729 - Endings Compendium, Part II

24:28John August:But the actual denouement, as we're describing right now, is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who's now born and saying like, oh, did all of that really happen? And the father says, yep, every word. So essentially, you see the son buying into the father's stories in the sense that there's a legacy that will live on. So they're very short scenes. They're probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking like, this is, the characters are on the trajectory I want them to be on. Yeah, the climax of Identity Thief is that Melissa McCarthy's character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman's character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal.

25:13And that's something she does. That's a self-sacrifice she does because of what he's kind of helped her to see. And that's what he's now learned from her. And the denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it's a year later, and she's in prison, which was really important to say, look, it's real, right? She went to prison. But what's happening? Well, Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they've had their baby. and everything's okay. He's got a great new job. He's doing fine. She's been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her, which is he's found her real name because she doesn't know who she is.

25:51And he found her birth certificate and found her real name. And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. And it could have, she's just, you know, she was a criminal, but it didn't. And that they're going to go on and on. And then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie and it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief, you have both. She at one point says she doesn't know her real name.

26:26Here we find out her real name, which is Don Budgie. It's the worst name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat and here she's going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change, but you don't change completely because that feels gloppy, right? But both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement, if you can find those, or if you're wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

26:56John August:Yep. And a crucial point I think you're making here is that the denouement is not about plot. So it's about story and theme, but it's not about sort of the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It's paying off things you've set up between your characters. It's really paying off relationships generally is how you are wrapping things up. It's showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward. Oh, and that's a great point too. You're absolutely right that it is showing what has changed and therefore it's also showing what hasn't changed which can sometimes be just as important.

27:33So for instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life, but the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren't there. So if your problem is, okay, my character is Vanessa, and Vanessa thinks that it's more important to be successful than to be loved, this is an incredibly trite movie i apologize um to vanessa um at the end i don't necessarily if she's found love i think maybe that's good like i don't need also then success because then i start to wonder well okay what was the lesson here sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing at the end of shrek he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre but he's not alone.

28:25So one thing changes and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

28:33John August:Absolutely. So you're saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have questions about sort of like, what is their life going to be like? Like we just don't understand, you know, how they fit into all this thing. But by changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of sort of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward. Yeah, exactly. It's a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent.

29:10And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot, dot, dot off. The way that a lot of songs just fade out, right? Some songs have a big dum-dum-da-dum, and that's your end. And you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. You know, the end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade out. You know, he says goodbye to Elsa. She's off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything's finished. And then, you know, two men just walk off and say, you know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And therein is a dot, dot, dot.

29:46And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. and you understand more adventures are ahead. But, you know, for now, everything's okay. Yeah, it's a nice one.

29:55John August:You know, you get a sense that there will be further stories. We don't necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they're generally headed and that you don't need to be worrying about them an hour later from now. Here's the counter example. Imagine you're watching this film and you're watching Casablanca and for some reason, the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you've not been sort of like safely placed back down. There's a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It's like the writer and the filmmakers say, if you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while.

30:32John August:And you trust me and I will take you to a place and I'll deposit you back safely where you started. And if you're not putting people back safely where they started, they're not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. and that's what you find when you do audience testing is so often what's not working about the movie is that they didn't feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered. Yeah. And I suspect that people well reasonably invest an enormous amount of time energy and thought into building their climaxes and then the dynamite becomes an afterthought and for me it is the actual ending.

31:11That's actually the ending I back up from

31:13John August:is the dynamite. Alright, so let's wrap up this conversation of denouement because denouements are about wrapping things up. So the key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot but of theme, of relationships, of sort of the promise you've made to the audience about these principal characters and sort of what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know? That is essentially what they're going to do. You're going to show them that last bit whether you've done a good job or a poor job, when they see the last bit of the movie, they will, in their minds, add on the following words, and thus it shall always be.

31:52And if you have done it well, and thus it shall always be, will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it's not comforting. Sometimes it's sad, you know? I mean, honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet, no shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. The Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this And it's very jaunty and he's on a roof and it's silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, yeah, you know, this is like our life is hard and it's tricky. And like, we're like a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.

