Episode 1647 - Scott Frank

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Lock the gates!

All right, let's do this.

How are you, what the fuckers?

What the fuck, buddies?

What the fuck, Nicks?

What the fuck, Adelix?

What's happening?

I'm Mark Maron.

This is my podcast, WTF.

It's been my podcast for almost 16 years.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

Yeah, how you doing?

Today on the show, I talked to Scott Frank.

He's a writer, director, producer, and one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood.

He wrote the screenplays for Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan, and a lot more, including dozens of uncredited rewrites on films like Saving Private Ryan and Gravity.

He's the writer and director of the Netflix series Godless and the Queen's Gambit, as well as the new crime thriller Department Q, which I watched all of.

You know, I've never been a binge-watching series guy, but I've had a few guests lately where I get it.

I get how it's satisfying.

And Department Q is very satisfying.

And I also watched Friends and Neighbors.

And now I didn't get all the screeners.

So now I'm hanging out, just hanging here like everyone else, waiting for Friday for the end of that thing.

Anyway,

my buddy Jack came over, and I love Jack.

I've known Jack for years.

We became friends back in the San Francisco days.

I guess that would have been, geez, when was that man?

92, 93,

somewhere in there.

And

we don't stay in touch as much as we should because sometimes, you know, friendships, it's not even that they get strained.

All of a sudden, you just, time flies.

No, I don't even like that.

Time, you just, you just kind of realize one day, like, oh, fuck, I haven't talked to that guy in a month or two, or three, or six.

I can't even really remember the last time we hung out, but it had been a while.

And it's just an interesting moment when you haven't seen a friend in a while and your contemporaries, and you look at him and you go, Wow,

we are

old guys.

And look, I'm not saying I'm old, I'm not whining about it, but I'm 61.

You know, when I was 15 and someone told me they were 61, I'm like, holy shit, that guy's almost gone.

But now I'm 61 and Jack's a couple of years older than me.

My buddy Steve, who I've known since college, he just turned 63.

There's a zone of aging.

that seems to happen in, you know, around 60 to 65, where you make this

one of the major turns physically.

And that's just my speculating.

But it just was this moment where I'm like, oh, oh man, because Jack doesn't have kids either.

And so we can't really judge ourselves against their growth or anything else.

So there's some part of us that are still 1994.

There's some part of me, I think, that's still like 1980.

But I think there's some part of me that's 1972.

They all exist within me.

And a lot of them haven't really aged.

But there is this current of, I don't know if it's youthful thinking.

It's just not really knowing.

If you're just spending most of the time alone or with one other person that you see a lot, you just don't know until you see a pal you haven't seen in a year or so with that like, oh my, it's happening, dude.

Look at us.

Because like so many of the cities I've lived in have changed dramatically over time.

So many of the people that I knew are either gone or have disappeared to where I don't even know where they are.

He was talking about San Francisco and we were there in the 90s and how amazing it was before it all crashed.

COVID really knocked the shit out of that place.

And all this stuff that him and I were brought up on, you know, we, you know, I grew up in,

I mean, in terms of formative years.

So I graduated high school in 81 and I was 10 and 60 and 73, 15 and 78.

And all the stuff that we were picking up was the stuff left over from the 70s.

And everything that San Francisco represented, all the free love and sort of celebration of weirdness and the embracing of

the gay community and all the sort of wild underground comics, underground art, all the weirdness of New York and LA, all the freedom of expression that used to define some of these cities, all the beautiful diversity of creativity and just like pushing the envelope to find out, you know, what the, what is the edge of the human expression, all that stuff is exactly what's being steamrolled and buried today with anti-diversity policy, anti-diversity movement, anti-gay movement.

All this stuff, you know, moving towards this, this homogenization of mediocrity and thick-mindedness and bigotry is a fucking disaster for the arts, for creativity, for human potential, for things that are interesting and provocative.

It's all being pushed aside in the name of anti-woke policy or in the name of anti-censorship so we can do hack jokes about vulnerable, marginalized communities.

It's just such a...

It's so like when I was talking to Jack and what we kind of grew up with, you know, R-crum, weird records, all kinds of

like the residents, like just the entire expanse of, and I watched that Pee Wee Herman documentary, half of it, the world he came from, the arts of the 70s.

It's just all of that.

But it was defining and essential and interesting.

And now we're just moving into this zone of authoritarian boredom and fear.

And it's such a fucking shame.

It's such a fucking shame to have people on podcasts looking at some of the greatest art of the 20th century and going like, I could do that.

It's just so thick-minded, out of context, without any sort of sense of

open-mindedness or exploration.

And these are people that pay a lot of lip service to freedom of mind and freedom of speech.

And I just, it just fits so snugly into a very fascist point of view.

And it's just, it's heartbreaking above everything else.

It's angering and it's scary.

but above everything else, the sort of movement to erase the kind of progressive and truly edgy creativity that was evolving and progressing in music and painting and dance, in writing, in

live performance.

It's just, it's such a fucking heartbreaking thing to grow up with such an exciting, full spectrum of human expression and just seeing that just bulldozed.

Also, just by the nature of media in general.

It's just sad.

And I guess this is like an old guy talking.

Hey, what about what's going on now?

It's not the same.

Doesn't have the same visceral connection.

Doesn't have the blood, guts, and soul, and sweat of, you know, actually being around exciting things happening.

But is this just me being old?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I do do know that I just did the beginning of the press junkets for the show

Stick, which premieres June 4th on Apple TV.

Me and Owen and Mariana and Peter and Lily.

We're all doing sort of press tour stuff.

That's going to be exciting.

I haven't watched any of it.

I'm going to watch it with everybody else or maybe not watch it at all because that's what Owen does.

I can follow his lead.

It's not great to watch yourself.

Sometimes it is, but usually

it's not great.

But everybody seems to like the show.

Also, if you're going to be in New York on June 14th or 15th and you want to come to the showings of Are We Good, the documentary about me, the premiere is on the 14th.

You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour to get tickets to that.

And I don't know, a lot of things going on, a lot of things going on, a lot of them bad.

But my life, you know, if I can continue to celebrate what I believe real creativity is and just hope to God that people are out there still doing it, still pushing the envelope in a way that takes real risks.

God, I hope you're out there.

I'll be looking for you.

So look, Scott Frank is here.

His new series, Department Q, premieres on Netflix today, and it's good.

It's a good watch.

It's one of those kind of

traumatized, angry police situations, cold cases.

You know,

I don't know the genre, but

it turns out that it's better that I don't binge these kind of shows because I can't stop.

And I guess that's the idea, but I've managed not to get too

completely absorbed by too many of them.

But I really enjoyed this one, and I enjoyed talking to Scott.

And so I'll let you listen to it now.

And also, before I got a pretty big announcement on Monday, got a pretty big announcement on Monday.

This is me talking to Scott Frank.

I think people get very,

you know, very comfortable with their discomfort.

I don't know.

What do you mine manifests itself in catastrophic thinking and dread?

I catastrophize over everything.

Right.

And then it stays in my brain.

And then I also.

Spend the day with it.

Yeah.

Why not?

I would sit down to read a book.

and I would still feel anxious like maybe I shouldn't be doing this.

Maybe I should be working.

Maybe I should be.

And then,

you know, and then in our world, our business, nothing is secure, you know, and especially when with kids and everything.

And the more I, you know, and this is, it's just,

it didn't get better.

It started to get worse as I get it.

You just pile it on.

Yeah.

That's what's happening.

It's worse.

Yeah.

Everything gets worse as you get older.

I know, but the odd thing is, is that now you're financially more comfortable.

Right.

It's not necessarily that you have

a guarantee of a job, but it seems like you do all right.

At some point, you got to look at your resume and go like, I've never stopped working.

Right.

But still, it's like telling a manic depressant to just cheer up.

Is it, though?

I think it is.

I do.

I think it is.

I think that for me, I couldn't.

I tried meditating.

I tried a lot of different things.

And I hear meditation is great.

I was probably the wrong time to try it when I tried it.

I mean, I've tried it.

Yeah, I think if you get a practice going, like in, you know, like

my late partner, you know, she would do it twice a day.

She was TM.

Twice a day.

But yeah, she was, but she was strict, you know, TM.

I mean, that's what you do, 20 minutes, twice a day.

And like 20 minutes, twice a day, it's fucking nothing.

Yeah.

And it's, there's some things become so big in my head.

Like, I don't have any sense of time.

Like, you know, you're coming, you're supposed to be here too, but you're coming over and I'm like, I'm up at nine and I want to go to the gym before you come.

And I'm like, oh, fuck, do I have enough time?

It's like, you have four hours.

I mean, what do you,

I, I, so, so I am the same way.

And I feel like 20 minutes in the morning, are you fucking kidding me?

I need to get going.

I need, that's my good writing time.

That's my, you know, and, and especially when I started directing too, you know, everything,

everything was too big in my head.

I realized, and my son said to me, my son,

who's sober, a lot of people in my family are, and he would say to me,

you're not, dad, you don't enjoy anything.

You have all these things, you have this great life, and you don't even seem to really enjoy it.

It's like you're in, you know,

fight or flight all the time.

Yeah,

I don't know if I'm in fight or flight, but I don't.

My whole new special that I just recorded has to do with this, about the inability, some of the jokes, inability to identify happiness.

Right.

And,

you know, anxiety and ssris

and but like like you're saying this idea of of identifying happiness one number one yeah and then sort of like um

experiencing joy number two i'm like that sounds like bullshit yeah or being in the moment being comfortable being uncomfortable being

you know

i i i don't know that i could i had to kind of fix everything right away and and the irony is in work i'm a big believer

you know when it it comes to writing, especially, it's messy.

You have to be comfortable with it being wrong until it's right for a year or two or whenever, however long it takes.

It's just messy.

Don't know how you do it.

And you, it's why I hate all these, you know, a lot of the film school programs and books and podcasts and things that try to organize it and turn you into a good student.

You know, I really think that the great stuff comes from the mess and the happy accidents, but you have to really constantly

tell yourself that this, that eventually, like you have the flu, you know you're going to get better.

Sure.

You just tell yourself, I'm going to get to the other end.

But also, you've got to do the work.

You have to do the work.

You have to sit there and do the work.

I mean, I think that is the hardest thing.

