The original post for this episode can be found here.
Craig Mazin: Hi, folks. In today’s episode, there is some language, some salty language, so if you’re in the car with your children, go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuffs on.
Chris McQuarrie: What the [bleeps] are you talking about?
Craig: Wow.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 596 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In ancient times, our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving amid the stars. Aristotle theorized these were dry exhalations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere. Later, the Romans observed that these objects return on a regular cycle, like small planets with eccentric orbits. Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.
For Scriptnotes, our comet is writer-director-producer Christopher McQuarrie, who first appeared on Episode 300, then Episode 400. On that episode, we invited him to come back on Episode 600, which is very nearly here. As we prepare to record that, I asked Drew Marquardt, our producer, to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show. Drew, what are we going to hear today?
Drew Marquardt: We’re going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. Obviously, he’s very good at that. He’s got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made but where these stories come from and where they’re going in the future on film and TV.
John: Great. I recalled these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris, and he came to the hotel. I went to his hotel. He had just come back from filming Mission: Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time. We had a great conversation. Craig was, in theory, kind of on the episode. He was Skyped in a little bit.
Drew: He comes in at the end. There wasn’t enough [inaudible 00:01:46].
John: It was basically me and Chris. The other one, Chris McQuarrie was sitting right in the chair that you’re sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.
Drew: I’ll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarrie crush that if he does come back, if the comet returns, I’m going to have to-
John: The comet will return. You had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?
Drew: Correct.
John: Great. That was a whole summer ago. You were an intern last year.
Drew: Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s been a year.
John: A whole year has passed.
Drew: What was amazing going through those two is he’s working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.
John: I find he’s a good balance of idealistic and pragmatic. As I hear him talk about other films that he’s worked on or helped out on, it’s very much like, what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch. Sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.
Drew: He’s never cynical, which is great.
John: That’s correct. We’re going to listen to things cut together from both those first two things, so there’s going to be some sound shifts. It’s fine. We got Matthew Chilelli cutting them together. It’s going to be great. Talk to us about what’s going to happen in the bonus segment for premium members.
Drew: In the bonus segment, you, Craig, and Chris are going to talk about spoof movies, which Craig has a lot of experience with and Chris has a broad knowledge about.
John: Fantastic. Drew, thank you for putting together this edited episode, and we will have the real Chris McQuarrie with us here soon.
Drew: I’m excited.
John: Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me.
Craig: The deal is every 100 episodes we have worked up enough tolerance to have McQuarrie back.
Chris: You know, Craig–
Craig: Here we go.
Chris: You weren’t here for the last one.
Craig: That’s why it wasn’t very good.
Chris: I miss that.
Craig: I can tell. Chris McQuarrie and I have been engaged in a, what, 15-year-long argument about everything.
Chris: About everything.
Craig: Literally everything.
Chris: It’s not so much an argument as it is a–
Craig: It’s a love story at this point.
Chris: It’s the duelists.
Craig: Yes, exactly.
Chris: I think that’s how you would describe our relationship.
Craig: Correct. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, fighting this man you must fight.
John: Back in Episode 300, I was talking to you, we were both living in Paris because you were directing Mission: Impossible. It hadn’t come out yet. You were in the middle of shooting it. It turned out really well, so congratulations on that.
Chris: Thank you.
Craig: Amazing.
Chris: Thank you very much.
Craig: And two more to come.
Chris: Two more to come.
Craig: The idea is you’ll make these until they kill you? Meaning the movies are going to kill you.
Chris: It’s more likely that they will kill me than they will kill Tom Cruise.
Craig: No, nothing kills Tom Cruise. You’ve proven that. By the way, openly attempting to murder him through film. I mean, everyone knows what you’re doing.
Chris: I have been described as his enabler. He describes me as his enabler. I’m not actually trying to kill him, I’m just trying to–
Craig: Could have fooled me.
Chris: He would be doing most of this stuff–
Craig: Movie number one, let’s drown him. Movie number two, oh, hang him off a plane.
Chris: The drowning I don’t think he would try to do.
Craig: Then let’s drown him. Then let’s make him hurtle from a roof. Oh, he broke a bone. Too bad. Keep going.
Chris: That’s true.
Craig: Wow, you’re killing him in front of us.
Chris: I’m whittling him away.
John: Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?
Chris: No.
