Scott Frank on Netflix, the future of Hollywood, and Dept. Q
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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kofka. That is me. I'm also the Chief Correspondent at Business Insider.

And today I got to do one of my favorite things. That's talk to Scott Frank, the writer and director who's had an excellent career in the movies and is now doing the same thing on streaming. Scott's the guy who wrote Out of Sight. It's one of my favorite movies, full stop. And wrote lots of other great stuff like Logan and Get Shorty and Minority Report. And for the past six years or so, Scott Frank has become a Netflix guy. He made Godless for them with Steven Soderbergh.

He had a massive hit with The Queen's Gambit during the pandemic. Now he's back with Department Q, which is a great take on the British crime story. That one's also a hit. I like talking to Scott because it's fun to talk with someone who is so good at what he does, which is make entertainment that's surprising and sophisticated and provocative and also accessible to lots and lots of people.

And I also like talking to Scott because he's happy to talk about the way his industry is changing and what that means for him and for you, a person who likes to watch great stuff. There's a bunch in here about how to make TV, but also about the future of TV and how tech and AI will and won't affect it. And maybe tellingly what Scott Frank would do if he was going to start a career in TV and movies today. That's enough of me. Let's hear me talking to Scott Frank. ♪

I'm here with Scott Frank, writer, director, guy who talks to me periodically about all the cool shit he's doing. Every now and again. Which is why you are my favorite guest. So thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me. I love talking to you, Peter. I was looking back. The first time we did this was 2017 when you were still writing and directing movies. And since then, you have kind of become a streaming slash TV guy. Yeah.

Um, did great stuff. He made Godless for Netflix, uh, with Steven Soderbergh, uh, Queen's Gambit, huge hit in the pandemic in 2020. Now you've got, I keep calling it, I want to call it project Q, but it's department Q. Great crime drama. Also a hit top 10 in the U S top 10 globally. Um,

So many things I want to talk to you about. Let's talk about the show first of all. I can't spoil it in part because I haven't finished it. I'm through episode five. I've got three more to go. I'll crank through them. They're great. When I first started watching it, I'm like, oh, you know what? My parents love these British crime dramas. They're the people who subscribed to BritBox to watch those. I've never really seen one. I don't remember seeing one. And this will be the Scott Frank version of that. So I'm up for that. And it is that.

But then there's a bunch of other stuff going on. So what's the best way to describe this project to someone? Well, I mean, it is kind of a, in many ways, I am aping the classic British procedurals, which is a genre I love. I am the BritBox subscriber. I'm watching Line of Duty, Happy Valley, Broadchurch, Vera. I'm watching everything on there. And I go back to Prime Suspect and Cracker. And I love all those shows. I just love them.

And I'd always wanted to do my own version of one of them. And much like with Godless, where I wrote a Western and when I was directing it, I said, I'm going to embrace every trope in the Western. Every cliche, I'm going to do them all. And we're just going to try and, you know, find a fresh way not to reinvent anything, but to...

to just have it feel like it's its own thing. And same thing with Department Q. I wanted to embrace, you know, the surly, grumpy cop who doesn't get along with everybody with his own dark personality issues and so on, and cold cases and all the things I love. - And really gray United Kingdom. - Gray United Kingdom, all that good stuff. But then try and contextualize it in

characters that feel different in the end. Once you go beyond the type and the attitude, who they are, let's see if we can't do something interesting with them because when you watch these shows, there's certainly the whodunit aspect that you're really into, but you kind of come back for the characters as well. You fall in love with these people and ultimately at the end of the day, it's always the why-done-it that's more interesting anyway.

Yeah. So this is based on a series by a Danish author? Jussi Adler Olsson. And he wrote, I think he's now written 10 or so books. Back when he gave me the rights to these, I think he'd only written three of them. And it was like 15 years ago. And they've done two film versions, I think, in Denmark of three or four, maybe more of the books, like the first few books. Yeah.