I think that people that are coming into writing without really doing it,

you know, they're looking for a system.

Yes.

So they can write within the system.

But if you don't have just

the need or the compulsion or the discipline to just write the fuck out of things.

What are you going to do?

No, listen, this is one of my favorite subjects.

And it's the talent or the way of thinking, even.

And so they tell you, if you just follow everything that's in here.

Yeah, and then you write and you're saying.

You have an outline, you have a this, and you read scripts and things where people are behaving because the script says so.

Yeah.

Well, but also, it's just like, I hate it.

I hate writing.

And I'm a good writer, but I hate it.

You know, I've written scripts.

I do this weekly thing that keeps me engaged with prose anyways and sort of

first person stuff.

But like when I've done shows and I've had to write scripts, to me, it's like, oh my God.

It's hard.

It's hard.

It's miserable.

And it's like, I just want it to be done.

And like, I'm not, you know, I'm not.

But do you find,

is there a point like.

I noticed with what I do with stand-up where I work and I work and I work.

And then it gets to a point where, yeah,

I'm in it.

I feel, I feel good about the work.

You know, I perform it in a way that doesn't require me to life or death it.

So is there a point where you're like, yeah, this is good.

I'm writing.

No.

What it is, is there's a few minutes a day

where it's going really well.

Yeah.

Where it's subconscious.

And I always talk about it.

It's like this ball of dough that lands on the board and you start rolling out that ball of dough.

Right.

And as it gets thinner and thinner, you're hoping for another one

to drop and hit.

But But I mean, this is like, you know, you've written some great movies.

Little Man Tate was the big first one.

Get Shorty.

Out of Sight, which I just watched recently.

The Interpreter, The Wolverine and Logan, Marlee and Me.

The Interpreter for me, like there are certain movies.

I was trying to make a list for myself while I was on the treadmill today of modern masterpieces, you know, in terms of like underappreciated movies.

And one of the ones that you wrote, which is Out of Sight, I think is one.

Michael Clayton is one.

Yeah, it's a perfect movie.

It is, right?

It's a perfect movie.

I cannot shut up about it.

Yeah.

I get excited.

And I'll tell you something.

I'm going to put Sicario on the list.

I love Sicario.

I'm going to put Sicario on the list.

There are a few movies that I, there's nothing wrong.

They're absolutely perfect movies.

Sicario, I would absolutely, you can write that on the list.

Right.

Three Kings.

Love Three Kings.

Right.

And then like, but Pollack,

you know, who, did he direct The Interpreter?

He did.

He directed it.

So you worked with Sidney.

He was my mentor.

The best.

Yeah.

The best.

And some of the movies he directed, grown-up movies.

Grown-ups.

For grown-up people.

Right.

Where they never get together.

The couple never gets together.

That was his thing.

And he...

I've had some really good mentors in my life.

I've been really lucky.

Who was the first one?

Lindsey Duran, great producer, was the first one who taught me how to write.

Then Sidney, then Bill Goldman.

Oh, Bill Goldman, yeah.

Bill Goldman.

He must have been old.

This was 1990.

I was 29.

Well, just to blow some smoke up for a minute, like,

absence of malice, The Firm.

The Firm is great.

What a great fucking movie.

Great.

Why isn't that celebrated?

Great.

It's a really good movie.

Random Hearts.

Random Hearts, I have more trouble with.

The later one, Savannah, Random Hearts.

Even the interpreter, I have some trouble with.

Jeremiah Johnson.

I love Jeremiah.

That's a perfect movie.

Three Days of the Condor.

You haven't mentioned that one.

That's amazing for that day.

One of the greatest lines ever at the end.

Jeremiah Johnson, for me, like, because no one really kind of lumps it in with those kind of revisionist Westerns, but

it was.

It's great.

It's crazy.

It's great.

How about Will Gere in that, too?

I'm just unbelievable.

I love that movie.

That's a perfect movie.

I used to watch that and Outlaw Josie Wales on the same one.

Oh, my God.

Another perfect movie.

I watched The Unforgiven pretty frequently.

A perfect movie also.

Totally.

And you know what's interesting about it is like he gets all the motifs in, right, of all the Westerns.

And he does it pretty well.

Yeah.

Maybe not all of them.

That's not exactly true.

Like, there's some Westerns where like the ones that I think that are massive failures because of their need to, they overreached was like Silverado.

Yeah.

Like Kazn's smart guy.

Yeah, very smart.

Smart writer.

But like, well, I don't know what happened to that movie.

It should have been good.

But it seemed like he was trying to do too much.

You remember it?

I do remember it.

I remember it being a lot of fun.

Okay.

I remember it being a lot of fun.

I remember,

and listen, when I wrote and made my own Western, I watched everything for a year.

I only read Westerns and only watched.

Wait, you mean Godwas or a movie?

Yeah.

Godless.

That's all I looked at.

So it was a genre study?

Yeah.

I thought, I really, I love them, but I thought, I don't,

if I can't make people talk, I can't write it.

And I was worried about writing lines like, let's rustle up a bunch of grub or a remote.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I think oddly oddly in my memory, and I'll watch it again, it's sort of a very finite and kind of a perfect Western is

Pail Rider.

Pail Rider is very good.

It's very good.

I like Pail Rider a lot.

It's very much.

It's a warm-up, though, more for Unforgiven.

Oh, totally.

Because he kind of limited the scope.

Outsider comes into the town, saves the town people, goes away.

Who was that guy?

Right?

Which is what, Shane, kind of?

Shane, which

I love, is for me another perfect searchers?

Searchers, I get bored with the searchers.

I like it because he's like a flawed guy.

Yeah, well, he's a racist for starters.

Totally.

And there's a great moment in it, too.

There's, first of all, there aren't a lot of close-ups, which I think is great because everybody shoots.

There are so many close-ups today, and that movie proves that not every other shot has to be shot.

Well, that's because he was in love with the landscape.

But there's one moment, though, where when he shows up and the wife, I forget her name now.

Yeah.

She

takes his coat and you see her just rub the coat as she's about to put it on the chair.

And that tells you

everything in that.

I love little moments.

It's great.

She's settled.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Butch and Sundance.

That's also terrific.

And that script is a ball to read.

In fact, that's what made me want to write scripts.

I wrote it when I was 11, and there was a line in it.

Yeah,

it was at the Gemco checkout.

So I'm a little older than you, probably.

I'm 61.

How old could you?

I'm 5, 6.

Oh, you look good.

It's all that SSRI scope.

Or all your insanity.

They're both.

But there's, you know, when you're 11 years old and you read in a screenplay, which I'd never read before, I'd never read a screenplay before.

And it says, Butch delivers the most aesthetically exquisite kick in the balls in the history of modern American singers.

And that was Goldman?

Goldman.

I went, I'm 11.

I'm a young kid.

This is what I want to do.

I want to do the that and Dog Day Afternoon was the other one that did it.

Dude, I can't stop watching that.

I had them screen it at Cinematech because they asked me, like, you know, you want to host a screening?

And I'm like, yeah, let's do it.

He's one of my favorite directors as well, the other Sydney.

And there's no score in that movie.

There's just the Elton John song at the beginning and then no music.

And also,

it's just one ride.

Yeah, it's one ride.

It all happens in real time.

Yeah, and then makes this fucking left turn in the middle of it.

Yeah.

And the audience goes with it.

They go completely with it.

With the lover?

Yeah, he's got a wife who's a guy.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's just so,

the intensity of it and just like that moment where Casale, is that how you say his name?

John Casal, yeah.

Casal.

He's like, did you mean it?

Because I'll do it.

When he said, I'll kill him.

I'll kill him.

And you realize, like, oh no, he's got to manage that guy.

Yeah.

Like this whole thing.

And what country do you want to go to?

Wyoming.

Yeah.

And the fact that it's a botched robbery from the second the movie starts.

Right.

The kid who was supposed to drive, he says, I can't go.

I can't.

I have to go.

Gibbs throws him the car keys.

And the gun.

And the gun.

Oh, my God.

And then he tries to open the box with the flowers with the gun in it and in the bank.

And it's a mess as he tries to.

You're laughing so hard.

And I remember sitting there in the audience and you're laughing at the beginning.

And when he gets to the point where he's chanting Attica, you know, the Attica, everyone in the audience is applauding and screaming with him.

And then it gets dead silent at a certain point in the audience.

It gets super quiet.

And

it was amazing.

And you're looking around.

There were three movies that I remember watching in that.

As a kid.

As a kid, when I was like, I think Dogged Afternoon, I was probably 14.

Right.

There was that.

There was Harold and Maude, which did that because Hal Ashby, another of my favorite directors.

God, to watch

Bamba and

Shampoo.

Last detail.

Coming home.

Coming home.

The last detail and coming home.

Fucking John Voigt.

What happened to that guy?

Well, you know, who knows actors?

You know, we all make assumptions because of what they do, but, you know,

you don't know them.

You know, and I don't know.

I don't know what his dad was like.

I don't know what any of them are like.

But, you know, the gift of the actor is we never knew who they were as people.

Well, I wish you still didn't know him.

Well, that's the problem.

No one shuts up now, and everyone, you know.

But he's particularly bad.

But that movie is great.

He's amazing.

Bruce Stern is amazing in that movie.

Amazing.

And the other one was that really, believe it or not, Robert Aldrich, I think, I really ended up.

The best.

The longest yard, his version of the longest.

The longest yard?

Was it worth it when you hit the

game ball?

Yeah.

When he didn't know if he was going to win or not.

Would you call that

the denux mon?

That's the beginning of the third act.

Yeah.

Right?

Right.

Is when he decides to win the game.

Yes.

Oh, it's so good.

It's the best.

Eddie Albert.

Kill him.

Kill him.

Shoot him.

He's trying to run.

Shoot him.

He's trying to run.

And then that great character actor game doll.

Ed.

What is it, Ed?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But Aldrich did, he'd been around a long time.

Oh, yeah, Baby Jane.

Whatever happened to Baby Jane?

The Big Knife.

I don't think I've seen it.

Really?

No.

With Rod Steiger and Jack Palance?

I've never seen it.

Kelly Winter?

I've never seen it.

Oh, you got to find it.

It's a Hollywood movie.

It's about an actor who

does a contract, an actor who had integrity.