32:28At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they are trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go. And he plays that same little tune, but it's so sad this time. and the denouement is there to say, and thus it shall always be. Meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka and whenever that takes place, let's just call it 1910, is going to be worse. Yeah. And it's going to get worse before it gets better and thus it shall always be. So it doesn't always have to be, and happily ever after, sometimes it can be and sadly ever after, but the point is it will be thus.

33:11and it shall thus always be. So if you think about it that way, the Dana one becomes incredibly important because that's where you're sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

33:23John August:Yeah, everyone's sort of frozen in that little capsule that you've created there. And that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you've built to contain this story. So that's why it's so crucial that it feel rewarding. So whether it's a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending. Yeah.

33:46John August:Today I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye, presumably for the last time. And sort of, we'll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also what are the characteristics of a farewell scene? And so this could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. So Big Fish, of course, is obviously a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart. Maybe buddies who've come to, they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they're having to say farewell and we sort of see the journey there.

34:21John August:But I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they're crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you've written? The one that I've spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada where they see each other on the street and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. And I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. And then Meryl says, go. And I say Meryl because the way it was scripted is it said actually in the scene description, it said she looks at the driver, go, was in the scene description and they had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, go to the driver, and it's a great, it sort of snaps you back into her actual MO.

35:15It's funny, because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing, and that has a finality, but you need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final, because you don't want to feel like, you know, they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca and then they ran into each other at a bar two days later. Like, you want to have, it needs to feel, and the same thing with rom-coms, if it's like, you know, and a pretty woman, you know, he rescued her, she rescued him right back. You don't want to feel like, cut to four days later where it's like, this is insane.

35:50You leave your pants on the floor. I don't, what is this? You know, like, how do you make any ending feel like it's stuck?

35:59John August:Yeah, and so that's why I think because movies are one-time journeys for characters. we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies of course some series especially with ongoing regular characters they will say farewell to a character and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time but let's think through the aspects of a farewell generally the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end they may not go into the scene knowing that it's going to be the end but at some point of course the scene they realize this is the end the location that they're at generally is relevant to the scene either was a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye.

36:36John August:Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story. Oh, that's a great point. Yeah. That's a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, oh, what the irony. Mm-hmm, yeah. So it could be the location rhymes that were back in the place we were before. The dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes a thing that happened before. Looking through these examples, we're going to see that there's a bunch of non-verbal story points. There's a lot of silences in these.

37:05John August:And that's honestly the characteristics of these. And that's why sometimes we're not going to be playing the audio for this because it's a lot of people not talking. I hope you're going to put these up on the website because these are, this is fantastic. Drew, did you make, this is fantastic. This is really good. Now, I did send you that funny, there's a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up where it's like, are there missing posters for him as an adult or they're missing posters for the boy. And I had read that in the original end of Big that he goes back to class and there's a girl named Susan in his class.

37:39And they sort of like wink of like, this is going to be Elizabeth Perkins, but they dropped that. And so they're never going to see each other again. And I had been trying to think of comedies and that's one. And then you have, you know, E.T. is probably like one of the, and as we had discussed, I think past lives is, you know, people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of they've been separated for so long and this is another separation, possibly permanent.

38:07John August:I think what's important about past lives is a good example of this is that you're closing hopefully two characters' arcs. And that, so it's not just your protagonist that you're seeing through this and like this is the end of their journey. Hopefully the other character, it's the end of their journey too, at least in terms of what we've seen them go through. And that past lives is a great example of that. if there's a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. So sometimes the situation may just require them to separate. But I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end.

38:37John August:And that feels great. Can I ask you a question? Please. How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you or is that frustrating for you? For me, it's a little bit frustrating. And also, as I went back to look at The Kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that there was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn't sort of, it wasn't a romance at all. And then he kisses her on the lips and I'm like, wait, he did? That sounds weird. It felt like it was a more of a... Of a cheek moment. Yeah, it felt like a cheek moment rather than an on the lips moment.