John: You were a writer of big movies, and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. I was surprised that you ended up wanting to direct them. What was the change?
Chris: Somebody asked me. I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a steppingstone. I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb. I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb.
John: Absolutely. I have one of those too.
Chris: Boy, people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy, and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.
It wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. As a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing than I ever did writing and directing my own movie.
John: Talk about the difference, because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. We talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. What was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie? It is just a fundamentally different beast from making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?
Chris: Yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. My intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together, but not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it.
Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say yes, but-
John: You’re really going to do that.
Chris: Yeah, but no, I’m not. I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. Instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” She said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”
I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. He understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. Then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” Tom and I worked together very well on that movie, and that sort of translated into the next thing and the next thing.
The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to do Ghost Protocol. He called me up to do Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.
John: Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?
Chris: Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise/Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall, saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. He said, “I’ve got this series of books at Cruise/Wagner, and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made.” He offered me the movie, and I said, “I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and getting nowhere,” and they did.
I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. He called me the next day and said, “Script’s great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible, and I need your help.”
Now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. Having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in movie-making, I now understood, okay, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.
I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. I could only reshoot what I still had sets for, sets they hadn’t torn down. It gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie… I was originally only supposed to go for a week. My first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, “Okay, these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else? If I have this idea, is there something you can build?”
Without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned, so that when it came my time to do it, I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. It’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule.
For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years… That was a $60 million movie with Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million, but I wasn’t directing. The budgets continued to get bigger over time. Now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million movie. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million, and he’ll make a billion.”
That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. Now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, “Okay, so now you’re making your big movie. Here’s what’s important,” because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take.
They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment, and they struggle against that. I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.
John: Yeah, we can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there. If you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you, or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?
Chris: There’s a sweet spot I call four in and four out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out, you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. If you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task.
There was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going, because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. There was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. I said, “If you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.”
There was a visual idea. There was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down.
He said, “It’s just too much work.” I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” More importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey,” because that’s really all I care about.
It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. It was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.
John: That four weeks in, four weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from… Like you and I on our first movies. Four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 million movie. It’s a very different thing. We’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever.
You and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in when the train is already running. Generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter, we’re just there to fix the visible screenwriting problems, and so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.
A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or David Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was swirling around. That’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help. Those are the moments.
If you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, how to push for the best thing, it can be really daunting. If I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help, because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.
Chris: Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”
There was one director in particular. His movie was in trouble. He was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” I have had that happen too. I have had studios try to manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man, and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.
I walked in and I told him, “Here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. A lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, ‘I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works, but if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.’“
I said, “What you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. The producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served.” He didn’t do it.
We had another meeting. Half an hour before, I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” He didn’t do it again. Eventually, everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had been taken over. His worst nightmare happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.
John: Absolutely.
Chris: You’re able to come into it and say, “There’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, “Oh, you just have to do this.” It’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.
Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, “I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here, and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go.” That’s the thing you’re always struggling-
John: You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, “On the wall here, I have all the different sequences. Find a way to connect them all together. Go.” Those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of, because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.
Chris: Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.
John: It pays well, but it kills you. You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.
Chris: It’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. Since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” That has evolved for me, so that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like, doesn’t matter what-
John: That’s great.
Chris: You look at it and go, “Yep, that could be in a trailer. Okay, send it away.” Then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. We also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. The sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. You develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. We have little placeholders.
There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie, and we have a blank space there, where it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one soundbite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.
John: If you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of how am I going to keep this thing on the air. It sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. It’s not just these two hours of film. It’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of, and from an early time. You can’t just make your movie, then get involved with the marketing.
Chris: Yes. What is Mission? It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You worry all the time. “Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go?”
We had a big conversation about tone, because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise, and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” We did, but now we find ourselves going, “Are we going where Bond went, where Bond became serious?”
John: Dark and serious.
Chris: It’s another kind of tone, which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place, but we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “We can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. We’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise, saying how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.
John: When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.
But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, we’re yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do, but it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.
Chris: DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said, “This is the movie.” I guess the closest analog in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin, who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.
Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. What is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character, whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies.
If you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe, I just would have laughed at you. We had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies.
John: They’re amazing.
Chris: Oh my god. Oh my god. It will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.