- And I read on the internet, which doesn't mean it's true, that originally you were gonna set this in Boston and then move to Scotland. - Yeah, I thought I tried to kind of get it going. I wasn't gonna write it or direct it originally, and then I ended up doing both, but originally I was trying to get it set up and we were working on a version in Boston and it never gelled. It was really talented people around it, but I don't think we figured it out quite.

And then I was prepping, I was in Germany preparing Queen's Gambit when Rob Bullock, who's a lovely producer at a company called Left Bank in London, came to me and said, you have the rights to these books and you haven't done anything with them. Let me help you. And I said, sure. And he said, we can do it in England. I said, great. That's how that happened. And why is the English, so when you're thinking about making a show,

in modern times, I mean, in this industry moment we're in, and you say, we're going to put it in Scotland, my first thought would be, that's a tax break thing.

Um, like I was just recently watching a Netflix show and I couldn't figure out where it was filmed. And originally I realized, and it's supposed to be set in some, um, indescript, nondescript city, but it's eventually it's filmed in Wales. I'm like, there's a reason they filmed in Wales and it has to be dollars and cents. So, so how, how does a show like that end up in Scotland and what are the considerations? And I should just add that,

that I'm kind of a subtitle guy to begin with for a lot of stuff I watch, and I'm definitely watching with subtitles for your show 'cause there is just a lot of Scottish brogue in it. - It's a lot of Glaswegian. - There's one English character and-- - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, there's a lot of Glaswegian accents which can be tricky, and the idiom sometimes can be tricky. - And you're making this for an international audience, so how do you think about that? - Making it for an international audience, and it's with actually the British division of Netflix.

which is obviously part of the whole company, but it is there. It is run separately. And so I was working with a whole different group of people, even in terms of marketing and publicity, than I was the other two shows. And so it was not because of tax reasons. It was for purely aesthetic and storytelling reasons. And

We began researching where in England we wanted to take place. I didn't want to do it in London. I was thinking maybe about a nondescript city or something like that. And I'd never been to Edinburgh and they sent me some pictures. And I said, that looks really interesting. And then we went and I literally got out of the van and said, we're shooting here. This is amazing. We have to shoot here. This is just incredible because everywhere you look is a shot.

And, you know, I keep describing it as this mixture of modern and medieval and that I hadn't really seen before. And yeah, it can be gray there and the weather can be tricky there, but it's just full of textures and things that just make it automatically cinematic.

So I can understand how that would appeal to you as someone making art. And I would, but I also imagine there's someone on the production side saying, okay, if we do it there, the people in America, they're going to be speaking English, but they're going to have a hard time understanding it. And there'll be British and Scottish isms that they won't put together. Not to mention when we move it to other parts of the world, does it have to be in a specific place? And if it does, could it be some other place that's more, um,

accessible to a general audience? They wanted it to be Scotland and they felt like there's a big market up there, the British folks, you know, the Netflix folks there, and they really, no one ever questioned it. There was some talk about maybe we shoot some of it in Glasgow, but I sort of started watching a bunch of

of shows that were supposedly set in Edinburgh and they were all shot in Glasgow, and I thought, no, we're not gonna do that. You have this great city and there may be a bit of a tax involved, a bit of a premium involved to keep the crew there, but it wasn't enough to make a difference. It really wasn't, and so we shot it all there and I really felt like it became a character, and again, nobody ever said, can you move it? Can you do it somewhere else? In Belfast.

I think the show's been out, what, a week? We can change right now? Yeah, we're actually number one in the world right now, I just read. Congrats. Thank you. So they let you know that. And there used to be, whenever I had someone who made a show from Netflix on, I talked to them about what kind of data they were getting, and they complained they weren't getting much data. Seems like they're giving you a lot more data now, especially if you're a hit. Oh, yeah. And remember, I think Stephen and I came on when he produced Godless and talked to you. We talked to you about all of that process, how it works, the whole Netflix, you know, and post and marketing and everything. Yeah.

