we want to use slow film. Well, like I got to think about the light sources at night because I don't want to have to have like a whole bunch of fucking lights, you know, in this particular scene. So what's, what am I going to do? You know what I mean? So it's nice to have those conversations as I'm writing now so that I can be sort of not putting myself in a place I don't want to be when I'm on set.
Yeah, and for the right genre of movie, like I watch Survivor, the CBS TV series, and their nighttime stuff now they just shoot with infrared cameras. And it's like, it's such a weird, cool look. And it's like, for the right production, that might be a look to take, but you're going to have to make that make sense within your whole world of stuff. We have a couple of listener questions that I want to get to if we can. This first one here is from
Lisa about detail. Drew, can you help us out? Lisa writes,
All right. So a good question about historical accuracy and details and what you need to put there versus feeling like it's shoved in. Robert, your script has like a lot of period details and I never felt like they were shoved in. But did you have any sense of I need to put this in there or I need to back off? I think that once you establish a location or...
or the persona of a character or whatever, and it's very clear, unless there's a major change or a major new addition, you don't need to harp on it so much. And as you get further into the script, you can also dial back. Again, it's like if there's...
been a big energetic scene and then the movie takes a pause and then there's like a funeral where you know the pacing is going to be slower then you can add some details about the funeral shit because you know the pacing is going to be slower but generally as
the thing develops you don't need to write like it's a wooden door with like iron blah blah blah because you fucking can expect that by now yeah you know I think I think that's definitely like a big a big part of it you know I mean I haven't read what you're reading and sometimes people just have bad taste but I think that that once you've established it people now know yeah
Yeah, one thing I hear you saying is that the speed on the page should match the expected speed of the actual story you're watching on screen. So I always describe like, you know, screenplay should make you feel like you're sitting in the audience watching this movie. And the really good screenplays I've read, I...
kind of forget after a couple years, wait, did I watch that movie or did it just read the script? Like they can really evoke the experience of sitting in that theater. And so these details can matter. Like Robert, you describe a character blowing the pounds off something and that's just not the way we would say that in American English. And yet it feels completely appropriate to the period of time that you're putting this in here, that your characters aren't speaking in German yet they feel like
okay, we're in this historic time. I believe that we're in Germany as we're doing this. But also like that, like the inclusion of that was because like you needed a beat change anyway. So like you might have just wrote pause, which also could have worked, but because we needed like a beat change, it was like a way to like work in a period detail that also keeps the momentum of the scene going in the right way, hopefully. Yeah, that's great.
Let's try Emil in Norway. Emil writes, I'm a film student in Trondheim, Norway, and started this fall. It's been a lot of learning, which is great, but also overwhelming at times. My question is, if you've ever felt stupid during your career, what did you do? I felt stupid a lot this semester. Not all the time, but those moments stick with me, so it feels worse than it probably is. I struggle to get my ideas out the way I imagine them, and I worry more about not seeming stupid than I'd like.
I try to tell myself that knowing you don't know the answer is supposed to make you smart, but honestly, that feels more like wishful thinking than fact. Any advice? Yeah, I think once you have a lot more experience, it's a lot easier to say, like, I don't know. What do you think? You know, then when you don't have a lot of experience, you know, it's that, you know, but I would just say,
Watch a million movies, read a million books, listen to all kinds of music, check out paintings, and just absorb stuff. And you do feel... I mean, I didn't go...
I went to drama school and that is it. And I definitely, like my wife has a PhD, you know, in clinical psychology. And I definitely, when I was hanging out with her friends, felt like a fucking idiot, you know? And I was like, I need to read some more books, you know? And certainly like, you know, in the process of making movies, you do make mistakes and you do not know everything. But I think,
Like you just kind of have to go for it and put one foot in front of the other. And then you learn more. I think though that one of the cool things about being a director is,
It's also sometimes frustrating and does make you feel dumb is that you are almost always, if you're not Ridley Scott, like the least experienced person on set. Because, you know, everyone's making many movies a year. And, you know, if you're lucky, you're making one every two or three years. And that's if you're lucky. So you literally have to listen to everyone around you who knows more than you do, but also know when is it the time to reinvent the wheel.
Now, it's kind of interesting to me sometimes when I talk to screenwriters who aren't showrunners and like aren't on set very much or and even sometimes people in post-production who have like incredibly illustrious careers but like don't know how movies are really made. Yeah. But also like maybe it doesn't matter that, you know, if screenwriting is your thing, you know.
Yeah. Going back to your story on Hansel and Gretel, like you watched this film at the film festival. You're like, you could have said like, oh, I'm an idiot. I should stop this. This wasn't very good. And instead you said like, no, no, I want to make something much better than that. And look, I knew the movie didn't work when we wrapped the shoot. Like, like, like, like I said, cut. And I was like, we don't have it. Like, we're going to edit it and it's not actually going to really work. But like, I have to keep going, you know, because I have to learn.
So what Emil is describing is sort of imposter syndrome. He feels like he's not up to the level of everybody else in his program, maybe. But remember, he only has introspection to himself. So he knows that he feels stupid, but he doesn't know that everyone else may kind of feel stupid too. Or they may be just as stupid, but they're just not projecting it. So listen, give yourself some grace. Know that you don't know everything. And it's also kind of exciting to be a newcomer at something. I love going into to do new things that I'm not good at because...
