The Interviews (ft. Maisie Williams; and David Koepp)

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to the latest episode of The Interviews. It's a shorter episode this week, but no less brilliant, with two cracking interviews for you guys to enjoy. First up is Maisie Williams, yes, Arya Stark herself, although she's a world away, or 500 miles away more accurately, from Westeros and Game of Thrones with her new movie, 500 Miles, about two young boys who run away from home in England in order to visit their grandfather, played by Bill Nighy, in Ireland. Along the way they bump into Williams' resourceful Irish busker who's prone to belting out a tune or two on a ukulele, George Formby style which means that Williams does the same.

0:55Chris Hewitt:I spoke to Maisie just the other day on Zoom and had a lovely time talking about this movie about playing a ukulele, about singing in public, about her podcasts about Game of Thrones, about live post Game of Thrones and more besides. Here it is. Enjoy. We are delighted to be joined on the Emperor Podcast by the star of 500 Miles. It's not a Proclaimers biopic. Maisie Williams, how are you? Hi, it's not, but we do feature the song. You do feature the song. And if you could play one of the two Proclaimers in a Proclaimers biopic, which would it be and why? The short one, obvious reason. Can you name either of the Proclaimers?

1:36No, I can't. No, neither can I. Craig.

1:41Chris Hewitt:There's a Craig. I think there might be a Craig. Craig, Proclaimer, and then Jeff. Probably a Jeff in there. But you do, you do. You sing a snippet of Five Five Miles, but that's not the only thing you sing in this film, Maisie. You sing quite a bit. You sing Road to Nowhere. You sing The Passenger. You sing all sorts of stuff. How was that for you? It was so much fun. I mean, I had the most amazing music teacher called Kieran, who's based down in Dun Laoghaire and he is so talented and is so patient and came to set with me every time I had to sing and played with me and warmed me up and he does like a lot of um like Irish folk music and he plays in a lot of like bar he plays in a lot of places but he sort of like was amping me up as if I was about to go play in a bar or something and it It was just amazing.

2:36So, I mean, I just got like one-on-one tuition by one of the most talented musicians ever. And I mean, there's like not, yeah, it was really amazing. And yeah, the songs were great fun and songs that I was a fan of, which is always fun.

2:52Chris Hewitt:I was going to say, what's your musical taste like? I mean, did it align? The songs were supposed to be, there's supposed to be one which is like Dancing on My Own by Robin. And I can't remember what the other one was now, but they were pop songs. They were sort of girly pop songs, which I also love. But just it was weird at this time, I was listening to a lot of Iggy Pop and I was listening to a lot of the Talking Heads. And so when Morgan was like, I think I might change the songs to these, I was like, perfect. So I love this. So, yeah, it was great. That's amazing. So what was your bass level?

3:26Chris Hewitt:Where did you start in terms of musicianship? I'd never played anything. Okay. Nothing. Nothing. nothing but actually turns out that i can play and sing at the same time which apparently is hard to do fucking difficult yeah especially so i mean i think picking those two things up at the same time but also that's because i've done a lot of musical theater and when you do musical theater you have to dance and sing at the same time which i think is probably a same kind of thing it's like something with your body and then something with your brain or they're all with your brain i don't yeah i totally get it could you do the thing where you is it you tap your head and you rub your stomach or you rub your head and you tap your stomach one of those two at the same time i have i have achieved that multiple times in my life yeah that's it you've peaked yeah yeah exactly i have that and a driver's license and i'm you know that is no small achievement it took me i think two goes to get my driver's license uh it's a it's a hell of a thing um but in terms of that in terms of yeah so you're you're singing you are singing and playing at the same time it struck me watching this that you do a couple of things maybe three things in this movie that i think would terrify a lot of actors so you are singing live in public in front of people you're playing ukulele that's two right there and the third thing is you're doing an irish accent that's true that's quite scary you're talking to an irish person here in amazie so I know and people have been quite sweet about it But I don't know if they just have to say that No it passed muster Believe me I've got more Irish just talking about it Believe me I crack down hard On shitty Irish accents And that was a good Irish accent Well done Thank you No I mean I did work with Jan Hayden-Rouse on it And she's just like amazing But then I mean I got to I got to do it in Dublin which I think is the best thing ever.