John: So we used to make things like St. Elmo’s Fire, The Big Chill, Breakfast Club, Big Fish, Terms of Endearment. So we used to make things that had big casts, where a bunch of folks came together, where characters did grow and change but it was an ensemble. It wasn’t sort of one character’s story. Is that a thing we’re going to be making on the big screen soon? We’ll start with what is the essence of that kind of story. What is the essence of an ensemble dramedy?
Craig: Let’s make McQuarrie take a shot at that one.
Chris: It seems to me as I’m running through the list that you just – nostalgia is a big part of it. It’s my understanding that somebody did a breakdown of why people go to see movies and the number one reason was to have a nostalgic experience. An emotional nostalgic experience. I think that probably plays into sports as well, especially plays into why a lot of sports movies seem to go–
Craig: Back in time.
Chris: Back to that. And you look at The Big Chill. The Big Chill was very much a nostalgic movie.
John: It’s a reunion of friends who had separated.
Chris: St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—
Craig: See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement, whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness, like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing, and we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god, I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.
John: Yeah, it’s tragic. I mean, on a big screen. I think you can absolutely make these for streaming.
Craig: No question.
John: But in so many ways though, the one-hour series have sort of taken, even like short series have taken the place of these, where you can see those characters grow over the course–
Chris: Oh, This is Us.
Craig: This is Us.
John: This is Us as a movie.
Chris: Modern Family.
Craig: Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–
John: Yeah, he tried to do it as a movie.
Craig: He sort of tried to do it as a movie. He tried This is Us as a movie and it didn’t connect with audiences. But he’s obviously incredibly good at it because tens of millions of people watch This is Us and it gets all these awards. There is something, I don’t know, we used to be able to go and watch this – maybe it’s just that we used to expect less. You know, we would go to the movie theater and we weren’t asking to have our brains blown out the back of our skulls.
Chris: I went to see Hell or High Water.
John: Oh, which is fantastic.
Chris: Which I loved. And I was talking to Tim Talbot shortly thereafter and I said, “Did you see Hell or High Water?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “What did you think about it?” He goes, “That was a great movie. In 1987 that would have been a good movie.” But he’s right in that that sort of… I remember going to the movies every weekend. It was not an event. Now when you ask anybody under the age of 25 why they go to the movies, they will say in one form or another, “Because I have to go.” They want to be part of a discussion.
I tried to get to see Avengers, which I finally saw yesterday, as quickly as I could, because I was tired of having a self-imposed media bubble. There were things in that movie I really didn’t want ruined. Getting to that state, whereas the stories that we’re talking about, what television does so well now especially is there is a collective history.
If you tried to tune into Game of Thrones now, you don’t understand. The number of people who are saying three years into Mad Men going, “Yeah, I tried to get into that show and I just couldn’t.” It’s like, of course not. If you turn middle of Season Three, none of this makes any sense.
Craig: Start at the beginning. That’s true. But I do think that one of the problems for… I remember going to see St. Elmo’s Fire. And my expectation was that I was going to see a group of people that were somewhat older than me dealing with problems. And I knew at some point somebody was going to like… I think Rob Lowe was going to light a torch on fire with some hairspray or something, and Demi Moore was in a corner, super dramatic. And I thought, okay, I’m going to see some sort of human drama. That would not do it anymore. Now when people go to the movie theater it’s like, well, this is going to pin me back and it’s going to blow my mind. And I’m going to see stuff and it’s going to be an event.
Chris: An event.
Craig: An event. I just think people go to the movies for a different reason now.
Chris: But don’t you think also what you can get from television is very different than what we could get from television?
Craig: No question.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: No question.
Chris: You could not make Game of Thrones as a feature film. Any of the content in Game of Thrones would be NC17.
Craig: Nor could you have made it for television prior to this kind of strange change.
Chris: Yes. It’s the networks. As soon as basic cable met the British model of television, which was you make a good television show and when it stops being good you – when it reaches the end you stop.
Craig: Isn’t that nice?
Chris: Yes, it’s lovely.
Craig: You know what? This is going to be six episodes long. Great.
Chris: Yeah, or six episodes this season instead of 22 every season.
Craig: Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple shows. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But yes, the format has become not just flexible, but there is no format. It doesn’t matter.
John: Let’s take the jokes out of biblical epics, and/or sword and sandals movies. So things like Gladiator, Ben-Hur, Noah, Passion of the Christ. King in Heaven. Spartacus. Ten Commandments. Braveheart, to some degree. Lawrence of Arabia. Like we used to make these things. That was actually a staple of original Hollywood. We have the giant ranches here because we used to make these epics.
