compendium

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 655 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a compendium episode, where we go back through the archives and find great topics and smush them together in one episode. Drew, tell us what you found this week.

Drew Marquardt: This compendium actually came about because I needed it this week.

John: You personally needed this.

Drew: I personally needed it.

John: You selfishly orchestrated-

Drew: Yes. This is just for me. It doesn’t apply to anyone else. But hopefully someone can get something out of it. I’m in the middle of revisions right now. Most of the notes I had were that the stakes were muddy, which I think is code for “I’m bored with this.”

John: They weren’t quite sure why they should continue to pay attention to your script.

Drew: Yeah. “Why am I turning the page?” I was trying to fix it at a structure level. I was hitting a brick wall. Not to make your head big, but I was like, “What did John and Craig say about this?” I went back, and in five minutes, you guys gave me the tools and shifted my perspective and cracked it open. It made me really excited, and I figured why not put it together.

John: Fantastic. Great. I’m glad this helped you out. Hopefully this will help out our listeners as well. Before we get into this compendium, we have one bit of news/housekeeping to handle.

In the 12 years we’ve been doing this podcast, I have learned that our listeners are brilliant and multitalented. When I’m looking for someone to do a thing, I know that I should start first with the people who listen to this podcast. This is one of those cases.

There is a little video game that I would like to make. Technically, genre-wise, it’s a deck-building rogue-like game in the vein of Slay the Spire or Balatro. If you recognize those titles and love them, great. If you don’t know those titles, seek them out. They’re very, very smart and very, very fun.

On paper, the game that we have been mapping out around the office seems really fun. We know the gameplay, the mechanics. But while our team is really good at making productivity apps like Highland or Weekend Read for the Mac and for iPhone, we are not video game developers. This is not our wheelhouse. But someone listening to this podcast probably is. That’s why I’m hoping we can find someone to come in and help us do this project. If you are this person or if you know this person, great. This may not be what you do for a living. We thrive in that space of really talented amateurs coming on board, so you may be the person we want. I have a longer job description written up, which Drew-

Drew: I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. You can apply through there.

John: Absolutely. You’ll see exactly what we’re looking for and how to send in information about who you are and what you’ve done before this. I have a hunch we’re gonna find somebody great. That’s it for the housekeeping. Drew, tell us about the show we’re listening to today.

Drew: It’s only two episodes that we’re pulling from. First is Episode 179, which is The Conflict Episode.

John: Legendarily, people got very nervous in this episode, because it sounded like Craig and I were not doing well.

Drew: We took that part out, but yes. Lots of really great stuff in there. Then we go to Episode 402, which is How Do You Like Your Stakes. That’s stakes from the fate of the world and all humanity, to personal stakes to characters, why it matters to them, down to the stakes of a given scene.

John: Great. Drew, you and I will be back at the end of all this with our One Cool Things and some boilerplate. But for our Premium members, what are they gonna hear in their Bonus Segment?

Drew: For our Bonus Segment for Premium members, stick around. You and Craig talk a lot about this conversation you’re going to have about the conflict in Whiplash, so we’ve saved that as a special segment for our Premium members.

John: Fantastic. I remember loving Whiplash. I actually remember doing that little segment on that, because I felt like the conflict between your hero and the antagonist was so detailed and precise and useful, applicable to a lot of other things.

Drew: And varied too.

John: Yeah. Great. We will start with The Conflict Episode and then get into stakes, and we’ll be back here at the end.

[Episode 179 Clip]

John: Let’s get into this topic of conflict, because you, in our pre-notes, listed seven forms of conflict, which I thought were really, really smart. Do you want to start talking us through them?

Craig: Sure. Yeah. Actually, only six. So we’re already in conflict. Somebody brought this up on Twitter. We hear conflict all the time. Studio executives love to ask for more conflict, but they’re maybe sometimes not sure why. And sometimes I think people who aren’t writers miss the presence of conflict because they’re only looking for a certain kind.

But I think there are six kinds. This is what I came up with. There may be more. The first kind is the simplest: an argument. This is a physical fight or verbal argument. And we all know that conflict when we see it. That is not, however, the most common conflict. Nor is it often the most effective or impactful conflict in drama.

John: The little skit we were trying to do at the start of the episode, that’s an example of this kind of argument. Even if it’s like passive-aggressive, the way I would naturally be in my conflict, you can tell that it’s happening there. It’s really clear. It’s in the moment. There is a disagreement, and people are expressing their contrary opinions in that moment.

Craig: Yeah. They’re fighting. We have one word for both punching each other in the face and yelling at each other. They’re fighting.

The second kind of conflict is struggle against circumstance. This could be as simple as I’ve locked my keys in the car, or I’m freezing and I need to get warm. Man versus nature. Man versus object. Man getting laid off by corporation.

John: Absolutely. In the scene version of it, what you talk about, like a man getting locked out of his car, locked out of his house, that’s a scene. But then, of course, we can scale this up to the entire movie. You have Castaway. You have these big things about a man against a nature. It scales both directions.

Craig: Correct. And you’ll see that in most movies, even if there is one dominating kind of conflict, like struggle against circumstance in Castaway, they will find ways to then work in these other interesting sorts of conflicts, even to the point where you can see a conflict coming between Tom Hanks and a volleyball. It’s very smart.
John: Yes.

Craig: The third kind of conflict is an internal conflict. And I’ll call that unfulfilled desire. Essentially, I want something that I do not have. How can I get it?

John: The scene version of this is the girl across the bar that he’s trying to get to, and he cannot achieve that thing. But the inner conflict is usually driving more a movie level kind of issue. There is a goal in life that somebody has. Hopefully, it’s articulated clearly to us, the thing he or she wants. And that is a thing he cannot achieve.

Craig: And that conflict will drive all sorts of stuff. Rocky is about wanting something, unfulfilled desire. Rudy. A lot of sports movies are about this unfulfilled desire, believing that there is more in you. We’ll see certainly a ton of this in Whiplash. Whiplash really is about two kinds of conflicts: argument and unfulfilled desire.

John: The last thing I want to say about this kind of unfulfilled desire is going back to the Chuck Palahniuk conversation from last week. If that unfulfilled desire is an internal motivation, it’s the writer’s job to find a way to externalize it. To find ways to have our characters take action that lets us understand what’s going on inside their head. It’s the writer’s job to find the words that the characters can say to articulate what is actually happening inside, and to create situations that are little blocks along the way that lets them get closer to or further away from that goal.

Craig: A hundred percent. The worst thing you can do when you have an internal conflict is to have somebody explain it as if the audience is their therapist. Incredibly boring. But I always loved that scene in King of Comedy where you see Rupert Pupkin in his basement, and he’s set up a fake audience, and he is performing as the host of his talk show. What an amazing way to get across this unfulfilled desire. And then in the middle of it he’s yelling at his mother because she’s calling down to him about eating dinner. But you get it. You get the depth of his need and his want. And he’s already at conflict with the world.
John: I’m a hundred percent in agreement with you that we need to avoid that sort of sitting on the therapist’s couch and expressing your inner thoughts and desires. It’s almost always death.

Where that can be really helpful though is, again, that writing that happens off the page. And it may be very useful for writers who – if you’re struggling to get inside a character, write that scene that’s never gonna be in your movie. But write that thing where they are actually articulating their inner desire, because that way at least you have something that you can hold onto to know what it is that the character is going for. Someone who is writing a musical, those are the moments that are gonna become the songs.

Craig: The songs, right.

John: Characters sing their inner wants in ways that is incredibly useful in musicals. They don’t tend to express them the same ways in movies.

Craig: That’s right. And partly because we understand when a character is singing – particularly when they’re singing solo, they’re alone on stage – that we are hearing their inner thoughts. They’re not talking out loud to nobody. That would make them schizophrenic. We’re hearing what’s in their mind.

What’s interesting about conflict is that we often don’t understand the nature of our own inner conflict. Early on in a movie, what a character says they want may not really be what they ultimately want. They don’t yet have the bravery or insight to express what they truly want. At the end, they may sing a different song about or they may say a different thing about what they truly want. And that makes sense, because that’s when the conflict is resolved.

John: Yes. And the best of those songs, while the character is singing their inner thoughts, there’s a transformation and a change happening over the course of it. There is a realization that is happening while they’re singing their song. And expressing it to themselves, they actually have an insight and an understanding.

