707 - After the Hunt

24:12If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. Exactly, that's what I'm hoping. That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping that if I say it, then everyone's like, then I - Former slam poet, Noah Garrett, yeah. If you only knew. Yeah, I got really deep into it. We'll find it, we'll find it. Oh yeah, it's so embarrassing. thing. But I loved it. And then I think that, so I wrote, I started writing, you know, I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Like everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series. And so I wrote a couple of web series and they were just bad.

24:50You know, they were bad. I think it was also the girls' renaissance. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. So everything was sort of that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. And it's only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is. You can't repeat that. But that's what we were all trying to do. So, yeah. So you're writing those things and you're writing stuff that you would sort of shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say, oh, this is what was on the page.

25:23This is what it's actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. So you do get a lot of experience that way. Yeah. So I, my last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. And that was really like, we, we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. And they looked horrible. Yeah. They were just awful. and I would love to think that I had the sort of cognition at the time to to have any sort of creative feedback about the artistic process but I think I was really just caught up in like how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time and I think it's it's also sort of when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you're just like, oh, this isn't even that art form.

26:17This is literally like a camcorder. It's an image on a screen, but that's really about as close as we got there. Right, exactly. And I think that you're like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they're supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes, yes, yeah. When did you write your first full-length featurey script? So the truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature. This is great. Yeah, that is the truth. On that. So talk to us about the idea of it and sort of going into it. And I guess we should say, like, I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won't have seen the movie yet.

26:54So how do you describe it? Like, maybe describe what your initial intention was for it. And if it's different than the final thing, tell us what changed. So it all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. and again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts, I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if there was a character who had at the core of sort of their identity a secret? And this secret is something where I thought, you know, it could go one of two ways, right? I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long.

27:39And I was trying to gamify the system in a way. But I was obsessed with the price of it and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price. And I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of this American life. And basically the upshot of that was that statistically people who are more successful in like our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. that can ensure more success. And I thought, A, I felt validated by that. But B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion. And again, what's the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.

28:17And so Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you're coming online enough to understand what you've done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life? And specifically when you start having like adult relationships. And then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Like, does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help? Or is there an eventual consequence? And so from that initial instinct, we're trying to figure out what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to sort of explore this thing?

28:57Because So the Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. And so she's uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth? How do you live an ethical life? And she has this secret at the start of it. So was that baked into the idea initially? Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first log line, I did think about the professor and student relationship. And having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was kind of my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself.

29:38So it was kind of the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience. Yeah, so very classically, you know, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they're sort of wrestling with and sort of digging through. so it makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there's a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies. So the thing that was due for Amanda was about episode 43, Philosophy for Screenwriters.

30:12We were talking through that. Weirdly, we don't see it. And in this case, you created a character who was just sort of exactly wrestling with that situation. Like Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to sort of explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I'm not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie? Yes, I think that, I think the genre that it started out initially was sort of the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real?

30:44And I think that that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, right? When you're like sort of, what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true and what is false and what's happening right now. That to me is the source of that sort of almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? And then I think, you know, Luca was sort of more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama. Yeah. Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that sort of has a negative connotation right now, but like we used to make melodramas.

31:27There's something delightful about sort of the drama is the drama in a way. Yes, yes, of course. Yeah, and I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about Amma and all the balls you sort of have her juggling. So she is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. And so there's that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student, who is daughter-like to her, but also kind of obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage, which is okay, but has some weird dynamics and strains in it.

32:11Her husband is a psychiatrist. She has a best friend who's also in the department and they have a complicated relationship. An Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition where she's not quite sure what it is weighing on her. And she has a secret. And she has a secret from before. So she has a comfortable life but a lot of things pulling her in different directions. And in other stories, one of those might be sort of enough but there's a lot happening there. And then these aspects sort of conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper.

32:46I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that, you know, I was part of a group of female writers who we'd all share our work with each other. And one of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, you know, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you're just going to finish a first draft in 12 weeks. All right. Basically the idea. That's a classic sign-up kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. A boot camp, like you're just doing it. 100%. You're just doing it. So I thought, okay, I'll do that. You know, like that could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.

33:26Nor like containers, I've learned so far in the podcast. I love containers. I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer. Oh, wow. Okay, great. We'll get to that in the bonus segment. Yeah, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we kind of talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. And part of that was really beneficial because you just sort of got out of your own way. I think that I, you know, it's hard to look back and sort of narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the sort of triad of Julia Roberts' character, Io Debrey's character, and Andrew Garfield's character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.