And I imagine because it's Odette's, it was like he was part of the living theater and now he's in Hollywood.

And he does this contract with this

studio.

And Steiger plays the head of the studio and he sells his soul.

And oh boy.

It's one it's, it's, I've never seen.

There's a few that are embarrassing that I've never seen.

And but he also did Kiss Me Deadly, which is great, which is funny.

He did the Frisco Kid.

Yeah, and the Frisco Kid.

I just watched that again.

It's great.

Yeah.

It's great.

So funny.

All those.

But, all right.

So you read that at 11, and I imagine you saw the movie.

And so what is it that

sets you spinning?

You mentioned there's some alcoholism in your family.

In not my immediate family, but in

my sort of chosen family.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, but

how did you grow up?

I grew up very boring.

I grew up, my dad was a pilot for.

That's not boring.

Do you get to go in the cockpit?

Oh, yeah, all the time.

That's not boring at all.

That's crazy to know what goes on in a cockpit.

It was great.

And he loved to fly.

And pilots are like cops.

All they talk about are flying.

They all get together and they sit around.

They talk about flying.

They love it.

They love it.

And they talk about, when you listen to the black box recordings, my dad would always say, before they take off, they're always talking about the three S's, sex, salary, and seniority.

Yeah, well, I mean, have you watched this new Nathan Fielder thing?

Yeah, I just started.

Wow.

Wow.

They should probably manage those conversations better.

Yeah, they should.

Yeah, they probably should.

So, but

because even when I'm on a plane now, and you know when a pilot has to take it out of autopilot and fly the plane and you can feel it, I'm like, he's having fun.

Like, you know, I can, I love it when they're flying the plane.

Well, they might not even be, you might not be right.

Yeah, they might not even.

Because autopilot, they can, I don't think they do, but the autopilot can, they can land everything now.

And, and

I'm not sure.

It depends.

Maybe they are, maybe they are, and I'm always wondering.

But it was, he loved his job and it was great.

And he was a captain and he flew everywhere.

And it was before Pan Am.

You know, he used to fly all over the Asian Pacific routes.

Those were his favorite.

Did he have his own plane?

He had a little Cessna that he used to pick me up at UC Santa Barbara in sometimes.

Where'd you grow up?

Northern California, Los Gatos.

Oh, okay.

In the Bay Area.

So you just fly down?

Just fly down.

So did you fly?

I flew, but then I stopped.

And I still could, but I stopped because I'm a daydreamer.

And I thought I'm a danger to myself and others.

I should not be in a plane because I find myself driving and I go, wait, I was supposed to get off the freeway

eight exits ago.

Oh, I see.

And flying, you have to, you can't.

make mistakes and you're so you have to really go through the checklist.

And by the way, my dad was a lot like Sydney that way.

Sidney Pollock believed, because he was a pilot, he was a really good pilot.

But if you just follow the checklist, everything will go fine.

And

so you had to, you know, I can't, like, I don't know.

So you're in the cockpit with your dad.

Is he showing you how to fly?

He's showing me how to fly.

And

just right away, whenever he takes anyone up, he just says, okay, you got it.

And let's go of it and lets you fly.

And

the story I would always tell, which just contributes to my anxiety, I've told it a lot, but it's he would say, okay, the engine cuts out.

Where are you going to land?

Right now.

Where are you going to land?

Right now.

The engine's gone.

Where are you going to land?

And so it made me, in my life and career, always think about where am I going to land?

Yeah.

Okay, this isn't going to, I have to think about where am I going to land.

Nothing, nothing lasts.

Also, you know, being a Jew, you're taught that nothing lasts because history has fucking proven that.

Yes.

Yeah.

That you could be having a great life and in they come with boots and guns and off you go.

sure yeah we're we're i i think we're probably a couple down on the list but you know it's happening now yeah not to jews i i know i'm i'm trying to you know look to see where i can get a foreskin quickly and it's not

otherwise i'll see you at uh guantanamo we can meet up there yeah your identity's in the cloud buddy there's no you can't hide behind a foreskin anymore they know where we are and what we're doing

whoever they are whoever they decide to be but it does train teach you and also my parents grew up you know they were products of the depression, too.

So I got a lot of, you know, it's all going to be gone tomorrow.

You never know.

You might be doing well today, but you never know.

And

my mom constantly, you know, the other thing I'd love talking about is I would come home and she'd be watching Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin and to go, that's Bobby Sherman.

He's broke.

He lost everything.

He's almost dead right now.

So that's so-and-so.

They lost all their money.

That's it.

They're held on.

Yeah.

Well,

I grew up with different, not that same kind of pressure.

For some reason, my parents were self-involved enough to believe that I had my shit together, which was its own problem.

But they always thought I would be okay.

You know, my grandfather was different.

You know, he was like, maybe you should get a job at the post office because there's security and you get a pension.

That was my mom and dad.

What did your parents do?

My dad was an orthopedic surgeon, and my mom was,

I think she wanted to be an artist, but she ended up being some variation of a surgeon's wife.

Oh, okay.

But they were just very,

you know, they were not equipped to parent.

They had me when they were very young.

So

what I usually say is I don't see them as parents.

I see them as people with problems I grew up with.

And I needed things from them emotionally that I didn't quite get.

But you make it, you fix it or you live with it, whatever.

That's my anxiety.

It's like, who's going to take care of me?

Right.

That's a whole other thing.

And who am I?

Right.

Those two.

But not narcissists that way, just, or were they narcissists?

No, my dad, I think, like, I, you know, that, that word gets bandied about quite a bit, but I think both of my parents had

empathy.

And I think that my father was pretty close to a narcissist.

He was, but he was also bipolar.

So that fortunately kind of breaks the narcissist's shell in a way.

And now he's like, you know, mostly demented.

So he's become amazing.

The depression goes away when they have dementia.

Oh, that's what it takes.

That's all it takes.

But the narcissism, not so much.

But yeah, no, he was definitely a kind of megalomaniacal guy, not really equipped to do that stuff.

But

that's my life.

So you're growing up in this.

You got siblings?

I got two siblings.

I have a twin sister and an older sister.

Do they take normal lives?

Very normal lives, happy, not a lot of anxiety going on there.

Huh.

Really?

Yeah.

And so

you have a younger one and then a twin?

I have a twin sister and an older sister.

Oh, okay.

Almost four years old.

But you're the kid, like, you know, you're interested in the arts early.

Yeah, very much.

I wanted to.

So you're getting a pounding by them from day one?

No, only when I wanted to take it seriously.

Only when it was, I'm going to school and I'm getting a lot of, you know, doctors can write too.

Michael Crichton is also a writer.

You know, you know what?

Being an airline pilot, that's good.

I have sons of, I know a lot of pilots who are writing at the same time.

You have to get something with security.

What are you going to fall back on?

Yeah, you know, and I had a great teacher at Santa Barbara, you know, which was not a famous film program or anything, but he was great.

And he was, he used to be a vice president under Harry Cohn at Columbia Pacific.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And he was teaching screenwriting.

And he's a great teacher.

And he said to me, you're 19 years old.

If you have a fallback, you're going to fall back.

You don't have a family.

You don't have this.

Just go for it.

You know, and let's see if you know how to write.

And if you can write, then you should chase it.

And then you get to the point where there is no more fallback.

There is no more fallback.

And you know what the fallback always is, though, when things get dire?

Let me guess.

I could teach.

I could teach.

I could teach.

And they are.

Yeah, I could teach.

I mean, and so that is, that's the thing.

And so you just realize that you have to at least try.

Let the universe tell you that it's not going to happen.

You know, not, you know, as a parent, you want, you want to, I feel like.

But if you're delusional, which you have to be to pursue

a creative life,

you know, you're going to push back on the universe.

Well, I would say reasonably delusional.

Okay.

Okay.

So how does that unfold?

You go to, you, you study screenwriting?

I studied film studies, which is.

Yeah, I did that.

I minored in that.

Yeah.

It's good.

And so, and at Santa Barbara, because it didn't have a lot of money or production facilities, that's super interdisciplinary.

So you're taking art history.

Yeah, exactly.

That's other things and you're kind of looking at other kinds of movies.

And you're also

really steeped in literature, art history, and film history.

Exactly.

As well,

which is great.

And as a writer and even as a director, all that stuff I still think about.

Well, what was the stuff where, you know, at that time,

because I remember,

you know, I grew up, okay, you're a little older than me, but there was,

you know, I took a screenwriting class and I took a history of film class with Roger Manville.

And

I did an art history minor, you know, primarily focusing on the history of photography.

So,

but there was always this kind of like, well, Chinatown.

Right.

I mean, Chinatown is Chinatown.

That's the script.

That's the easy go-to, isn't it?

Yeah.

It is, right?

But then you sit there and you toil over it and you're like, yeah,

I get it.

It's great.

It's pretty perfect.

Because of the levels,

because of you know what it's really about is is political and and and about greed and real estate and i you know you know i i watch it once a year maybe but then when you get into lumet you right yeah you met also but he's very versatile yeah like that movie is an anomaly for him i mean like it is his movie well it's a new york well i guess yeah but still but stylistically you know you look at the black and white you look at 12 angry men yeah and then you you if you move through his his filmography, he's very adept at different styles.

Yes, he is.

And he's not locked in.

But I mean, but that's as a director.

But I like directors like that.

William Wyler is another one I love.

You know, he does the heiress.

He does best years of our lives.

You know, he's a really interesting filmmaker for me who

they're just well-crafted.

Who is that noir guy?

Like, I kind of went on a little thing with him.

Now I'm forgetting his name.

it was not the Kubrick killing.

It was another killing.

It was called The Killing.

Oh, Siadmac?

Yeah, Siadmac.

Yeah, he's interesting.

Right?

Yeah, very interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, just sort of like matter of fact.

Yeah.

And kind of block.

And that's the, that, when I went to college, Film Noir became the other thing like Sydney Lumette that infected me deeply.

Yeah, Out of the Past changed my life.

Lady from Shanghai.

That's one that he was well.

That was really, really big effect.

Yeah, that

really was for me something amazing.

I just saw the stuff going on and the stuff said and unsaid, and they're all fucked up.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Really, really liked that.

Touch of evil.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, well, it's unhinged.

