Shownotes Transcript
Hey, this is John. 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. My name is Craig Mazin. 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 approach the second season of the acclaimed TV show you created? It's a question asked by roughly 1% of our listening audience. And yet the answer is surprisingly relevant to anyone dealing with the pressures of expectation and reality. It's relevant to 66% of the people right now on this podcast. Which is so odd to have you both here.
We will also answer listener questions about transitioning from journalism to screenwriting and what to do when you realize that someone else is making something with the same premise. To help us do all this, we have a very special guest. Tony Gilroy is the writer and director of movies such as Michael Clayton, Duplicity, The Bourne Legacy. He also wrote The Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum, Devil's Advocate, Rogue One, and of course, The Cutting Edge of D.B. Sweeney.
Most relevant to today's episode, Tony is also the creator and showrunner of Andor, which starts its second season on April 22nd. Welcome to Script Notes, Tony Gilroy. It is a pleasure to be here. It really is. I've been listening, so it's nice to be someplace where you've visited. It is startling and disturbing. Well, it's very flattering. Tony Gilroy, for those of you who follow screenwriting, needs no introduction, even though John gave him one. But if you're...
a casual listener, let me explain. We've got one of the all-time great first ballot Hall of Famers here with us today. And weirdly, Tony, your name has come up so much recently on the show because after our Moneyball episode with Taffy Bird, our actor, she mentioned running into you, which is great. And
And then a couple weeks ago, Christina Hodson was on and we were talking through action sequences and we went through a great action sequence of yours from The Bourne Identity, which was so much fun to see and sort of see like how you are doing things on the page, which is different than how Craig or I or other folks would do things on the page. So it's great to have you on our mind. So to have you on our show is just a delight. I listened to that episode yesterday to prep for today. I thought she did an amazing job.
She just covered all of it. It was very well played. It's very instructive. That episode was really terrific. Yeah. So Craig will never listen to that episode. But Craig, we have Christina, who's really smart. I will. No shock. You have a lot to learn. There's things to learn. I think with this recommendation, this might go to the top of my list. And Christina is fantastic. Plus, superb accent. It always helps. It's just the best. Love it. Love it to death.
Tony, we're here on the occasion of Andor starting its second season, and every listener needs to go back and watch Andor season one immediately, like pause the podcast and go back and watch it. But...
Maybe they're in their car and they can't. Could you give us the log line and sort of set us up Andor within the universe of Star Wars for folks who aren't familiar with what Andor is and why it's so awesome? I'm going to skip the awesome part. The simple setup is it's the five-year prequel of a character, Cassian Andor, who's in Rogue One. Yeah.
In Rogue One, he will sacrifice himself at the end in a very heroic, messianic way. And this is the five years that leads him into the first scene of Rogue One, which is a slightly odd concept. But when we meet him in Rogue One, the character in Rogue One is sort of an all-singing, all-dancing character.
spy, a warrior. There's sort of nothing he can't do. And the concept of the show is to take him from a 0.5 years earlier where he is a cynical, disinterested...
self-preservationalist, the kind of guy in his town that people don't want to see coming down the street. To take him from the lowest possible point and have him become, in the first season, the first season is really about his sort of stations of the cross on the way to becoming a revolutionary. And it's the revolutionary education of someone from a very outside point
point of view so we take him in the first season just to the point where he he will join at the end and this second season is about the next four years as he activates that involvement
Now that's centering it on your protagonist, the guy who's changing, but you don't limit to POV just to him. There's other sort of plot lines and things that are being set up, which leads to the bigger question of like, what is the show really about? Like to you, what is the show, what are you actually trying to explore in the course of the show? The show for me is the opportunity to,
with the largest possible canvas and the largest possible cast and the most resources you can possibly imagine to tell the story of a revolution and to try to tell the story about what happens to a great variety of people in a great variety of social stratus and on both sides of the fence, what happens to ordinary people as revolution just explodes around them and washes over their lives. As people become...
absorbed into history and the pressures that that places on everyone. To my mind, it's an all-encompassing opportunity to deal with things I've been thinking about my whole life and behavior I've been thinking about my whole life and challenges I've been thinking about my whole life. And so I have a chorus, I have a choir sort of 10 or 15 characters that are really identifiable characters
that we're carrying through. And Cassie Nandor, Diego Luna's character, is this sort of messianic character surfing through the center of that. But as you suggested, it would be a, it would be a disservice to say that it's really just about this one guy. It is a broad survey of what happens to people when the shit comes down. It is, I think, and I'm not going to get into the
absolute trap of trying to rate Star Wars stuff because, you know, I like my life to the extent that I have one. But I think that Andor does feel a part. It is completely integrated into the story of Star Wars, the history of Star Wars, that narrative, that world, that tone. But it does feel set apart because it's so... I'm just going to get in trouble. I don't care. It's so good. It's really just of a quality that feels...
