Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery with Rian Johnson

There's a mystery afoot on today's episode of Script Apart Guys, and that mystery is how you write a film like Wake Up Dead Man, The New Knives Out movie. How do you construct a hood on it that's both gripping and hilarious and riddled with reflections on religion's place in our current political climate? In the words of Benoit Bonk, "It makes no damn sense," compels me though. So I asked the one person who can crack this case wide open to sit down with me for a riveting chat. Yes, my name's Al Horner, you're listening to Script Apart, a podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows, and today I'm joined by the one and only Ryan Johnson. Ryan is a filmmaker who you might know from movies like Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and Looper. He directed one of the best episodes of TV this side of the millennium in the form of Breaking Bad's Fly episode and created the TV show Pokerface starring Natasha Leone. In 2019, he wrote and directed a movie about a Southern Accented Sleuth, played by Daniel Craig, titled Knives Out, that was to prove a massive smash hit. In 2022, a sequel, called Glass Onion, followed as part of a major deal with Netflix, and I should mention amid all of this, he apparently also made some kind of low budget, indeed, that probably completely passed under your radar because it was barely discussed online upon release. Wake up Deadmando is probably his most personal and politically charged film yet. As you'll hear in the spoiler conversation to follow, Ryan's relationship with religion is complicated to put it lightly. He tells me about growing up in the church before ultimately deciding to leave it, a story that totally altered my perspective on the last Jedi, a story less we forget about lapsed faith. This conversation shone a fascinating light on this latest adventure in the life of Benoit Blanc for me. We get into the overlap between the cult of personality church figurehead Monsignia Wix in Wake Up Deadman, and the politicians in our political landscape right now who position themselves as Christians but preach messages of fear them against us just as Wix does. We of course unravel the film's biggest twists and surprises, and Ryan also tells me what the future might look like for him after this tale, the next chapter in his story telling to come, having delved deeper than usual into himself to tell this story. A big thank you to him for being a fantastic guest, a massive shout out as ever to our Patreon supporters over at patreon.com/scriptipart for helping this show continue to grow, and a reminder for the screenwriters among you that Scriptipart now offers script coverage and one-on-one creative workshops. Meaning, if you've just finished a draft of a screenplay and are looking for comprehensive notes going into granular detail on your story and characters, I'd love to hear from you. If you're an emerging writer with an idea for a story that you'd love to tell, but perhaps having trouble bringing to the page, I can help you there too. It makes a great gift for the screenwriter in your life this holiday season. It's also a brilliant gift to yourself as 2026 approaches and all of our screenwriters head into the new year with renewed focus on chasing down our storytelling dreams. Simply head to scriptipart.com/coverage to find out more there that address one more time is scriptipart.com/coverage. Okay, with that all out the way, we can jump straight in with the very talented Ryan Johnson, discussing the first draft secrets of Wake Up Dead Man. A big thank you once again everyone for tuning in. I really do appreciate you being here. This episode was produced by Camille de Mac and who stood by me. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Ryan, it's great to meet you. How are you doing today? I'm doing wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'm catching you. I understand on a junket day, so you've been doing a lot of interviews. How many times have you been asked over the last 24 hours, whether or not Benoit Blanc could solve the Louvre heist crime? Today we haven't had any. I've been shocked. I feel like the last round that we did a few weeks ago, that story had just broken and it was probably every other interview. It's a fun question though. It's a fair question. It's an obvious question. Yes. Come on. I love this film, Ryan. It's a movie that feels personal. I understand that there's a lot of yourself that you pour into all of your movies, but it seems especially so with this one. I understand you grew up Protestant. Faith was a big part of your life through your early 20s, especially. You've now described yourself as a laxed Christian same here. What did Wake Up Dead Man awaken in you in terms of that period of your life and your relationship with religion? Well, it was interesting. Spoiler alert, I didn't become a believer again. That would be because automatically a screener, our mind goes to the biggest reversal at the end. That would be the big twist. That didn't happen, but it was interesting. When I started writing it, because Joshua Conner's character, Father Judd, is the central character of it. He's a priest who very much a believer, very much wants to bring Christ's love to the world. When I started writing, it's something was off. Father Judd wasn't engaging. He wasn't what he needed to be in the early drafts of the first act. Then I realized I was writing him from my perspective today. I was writing him as me as a 51-year-old, who hasn't been a Christian for 30 years. I had to go back and put myself back into being a believer. I had to go back to when I was a teenager. I