[MUSIC] Hello and welcome. My name is John Auguste and you're listening to episode 724 of Script Nuts. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting. Two screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you best introduce your characters and their world to the audience? We'll discuss with an expert on the topic. Yolkham Treer is a writer and director whose credits include "Ladder Than Bombs" worst person in the world and this year's "Centimental Value" which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for him and his co-writer, Escovote. Welcome Yolkham. Thank you. Hi. Good to see you. It's great to have you here. I love your movie. I'm so happy it got this amazing reception. It is just a terrific film. I want to talk about how it came to be, but I specifically want to focus on how you introduce the audience to both the world and to the characters. So that thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands. Like the opening sequence is brilliant. How do you mean it's Nora is so, so good. When you've sucked your claws into us that well, we're going to follow you on your story and it's just masterfully done. Thank you so much. That's a big compliment coming from you. So thank you. Yeah, I know I'd love to talk screenwriting. I've collaborated for all the six feature films. There's a short films before that with Escovote, so it's a co-writer, and I find that we are drawn to, on one hand, of course, wanting to do movies in a tradition of clarity of storytelling and all that, but more than anything, we are interested in the ambiguity of character. We are interested in building stuff around the psychological mechanisms and the earnings of people. And that's kind of where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot. Yeah, so I definitely want to focus in on that initial part of the process. We'll also answer some listener questions that were relevant to your film. And in our bonus segment from premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen because we have a screenwriter in this movie, the stolen scarlet writer plays a writer. And the printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect. And so I want to talk about sort of like how we depict screenplays and screenwriting in movies because it's a thing that actually weirdly comes up a lot in movies because writers are often writing about writing. But I want to talk about the choices you made and sort of maybe some things that I'm expecting as an American screenwriter that are just different than what you're expecting as an European screenwriter. Yeah, no, let's get into it. All right, let's start with the start of this movie. And let's start with where this movie comes from because you're saying this is the sixth collaboration with Eskil. On feature film. Talk to us about where an idea comes from. What is the discussion before there's any words put on paper? What was the impetus behind sentimental value? It started with wanting to talk about siblings, two sisters, two adults who are negotiating how come they feel so different about who they are as a family and why are their experiences so individually different from each other. So that was like some early stuff. That's sort of the mystery of how we become who we become in a family. We thought that kind of that idea of mirroring between sisters was interesting. So the way we work just to tell you a little bit about that. Is that we sit for about a year in a room together at Scalan Eye. We meet every morning and we work from nine till four or five in the afternoon every day on the weekdays and some days we feel terrible. We don't feel we're doing much and other days everything happens in two days. You know, like it's just as the rushes in of ideas and structure. And so after we have structured everything and come up with what we want to do, there's a part of kind of two or three months at the end where Eskil actually writes it out. And then I go out of the room and I edit, I look at it, I come back into the room sometimes. And then finally we have a reading phase where we do settings. Like we turn off the cell phone, we read it through to get it to the Maddie experience of reading it through in real time. And then we restructure a lot together. And those two weeks are the most productive almost. Because then suddenly you have to rewrite something quickly, you have to come up with new ideas, you have to change the structure. And then we go into the world and pretend it's our first draft. But you know, so that's the process. It's a much longer process than I would have guessed for sort of get into that first draft. So talk to us about what you're doing. So you're saying nine to four every weekday, what are you actually doing? Is it all conversations? Are you mapping stuff out on a board? How do you know that you're making any progress? What is the work in that daily session? So I think what we're aiming for is to find our own connection to the material. So I have not developed one screenplay or written a screenplay that I haven't filmed as a director. So this is like when we do a film, this is what we do for a few years. A bit more like someone who worked with a novel perhaps. So we let a lot of stuff come up very often. We start out with all three or four different directions we want to explore. And then something eventually after a couple of months, we see we have much more material or more yearning to tell something rather than something else. And for as an example, in this one, we were struggling to try to find something interesting in them. We didn't want to make sort of just a domestic, you know, sitting around table talking kind of move. That doesn't interest in us like the chamber drama. We wanted to be cinematic. We want to have conceptual formal scenes that we play around with, almost like set pieces. So what we do is we gather material, a lot of material, almost like actors exploring the life of characters and then just playing those few scenes. So when we then finally found out there was also the father's point of view and the daughters and more of a polyphonic, multi voice, multi character story. And it had that kind of novelistic feeling is what we were after. Not that we wanted to feel like a book. We very much wanted to be cinematic. But what we're yearning for is the sleight of hand that you get when you read a book and you don't quite know how you automatically get involved in what you're getting involved in the terms of thinking. That's the kind of thing we're trying every time. Is that through character you get involved in a space in the movie where there's space for some thinking and philosophy around life and existence and how little time we have. And why is it so difficult to be in a family and all that stuff. We don't want it to be on the nose. So when we have all that material, we start