It just also reminds me of what it feels like to be young and be trying things. And so if I'm doing a Broadway show for the first time or I'm doing a different kind of animation for the first time, I love being the guy who doesn't know how this stuff works because then I can find out. There's the opportunity to try new stuff. So, Emil, you're great. Just keep working.
Let's try one more question here from ABS. ABS writes,
Hmm.
John? Robo-bilatier. I don't know why this is... I mean, you know, like, Shion, who co-wrote The Northmen with me and a lot of other scripts that haven't been made yet, I mean, you know, he and his wife, Elsa, have a lovely relationship, and she's an opera singer, and so they have things they have in common, they have things that they don't, and it's cool. My wife's a clinical psychologist, same thing, you know, like...
She reads really intense, heavy literature, which I enjoy talking with her about and haven't read, but it's inspiring to me. And then she watches shitty reality TV, which I can't stand. And she's happy to come and go to watch a bunch of Bergman movies, but doesn't want to sit through a bunch of Hammer Horror movies, and that's fine. Mm-hmm.
And my husband is a super smart, very organized MBA. And we have lots of areas of intersect, but we're not the same person. And we have very different interests and things. I think that can be good. And whether you're with a person who's another writer, we have friends who are both parts of a couple are writers and it works great. And other couple friends who split apart because they did kind of overlap too much.
There's no one perfect answer. I would say just your choice of profession and sort of what you like to do for a living, it's important, but it's not the most important thing in a romantic partner. It's like, what does that person, does that person give you energy, give you joy, give you, you know, make you feel like more of yourself than,
then that's the right romantic partner for you. If not, then they're probably not the right romantic partner and it doesn't have very much to do with their profession. You're good at answering these questions like in a holistic way. I'm very impressed. Anyway...
Well, thank you. Yeah, we've been doing this for a while. So it's always nice to see things. The reason why I tend to focus on kind of early parts of careers is that like most of our listeners are kind of in the early parts of their careers. And so that's something they can relate to more because like you could talk about like, well, how do you deal with like a studio marketing team for this stuff? It's like, oh, that's...
Those are problems that people will get to later on down the road. Yeah, I mean, I had the absolute pleasure of being able to like call Alfonso Cuaron every once in a while, pleasure and privilege.
And I remember I was asking him about some lighting question on The Witch and he was like, well, what you need is you need this pyramid of like LEDs that like you program and all this shit. And I'm just like, we've got three and a half million dollars. Like, I don't like it. You know, absolutely. This is a gravity here. So, yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's great. This is the time of the program where we do our one cool things. And so my one cool thing is a video I watched this last week. It's by Max Miller. He's a guy who does like historical food stuff. He finds like old historical recipes and he recreates them. Things that would actually be very appropriate for some of your historical movies, like Nosferatu and stuff. Like what would they actually have been eating? In this case, he made school cafeteria pizza from the 80s and 90s. And so, Robert, you probably remember this. Remember like the sort of steam tray pizza? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
I'm sure it's illegal now. So he found the actual USDA recipe for it, basically how you're supposed to make it, this liquid crust you use, which seems impossible. But it is a very convincing sort of recreation of the original sheet pan pizza, and it made me kind of nostalgic for it because it was terrible, and yet I was always so excited for pizza day. Wow. So a very good YouTube video on cafeteria pizza and how to make cafeteria pizza.
Robert, do you have something to share with our listeners? Something to recommend? Yeah, I'm afraid I haven't done a very good job of thinking of something to recommend while I've been yapping away. But it's gotten some more attention lately. But I really liked Magnus von Horns' The Girl with the Needle. And I would encourage people to check that out.
Fantastic. I haven't seen it yet. So Girl with a Needle is animation or live action? I'm trying to remember what this movie is. It's live action. Magnus is Swedish, I believe, and he lives in Poland. And the film takes place like after World War I in Denmark. And it was shot mostly in Poland in some really...
gritty, like excellent locations. It's a very cool, unique script. It's actually based on real events, of course, because I'm recommending it. It's very dark, but some of the acting is just really tremendous and really nuanced. And we all know very well the feeling of when we're reading a novel or reading anything really, and the author has been able to articulate something that we have never
semi-understood but never been able to say, you know? Yeah.
And I think when actors are at the top of their craft and the story and the script and the directors are all doing their job, the acting can do the same thing where it kind of like expresses an emotional state, another state that is something that like is so true, but we maybe have never seen on screen before. And I think that there's a few moments that reach that level in this film. Yeah.
That's great. I will race to see that. That is our show for this week. Scriptress is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Zoe Black, edited by Matthew Schlelli. Our outro this week is by Guy Fee. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.
You'll find transcripts at johnoggs.com along with the sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting. There's lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. And thank you to the premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each week.
You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on cycling. Robert Eggers, an absolute pleasure talking with you about Nosferatu and all things moviemaking. Yeah, it was fun. And when you were wrapping up the show, I thought, oh, this is so lucky. I don't have to talk about cycling. But now we do.