had to get inside Judd's head. That meant going back for me into my past and truly trying to channel the person I was when I was when I was a Christian. Anyone who writes – anyone who's listening who writes, you guys know it's there's a bit of method acting to writing. You do have to believe what your characters believe when you're writing them. I don't know. It was interesting. It was therapeutic. It was very necessary for the script. I'll say that. It's not just your personal experience bleeding into the movie that way. The last film in this Knives Out series, that took its fair share of swipes against techbrows and so on, but this film, in particular, feels very markedly about the world today. Christianity in America has become enmeshed in a politics of fear, in service of different cults of personality, to use that phrase that comes up in this film a lot. What was on your mind in regards to all that as you sat down to write this film? Yeah, it's very present today. It also, though, I mean, I feel like the reason I felt the courage to kind of talk about in this movie is not just because I'm reading headlines today and reacting to them. It's because when I grew up as a kid in that in my household and grew up as a Christian, as an evangelical, was during Reagan's 80s, and it was very much a draw straight line from that to the line starts to rot at the end of it, that to where we're at in the present moment. We were a right-wing political household, and I'm the opposite of that now, but when I was up through, when I was a teenager, that was me. I was that, and so I experienced firsthand kind of the fusing of Christianity to right-wing politics, and a lot of which is enacting things that feel like they're antithetical to the teachings of Christ. But I also understand being inside that and believe in having the perspective on it, that this isn't a contradiction, and this makes sense. I actually lived through that. I don't feel that way now, but I did it at the time. So, I mean, I remember it's a quick little story. I remember going to, I went to many Christian camps when I was a teenager. I remember going to one, and the culmination of the week of camp was something that they called nightrun. And so, it was at night, and all the campers got on one side of the whole camp ground, and the premise of it was, okay, the thing we all knew was going to happen has happened. Christians are being hunted down in the United States because of their belief, and so all the camp counselors are the people from the government trying to hunt you down. They have flashlights, and you have to try and make your way from one side of the camp to the other without being caught. And at the time, it was the highlight of camp. It was a so really fun game because you're diving and trying not to get caught by the flashlights. I think about that now. I think about the mindset that that puts you in as a Christian in regards to the world. Also against them, we are victimized. We should be resentful of it, and we should live in fear of the world, and we have to fight the world. And it feels just so terrible and twisted to me, and that is kind of like the essence really of what Wix, Josh Brolin's character in this movie is all about, which is we have to build a fortress around ourselves. It's us against the world. They're out to get us. They're trying to destroy us. And if you can convince a people that they're under siege, you can convince them to do some pretty terrible things. And what did this all translate to in terms of the difficulty of writing this film, because on one hand, you know, you've made three of these now, and presumably quite well versed at this point in crafting the kind of rude Goldman machine mechanisms at the plots. But it sounds like, you know, the amount of yourself that you were threading in and the kind of heavy political matter that you're also factoring into this story, that would have been quite difficult. So yeah, how did it compare in terms of these? This is by far the hardest script I've ever written, not just of these movies. This was really, really hard and took a lot of rewriting. There's a lot of dead drafts in my folder on this one. Yeah, and it was. You're right. I mean, on one hand, they're like the mystery element of it, because the other thing I wanted to attempt was to try an impossible crime mystery, which is its own headache and is a little more complicated. That though, that's just puzzle solving. You can figure that out. You can sit down and figure that out as a writer. The thing that was really tricky is, I guess, theme in tone. I mean, theme always is a tough word because it sounds like it means message and it doesn't. I guess just the fact that I wanted to have the movie be about faith, but not be wagging its finger at either side of faith. But at the same time, I didn't want to just be pulling punches and tiptoeing through the raindrops and trying not to offend anybody because he wants that. So I wanted to be able to be very honest and very brutal. And he had the same time, very essentially generous because as much as all the stuff we talked about about the fear of based elements that I experienced in the world of Christianity growing up, I also experienced everything the Father Judd represents. And they had wonderful teachers in the church who were that to me and had incredible experiences that made me a better person and brought me a perspective that I cling to through the rest of my life in terms of, you know, mostly the things that Jesus actually thought in terms of, you know, trying to be a good person and trying to help the weak and to feed the hungry and welcome strangers and all that good stuff, all that woke