A good recent example is Emily Blunt’s song at the very end of Into the Woods. She has the song Moments in the Woods, where she actually has all these brilliant insights about what it is that she wants and wanted to have the prince and have the baker and have it all. Or at least have the memory of what it was like to have it all. And that’s a great thing that musicals can do that’s actually very hard to do in a straight movie.

Craig: Absolutely true. Yeah, it’s fun to watch somebody start to sing about one thing and then watch it turn into an “I want” song. Or start to sing an “I want” song and it starts to turn into an “I already have” song. It is fascinating. That’s what you get from that internal rhythm that you don’t get really from movies.

That’s our third type of conflict. Here’s the fourth kind: avoiding a negative outcome. That is, I need to figure out how to do something, but I have to do it in a way that doesn’t get me hurt. So a very simple kind of example of this conflict is I have to break up with this person. I just don’t want to hurt his feelings. That’s conflict.

John: Yeah. It is, absolutely. And this is the kind of conflict that you often see in comedies overall. If you think of any situation comedy, it’s generally one character is trying to do something without the other characters around them knowing that they’re trying to do that. And so it’s classically the I ended up on a date with two girls at once and I’m running between the two things.

You’re trying to avoid something embarrassing happening to yourself, and you’re making the situation worse by trying to just – if you just ripped off the Band-Aid, everything would be okay. But instead, you are dragging it out, and you are causing pain by trying to avoid it.

Craig: That’s right. Sitcoms are always very instructive because they are the most basic of these things. That’s where you get the line, “I should have been honest with you from the start, but I was just afraid that you would be so upset.” There’s a classic ’70s sitcom thing where someone leaves their pet with a neighbor, and then the pet gets out immediately. That’s classic avoiding a negative outcome.

John: Yes. Your next one was confusion.

Craig: Confusion. Right. This is an interesting kind of conflict that happens when – it’s different than struggle against circumstance. This is a lack of information. Essentially, you are at conflict with the world around you, because you don’t understand anything. Where am I? What’s going on? It doesn’t last long. But you can see that in a movie like The Matrix, for instance, where the conflict that we’re experiencing between Mr. Anderson and the world is one of confusion.

John: Definitely. And also, you can see it in movies like The Bourne Identity where he literally has no idea who he is. You can see it in movies where people are dropped into foreign lands and they have just no sense of understanding the rules of the world around them. The fish out of water movies are often cases where there’s just fundamental confusion, and you don’t know which side is up.

Craig: And you will see this in comedies also quite a bit. Private Benjamin, she’s confused. She’s clearly having arguments, and she’s clearly struggling against circumstance, but there is also just that terrible feeling of confusion and being lost in the world around you.

And then lastly, dilemma. Very simple kind of conflict we all know. You have to make a choice. The problem is all the choices are bad. And that’s a great conflict. Everybody likes that one.

John: Sophie’s Choice, of course, notoriously. But really, any situation between this guy or that guy; or Stanford or this; or do I break up with this person so I can have the opportunity for this person? These are fundamental dilemmas, and they feel familiar because we all experience them in real life.

The challenge is a dilemma is hard to sustain over the course of a movie. Dilemma can be like a crisis point, but if you keep your character floating in that in between for two hours, that’s probably going to be a frustrating movie.

Craig: Yeah. We like it when Hamlet waffles for awhile. We don’t want just nothing but waffling. You’re absolutely right. Some of these are better suited to moments. Confusion, for instance, cannot last the whole movie. If it does, everyone will be also in conflict and be angry. And there are filmmakers out there who seem to delight in placing the audience in positions of confusion. Perhaps confusion masquerading as art? But ultimately, the movies that I like the most are the movies that are both brilliant and not permanently confusing.

John: Agreed.

Craig: But yeah, dilemma and confusion are best used in small doses, for my taste at least.

John: For our next section, let’s talk about how conflict works within a scene, because as we read through scripts, a lot of times I will find a scene that says – there is interesting dialogue here. It’s either funny or that smart words are being said. And yet the scene is fundamentally not working. And when the scene is fundamentally not working, one of the most obvious problems I can point to is there is no conflict.

And sometimes you’ll read a scene where literally all the characters in the scene agree on what’s going on. There’s no threat to anything. It’s just a bunch of people talking. And when that happens, that’s probably not going to be the most successful scene. Let’s talk about some ways you can sustain conflict within a scene. I had a bunch of bullet points here, and we’ll see which ones work and which ones stick.

First I want to say is you have to understand what each character wants. Yes, you want to know what they want in the movie overall, but literally what is their purpose for being in that scene? What does the individual character hope to get out of this moment? And if you can’t articulate that, then maybe you need to stop and do some more thinking, or you may need to look at are these the right characters for the scene; is this the right scene for these characters?

Craig: No question. We all know that hackneyed phrase, “what’s my motivation?” And that’s a specifically tuned thing for actors. But for writers, what we have to constantly be asking about our characters is what do they want, because I’m telling a camera to be on them. And everybody in the audience understands inherently that the camera doesn’t need to be on them. The camera could be anywhere at any point. I’ve chosen it to be here. Why? And it has to be, because those people either want something or are about to become in conflict.

One of the fun things about characters that don’t want something is when they’re sitting there and they’re perfectly happy and then you destroy their moment. You have the movie crash into it. And now they want something.

John: Absolutely. They want that tranquility back and they cannot get it.

Craig: Right. The opening of Sexy Beast is a perfect example of this. Ray Winstone is just floating in his pool, happy as can be, and then crash, here comes a boulder. You want that. But sometimes you want to start with the scene where it opens up where somebody really, really wants something. And if you can’t have somebody want something at some point in your scene, that’s not a scene.

John: Yeah, that’s not a scene. The next thing I’ll point to is if you’ve ever taken improv class, one of the first things you learn, probably your first day, is “yes and.” You’re supposed to accept what’s been given to you and build on it and hand it back. And that next person, your scene partner, says, “Yes and,” and keeps going with it.

The real scenes are more likely going to be the opposite of that. They’re going to be “but.” The characters are going to challenge each other. And so hopefully in challenging each other, the information that you want to get out will come out much more naturally.

Sometimes you’ll read scenes that are just exposition factories where, basically, we’re going to talk though all the details of this case or whatever. And sometimes in procedurals you just have to swallow your pride, and that’s just the way it’s going to have to work. But more likely you’re going to be able to get that information out or get that sense of how we’re going to get to the next scene through conflict and through confrontation. Someone says something, and another character challenges, “But blah, blah, blah, blah.” “Yes, however, blah, blah, blah, blah.” The ability to sort of push back against the other characters in the scene is much more likely to get you to a good place than just agreeing all the time.

Craig: Absolutely. And you can use some of these conflict cue cards here if you’re struggling. If you have a Harry the Explainer, if you need an info dump – and sometimes you do – have the person listening be confused. Have them be struggling against circumstance. Someone is talking and they’re trying to escape while the person is talking. There’s always ways to avoid just the people talking.

John: That’s a great example. And I like that you go back to these initial six points about what is conflict, because in that explainer scene, you could actually be explaining the dilemma. Basically, the person, the explainer, could lay out the two – these are the two options and they’re both terrible. That is a way to create conflict through the action of the scene. And that’s going to probably be awesome. So look for that.

Next thing I’ll point to is the struggle for the steering wheel and that usually one character is driving the scene, but sometimes they can be wrestling over who is in control of the scene, this conversation, this moment, where they’re going to go to next. And that struggle for the steering wheel is real. That happens in real life. And it can happen in your scene.
Obviously, if you’re writing a movie with a central character, that central character should be driving most of the scenes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have other strong characters come in there and express their desire for control of that moment.

Craig: Yeah. And you’ll see this primarily in two-handers. It’s funny, I never really thought of it with that phrase “struggle for the steering wheel,” but that’s pretty much what’s going on in Identity Thief for the whole movie.

John: That’s literally a steering wheel.

Craig: I don’t think there’s ever a technical struggle for the steering wheel, but the two of them are just in complete – it’s really a battle for control. And that’s what’s going on the whole time.

John: Sort of a corollary to the knowing what each character wants, but making sure that it’s clear to the characters and to the audience, the if/then of the scene. So if this circumstance happens, then the outcome is going to be this.

Sometimes I’ve come into a scene where I don’t really know what’s at stake. I don’t know what the goal of the scene is. I don’t know what the goal of this conversation is. And so making it clear to the audience and clear to the characters in the scene what it is they’re trying to do and then what the outcome is that they’re hoping for.