Just totally unhinged.

Totally.

You know,

that was crazy.

We with the famous tracking shot.

But also, his sheriff was kind of something else.

Just batshit.

Totally.

But also, you know, the third man.

That's an amazing movie.

An amazing movie.

But

in the arc of

your life, though, what do you, and I know this is kind of a shitty question.

What do you see as

the best screenplay that kind of like works for you as a model of

a lesson?

I mean, that's a good question because

it leads to the notion that

you can be taught something.

Which is problematic.

Which is problematic.

Right.

And also there's, you know, we're talking different genres and, you know, and screenplays have different intentions.

Yeah.

And, you know, story is, you have to, it's relative to the story.

So screenwriting, unlike any other kind of writing,

seems to be one of those things where

on

every side of

the equation,

people think that

there's a way of doing it.

And especially in this world where we game everything now, from politics to

marketing to all these things.

Well, yeah, everybody is, but everybody thinks

that all you have to do is...

Have an idea.

An idea.

And then also,

but there's also

the bar has been lowered tremendously.

Well, yeah, because

only certain things can be successful

in a mainstream way, but any idiot can make himself a few bucks if he puts some bullshit together.

But you can't really bullshit with screenwriting because ultimately,

I mean, there are bad movies, but

if a movie sells, it sells.

And so you work within that.

And if you're willing to sort of say like, well, I don't care if this sells, this is my vision.

And then it sells, you're like, wow, we got lucky.

Or I knew it wouldn't sell.

But I love the movie.

But I love the movie.

And well, that's a good feeling when you're done with something and you say, I don't care what happens to this.

I love doing it and I'm happy with it.

But the problem is

when you go to the movies, your disappointment 99.9% of the time is not with the cinematography or the acting or the direction or the music.

It's with the story.

Yeah, blame the writer.

But nobody even knows who wrote anything anymore.

That's really gotten kind of confused.

Yeah, but that's interesting you're saying it like that, given that, you know, you are part of like, you know, dozens and dozens of movies in a capacity of fixing scripts that and your name's not on it.

You just get to say it now.

And then people go, Really?

What would you do?

Right.

But that's guild rules, right?

It's guild rules.

But I don't even like to, people dig it up.

People will say, did you do this?

Did you do that?

And I'll say, no, because I didn't.

I came in.

Oh, you didn't do the story?

No.

Or I came in and fixed something.

But it's very different when you come in

and you do something you're not.

90% of the time, the writer or writers I'm fixing deserve the credit.

They don't deserve the credit, but that just shows you the kind of peculiarities of creation in

movie making.

And the other thing is, but that's a problem.

And those kinds of movies that I'm fixing are rarely sort of, no one's going to fix a Wes Anderson movie or a Paul Thomas Anderson because they're so singular.

Yes.

And we're not taught to do that.

The movies that I'm fixing are often approached so mechanically that you can fix them.

Or the studio will say, you know, just do do a pass.

Will you do a pass?

Or actors are insecure.

Can you just do and and writers might be good at structure, but the dialogue isn't good.

Or they have a great idea.

And screenwriters, because they've been taught this, I think, have confused participation with creation.

So they think, well, I was there first.

I should have a credit.

I was there first.

That means everything came for me.

Not really.

And it depends.

It's more complicated than that.

And the fact that you don't know it's more complicated than that is kind of interesting.

And then, so that's, and it's the third rail of guild politics is when you talk about that.

Right, right.

And then some people get their name on there, you know, one way or the other.

There's two or three names on there.

I share credit with a couple of people that way.

One of whom has a big award.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're not going to go there, but it's fascinating to me.

And because I remember sitting there with the co-writer writing together for six weeks from a blank page,

and that was that.

And that happens a lot.

And then you have people shamelessly either arguing that they deserve credit.

There's a famous case, the movie, the Miracle on Ice movie, Miracle, the hockey movie.

Yeah, the writer wrote the script for that movie and

found out after the movie was done that somebody had written the same story.

And the guild and its infinite wisdom gave the first guy sole credit because it was based on a true story.

So he must have got.

And it's like stuff like that happens all the time.

That's fun.

Because they don't want to get sued, I think.

So they're so careful.

So they, instead of playing to win, they play not to lose all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

And so then it becomes ingrained.

And because I think it's hard to have a career in Hollywood that lasts, it's very difficult.

And I think that.

you think the credit is the the thing.

And so there's a lot of fight over for credit.

And I understand because a lot of people are denied credit that deserve it as well.

But you listen to actors and directors going, yeah, I basically rewrote it.

I wrote the whole thing.

And it's like, no, you didn't.

No, No, you didn't.

So how do you end up like, because you, you know, in terms of the type of movies that you've written, I mean, they're kind of, they go a lot of different places.

So when, but Little Man Tate

was your first big movie.

Right.

I wrote that in college.

But it didn't get made until 90.

And that's an original screenplay.

Yes, original screenplay.

And that seems like an odd place to start.

What was

the impetus?

It was a weird impetus.

I was home for Christmas,

my sophomore year of school, and I remember the

Iran hostage situation all going on.

And I remember watching it on TV.

And I just woke up in the middle of the night, and I had this idea that I was going to write a series of columns for the Daily Nexus, the school newspaper, written by called Little Man Tate.

And it was going to be, the joke was it was a eight-year-old kid commenting on world politics because there was such petulance, I felt, watching everybody screaming and this.

And I thought, I'm going to have a kid talk about world politics.

Now there's like thousands and thousands of little men tates.

Yes, there are.

Yes, there are.

And so that's how it started.

And then I got into this screenwriting class with Paul Lazarus.

And although he actually,

it was

a different teacher the first time named Chuck Wolfe.

He was also great.

And I needed an idea for a movie.

And all I had was the kid and his mother because he was always going to be talking about his mother.

And I just started writing it as a script.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And then it became a thing.

And it became a thing.

And that's what got you in?

It's what got me in.

But I had to rewrite it quite a bit, you know, because

there were lots of movies being made, you know, Gary Coleman and the kid with the 200 IQ.

And I would just see it's no, so it's not a really original idea.

So I have to do something else with it to make it more interesting.

Oh, and so in that script got you an agent and got you.

Got me an agent, got me an office on the Paramount lot when I was 24, 1984.

Wow, so you're in, and Jodi Foster gets.

Ends up direct later.

Joe Dante was going to direct it for a while.

And what would that movie have been?

It was actually the original version of the script was a very black comedy.

Okay.

And Jodi,

and I really like her version of the movie too, but she was more interested in alternative parenting.

Yeah.

And how that works.

Oh, and that made it a broader appeal.

I don't know what.

It just made it a different movie.

And I think that,

and I really liked the movie, and I loved the experience of doing it with her, but it was different than what I had in my head.

Yeah.

But we had

a great time doing it.

Also, because it got made nine years later in some ways,

and I'd written it at such a young age, it was a little like looking at a high school term paper.

I lost the feel for it.

You know, I just lost the feel for it.

Right.

But ultimately, once you write it and it's in the director's hands, I don't know how what's your involvement generally?

It depends on the director.

It depends on me.

It depends on

what the movie is and how it came together.

And I was there with her in Cincinnati while she was shooting it.

I came home because Ken Brana was going to start shooting Dead Again right after that.

So while that was shooting.

And he wanted you on set too?

He did.

And because he came from the theater,

God bless him.

And again, Jodi and I, so two actors directing two of my early films.

The first movie was called Plain Clothes that Martha Coolidge directed.

You really don't have to seek out or

you really don't need to.

But Ken Brana

came from the theater, so he wanted to have, and we were all, what was also interesting is they were two actors and we were all the same age.

And so that was an interesting experience for me.

And Ken would shoot a couple takes and say, anything you want me to try?

Anything else?

And I would look around wondering, who the fuck is he talking to?

It's not my job.

Yeah, wait.

No, but it's great

when he wants to do that.

And so

it was interesting.

And then gradually, the more time I spent on sets,

I just realized it's so boring.

If I'm not directing, if I'm not directing it, I'm just sitting there.

You have a voice, but no say.

I find that as an actor.

Yeah.

That the boredom is.

Yeah.

Well, I mean,

just like, I'm working on a script.

I'm looking to direct.

And my buddy Sam Lipsight wrote this book.

And he hammered out, we've gone through, he's writing the script, but I'm kind of coming in, doing passes on it.

We've been through five versions.

And

I was sort of surprised at my instincts about taking something from a novel

in terms of

how is this a movie?

Because

there's so much more you can do in a novel.

So you've really got to figure out what the story is and say,

all these other stories got to go.

Right.

Right.

And And I mean, I can't imagine what it's to have to do that with Elmar Leonard stuff.

But you had to deal with that.

I mean, you had to, you know, take that writer and figure out how to make a movie out of those books.

So what's the challenge there?

It was hard.

And I had a lot of help.

I had a lot of help I had.

From him?

From no, from, although he and I were always talking about it.

And he, I'll tell you a story about the ending of Out of Sight that he really helped me with in a second.

But

I had on Get Shorty,

both of those movies, I had Jersey Films, and people don't realize that Danny DeVito's company, Danny was a real deal producer, an amazing producer.

And he had Stacey Scher working for him, who's another real deal producer.

And so I had help.

I had help from Barry Sonnenfeld on Get Shorty.

And

the only reason I give the edge out of sight over Get Shorty is Barry did a broader version of Get Shorty than I had in my head a little bit.

He wrote a whole script?

No, no, he directed.

Barry was the director.

Sonenfeld was the director.

And

he his sensibility, which works great.

He's a great guy.

I interviewed that.

He's so much fun.

And I love the movie.

So let's be clear.

I really love the movie.

Well, you got all those fucking actors, dude.

But it was different for me in a way than what I had.

And my same with Ken Bronn on Dead Again.

I had written what I thought was this dark thing, and he made it very theatrical in a way that works also.

And so I'm learning all of that early on with Jodi.

She made a different version.

So what did Sonenfeld make it funnier than you anticipated?

He just made it broader.

It was just a little broader in tone a little bit.

But I really, I so enjoy it.

And then on Out of Sight, though, it was, I thought I did it because we had three kids all in one room and we needed a house, wanted to move to Pasadena.

And

I grabbed it because I thought I had gotten away with one Elmore Leonard adaptation.