Different. And my question, this is really a process slash psychology question, because I know I'm struggling with this myself right now. And you're about to unleash season two upon the world. There is a season three coming. When you finished season one, which was so complete and accomplished, did you think to yourself, well, how the fuck am I going to do that again?
How do you face the blank, I don't even call it the blank page, the blank mind, knowing there is so much work to be done to do another season, another season, another season, when you've just run a marathon and won it? The great crease for us was during the filming of season one. And our show was really, really salvaged. There's probably other shows were as well by COVID. COVID really saved our show. I mean, I started this process recently.
either out of ignorance or vainglory or just blithe indifference, whatever. I had no clue whatsoever what I was getting into. And I...
threw together a five-day writer's room and I had all the things were in process and I won't go through the whole thing but I was in London I was going to be directing three episodes in the spring I was prepping them I was casting them I was sort of half-assed watching the other scripts come in and going well I got to do some other work here and um had that had we proceeded on that schedule
It would have been a trade story disaster. I mean, it really would have been an epic disaster. COVID came in and everything slowed down and stopped and reset. I reoriented my job on the show. I decided not to direct. I realized where the priorities were. And as we began to crawl back into the process, and Disney was one of the first places to start that, and Zana Wallenberg, who you know well, was so great producer from Chernobyl, and we share a lot of things from Chernobyl. But
But she just was like determined. And so as we started that roll in, there was time to get our footing and for me to figure out what I needed to be doing and how to make the show potentially what I really hoped it would be. We were on the hook. We had promised that we were going to do five seasons of this show.
And it was going to be, you know, one season per year. I mean, there's another. I mean, talk about delusional. It seems so, but that's what we committed to. We got up in Scotland and Diego and I were up there. This was post COVID after I went through my quarantine and got back over there and up in Scotland with him. And
I was just looking into the next black hole as was he, because, you know, he's got to marry into Rogue One and we're going, it's 10 years earlier and this is taking, you know, 17 years to make the first season. And so we really knew that we were in trouble. And we, I literally remember the conversation where we just sat down in the backyard and pit locker at this hotel with a scotch and just said, we're so fucked. We're just so totally fucked. What are we going to do? And the, um,
I don't want to make this the longest answer ever, but... No, go for it. The answer was sort of...
Mystically already in front of us, our show is organized around blocks of three, which is this European system that we, you know, you go for any system, you're looking for systems that'll help you survive, organize things. Yeah, survive, really survive, really. And so these blocks of three, a director will do a block of three and three and three and three, and we're doing four blocks of three. And that's what we were doing for the first season. And it was like, oh my God, we have four years to cover. And look at this, we have four blocks. And
And I remember going back to the room and going, what if I did a year per block? What could I do? And would Disney go for that? And would that appeal to them? And what would Cappy say? And how would we do it? And that was the crucible moment where we really figured out what to do. Tony, can you describe what you mean by blocks? As I watched the first season, it does really feel like this is a movie, this is an arc, and then there's another one, and there's another one. Is that what you're describing? Block is three episodes. So a director can come in and do three episodes in a block.
And we do treat them like films. The prep time is probably longer than most films because our demands on the show, which is something we can talk about, are so many extraordinary extra credit things that you would never think about in any other project. So the prep, the building, the editorial team, the whole project is on blocks of these three. And a director can, in both seasons...
it is physically possible for a director to come in and do the very first block and the last block but that would be the only way you'd be able to do the workflow yeah that's great well one of the things i really admire about andor is if we reach a new environment we have a sense like okay we're going to be here for a moment so the prison sequence of the first season is so incredible and i think because you're doing as a block logistically you're able to build out these incredible sets and sort of create
create the space but also create story elements and create characters who are going to be so important for that sequence but we also have a sense like we will move past them at the end it made so much sense and it seems so obvious but what you're describing is it wasn't at all obvious as you were starting the process you really probably were thinking episode by episode it wasn't until you got to this idea of blocks that it became feasible to tell the story the right way
No, but season one was built around that system. Okay, great. We did build around the blocks and each of the, you know, our very weird writer's room thing that I, you know, that we did. And we can talk about that if you want to. The very weird thing that we did, each writer took a block. That's again, you get a chunk, you get a movie, you get these three. And season one almost fits that. There's an anomalous seventh episode, which is an interesting little sidebar. It's just, we weren't Calvinist about it.
In the first season. In the second season, because we are jumping a year each time. Yeah. I mean, as writers, it's a fascinating concept. So the idea is we come back, it's a year later. And then the idea became refined as I started to sketch it.
I'm like, oh my God, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to come back for, I'm not going to come back and stay a month or dick around and do this thing. We're going to come back. When we come back, we're coming back for three days each time. So we just drop the needle on three days and then we drop a year and come back for three days and drop it. And so there's these, this abyss of negative space that's in between. And then the,
My desire, my goal, what we went for is to not have any exposition whatsoever. None of the Chicovia, no, John, I haven't seen you since then, you know. As you know. None of that. As you know. Of course, you remember when last we spoke. None of that. So what's the most badass drop we can do and get away with it? So that's...