structuring it after a few months. And then we get kind of a timeline and we'd write kind of a step outline and sometimes there are pieces or, you know, there's ambitions of pushing some material together. So it's not like a story arch just yet. It's more like we know we want a montage that's like an essay about a house told from one of the characters and we know that we want a panic scene when she has dates right. But we also know what the ending is and we, you know, how do we get there and then there's just how do we get into a situation where the other sister could go to the national archive because that's an interesting building and that's a cinematic thing. Like, so all of these things come together. So Eskilo often says when he's asked, like, use the word storytelling. We're slightly abivellent because the storytelling, the structuring is something we almost want to hang our material and our characters on. It's not like one of these wonderful, you know, I know they're wonderful screenwriters who are like, I got the story. And now I illustrate it. We kind of worked the other way around. We want the material and the characters to come first. So for listeners who haven't seen the finished movie yet, it's story follows an origin family, the two grown daughters and their father who was a feminist film director trying to make an autobiographical film after a long time family house. How many of those things I just described in this log line existed in early stages of these discussions? Like, you said it was about sibling. So you knew that and at what point do you know there was going to be two sisters? At what point do you decide that their father was a character? He said polyphonic that was able to switch to his point of view. When did you start to have those realizations? I think three to four months in, it all clicked. Okay. We suddenly saw what it was going to be. And then we went on another round exploring character scenes and getting material and a lot of stuff ends up on the floor. But it gives us a deep sense of who they are. I would say that just for the listener who aren't that familiar with what we do, that we are in between kind of two traditions a bit. On one level I feel I grew up with a lot of American great character films. I remember Crane vs. Kramer undergraduate when I was a teenager being like amazing films and ordinary people, you know films like Hannah or Sisters or Annie Hall or Amazing or the Breakfast Club, which was kind of a gateway drug to Igmar Bergman. Because it was actually deep character studies done within a genre that seemed like it had levity. So on one hand we love American character driven storytelling. On the other hand we're also film geeks that love Filini and Alain René and Goddard and how do you do that modernistic break the form, make some hard edits, not make it all fluid, make the audience have to fill in the blanks a bit. So we're kind of going between these traditions when we're writing these ideals. So when we gather material we want, for example, when we do character scenes, how can we avoid it just being done through dialogue? How can we make a formal scene? And I don't know if this is the moment where I can make it use an example like the opening of the film, for example. Oh absolutely. So I want to say we write into that because that's your establishing in this opening sequence, this narration about the house and sort of like what this is. And I'm wondering if you could, we actually have you read a bit from the English version of the screenplay because I thought the narration voice over here is so important in terms of setting things up and it's so unusual and so unique. Can I?
share my screen and have you. Yeah, please do. Yeah, yeah, I'll read off the screen. That's great. And so the film opens with this house and I love how you describe the house. This is a venerable old house in Oslo, sorely in need of a coat of paint. Other houses in the neighborhood may be more modern and in better condition, but there's something soulful about this one missing from the others. And then we're going to see this house in different times, different periods inside and outside, but this narrator starts talking to us and you're welcome, could you be his narration? Yeah, I'll read the narrator. When she received the essay assignment to write a story as if one were an object, she immediately knew that she would choose to be their house. She described how the house is belly shook as she and her sister ran down the stairs and out the back door, the house's butt, taking the shortcut to school for a whole in defense and a neighbor's lawn before they turned into the road and their house could no longer see them. Her mother pointed out that he was a bit inconsistent that the house could also see behind its back as if a house couldn't have eyes in the back. She remembered wondering if the house preferred to be light and empty or full and heavy, if it like being trampled on or that people crashed into its walls, the eager dogcloths scratched the floorboards and she thought, yes, it like being full and that the marks were just scraped like you get clean tag or soccer. Her father said that the crookedness was an old flaw, discovered right after the house was built a hundred years ago. She wrote that it was as if the house was still a sinking, collapsing just in very slow motion and that the entire time her family had lived there was just a split second in mid-air and before them a number of people pets insects also had their brief flash in the house this time. Four people have even died within the walls of the house. Nora's great grandfather Edward Irvings died in the bedroom on the second floor from the Spanish flu in the same room where his granddaughter Edith was born just seven years later, which was now her parents bedroom. And I have to add like the pictures are then telling a complete story of parents arguing here of people coming and going. We are illustrating it with lenses and celluloids from different cameras through the 20th century and all of that stuff. So this is a good example of how we are dealing with kind of a cinematic language counter by a literary voice so that the voice only tells a part of it where the pictures kind of reveal more and I'll jump back into the narration's voice. Her teacher gave her an A and her father had loved it. She dug out the essay when she was looking for a monologue for her auditions at the theater academy but was disappointed because it seemed so unemotional. She therefore chose Nina's monologue from the seagull instead. And then we do a hard cut in the film. And we're at the National Theater. Nora is now a grown woman, an actor very accomplished about to go on stage and delete of a theater play and she's panicked. So this is about six pages of script and it's an unusual choice to spend the first six minutes