The the yeah, they they're, they're not shy about telling us they're not secretive, or it's not opaque. They tell us

you know, everything we wanna know. There's no question that I've asked that they haven't answered so far. - And you had a giant, massive hit during the pandemic with Queen's Gambit. Can you compare this sort of vibes-wise in terms of how it feels, how it's being received? Does it feel like it's the same scale, different, different audiences, you're reaching different people? - I think it feels, they all feel different. I think it feels somewhat different to Queen's Gambit

in that Queen's Gambit was this kind of strain. It was COVID. There were so many weird circumstances around that, and it happened at just the right time. And so for me,

And I've been doing this now for decades, and that was the first time I'd ever had anything that was like a phenomenon. I'd certainly had things that were successful to some degree, but this was like this phenomenon suddenly, and it took over the world, and people started playing chess, and I don't think I'll ever have an experience that feels like that, where it just...

affects the zeitgeist where it causes a ripple everywhere. This feels more like a traditional kind of thing where people are watching it and liking it and I'm hearing from friends from high school and so on. And you know that it's from all walks people are getting into it. It feels a little different that way.

There is that thing about a Netflix show in particular. I know it exists other places, but definitely a Netflix show where I'll have someone on who has the number one streaming movie, huge hit.

And I don't know a single person in my life who has talked about it or mentioned it. And if I tell them what movie it was, they'll give me a blank look. You know, I'm assuming Netflix is not ginning up all the numbers and not committing shareholder fraud by inventing audiences. People are watching it, but it doesn't feel like it has the same cultural resonance and it doesn't feel like there's word of mouth.

Again, this is just guesswork on my part, but just in my life, I hear people talking about this. There's people just sort of popping up, talking about it. Do you feel that? Can you feel the difference in what I'm talking about? Yeah, I mean, you're you're certainly correct in that a lot of the movies in particular don't don't leave much of a much of a ripple. There's not a lot of, you know, cultural wake for for a lot of the films, right?

That being said, they are watched a lot and people enjoy watching them and seek them out. And they have, you know, 300 million worldwide subscribers. And so way more people are going to watch your movie. And as opposed to something getting released in theaters that no one watches and it also doesn't create any kind of long tail either. So people are watching it.

And a lot of times they're there in a blank and then they disappear. But, you know, the library is there and I find myself discovering these weird movies I'd never heard of. I just watched a movie with...

Chadwick Boseman the other night. I'd never heard of, it was eight years old or something, maybe even longer, called Message from the King. And it was kind of a genre movie that I loved. And so there's a lot of things that happen. But with the television shows, it's a little different because I do think when they hit, they tend to leave a mark and they tend to resonate.

What do you think accounts for that? Is that simply because there's more of it? There's 10 episodes, so you're spending more time, there's more reason to talk about it. Is it because it's episodic, so you want to tell people, oh, wait till you get to episode five because this thing happens? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I think that's why. I think it's a different sort of investment. I think that when you're sitting down to watch a show and you are hoping that it's something you're going to stick with.

Whereas when you're watching a movie, you know, I have a couple hours, an hour and a half, I'm going to watch this thing. You know, it's part of something else. You know, before I go out, I'm going to, you know, have a bourbon and watch Message from the King. And so I think it's a little like that. But I don't have an easy answer other than to say that for me,

I think the engagement and narrative in the world right now has never been higher. And yes, we can talk about how people, if it stays with people, and we can also talk about how people come to it, if they're only half watching. There's all kinds of things we can talk about. But at its core, people still, the most desirable experience is when you actually want to watch and are invested. And that remains true.

So, like I said, over the years I've been talking to you, you seem to have transitioned from movie making to TV streaming making. How intentional is that move and how much of it is just that's where the opportunity was? I don't think it was so intentional. I mean, I'm trying to get a movie made right now, right this moment. There's a I'd love to make another movie or two. So it wasn't that I was I was leaving movies behind. It was just increasingly more difficult for.

to get the kinds of movies I wanted made, made. Both Queen's Gambit and Godless began their lives with me, at least as a feature. I was trying to get them made as movies and couldn't. And only succeeded in getting them made as limited series, which turned out to be better for the projects. Really, creatively, it was much more satisfying. And I shot them both no differently than when I would shoot a movie. I've shot...

you know, "Godless Queen's Gambit: Miss Your Spade" that I did a couple years ago and this one, just like a movie, you know, there's really no difference there. There's no difference in terms of how you physically make it? How you shoot it and how you, yeah, it's just different, you're chopping up the storytelling differently.