This second season adheres very rigorously to the four-movie concept. Right. The show will be released that way as well. They're going to release them three per week for a month. Which I love. It's amazing that we're still coming up with new ways to do this. I know. I'm just thrilled that any movement towards not dumping everything at once to me is a huge victory. Yeah. And I'm curious, and this will lead in a little bit to some consideration about your writer's room and how that works. Yeah.
But show running, which is something that you hadn't been doing, you had been writing movies, you had been writing and directing movies, which is kind of like a show running a thing. But show running a television show like this, of this size, is somewhat of an elastic job. People do it differently. I myself go crazy. And I wonder how you do it. I'm curious how you handle your attention. Where do you hyper focus? Where do you delegate attention?
And how do you keep your hand on the tiller of quality control over the course of this beast? Because a production like this is an absolute beast. Look, you're absolutely right. I think people are constantly striving for a formula for how to do this. I mean, they haven't even figured out the formula how to make people's deals on this shit. Yeah. I mean, anybody who tells you, oh, well, this is how everyone's doing it is lying to you. It is absolutely the Wild West. And
I didn't know what to do. My only experience had been, I spent two years on House of Cards as a consultant. So I really didn't go to the room. I went there a couple of times. I was really there as a backup asshole at the end to give notes. Really, that was my function, to be the final horrible critic of what was there. That's awesome. And so...
But I'd gone to the room and I'd seen it and I certainly had a lot of friends who were doing it. We evolved into, what's the most graceful way of saying it? We evolved into a system that was a writing system. I never once for five years strayed.
have ever, ever, ever stopped writing. I mean, I'd never, ever, ever had a break, not a single day, ever. And the writing started in the conception, in the very first conversations with Lucas and Kathy and Disney and everything, and tiptoeing into how this might be and what I could get away with and how far we could push it and should I do this, all that advanced work.
Luke Hall was my next collaborator, the great production designer of Chernobyl, who Zana Wallenberg brought over, the great 14-year-old Mozart production designer. And so I began collaborating with Luke and building Farrick's and building these places and starting to design and getting some sort of handle on what we could afford and what was manageable and what would the scale of the show be. So there's a writing process with him. I write the first three episodes. I have 100 pages of what I think might be a season written.
And then I brought in Bo Willimon and my brother Dan. Stephen Schiff was ill in London, so he couldn't come, but he'd pick up an episode off the notes. But Bo and Danny and I go to a room for five days in New York with Luke Hull in presence, with the production designer there, who's already been my co-writer through a whole bunch of stuff in the design sense. The producer is there. We have lines to Lucasfilm about what we can do and what we can afford. And we have...
This absolutely knock-down, drag-out, accelerated five-day story conference where we beat out the story as crazy as we possibly can and fill in the gaps, all the gaps that I don't have. And then divvy up who gets the assignments, and those guys go off and they make drafts. They solve problems. They brought ideas in the room. They make drafts. They do rewrites. We do stuff. But they're always an approximation, right? It's just such an approximation because...
Those scripts are not going to be done, well, because of COVID. They're not going to be shot for 18 months. Oh, well, that's a lovely luxury there. Right? So there you go. So they're writing and then they go away. And then when COVID happens, then I just, all I do nonstop. I mean, literally every day is write. And our system on the show, I always hear people say, oh, well, you have a writer on the set. Never, ever, ever, ever had a writer on the set. Our whole principle is to have the scripts be so prepped
So perfect, have so many meetings and so many design discussions and everything's so completely taken care of. I'll do the first page turn. Sure. You know, I'll do the first HOD page turn. I'll run that one. The second one, I'll kind of a scramble. The third one, the final one is the AD and the director taking over the show. The best version of that is I don't ever have to say anything. I'll have a Sunday night phone call with every director before the week shooting to go over anything that's missing or any questions that we have. That's a great idea.
But I want everything so perfect in every moment of tempo and design and everything, everything's been tucked away that these people can go to set every day and swing.
The TV director thing is a whole other, that's a whole other podcast. But like as a director and as a first final cut director and as a protective director, the idea of having me or somebody else watch over, I want them to know exactly what they're supposed to get, what the protein is every day, what we're going for. But I want them to swing when they go to work. And so our system was developed around that, a very sort of scientific approach.
