Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Jacob Krueger discusses The Battle of Winterfell and the poetry and structure behind writing an action sequence built on the interpersonal drama of the characters within it.

This week, Jacob Krueger discusses the events of Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 8 and shares how you can take an audience along on any journey, but first you have to make them care.

Jacob Krueger compares and contrasts two Game of Thrones pilots: Season 8, Episode 1 and Season 1, Episode 1, to show you the elements of a successful pilot, and how, as a writer, you can benefit from “saving the best for first.”

For eight seasons, Game of Thrones has attracted and retained a devoted audience. Now drawing to a dramatic finale in Season 8, this week we take a look back at Season 1 and how by building a powerful series engine the show has kept viewers flocking back to this fantastical world year after year.

ROMA: Turning Your Life Story Into A Screenplay

This week, we’re going to be talking about Roma by Alfonso Cuarón.

Roma is an extraordinary film that harkens back to a different era of storytelling. It’s shot in black and white, despite having a substantial budget. It’s entirely in Spanish. And, in a way, the whole film is a love poem for Alfonso Cuarón’s real-life nanny from his childhood growing up in the Roma section of México City.

The film harkens back to a different kind of filmmaking. An age where storytelling was slower, where the pace was different, where shots were longer without so many quick cuts, and where stories unfolded in a more symbolic kind of way.

And that kind of structure is quite appropriate for Roma, because, in a way, it is a nostalgic look back at Alfonso Cuarón’s own life.

We’re going to look at Roma to talk about how to write a screenplay from real life.

How do you look inside of yourself and find those true stories that matter to you? How do you find the shape you want to put those stories into in order to communicate, not the literal experience, but the emotional experience to an audience?  How do you use your real experiences to open up that little piece of your life in a screenplay?

What’s interesting about writing from real life is in many ways these true-life stories are actually the hardest stories to tell.

One of the gifts we have as screenwriters is the gift of metaphor.

If you're Alfonso Cuarón and you're writing Gravity or Children of Men, you can look at those experiences from your real life through the veil of metaphor.

You can convince yourself “Hey, this isn't really me!”

By using the technique of metaphor, using a work of fiction in order, to tell the truth, sometimes we allow ourselves to actually see the truth about ourselves and our lives more clearly.

And, in doing so, we can also help our audiences see the truth about themselves and their lives more clearly.

By abstracting just one degree, or two degrees, or three degrees, or twenty degrees from what actually happened, we allow our subconscious minds to start to give us the clues we haven't yet processed in our conscious minds. We start to actually see the truth of our experiences, in a way that our conscious minds shields us from in our daily life.

If you have ever been to therapy, you know what this is like. You come in for your first session, and you think you're in therapy for one reason, and then you start to spend time and you realize you're actually dealing with something completely different.

This is exactly what writing a film is like. We start with some story we think we’re telling, or sometimes we think, “Oh, I’ve got a great commercial hook...” But then over the course of a year, or six months, or three months, or however long it takes you to write it, you start to realize, “Oh my God, I’m actually doing something very different. I’m actually telling a story about my mother. I’m actually telling a story about my brother. I’m actually telling a story about this thing that happened to me that I can’t make sense of.”

That veil of fiction, the way we convince ourselves we’re using fiction, the way we convince ourselves this character isn't really me, gives us a level of safety within which to play. That way we don’t have to deal with the entirety of our past until we’ve done the work to get ready for it.

When you start to tell a true life story like Roma, things start to change.

It’s just a fact of life that you are actually the one person you can’t see clearly.

This is a physical fact. When you go around in the world, you're looking at other people all the time, but it’s only when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that you actually see what you look like.

In fact, most of us, myself included, have a vision of ourselves that’s from a different era of time. I still think that I’m 33 years old! We actually have a vision of ourselves, but when we see ourselves, it doesn’t always match up with the person who’s in the mirror right now. Physically, we actually just don’t see ourselves well.

But also emotionally we don’t see ourselves well.

It’s extremely hard to look at ourselves. If we could, we would all be capable of change instantaneously. We’d all be capable of being exactly the people we want to be all the time.

But there are layers of ego, and self-protection, and fear, and confusion, and conflicting messages, and concerns, and thought processes and belief systems we have to navigate through to actually look at ourselves clearly.

In order to survive the things that happen, we put walls around our real self that get in the way of us actually seeing ourselves clearly. So to adapt a true-life story into a film, we must find a way around these walls.

Using fiction as a tool is one of the ways we, as writers, get to look at ourselves and heal our wounds or express the beautiful parts of ourselves. Fiction allows us to bypass those filters.

But when we start to tell the story that’s “the true story,” things get a lot harder, because now we no longer have the veil. Now we have to start to look at ourselves clearly, and that’s the hardest thing to do.

So, one of the places you want to start, as Alfonso Cuarón starts in Roma, is by abstracting to some degree, even within the real story, by giving that story some level of fiction.