Chris: Giant movies.
John: Giant movies. We don’t make them anymore.
Chris: No, because they don’t win awards anymore.
John: They don’t win awards anymore.
Craig: Precisely.
John: Even though Game of Thrones is being show on smaller screens, it is that kind of sword and sandals thing.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: Yes.
John: We’re making them, but we’re making them for smaller screen.
Craig: TV. No question.
Chris: I have a very large television. It’s not terribly expensive. I would imagine a lot of people have maxed their credit cards for a large TV.
Craig: You’re comparing your large TV to the TV you grew up with, which was like the TV I grew up. That 9-inch black and white thing in the kitchen, with the single antenna shooting out.
Chris: It was a letterbox.
Craig: Correct. But my kids only know those TVs. But those TVs are still not – I mean, they’re not movies.
Chris: No.
Craig: It’s not a movie screen.
Chris: No. But most people, the way their viewing habits are now, we’re making a Mission: Impossible. We have an IMAX segment in it. And people are saying, well why don’t you just shoot the whole thing in IMAX?
Craig: No one is going to watch it.
Chris: It’s never going to be seen again. You’re making this balance. And there are times I’ll be framing a shot, and Cruise will walk up to me and go, “You know when this is on the big screen and I pull my phone out of my pocket—”
Craig: Here it is.
Chris: This is the screen now. It’s not that it will only be watched on television, but for the life of the film.
Craig: For the life of it. Primarily.
Chris: The theatrical lifespan of a movie is 12 weeks.
Craig: Whoa. 12 weeks. What is this hit movie you’ve got that’s in there 12 weeks?
Chris: I’m talking like by the end it’s in eight theaters.
Craig: Yes. Correct.
Chris: I’m giving a conservative—
Craig: Really it’s four weeks is what it is.
Chris: Four weeks. Yeah.
Craig: It used to be months.
Chris: Yes.
Craig: It is now about four weeks.
John: So what is the essence of these biblical epics we’re talking about? So if you’re talking about a Gladiator or a Ben-Hur, it is a character in a long ago time, typically a Roman time, who is coming up against an authority system. He is leading, it’s always a he in these movies, is leading–
Chris: It’s a Christ figure against Rome.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Christ figure against Rome.
Craig: That’s exactly what it is. Every single time. Christ figure against Rome. Doesn’t matter what you do.
Chris: Doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or not Rome. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christ or not Christ.
Craig: That’s what Braveheart is. That’s what Ten Commandments is. Even when it’s Jews it’s still a Christ figure against Rome. Some hero will rise in a kind of faded destiny way, usually out of nothing. And they have special powers, special abilities. They are spat on, tortured, hurt. Their family is killed. They are persecuted. And ultimately they do some incredibly self-sacrificial thing and the world is saved. And the last scene is people sitting around going, “God, he was awesome.”
Chris: He was a great man.
Craig: He was a great man.
Chris: And it’s always a man.
Craig: And it’s always a man.
Chris: Yes. A lot of this conversation seems to be about how technology has disrupted what we imagined the plane of cinema to be. There seems to be a really clear shift.
Craig: And just wait.
Chris: From no home video, to home video, to no home video again. Now it’s home theater. Now it’s home – it’s content. That’s where I think the line is blurring. It’s big screen/small screen.
Craig: And the amount that’s available now is – and the resources that are being poured into it. I mean, better or worse, however you want to chop up the money, there was just way less money. I mean, there were five studios and they gave you some studio. And there were three networks and they gave you some money.
But now we’ve got just billions and billions rushing in to make more and more stuff. It is transforming things. But there aren’t that many more screens. In fact, I’d probably argue there are fewer screens than there used to be.
John: Well, there’s not more time. There’s not more time for people to view things. And so even though we have new people coming in and new distribution outlets, we have new money chasing new things–
Craig: Time is a flat circle.
John: Yes. And so we don’t have the ability to watch more things. And so we have to choose how we’re going to do this.
Chris: I’m looking at the–
John: So I skipped over some things. Is there a genre there you want to tackle?
Chris: Westerns.
John: Let’s talk about westerns.
Craig: Hmm, westerns.