Let's get a perfect set of drawings. I mean, to a level I would never take a movie. I've never taken a movie that far. I mean, and this is hundreds of people, but so detailed. And that's what we evolved into. So it's a writing system. And I wrote from the very first memos to Lucasfilm,
straight through we finished November 5th to the final ADR and working with my brother Johnny when we're doing all the final cuts and all the stuff because you know we get to finish up the show in a way so I mean I don't finish until the final ADR mix session I mean I'm writing every single day I mean you basically write through it sounds like you're writing through until the point where you have finally finished the scripts at which point you now go and you probably were already doing this anyway
to begin editing because you were now receiving director's cuts in and now you start editing those and you start working on the visual effects and so the job never ends. But it sounds like you've got a system where the materials that are coming in, it sounds like you've got a system where there aren't too many bad surprises. We shot 1,500 pages of script, right? We only lost one scene in the entire thing that we didn't use for the cut. Nice. We only ever reshot anything which was the first sequence in the very first episode of
And essentially we reshot it because we wanted to give the directors the balls to swing away. They were too afraid to swing. And it's like, dude, you got to like go for it, man. This is like, you know, I don't need coverage. I need a movie here, man. And like, so that's the only time we ever did it. Obviously we had problem solving complications and all kinds of workarounds because of the strike and different things like that. But it is the most maximal, imaginative, immersive thing ever.
that I lived in for five years because when I say writing,
I'm not just talking about the dialogue or the scenes. I'm not just talking about all the memos that I have to write to explain everything that I want or fight for what I need or all those things. I'm also talking about all the dizzying, really almost hard to comprehend amount of design work that has to go into the show. I mean, there's places where I will delegate, obviously to the directors. I delegate on the day and I hope the phone doesn't, you know, every now and then the phone would ring at, you know, 4.30 in the morning and I'd have to do
do something but very very rarely mostly it's me getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning and going through dailies from yesterday and being astonished at how cool these directors are blocking holy shit look what they did this I could not how did they know how to you know so they're because they don't have to worry about the script when they get to set right yeah now Tony this is your first time doing a second season of a TV show but all
all three of us have done sequels. We've done movie sequels where we worked on the first, worked on one movie, then we had to come back and sort of do the next one. And so we have the knowledge of like, we know what the thing is. And so we can make a plan for the second one. And in my experience, you could have a plan for it, but that plan will go awry. And there's, you're dealing with a bunch of other expectations around it. And because it's the second time through, expectations are higher and different. What were you able to take from, for example, the Bourne movies,
from that and bring it into this or just like what has been your experience of sequels overall and what are the things that you've learned that work well when you're trying to do the next installment of a franchise versus that's just not going to be relevant because you're trying to make a new movie each time.
I think it's easier. I mean, the first time I went to do the, when I went to do Supremacy, I was shocked that I didn't have to introduce the character. You know, I was like, oh my God, all the work that you do to have people really understand this person that you're talking about as quickly and as quickly
elegantly as possible. All that's done. So I think it's a huge advantage in a way to the larger question. I think this maybe sort of goes to what you're saying and sort of maybe the cherry on the top of the previous answer. You know, I'm no kid. I did a lot of things over the last few decades and a lot of experience of things. I found there were so many days every week where I was using absolutely everything I knew. Mm-hmm.
in all aspects of my life. I mean, I'm talking about all the ambassadorial things that one does as a showrunner. I'm talking about all of the, should I be Ho Chi Minh today or Napoleon? Am I, is it time to write that memo? Is it everything from the most
molecular scene writing tweaks to the most maximal decisions about, oh my God, we can't afford to pay for this entire episode. What are we going to do? And everything in between. It's been a decompression process to come off of it, I must say. Yeah, I go through the same thing. And I wonder if you've had this existential thought
Because I have. Because you've been doing it longer, but John and I have been doing it, I think, if anybody is a young person for a long time. I think we're sort of contemporary. We've all been doing it for a long time. But when you work in features, as you and I and John did for so long, you do get used to a little bit of the, well, you work on a thing and it's maybe a year or if you're making it two.
This show that you're making and the show that I'm making will devour, what, a decade, a decade and a half of your life, of your rapidly dwindling life. And I wonder, sometimes I turn to my first AD and I say, when I'm not looking and when I don't expect it, please hit me in the back of the head with a hammer as hard as you can. Because I don't know how else to get off of this. Because it's so, like you said, the dizzying move from molecular to macro at times is exhausting sometimes.
But I love it. I just, I do feel sometimes a little bit of an ache that there's something, well, whatever my Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? And whenever your next Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Do you feel that? Or are you like, screw it, this is a beautiful thing? No, I spent the first year, even when I was in London pre-COVID, I began to have just
the worst buyer's remorse. I mean, epic. Every morning, what have I done? I've fucked my life. I shouldn't have done this. Now I've committed. All these people are here. This is horrible. When COVID came, I kind of thought like, you know what? Thank God. That will kill the show. And thank God. And I was very, very unhappy when the phone calls started coming. And then I was like, well, I'm not coming back to London to die for this show. And they were like, well, I'm not going to direct anymore. You know, it's two speeds. Number one, you have your pride of...