5:25And I got to have people be able to be like, I think you're saying that a little bit wrong, which I welcomed so much because there's no point in everyone watching the monitor and cringing. So yeah, I, but I love, I loved it. I feel like it changed my whole personality. I actually started doing it like out and around in Dublin because I felt like people would treat me nicer.

5:46Chris Hewitt:Did you? Okay. Yeah. And I would order drinks at a bar. I would just do it in an Irish accent. And then I felt like, I don't know. it was just like there was a slight warmth that I was quite addicted to that I didn't want to quite let go at the end of the day when I was filming. How did it go down in Dublin? Did you pull it off okay when you were ordering drinks or did people, you know, people who know you would be going, hang on, why? That's Maisie Williams over there. Why is she doing an Irish accent? I would order a drink and then I'd get my drink and then I'd go and sit down. And then if someone came over and said are you the girl i just immediately dropped the accent and i didn't reference why i didn't acknowledge it at all i just would drop the accent immediately going back the idea of things scaring you as an actor is that important to you to to wake up in the morning and go oh i'm not sure i can do this well yeah absolutely but also just in life in anything yeah i just think it's fun to i just think it's fun more fun to try something that's really scary or really hard and fail than it is to never know really i think that like as i'm i i don't i think i'm getting better at my fear of failure and i'm getting better at just um um it just so happens i never fail but um i'm joking um but i just i think i i think it's good i think it's good i think it's good i probably not for your heart because i feel like i do get like a racing heart when i'm doing things that are a little bit scary but i just think it's good to keep you young or something i don't know keep you i don't know in your toes keep you on your toes on your toes yes so yeah I mean in this job I did a lot of things that I say is there's always a night where you go to bed and think what what have I done this was a horrible mistake I'm never going to be able to pull this off but then you have a good time and you surprise yourself and and yeah and then it's not so scary the next time so I just think it's good to do what's the day in your entire career if one comes to mind where you've been the most scared about the the task at hand i mean i i this doing my first song which was actually the second song in the movie i thought i was going to throw up before i started um so it's which one is it it's um it's talking heads yes i i was like are we filming now and they were like we're filming now I was like I need a minute and they were like we gotta go like now though Maisie like we're really running out of time I was like no no no no I'm serious I need a minute and so I ran to the garage that was next to this and I locked my toilet for a moment and like like you know when your brain's like and I was like it's fine you can do this like it's okay and then you're like I can't do this oh my god this is not okay like no no no like don't let the thoughts in and then And I went and did it and it was fine.

8:58Chris Hewitt:But is that something that as you get older happens as you get older? You know, the idea of fear, the idea of fear of failure, as you say, you've never failed, but, you know, one day you might and the fear of that will drive you. But, you know, obviously you've been doing this for a long, long time now and you started off as a kid in this industry. And I don't know, going into something like Game of Thrones as a young person, did fear manifest itself for you? or was it very much like, no, I can do this. This is a breeze. Yeah, not at all. It's definitely something that's come later in life. I was just completely fearless.

9:34And I think it's just come from more exposure and just being exposed to more people's opinions and this and that. And I think that's why I do try and shoot it down as much as possible is because I still remember, like when I'm acting, I still remember how I felt when I first started doing this. but this feeling of like this fear of failure i think this isn't familiar like what where's this come from this isn't how this usually makes me feel so i get good at shooting it down because i remember so vividly having no fear um so i know that it's a manifestation of something that's not