of your film establishing a place rather than the individual characters we're going to be following. But what you're doing so masterfully is saying this place is going to be important and most crucially the people who live in this house and their relationship with each other and with this physical space is going to be so important. This is a movie that's going to involve death. I'm it's going to involve noise and fighting but also this idealized version of what a house in a home should be and how everyone's perception of it is going to be different. Yeah, yeah, no, I think absolutely and I'm going to be very straight now and so listen should turn off because I'm going to really explain stuff which an artist or a creative person should always be careful about but I think I love the craft. I'm always when I'm due to doing talks about screenplays particularly or directing. I always imagine talking to a younger version of myself and I always love when people were speaking straight about what they did. So here's the thing. This sequence sets up themes as you were just funny out and character which are the two things that we care the most about themes in my opinion or motifs are this is the area that I want you to think about when we go through the story. So what we're learning is Nora as a 12 year old being the old sister we learned that parents quite dysfunctional arguing a lot she is avoiding describing that even though the film shows it to us by being created by telling a story by being the good daughter by being someone who in a in a in a psychodynamic term sublimate her pain. I'm being very literal now into something creative already as a child as we all do children do this all people whether they choose to be artists later in life. Danson Singh to make their parents happy we tell stories to try to understand who we are all of this stuff is inherently human in my opinion so we set that theme up that in this creative family that's her choice and she's longing to become an actress we later learned that's also an avoiding mechanism yet paradoxically it also gets her closer to herself it's a double bind of the creative role in life that we both avoid ourselves and get closer to ourselves in strange ways that to me you all came to your the filmmaker is still mysterious so I'm exploring something we also learned that the house has had a perspective on time people come and go they're born they're die time is short this story is about reconciliation it's about grown people realizing they don't have those difficult parents around forever and within that limited space and time that we have together how we're going to deal with that maybe we're never going to get what we quite want for our parents but is there baby steps of reconciliation we ask so all of that is placed in the background hopefully not too explicitly in the that first part. Yeah you've primed the audience for what they're supposed to be looking for and so I came out of the sequence going like oh no the house is going to burn down that you even it's not like this this house is crucial to the film and something terrible it's going to happen spoiler doesn't burn down but something worse happens I didn't see it in an audience but I'm sure there's an audible gasp when people see what happens to the house. I've experienced that and that's kind of fun yeah it's turned very slick at the end isn't it yeah but let's talk about so I wrote big fish and big fish has a similar sort of set where we go through a many many years to establish sort of what is the underlying dynamic here and prime the viewer for this is what to watch out for these are things are going to keep singing again and again over the course of the movie how early did you and I still find that this was going to be the way into the film because it's it's not an obvious choice and yet once you've realized that you want to make a novelistic film it's a very novelistic device what you just read could have been the first few paragraphs of a book yeah I think there are many reasons to choose this opening so we love opening movies and we have several openings often and several endings it's like the the freshness of an audience meeting a film it's just a remarkable moment and one needs to be smart about it it's a luxury in a way you know they hopefully bought a ticket and go to the theater and they sit down you got them but you owe them something so first of all we want to establish a sense of narrative authority I don't know if that's the English word yeah the word sounds a bit strict but a sense of guidance that we really care and we're gonna have fun here we're gonna try to make a movie that that takes you several places you know I often say to Escal is a joke that why I love James Bond moves as a kid was you know you're gonna go to like an island with the palm trees in a beach you're gonna go into the mountains you're gonna go to cool cities gonna be you know I'm gonna take you several places you you bought a ticket to see family movie but we're not gonna get stuck by the kitchen tape guys so that's a promise right so that's one thing that we know very early we want to show of kind of formal playfulness because that's what we do I in Oslo August 31st the film we did several years ago we started with the kind of documentary montage or in the worst person in the world we start with a kind of a narrative playful story of how the lead character can figure out what to do with their life in a humoristic way so there's that establishing of sense of humor and levity to it but also the theme so we knew that but then also we caught contrast got straight to a very subjective intimate real-time feeling of being behind backstage going on stage as an actor and having stage fright and panicking completely which is the opposite it's a formal opposition it's not about montage and moving in time space freely it's sticking in that anxious space of going on stage so to have that contrast in in dramaturgical terms is what I'm you know that's what it's going to talk about a lot how can we make contrast we have one posted note that's been hanging there for several films we've ripped them down every time you start all over with newscare but the one that keeps sticking on the board is remember contrast so that's the holy thing like contrast of scenes contrast of characters the formal devices the character explorations the unexpectedness remember that the dynamic of contrast is at the key of making interesting material it sounds childish maybe in obvious but it's really good to bear in mind so we start with a very clear dramaturgical contrast between the opening scene and the next one yeah your opening sequence goes through a several over a century and it's jumping forward versus a real-time panic moment with Nora. So let's talk about Nora because a choice you're always making is a writer.