Every time that you are in a conversation in real life, you have a sense of like, these are the kinds of things that could be happening next. And you need to have the same sense for your own characters. And hopefully, the characters in a scene don’t all have the same sense of where they’re going to go to. Otherwise, they could just skip forward all those steps and be at that place.

Craig: This very thing, this make clear the if/then, is why a lot of first-time writers screw up. For whatever reason, I feel like they’re primarily worried about trying to write naturalistic dialogue. Everybody is in a panic about writing dialogue that sounds normal. But all of our normal dialogue throughout the day is not if/then. It’s just this. We’re just going to talk about lunch. And they don’t understand that movies are about those days or weeks in someone’s life that define their life. It’s the craziest days or weeks in a human being’s life. So everything is far more important. This is all staked up.

And so when you are in a situation where there are high stakes, then every moment should have an if/then. Every moment. Because you are constantly moving toward your goal and away from pain; or mistakenly towards pain and away from your goal. There is no relaxy stuff. People draw all the wrong lessons.

John: Very much related to that is to really be mindful of where you’re coming into a scene and where you’re exiting a scene, because in real life, conflicts will rise up, and then they will diminish. If you wait long enough, every conflict is going to taper off and everything is going to get back to normal. But your job as the writer is to figure out, how do I get out of that scene before all the conflict has resolved. How do I think about coming into a scene where the conflict is already there?

By figuring out where you can first turn on the camera in that scene and where you can exit the scene, that’s going to get you to the heart of your conflict. The part of the scene you really want is generally that hot spot, that flare right in the very middle of it.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. If you’re going to let a conflict peter out, it better be for comedy sake, because it’s a lie, it’s a misdirect. Otherwise, absolutely; nobody wants to watch people make up over and over and over throughout the course of a movie. We need conflict. We must have it.

John: Next point. If your characters are not in conflict, then the external conflict better be really apparent and right in their face. If your characters are getting along fine, then the thing they’re facing should be right there. Literally, the lion should be right in front of them.

If there’s a lion in the distance, or there’s a roar you hear in the distance, your characters in our present scene should still be bickering or fighting with each other. It’s only when that thing is right in front of you, then you can drop the conflict right between those two characters that we’re looking at.

Craig: Yeah. And you might say, why? If there are two people and a lion is far away, why are they arguing about who is going to have to take care of the lion? Why can’t they just work it out like friends? And the answer is because they’re bad people. I hate to put it that way. But characters in movies should be bad people. I don’t mean bad like evil; I mean bad like they’re not finished.

John: Yeah. They shouldn’t be perfect.

Craig: Right. They’re not idealized. They are messes who are struggling with something that will be overcome by the end of the movie. But because it is by definition not the end of the movie at this point, they have these flaws. And the tragic flaw of any of these characters is going to manifest itself through conflict that should otherwise probably be avoided.

Look, let’s go back to The Matrix, because it’s such a basic fairy tale. The whole point of The Matrix is you’re the one you have to believe. When you start believing you’re the one, you’ll be the one. His tragic flaw is that he doesn’t believe. His tragic flaw is that he is incapable of faith in self. If he doesn’t have that tragic flaw, they come to him, and the guy says, “You’re the one,” and he goes, “Great.” And then the next scene, he does it, and we’re good. And then they have a party on the ship.

The conflict is driven entirely by the fact that he’s not finished baking. That’s why your characters must be arguing with each other, even if you like them both, about who is going to handle the tiger. I’ve changed it to a tiger.

John: Tigers and lions. They both work really well. You can mate them together. You get a liger. It’s all good.
Craig: The liger. The liger.

John: I’m going to circle back to what you were talking about with The Matrix, because I think that was a great example of – if Neo had just accepted his fate from the start, like, “Oh, I’m the chosen one? Okay, great. Let me do this thing,” the movie would have been 10 minutes long.

I want to talk about that in context of how do you sustain conflict over the whole course of a movie, because there have been times where I’ve read scripts that I’ve really enjoyed the writing, but I felt like, “Okay, on about page 50 we’re done. Everything that needed to happen happened. Okay. I guess we have another 50 pages to read through, but I don’t know why we’re reading through these things.” Let’s talk about some ways that you sustain conflict over the length of your movie.

First off is the question: are you resolving the central conflict too early? If there’s a thing that the character wants, are you giving them what they want too early? That’s sort of an obvious thing. You’re not going to find that all that often. Usually, people have a sense like, oh, I need to actually wait until near the end of the movie for the person to win the championship boxing prize.

But as Lindsay Doran often points out, the real nature of victory in these kind of movies usually is not winning the championship match; it’s resolving that conflict with your wife. It is the achieving this inner vision for who you need to be in your life. And if that happens too early, that’s not going to be a good experience to sit through the rest of the movie.

Craig: Yeah. And you can really see this with biopics because biopics are stuck with facts. And when you see a bad one, you’re watching somebody go overcome their conflict and then now they’re famous and stuff. And then you can feel the movie trying to manufacture conflict and struggling to do so, or manufacturing the same kind of conflict over and over.

That’s why one of my favorite biopics is What’s Love Got to Do With It, because it’s got this incredible conflict going through it that changes and builds and crescendos and finally is resolved. And that’s what we want. That’s why in biopics in particular you can see how the external successes are meaningless. That’s the whole point. Oh, all you thought it was just fun and games and fame, but look what was really going on. We like that sort of thing.

You definitely don’t want to make the mistake of the bad biopic. You don’t want to reward your character too soon. You want to hold back. There should be really one reward. That has to land essentially 10 pages before the movie ends. I don’t know how else to do it.

John: That sounds so formulaic, but it’s absolutely so true. And the success of writing is finding ways to get to that place, so when that moment comes, it feels like a tremendous reward that you didn’t quite see coming that way. That it’s still a surprise to you. That you may not even as an audience quite recognize what it is that you wanted them to achieve, but then they achieve it and that’s fantastic. Or if they don’t achieve it and that’s tragic. Yet, that is the point of how you’re constructing your movie.

Craig: Yeah. In Up, Carl wants to make good on his promise and take the house and land it on the place where his dead wife wanted to be. And in the end, he’s changed that, as we knew he would, and he finally lets the house go. And when he lets the house go, we understand. Maybe there’s five minutes left? Maybe eight or nine. I don’t know how much we can bear.

But the point is if that in your creation is coming at the minute 30 mark, you have a short film. Just know you’ve got 10 minutes after that thing. That’s it. And then stop.

John: It has to be done. Next thing I want to point out is sometimes you’re hitting the same note too many times. You are trying so sustain the conflict, but if you’re just sustaining the conflict by having the same argument again, or having the same fight again, then you’ve lost us. Because we need to see each time we revisit that conflict, revisit that theme, it needs to be different. There needs to be a change that has happened. If the same characters are having the same argument on page 80 as they did on page 20, that’s not going to be successful.

Craig: Agreed. Again, What’s Love Got to Do With It is a good example of this, because the actual nature of domestic violence is incredibly repetitive. A man beats up a woman. The police come. She doesn’t press charges. They go away. A man beats up the woman. And this happens over and over and over and over and over. Tragic, but not movie tragic.

The problem is, and it’s terrible to say, that in narrative form what happens is we become numb to it. We become numb to narrative repetition. What that movie does so well is it changes the nature of the abuse subtly but almost every single time. Whether it’s I’m going to say something to you, I’m going to be cruel to you, or I’m going to control you. Now I hit you once. Now I’m on drugs and I’m out of control. Now I hit you a lot.

Now the problem is now you’re having an argument with somebody else about why you don’t want to leave him. Now you’re having an argument with him about him cheating. We’re starting to change the arrows. You really can’t do the same fight over and over and over. You’ll start to feel very, very bored, unless you have a simple adventure movie where – martial arts movies oftentimes really are just a video game of increasingly difficult battles until you face the boss, and that’s okay. That’s what people are going for.
But even in those, there should be some sort of internal conflict.

John: Yeah. Generally in those cases, those conflicts, there will be dance numbers that are like a different kind of dance number, so each of those fights is a little bit different, so it feels like you have made forward progress. There’s a video I’ll link to that takes a look at Snowcatcher. Snowpiercer, sorry, Snowpiercer. Foxcatcher/Snowpiercer.

Craig: I want to see Snowcatcher.

John: Yeah. It’s basically the guy who catches snowball. He does such a great job. But then his snowball catching coach is really creepy. It’s pretty great. And it’s post-apocalyptic, too.

Craig: Of course.