pride of work. That never goes away. And I think anybody who gets onto this podcast is probably in that category of obsessive human being who's going to just, you're just going to do the best you can all the time. But it was with horrible, horrible doubt. And it really wasn't until we started shooting and stuff started coming in and it started to pull together. And my brother Johnny really came in and was really seeing stuff. And I was like, well, I mean, this is going to be good. And, and
My feelings changed as we did the first season. And, um,
I'm only doing two, though, Craig. It's five and a half years for me. I did do Rogue, but that was in the past. You're not only doing two. I don't believe that. I'm only doing two. We're done. No, it's a closed circle. It's over? Yeah, no, it's a novel. Yeah, because he walks out in the end. We're taking him to the final scene that walks him into Rogue One. In season two. Yeah, literally, we're walking him. And I will say that is... So you found a way to get out. That is something... Well, we...
Not only that, I think it let us stay sane. It let Diego and I stay sane. Yes. And the people involved. It let Disney stay sane because there's no secret there. The streaming model and economics changed right in the middle of our show, which could have been cataclysmic. Well, you're in a victory lap now then. Yeah, but knowing the ending, always knowing the ending. Yes.
everything much more. Yeah. It's a freeing thing. It's a liberating thing to know where the end of the road is. Well, I know where the end of my road is. It's just way the fuck down. Yeah. Well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell me either. No, I've been out. I wrote another script over the summer, so I'm like, I'm already out. Screw you, Gilroy. I'm trying to get out. No.
No, I mean, I'm out. All right. Well, that's a good answer. And that's encouraging. I like how happy you look right now. So we're looking at each other on Zoom. You look delighted. So just check in with me about five years from now. I think I hopefully will have that same. I did it.
Look on my face. Yeah, we're an audio podcast, but if we ever released video episodes, you could see Craig, like the realization that like, oh, Tony LeRoy's done. Like that's a choice I could have made. You can see him like recalculating everything he did. He's sort of shrinking there. That was just my rage building up. That's what that looks like. I mean, I love working on the show, but my God, the marathon aspect of it really is...
It's just at times it's incredible. And so congratulations for making it to the end of the finish line. Is there a way that we could manufacture a COVID? I mean, basically. Oh God, John, what are you saying? Dude, I think they did that. They tried that. Craig's show actually has it built in. But is there a way that we can sort of build in those times and those stops? Because like that was so crucial for you to be able to make it the first season. Yeah, I'm kind of curious because you had the benefit of that forced break.
Yeah. In season one. Now, in season two, as you were working on it, there was kind of a forced break, but you couldn't work during it because it was the Writers Guild strike. Yeah, but that was a different... By that point, it's actually...
The irony of that was that if you had asked me at any point during that year, what's going to be the most epic moment of your year? I would have said without any labor issues on the horizon whatsoever, I could have told you in September. Oh, my God. Around March or April, I'm going to finish the final rewrite on the final script. And that's my timeline. I'm ahead of the production deadline.
I don't want to minimize the work that Danny and Bo and Tom Bissell and Steven, they make the rough housing that we can cast and build and budget and everything. But my work to finish it and to get there and to tweak it all out and to get it off this desk, I was looking, oh my God, around March, that's the way I'm going. That's what I'm going to finish. So I literally finished the final page turn about,
Six days before the strike. It rhymed with that just by accident. So the problems with the strike were production problems and it's a whole different... It didn't help me out. It didn't really help anyone out, I think, other than the membership as a whole, which I guess was the point. I will say, I'll tell you one thing it did. And this is interesting. What it did do is I was not allowed to see the show for six months.
Oh, that's interesting. And they kept going. They kept going. Oh. And I had only seen one cut of one rough cut of the episode. So in September, when the strike was over, my brother John came to New York and brought me all 12 episodes in extremely rough form, but all 12. That's amazing. With temp crap and all the IOUs and temp music and sloppy shitty all over the place, but 12.
And I was extremely nervous. Sure. And I spent two days and I watched them. And I had the experience that one always speaks about in an editing room. On every movie I've ever been on, there comes a moment where you go, God, I'd pay $50,000 if I could see my movie for the first time. Right, right. And I got to watch all 12 episodes on a run with the freshest eyes and smart, fresh eyes that you could possibly ever have. I generated...
I don't know, 100 pages of notes, but they were notes that were like, I had developed a new way of thinking about things in a way where I'm really into the calories that the audience spends on information. I'm really sophisticatedly into that. Describe that concept a little bit for us. Like, well, if the audience is worried about any bump in the road over here, or if that's confusing when they come in, or something that she said,
takes my energy away and the audience is missing the protein that I have in the middle of there that I want to be there. I want to smooth that down or get rid of it. And I was so much more in tune with that in a way that would be, I never would be holistically before.