34:07Um, and I think that, I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to, to sort of see if, if this was someone who was like very calm, cool and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed sort of the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that like whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of. And I think also I was interested in kind of substance use. I don't know, just sort of that as like somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being sort of degrading to their body.

34:53I think especially as a woman and especially as like a female character, women's bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. And I was interested if like, you know, if you can take sort of the Brad Pitt character where he's constantly eating in like half of his films and gives that sort of trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. but yeah, that notion of just sort of like hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind. Yeah, great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. So over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script?

35:28Did you get through it? I did because again, I love rules. So I did finish it. And it was, again, it was just really bad, but I think all of it was like a really good exercise and learning that like just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. And I think I had to push, I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it's not the final iteration by any means. Well, let's talk about that, getting it from it's finished to actually to good. And so what was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?

36:05Yeah. So, you know, I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belong to the sort of like cabal of people that I went to college with. So I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was like in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was I was very financially stressed. So part of that was by necessity. And then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. and then I kind of re-outlined, rebroke the second draft, rewrote it and then started sharing it.

36:40And so I started sharing it with a group of just like really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected and then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends. Yeah, I was going to ask, so knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to sort of hear some stuff and sort of see what's working there. What did you learn in that reading? I mean, there's just, I don't know if you have this, but there's like an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud.

37:13Yeah, absolutely. All the things you'd never notice were like, oh my God, that actually isn't text. There's a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work. Yes, 100%. Or I'm like, God, I use that word so much, like container, right? I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? Like that makes no sense. But it's yeah. So so after getting over the initial sort of hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing. After that, I tried really hard to just step back. You know, I think it's really important if when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it's like I had actors who it was during the actors strike.

37:52and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other jobs. So it was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors and if they're struggling with this moment or if this doesn't sound right coming out of their mouth then I know something needs to change. Yeah, if they can't sell it, it probably is a lie and it's not a person reading the line. So through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of it's Imagine who ended up taking it? So what was that process of like, I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?

38:21It's so funny. looking back on that version of myself, because I feel like... Looking back, what, two years? Yeah. Looking back. So long ago. The younger me. No, but I think it's, you know, I've had for so long, I've been really timid and kind of skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. So all of my friends, for the most part, there's obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. And so you kind of have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place.

38:56And then suddenly you're seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you. And, um, sort of, again, like that gap is, is one that can be difficult to, to close, but also it's sort of that awkward thing of like, I don't want to ask my friend to help me, you know? And, uh, I don't know what, I really don't know what changed. So I didn't have an agent. I didn't have a manager. I had this script. And two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, you know, I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions, you know?

39:31And I submitted it to the Blue Cat screenplay competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember reading it and I I was just like, whoa, okay. And they were like, we, you know, I think they issue some boilerplate statement that's like, we suggest you reapply or you suggest you take this writer's notes. And I'm like, I don't even think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, this is bad. So you're on the website now. Like, I'm normally good. I've probably participated in it. Yeah, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it.

40:16And there's something crazy making in that because you're like, what is good? I can't say what's good. And it's a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure and that there's just no objective measure of any of it. Exactly. So it is sort of that thing where it's like, okay, you know, I mean, obviously when the film comes out, we'll see. But like, there's a big feeling of just like, okay, I mean, you hate my writing and this person doesn't hate my writing. And I think that I read the feedback back. And I had that moment where you're like, oh, I'm horrible.

40:50Everything I do is bad. And then I thought, you know, I don't know, my friends like this and I trust them. So I'll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I'll just keep going. And again, I think that that's sort of an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, you're right, blue cat. I'm very stupid to tend this to you. I'm sorry for wasting your time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I asked a friend of mine who was represented. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me. And he set me up with my now manager, Sydney Blank. And I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother's house in New York and I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta.

41:34And so I like took off of meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting. And I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it's the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it's like, oh, there's, it's really talky. A lot of conversations. There's a lot of$5 words. It's, it's very cerebral at times. There's no major set pieces. you know I was pretty certain I was like this will just be a really good sample and I'll be able to get in rooms hopefully. Yeah like getting a room on a succession like show would be a dream that was the dream 100 % I was like I just hopefully I get a manager and then hopefully I start working in rooms and Sydney was the first person who said you know I really think we can make this into a movie and that was I think December of 2023 I'd say Yeah so recent It's so recent or maybe two.

42:31I can't, I mean, I don't know. What are years? What are years? So it was very recent though. And then that next year, which I think it, yeah, God, I think it was 2023. But that next year, she, Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. And Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was sort of in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. And incredibly lucky for me that she was right. Yeah. That's great. So imagine, read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process? I remember that meeting really well.