John: In Snowpiercer there’s a video that shows left or right, which is the fundamental dilemma of the movie. But essentially that movie is completely linear. It literally goes from the left side of the train to the right side of the train, from the back to the front. It could have that quality of just being a grind, like fight after fight after fight, and yet it’s able to make each of them different and actually change how the Chris Evans character is facing each of these battles, because he’s questioning his own choices along the way.

Craig: That’s right. Each successive conflict point should change the character. It doesn’t have to change them for better. It doesn’t have to change them necessarily for the worse. Sometimes it just changes them sideways. Sometimes they just learn information. But it’s always about character.

And you have to remember through all of these conflicts that the people watching the movie without knowing it are constantly doing this computation of connecting the character’s conflict and tragedy to their own. Constantly.

We’re coming up on our discussion of Whiplash. Very few people are jazz drummers. I don’t know how many there are left.

John: There are probably more screenwriters than there are jazz drummers.

Craig: There are probably more screenwriters than jazz drummers. But that’s okay. We can all do the computational math to connect it to the analogs in our life.

John: Yeah. Going back to this idea of sustaining conflict across the nature of the movie, you pointed to this in your last discussion here, is that you’re looking for ways that these conflicts are changing the characters and basically how do you make it worse for your hero.

There are certain tropes that I sort of fall back on, but they’re meaningful. And to me it’s burning down the house. How are you making it so it’s impossible for them to go back to the way they were before. How do you make it so it’s impossible for them to get back to a place of safety? How can you have characters betray each other or betray their own visions? How can you pull characters away from the other characters that they love? You’re looking for ways to make things worse so that the conflict actually increases and doesn’t get resolved too early in your story.

Craig: To use The Matrix as an example, what we’re talking about I think is the genesis of one of the smartest choices in that movie. They didn’t need the Oracle character. What they had was a screenwriting problem if you think about it. Laurence Fishburne, Morpheus, is saying, I’ve been looking around. I’m really smart. I’m essentially the smartest person in the world based on what the movie is telling everyone. And I believe you are the one. I’ve been watching you. And I think you’re the one.

Now, we have no idea why. The answer to that question why is because they don’t know either. Nobody knows. It’s just let’s just take it as a given. He’s watched him. He’s smart. You’re the one. The problem then is Keanu Reeves doesn’t believe he’s the one, but I know he’s the one, so I guess I’ve got to watch this jerk not believe what I already believe until he finally believes it. And that’s brutal. That’s just brutal. I’m way ahead of him.

Enter the Oracle character, a brilliant idea from the Wachowskis, who is going to confirm that this is the one – Morpheus. It’s just a little check to make sure. She says, “You’re not.” She actually doesn’t say, “You’re not.” She says, “But you know what I’m already going to say.” And he says, “I’m not the one.” She says, “Sorry. It’s not all good news. Have a cookie.” Great character. And that was really important, because what that did was start us all running other computational math. And then it made the revelation later – she told you exactly what you needed to hear – impactful. By the way, that comes up in Whiplash as well.

John: It does. Absolutely. Before we get to Whiplash, I want to talk through one of my favorite movies of all time and sort of how it does conflict and how it sustains conflict over the course of the whole nature of the movie, which is of course my dearest most favorite movie, which is Aliens.

Craig: Game over, man.

John: Oh, my god, it’s just such an amazingly good movie.

Craig: Why’d you put her in charge?

John: Within each and every scene, there is terrific conflict. And Ripley is always in conflict with characters. Sometimes she’s arguing. Sometimes she’s disagreeing with what they’re doing. Sometimes she just doesn’t want to go on the mission at all. And she’s sort of forced into going on this mission. In every moment within each scene, if she’s not driving the scene, she is your eyes on the scene and she is your way into the scene. And she is in conflict with everyone around her basically the entire movie.

But if you look at the movie macro overall, it does just a brilliant job of not ever letting her get out of conflict. And actually, each point along the way she is getting herself more and more into more immediately dangerous physical conflict with either soldiers she’s sent on the mission with or with a group of aliens or the Alien Queen. The movie is so smartly constructed to make sure that the conflict is continuously escalating up through the very, very, very end.

Craig: Yeah. He, Cameron had this really – I don’t know if this was quite this conscious, but he created this situation that was remarkably frustrating. Frustration is a great feeling to inspire an audience.

She knows. She’s the one person who has experienced this thing, these things. She knows and everybody else is being either arrogant or duplicitous. And it’s incredibly frustrating to watch her continue to say this is bad and have nobody else really care, or think that it’s not that bad. And then it’s more frustrating when the truth emerges and all the arrogant people are now cowards, or at least one notably is a coward who is saying, “We got to go. We can’t win.” And she’s saying, “No, actually you can. I’ve done that before too.” And now she has a kid.

The conflict of frustration is wonderful. It makes us angry. And anger is a terrific thing to inspire an audience, as long as you can eventually release it with some kind of final triumph.

John: What Cameron was so smart about recognizing is that the audience had the same information as Ripley. And so we and Ripley both knew that the aliens were incredibly dangerous and this was an incredibly stupid idea to go on this rescue mission to this planet.
And he was able to let her articulate exactly what we’re thinking, like, “No, no, don’t go there.” And yet we all had to go there together.

And it was a very smart setup and a very smart change along the way, because we would make the same choices Ripley made, or at least we hope we would make the same choices as Ripley made, to go to try to save Newt, to save the other soldiers, to do what she could.

Craig: Yeah. Also, brilliantly, he understood, and I think Cameron has always understood this: that beyond all the hoopla of the effects, and the light, and the noise, and the monsters, we will always care about the person more than anything. And so we don’t care about the monsters.

I bet so many directors saw Alien and thought, wow, it’s about the monsters, man. And it’s not. It’s never about the monsters. We’re the monsters. We’re the problem. Whoa, dude.

John: Whoa dude. Just to delay Whiplash one more moment, as we were preparing our outline of notes for this thing, I started thinking back to my own movies and I wanted to quickly go through my movies and figure out which ones had conflict that basically drove it, and which ones didn’t so much.

My very first movie, Go, it’s a conflict factory. Everyone is in conflict at all times. Ronna wants to make this tiny drug deal happen. She sets off this series of events. Claire keeps trying to be the voice of reason and keeps getting ignored. The second section, the four guys in Vegas, every one of those guys is in conflict the entire time. And sometimes it’s just bantery conflict, but then it gets much, much worse throughout the thing. And in the final chapter, Adam and Zack, they seem to be at each other’s throats. We’re not sure why. We find out that they’re a couple and that they’ve been sleeping with the same guy. So, that whole movie is a conflict thing.

But compare that to the Charlie’s Angels movies, and one of the real frustrations of the Charlie’s Angels movies is the Angels kind of had to get along. They’re supposed to be a team, they’re supposed to be sisters. They weren’t supposed to fight with each other. And so we had to create a lot of external conflict just so you wouldn’t kind of notice that they were getting along so well.

That’s one of the challenges of that kind of movie is if they’re supposed to be a team that gets along great together, well, it’s hard to have it introduced in a scene. Somebody else has to show up to make there be a problem.

Craig: When they’re not in conflict with each other, sometimes it’s hard just to figure out who’s supposed to talk next.

John: Absolutely true. I was reminded by Max Temkin, who created Cards Against Humanity, one of the guys behind that – he had this great blog post this last week about how to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 hours. And so he basically gives you a viewing list to go through the whole series and understand what made that series so great. But he points out that Roddenberry did not want there to be any conflict between the characters at all.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So those first few seasons, he didn’t want the characters to disagree with each other unless they were possessed by some other force or something else. And so it became really hard to write those characters in scenes because they had to get along. They had to follow orders.

Craig: It’s strange. I never really thought about it that way. I love that show. I watched every episode of that show. And it is true. You sort of began to see them all as vaguely people, but really more — you were waiting for them to fight someone.

John: Yeah. And so season three, like after Roddenberry was gone, it did change. And you started to see some conflicts between each other which were useful. It never progressed as far as later science fiction shows would take it, but there was some real —

Craig: Yeah. Worf would get all grumpy.

John: Big Fish. Big Fish, there’s not a lot of conflict in the Edward flashback scenes. It’s sort of his story. Because it is idealized. It is happy and wonderful. But the movie is structured around a central conflict between the father and the son. And in my 15-year journey of making different versions of Big Fish, that’s always been the hardest thing is how to have that conflict feel real and meaningful, and yet not have the son become completely unlikeable and not make the father so overbearing that you kind of want him to be dead. And that is a fundamental challenge of that movie.