One of the techniques Cuarón uses is simply to change the name of Roma’s main character. His real nanny’s name was Liboria (she’s actually still alive). He changes her name to Cleo.

And simply by making that tiny little change, he gives himself just a little bit more abstraction, just a little bit, one degree further from the true-life story.

A trick you can use if the main character is you — and you can see it in Roma — Alfonso Cuarón is a character in the film, but he’s actually even more tangential than the main character. He’s actually off to the side, barely a featured character in the piece. In fact, you don’t even know which little boy he is, but he is a character hanging out there.

In Eugene O'Neill’s great play about his family, Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was also made into a really beautiful film, he is finally deciding to confront his father’s narcissism and his mother’s addiction, and he dramatizes the story of all the people in his family except for himself.

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, he decides that Gene was the child who died. He actually writes himself out of his own life story in order to be able to tell the story more truthfully.

We’re all our own protagonists; we all see ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories, but Cuarón takes that character and slides him just a little bit to the sidelines.

He looks at that character just a little bit from an angle, instead focusing the camera on the person who he both loved and underappreciated during this period of his life.

If you're ever writing a movie where you're the main character, another trick you can use is to give that character some element that’s very different from you. Find some difference between that character and the way you perceive yourself, something that gives you that one degree of abstraction.

You might think finding that one thing that’s different might actually hide the truth from you, but actually, the opposite is true.

By finding that one thing that’s just a little bit different, that is just a little bit more abstract, what happens is it actually allows your subconscious mind to start to play and feed you that truth.

So, in this case, Cuarón changes his main character’s name. That’s one little trick. He writes himself off onto the sidelines but also uses another technique of amplification.

What Cuarón is doing in Roma, you might have noticed, is hitting his symbology not with a little ball-peen hammer, but with a giant anvil. He is hammering, hammering, hammering on his symbology.

We don’t get to see this a lot in movies anymore, but in Roma, it is unbelievably effective.

For example, we have the symbology of that car that can’t quite fit into the driveway. And then we have the expansion of that symbol when the mother purposefully drives it between those two trucks and destroys the car.

And then, we have the next step of that when she slams it drunk into the driveway. Then the next step of that when she replaces it with a new, smaller car.

And we start to realize, as we play with and amplify that symbol, that the car is a symbol for the father—the husband who abandoned her—and her anger towards him.

And the replacement of the big car with the smaller car is the beginning of the movement back into herself, into building the life she wants to build, rather than trying to fit into somebody else’s walls.

Who knows if that car even existed, or if that driveway even existed? In Roma, the car is a metaphor, it’s a symbol, in the same way when Cleo tells her boyfriend Fermín her little secret in the movie theatre and we watch the plane crashing on the screen.

This is a symbol; a symbol for the way it feels inside of that character. And so what Cuarón is doing is using these symbols and he’s allowing himself to play, not in a realistic world, but in a heightened naturalistic world, in order to get closer to the truth of what this feels like. He is taking the experience of his true life story and he is translating it into art.

There is another level though to what’s happening here because the intention behind Roma actually grows out of the kind of perspective we can only develop over time.

Growing up in this little section of México City, Alfonso Cuarón was sheltered from what was really happening around him. He was sheltered even from the Corpus Christi Massacre, which we end up seeing towards the end of Roma.

He wasn’t aware of the political events. He wasn’t aware of the real life of his nanny....

This podcast was taken from our vault.  If you are interested in studying Television Writing with Steve our next class is Feb 3rd-March 3rd; you can sign up here.

From GoodFellas to Breaking Bad with Stephen Molton

Jake: Today on the podcast, I have a special guest, Steve Molton. Steve is a mentor here at Jacob Krueger Studio, and he’s also just an extraordinarily amazing human being and writer.

He’s a Bloomsbury Press Pulitzer Prize Nominee, he’s a former HBO and Showtime executive, he just did a movie with Frank Pugliese, and he’s a general badass.

Today we’re going to be talking about not just how cool Steve is, but also about TV Drama.

We’re living in a golden age of television, and Steve comes with vast experience. He teaches our TV Writing Class that’s coming up February 3rd,  as well as our ProTrack Mentorship program.

 

So, Steve, I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about how is it different today than it was a few years ago. Where are the opportunities now?

Steve: That’s a great question. As you know, we’re in yet another golden age. I guess we could probably describe it as a third golden age, because there was the initial one in the ’50s, and then in the ’70s and ’80s, cable transformed everything.

And then, there were suddenly a thousand different platforms, and that has given rise to an immense number of shows at any given moment. It has also given rise to web series, to the short form, which we hadn’t seen before.

And that opens up a vista for writers, of a kind that no other form of writing does at this point, partly because the appetite is amazingly large for all these companies.

Everybody wants to brand themselves, and the most secure way to brand themselves is to create their own series.

There has never been more opportunity for original voices as right now.

Jake: Yeah, it’s very exciting. Writing feature-length drama is much different than writing television drama.

Steve: There’s the rub!  That’s the fascination. And you and I have had experience in both worlds. I always like to position this process as who is the writer in society at this point?