43:07But yeah, they met with me and I met with them really. It's also so funny going from like auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people's offices or like, I had a meeting once in like an anteroom of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at like 6 a.m. It was so bad. And then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship. Whereas before I'd been in the position of me trying to really sell myself. But Alan immediately, and it was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi.

43:50And immediately Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can't believe any of this is happening, you know? Yeah. So my first paid job was also Imagine. No way. The first time I went through there. So Colorado and Imagine. Yeah. Time shifted or something. I have a podcast called Schmidt Smoked. So good. It's rising up the charts quickly. So at this point, they've purchased your script. They've optioned your script. No, so it was just sort of a meeting of like, and then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him.

44:30So I had sort of a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it. And so we decided to go with him. That's great. And you did Drafts or Imagine before you went out to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened? No, I mean, I think this was so atypical across so many different lines, you know, And it's hard to say that because obviously I don't have another experience to draw from. But I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. And once he signs on to something, it's like, you know, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it.

45:06He's like, this is getting made and we're going to get it made within the time frame that I have. But the process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience. where I didn't even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine's repped by CAA. And Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. And Luca's name was right up there at the top. But I, you know, they asked me after we decided to work together to kind of hone in and find a smaller list of directors. And I made a list of like four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it'll be the best day of my life.

45:47And Luca was in that little grouping. And we sent the script to his agent, who happens to be married to Julia Roberts' agent. And we were, imagine, really wanted things to be, we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. But the way it happened, because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. And then she actually came on first because initially Luca had a scheduling gap or no, he had a film was going. And then that film, for whatever reason, didn't happen. And so then he came on. That's great. Yeah. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia.

46:30She was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. and you feel lucky to be in the room, but also you're trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make? Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think it's really difficult being like a first time screenwriter in some ways because especially coming from the acting world and just having like zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms, you know? I think I felt like, wow, I feel so lucky to be here across the board.

47:14And again, it all happened so fast that it's hard to look back and be like, oh, what was – it just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now because I think it would have been insane for me to at that point be like, Luca, no thank you. That's crazy. But I think that, you know, the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. And I don't want to spoil things, but like I used to work there and he was staying there at the time. And so our first meeting was there and my old manager was there. And I like remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1 a.m.

47:57every night. And he was there. And I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino. And he was like, what? this crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I've been so many times in such a different capacity. And now I'm meeting with this person here. And I felt like so much of it, you know, I love Luca as a director and I'd seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. And I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. And then of course the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash. And I was like, oh no, I knew it. But I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you're just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect.

48:43And I have no idea. It should be obvious, but you forget like, oh, that's right. I've actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I've been inside this entire movie for years. And so I really can describe everything that's in here and why everything is in here. and I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. Yeah. And it's not like if this script had sort of plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn't have the ability to talk about what's really inside it. You're the only person who's already seen the movie. Right. Which is a hard thing to remember.

49:15And sometimes as you're talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, oh, that's right. They've never been inside this. They're just trying to find their way in. Totally. Yeah. So you have this meeting where they're immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we're going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with him? Yeah, I think that Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. And, you know, I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the sort of thorny social dynamics and really exploring the sociopolitical world in which these characters were in.

49:58And I think that something I was scared of when I initially, when all this was initially happening is I'd heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting sort of denuded. Oh, yeah. teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized. And I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he's really able to sort of silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. And I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.

50:38Yeah. And during the movies, if this were this psychological thriller there'd be probably a clean answer to sort of how these things sort out and my experience with watching the movies I went to a screening, like a 10 a.m. screening in Culver City with just myself and I didn't have anybody to talk about it afterwards fortunately I grabbed a sandwich nearby and there were three women who had just seen the movie too and I heard them talking so I could join their conversation and ask like so let's talk about these three things because it very much is one of those kind of movies where you want to have some discussion about like what really happened there.

51:10Yeah. And sort of for a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places that they got to. Yes, yes. Look, can we take a look at some pages from the script? So this is how we're starting the movie. So this is the initial scenes as we're meeting all the different characters. And I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. So Emma Hoff, the Julia Roberts character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don't give any specific more information with her at this point, but we're going to see a lot of specific behavior from her.

51:44Frederick Mendelsohn, her husband. Can you read the description for him? Sure. Frederick Mendelsohn, Alma's husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over. Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. So we meet him in the parking lot. Yes. Hank Gibson, 40, Alma's colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower class background. Right. And so that last clause, having worked his way up, like that's not evidence that we can't see that on screen, but we're going to see it in his behavior later on. So that's just the kind of cheating that we sort of embrace in a screenplay.