Craig: And that was certainly something that we went around and around on with Melissa’s character on Identify Thief.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Craig:  Melissa and I and Jason all felt pretty strongly that the only way it was going to work was if we just took all of the safety belts off of her character and let her be awful. Just let her be awful. But the very first scene had to show – it’s like the planting the seed of redemption. There’s a difference – even Darth Vader. Before we really get to see Darth Vader going bananas and being a jerk, Obi Wan says, “Darth Vader was a pupil of mine. He was great. But then he turned to the dark side.” And we go, okay, well there’s a good guy in there somewhere. So when he turns, we think, yes, finally, he has returned. He’s not turned; he’s returned.

When you have these awful characters, you need to set up the return fairly early on. Some sign that they were not just simply born psychopathic. Otherwise we won’t believe the return. For me, all of my movies have conflict, because comedy is conflict. That’s all it is.

[Episode 402 Clip]

Craig: Listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

John: Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

Craig: Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story, and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them, and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?
John: Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question, because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes, but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of a failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

Craig: No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking, and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

John: Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions, and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often, I think especially in our blockbusters, we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world, and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

Craig: Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet; now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive, which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there are people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day, because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up. It’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose, and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

John: That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes, our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters, and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws, there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem, there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing, the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened, these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out, because if we do let this get out, then there will be a panic. Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

Craig: Yeah. For some characters in the show, the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people, the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to, then there’s going to be chaos. Everybody had their different competing interests.

For instance, in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes. One guy is, “I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that, because if I don’t, I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat.” And the other character’s stakes are, “That’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.” Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

John: And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, okay, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes, and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes, which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies, it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture, and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

Craig: All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes, I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest, because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you, but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

John: So Craig, let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes. And obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes, which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. We see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back, and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark, and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution, because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time, was really smartly done.

Craig: Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe, they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals. What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important.

I just think these broader stakes of “something is going to blow up” is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

John: It doesn’t matter.

Craig: I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s what I’m hoping for.

John: Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices, the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels movies fundamentally – will this family be torn apart? Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

Craig: Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes, and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people, but you understood watching it – and you may have to adjust – that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important, it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all,” quote unquote, and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

John: Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich, which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing, they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but that it is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

Craig: Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us, like, “What are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same, and the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel, my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s okay to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that, but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

John: I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that, where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases, it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that, which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question, you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff, it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other. So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

Craig: Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank, then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally, there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing, there are stakes. So it’s always there.

[End of Clips]

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article from this past week from The Guardian all about whether it’s appropriate to apostrophe-S to the end of Kamala Harris’s name when you’re using it as possessive. It’s a complicated situation, because AP Style Guide says if a person’s name ends in an S, you just add an apostrophe, and not the apostrophe-S.

Drew: That’s what I was always taught.

John: But that’s not actually how most places really do it. AP Style Guide says one thing, but in most cases, they’ll say you should actually do it the way you pronounce it. We say “Harris’s.” We say the apostrophe-S. Most grammarians, most word nerds would say you should really add the apostrophe-S. It’s an ongoing debate.

Drew: That makes sense it’s a debate, because my defenses went up. I was like, it’s an apostrophe at the end of the S, and that is final. I’m interested to read this.

John: It’s one of those situations where there’s no perfect answer. Benjamin Dreyer, who’s one of the more practical grammarians out there, says it’s not worth worrying about so much, and because it’s not worth worrying about so much, probably apostrophe-S makes the most sense, because it just disappears for people.

Drew: I can see that written out too in my head like “Harris’s,” apostrophe-S.

John: Fine.

Drew: I’m open to it.

John: Drew, what do you got?

Drew: I have two this week.

John: Please.

Drew: They’re both food related. If you’re in LA, The Heights Deli and Bottle Shop in Lincoln Heights. It’s my new neighborhood. I just found it. It’s great. They do sandwiches. They have cans, like you can have beer, and they have wine. That’s it. It’s just very barebones. But the sandwiches are delicious. They’re huge. They’re 11 to 13 bucks. The wine is really nice, really cool stuff, like pét-nats and stuff like that, but priced well. If you’re going to a friend’s party and want to show up, but you don’t want to spend more than 20 bucks, The Heights Bottle Shop has you covered.

John: How does this compare to Larchmont Wine and Cheese? Which naturally, people are going to have it as a reference, because that’s an iconic brand. It’s a wine store on Larchmont Boulevard that for some reason sells sandwiches.

Drew: Such a good question. They sell the same things, basically, but totally different. The way Larchmont Wine and Cheese is, there’s lots of different pieces to it. They have olives and things like that. It feels very lived in and worn. Heights Deli and Bottle Shop feels much more like The Bear. It’s much more stripped down. It’s just fridges running with some beer, wine in the middle, and sandwiches on the side. There’s not that kind of curation that Larchmont Wine and Cheese has, or at least with all the little pieces. I feel like they’re less cheese enthusiast at The Heights Bottle Shop.

John: I guess the store is Larchmont Wine and Cheese, so the cheese is a big part of it.

Drew: It hinges on the cheese.

John: The cheese stands alone. What are these Cheerios Veggie Blends?

Drew: Cheerios Veggie Blends, brand new cereal. I had sworn off cereal. I’m back. They are delicious. They’re really good for you. They’ve got a quarter cup of fruits and veggies. I don’t know if that’s real. I had a high school chemistry teacher who broke apart why all cereal marketing is lies. But they’re delicious. They’re really good. They’ve brought me back to cereal. They are Cheerios Veggie Blends. Worth giving a shot.

John: If we’re hyping cereals, I will say that my new go-to has been Fiber One, which is an iconic good cereal, a high-fiber cereal, but you add in a little bit of the Special K Zero. Special K Zero is a very low-carb cereal that if you were to eat a bowl by itself would taste kind of weird. It doesn’t work by itself, but that on top of some Fiber One, delicious, love it.

Drew: Is there any sweetness to the Special K Zero?

John: There is. It uses some magical process to create a thing. It’s probably soy based. It’s actually not a grain-based thing. It has the texture of cereal without actually being cereal.

Drew: I feel like I’m at this point in my life now where I’ve pulled back on sugar so much that even that little bit of memories of sugar does it for me.

John: Delicious. Drew, thank you so much for putting this episode together. That is our show for this week. These segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is now produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, as always.

Our outro this week is by Tim Brown, has a good Western theme. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. If you are curious about the game person we’re trying to hire, there’s a link in the show notes, so click through to that. Don’t send it to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. It’s a whole different place you apply for that.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You’ll love them. They’re 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 on the conflict in Whiplash. Drew, thanks so much.

Drew: Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: We’ve delayed long enough. Let’s talk about Whiplash. Whiplash is a movie made by Damien Chazelle. I quite enjoyed it. The script for it you can find in Weekend Read. Sony finally published it on their site. We’ll have links to both the pdf version and the Weekend Read version of it. It’s slightly different than the one they actually sent out to us, which is strange, but that’s just the way it happens sometimes.

I was actually fascinated by the way that Whiplash is essentially a two-hander, and it’s just a conflict machine. It’s basically the story of Andrew and his drumming professor, his jazz teacher, professor, and their conflict throughout the course of this movie.

Craig: There’s so much to talk about with this movie. Because we’re running a little long here, I’m wondering should we maybe move it to the next show, because not only is it a great study of how to portray conflict and to escalate conflict and change conflict, but also, it’s got this whole other discussion about art and being an artist.

John: I think we should move the art discussion to the next one, but let’s just talk a little bit about the conflict, so we can wrap up this episode to be super conflict-y.

What I think is so smart – and I’m going to use one of our favorite words again. I apologize in advance that we use this every episode. It’s specificity. I completely understood what each of the characters was doing and why they were doing it, even though I don’t know a damn thing about jazz bands or drumming. I don’t care about jazz bands or drumming, and yet the specificity of it made me believe that the filmmakers understood it, and every character in this thing loved it and was obsessed with it.

When you have characters who deeply believe in their worlds and deeply believe in their world visions who come into conflict, you’re going to have potential for great stuff. I thought it really achieved that. I understood what Andrew wanted. I understand that he had this vision of himself as being one of the greatest drummers of all time. I had this vision that Fletcher saw himself as a kingmaker of sorts. He saw himself as the gatekeeper between you are just a jazz student and you are one of the greats. Yet the movie asked me to keep asking the question, is this guy trying to inspire his students, or is this guy just a sociopath? That was really, really well done.