Is that you're introducing a character on a normal day or on an extreme day? And you made the choice like this is Nora at a very big extreme. So we're seeing her. She's supposed to be going on stage in this play and she's having a panic attack and she is both clearly a protagonist but also the problem. And I love how you as audience are not even a panic on her behalf. You're sort of panicking on behalf of the stage manager and everyone who's acting normally just trying to get her like, effing go on stage. It's a really funny sequence and it's harrowing. It's just a great way into it. So this sequence is seven pages long. So we've got a six page opening and then it's the seven page sequence. Some simple things you notice on the page. You never name characters who are unimportant. And so the stage manager, great role, really great performance but their stage manager throughout. We don't give them a name because that way as a reader we know like, okay, this is not a person. It's not a person who's not like, same as the director. The actor gets a name because he's going to be coming back. And there's small things but there's help the read because ultimately, you're going to be directing this and we're going to get a sense of people's relative importance but our first experience with them is on the page. And just making those choices, help us know what to focus on. How to be thinking about the sequence that we're seeing. >> The right things. Yeah. So we knew one challenge with the screenplay was we're going to throw a lot of characters on everyone. And we're going to play the casting department work for one and a half years getting this cast together. We're super proud of it. It also people have to look like themselves at various younger stages. And the previous family of the 20th century going hundred years back also needs to kind of have similarities. It could be one family and all that. So a lot of work and then we're jumping straight into theater world with tons of the side characters. And I mean, we grew up adoring really loving Merton's Corsese. The films like, obviously we all love good fellas but also the age of innocence like this incredible variety of characters and then to the task is how are they important in different ways. So there's kind of a hierarchy of who you're going to invest in emotionally. And that's my job as well as director. So S.Kill always manages to do a good reading script and we're you know, created to him because I think he's a much, much better writer than me. And I think he's very smart about conveying what the film will feel like and we know that we will do more shooting like scripts later on and that I will go with the actors all of them. I even rehearse or meet smaller parts. Sometimes I cast amateurs and I want them to get to know me so they feel safe on set and so they don't come and feel like as a day player they're not up for the task. So then you give them names and background and you discuss with them who is this character and all that but as you're absolutely pointing out correctly at this stage we're throwing a lot of less central roles into the play. Yeah. So we're meeting Nora here. We're sort of panicking with her and around her and about her and ultimately she does succeed and triumph there. But in the sequences on the page versus what's in the film, some things have changed and let's talk about some of the discoveries you make along the way. So like she kisses him backstage which is not scripted. There's the sense of geography and space. It's going to be dictated by the actual place you're in a picking and sort of how it's all going to work. How do you find as the director who also helped write this film that balance and when you're taking off your right or hat and putting on your director hat? I feel that kind of developing the same thing all along and that the writing is such a kind of central aspect of setting up the possibility of directing but then I go to the national theater which is very hard to get into it's where it gets into this place. You know, we were so lucky to be allowed to film there. It's a 150 or almost 200 year old building. So I get those late Sunday nights after I play to go there and research with my team, my AD team, my production designer, the cinematographer, you know. And then I see a lot of possibilities and I know that now we do floor plans, we shoot and we shoot on video, we do this stuff and I often bring it back to us to explain it to him so we can do a quick read draft so that the team that comes in later will feel that it becomes an organic process of reaching that space. So writing is spatial, writing for space. It's going to talk about it. Like the banal example is all writers feel is that if a character is in a kitchen and it's important that they are looking into the fridge as someone saying I'm going to leave you and then they turn around and go through the table. How far is that walk? That walk is going to be tremendously important to the dramaturgical weight of that scene. So from the smallest to the biggest thing. So I go back and forth and then ultimately, Eskil is not precious. He trusts me as a director. I go and do my thing with my team, you know, but it's important for example, this scene in the editing of the film is when we really we shot a lot more for everything. That's what we do, you know, and we invest a lot to go on screen, which is the magic of having