I think I generated, I don't know, hundreds of pages of ADR and all kinds of, and it just, it was a superpower to go back to London a week later. I think we had the most exciting two weeks that I've almost had on the show, getting back to London after that cut and going all four cutting rooms, all four directors and just going like, okay, this is what I do here and this is this and this isn't working and let's do this and like,
man, people, it was so much. Those are fun. Those are the fun weeks. Yeah, and so the strike in that sense maybe had a positive effect, but boy, I wouldn't want to do it that way again. It was very... Once is enough. It's like asking to be severed. Like, there was two Tonys and like, no, it's appealing, but also clearly you see the damage there. It was so much heartache for Zana and the people in production and
And it was really, the work that they did was just heroic. And my brother, and not to be repeated, but again, there was, you're always trying to make an advantage out of something that's a crisé, right? Yeah. So, crisé is crisis? Like, the second time you used that word. Yeah, crisis. But it's a French crisis. That's the word I'm going to use. That's the word you're going to ask for. In your bonus segment, you'll get more on crisé. Yeah, he's already found the word for his word. Exactly.
Exactly. So, Craig, I'm taking from this calories, protein. Twice you mentioned protein, the protein of a scene. Love that. That's so important because like everything else, lovely, makes things taste better, but the protein is the actual substance that you're trying to make sure. Why are we here? We talk about writing sometimes like...
It's a little bit like the way magicians practice the art of deception and distraction. And if they are looking at the hand you don't want them looking at, you need to figure out how to get them to not look at the hand you don't want them looking at. You want them over here. And those little bumps, the tiniest bump is too much of a bump. So I love that you talk about that.
I'm really, in my later career, I'm vastly more conscious of my relationship with the audience than I ever was before. Not in a pandering way, but in a communicative way. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, the real trick of the writing that we do is we have to simultaneously know everything that's going to happen and divorce ourselves of all memory. So we have to both be the creator and the audience simultaneously. And every word on the page and every frame is that split. Exactly. Yeah.
Let's go to some listener questions. First one here is an audio question. So Drew, help us out. You can play us this question from Jason in Canada. Back in 2021, I wrote and directed my first short, a ridiculous sci-fi comedy titled I'm Not a Robot, about a man who, after failing a capture test trying to log on to a website, faces an existential crisis when he thinks he might actually be a robot.
If the title and premise sound familiar, it's because Victoria Warmerdam just won the Oscar for Best Short Film for her I'm Not a Robot. It was funny hearing from friends and colleagues joking that my film was nominated for an Oscar. But this got me thinking how interesting it is that two writers, an ocean apart, came up with and created such similar short films within a few months of each other. Maybe that's a sign that the idea was in the zeitgeist or that the idea wasn't that original.
But either way, it is cool that another writer felt like an existential crisis triggered by the mundane task of clicking on images of bicycles to prove their humanity was a story worth sharing. And even cooler to see Victoria recognized for her incredible work. As Craig has said before, and apologies for paraphrasing, but it's less about the idea and more about the execution. And Victoria is certainly executed at the highest level.
With that in mind, I still feel oddly validated. My first no-budget film did not win an Oscar, not even close, and I had nothing to do with Victoria's Oscar win. But at the same time, I wrote something that felt true to me, and another writer felt that way too. I was curious if, as writers, you've ever experienced something similar where you saw one of your ideas or stories brought to life by another writer. And if so, did any interesting similarities or differences stand out? Your friend in the North, Jason.
I love our friend in the North. That's so nice. Painful, painful, painful, painful. I mean, yeah, many times, many times. It's the one reason why one should avoid the idea that you're better off isolating yourself away from entertainment news and staying on top of the industry and keeping your ear to the ground. And if you live in New York or you live in London, you live away, making sure that you have an agent that has their ear to the ground. I've had
several many things shot out from under me when I realized someone else was doing it or there was something that was close it's really painful when you go deep it's really painful when you go all the way through and find out that you've been treading the same territory you have a remarkably generous attitude about it I'm sure there were some other
I'm hopeful that you're a complete human being. There's some other painful conversations about it. Oh, yes, I'm sure. There was a journey of acceptance to get there, I hope. Jason can feel pain. Sounds a little valiant to me. Well, I think you probably had the experience a few more times than Jason has. There is something, I think, at least nice to say, listen, I'm just starting out. I'm aspiring. At least the thing that I thought would be interesting conceptually turns out to be interesting conceptually to somebody, which is...
And it's funny, this was in the Zeitgeist because I remember that Ron Funches, who was a fantastic stand-up, did a joke about this very thing where he said, they keep on asking me if I'm a robot and they make me enter a series of numbers and letters, which seems like the sort of thing a robot would be really good at. So, yeah. This hurts. This question hurts.