But there's something that you in particular, I mean, everyone who makes TV has to do this, right? Figuring out how to move people from one episode to the other. Like, you've got a real knack for a crazy last scene or two that doesn't, it's like you're not doing, we are doing it for shock value, I guess. But I mean, like, oh, I did not see that coming. And it's not the killer jumps out from behind the bookcase, but it is something that is

Totally different or I think a Queen's Gambit that last scene in the in the first episode with the pill jar and you know almost every episode the first five that I've seen has some version of that with what you're doing here.

Is that something you had to teach yourself or was that just such an obvious part of writing that you knew how to do it from the from the get go? Both. I mean, I had a lot of help that that scene at the end of The Queen's Gambit wasn't originally the ending scene. There were six other scenes that came after it. And the producer, thank God, Bill Warburg said to me, it's over.

This episode just ended. You can put some of what comes later after it in the next episode, but this is it. You don't want to go. I had a whole coda to Godless at the very end that I shot with Matthew Goode, of all people, that turned out the movie was over. The movie wanted to be over. It didn't need this other thing. I always say the second most important scene in your first episode is the opening. And the most important scene is the last scene.

Um, that's sort of my, my rule of thumb. And, and do you think the mechanics of that are different in a streaming world or a Netflix world where there's an expectation that you can watch all of these and, you know, a couple settings. And so you want to go from one to another immediately versus waiting a week, or is it really kind of the same thing? If it, if this was an HBO show and you were doling it out once a week, it'd be the same kind of structure.

I mean, I'd like to think that the latter is true, that it would be the same no matter what, that we're not sort of pandering to, you know, the binge watch. I do think everyone is mindful of it, though. People are mindful of how do you keep people in. And I tend to have slower beginnings, you know. I like things that take their time and then uncork at a certain point. I really, I like that kind of storytelling. It's just been. But I experienced something on Monsieur Spade, which was a really dense show, and it was done on AMC+.

And several things worked against it. Creatively, I made exactly the show I wanted to make. They were lovely people. But in terms of access, people didn't know how to watch it, didn't know where to find it. There's so many versions. Most people who listen to this show who are serious media nerds probably don't know there's a service called AMC+. And so most people would watch it. And it was also they released it on a host of these other services. So you could watch it chopped up with commercials online.

But it wasn't released at once. And so people were confused because you couldn't watch two at a time. You couldn't hold it all. And it was, you know, it's Dashiell Hammett. It's that it was aping Dashiell Hammett, certainly. So it was trying to be this thing that was very complex. And it just it just didn't it didn't happen. It didn't happen.

And when you cast a show like this, Matthew Goode is someone who looked vaguely familiar to me, but I went and checked the Wikipedia and most of the stuff he's been in and I haven't seen. A couple of the other actors, again, look vaguely familiar and I have even less familiarity with them.

So they're all working actors who do great stuff, primarily in the UK. Is there a discussion when you're making a Netflix show that's going to have a global audience about whether you want people who are relatively unknown globally? Do you want a giant, you know, Netflix also makes movies with Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz. And that's kind of, you know, that's the old way of making movies. Two big stars in a thing. You will watch it.

How does casting come into play when you're talking about a project? Casting is super important. And we had kind of a veritable who's who of the Scottish acting community. It's a kind of a great roster of people that we tripped into signing on to do this. But I find in the series side of things, more often than not, it's the series who makes the stars, not vice versa. You can have giant stars in these shows and they just fall flat. Right.

It's usually, you look at Squid Game, I didn't know who the hell was in that show. Queen's Gambit, you know, there were no names to speak of in that show. Godless, similarly, there weren't any real big, Jeff Daniels, but you know, I don't know that Jeff is a fine actor, I don't know that he's a draw. Matthew Goode, I made a movie with him in, the first movie I ever directed in 2000, I think we shot in 2006, was called The Lookout, and Matthew played a Kansas City thug, a bank robber.