39:08John August:And I was like, oh, I didn't like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context. Yeah, well, lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple friends who were lip kissers and I feel like, which was always like when you saw her coming towards you and time slows down and you're sort of like, because, you know, my lip kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to. That's about it. Yeah. Pretty much. You know those people who are coming at you and you're like, oh, slow motion, turn the face. But, you know, I think post-COVID. To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture. Can you imagine if I lip kissed John on the way out of here?

39:44I don't. Drew would be so uncomfortable. Or if I lip kissed Drew on the way out of here.

39:47John August:It would all be so uncomfortable. So weird. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the French, Yeah, but the two cheeks. The cheek. Yeah, and it felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker. We don't do that in America, but I agree. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it's not. You're saying it's a full lip kiss. Interesting. It's a full lip kiss. We can look at the video. But what do you feel about not knowing what he said? I'm a little bit frustrated, but I'm also kind of okay with it. And so how do you feel about it? I think it suits this movie, which has sort of a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think suits Sofia Coppola's vibe.

40:23So I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that like people are layered and mysterious and you, you know, so I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you'd be irritated.

40:34John August:We as an audience need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us unless we've seen the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story. And not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do. And also as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they're not saying it out loud or speaking it. Because oftentimes in these things, one character is being stoic and sort of holding back. There's reasons why they're not fully expressing themselves. But we as an audience have to have insight into what they're actually really feeling inside there.

41:05I mean, something I think about a lot is that because if you have a quieter movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. And E.T., interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I've seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. Like, you know, the enemy is keys. It never really gets that heightened. And I know that if you made that movie now, there would be a shootout, an interstellar shootout. There would be so much action packed into that end. And I think about that a lot because anything that we're working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into, you know, a third act where there's giant caterpillars invading from space.

41:50You know, they need to be shot. And I do feel like that movie now, you'd get a lot of notes about making it huge. And it's, I would put this up there with Casablanca for me in terms of merely really meaningful goodbye. And I think it's because the 70s aesthetic was still at play there where you could have these quieter movies. And I really mourn that because now it feels like that's reserved for the smaller movies and the bigger movies. If you're not exhausted on the ground with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they've not done their job.

42:27John August:our big marquee topic i want to get into today is the final moment in movies or i guess episodes of tv but i'm really thinking more in movies and this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of captain marvel this is a not even really a spoiler but at the end of the original version of captain marvel uh she flew off into space and they changes so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change in sort of giving a sense of where the character was headed next. And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I've written, that last moment, that last beat has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie.

43:08John August:And I sort of want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much. Interesting. No, and it's funny because for me, because I'm obsessed with that moment, it actually rarely doesn't change. It doesn't change much for me. But that's in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don't know. I start with it too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney, and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry. That last line, the last image of that last moment, it's not in the movie at all.

43:45John August:It totally changed the ways that things change. But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, you know, we shot the script, those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change because it's based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it's delivered it to. So let's talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you're first thinking about the story and then what it looks like at all the different stages. Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. You know, I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms.

44:22Somebody rides off into the sunset. So the last shot really is about sunsets, but of course it's not. For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image, contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. You know, we've talked about Lindsey Duran's TED Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. And she would cite how sometimes she would ask people, well, what was the last image of some movie, Karate Kid? And a lot of people don't remember. It's Mr. Miyagi's face, you know, proud.

45:06It's Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other and there's pride. So figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it's supposed to be. And you can't get there unless you kind of know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

45:22John August:Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to some place. But it's also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so, of course, you're going to be thinking about that early on in the process of where do you want to end up? And, you know, way back in episode 100, there was a listener question and someone asked us, I have a couple different ideas for movies and I'm not sure which one I should start writing. And my answer was, you should pick the one with the best ending because that's the one you'll actually finish.

45:55John August:Right. And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you're going to, you're very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you've done. So having a clear sense of this is where I think the movie lands is crucial. It's like the plane is going to land on this runway, tells you, okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately I have to make sure that I'm headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they're not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

46:30John, when you were in grade school, and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said, you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle. You don't have like a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?