10:11Chris Hewitt:really me what does that come from does that come from other people's judgments does it come from Supposedly, like, I think just, I don't know. It happens to us all. It's like, I think it's an explosion into exposure with, you know, not really as much experience to kind of match, you know, the level, like the trajectory of which I was getting famous compared to the amount of actual experience I was having was like quite outnumbered and so you have sort of a re-leveling where you think god there's a lot that I still gotta a lot I gotta learn a lot I gotta build a lot I gotta you know and and I think that becomes kind of nerve-wracking and it becomes because now you feel like people are watching you you know whereas yeah so so I think it's just that really yeah it's been like yeah I love the feeling of being scared in a way that like i think people who have eczema like love to scratch it i don't know if it's necessarily good but i love to feel fear well it's good that you know that you're embracing it now but yeah it's fascinating though because as you know as you say going back to the idea of ordering drinks in an irish bar and people might recognize you you know and i imagine that's been your experience now for what well over 10 12 13 years maybe maybe 15 but in terms of going into bars in terms of going into public places and people going that's maisie williams that's you know that's that's aria stark you know and how difficult an adjustment period that must that must be that must be that must be so hard like if people started recognizing me i'd become such an ego monster in within minutes but i don't know what did they do for you i mean it was there was a time when it was so hard and i think it's mostly because when after people have had we're in a place where people drink and so after an hour or so all those people who maybe would be too shy and reserved to say something you know before they've had two pints now start to feel a little bit more comfortable doing so and so and then one and i just think yeah i just found i just found like being approached by strangers like overwhelming a little bit but it's it changes every year like you know and then house the dragon comes out and then there's an explosion of new fans and then you know night of the seven kingdom comes out and then there's an explosion of new fans it's just like it um it changes all the time and then i change i grow up i you know you know like i seem different people say no you're not the p i get that more now are you whereas i think for the longest time it was just like of course yes um yeah i don't know it just it it it just constantly changes and evolves well one of the interesting things i mean that is the kind of watching your career over the last few years is has been that fearlessness to your choices and to the way you've approach things post Game of Thrones I think particularly um the last time we spoke was for the podcast it was for Pistol you know and that's that's a very bold out there turn from you in that and then you've got other things like the podcasts that you were doing as well so you just seem to be grasping life and opportunities you know right by you know grasping the nettles so to speak yeah I mean it's felt like a really exciting time I think for a long time I knew exactly what my schedule would look like each year and now it's like been a lot more free and so I've really gotten to be able to ask myself the question of like how do I want to spend my time um and so I've been drinking Guinness in Ireland no I've I've you know it's been yeah I think right that's very kind of you to to see it yeah yeah as as um yeah i guess in that way i i yeah i guess i hadn't really thought about that but it's been nice to do lots of very different projects and uh of course being in ireland do you do you go up north at all i'm from bambridge which is kind of game of thrones country yeah all the time yeah when i was shooting this movie no i haven't been back to northern island in a little while okay mostly because i know there's a lot of tours happening in that bridge yeah it's like i can't go to croatia i can't go to malta i can't go to morocco i can't go to iceland there's just game of thrones tours everywhere and if you get off the flight everyone's like i'm not part of the tour i'm just here to have a holiday so yeah Yeah, it's just too much.

15:15Chris Hewitt:Yeah, that I can imagine. That I can imagine. Glad to go in a second, Maisie, but you mentioned, or I mentioned, the podcasts that you did. And it did at the moment is the correct term. It is the correct tense at the moment. Yeah, it's in a little hiatus currently because it's not really any of our primary jobs. And we've all gotten very busy, which is exciting. But we hope that at some point we can start it back up again and we can talk about the movies that we've all been making. because that's sort of why we started it. But then it takes a lot longer to make movies than it does to watch movies.

15:50Chris Hewitt:Yes, this is very, very true. And it, of course, being Frank Film Club, which I guess was your main podcast. You've had a couple. Exactly. That's the big one. That was the big one. And so it is coming back at some point. That's a promise. That's a guarantee right here on the Empire podcast, a rival podcast. But nevertheless, you're willing to make the guarantee. Exactly. Right. So what was podcasting like for you? Was it a fun outlet? Absolutely. I mean, just getting to hang with my friends, Lowry and Hannah. I just, and yeah, I mean, I think we started because we wanted to, we wanted just to be able to speak more comfortably and more confidently about movies.