PTSD. Yeah. All right. Well, Jason, you've triggered Tony Gilroy. So another feather in your cap. For me, that example was this movie, Monster Apocalypse, directed by DreamWorks. Tim Burton was attached to direct it. And I turned it in and they're like, oh, wow, we really love this. Oh, wait, there's a movie called Pacific Rim and it seems like it has a similar premise. And so they found that Pacific Rim was like, oh, Jesus, it's the same movie. And it really is. It's just way too close. So it was a Dante's Peak versus volcano kind of situation where it's just like,
They didn't want to be the second movie. And I'm like, I get it. They did those, though. They did both of those. They did those, and it didn't help. And they did Bugs Life and Ants. They did, yeah. So sometimes they will do both things, and sometimes it works out. Sometimes they're like, screw it, let's just do it. But they decided not to do mine, and it's like, okay. And I wish I were as immediately accepting as Jason was, but...
It's tough. Yeah, you know, Jason is just clearly far better balanced than the three of us. Hey, Craig, I do want to hold on to this example for the next time we see a story in the news about like, oh, this person stole my script or stole my idea. Come on. You know what? It's the same title, the same idea. Great point. And so I love Jason for...
A, being an incredibly positive person, which is really cool, but B, not going anywhere near the whole, they stole my thing. If I see, so Tony, John and I are sort of obsessed with the following concept, that if there were justice or I don't know, some really good journalistic standards,
in the entertainment reporting business that you would never hear a story about somebody filing a lawsuit saying someone stole their thing. You would only hear if they won. And that meant you would never hear anything because they never win. I mean, I'm not saying that people don't occasionally infringe. I'm sure infringement occurs, but I just love that Jason didn't go down that path.
Yeah. I've been ripped off. I'm not saying you, of course you've been ripped off. You're really good. I've been ripped off and we, and I'm not going to get into it, but Danny and I really early in our career got ripped off. Did you sue? No, we were advised by an agent because we didn't really have an agent. We were hip pocketed at that point. And they said, look, you could do this. You might, you might get over on this and these people might put you to work even, but like,
You guys look like you might be around for a while, and this might not be the best thing to do. There you go. You guys look like you might be around for a while. I guess, listen, I got ripped off too in the beginning of my career. It happened, and it hurt. But then people said to me, this is not your last at-bat. So just, you know, eat this one, get back out there, you'll be fine. It's not fun, but yes. So anyway, I appreciate that Jason didn't go down that road. Yeah, yeah.
Drew, another question here. This next one comes from Anonymous.
Could being a film critic or film journalist affect your chances of working as a screenwriter? As someone currently looking for work and with a background in journalism, I personally really enjoy writing about film, and I feel like it could be a great avenue for me as a young person starting to build a career, but I'm afraid of costing myself future opportunities by being branded a film critic. Perhaps it makes me look bad, or someone doesn't like something I said about their work. Is that a real concern? Stephen Schiff. Yeah. Look, a good script's a good script.
If you're lucky enough to write one, someone's going to pick up on it. Yeah. Could not agree more. Everything else is mood point. Nobody did this shit. Yeah, you could absolutely destroy someone's mom's movie, and if you write a good script three years later, they'll buy it. Yeah, and they'll put their mom in it. So Stephen Schiff was the chief film critic for The Atlantic, I want to say? Or Vanity Fair. Or Vanity Fair. So like a really big film critic, and then one day said, I think I'm just going to try doing this, and has been doing it at a very high level ever since. Yeah.
I mean, as much as film critics can make me nuts, I'm on record with that one. No, I don't think being, as long as you're not a complete jerk, like if your persona as a critic is jerk, or if you kind of go down the Armand White, I just like disagreeing with everybody, kind of, you know, maybe then, maybe. But I agree with Tony, write a good script, all is forgiven. I would also say that there's a difference between being the critic who is like,
reviewing every movie that comes out this week and sort of trashing them or giving them the thumbs up and the thumbs down and being the person who writes very smartly about movies and sort of like the overall trends in movies or things you notice about like who can like
pull out themes among different directors and different films. That's the kind of thing which is sort of elevating the art of film criticism and making us think about film. That's a different thing than sort of just like trashing the new thing each week and saying how bad the most recent Disney adaptation is. Like that's not doing you any favors. If people are Googling your name to see that kind of stuff, that ain't going to help you. But if you're writing really smartly about film like Stephen Schiff, that's fantastic.
And then wait for your first reviews. Yeah. Nothing will help you out more there. That's when you fucked around and you found out. Yeah. Because good Lord, that hurts. I will say there have been some cases where I've seen a person who does film criticism who then like goes off and makes a movie and it's just terrible. And it's just, it's always fun to see like, oh, you know what? Criticizing a thing and actually making a thing are very different skills. Absolutely. Wow, that is.