shit. So, yeah, having all of that be working together and to have all of it, I guess this was a tricky part, have a generous spirit to it. So it didn't feel didactic. That was what was really tricky about this. And it was just a lot of trial and error. It was a lot of writing and rewriting. Open that dead draft folder for me, just for a second, Ryan, what was some of the kind of bigger swings that you explored and ultimately decided not to fit in this movie? There were a bunch of different highways and byways that this went down. And especially with the first act, and I think this is always the case with any script. I think you spend, typically I know I spend 65% of the time writing the first act. And then you speed up as you get closer to the end, right? So, you know, there were at some point, there were multiple other suspects that existed. The character of Lee, the science fiction writer, had like a teenage daughter at some point, which I was kind of putting all of my kind of the notion that there's nothing quite as, and this is describing myself as a teenager, there's nothing quite as terrifying as a teenager with a certainty of God in them. So it was a fun character, but there just wasn't room for her. And then there were a lot of different pathways to defining Judd's conflict with the congregation. I think that I had many different scenes where Judd and the congregation would, would butt heads in different ways. And a lot of that got stripped back as I realized that could all be embodied by Judd and Wix's, you know, locking horns. So yeah, it was just, it was a, it was a long, long, and beyond even big things coming out or staying or going, it was also just a question of tone of how hard you hit this, how much do you pull back from this? When is it important to go for the throat and when is it important to give a little moment of grace here? It's all that alchemical stuff that you just got to try different amounts. Well, I want to get into the weeds with it. I want to kind of go into the granular details of this story, but before we do, just help me situate it in terms of your wider body of work, Ryan. It's another story of yours that finds life and story and drama and intrigue somewhere off the beaten track. And I love that component of your work. Pokeface has it to kind of traveling through all these kind of different dusty pockets of America and finding adventure there. Your stories to me always seem to make the world feel bigger somehow. And yeah, that tendency to see the world as a huge, expansive place to be explored, even in Star Wars, it's there. So, do you have any kind of insight on where that impulse in you came from? Did you dream of a bigger world when growing up in Silver Spring? Or what do you think drives that kind of aspect of your story telling? Yeah, probably like a lot of us, right? I mean, we have a lot of writers, I think we we write big, expansive universes because we spend our childhood sitting in our rooms thinking about that. Or like I know a specific example of that, I spent my 20s in Los Angeles working day jobs trying to get my first movie brick made and failing to get it made and feeling like I was never going to never going to be able to get it made. And also not having feeling very trapped in Los Angeles, resenting Los Angeles. And so when I wrote the brother's bloom, that was all of that bottled up intensity of the romance of dreaming of a life traveling traveling the world and falling in love and the notion of storytelling being a conduit to all of that, all of that got poured into the brother's bloom. And it's a very concrete example of almost literally wanting to manifest an adventure for myself that I had always dreamed of but never have by putting it into a movie. But I love that movie and I love that experience in making that movie. I also think it is a little bit like that movie is a bit like a ripe tomato being shoved into a match box. I'm trying to get everything I love to one thing, which is what I love about it. But anyway, but I think that's, I don't know, that's something that we all kind of have to have to do. I also though, I think in this speaks to kind of poker face and maybe this movie a little bit more, I think as I get older, the notion of the big wide world out there, you slowly start to realize that the bigness actually happened in these intimate little fish bowls that we find ourselves in, in these little microcosms of the bigger world and in intense relationships between smaller groups of people. And that I think is more and more what I've drawn to. And you mentioned brick there. The mention of that film reminds me that like since the very beginning, you have gravitated towards characters who are pulling threads trying to find a truth. And that has really ramped up the more that our world has become a place of dwindling truth. Pokerface is about truth. Benoit Blank is all about truth and he has like a great amount of dialogue speaking about his relationship with truth in this film. Why do you think that's something that you're drawn to again and again? Well, and you're like you said, there's something that's very present right now. But also, I mean, I don't know. I do. And this is something another one of one of several things that I'm very grateful for in terms of growing up with faith and growing up with seeing the world through the lens of a relationship with God and the higher power. That brought a sense of wonder to the world. And it also brought a bigger draw it overlaid kind of this bigger drama onto the world of the of which the notion of truth is was a big part of that. And so when I drifted away from faith and when I lost that that left a big vacuum that I then had to