Because I remember when I met him, the first time I met, he was telling me story after story over lunch about all his books that have been fucked up as movies, one after another.

And so I thought, I don't want to end up another story at some other young asshole's lunch.

And so we did, we got, I got a lot of help on Get Shorty, as I said.

And so the script, the movie worked, and but then I was in a panic because I needed a bigger house because I was getting ridiculous.

And so I grabbed that and I thought, I'm going to write this really quickly.

It took me over a year.

To do out of sight.

But what?

Heaven's Prisoners didn't get you the house?

Heaven's Prisoners.

You know what?

Heaven's Prisoners got me a lot of things because it was a rewrite where I was paid a lot of money.

Okay, good, good.

I have a few of those.

When did you start getting that kind of work?

Early on, very early on, when I was at Paramount, I got a call to rewrite a movie that Danny Houston was directing because we had the same agent at the time, roughly.

And he was doing a Disney movie of the week called Sasquatch, literally about Bigfoot.

Yeah.

And they paid me $11,000 to rewrite the whole movie over the weekend.

Yeah.

And they were happy with it?

Yeah.

And so you became the guy.

And then Ivan Reitman had me rewrite.

His wife was doing a movie, a musical at the time called Casual Sex based on the Groundlings

show.

Yeah.

And he gave me...

the movie to rewrite and paid me some money and gave me like eight days to do it.

And the first thing I did is made it not a musical.

Yeah.

And rewrote it.

And I was probably the wrong guy for that, but I just started doing it and it just kind of escalated.

Well, I imagine that what helped that helped you in the sense that you could interpret

the voice and

struct, not structure, but at least the voice of other people's work.

Yes.

And so that as an adaptive skill enables you to broaden your own ability to certainly adapt.

from fiction.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, and it's and in the case of someone like Elmore Leonard, who has a very specific voice, so you're trying to catch that voice and you're trying to, because in his case,

there's a need always to invent a lot of plot.

You have to invent or invent some plot.

You need to invent some things because oftentimes

in his books,

he'll either introduce a new character toward the very end all of a sudden, or he'll become disinterested in a character.

And so you're trying to find a movie shape to

you know, right.

And that's what was really hard about it.

Less the but but the ability to sort of catch a tone and do that I don't know I it just it was like those people who have a good ear for music and they can play the song right I've always been that way with dialogue and tone and does it help when you have actors attached

yes yes but they're usually not attached while I'm writing oh okay rarely are they attached while I'm writing because like they're certain there I mean those roles in Get Shorty are crazy great that's Barry

Barry

I read his book and I interviewed him as great.

Both of them are really funny.

Yeah.

But I just watched out of sight.

I was like, I have to rewatch it.

And

what, and I'm sure I'm not the first to say this.

It was sort of

a throwback to

a 70s movie that wasn't existentially challenging.

It was just, it's sort of like it's a romance.

Yeah.

But it's set in this way where you used to see this.

It's almost like, I don't know the leading guys like Burt Reynolds.

There were guys back in the day that, you know, would carry these movies that were relatively serious and had some menace to them.

Paul Newman, hard.

Yeah.

But they were so charming that what elevated the thing, you know, you didn't care about the dark backdrop.

And I think that the dark backdrop of some 70s comedies is kind of, like, did you, have you ever seen how many people were killed in Freebie and Bean?

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

And it's a comedy.

And that was when I had that realization, like, they're not killing people anymore.

You're not seeing that.

I mean, they destroyed a city in a cop comedy but but nonetheless i felt like it had that there was a lightness to it because you had you know you can get lightning in a bottle with those two though yeah absolutely i mean jesus absolutely and and the thing with with also you know jennifer lopez george clooney that was the right time for them and and out of sight and and stephen i remember him coming to my office yeah he would come to my office in Pasadena and we would sit there and just go through the script and act it out.

And it was an amazing experience.

Okay.

And we would just sit there and

talk it through and

work it out.

And at one point, I panicked because I'd sent the script to Elmore Leonard.

And he said, I don't like the way it's all jumbled.

The time.

What are you doing?

And I'm saying, well, Elmore, the...

Are you even going back?

Yeah, going the book.

You know, you open with the jailbreak, but then you flash back in the trunk.

You get 30 pages of history of this guy.

So I'm trying to figure out how to do that and give the illusion of the movie moving forward.

And I, being, you know,

basically easily influenced,

straightened it out.

And I gave the script to Stephen all straighten out.

He said, what the fuck are you doing?

Put it back.

Oh, really?

He said, yeah, put it back.

What are you doing?

That's crazy.

But the greatest thing Elmore did was the ending.

I wasn't sure how to end it because

the book ends.

Yeah, the book ends where she busts him and she calls her dad on the the phone and her dad says, you know, my daughter, the tough babe.

That's it.

Yeah.

That's it.

That's all.

And in the movie, I thought

in the book, she doesn't ever change as a character.

Karen Sisko is sort of the same from beginning to end.

And she's defined by this kind of really sexy competence.

Right.

But he's really sad.

He's all about the road not taken.

He's like, if only I hadn't done all this stupid shit, I'm such a fucking idiot.

So you took that out?

No, I put that in.

I really leaned on that and made the movie about him.

so it couldn't end with but what was his regret that he couldn't be with someone like her because oh you mean on an emotional level but he didn't regret his line of work no no he just realized it was a stupid line of work yeah yeah you know yeah you know but he was good at it he was good at it yeah and so at the end I was trying to figure out what to do and I was just talking to Omer one day and

he said you know he had just hung up with this guy he's been corresponding with in prison and he was telling me that this guy's trying to write a book and he's talking to him all the time.

And he said,

he said, yeah, and Olmer just throws out, yeah, and he's like broken out from like 11 federal lockups.

And I went, I have to go.

I have to hang up now.

I just need to go right now.

And I just, it just hit me when he just said that.

I went, of course, of course.

I'm going to put him in a van with that guy.

Yeah.

But I'm going to do a different version of him.

I'm going to do, you know, the

Muslim version of him.

Right.

But then it gives you a romantic ending.

Yeah, exactly.

And that, you know, and that, like, it seems like in the book, you know, she was not invested in her love.

No.

And in the movie, you're like, here we go again.

Right.

But you don't even know.

Maybe he will break out.

Maybe he's going to be.

Sure, sure.

But it's that look on her face.

Yeah, that look on her face.

And you wrote that in.

Yeah, that's all in there.

That's all in there.

And

but that, that, when that happened, then I realized, okay, we're done.

We're done.

Now we got it.

Yeah, it was great.

And then how do you go?

And then you go to Minority Report?

The hardest thing I ever worked on.

It's a hard movie.

Really hard movie.

A really hard movie.

And

we spent a long time.

Originally, that was going to be a job where I was going to work for a few weeks

on the script.

And he

Steven Spielberg

just wanted to work on, had a few things on the list he wanted to do with the script.

And it was a very different movie.

And it's a short story that's all of 11 or 12 pages, I think.

It's a very short short story.

Who did it?

Not J.G.

Boward.

Who was it?

Philip K.

Dick.

Oh, yeah.

Philip K.

Dick.

Yeah.

And it also, it's sort of, he was an interesting guy as a writer.

He seems, you know, sort of, seemed kind of to me almost fascist in some of the ways he thought about politics in his books, but also was really into drugs and experimenting and things like that.

I find him endlessly fascinating.

But the book,

rather, the short story ended with him sort of trying to support pre-crime, which is terrible.

And so it was, and they had a movie version that

was

very good, but it was a different movie.

And it was about an America where everybody wants to live in the 1950s.

And so their houses look like the cars.

Everything sort of felt like the 1950s.

It was a very different tone.

There really wasn't a mystery in it.

It was very different.

But it was this guy, John Cohen, very good writer, had done a really

interesting job with it.

But

it didn't quite work.

And so we began working on it.

And then what happened is Tom Cruise is shooting Mission Impossible 2 in Australia.

And his schedule, they shut down to rework that script.

So now suddenly we have endless amounts of time in front of us.

And Stephen said, well, let's really look at this.

So we ended up starting and

you had worked with him before, Spielberg?

I worked with him.

Yeah, I had done a rewrite with him before of

Saving Private Orion?

Yes.

Yes.

And it was just the two of you?

Yes.

What were the fundamental issues that he was worried about?

The voice?

He wanted to give the characters more individuality.

To sort of give them...

Yeah, you had a dirty does in it.

Yeah, he wanted to sort of give them so that they could be

a little more specific.

And

it's funny, I never ever really talked about that movie until

Patrick Rad and Keith outed me in The New Yorker.

But

it was a really good script and a really good idea by Robert Rodat.

And he deserves all the credit for it.

But it seemed like

when

a director or when you do rewrites, like in certain situations, it's really not about the story per se.

It's about

elements of language or character.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

And that's that's usually you read something and

it's like the characters are not characters, they're attitudes or types.

Sure.

Or even worse, jobs, or even worse, the actor.

Yeah.

And so they're always looking to find a way to...

to give them something to do, to make it, because character is what makes you care.

That really is the thing.

And plot should really come from that, not from sort of, and then this happens and then that happens.

Oh, interesting.

Because you don't want people doing things.

You got to believe that the character is going to move through that plot.

Yes.

And you don't want people.

My pet peeve is when you see characters doing something because the script said so.

Yeah.

You know, where why are they arguing with each other right now?

Well, yeah.

Why don't they believe Jack Bauer?

He saved the world 100,000 times and now he's saying, I'm going to save the world again.

And then they say, no, you're not.

You arrest him.

Lock him up.

You're like, wait, what?

Or the little kid says, Mom, I saw a thing.

No, that's just your imagination.

And so that's lazy.

You need to go figure out why they won't believe him.

Is it a boy who cried wolf?

Is it a this?

Is it a sure?

Otherwise you're just annoyed.

You're not feeling the tension of somebody not believing him.

Or worse.

Like in TV writing, like certain things that I've had to come up against as an actor is that like this wouldn't happen.

Right.

I mean,

why do you have this guy doing this?

Right.

There's no way,

no matter how

ill-defined the character would be, he's defined enough to know that he's not going to do that.

So what are we going to do about that?

Because the outline has him doing that.

I know.

It's just a guy in a room's decision.

Yeah.