And he was amazing, and I wrote this for him. I had him in my head as I was doing this because I know he usually plays these posh boys, you know, and he's been in everything from The Good Wife to the making of The Godfather, that limited series where he played Bob Evans and so on. So I just cast who I want, and they certainly will have opinions or they'll be worried about someone or this, but they've never really said no. I mean, I cast Mari Heller, who was a director,

and a writer and had acted in theater and done some small things, but she had a major role in the Queen's Gambit. She played the mother, the adopted mother. And so they said, if you think that she's right. So they're enormously supportive. We'll be right back with Scott Frank, but first a word from his sponsor. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Adobe.

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And we're back. So how has the business, I mean, the last time we talked was, again, in the pandemic, which also turns out in retrospect to kind of been peak Netflix. Yeah. It's, you know, when they just had no governor on them. They were just spending and growing and spending. And the more they spent, the more they grew. And they're still, they still won streaming, right? They're still top of the pack. But they've, you know, the budgets, overall content budgets kind of flattened out.

they've introduced ads, right? Because they're trying to figure out how to generate more revenue. As a creator, how does that affect what you're doing? Can you feel the difference? No. No, I really don't. I mean, I think...

I think there's a weird thing in the media. And there have been these changes throughout my 40 years that have affected why. It doesn't affect me so much. It affects a lot of the decision making on the other side. And the first thing that happened, I remember, is when they started reporting box office, everything changed because people wanted to watch what everyone else was watching. When I grew up,

70s, 80s, we're watching a movie. I didn't know what was number one. Nobody knew what was number one. I mean, you knew when there was a giant thing. Of course you knew, Jaws, Star Wars. People standing in line to watch Star Wars. Oh, of course, yeah. But it wasn't every week where they were printing and where my grandmother would say to me, you know, I hear, you know, such and such has legs, you know, like it was crazy. And that affected, everybody began competing for that.

and opening weekend became everything. Whereas when I was younger, movies would kind of stick around for a while. And the opening weekend, and then the second thing that happened was marketing became, they were allowed in the room with the Greenlight folks. They became part of the Greenlight committee. So you were getting input from marketing before, and this speaks to Netflix and all of the streamers and algorithms in a second, but you were getting

information from the marketing people, what they were worried about, you know, and so on. And they were trying to game the system that way. They were testing trailers now. They were as well as movies. It was all kinds of stuff. And Jeff Katzenberg thought he had a formula when he took over Disney, you know, the fish out of water thing. And what happens when you do that is if everybody's chasing the same marketing formula, every movie becomes the same. And so that had a big effect.

then streaming happens. And now Netflix is spending in order to create a business. So they're the first mover, so they're spending, they're starting with nothing, and they're creating, and they need, and they're getting material that they can license, and they're making a fortune off of, or doing well, let's say, off of the licensing. And then they start making their own stuff as well, and they're doing really well with that, and they need to keep increasing subscribers,

and so on. And so they're spending to get people like me or even more interesting people like David Fincher and all these huge deals that they make because they have to. Because why is someone gonna take a risk there? Then,

Post-COVID, maybe, everybody tries to be a streamer. Everybody, but they can't because they're not the first mover. They try and they pull their library from Netflix. So it's a loss of income to Netflix, but it's also a huge, it was a huge loss of income for them, too, because they're no longer licensing and getting money. Right, they were getting free money, giving their leftovers to Netflix. Yeah, and they're all trying to create libraries because the library is...

The thing, that's the elephant in the room. That's why when they're spending money, why are they making so many shows? Why are there so many movies you've forgotten about or you can't remember or whatever? Because they need a library. That's where the value is. But then the other thing after marketing, after reported box office came reporting stock price, which fucking destroyed everything.

Everything. Because every quarter, you know, you have your predicted income, and if you don't make it, and the shareholder meeting, all of that stuff. And so Netflix loses some subscribers one quarter, and they call it the Great Correction.