And one of the fascinating things, if we go back to our old Greek or Roman heritage, is that we discover pretty quickly this very intimate relationship between the law in a democratic society and the storytellers.

And that all began, as you know, you're sitting there smiling because you know all too well, it began with something that the Greek called the Agon.

When the Greeks, 2,500 years ago, they were trying to train people in the system of jurisprudence, they’d bring all these people down to Athens once a year, and they’d talk to them about how you serve in a jury, and what the law was, and why this was a cornerstone of the free society, etc.

But then, at night, they’d put on tragedies. And what we now know as, sort of, the origin of sitcoms.

Strangely enough, we don’t think of sitcoms as being 2,500 years old, but they were!  They are.

In the middle of the dramas and tragedies-- there are about 22 of them left to us for us to look at-- but in the middle of each of these dramas there was something called the Agon, which was really like intermission where the people who had come down to learn about their judicial system would debate the kinds of issues that had been raised in the drama itself.

And it was out of the Agon that the idea of the protagonist and the antagonist were born.

What we often assume is that the protagonist is inherently the good guy. But the reality, all the way back to the Greeks, as it wasn’t really the good person. It was the moral contestant. It was the person who was sort of caught in between.

One of the best evocations of that in older literature is Hamlet.  This guy is a moral mess. He’s back and forth between this choice and that choice, and to be or not to be, and yadda yadda.

But if you flash forward to somebody like Henry Hill in GoodFellas-- and Henry is a guy I actually encountered in meetings at Showtime, if you can believe, when he was in the Witness Protection Program-- Henry Hill, despite the fact that the normal world for GoodFellas is a skeevy, funky, deadly world, Henry Hill is ultimately the one that’s just a little bit better than the rest of them.

And that’s why Scorsese drives the whole film with Henry’s voice-over because he’s the moral contestant. He isn't quite exactly sure if he is who he thinks he is, and of course, his identity is completely flushed into the open by the end of the movie.

So, I always try to encourage my students not to think in terms of these strict boundaries of good and evil, but to realize we’re in a protracted journey with the protagonist.

And that, of course, takes us to: what’s the difference between movies and TV?

You and I have talked a lot about this. The primary difference between movies and TV for me is that a movie is about a character who changes, and television is about a character who procrastinates.

Jake: [Laughs].

Steve: A movie is a journey, a movie is a product, a movie is all built on an outcome, and it’s driven mainly by imagery and the relationship of character to action, because what we’re really dealing with is rates of change-- and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.

A series is really about a world, it’s about a habitat. It isn't really about a product or an outcome. It’s about a world in which characters wrestle with these moral quandaries.

I always try to help students look upon their world as this kind of moral arena. And we have all kinds of postmodern ideas about the word “moral,” but when you get right down to it, all the way back to the Greeks, and right up to today, we are storytelling creatures. We’re constantly wrestling, We’re constantly looking at stories and thinking about stories, and reading them, and watching them.

And the reason is that we’re protagonists in our own moral universe, right?

Jake: Everybody is wrestling with trying to do the best they can in some way.

Steve: Yeah, exactly, and trying to sort out the options: “Well, what if I did that?”In our own minds, we’re always projecting, “What if I made that choice?”

The great thing about films and television is it’s full of people who are making the kinds of choices that we wouldn’t necessarily want to make!  But we get to see the repercussions, right?

It’s a safe way to experience our own moral dilemmas and work through them.

Jake: You know I’ve thought about this a lot.

Steve: Why am I not surprised? [laughs].

Jake: All screenwriting, all TV writing, it’s all political.

Steve: Yeah, [laughs].

Jake: And it is socio-political, right? Like the act of doing it is a social and a political act. We’re actually looking inside ourselves, looking at our society, trying to understand some aspect of it.

But it’s also political in that, regardless of what you put out there, you're the debate at the water cooler the next day.

You're raising the questions that are going to be debated throughout the world.

Steve: Exactly! That’s exactly right.

When a student comes to me and says, “Well these are the themes and this is exactly where it rolls…” I think, “Well that’s morally very self-secure!”

But it isn't going to be a very interesting movie or an interesting series.

I want somebody to be talking to me about their own complex problems, with the questions that they can’t quite answer.

Jake: We talk about engine all the time when it comes to TV Writing.  In a way, the engine is the unresolvable question.

If you have a question and you can resolve it, if you know the answer, if you know the thing that would save the world, then the truth is you don’t have a series.

It’s the unresolved questions, the constant search to try to understand the truth.

Steve: Absolutely, absolutely! And that’s why the world of the series is such a vastly important thing when you're starting to conceive of a TV Drama.

Because what you're really talking about is a world as a moral arena, as a moral universe, and you think about the specific kinds of choices a character can make within that moral arena.

I always say that writing a movie or making a movie is really about building a journey. And writing a TV Series is about living in a building--with all these people living in all these different apartments.

So the world of the show and the characters within it is really the essence of this.