46:44John August:I was a fair circle drawer. I know it's a very classic artistic lesson. It's like how to sort of trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer? No, absolutely horrendous. If you asked me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course, we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle. If you don't know your ending and you don't know how the circle finishes, it's quite probable that you won't know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mason attempting to draw someone's head.

47:34This is how things go off. This is where I think people can easily get lost as they're writing their script because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning. One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd's The Wall. I guess Pink Floyd, the wall and Pink Floyd, the wall, they play little games. The Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd, the wall is very low volume. At the very beginning, you hear this little tiny little song. And then someone says, we came in. And then at the very end, the very end, they're playing the song and it finishes.

48:22And then you hear someone say, isn't this where? and you know that's the exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15 year old voice but it also it was satisfying you felt things were connected and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant it's the way frankly watchman ends it's the same thing there's this beautiful come around with that last final look now because we're

48:54John August:talk about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that's based on a circle where there's a circle and there's these little lines across it that characters go on this journey. That's absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That's not quite what we're talking about. We're talking about how, in general, a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases, they're either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn't a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change.

49:29John August:And sometimes it won't be that one character. Sometimes it's like the narrative question you've asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back in a place that lets you look at that question from a new way. So it's either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that's what we're talking about. Like the narrative comes full circle. There's a reason, there's a place that you were headed and that place that you were headed reflects where you began. No question. And it's really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them.

50:04It's just one of those things where you can say, oh, here's the variable, right? This is the, where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end and let me see the difference. And sometimes it's very profound. You know, I mean, we start and end in the same place and finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed

50:26John August:and that's your character. So I'm finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy. And so each of the books has had that sense of like, okay, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and that there is a completion there. But it's been fun to actually see like the whole trilogy and it's like, okay, this is the journey that we've been on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch's life. and yes, he's physically in the same space, but he's a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what's happened. And so as I've been able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he's a different character having been changed by what's gone on.

51:05John August:That's what we're really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character. Yeah, I mean, you would not, reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does. It's really shocking for middle grade fiction. Well, it is. But then when you look back, you go, oh, yeah, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that awful long. Actually, it makes sense. He's a nightmare. Then there's the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. You know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not bad.

51:38Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

51:39John August:You should do it. Yeah. I think it's going to be a crossover with Derek Haas' books about his assassin. Oh, yes. Silver Bear. Silver Bear. Silver Bear, Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it. Oh, yeah. I love it. So, you know, when I'm thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. Yeah. What is it that I want to feel? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? the movie that I worked on with Lindsay Duran, which is, I think, my favorite feature script.

52:20And so, of course, it hasn't been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot, to me, was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. You know, it's a coming-of-age story. And the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, And the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who's no longer with you. And that's, I go, okay, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change. For sure. And often changes frequently.

53:00But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. So a writer will have an intention like I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention. And here's how I would execute it. Nobody else sees the intention underneath or they don't understand it. and they just go, well, you know what? We don't like necessarily the way they're executing that. Let's make a new execution. Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's make it noisy.

53:33Let's make it loud. Let's make it funny. Let's make it... And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it and people go, well, the ending. And you're like, yeah, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending. You see how it goes? Yeah. Freaking brutal.

53:48John August:Yeah, that's never happened to me once in my career. Let's talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. So in the pitch version of it, you know, obviously we've talked about in pitches that I would describe it as like, you're trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you've seen that they've not seen. So you're really, you're talking a lot about sort of the characters and sort of how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff, but you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you're really talking about like, what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who's watched this movie that you're hopefully going to be writing?

54:23John August:So in the pitch, you're going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that's really important. It's the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. So that last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it's not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the reader to take away from reading the script. What I'm thinking about in a room where I'm relaying something to somebody is, ultimately, how do I want them to, I want to give them a fuzzy at the end.

54:54I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don't want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot, so for instance, let's say I'm in a room and I'm pitching Star Wars. What I don't want to do is get to the end and say, in our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved. What I want to talk about is how a kid, I would bring it back to the beginning and say this farm boy who didn't know about this world beyond him, who didn't know about the force, who didn't know about the fate of his father or the way he could maybe save the world. He is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.