John: On this show we’ve talked about Unforgiven. We’ve talked about 3:10 to Yuma. We’ve talked about sort of westerns. But what is it about westerns that you think can be suited towards the big screen. Because also we had Scott Frank on who talked about his great Netflix show.
Craig: Godless.
John: Godless. Which was sort of exploding what a normal western—
Craig: Meant to be a movie. Written as a script.
Chris: He struggled with it for years, right? He was trying to get it down to something movie size.
Craig: Well, and he does it with all of his movies. But, I mean, look, it was movie size. It’s just that what he was struggling was to get somebody to pay for it as a movie. Because essentially people kept saying well the western is dead, the western is dead, the western is dead.
Chris: And that which is the WWII movie is dead. You hear about this all the time. And then the number of times I’ve seen a dead genre—
Craig: Everything is dead until it’s not.
Chris: Yeah. Dunkirk was a really great example of a dead genre that people don’t go to see anymore.
Craig: My favorite example is nothing could have been a deader genre than pirate movies.
John: Oh yeah, of course.
Craig: Pirate movies. Not only dead—
Chris: Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yes.
Chris: Oh my god.
Craig: But before they made Pirates of the Caribbean we had Cutthroat Island which had sank an entire, like a hedge fund disappeared.
Chris: It killed Carolco.
Craig: Yeah, Carolco. An entire company was dead. And before that–
Chris: Killed careers.
Craig: Careers. Renny Harlin. And then – and the thought of making a pirates movie was considered almost obscene.
John: Yeah.
Chris: Yes.
Craig: And…
John: Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.
Craig: There we go.
John: It didn’t start a new genre. There weren’t like other pirates movies coming after that. It was only the one pirate movie.
Craig: Exactly. Everybody else was like you know what, let’s let them have it. We’re still not making pirate movies.
Chris: We’re still not making pirate movies. And it so specifically hinges around a kind of storytelling and a character. Johnny Depp.
Craig: And a brand.
Chris: Exactly.
Craig: I mean, just built in.
John: It was also supernatural. So you had a supernatural vibe to it which is different than other stuff.
Chris: But the western, Unforgiven represented a shift towards deconstructionist from which the genre never seemed to – 3:10 to Yuma was its own darker western. Godless was its own. What I miss – what I’d love to see is—
Craig: Shane.
Chris: The Magnificent 7. And Shane. Silverado. The Big Country. Movies that are more of an adventure and more a morality tale as opposed to – watch slow west.
Craig: It’s never going to happen. It’s gone. It’s over.
Chris: I will fight you on that.
Craig: Well, look, I think as a country and a culture we have lost the ability to go back to the kind of idealized west. We just know too much.
Chris: No, I don’t think it’s idealized. I think – you look at The Big Country, it’s not idealized. The country is rough, but a man walks into it who refuses to play by those rules. And I think that’s – if you take westerns there are two kinds. There are kind of westerns noirs where the west just chews you up and spits you out. And there’s the place where one can prove one’s self.
Craig: Sure.
Chris: And it’s this rough and lawless place where somebody, you know.
Craig: Maybe a book would do it.
John: A book might do it. I mean, I think it comes back to the discussion we had with the ensemble dramedies which is that we used to go to see those movies that didn’t have a lot of high stakes in them because that was fine. We needed to go see a movie.
Craig: What the hell else were you going to do on a Saturday afternoon?
John: And so I just wonder that this non-deconstructed western that is just truly a western whether it’s actually going to get people to go out to see it on a screen.
Chris: Hell or High Water.
John: Hell or High Water—
Chris: It was contemporary but it’s a western.
John: It totally is.
Chris: It’s a bank-robbing—
John: It’s a pickup truck western and I loved it for what it was able to do. But that was not a breakout smash hit. It was a good performer, but it was not—
Chris: I think it did OK financially and it got nominated for Best Picture.
John: It did, absolutely.
Chris: Which for movies of that size is kind of the – that’s your life blood to keep in the theaters for another—
Craig: John Lee Hancock has kind of made a western in a sense with The Highwaymen.
Chris: The Highwaymen. Sure.
Craig: But, again, Netflix. I mean, and that’s where John Lee lives now. You know, those are the movies he’s going to be making now because – and here’s a guy who made, I don’t know, $14 billion for Warner Bros and Alcon with The Blind Side. And today I don’t think they make The Blind Side for theatrical. That’s what’s happened. I fear that we have lost something kind of permanently in the economics of making these movies. And it may have literally just come down to the cost of marketing. Because—
Chris: That’s everything.