I want to talk about Engine in a few minutes, but that’s precisely it: the array of characters that populate that world.

Just look at genres of television, their habitats: it’s hospitals, it is prisons, it’s the legal system, it is families, it is urban tribes or its conspiracies.

These are the agreed-upon social entities. And in a way, they are also political entities, right?  The politics of the self.

And within that particular world, are a certain set of moral choices that don’t necessarily exist outside that world. But they definitely have things in common with those worlds.

One of the most wonderful things that you talk about, and that I think is so germane here, is that particularly if you're thinking about movies being about a character who changes and TV about a character who procrastinates, is that it always brings us back to the holdfast ego and the nascent ego.

It’s wild how that keeps happening, again and again.

Jake: Can you run through that real quick for anyone who is listening, who doesn’t know what they are?

Steve: The holdfast ego is the ego you encounter when you wake up in the morning.

You look in the mirror, you're putting on your makeup or you’re shaving, and you look in the mirror and you say, “Okay that’s Steve Molton, and Steve is this and Steve is that and it’s wonderfully predictable how he’s like that, and I know what he wants every morning, and I know where he comes from, and I know he has been a jerk, you know? Flopping at this and that. And I also know he’s fantastic! And he’s on his way somewhere.”

But it’s basically the guy that you’re familiar with,...

Beautiful Boy - Where Does Screenplay Structure Come From?

This week we’re going to be talking about Beautiful Boy by Luke Davis and Felix van Groeningen.

This is a particularly interesting film to discuss in light of our last podcast where we talked about Destroyer and the use of flashbacks in a movie, because Beautiful Boy is also built around flashbacks, but tends to earn those flashbacks in another way.

So, we’re going to be looking at Beautiful Boy to talk not just about flashbacks but also about structure, How do you make those structural decisions in your film? Where does screenplay structure actually come from?”

If you have seen Beautiful Boy or read reviews of Beautiful Boy, you know that the response has ranged wildly from those who think it is the most beautiful film ever made, to others who feel like it only scratches the surface of the addiction issue, who’ve even compared it to a beautifully produced PSA.

Whether you were deeply moved by the film or felt like it only scratched the surface for you, there’s no doubt that the way the structure of Beautiful Boy is constructed grows out of its theme.

Beautiful Boy comes at the issue of addiction in a much different way than a movie like Half Nelson or Requiem for A Dream. It is actually adapting two different books one non-fiction memoir written by David Sheff called Beautiful Boy, and one written by his son Nic Sheff entitled Tweak.

What the film is basically doing is taking these two non-fiction works and squeezing them together. But it is still primarily looking at the issue of addiction through the eyes of the father played by Steve Carell.

And in looking at the father, it basically makes the assumption that we see towards the end of the film when David and his wife Karen find themselves at a 12 Step meeting for parents of addicts, where the sign proclaims, “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t fix it.”

The movie comes at the character of David Sheff from that point of view. This isn't a movie about how the pitfalls of parenting lead to addiction, This isn't a movie about how that empty space in Nic that he describes in the film got created in the first place.

This is a movie about a guy who is a good parent, who has a son who is a good kid, who are both fighting the same issue and both failing.

Whether you agree with the psychology and the sociology of this premise or not, that’s the thematic place that this piece starts from. We aren't looking at bad fathers and bad sons. We aren't looking at ugly people addicted to ugly things. We’re looking at a loving family torn apart by addiction.

This doesn’t prevent the movie from getting deep or complicated in some places. For example there’s a wonderfully complicated scene where David Sheff smokes a joint with his son Nic, not knowing that his son is addicted to a whole array of drugs, thinking that he’s creating a special moment at his son’s request.

There’s a very complicated moment when David buys cocaine himself and has a one night cocaine binge--he’s trying to feel what his son is feeling-- or maybe just trying to escape.

So, coming at these characters in this way isn't limiting the ability to go deep, but it does cut a lot out.

This is true whenever you're using theme.

Theme is a way of looking at your screenplays structure and saying, “What am I going to show and what am I going to not show?”

“What am I going to dive deep into, and what am I going to skim over? Where am I going to get serious and where am I going to focus my attention?”

The truth is in a two hour long movie, you can’t do everything, so you have to choose the things that you want to do.

You have to choose where to point your camera and where to point your words so that you know what you're looking at and what you don’t want to look at.

Some people are going to love the choices you make:  the people who’re wrestling with the same theme.

In this case, the parents who see themselves as great parents with great kids who are victims of a horrible disease.

And other people aren't going to like your decision, for example, the people who’re interested in the psychology that creates addiction, who’re interested in the big mistakes, or the sociology that creates addiction.

In Beautiful Boy, the camera shows us some things but doesn’t show us others from the true story.

We’re told that Nic was primarily addicted to crystal meth. In fact, that’s the first thing that his father says in the very first scene of the movie. But most of what we actually see is Nic using heroin.

And while Nic certainly did use heroin, the choice to switch the drug he’s using switches the behavior, and switches our feeling about Nic, allowing us to see him through a different window.