Because it's funny or whatever.

Right.

And it's like a lot of times it doesn't make any emotional sense or character sense.

Right.

And so that is, so that's something that you find yourself fixing.

And by the way, the other thing is the way movies are developed isn't helpful to writers.

So a lot of writers will get bounced off projects.

There are things, I just read something not too long ago where I said, you don't want to get rid of this writer.

This writer can write.

You're just not, no one is having the right conversation about the script.

You don't want to get rid of them.

And I wish I had been mature enough.

or smart enough to recognize that because there are probably many times where that had happened in

of the 50 or 60 or so things I've done over the years.

There's gotta a lot of them and there are many jobs that I didn't.

Where you didn't stand up for the other guy you didn't?

Right.

Where not that I didn't stand up for the other guy, but that I didn't realize that they don't need me.

They need, there's something else going on here.

Okay.

You know, that this is a, this is another thing.

And listen, as writers, we're also frequently our own worst enemy.

And sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes it's just a personal lack of communication.

They don't, or they don't want to do it or they refuse to do it.

There are a lot of those where, or most of the time when I'm fixing things, they were already,

listen, I wasn't the first one on Private Ryan.

Frank Darabont was in before me.

You

So there's a lot of times there are

people who are working on

a lot of different scripts at the same, or working rather a lot of different writers on one script.

And so you come and you see your number eight on the list of all these people.

In that case, I'm there for the, you know, I don't, I don't really care.

I'm there for the money.

Right.

But also.

And to do a good job, of course.

Well, also when you have somebody like Spielberg, who like he knows that he makes big movies that are unique to him and he's obviously you know beyond capable so you're anyone he brings in it's like he's gonna make it better right right it's it's not like the other guy fucked up no it's because he that that's really smart because

he has he the thing the good thing is that he has endless resources in terms of people he can talk to right so there's always ideas coming in all new things so if there's a way to make him better he's agnostic in terms of who's making it better yeah You know, he has his ideas and he just wants to see those ideas, you know, made manifest.

Interesting.

So

it's not really a personal thing for him.

It's just like, I need this done.

Yeah.

Can this person get it done or can that person get it done?

Right.

You know.

And then like the interpreter working with Sydney, what

that was her book?

It was, no.

It was an original script.

By you.

No.

I came in later.

I came in.

Charles Randolph wrote an original script.

And the problem with the script, from Sydney's point of view, is it had a very surprise ending, a kind of sixth sense-y sort of ending.

It was when they were all the vogue at that time, you know.

So it no longer, it didn't work to kind of do that movie.

It wasn't a human story.

It was, but it also relied on this twist at the end.

Everything was built toward the twist.

And so what Sydney wanted to do, which was, I think, a great idea, what Sydney really wanted to do is make a movie about someone who believes with her whole heart in diplomacy, but ends up with a gun in her hand at the end.

How do you do that?

How does that happen?

And he thought, and I agree, I think that was a great idea.

And he wanted to shoot in the UN.

No one had ever shot in the UN.

And he was fascinated with

the way diplomacy works and how it's getting a bad name and how the UN was getting a bad name.

So wait, in the original script, her family weren't victims?

They were.

Oh.

They were.

All of that was was there in the original script,

but

it was a very different kind of story.

And I think that what he wanted to do also was focus on the relationship between the two of them.

Sean Tance characters.

Yeah.

And

so I think that was

a big thing for him, that he really wanted to,

what is the dialogue they're going to have, the running dialogue they're going to have as

this movie goes on?

And is she really mysterious?

Do you really, could she be involved?

We want to know, might she be involved?

What happened?

We keep learning things about her that make her more and more suspicious.

She's acting like she's afraid of something.

And in the script, all the threats against her were fake.

She was making it up.

And so you had to believe that she was pretending to be scared by herself sometimes.

And so the big change that we made in the final, in the film was to

make it she's really under threat, and yet yet he's not sure he needs, he's trying to find out the mystery of who might be after her and why.

And so, we had to create a whole new subplot with other leaders from the country.

Yeah, and we had to make the guy she wants that they want to protect.

We had to make him a real person.

So, we really did a lot.

I read a lot about Mugabe, and they called him the teacher and all these things that I loved.

And he fucking sold out his country in, you know,

and

so we just sort of started going deeper and deeper.

And Sidney guided you there.

He guided me there.

But we also, it was hard.

And I felt like I couldn't deliver for him.

I felt like at a certain point I gave up.

He was very upset with me.

I kept saying, I don't think I'm giving you what you want.

And I don't, and it was interesting because his apartment in New York City overlooked the UN.

Okay.

It was on the East River and out the window you could see the UN.

And I just was feeling kind of stuck.

And I felt like, you know, maybe I should go home and do this alone and see if I can do it alone.

And I couldn't.

I just couldn't, I couldn't figure it out.

And I remember one day, all three kids, my wife and myself, we all had the stomach flu at once.

Awesome.

And yet nothing was coming out of me.

I was sick, but nothing.

And I thought, this is a sign.

I go, this is blocked very deeply.

I'm blocked very deeply.

And so I said, you know, and

so I left the project and then Steve came in and finished it.

It just didn't feel like I was doing a good job.

I wasn't making it.

And did you and Sydney survive that?

Yes.

Eventually, you know,

he was really upset with me,

but we talked later and made up.

And then the next few movies, you know, Marley and me.

What was that?

I know.

My son loves to make fun of me about that movie.

You know, if he's trying to dig at me, he'll go, yeah, well, dad, you you wrote Marley and me.

It was a big movie.

I love that movie.

And we're big dog people, you know.

And I...

You needed a break.

No, it was weird.

I didn't want to do it.

Elizabeth Gabler, who was running the studio, said, I need a rewrite on this movie.

And Don Roos, who wrote the first draft of the script, is going off to make his own movie.

So he can't do this, which is usually a very common reason for why they need somebody else.

Somebody's not available to finish or they don't want to finish.

But Don was going off to make his own film.

And I said, I've read that book.

My daughter knows that book.

And my daughter, every night we would take the dog for a walk.

She would tell me another chapter.

That's so not me.

And she goes, you know, it's a story and the story needs fixing and I think and finishing.

And I think you could do it.

Just take a look at it.

And so I read it and I realized, oh, this isn't about the dog.

It's about my marriage.

I'm going to make this about the messiness.

And when I think about the history of our, you know, 37, whatever years, I think all you think about are the dogs and the different dogs and the this.

And it's like this great metaphor.

And so I really ended up having a ball doing it.

Oh, that's great.

And so that's how it happened.

That's great.

And then, like, I guess, I mean, I'm not a Marvel guy, but the Wolverine and Logan are pretty high up on sort of the list of great, you know, kind of different type of Marvel movie.

Am I wrong?

Logan, certainly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Logan, certainly.

Wolverine was, and, and, and, you know,

I say this to Jim all the time, so it's no secret.

Commandled.

Yeah, it was, it was frustrating for me because at the studio, I read the script and

I didn't know anything about Marvel.

Yeah.

I really barely do now even.

I had not read anything.

Right.

And so I read a script that I thought was really good.

And I go, I don't know why you want me to come on here.

Yeah.

And he said, well,

I'm trying to do something a little different.

And he talked about it.

And I said, well, the only thing I can think of is,

you know, in the end of the movie, he loses his power for five minutes and then he gets it back again.

I go, what if he lost his power in the first 10 minutes or 20 minutes or even the first act, say?

And now you have this guy who's immortal and all of his problems come from his immortality because you watch people you love die.

And now he's stuck in feudal Japan, hiding in feudal Japan, like witness, Harrison Ford among the Amish.

She's among the people in, well, not feudal Japan, but in rural Japan, sorry.

And he's with this woman that he actually really cares for.

And the irony is he doesn't have any power to protect her.

I go, that would be really interesting.

And so we kind of wrote that all up.

And the studio said yes.

And the movie that was written ended with a giant robot at the end and all these things.

And I wrote the script,

rewrote the script.

And

next thing you know, the studio was like, well, where's the robot?

Where's the this?

Where's the bullet train, Chase?

Where's the that?

And suddenly, so the first third of it is one movie and then it just becomes a Marvel.

So when Jim wanted to do Logan,

I said to him, why?

After all that happened before, he said, well, it's a different studio regime now, and they're telling me I can do what I want.

And he would send me the scripts.

And I had just moved to New York and I was working on my novel.

And I was at the writer's room in New York.

They have this place.

It's like across from Tisch School of the Arts.

It's just a room where you get a desk.

And I wanted to go someplace different to write a book because I wanted to feel

what that felt like.

Because screenwriting, you have so many voices in your head.

And I thought this is going to, I want to try and purge all that.

And I had a deal with Gnopf.

And so I thought, I'm going to do this.

But he would send me, two things would happen.

He would send me scripts all the time of what he was working on for Logan.

And I would go, this feels like

a Marvel movie.

This feels like every other Marvel.

They're killing the vice president.

They're this.

He's a cage fighter at the beginning.

He's a, you know, they're all these characters from, you know, touchstones.

And he had someone come in once and they did a version of it.

Then someone else did another version of it.

And the thing that was so annoying is the reason I bring up the writer's room is I was so happy.

And I had told my agent, I'm going to do nothing for a year now.

I have for the first time in many years cleared the deck.

I'd shot a pilot.

That wasn't going to happen.

So I had all this time in front of me.

I don't want to do anything.

And in the writer's room, you're not allowed to answer your phone.

So you have to get up and leave and you can't be walking out going hello or they have all these rules and then they have this little area.

So every time he fucking called me, It was a hassle to get on the phone to talk to him.

I would have to walk out, call him back.

Maybe I miss him.

Maybe we, you know.

And then he would send me these scripts and I was just getting really annoyed with with him.

And then finally he said,

and I was about to go shoot godless in two months.

And

he said,

I need,

I need you to do this.

Can you do this?

And he sort of, and, and what had happened, the way he got me on Wolverine was he sent me a comic book.

And I'd never really read any of these comic books.

And it was a different one.

It was called Old Man Logan.

And it was Logan as Clint Eastwood.

Yeah.

And I loved it.

And so he sent me another comic book, and it was him with this little girl who has claws coming out of her hands for this one.

And I thought, oh, fuck.

It could be a super violent like paper moon.