52:19Yeah, I take advantage of that. Next week, we're meeting Maggie Resnick. Mm-hmm. Maggie Resnick, mid to late 20s, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy. So cast in the movie, played by Iowa Debery. Mm-hmm. Her being black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the script, you didn't know it. No, I didn't know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn't any specific notion of race. Yeah. Yeah. Next, we have Patricia Engler. Forties, a professor emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.

52:59Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. So it's delightful. Again, it's the specificity that I'm loving about these things. Then we're meeting her almost in class. So we're going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. And we're meeting Fabiola. Not a housekeeper. She's sort of hired help. She's just sort of a do-everything person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don't have kids. Exactly. Yeah. We'll try to put this first three pages up so people can download them. There's a lot of behavior, a lot of sort of setting up of worlds and sort of establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven apartment life.

53:41Yes. Which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London? It was actually in London, yes. Yeah. And something that Luca is is very rigorous about research. He has a researcher that he's used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. And he is very adamant about versimilitude. And he has a wonderful set designer. who makes... The sets are incredible. Incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. And they're always jammed. Yes. All these people are hoarders until you get to, like, one point very late in the movie where we're at a place that is incredibly spare in Spartan.

54:16Yes, exactly. And that was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, you know, where it's like you're walking, you know... You don't sleep no more. Exactly. You're walking around the sets and you're opening drawers and you're like, God, there's actually, like, what you would have in your drunk drawer If you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019, like this was what it would look like. And yeah, he was very meticulous about that. And I think that that's a wonderful thing for actors to have for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to sort of set up entering into these characters' lives prior to feeling like, oh, we're just at the fulcrum point.

54:57Yeah. Talk to us about the language because we're catching glimpses of them like in class and they're just talking in what's almost like legalese or medically. It's almost incomprehensible to sort of what they're saying to each other because it's all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. Yes. To which degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft, how much of this came in later on? What was that process? So my cousin is getting her master's in philosophy at Stanford. So I really plumbed her experience and also literally like some emails that she's gotten from professors about announcing talks.

55:29And the language that's in the script is like a very, very sanded down version of the sort of opacity that exists in that world. Like it is just, it is like legalese. It's jargon. And something when I was taking philosophy classes sort of ad hoc postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me, philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. But the barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose. And there's a part of me that loves the idea of like you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences.

56:09But there's another part of me that feels like, come on, guys, just say the thing. I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. And that was something where, you know, Luca really thought if this is someone who's supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. So that required a sort of crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself. Well, it also creates structural issues because you need to find, like, well, where do those scenes go in a natural way that's advancing the actual overall plot? They believe that, like, she's teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and happening after this.

56:47Exactly. Yeah. And how can we use those scenes that otherwise would be sort of like cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add the drama? Yeah. So the tension sort of reaches a boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma, which is outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie, who's talking with their partner, Alex, and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It's sort of a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is this the thing that came along in the process?

57:25Portions of it were always in the script. Certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals. Oh, great. Yeah. So talk to us about the rehearsal process. Yeah. So, I mean, talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you're just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals. Is it New York City? No, San Francisco. San Francisco. Yeah. So she's lovely and so warm and disarmingly so, you know, because, and we had had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script.

58:01So at least wasn't like a complete cold meeting. But Luca basically ran it so that, you know, obviously the actors were all very busy. So we had to kind of stagger who was involved in rehearsals. And sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. But, you know, so it started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I. And then slowly but surely, then Ayo came. And then it was Chloe. And then it was all of us. How far in advance of production was this? Gosh, not terribly far. I would say like May. And then we went into, Luca went into prep in June.

58:43Oh, yeah. We started shooting early July, I think. Yeah. I'd love to read through some of this back half here because it's a chance to actually sort of, you're at the point in the movie where people can sort of more clearly state the themes and sort of what their actual things are. It's not sort of couched in a specific language or it could be a little more direct. If you'll print me page 82, I'm nowhere near the actor. You know where Debra is. But I just want to read through some stuff here. Sure. She says, I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore. Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie.

59:15Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown. And there are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible. You've constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. But you, you lie all the time. Living in an apartment ten times cheaper than what you can afford. Dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting. Fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility.

59:46Another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It's all a lie. It's no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank too. All right. So again, it's a moment where you actually sort of can pull off all the niceties and things. And you're also answering an audience question because I was watching like, wait, if she's rich, like why is she living in that crappy apartment? And so it's rewarding the audience for like that question you asked. you're actually answering that question that was never sort of audibly asked before. It's like, why are you doing this thing? And sort of getting to express these, like, you're not entitled to comfort is an aspect too.