There was a period where Nic was prostituting himself for drugs. There was a period where he was attempting robbery (although he says that he was never very good at it), There was a moment where (in “Requiem For A Dream” style) he actually almost did lose his arm.

But these moments are cut out of the film in order to focus on what’s beautiful about this boy. in order to focus our attention not on the ugliness of what an addict is willing to do, but on what happens to a beautiful person when a terrible addiction takes them.

Similarly, in writing his memoir, David Sheff went through a very interesting experience. There was a period where he experienced a brain hemorrhage and actually had to learn to write again. In his words, it was like “his brain was a broken suitcase full of scrambled items that he had to fit together.”

But the brain hemorrhage-- that part of his story-- is entirely left out of the film, as is what caused his divorce in the first place or how that affected the children, or what the parental rifts between father and son were outside of this horrible addiction.

And whether you agree with it or not that’s an artistic choice, that’s the writer choosing not to lie, but focus the camera-- not on the full complexity of the relationship, but on what’s beautiful about these two people.

And that’s mostly what we get to see, we get to see Steve Carell play the dad that we all wish we could have—the father who’s going to be there, who’s going to be understanding, who’s going to be full of love, who’s going to create so many beautiful magical moments for his children in this beautiful, wonderful house with his wife who’s full of art. And though he isn't a perfect person, he’s always a good dad.

And similarly we’re going to see Nic, who may be in the thrall of a horrific addiction and may be making some really terrible choices, but who in his moment of lucidity is the boy that we all wish we could have had.

You may agree with this decision or you may disagree with this decision, but this is a creative decision built out of theme.

That theme trickles all the way down to each little moment of how this film is shot, the beauty and the nostalgia of each shot, and it also trickles all the way up to the title, Beautiful Boy.

The whole film is built around this decision, and that’s why the structure of this film is so much different from so many other addiction movies we’ve seen.

Which brings us to the flashbacks.

While we never do see the brain hemorrhage that occurred to David Sheff during the writing of his book, we do get the feeling of that experience--of a brain that’s like “A broken suitcase full of scrambled items that have to fit together.”

One of the big choices made structurally in Beautiful Boy is that we aren't going to watch the film in linear order, nor are we going to watch a traditional flashback structure.

Rather, present and past are going to swirl and cycle around each other, good things and bad days, getting on the drugs, getting off the drugs, moments of hope, and moments of despair.

And it is built this way for a reason, because this is a story about a father chasing his beautiful boy, and a son chasing that first moment that he took drugs and felt like his life went to Technicolor.

Beautiful Boy is a film about two different people chasing this feeling that they once had that they lost.

We’re going to watch Steve Carell’s character, David, chase his son. We’re going to watch his wife chase their son. We’re going to watch his ex chase their son. We’re going to watch all three of them become addicted to their son’s addiction, become addicted to the need to help him.

They’re going to spend the whole movie chasing this child, until finally; they reach the moment where they stop.

And similarly we’re going to watch this child chase that feeling, chase that first high. We’re going to watch him struggle. We’re going to watch that desire come over him again, and again, and again, every time it looks like he’s going to get clean.

And we’re basically tracking his journey towards that stopping point as well, even though it is a stopping point we never know if we’re going to reach. How is this built structurally?

Like in any father-son relationship-- like in any family relationship-- when we react in a moment we aren't just reacting to that moment, we’re reacting to every moment we’ve experienced around it; we’re reacting to every memory.

In Beautiful Boy, when David Sheff is chasing his son, he isn't just chasing the 18-year-old version of his son. He’s chasing the 5-year-old and the 10-year-old, and the 3-year-old version of his son. He’s chasing every beautiful moment that they ever had.

And that chase isn't always in alignment with the reality that’s happening now, just as the chase for Nic isn't always in alignment with the reality of what’s happening now.

The way that that chase is created in Beautiful Boy is with a series of flashbacks, and these flashbacks are given order and structure through a very simple approach--which is to keep coming back to the same locations.

There’s a risk when you build a movie like this of everythi

Learn from Destroyer how to use flashbacks in your script. We'll discuss the common pitfalls that can make flashbacks dangerous, and the questions you can ask yourself when using flashbacks to determine if your flashbacks are likely to make the structure of your script stronger, or to get in the way.

Linus Roache, actor in Mandy, in conversation with Jacob Krueger on the Write Your Screenplay podcast

Jake: I’m here with Linus Roache, a Golden Globe nominated actor that you probably recognize from Homeland, Vikings, Law and Order, Batman Begins, Chronicles of Riddick, Priest and a ton of other features and TV shows.

Linus was just in Mandy with Nicolas Cage, so we’re going to be talking a little bit about that movie. And Linus is also a writer in his own right, so we’re going to be talking about his projects, what it is like to walk the line between being an actor and a writer, and how those

processes are similar and different.

Linus, after a whole career in acting, how did you come to writing?