What if we did that?

And so it kind of, I despite myself.

And so I said, okay.

What if I write the opening scene?

And Jim is, he's the best writing partner imaginable.

He's so good.

And he's so, and even if he's not writing, he's just giving you, you know, guidance as a director.

It's, he's so smart, a big brain.

And

he kind of is very clear with his intention all the time.

And

it really is a kind of one in one is three situation for me.

I really enjoy doing it with him.

And I hope we write some other things.

He's one of the few directors that I'd still love to write for.

But the last thing I was going to say is I said, I'll write the opening scene.

And if you don't like it, because it's going to be the key of the song, then we'll part company.

And he said, well, why?

What are you thinking?

And I said, well, I'd always wanted to do a James Bond movie that opens with not a giant stunt, but he gets the shit kicked out of him.

And that's what I want to do here.

And so he said, well, show me what that looks like.

And so I started to do it.

And I was so mad that I had said yes as I'm writing.

And I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but it's coming out in the writing.

I'm so angry that I literally stop and write this two or three paragraph obnoxious as fuck manifesto about this movie will not be this.

It will not be that.

It will be this.

If somebody falls out of a window, they're going to fucking die.

If somebody gets it, it was like this awful, stupid thing that is still to this day in the shooting script.

And then I wrote that opening scene that's in the movie.

And they were like, yes, let's do this.

Let's go.

So you were in.

And then we just did it back and forth.

We just literally, he was in California.

We just passed the script back and forth.

And I kept saying things like, I just wrote a scene where this whole family gets massacred.

There's no way anyone's going to want to do this.

And he's like, I I love it.

And

so we, and then Shane, two things happened that were fascinating.

He decided to use Shane.

He was watching it and he said, we're going to use this in the movie in a great way.

Yeah.

And it completely organized everything in my head.

And what was that element?

It was the idea that,

you know, the mentor.

the violent mentor and then the young kid and the sort of the using the tone of Shane for this and also the sort of Western feel.

Because Jim loves Westerns, so do I.

And so I thought that was a really good idea.

It was so smart.

And then I had this weird idea that just came out of me one day when I was just writing on it, which is, what if the whole thing this girl believes is true, this whole journey he's going on is based on a comic book, a Marvel comic book,

where he realizes this whole place that she's got me taking her to, this Eden, isn't even maybe a real place.

And then the joke is it turns out, of course, to be a real place.

And then we finished the script and I forgot about it.

And he had had an outline that he wanted to follow.

So we kind of knew the basic outline of it.

And we wrote it.

We wrote it very quickly.

And then I went off to go shoot Godless and he went off to go shoot Logan and I forgot about it.

And a year or so later, he said, you know, I, I, you know, Godless was a long, long shoot because it was a long, it was, you know, seven episodes.

Seven episodes.

So I finished after he did.

And when I finished, he said, you know, I have a cut of the movie and we tested it and it tested incredibly high.

And I said, that's impossible.

And he showed it to me and I watched it on my laptop.

He sent me a link.

I was so skeptical that I didn't even put it on a big screen.

I just watched it on my laptop and I thought,

oh my God, he stuck to his guns.

He did everything he said.

Nobody got in his way.

They let him make this movie.

I can't believe they let him do some of the things he did in this.

And

it's one of the, outside of the first time I saw Out of Sight, it's one of the happiest I'd ever been to see an early cut of something.

And God bless him for dragging me into that.

That's funny.

It's the closest you've gotten to an independent film.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You work with a guy who is in the biggest machine in Hollywood.

Yeah.

And you guys made an independent movie.

I don't know how we got away with it.

I have no idea how we got away with it.

But you don't do like that thing, the independent movie.

Well, The lookout was a small movie.

Sure.

You know,

but not I haven't really.

I have for,

I don't know why.

Do you think it's because like you work for a living?

That could be.

Could be the monthly nut, you mean?

Yeah.

But that was the lookout was the first one you directed?

That was the first one I directed.

Yeah.

And

then what, you did one other film, directing and writing?

I did A Walk Among the Tombstones.

I did this pilot called Hoke based on these Charles Williford novels I love, but for FX, that ultimately didn't happen.

But it was a great experience.

Oh, good.

Man, and then with Godless and your godless, yeah.

Shoot a lot of those.

Yeah, did you shoot all of them?

All of them.

Yeah.

All of them and all of the Queen's Gambit.

Well, that's interesting because, like,

you know, you must have learned something from focusing on the novel in terms of your own voice.

It freed me up.

It was like, it was like, I mean, two things happened.

One, I think, going on Zoloft at that time.

Yep.

Two, I think, working on the book and just hearing, just freeing up my brain to just, just to be loose and more supple in terms of, and not so careful anymore.

And also you weren't limited to, like, you know, with Queen's Gambit, it was a very interesting

environment or world.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, no one's going to come up with that idea.

No.

You know what I mean?

And, well, godless, you were able to exercise everything you wanted in terms terms of Westerns.

It was a great sandbox to play.

Yeah, yeah.

But I assume it's just interesting to me that as opposed to

play in the field of like, you know, being a big script writer and

doctor and stuff to just pull out and go like, I'm going to do an indie movie and not care is that

you picked a fairly big

audience.

Yeah, Canvas.

Canvas to work your shit out with a lot of support.

A lot of support.

But this is where Steven Soderberg comes in.

Because on A Walk Among the Tombstone and Tony Gilroy, you know, two of my oldest friends.

Oh, those are great friends.

And they're nasty when I show them stuff.

Tony can be brutal.

And he's Michael Cayton.

He's Clayton, right?

Yes, he's Michael Clayton.

He's Andor right now.

He's unbelievable.

The best.

Yeah, I talked to him, yeah.

And,

you know, we've known each other forever and

maybe even longer than I've known Stephen, I think.

But I showed them a cut of a walk among the tombstones and the two of them just ate my lunch.

I mean, I got vertigo walking home from that.

They were so brutal, but they were right.

I mean, in what way?

What did they say?

It was every scene was a new movie.

I realized that there was a lot of,

I didn't have rules for myself.

There was a lot of look ma I'm directing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I overcomplicated and Stephen.

taught me.

He came into the cutting room with me.

Yeah.

And we recut the movie together.

And he said, I'll be your editor.

Let me be your editor.

And I said, well, I don't want to cut your movie.

I want to cut my movie.

And he said, well, we're going to cut your movie.

You have it all there, but you're using all of it.

Yeah.

And you need to simplify it.

And what I learned going through the process in just a couple days with him, I mean, we spent a week together in the cutting room, but...

is that simpler, the effort to make something simpler as a filmmaker makes it more elegant.

And in order to make it simpler, you need to have real rules for yourself.

And so after that, I did Hoke, where I experimented on that.

And then Godless really solidified that for me.

And Queen's Gambit.

Well, Queen's Gambit, you had to be meticulous.

Absolutely meticulous.

And it was really, instead of trying to overcomplicate it, how do I really make this simple?

How do I choreograph or block story?

You make it about her.

You make it about her, but it's even the filmmaking.

You know, how are you telling the story?

And I relied more and more.

And on Mr.

Spade, I really experimented with this.

How much story can you tell in a single composition?

How much can you tell?

And in-person?

Yeah, exactly.

And how much, because you don't have to cut a lot.

And a lot of these young filmmakers, Ari Astor, I was watching Midsummer and I thought Midsummer, Midsummer, I don't know.

But it was an amazing movie.

And he would just have these wide shots and the story would play out.

And I thought, he really, he really has,

there's clear intention in everything that he's doing.

He's a hell of a filmmaker.

Hell of a filmmaker.

And a lot of these young horror filmmakers are doing that.

Well, that's where it's all happening.

It's fascinating to me.

And so in Godless, I shot almost all of it with a 25-millimeter lens.

And it's like, what can we do?

And you're still at a good pace.

Instead of cutting just to cut, you cut when you need to cut.

You cut when you need to punctuate something or when you need to.

Yeah, but you're not making a gimmick out of it.

No, no, no, no.

You're just utilizing the

go back to William Wyler.

Yeah.

You shouldn't notice.

Yeah.

And it's still beautiful.

It's still got its own rigorous palette and it has a very strong look.

It's still got all of those things.

and the performances, you're still directing it, but

you're not running in front of it waving.

And also when you do these series or these mini-series or whatever they're called, now limited series or whatever they're called,

you know,

you can make an eight-hour movie.

Yes, you can.

And I shoot them like that.

I don't shoot them episode by episode.

I did on Department Q recently, but that's just the way that came together.

But normally I shoot them like a movie by location.

Yeah, I mean, I think

it must be very exciting to know the craft so well and then to engage in this other craft, but being so adept at writing that it frees you out.

You're not insecure about that.

No.

So you can really like, all right, if I'm insecure about being a director, you know, I can go to my own scripts or I can go to these peers that will, you know, inform me.

And again, Stephen said to me when he watched

A Walk Among a Tombstones, he said, it's very insecurely cut.

You don't have...

Those were his exact words in the talk about shriveling.

And so

there are times I'm on the set where I'll be shooting and I'll realize because it's all about the story, it helps you have a conversation with your actors.

Those conversations are better.

I know

I'm OCD, anal, whatever you want to call it, but I'm always, I'm very, prepping is really important to me to know just so I have freedom to work with the with the actors.

It's my favorite part of directing, I think.

But there'll be times I'll be shooting and I'll say to the crew, we have to stop.

I made a mistake.

We're not telling the right story here.

It's the wrong point of view or we're not focused on this.

And I'm going to have to shoot my way back to, so we need to stop right now rather than waste time.

So I'm going to figure out to create a scene I can cut that's the wrong scene anyway.

Yeah.

Let's, let's, and then I would tell the story to them.

I would remind them of what is the story here.

And everybody gets excited.

And we go.

And that happens at least once or twice on everything I've ever done.

Now, when you do, like, you know, we'll talk about Department Q, but like, just, you know, what did you learn from Goldman essentially?

Goldman was just a great yarn spinner.

Okay.

His instinct for going in the opposite direction where they think you're going to go.

Yeah.

To not do, to lead people on, like, this is what's going to happen, and that doesn't happen, something else happens.

Department Q is all of that.

That's all of that.

It's all of that.