They're in trouble. The business is over. They're fucking Amway. It's all it's a pyramid scam or whatever. It's this, you know, this this whole thing that's just, you know, a lot of that, by the way, was coming from everyone else in Hollywood. Of course, delighted to line up and tell you how bad it fucked up to the max. And all their and all their prescriptions for what Netflix should do should be they should go do stuff the way we were doing it five years ago.

And they're wrong. And so Netflix, by the way, if you were to talk to anyone at Netflix at that point, they were pretty sanguine about the whole thing. Yeah, we're going to do ads, but they were probably always going to do ads and sports and a lot of things, even though they say no. Inevitably, they were willing, they weren't just going to force it. They were going to see where it goes. But because we report the stock, we do these quarterly meetings and you have people covering the shareholder meetings. And it's like trying to lose weight and weighing yourself every fucking hour.

You don't have a good, you don't know what's long term. You can't tell and there's no room for these anomaly shows that happen that change everything because you're just weighing yourself all the time. And stock price isn't necessarily an accurate reflection of success in this business and in streaming in particular. So they lost some subscribers and they said, oh, they're going to be out of business, but they still had 200 million or some crazy number.

And the closest was Disney with like 12 or whatever it was back then. And now they have over 300 million and Disney has like 60 million. There's no competition. And yeah, the stock prices are going to go up and down, but, but when it goes down once, they're like a school of fish where they all move in unison and everybody panics and everybody abandoned their, their streaming dreams. And they began licensing back to Netflix. Now you can see HBO shows on Netflix. You can see anything you want. And, uh,

And so I think that they're still figuring it out and it hasn't landed. But I think trying to understand it in a way by taking a snapshot of a moment is a mistake.

But, I mean, one of the reasons I love talking to you, in addition to the fact that you make great stuff, is that you're candid about talking about the commercial pressures and business pressures and adapting to them. And there's always been commercial pressures in Hollywood, right? These are for-profit companies. They're making stuff. Procter & Gamble does testing before they roll out a new toothpaste or whatever. Of course, they're going to try to, you know, minimize risk and accelerate returns, all of that. Right.

For you personally, and again, you were very well regarded in Hollywood. You got to the top of the heap. You wrote tons of movies, credited. You did a lot of script doctoring, very good life, got to make cool shit. Then you get to Netflix and streaming where you're making cool shit that is also exceptionally valuable for Netflix. Yeah.

Do you feel that personally? Like, I'm assuming they're paying you well. Do you feel like, all right, I'm in a place now where I have more freedom. I can come to Netflix. They're more likely to let me do something. I have some degree of security in an industry that is famously insecure. Yeah, I mean, I think...

I mean, of course I feel like I have a nice relationship with Netflix in terms of every project I've done with them has been a good experience. You know, there's been nothing negative. But they say no to me as often as they say yes. They said no to Monsieur Spade. You know, they said no, there was a project I really wanted to do years ago called The Sparrow. And I'm always teasing them for, you know, you said no to this. And so I ended up, you know, doing that at FX. They're never going to give you a vanity project.

No, no. And I get it. And nor would I ask for one. Because I feel like the way I get to keep working is by having things that work. And so I don't, and if I, you know, they're, and if I'm presenting something or pitching something to them, I'm very mindful of how big is this? What is this going to cost? And when I'm shooting, if I tell you, I think I can make the whole series for X amount of dollars, I make it for that.

And I work really hard to work within that because I am very aware and also grateful of the fact that I get to keep doing this. They're always, even if they say no, they're saying, what else? What else? Ask us to do something else. We'd love to do something else. During the strikes a couple years ago, AI didn't start off as the issue, and then sort of as the strikes went on, AI became at least the dominant talking point, right?

What did you make of that discussion then? And then the second part is, how are you thinking about AI and tech now? Well, I think tech has been a bit of a disaster for the country in many ways, but also been an amazing boon to the world. You know, I just think that these guys, it's who run the company. So many of them are are compromised.