Craig: It’s funny, I made my list of conflict types before I saw Whiplash. As I look through this list, I realize Whiplash has done all of them. It has physical arguments and verbal arguments. It even has struggle against circumstance. There’s a sequence where the bus that Andrew’s on breaks down, and he’s late, and he has to figure out how to get to the auditorium on time.

It certainly has unfulfilled desire. The movie’s soaking in it. He desperately wants to be great, and he doesn’t know how to be great.

It’s got avoiding a negative outcome. He’s trying to not be punished at times. There’s a scene where he breaks up with a girl and is trying to not hurt her feelings.

There’s a wonderful scene that’s based entirely on the conflict of confusion, where he is asked to play something in front of an audience that he doesn’t know.

John: There’s actually a couple great moments of confusion along the way, where he’s not sure, like, wait, did I get invited to the band? Did I show up late? What’s going to go on here? Wait, why am I not playing this? There’s the rate of confusion throughout.

Craig: That’s right. He’s told to show up for practice at 6:00 a.m. sharp. He wakes up at 6:05 in a panic, runs, falls on his face, gets up, keeps running. Finally gets there at 6:10 and sees outside that actually practice starts at 9:00 a.m.

John: He has that weight of confusion, like, “Wait, was I too late? Was I too early?” and what do you do.

Craig: Why did he tell-

John: It was the whole experience. It was incredibly specific to his situation, his moment. It was universal, because we’ve all had that thing of like, I don’t know if I just made a horrible mistake or what.

Craig: Right, is this my fault or is it his fault. Then lastly, dilemma. It’s got a huge dilemma in it. That’s articulated between his relationship with him and his father, and that is, is this worth dying for? Do I have to die to be great?

John: There are small dilemmas along the way too, which basically, do I send the letter talking about what actually happened, or do I not? That later becomes the confusion of, does Fletcher know what I did, or does Fletcher not know? The revelations of Fletcher’s actual motives comes onstage in a brilliant way. Interestingly, when you look through the screenplay, it happens differently in the screenplay, or it’s tipped in the screenplay.

I think we should come back to Whiplash next week. Maybe more people will have read the script, so we can get a little more specific about what is on the page. Because the movie has a lot of action sequences without any dialog, and it does a great job, I think, of doing that.

But also, you can look at the great example of what changes between a script and what changes in a movie. There’s little small things, little razorblades that went in there, and cut stuff out. I think they made for a stronger movie. That said, I’m not sure I would’ve changed anything in the script, because I think maybe you needed to have that stuff in the script so you would understand what was going on there. But you sometimes don’t need that in the final movie. The change between what was on the printed page and what showed up on the screen is really fascinating.

Craig: There are some big razorblades that came in too. It’s a very comforting thing. A lot of times we watch a movie, and we think, how am I supposed to write a script that’s as good as that? You’re not. The guy that wrote that movie also didn’t write a script as good as that. That’s the point. You’re going to make mistakes.

It’s funny; as I read through the script of Whiplash, I would occasionally get to a bit that wasn’t in the movie. It would read like a mistake, and I would also think, I know why he made that mistake. I make that mistake too. It’s a totally normal mistake. Sometimes that’s the thing. Sometimes it’s not a mistake.

John: Some of the things that get taken out of the movie, I can totally see why they would’ve worked, or maybe would’ve worked with different actors. Maybe you needed to have that moment just to play this thing. But because it’s a movie on a visual stage, we get the relationship between those characters. We don’t need any of the words that they just said.

Craig: Exactly.

Links:

• John’s Video Game Job Posting
• Episode 179 – The Conflict Episode
• Episode 402 – How Do You Like Your Stakes?
• Snowpiercer – Left or Right by Every Frame a Painting on YouTube
• Star Trek: The Next Generation In 40 Hours by Max Temkin
• Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds from The Guardian
• The Heights Deli & Bottle Shop
• Cheerios Veggie Blends
• Special K Zero
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
• Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 647 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today I am so lucky to have two Scriptnotes producers in the studio with me. Megana Rao, welcome back.

Megana Rao: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

John: Drew, of course, you’re always here.

Drew Marquardt: You’re stuck with me.

John: We are doing a compendium episode, a best of things. Drew, as you were putting this together, you realized that this is familiar territory here.

Drew: It’s an endings compendium. Going through, I found out that Megana had already made an endings compendium in Episode 524, which was very good, but I’m gonna try and one-up you.

Megana: I so welcome that. Yes and me, please.

Drew: That’s the best way to do it.

John: Talk to me about the things you chose for this, which Megana may have already chosen for her episode too.

Drew: We’re starting out with a clip from Episode 44, which is breaking down how an ending works. It’s a really great primer for what you should be looking for in endings. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 170 and talk about twist endings. There was a great article that provided a framework for that. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 366 to talk about denouements, that little moment after you’re climax where you’re wanting to wrap everything up. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 392, talking about how that last moment or last image develops and how to fix an ending that’s not working.

John: The reason why this is relevant for me this week is I was just doing the Sundance Labs. One of the things you do in Sundance Labs traditionally is show a scene from your movies or movies you enjoy. The theme for this lab session was endings. Susannah Grant was talking about the ending of Erin Brockovich. It’s not just about winning the case. It’s all the things that happen after that and how you tie up all those relationships and things that actually matter to your audience. Endings were on my mind.

It’s great to have both of you here for this. We’ll start with this Episode 44 clip and then hear bloops between them. But the three of us will be back here at the end for our One Cool Things, little wrap-up, and then we’ll do our Bonus Segment. We’re gonna talk about reunions, which is something that happens after an ending.

Drew: Yeah, like right now.

John: Yeah.

[Episode 44 Clip]

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start looking at writing screenplays and start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re gonna walk away from your movie with. They’re gonna walk away from your movie with an ending.

And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig: I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first 5 pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s gonna end. That’s insane to me.

John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”

The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line. It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. And so often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.

So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first 10 pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody or they just have to finish. And so those last 10 pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started, which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.

My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right, because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this – not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this – and that ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.

And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected – it always seems to me it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.

That’s the point is that there is an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was, so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.

John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re gonna get to, like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City, because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence. What is the need in Wizard of Oz?

Craig: But that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away.

John: That’s right.

Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just gotta want to go back home. I know you ran away. You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”

That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending – it’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning. We’d be done with this thing.” But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point, the ending is defined by faith and decision.

And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies – and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re gonna cross the streams. We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t gonna do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s gonna be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie, they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about – sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.

John: And we are specifically talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we see? How are we gonna meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing – and frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning, because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise but was actually very illuminating, because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie, because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.

Craig: I love it.

John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.

And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean I know what the character thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.

When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life – and Pixar does this better than anybody. And they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films.

I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s gonna leave that and go back. And I like that, but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go. They design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl – the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.

And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with Boy Scout; flying, talking dogs; and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.

John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines. And the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?

And so quite early on, I had to figure out like, what is it that the son can — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing that that’s going to be incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that. I could feel that. Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to, what are the steps that are going to get me to that point?

And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, in this case Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that ending – the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of – I met John Williams. At USC, the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.

And John Williams made this really great point, that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s your ending. And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumb’s up. But if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer.

And similarly, when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie, when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.

John: But what I want to make sure that people who are listening – we are not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point, and so one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yeah, and maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside in fact he was awful, and in a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he just died alone. And yet there’s something nice about the image, because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there.

[Episode 170 Clip]

John: So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley. Whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.

This blog post talks through twist endings. It defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.” And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies, because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.

Craig: Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal of identity, in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster.

John: The Crying Game where the woman you love is not –

Craig: Is not a woman.

John: Ta-da.

Craig: Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.

John: That would also maybe play into the third version, which is the reversal of perception. And reversal of perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was.

My movie The Nines has that aspect, where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all.” But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.

Craig: Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder, in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.

John: Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen, because in some ways, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal, but a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes, you’ve spent eight hours on this thing, and then to say like, “Oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you,” might feel like a betrayal.

Craig: No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.

One of the other twist endings he identifies is the reversal of motive. I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. He cites Seven, where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.

John: Obviously, reversal of motive is often found in comedies also, where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. In the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack, like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen, and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products. Their motive was very different, and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting.

And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect, because you’re like, “Oh, that’s the twist,” and then the next scene, you’re going to see that actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting. So sometimes you can misdirect twice or you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.

Craig: Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. What just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks… She is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there undercover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.

And here he also has reversal of fortune. This one was a little – I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory. What you thought you were going to get, you’re not quite getting.