It's like, I'm pissed off because I only got five fucking episodes.

That's all.

I'll give you the rest.

Tell them to give me the rest because now I'm in.

Yeah, the last four are the best episodes.

And is that it?

Or are you going to do...

I would love to do another season.

But you shot this as if it was it.

No, we shot it like hoping it would be another season.

But this crime gets solved.

Yes.

Yeah, well, I need the rest of it.

And I can't wait for however fucking long.

When is it going to be out?

May 29th.

Oh, soon.

Yeah.

Soon.

But I don't want you to forget the first five because.

Yeah, I'm locked in.

I watched the first one.

I got to give you a second.

I'm going to get you the next one.

Tell them to send it to you.

But like when you're going to write a movie,

what do you know you have to do?

In terms of, yeah, we know there's a three-act structure.

Not necessarily.

Okay.

Well, okay, so that's out the door.

But like in terms of like, you know, what are the essentials?

you know, in terms of style or in terms of form that

they're already ingrained in you.

But if you were to tell somebody,

not to make it easier for them, but from your point of view, what do you got to do

once you have the story?

So the idea is just the excuse to start with.

The idea isn't everything.

And when you put too much pressure on the idea, you're in trouble.

And so

the thing I need to be really clear about is who.

Who am I writing about?

And if I can't make two people talk to each other, I can't write them.

I can't write characters if I can't, I don't know them well enough.

And so no plot plot is going to come from these people if I just know, you know, slightly of them.

And so that's one thing.

Character, character, character, who are these people?

Right.

I would say the other thing you need to know is you need to constantly be telling yourself, spinning, do you have...

the ability to spin yarn.

Can you do the once upon a time?

Every time you're writing a scene, you know, what comes next?

What is surprising to you?

That's why I don't outline.

I outline a couple scenes at a time to know.

But beyond that, I don't know where it's always going.

I have an ending maybe in mind.

I have an idea where it's going.

But I feel like I just want to keep making it feel downhill as I'm telling the story.

I don't know necessarily what the whole shape will be.

I get ideas as I go.

I'll spend months just writing about the script before I write it, not doing exercises or things, just writing whatever.

Whenever it comes to you, whatever I'm thinking about, and then I'll reorganize that into kind of an order but I think the big the main thing is to keep yourself open and to not do things again to not give yourself these tasks that are more about being a good student than being a writer.

And a lot of people, they love their dry erase boards and their cards and their this and that works for them.

But I have a very neat desk because I have a very messy fucking head.

And so

that for me, I need to be able to just go off and try and write because that's how you get the happy accidents.

If you're careful, which I was sometimes early on, if you're too careful,

it's going to feel that way.

And so I would tell people, when you start, just make it downhill.

Don't have expectations as to how long it's going to take you to write, because that's always disappointing.

And it's going to take you longer.

And no one wins prizes for getting a script done.

The contract in Hollywood is 10 or 12 weeks for a first draft.

I have never in four decades ever ever made that deadline ever.

Never once.

Yeah.

Because you can't.

I don't know how you can.

And so that's

where I would say that if you approach it with these little bite-sized things and you kind of make it downhill.

Okay.

And with Department Q,

I mean, is this all original?

No, Department Q is based on a novel.

It's one of a series of novels from this Danish author, U.C.

Adler Olson.

Because it's another one of these worlds where not unlike Queen's Gambit, where you're like, well, how are we in Edinburgh?

Right.

With you know, a cop with PTSD because of a very specific thing that he might have fucked up and, you know, kind of moved from there.

But like, I don't watch a lot of that type of television.

And because of that, and also because it's so good, I'm like, oh my God, why am I not watching more of this kind of stuff?

You know, it's

like a little bit of a true detective element to it.

Well, I love those British procedurals.

And this is a Danish novel that I turned into a British procedural.

And I'm obsessed with like Happy Valley and Broadchurch and Line of Duty was this fucking masterpiece.

It's like their wire, I think.

The blue lights, all these, or going back to Prime Suspect, and they're great.

And what I wanted to do, what was so fun about doing Godless was to embrace every single Western cliché there is.

The gunfight, the breaking of the horses,

all this, the crazy bad guy, all this, and then turn it on its head somehow.

And so I wanted to do a procedural that's also on tilt a little bit.

And so

that was the fun of it.

And

so I read these books.

The author

just gave me the books 15 years ago.

He said, they're yours.

And I was never going to write or direct them.

I just wanted to watch them.

And so I kind of was trying here and there to get them made, and I couldn't do it.

And I was in prep on Queen's Gambit when Rob Bullock, this terrific British producer at Left Banks, came to visit me in Berlin where I was shooting and he said, listen, let me help you.

We'll get a writer.

You can work with somebody and you can develop it and you can, and then, you know, and I said, okay, but I'm not going to direct it or do any of it.

And we worked for a year with this lovely writer, Chani Lakani, who I co-created the show with.

And then what happened was everything got escalated.

super fast.

The strike came on and I had to stop working on the show, but the British writers were still working.

They had two other writers.

But the problem was I wasn't involved.

So through no fault of their own, the strike ended.

I'm reading scripts that we can't shoot because they're different than what I think the show should be.

So I ended up writing and directing.

I wrote them all, co-wrote it, well, wrote them all essentially, or co-wrote with

the other people, and then directed Six of the Nine.

Yeah.

Well, no, because like,

you know, it's one of these things where there's a few turns, you know, like I just, like within the last episode or two, or maybe even the fifth one that I watched, that it's not just penance.

No.

And then you're like, oh, God, so all of this shit's connected.

Yes.

And now I don't know how.

Well, I'm right on the precipice.

Well, the good thing was, because I didn't shoot this, because I wasn't going to be directing it.

It was set up to shoot in episode blocks.

Yeah.

And I was writing it while we were shooting it.

I was building the airplane while we were flying it.

It was, I've never done that before, and I don't think I'll ever do that again.

But because we were going in order, I could do that.

So there were times where I didn't finish writing the last episode until two weeks before we wrapped the entire season shooting.

And so I would say to the production designer, I think I need a, I think I need a laundromat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gonna have a scene in a laundry mat.

I think I needed this.

I think I needed that.

And it was, it was crazy.

And by the way, because of that, it was eight scripts that became nine episodes.

And I've done that a few times.

It happened on Godless, Extra, happened on, because I don't know what I'm doing in terms of that stuff.

I just

it all and then chop it up.

Well, that's interesting because

it comes back around to

sort of the way that I create comedy bits is that you don't know where it's coming from.

So

whether it's a muse or a gift or whatever, but when you're cornered.

Right.

And

you've got no choice, you've got to find a place to land.

Right.

That's exactly it.

You've got to, where are you going to land?

Right.

Yeah.

That's exactly it.

And sometimes when you're cornered, I find myself doing amazing work.

And sometimes I find myself so frozen.

Well, that's when you bail.

Nothing happens.

You eject with the chute.

Yeah.

I realize nothing is happening.

I can't.

You know, you're hoping here's this facility that's going to kick in.

Yeah.

And it just doesn't.

Well, that's the risk.

But it seemed to have worked out for this last one anyway.

Yeah, it is.

And that's why, again, going back to writing and

listen, you're storytelling.

Your work is storytelling.

You are telling stories.

There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And that's what you're doing.

And so,

and the fun is that we can't guess where it's going.

And also the liability of that is that, you know, once you get it all done, a month later, you're like,

I know.

Well, that's just the part of us.

Yeah, I could have listened to no.

It could have tied the two languages.

You know what?

The people who feel that way are usually really good at what they do.

The people who say, I nailed it, are usually not.

Oh, good.

I never

know.

I just watch and I think, oh, man, if I had 10 more minutes on that day, I'd be here.

Or if I'd written.

Because my comedy is so fluid, you know, in terms of how it unfolds in real time and then kind of builds itself, it doesn't stop building itself.

No.

Once I've shot it.

Right.

So, you know, what are you going to do?

You can add.

You can do it later.

You can keep going.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, great talking to you.

Likewise.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

Thank thank you

there you go you can stream department q on netflix it's a good show it's engaging i liked it hang out for a minute folks

hey people john mulaney is back on the show next week and before his new episode on monday you can go back and listen to him on episode 551.

You saw my worst set ever, I think.

At that one-man show?

No, in Aspen.

Did I?

Yes.

You don't remember that?

Of course, you wouldn't.

That was a huge moment in my life and not.

But I was there.

You were the host.

I met you that weekend.

I hosted for you and Tosh.

You guys were co-headlining a show.

This was.

Oh my God.

You were wearing American apparel jackets and overcoats a lot during that time.

Sure, sure.

So you were very nice to me.

Yeah.

I had just seen you on Conan.

Yeah.

And I really liked that joke you did about your mom calling you and asking you what you thought of this guy, Sabu.

And you saying, Mom, do you mean Barack Obama?

So I told you that at the Tosh, I got to host for you and Tosh.

And I walked up on stage and I started to talk.

You reminded me of it when you said my laugh was up here.

I couldn't breathe at all.

It's hard to breathe there.

Couldn't breathe at all, though.

And my first joke.

It died.

It died.

And then

I remember that white hot panic rolled over me, right?

But you were having trouble,

I was having real trouble

in the bombing sense, and also I couldn't breathe.

And to this day, I don't know if I was having a panic attack or elevation signal.

But there was like concern, like you, you got off stage, and it was like you were yeah, you and uh, uh, you and Mike DiStefano uh were very nice to me backstage.

They got me an oxygen tank.

I remember this, right?

Right.

And uh, Mike DiStefano sat with me for a little while.

You came and checked on me, which I always never forgot.

You were very cool in that moment.

And you came on stage and

so I bomb and almost die.

You come back on stage and said some nice things about my set and kind of used one of my jokes to get into one of your jokes.

It felt, I remember hearing it and going, oh, he's really trying to make it seem like that went fine.

That's from episode 551, available for free on all podcasting apps.

For every episode of WTF ad-free, sign up for WTF Plus.

Just go to the link in the episode description or go to wtfpod.com and click on WTF Plus.

Again, John Mulaney will be the guest on Monday show.

And I also have an important announcement at the beginning of that episode.

And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by ACAST.

Here, I'm just going to try to hold on to this riff.

Boomer lives, monkey and the fonda, cat angels everywhere.