Linus: Yeah, well I think I’ve always had an idea or an ambition to write at some point. Even as a child, the idea of being able to write your own movie-- everybody wants to write deep down, I think.

And I’ve always had a great appreciation for writers. I have a theatre background. I love playwrights. I did all the classical work of Shakespeare, so I’ve always had a great love of writers and what they do. I’m slightly in awe of them, and I never felt that I’d really be able to write. I could get a script and see what I didn’t like about it and try to change dialogue and things, but I could never really craft anything.

But eventually, at a certain point as an actor you do realize that you're just a piece in a big, big puzzle, and you don’t really have that much power, ultimately (unless you're an A list actor who’s controlling everything like Tom Cruise or something like that).  And I’ve just reached that point where I’d like to be more creative. I’d like to bring more of the stories I want to tell to life.

And, as you know my wife, Ros, who I co-write with, had a passion project that we wanted to turn into a screenplay. And I knew there’s no way you can just sit down and write a screenplay without some help. So, we looked around, and, you know, there’s all the usual suspects out there. And I think Ros came to see you doing a one-off little seminar and then we did Write Your Screenplay 1, 2 & 3 and then Pro-Track.

You know just to say Jake it has been an invaluable two years that we spent doing that with you. Because, for me, for someone who has read-- I don’t know how many thousands of scripts I must have read! And I can immediately tell you what’s a good one and what’s a bad one. But I couldn't tell you how to make a bad one good or why something necessarily is that good. It is like taking the back of a Swiss watch and understanding how it all actually works.

And it was the most humbling two years of work I think I’ve ever engaged in. In fact if I had known it was going to be that difficult I might not have done it! But I’m so grateful that we went on the journey and have learned something of the craft; it is a craft you never stop learning.

Jake: Like acting.

Linus: Just like acting, yeah.

Jake: Movies get made when they’ve got great actors in them. And I think one of the thing that’s top of mind for all of our writers is, “What does a great actor look for in a script?" If you want a Linus Roache in your movie-- what do you look for when you're looking at a role?

Linus: Well, it might be different things at different times but ultimately you're looking for a journey. You're actually looking for a journey of transformation that’s believable. You want to feel as you read like you're being carried through that journey.

In a sense what happens I think when you read a good screenplay is you do see the movie. And for an actor it is almost like what I call "N.A.R.-- No Acting Required," because it is actually being, in a sense, almost done for you on the page. Of course you’ve got to show up and you’ll bring nuance to it, but when something is really well written, your job is to be a conduit and get out of the way and allow the story to guide you.

I’ve often ended up in a situation where someone gives me something that’s "kindof good," its heart is in the right place, there’s a lot of good things about it, but the character isn't quite believable. And I’ve ended up joining in and trying to help shape things.  So when  you feel like you believe that journey, you go on that ride, and you know an audience is going to follow you, you're like, “Oh I don’t have to make stuff work! It works and I can deliver it.”

Jake: Yes, and you can also deepen it too, right? It gives you the opportunity to play against the line or to find a moment of nuance that wasn’t there before, because you aren't building that primary structure. You're playing within it.

Linus: That’s right. I think that word you just used, that’s been the big takeaway for me in terms of what I learned spending time with you learning to write: I learned more about structure.

As an actor, I tended to be very subjective. You work on your scene, your moment, you make things real in the subjective point of view of your character, and you aren't really given the opportunity to stand back and look at the whole structural piece and get involved. It isn't your movie, not my duck, not my bottle. You know it isn't your movie and that isn't your job.

But there are very few actors that actually think structurally. I’ve met one recently. I worked with one and it was fascinating. We were on a TV series together and he actually just inherently had the ability to see structure and he would take things we were doing in a season and say, “What if we did this? What if we did that? What if we did this?" And it would up the stakes for the journey of the characters.

In long form TV right now, that’s a joyous ride to go on. But for most actors I think your role actually, your function, is to think subjectively, and actually sometimes come to the writer and the director and say, “No my character wouldn’t do that. That isn't true.”

I was on a little indie-- I came back from Boston yesterday-- and in the end I spoke out and said, “This isn't true, what we’re doing isn't real.” We were getting this actress to do something and it just smelled of bad writing. And the irony was, the writer was there and he had actually written it first time round beautifully. But he couldn’t help himself. He just had to further mess with it. It was already good, and he just felt like he had to be doing something, and he actually destroyed his own scene.

Jake: I should probably do a whole podcast on that!  How do you actually know when your script is done so you don't overbake it? It is just a big and challenging question.

Linus: It is a really great question. I think a good example, I did Season 7 of Homeland and the writing on that show is superlative. My analogy is it is like getting on a Mercedes E class after driving an old Citroen Deux Chevaux.

You know they’ve thought it out in the writers’ room. They’ve worked out what they need, what the wants are, what the points of view are. So when you actually hit it, it isn't restrictive to you as a performer. It actually helps you. You're very clear.