less resources go above the line in our way and more of be low because I shoot for 60 days. And you know, we get to try a lot of stuff. So for ambitious film like this in terms of all the spaces, remember there are several long toages where we actually have to like go through the century again, the bit later in the film. So for the national theater, for example, I had a lot of material and in terms of character, what we realized was the build up of panic is what we dropped. We got straight into the line. So people will put a link in the show notes to the English translation of the script. And there is a lot more lead up to it and you were able to just come right to her at that moment. And it seems an obvious choice in retrospect because you just established this narration about who she was. And so to see her as the adult figure in this bummer panic makes sense. And yet you don't know that as the writer, do you think you need more runway for the plane to take off and you didn't? Yeah, that's exactly it. And I find that during the editing of the film, where Olivia Bibli-Cute, the editor who has done all the same features that Eskana and I have written together, we have a very close collaboration. And his job is to be a dialectically opposite to all the establishing. He's saying, do we need this establishing? People are smart, the actress are great. Look, he's kind of coming in at the other end. And it's a wonderful dialectic always. So Eskana always says, you know, when we talk that ultimately Olivia makes us shine as Queen Riders, but I must say going back to the script, for example, I'm very proud about the script as a structure. And it doesn't mean that it didn't work. It just means that we can be more effective and be more respectful to the audience. There are certain things you think you need to establish like the runway was a wonderful way of coding it that you just said. I like that metaphor. You think you really need to involve people on every step of that staircase. And actually it's quite exciting to jump into the middle of it and discover it a bit backwards. And it goes for a few other points in the film as well. Well, let's talk about the introduction of Gustav. So Gustav appears, here's the description from the script. The car stops in front of a house and a figure dressed in black steps out. This is Gustav Borg 71. Gustav is a well-known film director with his heyday behind him. On a good day, he still has the energy and charm that once made him a force of nature. But today it's not a good day. He is tired and his suit is creased. So at this moment we are introducing another crucial player in the film. We don't realize yet that he's going to have storytelling power. That the film is not quite a two-hander because the other sister also can drive scenes by herself. Yet we've greatly changed the dynamic here. And what you were saying about sort of like the audience doesn't need to know, we often talk on a podcast about the difference between mystery and confusion. And we're not confused when this guy comes on. We're just curious. And his arrival without any real explanation gets us curious about what's going to happen next. What does it mean that he's entering into this house during this post-femoral meal? What's going to happen? We're leading in because we're curious because we weren't told and that's the power of holding stuff back. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. We often use the same dichotomy and we talk about ambivalence or uncertainty or mystery as a positive, but vagueness is what you want to avoid. So it's how can we be specific yet not give all the answers? The reason we've read it, it's just a comment on it. I love that we're having conversations about the actual creation of the process of creating something that will read and hopefully be made into a movie. We cheat only in cases like this, describing all this stuff as a director, I won't show all that. It's give a context to the following scenes of him so that it's still on scars that more brilliantly will help us illustrate and we can even get rid of more of the exposition than we thought because he's a great actor. But there's a moment in notorious by Hitchcock when Terry Grant gets introduced later. And you have a lot of examples of films and the way they do it because Inri Bergman has kind of established it the lead and then you do it in Coley, is there's a long track in on the back of the set at a party where he's smoking. And just the film language tells you, now this is important. It's not just one of the guests at this party. This is a guy we're going to follow and of course it's Terry Grant. So we had the luxury of having still on scars gore step out of a black card which arrived while we proceed exactly and we use time. So it is that and we follow him in and he looks around and he's not doing anything for a moment. But here comes a big difference between the screenplay and the finished film as he enters the house in the screenplay. He goes in and sits by himself for a moment and we get a huge second montage early on with the kind of the remaining story of the house and the death of his mother and all this stuff. And in the film again, let's sustain the mystery. Yeah. Let's do that. And then we used that montage much later and it became much more interesting when the audience wanted to know all of that. At this point, we're going to have a lot of fun.