John: Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory, or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar, who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” And so this is basically, there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly that Twilight Zone kind of fiction may have that, like suddenly at the end, the great and short version, where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.

Craig: Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending. One of my favorite Simpsons jokes, it was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it, so he doesn’t have to go to Hell. But then he does finish it and he ends up in Hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment, where he’s put on a conveyor belt and-

John: And force-fed doughnuts.

Craig: … force-fed donuts, except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many donuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes.” Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment. And then we have reversal of fulfillment.

John: Which I found the most challenging of the ones he described, and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.

Craig: Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.

John: It’s not only that they’ve done this, but one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.

Craig: Right, that the gifts are now useless for each other. Yeah, that works. That sort of, kind of is also-

John: It’s ironic too.

Craig: It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.

John: Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at, what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist, and so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending, the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”

So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information, and then at the end, providing it, and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s the only thing your story has going for it, it’s unlikely, I think, to be completely satisfying.

Craig: That’s right. I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all. It does not.

The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie whodunit. All of Agatha Christie’s stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it, and you never could figure out who did it, and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time. Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her.

And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high-wire act to do when you… We all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I wonder what the twist is.” I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, “Well-”

John: “Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.

John: There’s a meta level of expectation, that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending. So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, “Oh, but that’s not really true.” And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.

What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names, because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him, because three times is certainly a pattern.

Craig: No, for sure. Frankly, it’s started to feel a little desperate. We don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently, and then we can enjoy it along with them.

By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this mystery writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization, because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft, because the twist…

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first-person account. A guy is living in this little town. Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him. He describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator. And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.

John: Yeah, we like that. In many ways, I think that’s that kind of reversal of expectation. That’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. You thought this was going to play by the rules, and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens. It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.

Craig: It’s my One Cool Thing.

John: Oh my god. Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is. I know what it’s parodying.

Craig: Repeatedly.

John: Repeatedly. And then, through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.

Craig: Indeed.

[Episode 366 Clip]

Craig: My fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. It’s not, with me, as always, any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.

It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say, “How does the movie end?” Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax, when things have settled down. And there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.

I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you. If you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. “Denouement” is a French word. “Denoue” is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something, because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created, sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages. Correct, Craig?

Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.

I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say, okay, what is the difference here? And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing. That’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. And at the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0.

The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last, that this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person. This is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally, and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing, or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding, because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says, “Okay.” We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. They have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?”

Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax: Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement: Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end, and Manny’s final question is, “So what are we doing for New Years?” It’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before, that the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son is now born and saying like, “Oh, did all that really happen?” and the father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking, “The characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.”

Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her.

And the denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” But what’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is okay. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name. And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there, and it could have – she was a criminal – but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on.

And then she punches a guard in the throat, because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie. And it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief, you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. And here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat, because you change but you don’t change completely, because that feels gloppy, right?

But both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A-plot of your movie. Your A-plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally. It’s how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important.

For instance, if your theme is “all you need is love,” then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there.

If your problem is, “Okay, my character is Vanessa. And Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved,” which is an incredibly trite movie – I apologize to Vanessa – at the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success, because then I start to wonder, okay, what was the lesson here?

Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes. The denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, so if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather, letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big (sings) and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely.

The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is okay.

John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories. We don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.

Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film, you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring, because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started.” And if you are not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.

John: Let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script, I will generally jump forward and write the last 10 pages, so some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.

Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often, you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last 10 pages, which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.

Craig: That just infuriates me, the very thought of it, because I obsess over those the way I obsess over the first 10. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie, essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.

John: Probably so.

Craig: I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way. Creatively, obviously, inside the robot management, I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But yeah, I’m a big planner.

John: I’m very instinctual, and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.

Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.

John: Let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement, because the denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationship, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit. Whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job, when they see the last bit of the movie, they will in their minds add on the following words: “And thus it shall always be.” And if you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad.

John: True.

Craig: Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there.

Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this (sings). It’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “Our life is hard and it’s tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go, and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say “and thus it shall always be,” meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place – let’s just call it 1910 – is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be.

It doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be “and sadly ever after.” But the point is it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important, because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yeah. Everyone is going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding; so whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.

[Episode 392 Clip]

John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.

And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last beat has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.

Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it doesn’t change much for me. But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

John: I start with it too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry, that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.

But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much “we shot the script,” those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change, because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and where it’s delivered it to.

Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

Craig: To start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. The last shot really is about sunsets, but of course it’s not.

For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.

We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. She would cite how sometimes she would ask people what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other, and there’s pride.

Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up.

And way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question and someone asked us, “I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” And my answer was, “You should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.”

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

Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle, you don’t have a thing to trace, were you a good circle drawer?

John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.

If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click, connection to the beginning.

One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I think it’s just Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind, but also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.

John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.

So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about. The narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable.” Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound. We start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place, because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.

John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy. Each of the books has had that sense of reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.

Being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different, because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.

Craig: Yeah. Reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.

John: It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.

Craig: It is. But then when you look back, you go, “Oh yeah, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that all along. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.

John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

Craig: You should do it.

John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.

Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.

John: Silver Bear.

Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel at the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope?

The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story. And the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you.

I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that.” That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-

John: For sure.

Craig: … and often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here is how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “You know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, “Yeah, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.

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

In a pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.

Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot…

For instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.” See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning.

If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.

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

And so in the script stage, what was a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.

Craig: Yeah. I hate being the guy who’s like, “Would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this?” But the last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and starting a new hope, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.

John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though, it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. The journey was this is a kid who is all on his own, who forms a new family, so going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the victory.

Craig: Dead family.

John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than the – I imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.

Craig: Yeah, it would be like (sings). You’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family. We’re friends. We did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”

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

In some cases, it’s reshoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways. And it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.

They’re thinking about, “What does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here?” And the music is going to be a big factor. There’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention, because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my god, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship.” Okay. Now, we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.

But the ending can never be just, “Do you know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or an extra thing. And generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.

Craig: How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.

John: Sometimes though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that, it’s like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.

It was really talking about, like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie, because doing that, you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.”

Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. If something is not working in that, where your circle is supposed to connect up, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong or the beginning is wrong or they’re both wrong. But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and then this thing that sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix. John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.

Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

[End of Clips]

John: We are back here for the end of this episode to do a classic thing we do at the end of every episode, which is our One Cool Things. Mine was an article I read this past week by Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post. It’s called “America’s best decade, according to data.” If people talk about like, “Oh, things today are terrible,” well, when were things good? When you ask them these questions, was it the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s? It turns out it was when people were young is when things were good. Generally, people remember things being better at their time. Starting a little bit before they were born up until their teenage years was the best time according to most people.

Drew: Are there any outliers, or do we ever feel like it’s not our youth?

John: This article didn’t really point to any areas in which there was notable exceptions to that rule. But by any objective measure, most things are better for most people right now. It’s hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.

Drew: That’s crazy, because it was objectively the ’90s.

Megana: Because you were such a young man, I feel weird asking this, but do you find that to be true?

John: That what, the ’90s were the best decade?

Megana: No, when you were younger.

John: You do have some sort of halcyon vision of how things were, but no, I don’t personally think things were better in the ’70s or ’80s as I was growing up. It was easier for me because I was a kid, but that was a time before the internet. The world wasn’t better before the internet. For all the challenges the internet has brought, it’s also a good thing that I wouldn’t want to give up. There’s a lot of stuff that’s better about living now, so I’ll take it. Megana, something to share with the audience?

Megana: Yeah. I just finished this book. I just finished Miranda July’s latest book called All Fours. She’s a filmmaker and a screenwriter and a novelist. I don’t know how to describe this book without giving too much away or being too reductive, because you could say that it’s this coming-of-age midlife crisis for this woman who finds herself in her late 40s and dealing with her body aging. But I just find Miranda July’s writing to be so delicious and intoxicating. It just completely swept me away for the two days that I was reading this book. If you have travel or summer plans coming up, I would definitely recommend a read.

John: Awesome. I’m traveling, so I’m excited to read. I’ll add it to the list. I actually met Miranda July at one of the Sundance filmmakers’ labs along the way. My proposal to her, which was almost literally a proposal, is we should get married and have a daughter named June so she could be June July August. It was just there. It was out there. She’s lovely. I think we would’ve made a great couple.

Megana: I think that that is how those decisions should be made.

John: We are so suited for each other. Drew, what is your One Cool Thing?