16:38And we became so, we, like, with the audience, like, became, like, a nice little group. And I feel like I miss it so much. I'm actually going to see them all on Friday. We're going to have a sleepover, which will be very cute. And watch 500 Miles. No, I'm joking, but it is out on Friday.

16:59Chris Hewitt:Don't be amazing. You make them watch your movie. Yeah, I'll be at the cinema. So if you want to go, I'll be there. yeah so but but yeah so it was great it was so much fun it was such an opportunity to chat with the interesting filmmakers to watch brilliant movies and yeah just to speak with i think two of the most interesting and articulate girls uh that i know all right well listen when it comes back you've got to come back on the podcast and and cross promote that's what they do totally love that it's all about the cross promotion these days and uh yeah on that note Maisie, I know it's a really, really hot day and I believe you want to go swimming.

17:38Chris Hewitt:So I'm going to get into the water. But thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Chris. It's been wonderful. Thank you. OK, that was Maisie Williams and 500 Miles, a film that legitimately reduced me to a sobbing wreck, a sodden mess of a man, is in cinemas now, folks. As is Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, the alien conspiracy thriller that is the latest Spielberg flick to feature a screenplay from the great David Kep, writer of Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way and Mission Impossible, the name but three. Kep popped into our pod booth just the other week to sit down with me and go full spoiler on Disclosure Day.

18:15Chris Hewitt:And you're about to hear a chunky excerpt from that conversation. now we get into it from the off and by it i mean the film's ending so be careful if you haven't seen disclosure day and wish to avoid disclosure about disclosure day then perhaps skip this and come back when you've seen the film for the rest of you well listen we are delighted to be joined on this disclosure day spoiler special by the film's writer david kepp how are you sir very well chris good good good having we have been uh teasing spoilers in our previous interview for the regular podcast, and now it is time to talk about Disclosure Day, which is not a Close Encounters sequel.

18:55I think that seems fairly clear. It is not.

18:58Chris Hewitt:You could call it a bookend. You could. You could call it a companion piece. You may not call it a sequel. No characters or events recur. Were you surprised at that theory gathered pace that this might be a Close Encounters sequel in some ways? Not at all. I think it's a fair assumption. A filmmaker is revisiting some of his most prominent material. What additional thoughts? Is it a sequel? I think I was more impressed with the theory that the government had recruited Stephen and partially financed the film in order to soft launch the existence of real aliens. I haven't heard that one. Yeah. Now that the film is open, I can disabuse that.

19:42Prior to the opening, I would have said, you know, they very well may have. there are many things you can only learn by watching this film and ideally not at a discount matinee showing.

19:54Chris Hewitt:Ideally not. All right, so let's talk about the movie. There's so many questions about this film. You said to me earlier on that when Stephen first told you about this and first sent you the story, you said to him, you have a hell of an ending. I may be paraphrasing slightly, but the ending is terrific. Let's start at the ending. Let's do a Tarantino and start there. and work our way back. So that was always set in stone, that it would be Margaret delivering this address to the world and we don't get to hear the address to the world and the last line is listen. Well, that wasn't in. The specifics of what Margaret would say were not in the treatment.

20:37What was... Oh, so Stephen didn't have the last line. He didn't have that word. I'll tell you how that came out in a second. the what worked the reason I said I believe I literally said it was a hell of an ending the reason I said that is because the the the the intercutting of the ending the suspense of the ending the desire that you have built up over the last two hours to have this information come out yeah is so tremendous yeah you know you've been told since a few minutes into the movie there's all this information boy oh boy do we need to get this out there And the next two hours, they face ridiculous obstacles, and it seems so urgent, and you're frantic for them to get it out.