and the film has finished, we just want to be there with them. We want to observe, we want to feel, we want to be in the spaces, you know. We've just been on a montage not so long ago. And we want to be present. We want to explore the wonderful actors doing the character work, you know. So often in screenwriting, we talk about how you want to end a scene with enough momentum, like four to a momentum. They sort of lean at the end so you have to momentum going into the next scene. And your film does that all the time. But your film also makes a lot of use of blackouts, like we paid to black, and then we'll come back up. And the curtain comes down, the curtain comes back up. And it gives you the power of a new scene. It gives you power of starting a whole new idea, which is so useful. When did you know you were going to do that? How many of the lens you had planned ended up making it all the way through editorial versus disappearing in the edit? Like what was the discovery process there? - I would say that those blackouts, they're also noted in the film. And they are important because they are a formal device that does a couple of different things. First of all, it gives that fresh, hey, here we go, it's something new. It gives it kind of freshness. And sometimes it's fun again to use the energy of an opening, you know? It also tells the audience, which is almost more important that hey, this film consists of pieces that have an autonomy in the sense that they might be little chapters that have an entertaining quality on their own and you'll follow a little story. And you'll have to help us piece it together. Like it's an invitation for interpretation space. And sometimes we jump time. Oh, wow, something has happened. It gives this kind of urgency and energy that jolt into the film. And it keeps us guessing, but it also gives us a possibility of shifting point of view, which is kind of the difficulty of this story is that we suddenly need to establish that the other sister is also really important, but it's a slow process of her building from being an observer to being a subject. And through these kind of chapters, we haven't allowed us to kind of jump somewhere else. Yeah, so we had Eva Victor on the show recently we were talking about their film, sorry baby, which has more formal chapters. And the chapters are important for us understanding that oh, this is not told chronologically, it's crucial for this. But in the case of sentimental value, we are sometimes shifting between who is really driving the sequence of the films. And it's important for us to understand that we've moved not just in time, but also a point of view. You are covering also many seasons here. So we're gonna see this house and these people in different seasons as well. That's very important. And again, it's a subject of time and memory. It's feeling that it's almost like a family album where we can jump between very intimate moments and more assay, stick observations of how time passes in a family. You know, that we have that dynamic at play in the narrative structure of the actual film. Which I think opens up different thinking for scriptfully. - We've a couple of listener questions here. Let's start with Jeremy and Montreal. On script notes, you often talk about outlining your script and knowing your ending before you begin writing. This makes a lot of sense. As knowing where you're going feels like the best plan to actually getting similar. My question is, how often do you find that your ending has changed by the time you've gotten there? - Hmm. So now knowing your process and sort of how much work you were doing before ESCO went off to do a very first draft, I would guess endings didn't change a lot, but tell us in this movie and your other movies what's been your process and how much of your endings shifted based on how the script turned out or how the film turned out. - That's a great question. And a very important one. In our case, I would say that almost all the endings of the six films we've done, and particularly this last one, the ending have been tremendously important to understand and believe we had a film. It's not to put too much weight on conclusion as tying things up neatly, but it's rather trying, like in sentimental value, to have an organic, dramaturgical feeling of this story is now ending, but there's just enough to keep thinking about. Not getting that balance right, I think is the magic we're trying to achieve. That Nora, again, spoiler alert, forgive me listeners, but Nora actually ends up doing the film with her father. And that final scene encapsulates both her anxiety of mirroring her grandmother and the mystery of transfer and psychological outcomes she feels the same depression as her grandmother. And that comes from the absence of her father who himself had a difficult time being a child because what happened to his mother and all that stuff. But not explaining it. In the scene they do, he's making a piece of art because he's so incapable of talking in the social language to his daughters. He's very clumsy. He's a difficult avoiding father. But at the same time, in that writing, he kind of sees his daughter and she knows it and she feels it. And she does it well and he looks at her and says after the take perfect. And they don't know what to say to each other. And the fact that they don't embrace and have a conversation of a solution, which to me would be a lie. I don't think that Nora and Gustav could just hug and it would all be fine. They're probably going to continue to have a complicated relationship, but maybe they got closer. Maybe they saw each other in the act of creation, which is kind of where they've fled. They are very similar. They both fled into the creative, maybe also because that's where they feel they can function. So that they meet in there in that fictional room somehow, we thought was important. So to that question, which is a wonderful question about endings, getting an ending and writing towards it will very often give you a sense of what your middle part of the film needs to be and how luxurious you can just have character scenes in front and play as opposed to setting up the turning point when it goes towards an end. But I will say this, what changes a lot is all those scenes leaning up to the ending. We always have too many endings, too many resolution scenes in a way or that we get rid of in the editing. Another way to address this is that the ending, you're saying it's not a conclusion, it's not the end all be all resolution of everything. But you are answering sort of the central dramatic question that you've established in the opening, which is to me was like, can this family deal with their idealized versions of what their home life should have been? And it's only by creating this artificial house and this movie set that two of these characters are able to grapple with sort of what they actually wanted. And so that it does feel like the right ending for the questions that you