So, I would occasionally think, “Maybe we should say ‘Da-da’ instead of ‘Da-da-da’” and they would normally come back with, “No, no there is a…” they had actually thought it through already. Because it is, in a sense, deeply personal-- that it is the story you want to tell, you need to tell. So they knew when that writing was done.

Jake: Yes,  I think really that’s a really beautiful way of looking at it. And, in a way, the

same when you're playing with a performance, right?  “I’m going to try this, I’m going to try that, I’m going to try this.”

Linus: Right.

Jake: Like an early draft, and then there’s this moment when you start to realize what it is. And you start to go, “No, I know intuitively it has to happen here.”

Linus: And I think with great writing, when you’ve actually got it in place, it isn't rigid. When you come to it each time, it is actually fresh. If you truly find it, as an actor and performer and it is well written, you can do it 100 times. You don’t get bored of it. Because it is always alive, because it is true, it is real. It is accurate to that moment with

those characters.

Jake:  So many writers get sucked into is this idea that they've got to write the commercial thing or write the hooky thing.

Linus: Right.

Jake: And that works really well if you already have a career, right?

Linus: Yeah.

Jake: If you're a famous writer and you just made $100 million from your last movie, it is a lot easier to have a good idea and let that be attractive. But in early phases of a career, you have to distinguish yourself from all that stuff that’s "a great concept" but only okay execution. To get somebody to invest in you, you have to give them that thing that’s already complete.

You want them to read your script and think, “Hey, this might be a hard project or this might be a new writer, or there might not be another famous person attached right now, but I see how this can work and this is so much better than anything else I’m reading.”

Linus: Right, and I think that comes down to one of the things you spoke a lot about-- really, you know, it is true of any art form-- finding your voice and being willing to commit to your voice.

Jake: Of course.

Linus: And if you have the courage to pursue that-- I mean, you have to dig deep for that sometimes! Some people just have a voice and others of us have to actually fish around, and fight, and struggle and look, “What are these themes that are coming out of me, I don’t really understand them yet?” Then you have to curve them into something that translates and impacts people.

When you tell that story that is deeply personal, that it is the story you want to tell, you need to tell, I think that does have impact. It finds its way through a lot of generic stuff, or a lot of  people trying to write formulaic stuff, or trying to fit into the existing structure of Hollywood.

I mean, I think the films that I admire,...

This week we’re going to be talking about BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott.

When I first went out to see BlacKkKlansman, my hope was that I was going to be able to do a podcast about how to write a movie for a political change— to talk about the confluence of race and politics and storytelling and history.

But, my experience of BlacKkKlansman led me to an even more important topic: the role of the truth in adapting a true life story, and how running towards (or away from) that truth can impact the overall experience of your screenplay.

Like always, in his script for BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee has a lot of very interesting things to say about race and politics, particularly about how the white supremacy movement has taken off the hood and the robe, put on the suit, and made themselves frighteningly presentable to the American public.

I think he has a scary message there that’s well told, and I think there are some really transcendent and wonderful moments in this film.

But for all the power of its message, and the appeal of its true-life premise, the actual execution of BlacKkKlansman feels shockingly uneven, bouncing between moments of political insight and compelling storytelling that we expect from Spike Lee, and others that feel predictable, anticlimatic, heavyhanded, or downright false.

What’s causing this unevenness in BlacKkKlansman is a simple problem that many writers fall into when adapting a true life story into a screenplay.

So in this podcast, I’m going to be talking about how-- whether you're writing a political film or a non-political film-- you can avoid falling into some of the traps that get in the way of a really tremendous premise.

So let’s talk about BlacKkKlansman.

The premise of a black undercover police officer infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan is just about as good of a premise as you can get. And the fact that this actually happened in the 1970’s is even cooler.

The problem with BlacKkKlansman isn't in any way its premise.

The problem with BlacKkKlansman is that the writers make the most common mistake when adapting a true life story.

Rather than running towards the truth, they instead end up running toward the same old Hollywood elements we’ve seen in a million films in this genre.

They think this is going to create drama, but instead they end up creating cliché.

If you’ve seen BlacKkKlansman, think about the moments that really stood out to you, the moments that really mattered, the moments that seemed too wild to believe but totally compelling… well, the truth is a lot of those moments were true.

And if you think about the moments that felt a little cliché, a little “seen it before,” a little familiar… well, you probably won’t be too surprised to find out that a lot of those moments weren’t true.

But there’s an even bigger consequence here.

By running towards the Hollywood story, rather than running towards the truth, BlacKkKlansman misses out on the full potential of its premise, not only structurally, but also politically.

And I’m not saying that BlacKkKlansman doesn’t have a powerful political premise at its center. I’m just saying that there’s an even more powerful way to deliver it.

So, let’s start with the biggest most “Hollywood” moment in BlacKkKlansman.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie— Ron Stallworth is a black police officer in the 1970’s. His only dream is to become an undercover police officer. He’s the first black man to become a member of this police department, and of course he’s dealing with a lot of racism, and he’s dealing with the pressure of infiltrating both the Black Power movement and the Ku Klux Klan at the same time.

So, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff happening here, and what makes it most interesting is that this stuff is actually true.

There really was a guy named Ron Stallworth, he really was a black policeman in the 1970’s, he really did infiltrate the Black Power movement, and he really did infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

So, as soon as you find out that a black police officer is infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, the first thing you're going to think is, “how the hell did he pull that off?”

And in fact that’s exactly what draws you into BlacKkKlansman— that’s why you go see it. “Hold on, there’s a true story about a black cop who actually infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan? I want to see that movie. I want to know how he did it.”

And as soon as you hear the premise, you start telling yourself a story. Maybe it’s an unlikely story about a guy who is wearing a hood all the time so nobody knows— but you’re trying to figure out how this happened.

Unfortunately, this presents a challenge in the movie, because the way it happens, at least at first glance, isn't all that dramatic.

What actually happened in the true story was Ron Stallworth sent a postcard to the Ku Klux Klan and they called him back at an unlisted number.

And it’s true that he developed a phone relationship with David Duke, and it’s true that the Klan wanted him to join and wanted to meet him…

So how is he going to pull this off?

In the movie, what happens a “white” cop, Flip, played by Adam Driver, poses as Ron Stallworth and goes and interacts with the Klan for him.

So the in-person conversations happen with Flip, and the on-the-phone conversations happen with Ron Stallworth— which raises the question of believability.

If he can pass for a Klansman, why doesn’t Flip just have these phone conversations and make it all a lot easier?

Many critics (who have not done their research) have pointed out this question as one of the biggest problems in the script. It just doesn’t seem credible.

But in fact it’s entirely true.

So, the first problem is, the “way things really happened” doesn’t seem credible, even though it is.

The second problem is that even if “the way things really happened” did seem credible, on first glance it isn't that exciting.

The moment we hear the premise of BlacKkKlansman, we start imagining something really exciting: a black cop having to interact with the Ku Klux Klan.

Instead, we’re getting a white cop interacting with the Ku Klux Klan and a black cop on the phone. Which, true or not, feels like a bait and switch based on what we imagined we were going to see when we bought our tickets.

When writing a true life story, this is a danger that all writers face: sometimes the truth doesn’t seem inherently dramatic.

And this leads to a panicked desire to forget about the truth and start making things up.

That’s usually the wrong decision.

Now don’t get me wrong. The writers of BlacKkKlansman are not bad writers.

A really bad writer would make an even more problematic decision than these writers made.

A really bad writer would send the black cop in to meet the Ku Klux Klan, get rid of the white cop entirely, and run towards the drama…

But pretty soon that really bad writer would find themselves with a much bigger problem than the inconvenient truth of who actually met with the Ku Klux Klan.

They’d soon start to realize, having built everything on fiction, that each following choice they make is going to open a Pandora’s box of new credibility issues— because eventually both the writer and the audience are going to realize the same thing the real Ron Stallworth had to realize: there’s no way this guy could pull this off! That the premise just doesn’t work

If you run away from the truth when adapting a true life story, you will find your script is floating completely in a fictional world and not in the real world at all.

And you’re going to lose your audience and you’re going to lose your character and you’re going to lose your instincts that guide you through the writing process.

What a great writer would do is ask themselves a different question:

“How do I make the fact that Ron Stallworth isn't meeting the Klan the coolest thing in the movie? How do I make the fact that what the audience expected isn't what the audience is going to get the coolest thing in the film?”

And the way you find that answer is by running towards the truth, rather than away from it.

Unfortunately, that’s not what these writers do either.

What these writers try to do is to run a middle road--

“Let’s make the white cop Jewish, let’s create a lie detector test, let’s create a lot of suspicion among his new white supremacist “friends” that maybe he isn't really an aspiring Ku Klux Klan member, let’s try to build some danger.”

But none of this is true, or at least none of this is confirmed.

The identity of the actual white cop is unknown, it is still classified, so no one knows if he’s Jewish or not.

But Ron Stallworth has been clear in interviews that no, none of these Ku Klux Klan members were especially smart and none of these Ku Klux Klan members had any suspicion whatsoever that this undercover white cop was anything but a wholehearted Ku Klux Klan member.

Rather than running towards what’s really cool and what’s really true about this story, the writers have immediately gone to the easiest solution, the one you’d most expect. “Well since there’s no way a black cop could physically infiltrate the Klan, what if it were a Jewish cop… yeah, that’s a lot easier… and what if there was a member that was onto him… yeah, that would create some drama”

Unfortunately, what’s easier for you as a writer is rarely better for the story.

I think we can all agree, the premise of a Jewish cop who might get recognized as Jewish is fine… but it’s a lot less exciting than the premise we paid to see-- of a black guy doing the same thing.

What we’re served is a lesser version of the same story.

More importantly, we’re served it in a way that belies credibility; we don’t actually understand why this is necessary. And this breaks our suspension of disbelief,...