21:24So the level of satisfaction, just in terms of movie mechanics and feeling satisfied by an ending, the thing that you want to happen happens or doesn't spectacularly. that stuff was so strong in the initial storytelling I'm reading this you know treatment that's written like a treatment I'm I was anxious I was eager for them to succeed in their goal so the fact that that was already in place and didn't have to be figured out the movie's called Disclosure Day so please for God's sake this better end with somebody disclosing something and the fact that it did I thought was tremendously satisfying.

22:07Chris Hewitt:It's really interesting as well because all the way through the film you talk, there are conversations about do we do this? Should we do this? Is this the right thing to do? And building up to that moment where it is revealed to the world in the way it is, but then also cutting it off so we don't see the aftermath. I thought it was a really interesting decision as well. We had a lot of talks about that. Again, it goes back to the title of the film. Disclosure Day. It's about the fact of the disclosure. It's not called Disclosure Day in the subsequent week, which is a terrible title, by the way.

22:46So, getting the information out was the entire point. However, it was planned that she would, we assumed she would say more. When I was writing the first draft, and again, as we said in our earlier chat, you know, Stephen leaves you alone to write your first draft. he wants to see what you have to say. And I wrote, I had imagined I would write more for her. And then I, as I was typing, I knew I wanted it to start with the word listen. Because, you know, literally, you know, alien boy told me some interesting things and now I want to repeat them to you.

23:28Chris Hewitt:Yeah. But it's also the word that perfectly encapsulates the message of the movie, which is about human empathy and that it is imperative to our survival that we listen and understand others. But also, it's the first word of one of my favorite books, Slaughterhouse-Five, the Kurt Vonnegut book. Listen, colon, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. And it's the first word of most Hebrew prayers. So, this word has a lot of power, and it has a lot of meanings. and I typed it and I had my hands, you know, over the keyboard ready to write more and then I just wrote a period and I thought when there's one word that says everything you want to say, you should probably stop talking.

24:18Chris Hewitt:Rightly so. So Emily said nothing else after that? No. Stephen didn't shoot anything? That's beautiful. And it was one of those last lines of the movie that it was in the first draft and it was never even discussed to changing it over the many drafts we did after that. You also, you and Stephen, do something really interesting in that final act of the movie. We've been tracking Margaret and Daniel on their journey to get to KCXE. They finally get there. Margaret starts the broadcast, and then you hand off to this anchor in New York. Did you do that in a way to properly convey the sense of shock and fear and wonder.

25:02Chris Hewitt:I don't know who that actress is who plays that news anchor, but she's terrific. Her name is Courtney Grace. Courtney Grace. And she is terrific. And she came in, it's interesting, she came in for one day of work and we realized, Stephen realized, and I agreed, you're right, boss. Stephen realized, she's got to hold down the climax of the film. I need a second day. Let's write more stuff for her, not to redo any of what we have. Let's keep all that. Let's write even more and let me really work with her because the first time she was working, technically that seems very complex. She was off in a studio so that she could be on the screen so that we're shooting all this other stuff.

25:48And I think the camera that was shooting her, he wasn't standing next to it. And he said, I want to do all that again and I want to do all this new stuff and I want to be right there so I can talk to her. So we added that because she was very good and her part is very large. The reason why we wanted her to say that stuff and not Margaret or her character to say that stuff and not Margaret's character is it needed the audience surrogate to be reacting to the material. Margaret can't react to the material. She's an experiencer. She's got this weird psychic thing. She's like, that is not an audience surrogate.

26:25That's a fascinating character.

26:27Chris Hewitt:Yeah. But we needed someone who was reacting the way we in the audience would be. And the fact that Courtney became emotional, those are some of the moments I get emotional when I'm watching this movie. And so it was risky to say, well, we're two hours and ten minutes in. Now we're going to hand off to a character you've never met before, and she's going to bring us home. And she nailed it. Yeah, it's absolutely terrific. but Margaret you're absolutely right Margaret is an astonishing character Emily's phenomenal in this movie and it's a tricky arc for her to bring home we don't meet Margaret for what the first 10 minutes or so of the movie and she's in a very different place when we first meet her can you talk about about her journey and creating that character arc well it's funny in the first one of the first drafts of the script my wife Melissa read it and her very first note she's you know she said many nice things.