were asking of the audience at the start. Well, but no, thank you. If it does that, we're very happy. So that's what we're trying to say is that we have what I would call a more thematic closure without it being a cheesy happy ending that I don't believe is like life. We try to create something which mirrors life on some level. Question from Chamos in Brazil. Have you ever written a character whose traits and way of speaking were clear in the script, but during the casting process, you couldn't find anyone who matched that. Or you chose someone who ultimately didn't fit what you were looking for. Did you ever adjust the script because of this, whether during rehearsals or other stages? This is such a great question because of course, we have a movie within the movie and where you have your casting an actress played by L fanning in the film. And it's a question of is she even the right fit for this role that Gustaf has written? So you came, how do you as a director grapple with this when you have a role that is specific and you're trying to find a person who can embody that character? Yeah, that's a great question. This is really at the core of character work, isn't it? Both as a bright and a director and the actors. So we have rehearsal, which just is the time for the actors to look at the script and talk to me and get to know each other. It's not about table reads. It's not about having them sit around and have a fake read the script aloud. That's not my vibe. I'm interested in them getting on the floor and trying scenes a bit. And then that will affect it. And then as to when I tailor it a bit more to them, very often it's very similar, but just new answers. So two good examples from this film. One is L, bettering the character. We did not want Rachel, Kim, the American star, to come see Europe to be in a film to become kind of a joke. We wanted her to be a serious character that actually is pivotal and a catalyst to what happens to the family. So I think she's very important as the synthetic daughter. Yeah. She teaches good stuff something about himself and she also, by stepping away from the role, opens up that this project, this film, they're making inside the film, is of a different nature than any other film that Gustav maybe has even made. So she's very important and L helped that a lot. But something that changed radically from the writing is the youngest sister Agnes played by Inga Ip Stolte-Lilo's. Because we cast and met a couple of hundreds actors, known and unknowns for this role. And Agnes in the script is more, in her avoiding of conflict and wanting everyone to feel good, she's more like jovial, playful, kind of, giggly, smiling, trying to avoid the vivid my sister and father arguing. But whereas Inga came in with this earnest groundedness, this sincerity and that power shifted the character tremendously because that is how she holds her place in this complicated family dynamic, is through silence, observation and honesty, in a straight way that the others are always avoiding. So she's not avoiding by joking it away or being jovial. She's actually staying silent, looking, and being pretty straight shooter when she actually confronts the others. And that was forceful and that was a great idea.
in to bring that in. Actually, the dialect didn't change that much, but the interpretation of the scenes from an actor point of view changed along. I'm sure I could have an hour-long conversation with you about Rachel is doing a scene from the script at a table and just how you have a conversation with an actor who's playing an actor, who's playing a role as the levels of looking into a mirror is so challenging at the scene works so well. I'm so impressed with Elle because I don't know if people understand exactly what you're planning on, how difficult it is to play inside the film and crying and being genuine, but yet doing it slightly within a style that makes us unsure as an audience whether is this the kind of film that Gustav Borges making? It's not bad, but it's almost like singing on the edge of a tonality or falsehood, but still being in key. There's something really sophisticated and then Elle shows us at the end when she leaves the film. She breaks down and she weeps and gets this falledly hug from Gustav that he's unable to give his three-year-old daughter, so it seems. But in that scene she shows a different kind of vulnerability in acting style. So like Elle is really amazing, I think. I'm very, very impressed with her. Yeah, and so both Elle and Elle are nominated for their work, which is not surprising. They're both incredible in it. Let's do one last question here from Peter. Peter says, "I'm married with stepkids and early-ish in my screenwriting career. I've realized that when I'm struggling to crack a story or feel like I'm facing a creative brick wall in my script, my inner frustration can spill over into my mood when I'm spending time with family, especially if I haven't had a chance to decompress from the work. Do you have any good transition habits that help you leave creative work frustration at the desk or at least buried deeply enough in your subconscious so that you can be fully present with your family?" Yeah, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it? And that's what the film is about, too. How do you transition so that you can be a parent? Yeah, Gustav never mastered that skill. No, he's not good at it. No, he didn't. I mean, what I do is I communicate very deeply with my wife, and now we have two young daughters, and we talk about it. And I try to look at it like a real important life task. And that I try to be good enough. And I know I will fail some days, but I will also be better all the days. But I find that during writing, those are the best, actually, where I'm the best at it in a strange way, because I go home, and I don't have the adrenaline and the stress I'm shooting, so that I can go home. And then I think, I try to tell myself this, I don't always manage, but I try to think I'm interested in characters and life, and I love being surprised by what happens in reality. And if I lose that contact, I will also lose my writing skill, because those are the kinds of, I'm not entering into space in the movies primarily that I make. So actually being with people around me and my family can really, suddenly, surprisingly, if I let it go, come back to me as inspiration in direct and strange ways. So I try to tell myself that, but then there's also a weird thing, all parents at the moment are guilty about using cell phones. And doing a ritual of putting away the cell phone can almost be like a ritual of letting something go. You can actually use it to double up on the fact that I'm putting something aside symbolically when I'm home. So I'm trying all these things, and I'm grappling with it, and I'm trying my best, but I think it's a relevant question for creative people to ask themselves, at the end of the day, I think we need to get our family to accept that