Let's narrow it down to your world because we could have the other discussion. But I think it affects my world because they now own my world. Our world, we probably were striking against the wrong people at that time because we're owned by tech people now. The business is increasingly more and more a tech business. And so ultimately, we're at the whim of these people at the very top of these companies. And

And so, you know, Paramount might not happen, but it's really gonna be, I think, up to Larry Ellison in the end whether or not that deal goes through, you know, his relationship with Trump. He's the guy buying it, yeah. He's the guy buying it, but ultimately also he and Trump, you know, there's all this stuff. And we saw after the election, everybody's sort of paying essentially bribes to this guy in Amazon, everybody donating money, Apple,

all doing that. So that affects us. That really does affect the business and affect the way people are afraid now. And so you see that you see people are very are too careful. They're no longer afraid because they're afraid because of the political climate or they're afraid just because it's an era of consolidation and there just aren't that many places to go if you upset studio chief. A both because it's always been, again, pretty limited, right?

Oh, yeah. No, I think all of the above. I just think it's all at the same time. Also, what I said before, that the ground is shifting. This business hasn't landed where it's going to land yet. And people keep looking backwards and saying, no, we just need to get movie going back to where it was. That boat sailed. That's not going to happen anymore. So we're not thinking about, okay, well, what is the business now? What does the business want to be? The audience is trying to tell us and we're not listening. We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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And we're back. And how do you feel about using tech and specifically AI in your work? You know, there's one school of argument that's often meant to intentionally be provocative. It says people are just going to type in a prompt and out is going to spit out an entire movie. Right. Obviously, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Not that anyone's going to watch.

maybe one day. And then the more conservative argument is we're going to use this to improve flows. And instead of using 10 visual effects people, you could do it with four or eight or the even more positive spin is those eight to 10 visual effects people could do much better work now. Are you thinking about how that's going to work into your productions?

Yeah, I mean, we've always we've used versions of that. If it wasn't proper AI, there was always ways to shortcut those kinds of things to cook, to create a smoother workflow and all of that.

to if an actor couldn't do a certain stunt, we want to put their face on something else. You know, that's been happening and that's going to get easier, which is scary if you're an actor. I think that's very scary that I can... Or writer. Or writer, but I can, you know, put Brad Pitt on Peter Kafka's body and, you know, and not... Poor Brad. And not pay him or whatever, you know, or try to get away with something like that. So that's scary, but...

I think the bigger problem is not making stuff with AI, but deciding what to make with AI. I think that's the bigger threat, at least for me in the immediate sense. I can't predict...

What's going to happen in 10 years if someone will hit a keystroke and out comes a thriller? I kind of think it's going to feel dead. Those things tend to not feel that interesting and feel like there's a weird there's an uncanny valley, you know, thing happening. That's what we're telling ourselves. Have you played around and said chat GPT make me a script in the in the mode of Scott Frank?

Yeah, it was silly. I think the someone sent me something. Yeah. And I don't even know what my mode is, to be honest, but I could do it's probably easier to do a Quentin Tarantino. But if you want to write a letter, a business letter or something, you want to kind of lay out how to make an argument, you know.

My wife is president of the board of a charitable organization. She said, "Yeah, I needed to write this letter, "and I just thought I would see what chat GPT said." And she sent me the letter, and it was damn good. It was really good. But I think it's more about, you know, it's the future of the algorithm, and the algorithm is great for marketing after something's done.

It's death to the industry to use it to decide what to make because you're gaming something again and if everybody's using the same algorithm, it becomes a snake that eats its own tail eventually. And so, but I do think, you know, that's my big fear is that they're going to, I have a friend who was telling me about a company, he's,

where they're creating an AI to figure out exactly this, what is kind of missing from the world that people might need. And, you know, I'm thinking, oi. Which again, I mean, people have been dreaming about on the tech end for years. I guess we can get to that point, but there's always been analog versions of this, right? In any giant commercial enterprise. You'd send people out to do this with pens and paper and guesstimate this stuff or in Excel and just sort of speeding up.