1:00:22And it's almost like the audience is not sort of entitled to a nice tidy ending. And sort of it's setting up a, hopefully, the right expectation for the audience about what they're going to get to. Because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was, they're going to be answered, but not answered to the degree that, like, oh, here's the clear, it's not the sixth sense. It's not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It's not that kind of clear answer. Right, right. Yeah, and initially it was. Initially, the earlier drafts, certainly the drafts that were, that was circulated was very much like you got the answer.

1:00:57Yeah. And I think that, I think you're absolutely right that it is a sense of metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having. Great. Well, congratulations on the script. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer. Great. Anita writes, when is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? Great. So how long can you go with a character who's talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to sort of show that.

1:01:36And a script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It's like, okay, what's too long where I don't actually need to show the thing? I don't know. To me, it's just, it's the instinct that like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and sort of show the story. But there's other times where like, you just tell the story. And if it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on the after that long. I think my instinct is to stay. What's your instinct? Yeah, I think it's a difficult question and it was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there's sort of that feeling of like how long can you hide the shark in Jaws?

1:02:18You know what I'm saying? Like how long can you make it? Because there's going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually you move towards satisfaction in the end. But there's a sense of like what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. But I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying. Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, like there's still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not?

1:02:49Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it's trusting the filmmaker is like showing the actual real truth. And so if that's not the case, you're going to have to do a little more work to undo that. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's about rewarding people's faith while creating as much tension as possible. Agreed. Let's take one last question here from Nami. I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.

1:03:26So tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don't know when it's going to happen. And it's the buildup to a sneeze. It's the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, oh God, something bad is going to happen. It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there's a bomb underneath the table and you see the countdown underneath the table. Or a longer term thing where just like, oh, there's a sense of dread. I think one of the issues that we're living with as a society right now is that sense like there's just a, there's an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment.

1:04:00You're just not quite sure when it's going to happen or what it's going to look like. Yeah. But in movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Like, are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you're cutting to something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we're still worried about what happened before? Or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment? Your movie has a lot of tension. is building up to just mysteries that we're trying to figure out. A lot of Chekhov's guns are being loaded in your movie. Yeah. So any more instincts about sort of tension and suspense?

1:04:34I mean, first of all, I love The Twilight Zone. But I think that, yeah, it is, again, I think it's a delicate dance between feeling like what do you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging? Or what can you get away with not paying off, and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement. Yeah. All right, it's come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience? Sure. So I've been really interested in Substack recently. I think that it's a great little corner of the internet when there's a lot of scary corners of the internet.

1:05:14And I also think it's really great to just sort of read flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. And Jessica DeFino is a writer who runs a great subset called Flesh World. And it's a lot about like the beauty space. I'm really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. And there's another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. And he writes sort of flash fiction. And I just started reading him and I just, I love it. It's really tightly told and very evocative. That's great. So a couple things to respond to on there.

1:05:54Flash fiction as a concept can be great. And so these are little short bits. It's almost the textual equivalent of like TikToks where it's just like, here's the idea, you're in and you're out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. And I respond to it the same way. It's like, just one more, just one more, just one more. And Substack is so fascinating too because there's so many really good writers on Substack. And anytime you sort of mention Substack, people are like, but what about the Nazis? And it's a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and sort of like, and it's corporatizing a bunch of independent voices.

1:06:27And yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating. So it's a... Yeah, God. And see, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn't even know about any of that. Oh, that's great. Yeah. And so like, so literally I'll post something on Blue Sky about like this post that I really liked. Yeah. And the first comment will be like, oh, too bad it's on that Nazi platform. I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, God, no. Everything is ruined. I have to think of a new cool thing.

1:06:57The scolding that happens in pop culture is true. And it's also part of your movie, too. I mean, your movie is building off of reactions to me, too. But just the general sense of like there's no good way to be a decent person in the world. No. I mean, and I think it's also a certain sense of like, God, there's nothing that seems particularly clean in this world. now. Like everything is, everything is touched. Everything is tainted in some way. And it's like, how do you, yeah. How do you, how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy? Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One Podcast by Jesse David Fox.

1:07:33So we had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. And so The Good One Podcast is sort of like script notes, but it's talking with funny people about sort of how they do their work. and one episode I really liked recently was Ben Delacremme's episode. He said... I love Ben Delacremme. An incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but like talking through sort of the behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race but also the bigger issues of sort of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we're trying to do.

1:08:10You're always grappling with like, well, what is drag anymore? and if drag isn't dirty, is it still drag? And all these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. So one of many good episodes of the Good One podcast. And that is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

1:08:43You'll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at Script Notes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the ones we referred to, and the new one we're about to record on day jobs.

1:09:11Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes. Thank you for having me.