Drew: My One Cool Thing is an app called Callipeg. It’s an animation app. You can do it on your iPad. To unlock all the things, it’s two bucks a month or something like that. But I’ve used it to make little things. You can rotoscope really easily on it. It is just fantastically useful if you want to just make a quick sketch animation thing. You don’t have to know – I don’t know how to actually animate. Using it takes a little bit of time. But it’s really fun and I love it.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but spell it for us so we can look for it easily. Is it Callipeg with a K or with a C?

Drew: It’s with a C. It’s C-A-L-L-I-P-E-G. It’s a French animation app.

John: Excellent.

Megana: How fun.

John: Nice. That is our show for this week. Thank you to Drew and to Megana, our producers. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our classic outro this week. Matthew, thank you. Matthew, for folks who don’t know, started on Scriptnotes as being a person who did outros and then became our editor. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Megana, you saw that we now have hats?

Megana: I have not seen the hats.

John: My hat’s inside. I’ll show you the hat.

Megana: I can’t wait.

John: There’s even drinkware. No mugs. As you know, I am anti-mug, but we do have other drinkware.

Megana: Sadly, you are anti-mug.

John: I’m anti-mug. We can get into my anti-mug stance. That’s another episode. 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 record on reunions. Drew and Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thank you.

Drew: Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Megana, we are catching you just coming back from a reunion, a college reunion. Was it what you expected? Was it nice to see people? What is a reunion like in this time of Instagram where you could keep up with people you want to keep up with?

Megana: That’s such a good question. I feel like the people that I end up keeping up with on Instagram are not necessarily the people I want to keep up with.

John: If Megana follows you, she secretly hates you.

Megana: No. I would just say that a lot of my friends who I was most excited to see do not post that regularly on Instagram. Maybe it’s the mystery that made me more excited to see them. But also, a lot of the friends that I wanted to see have had babies recently, and so they also have-

John: Reasons why they’re busy.

Megana: Yeah, their hands are full.

John: I’m always a little suspicious of people who are not on Instagram.

Megana: Are you?

John: Weirdly, I am. I know people have their valid reasons. Maybe they get sucked in too much or they just don’t want people to know about their lives. But also, that’s how I would assume I’m gonna reach you is on Instagram.

Drew: It’s like being in the phone book.

Megana: That’s so interesting, because I recently got hacked, which is humiliating and embarrassing. But you knew that.

John: I knew that. I think I was the person who-

Megana: You were the person who told me I got hacked.

John: I messaged you like, “Megana, there’s a problem here.”

Megana: After that, I was so irritated with just the process of getting my account back under control that I was like, “I am gonna absolutely delete Instagram.” It’s interesting that you would’ve been suspicious of me had I done it.

John: I’m nothing if not self-contradictory. Talk to us about this reunion. You go back. You see college friends.

Megana: I went back, saw college friends, saw college friends’ families, held a lot of babies, which was nice and something that I enjoy doing. It’s just wonderful to see people become more themselves. I know college is such a special time where I think you are so free of obligations, but it’s just wonderful to have seen my friends develop in their careers and just how that manifests and how they carry themselves. I felt very proud in a dance mom sort of way.

John: This is your first reunion being back since you moved to Hollywood, correct? Your previous reunions, you would’ve been still at Google, I’m guessing? Where does this find you?

Megana: Yeah, which was a big change to explain to people that I don’t know all that well, but yeah.

John: Nice. Now, Drew, it’s complicated to explain your schooling history.

Drew: I’m weird, yeah.

John: You’re weird, yeah. You did not go to a classic college situation, so you don’t have a college reunion in the same sense.

Drew: We don’t. No. I went to conservatory in the UK, which I think most schools in the UK, I’m not sure if they do any reunions. I feel like that’s far too sentimental for them. No, so it’s just been keeping up on… Also, I have a tiny class. I’ve got like 20 kids basically. That’s probably not gonna happen. We have to figure out ways to do that ourselves.

John: Have you been to high school reunions?

Drew: I haven’t, because that also is a weird situation for me. I went to a little art school in the middle of the woods.

Megana: I don’t think I realized that.

Drew: I went to a place called Interlochen Arts Academy.

John: I’ve heard of that, yeah.

Drew: It’s great, but you have to take a lot of planes to get there, and a reunion’s not that easy.

John: I’ve had both high school and college reunions, and I’ve found them both great. College reunions, it’s nice to be back in the campus space. It’s like, “Oh, Peggy’s bar is still there,” all the stuff. You recognize what’s there, what’s the same, what’s changed. Just that feeling of being back in that location takes you back in that time, which is really, really nice. You get to see friends, of course, and catch up, and people have gotten married and divorced and all the changes that happen. You see who aged well and who did not age well, which is always fun to see.

But weirdly, high school reunions, I can chart more progress in the high school ones, because they’re the people who I didn’t want to see, who I did see at my 5-year and my 10-year. You’re still very competitive, who’s doing what, and people are showing off. At a certain point, people who’d left Boulder, where I grew up, were boomeranging back to Boulder. That I found really strange too. People who went to California, who went to New York, and suddenly they’re back in our comparatively small town. People who I never thought would come back were back. Getting to my 10-year and then my 20-year reunion, even the people who I didn’t especially like, I was happy for them. I was just happy to see people thriving a bit.

Megana: That’s so interesting. I have so much affection for the people that I went to high school with. Most of them are still in Ohio. I’m actually in the process of making up for a high school reunion that was compromised by COVID, I guess. It’s interesting, because most of my peers and the other student counsel people still live in Ohio. I want one of them to just step up and take the reins, because they live close by and could easily organize it.

John: Let’s paint the real picture here. Of course you were the student body president.

Megana: Yes.

John: As a student body president, it is this tradition where you are therefore responsible for putting together the reunions, which seems like a lot of pressure to put on a 17-year-old for future life decisions.

Megana: It is a lot of responsibility. I would happily do it and just choose a bar for people to meet up at, but then when I start having this conversation, other people have really strong opinions. I’m curious to hear your take, because that last time that we started talking about this, the other class officer people were like, “Oh, we’ll do it at this fancy event place, and we’ll get alcohol, and we’ll charge this much for tickets.” I was like, “I certainly don’t want to organize that, but I also really don’t think that I would want to go to that.” Don’t you want your reunion to be a casual thing? What’s your guys’ take?

John: I’m a little bit sympathetic to what they’re saying, because there’s a sense of providing a little bit of structure for it, makes it so it’s not just so casual that it’s just at a bar. My 10-year reunion was a little bit more structured in the sense of, it wasn’t just an RSVP. You did have to pay in advance so that they knew how many people to expect and they could actually plan stuff. The later ones were a little bit more ad hoc and thrown together and it was in a bar. But at that point, it was who was still in town and available. But my strong advice for you is just pick whoever has the strongest opinions and say, “I agree. You should be in charge.” Is that possible?

Megana: I think that it could be. I think it’s probably my own guilt that is preventing me from doing that. But I think that that would probably be a happier solution all around.

John: The local person should head it up, because it’s so hard. It’s easier now to do that remotely than it ever has been before, but still, they’re on the ground.

Megana: I keep being like, “Oh, we should go to this bar in town,” and it’s like, nope, that bar closed. I just don’t know stuff like that anymore.

John: Reunions are also a fascinating thing in movies. Obviously, The Big Chill, but there’s a lot of other of people getting together over time. It’s a question of do you show them in the original thing and then jump them forward or is it just them meeting now and having to catch up over what’s happened. I’m surprised there’s not been a Breakfast Club reunion movie, for example. That feels like a missed opportunity.

Drew: That’d be cool.

Megana: That is so interesting. I guess my cynical take is that not that much changed after that Saturday.

John: Probably not, yeah.

Drew: It’d also be fun to see them at a reunion with everyone else in the school and you’d be able to fill in all those other characters.

John: We would do it. Obviously, all of our sequels tend to feel like reunions as it is. Bad Boys 4 is a reunion movie. There’s something nice about getting the gang back together for one more run.

Megana: Whenever you do a sequel, you have to start the characters worse than you hope they have their happy ending, just so you can reset the conflict. It makes me a little sad to think about doing that to those kids.

John: It’s fine. That’s what we go to movies for is seeing that.

Megana: The Deadline article is coming out as we meet.

John: It’s so good to have a little reunion of the three of us here. Megana, thanks for stopping by.

Megana: Thank you.

Links:

• Episode 44 – Endings for beginners
• Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings
• Episode 366 – Tying Things Up
• Episode 392 – The Final Moment
• Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
• Too Many Cooks
• America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post
• All Fours by Miranda July
• Callipeg
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.