It is time for our one cool thing. Craig, what do you have for us? Right. Today, it's something I mentioned on the podcast before I'm passing, but I wanted to drill down a little bit into it because I use it literally every day now. It's called Startpage. So Startpage is, I don't know about you guys, I've been like looking for an alternative to Google for a long time because the company that says don't be evil is becoming evil. So the problem is the other search engines just aren't very good or they're slow and
But Google is giving me the AI slop all the time. So Startpage is a company that's run out of the Netherlands, and they aren't their own search engine. What they do is they take your search query and they run it through Google or Bing if you prefer. But they don't save your search information and they strip away all the trackers. So Google doesn't know who you are. They don't save any of your stuff.
you get to Google without becoming a product of Google. And it's just as fast, just as good, and no annoying AI slop. The last thing you might want to Google with actual Google is Startpage. Install it. It's actually just startpage.com. There you go. You don't even have to do that. Go to startpage.com, and it's been a delight.
So, Craig, I was trying it out because I saw it here in the show notes, and I think it looks great. I really agree with it. I want to try to use it. One frustration I have is that in Safari and other browsers, you can set your default search engine so you can just type in the bar to get a thing. And right now, you can't set StartPage.com as the default search engine. You can. Yeah.
Okay, so tell me how you're doing it. I'm doing it on, well, I'm using Chrome. So that may be the part of it is that I'm not using Safari. So in Chrome, I think there is an extension or something that allows that to happen. Okay, but it's certainly worth considering because I really do think it's a better way to do stuff. Tony, what do you have for us for one cool thing? Can I name a podcast without getting in trouble? Are you kidding? 100%, we love it. It's not a competitive one. I mean, my salvation for the last...
year and a half has been I think the greatest podcast I've ever heard it's called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by a guy named Andrew Hickey there was an article about it in the New Yorker last year and I can't remember who wrote it it wasn't Adam Gopnik it was somebody else but they it was an appreciation of this and it said basically this is the
the equivalent of one man trying to write the oed the oxford english dictionary this is he's only up to 170 he just dropped 177 this morning i literally got a new one this morning i don't know if he'll possibly survive to finish it i cannot recommend this enough if you're into music
I was turned onto it and I started listening to 60 stuff that I was really interested in and British invasion and different things. I was, and I worked through that and then I chipped away at some other things. And finally I was like, I'm just going to go back to the very beginning and start at the beginning and go all the way through. It has been a place of great safety and, and curiosity. And I just love it. That's my recommend. And he always says at the end, he always says at the end, if you like this podcast, please recommend it because word of mouth is the most important communicator. This is the most important communicator.
This is my appreciation of Andrew Hickey. It's on Patreon, but it's on Spotify. It's just, it's fantastic. Awesome. That's great. So Andrew Hickey did the thing which we sort of cautioned against, which is like you're starting your premise like, I'm going to do 500 episodes of this thing. And then you've like boxed yourself in there. So maybe he'll find some blog format to get through that. We should have done that.
we would have been done years ago, John. I'm just going to say one thing, guys. I'm going to tell you one thing. If you ever listen to this, you'll clearly understand that he has to put a lot more into it than you guys are doing. Yeah, absolutely. It's not just two people chatting on microphones. I mean, I will tell you, what we did put into this, John did 99.3% of. Yeah.
Yeah, Andrew, but yes. My one cool thing is sort of like Craig's and it's a utility I find super, super helpful. So basically, you're surfing the internet, you're finding stuff and there's a site, an article that you want to hold on to, you want to set a bookmark for it. You can save it in your browser, but then you're never going to actually find that again. So you have to find some place to store that thing.
And so for the last 10 years or so, I've been using a service called Pinboard, which is a bookmarking service. So you save the link and put a little tag on it. So if I remember if it's a how it's be a movie or one cool thing, Pinboard is clearly near the end of its life. It has not been updated for a long time. I knew it's going to just fall apart at some point. I have like 4000 bookmarks saved someplace.
So I was considering rolling my own because I'm a masochist. But then I found a service called Raindrop, which is actually really good. And so it's raindrop.io. And it's just a bookmarking service. And so you click a button, there's a little browser extension, and it saves it, you put a little note for it, put a tag on it. And then you can always just search it and find it, which is really good. What I like about it, it has a native app for iPad and for iPhone. And so if you're
looking on your phone, you tap the little share sheet and you just save it to Raindrop and it's there. So if you're looking for a way to sort of hold onto your bookmarks and organize them in a way that you'll actually find stuff again, I recommend it. It's good and it's a paid service. You're paying for this to get the premium stuff. And I like paid services because then they're going to stick around because they have an incentive to stick around. So yeah,
raindrop.io if you're looking for a bookmarker. An actual business model in tech. Huh. Yes. That's what I was going to say. When you don't pay for a thing, it tends to break and fall apart because people abandon it. Yeah. Yeah.
That is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Barquart and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. It's an homage to The Last of Us, Craig. Oh, I got to listen to this one. Yeah. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we asked you today. You'll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find us at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today.
in the description, but also in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week and to pay the talented folks who put it together. 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 which words we wish existed in English. Tony, Craig, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations to both of you on your new seasons. I'm so excited to watch it. Thank you, Tony. Really, yes. Really happy to be here. Thank you.
Thank you.