And it has all the pluses and minuses, I'm assuming. But it doesn't sound like you're anticipating this is going to be meaningfully, it's not going to meaningfully change the work you do. I'm not anticipating that. I'm like everybody else trying to see where it's going. I'm fascinated by what it does. It is a little, does make me nervous just because it learns so quickly and it's kind of so good at certain tasks. But I would be more worried if I were a lawyer or a doctor.

You know, but I could be naive. A lot of people, a lot of my friends say that I am in terms of this, that it's going to eat the industry. But I can't I have trouble imagining that happening soon. It might, but I don't see it happening tomorrow. You grew up in Florida, right? No, I was just born there. I lived there about two months as an infant. My dad was on the Air Force Base there. But you came to remembering your story. You came to L.A. and kind of had the classic experience.

figure out how to make your way in the industry and write a lot of scripts that no one wanted and eventually climb the pole. Yeah, I wrote one script over and over that no one wanted, Little Man Tate, until somebody wanted it. That's sort of what I did.

What would that path look like for you now if you wanted to get into making movies, television shows? Oh, that's easy. Would you move to L.A. for starters? I wouldn't go into movies or television. I'd go into games. I think games, if I were 24 now, I'm not going to fuck around with movies or television. I want to go work in the gaming world where I think there's some really interesting stuff going on.

And I would rather go there than deal with movies or television. What is...

Other than the fact that lots of people play games, what's appealing to you? Because they seem actually pretty narratively limited when I, and I play, I spend a lot of time playing games, but they seem to be, you know, at best, you know, the ones that people laud for being sort of cinematic are lesser movies. But they're at the beginning in a way. I mean, the first movies were narratively limited too, you know, and I wonder what,

what you can do with them. You know, I'm really curious. And, um, I just feel like that world is a way more interesting. I mean, I mean, you know, probably as well as anyone that personal video is more people watch YouTube stuff and TikTok stuff than Netflix. YouTube is the number one, you know, people spend more time on YouTube than Netflix is like

way down. And then the next closest thing, Disney or whatever, is way down. And people on average spend two hours a day on TikTok. So that's what you're competing with. You know, you're competing with, you know, people who have TikTok. You're competing with all of that right now. How do you, so how do you get people to go to the movies? How do you get people to pay attention to your show? There's so much competition.

stuff, whereas gaming, you have to skip that. Yeah. You're not folding your laundry while you're playing a game. You're not, you know, texting while you're playing a game. You're not. You're you're involved in a way. And that seems to me like an opportunity for storytelling. So your next project is an immersive game. I'm too old. I can't. You know, I remember asking somebody who owned a gaming company, I want to come. I'll work for free. I'll be an intern. They go, no, it doesn't work that way. You're not doing that.

You've aged out. So what is next for you? This is, Department Q is a series. Will you do more of these or is this a one-off for you? It's up to Netflix. I would absolutely love to. And I had a lot of fun doing it. And I had a great cast. I love being in Scotland. I love the Scottish people. They're just, they're wonderful. So there's that. I'm trying to get a movie made. I had adapted with Megan Abbott. We adapted, yeah.

Laughter in the Dark, this great Nabokov novel from the 20s, takes place in Germany and right around Hitler. And it's really...

We've sort of changed the time frame a bit from the 20s to early 30s. And it's just a film noir that's really fun. And again, it's me answering a question no one is asking. So I'm sure it'll be tough to get made. But we're trying to put that on there. You love a crime novel, right? Oh, I love a good crime novel. You make lots of stuff, but you make a lot of crime stories. Yeah, this is more a social...

It is kind of a crime novel. There is definitely crime in it, but it's its own kind of feathered fish the way Nabokov does that so well. All right. Whatever you make, I'm going to watch. I'm trying to do that. So we'll see what happens. Scott, great to talk to you. You too, Peter. Always a lot of fun. See you around. Yep. Thanks again to Scott Frank. I highly suggest starting a podcast just so you can talk to Scott Frank every few years. It's a lot of fun.

Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to Charlotte Silver, who produced and edited this show. And thanks to you guys for writing and listening and telling other people to listen. We've got a special bonus show coming up later this week. Stay tuned. See you soon.