Craig: Right. I mean, Netflix, the way they market their movie is they don’t. It’s just there.
Chris: When you turn on Netflix they’re like, hey, do you want to watch this?
Craig: Correct.
John: Absolutely. And they bought every billboard in Los Angeles but that’s just for us.
Chris: But here’s the upside to that. Here’s the less than dystopian way of looking at that. In the current culture where the business is suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to diversify, this is something I experience a lot on the movies that I get called in to come in and do fixes on. The business was predicated on a male director makes a $5 million movie that makes $50 million. Let’s give him $200 million in hopes it makes $1 billion. Women were not afforded those same undeserved opportunities.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: Which they are now.
Craig: And were punished—
Chris: And were punished – exactly.
Craig: If they didn’t do the impossible.
Chris: Whereas the way to look at Netflix is Netflix could be the farm system. Now there’s many more movies being made for lower budgets creating – and I see lots of women directing television now.
Craig: Way more opportunity.
Chris: The director lists that I’m now being handed for the TV shows I’m working on are 50/50 and you’re actually looking at, oh, that person is being hired for the quality of their work, which is very encouraging. Is it possible that what we end up with is – you know how the Oscars have sort of divided into—?
Craig: Yes.
Chris: You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff. You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.
Craig: Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question is, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this.
Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to. I want to do this.
Chris: Well, there’s no point in making it if – you look at her and that dilemma knowing that – having nothing to do with who is directing a movie how those movies get made. The script is not ready.
Craig: Yep. [laughs]
Chris: The movie is going in three weeks.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: You’ve never done anything like this.
Craig: The actor is kind of in charge.
Chris: The producer, whose name is on a bunch of giant movies, will not be there.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: And this is all going to be your fault. Do you still want to do it?
Craig: It is really terrifying.
Chris: Correct. And again, it takes a special kind of director to get into that kind of trouble and then accept the help when they bring it in. Because you are essentially now, it’s very embarrassing. You’re at a point where you’re in way over your head. And not because – this is not hubris. They’re promised support, and then it’s just not there. So now suddenly you lose control of your movie. It takes a lot having never been through the process to know that it’s all going to be OK in the end. When the movie works you’ll still get credit.
Craig: That’s a lot to have faith in.
Chris: It’s very wounding. So I can see somebody looking at that and saying—
Craig: Nah.
Chris: But there’s the other side of that is the grass is always greener. You’re going to have people making big giant movies. Michael Bay made Pain & Gain because he really wanted to make it. Michael Bay, some part of Michael Bay – I don’t care, any filmmaker you can name at that level – some part of them wants to make their little movie about—
Craig: Their podium movie.
Chris: [laughs] They want to make their podium movie.
Craig: They want to make their podium movie.
Chris: Yes, and the same thing I would imagine is just – the Duffer Brothers have some big feature they want to do.
Craig: Big ass dumb movie they want to do.
Chris: Yes, they’ve got some big ass-
John: Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.
Chris: Yes.
John: But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.
And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?
Chris: Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.
And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.
And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people and had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this…
The fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. We were like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big? And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.
John: So, switching just for our last topic here, if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie, like what do you do?
Chris: Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike, on the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a 10-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment.
I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that 10 days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.
John: So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.
Chris: You had to have something you could shoot.
John: Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the rocky shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act. It’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.
Chris: Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.
There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.
John: One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–
Chris: Transformers.
John: Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?
Chris: I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”
An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.
Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill. And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.
John: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.
Chris: Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.
I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only 10 episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s 10. Why should we pay you more if there’s only 10?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”
The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writers’ opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent, that you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.
Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but a great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.
As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.
You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.
When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”
So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me.
John: That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Our earlier segments were produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Since it’s a throwback episode, let’s do a Matthew Chilelli throwback outro.
If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to feature with Chris McQuarrie and Craig talking about spoof movies. Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Drew: My pleasure.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, can we skip ahead to something that you know especially well? Spoofs and parodies.
Craig: Spoofs and parodies.
Chris: Spoofs and parodies.
John: So movies like Airplane, Spaceballs, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie series, MacGruber, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie. Tropic Thunder. Shaun of the Dead. Vampires Suck. Austin Powers. Blazing Saddles. We’re not making many of these movies now. And I have a theory why, but I’m curious what your theory is why we don’t make these movies.