55:34See, like some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you're selling plot at the end, then what you're really selling is what Lindsay Durant calls the, you know, the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.

55:48John August:Well, let's take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write the scene that gets you that moment. And so as you're writing that scene at the last moment, you're looking at like, what is the medal ceremony like? Who's there? What are the, what's said? But most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there? Actually painting out the world so we can see like, okay, this is why it's going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind the scene, but also I'm giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.

56:21John August:And so in the script stage, what was sort of a nebulous description of like, this is what it's going to feel like has to actually deliver on that promise. Yeah, I always wondered, I hate being the guy who's like, would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this? But the last shot of Star Wars is, it's the medal ceremony, right? I mean, and then you have them looking at each other. And so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last, last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and kind of starting a new beginning, you know, a new hope to, you know, that vibe of returning.

56:58I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.

57:03John August:I think it's worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that, that would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had the swell and you had, you know, whether the journey was, this is a kid who was sort of all on his own, who like forms a new family. So like going back to where his dead family was, it wouldn't feel like the kind of victory. Dead family. Dead family. So I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than sort of the, I would just imagine the music would be very different if he'd gone back to Tatooine. It wouldn't feel like that.

57:38Yeah, it would be like da-da-da-da-da. And yeah, no, you're right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke and Han and Luke, that it's, we're a family, we're friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.

57:54John August:So let's say you've written the script, you've gone into production, and you've, you know, 100 days of production, there's finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it's different, or it doesn't work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn't work. In my experience, it's generally because the movie sort of got, the actual movie that you watched isn't quite the movie that's on the page just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters, things just feel different. Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you kind of thought you were headed is not really where you've ended up.

58:32John August:And so you have to make some sort of change there. In some cases, it's reshoots. In some cases, you're like, you're really shooting a new last scene. You realize like, this was not the moment that you thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it's just a matter of like this shot versus that shot. Whose closeup are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried a bunch of different ways and like it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but like ultimately Mr. Miyagi was the right choice. They're thinking about like, what does the music feel like this moment?

59:00John August:Like how are we emotionally landing the payload here? And the music's gonna be a big factor. So there's gonna be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. and you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page. No question. And this is why it's really important for you to understand your intention because it may work out that your intention didn't carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling.

59:39Let's see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can't, okay, let's go back and reconsider what it's supposed to be. In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, oh my God, having gone through this movie, it's really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. Okay. So now we have to think of the beginning. Let's recontextualize what our beginning means. And then let's go ahead and fix an ending. but the ending can never be just, you know what? It just needs to be more exciting.

1:00:15John August:You know, that's nonsense. The danger is a lot of times in test screenings, they'll see like, okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end. So let's add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat or like an extra thing. And generally people don't want more. They don't want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that's the challenge. How do you leave them feeling is the biggest. So sometimes though, the opposite holds true. And just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend's film and he has this really remarkable sort of last shot.

1:00:53John August:And these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, oh, that's a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw. And, but when I looked at sort of the movie I'd seen before that, it's like, oh yeah you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense and so it was really like talking about like this is where we get to at the end i think you're not starting at the right place and so therefore you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really um change our expectations and change what we're following over the course of the movie because doing that you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful i mean again the the beginning is the end is the beginning right so you either if something's not working in that, where your circle is supposed to connect up and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong or the beginning is wrong or they're both wrong.

1:01:48But it's usually one or the other. And it is, I think, tempting at times to say, well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid and this thing sits atop the pyramid. This is the easiest thing to fix. And John, you're absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning. Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience

1:02:05John August:as they go into it. Right. and you can get them there. Match them to where they're going to arrive. And that is our show for this week. Thank you, Drew Mark, our producer, for putting together this compendium, which was edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnawgust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnawgust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

1:02:36John August:The Script Notes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can go back and read the endings chapter and see what we pulled from these conversations into the book. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll 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 again to our premium subscribers. you make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

1:03:08John August:You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we're about to record, on casting minor characters. Drew, thanks for putting this episode together. Of course. Thanks, John.

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