27:26And then her very first note was, okay, character of Margaret. You got her coming in on page 40. I want that lady a lot sooner, because she's great. So that was, I told it to Stephen, and he said, how did we let that happen? You're absolutely right. She's absolutely right. So a lot of the work was, no, no, no, we gotta restructure the front, because this is a great character, and she's so central to the movie. It was very hard to write three intercuts. You know, it's hard enough to write stories that intercut two things, but we're going to, you know, we're on Daniel, we're on Margaret, and we're on Colin at Wardex.

28:08It's, there's a lot to try to never be away from one for too long. Yeah. And so, Margaret comes in, I'm glad it feels like 10, I think it's longer. Is it longer? I think it's probably 15. I've only seen the film once at this point. But that's good, that means it didn't feel too long. But she does come in and things start happening. Very unusual things happen to her right away. But getting that structural balance right was tricky.

28:35Chris Hewitt:In terms of Margaret's place in the film, you talked about the overall theme of the film being that humans should be more empathetic and they should listen more. Listen to each other because otherwise who knows where this is going to end. And Margaret is an engine of empathy in this movie. If you wanted to look at this as superpowers that she and Daniel are imbued with, her superpower is empathy. Can you talk about creating that and bringing that to life on the page? That's an incredibly difficult thing to show in a movie. I'll say. But my superpower was I had Steven Spielberg chiming in on the story and giving notes and coming up with stuff.

29:20And he's, one of the things he does exceptionally well in his movies is finding smaller characters and letting them have human moments too. Because that makes, especially when the premise is large and extraordinary, the more, you know, the more detail, the more day players seem like they have real lives and are real people, the better the movie will be. And in this case, that was part of the story as well, is that the first time we see her do it, Margaret is pulled over by a cop. And the cop's being kind of cop-like, or the bad parts of cops. He's being bossy and impatient. And she says, oh, you're just having a bad day.

30:10And then we would speculate about that. and I wrote so much stuff that was her encountering someone and having a specific real specifics about their lives that she was able to fire at them right away and that person would of course be moved by it and I wrote so much stuff because so much would get kicked back and Steven would say pretty good but kind of generic can you please be more specific so I had to be pulling stuff out about people I know or experiences I've had that are real and detailed and seemed specific. And it was, anytime I got much more specific, there's a tiny little bit where someone that some Wardex agent seemingly has lost a sibling in their life and says, you know, they said we can go up to the lake and we're going to see so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.

30:59Chris Hewitt:That was straight from my own childhood. And Stephen said, oh, that's more like it. So he could always spot the Glengarry leads, I started calling them, you know.

31:12Chris Hewitt:so in terms of that one of the moments that really struck me was when she appears to Noah as his late wife Jocelyn and that really floored me because a floor is him yes so for the rest of the movie he's chasing them but the the feminine figure has somewhat left him his heart's not really in it I would argue in the last 10 minutes of the movie it's really fascinating he just sits down and watches it all happen isn't that a lovely moment when he surrenders and sits down and just takes the earpiece out. Yeah. Yeah. I would, yes. Well, wait, that wasn't a question. It wasn't a question. It was about that sequence really, that moment with Jocelyn.

31:55Chris Hewitt:Where did that come from? Was that always, was that something you... It came when we needed a, there was a point in the process where Stephen and I stopped to do a pass for every individual character. You know, it started because we felt like, oh, Daniel's not quite as good or as detailed as Margaret. Let's do a pass through the script where we only think about him. And then that was really fruitful in giving everyone real backstories and whether it appears in the film or not so that we understand them fully. And when we did that for Colin's character, I think it was when I changed my thinking about the character.