we are as we are, and to be open about it, I believe, and transparency. Yeah, for me, I'm not putting myself on a way necessarily, but having a clear separation between this is my workspace and my home space is really helpful. So I'm lucky that my office is over the garage, and so just those 10 feet going back into the kitchen, things are separated out. And then when I'm in production, a lot of times my daughter has been around, and she's seen the work, and for her to see how much work there is, and sort of the tedium of it, but also the all the decisions and the questions and meeting through the people around it. It's just taking the mystery away as helped as well. That's great. That's exactly it. And during shooting, I also take my family on set, and I was a child because my father and my grandfather, my grandfather was a film director. My father was a sound recordist. My mom did documentaries. I was on sets all the time, and I try, I have a couple of holy things. Also before I had kids, I had kids quite late in my 40s, but I try not to give anyone guilt when I make movies about going home to the family. Yeah. I always want to have straight talks because I know how hard it is. I was a child in the film family, but also on the other hand, bringing kids on set and being nice about it. I love that people bring kids on set and I meet them. And they, you know, all these parents that do this wonderful work, it's actually joyous. It's actually wonderful to make movies and it's a privilege. So kids can see that and maybe we'll get them into the tribe. Yeah. For sure. My daughter learned that she doesn't want to be in the creative side at all. She doesn't want to be a writer or director, but she loves production. And so through the big fish musical, she is there for all the tech rehearsals, which is incredibly tedious periods where the adjusting lights like a foot by foot and she loved it and so she loves production. Wonderful. Wonderful. And I have to give it a compliment for big fish because it's very relevant for Gustav Boris character. You know, this idea that the the historic, crazy father, the one that exaggerates, it's a double energy. It can be terribly annoying, but it can also be the most wonderful thing in the world because it's truly that crazy open creative part of childishness that has prevailed inside a human being that should be grown up in responsible. And there's something kind of punk and crazy and wonderful about it that we are all ambivalent about, right? Yeah. It's an immaturity that as you grow yourself, you start to write and I say, wait, it's unfair that I didn't get a mature person in that role that that's what you're lucked with. It's time for one cool things. My one cool thing is something I was not aware of, I term, which is kind of useful, called the Lindy effect. So the Lindy effect is basically for some technologies or ideas or cultural things, the longer they've been around, the longer they will stay around. Generally, as things get older, you start to like, oh, they're going to have a few years left. But for something like a Broadway show, it has been open for two weeks. You'd expect like, well, it's going to be open for at least another two weeks. It's been running for two years. It's probably going to be running for another two years at least. And so momentum will sort of keep things going. And I think that also applies to friendship because as I think back to my friends from high school or college that keep up with, like, I don't have to see them that often. But I know that I'm still going to be friends with them until the day I die because that's just things persist because they've actually been around for a long time. And so in a time where it feels like things are often in temporary or impermanent, it's recognizing the things that have been around for a while will probably still stay around for a while. So it's called the Lindy effect. I'll put it a link in the show notes today. Wikipedia article. But it's just a, I always like when there's a name for a thing that I just didn't know what to call it. My goodness, that is beautiful. But the bad news is so we won't get rid of the it is complex. Yeah, I guess way. I was always, people are always going to bring that up. So, no, listen, that was lovely. I can't follow that up other than to say that I have a recommendation that I feel that I haven't really put out there yet that I'm, I, oh, which is Chris Ware, who is a graphing novelist. I know Chris Ware does like very cool books and things. I have a giant box of his comics. Yeah. So that's the building project is like a box, but he's also made more classical story graphing novels. I think maybe the most famous one is Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid in the world. But I think the whole Ackman novelty library, which is available wherever they sell graphing novels, it is way of dealing with space and characters. It's deeply inspiring. Well, long before I made sentimental value, I valued him as a great artist. You know, his books have been voted by New York Times to be the greatest graphing novels of all time and stuff. So he's quite renowned in that world. But in the movie world, I think everyone should have a look at his work in all his variations because it's formally triggering in the best way. Like, oh my god, you could tell the story that way. You know, he has a whole story which is told with one, one, how do you say square per year of a character's life from birth to death. Or so, you know, like he just plays around with how we can elasticize and play with form of storytelling. I think that's healthy for all of us to be inspired by. So shout out to Chris Ware, the master of doing character and space stories, I would say. And that's our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Markhart and edited by Matthew Choulli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Hopener and Richard Kraft. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to
[email protected]. That's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answer today. You'll find transcripts atjonalux.com along with this sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The script notes book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips, another helpful video on our YouTube, just search for script notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at script notes podcast, you have t-shirts and hoodies and drink where. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email. You get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at script nodes.net.
We get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Like the one we're about to record on screenplays on screen. Y'all can congratulations on your film and it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you about screenwriting and filmmaking and parenthood. A great conversation. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. [Music]
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