Craig: As David Zucker would repeatedly say, “Spoof is dead.” And his thing is that he would say spoof is dead, he said it before spoof came back. Spoof was dead. I remember Jim Abrahams saying that he was mixing Mafia, a Jane Austen movie, Jane Austen’s Mafia.
Chris: Jane Austen’s Mafia.
Craig: And he walked down the hall where they were mixing and on another mixing stage they were mixing There’s Something About Mary. And he just sort of watched a few minutes of it and then went back and said, “Yeah, we’re fucked. Our time is over.”
And it was over. And then the Wayans Brothers brought it back with Scary Movie. But following the success of Scary Movie, and 2, and 3, and 4, there was this sudden – suddenly they were everywhere. And the marketplace was flooded with a lot of cheap stuff. And honestly as one of the people that wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, I mean, the pressure that we were under from the Weinsteins to make those movies as quickly as possible was brutal. And we couldn’t do them as well as we wanted to do them. And we did them with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams.
So by the time all that unraveled it was mostly I think killed at the moment by just the marketplace being flooded. But also you got the sense pretty quickly that the Internet was essentially mooting the entire point of this.
John: Yes. That was my instinct.
Craig: Because every joke, I mean, we used to be like, OK, you want to make fun of this movie. Well, four or five nights from now Leno is going to do the joke. Well, now they’re doing the jokes while they’re watching things. There’s no more time. It’s over.
Chris: That’s very true.
Craig: It’s over.
Chris: Everything is – yeah, the Internet is a spoof.
Craig: The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.
John: There’s no way to make the movie quick enough to do it. And even like on YouTube they can do the crappy effects version of that joke anyway.
Chris: Blazing Saddles is on this list. It is a spoof but it is a spoof with a higher purpose.
John: So it’s not a spoof of any one movie, it’s taking genre conventions–
Craig: Of a genre.
Chris: Of a genre.
John: And Shaun of the Dead is a great example of like taking the genre conventions and upending them in a way that’s—
Chris: Well that’s a mashup.
John: Yeah.
Chris: And a great one.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: It’s still I would say really hard now. I mean, Airplane was a direct spoof of a movie called Zero Hour from 1956 or something, or 1955, which no one had seen. That was sort of the oddity of Airplane that they just did this random thing. But somewhere along the line spoofs became connected to either genres as a whole or when it got really bad pop culture. And that’s when it just all to me absolutely fell apart. There’s probably room for somebody to make a spoof of some weird movie that has been forgotten.
Chris: Well, but and Austin Powers is taking shots at movies along with Bond. Matt Helm. And some really–
Craig: In Like Flint.
Chris: Yeah, In Like Flint. When the phone rings, that’s directly taken from In Like Flint.
John: But you look at the ones of these that we feel like you could still make is that these films actually have individualized characters who sort of have an arc and have a point of view. And the movie doesn’t exist just to make fun of the movie that came before it. The character is existing within a world and is consistent within a world. So Austin Powers is a spoof of another kind of character, but is also a character himself. And Dr. Evil is a character himself.
Chris: Yes. And it’s a time travel comedy in a way. They both are, at least two of the three are.
Craig: I mean, the people that kind of come the closest now to doing spoof and parody in their own way is Chris and Phil.
John: Lord and Miller. Yeah.
Craig: Yeah. Lord and Miller in a weird way do. I mean, Lego has certain spoof aspects to it.
John: Their Spider Man also has aspects of like it’s an awareness of where this is fitting inside the culture.
Chris: Meta.
Craig: Yeah, it’s meta. Their Jump Street movies are kind of spoofing Jump Street.
John: Oh yes.
Craig: Like it’s a self-spoof. But it’s different. It’s not like, I mean, thank god, by the way. Because honestly nothing is harder than writing those things. I will never work harder in my life than I did writing Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. It was just—
Chris: It’s one of the reasons Chernobyl is not as funny.
Craig: Yeah, I know. It took the jokes out.
John: It took all the comedy out.
Chris: You didn’t make the effort. I know.
Links:
- Original Chris McQuarrie episodes 300 and 400
- Chris McQuarrie on IMDb
- Chris McQuarrie on Instagram
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt (from episodes originally produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe), and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.