actively figure out how to how to fill. And so so going through my 20s and into my 30s the search for truth and figuring out how to how to form how to basically frame the world around me now that I lost this central framing device of a belief in God. That was kind of my version of that. So I think that God implanted very early. And I'm sure a lot of writers have some version of that. We're all kind of we're all trying to figure it out man. I have to let you know as you say all this and and describe your your kind of loss of faith and crisis of faith. The last Jedi has been completely retextualized for me. Sure. Well yeah Luke's whole whole kind of storyline in that. But that's another film, pre-deception in the day. So I'm at the beginning of kind of conceptualizing this film. You obviously had a two film deal with Netflix. You knew you had to continue this knives out story. Were there other ideas you explored before you realized that you wanted to venture into this kind of religious space? There was one that I had gone briefly down the notion of doing like a Broadway mystery, which I still think could be fun at some point. But but then once I kind of lit upon the idea of talking about faith and using an impossible mystery to do that then that totally took my took my attention. But also I was you know with with the deal with Netflix the two-picture deal after we made glass onion. The timeframe on the deal was loose enough to where I could have made something else next. For me it was very it wasn't like oh I have to come up with something I do is that when I struck upon this this was then the most exciting thing I could imagine doing next. And so yeah that's kind of why I dove into it. So I imagine that it was it was quite quickly after that moment that you you came across the character of Judd and you started to work out who he was and how he would help drive the story. He's of course a boxer who killed a man in the ring and then made these sweeping changes in his life. Tell me about the development of Judd and who he is to you Ryan. Well he started with me just kind of wanting to pour everything that I hold dear about about my experience with faith into one character. And I want to create so I want to kind of everything that I truly value in Christ's teachings and in Christianity and in faith in general. Let's put it in this character. And then I was like okay this is a very boring character. So now let's figure out what the conflict is inside this guy. Well what is the conflict within me? Well the conflict is that's the ideal that you hold and that's what you aim for but you know you have this kind of anger inside you or you have this fighting the fighting instinct inside you. And so let's give him roots in that. Let's make him a boxer and give him this backstory and okay maybe that's how he came to the church. That's what he's trying to get away from. And that's great because that means when he finds himself in the middle of a murder mystery movie it's almost like his past coming back to haunt him in this horrible way kind of the thing that he clung to faith to get away from. He found refuge from in faith. God is throwing him back into it as the ultimate test. So that's when it all started to kind of click and then also the bigger thing throughout the movie is and this is kind of what Blanc's relationship with Judd is all about or Judd's relationship with Blanc is all about. The notion of the selfless kind of service, the love your enemy service that Christ calls us to calls on us to do in this world versus Judd's place in the story of a murder mystery which is let's find whoever did this and catch them and punish them so that my name can be cleared and I can be in the in the in the clear. And Blanc's kind of gamified version of that that Judd finds himself just like we as the audience find ourselves swept up in. And so the notion of Judd and asking swept up in this and then having a point in the movie where Judd has to do a hard reset and remember that's actually antithetical to what I'm put on this earth to do. Blanc's relationship with Judd is fascinating because when they first meet they there is something there there is kind of a a gulf between them because of this this notion of faith and because of Blanc's relationship with faith and with the church he has this anti-church stance that's really interesting. He is usually quite an unflappable character but he comes barreling into the movie in with a bit more of an exposed nerve than we've seen him before. It's fascinating from a narrative perspective in terms of what's driving the character. It was obviously established in the last film that he's gay. He as we've been discussing he is like in this relentless search for the truth and he sees the Bible as a fiction. Was it kind of one of these things that was kind of driving his his kind of suspicion towards the church and what Judd does or how did you build that out? Yeah so I mean and I think I think there's just like a small moment where we communicate the notion that he had some greater rift with religion because he had a very religious mother the implication being that there was some rift probably because of his sexuality and that ended up kind of you know informing a lot of it but also you know also Blanc being you know that combined with him forming this and this wasn't the same lens that I found for myself but the notion that having stepped out of that he then had to form a new lens to view the world through and this is what he did it around is the notion of a man of reason and rationality it was interesting because that first scene between Judd and Blanc as written originally it was a much softer scene especially with Blanc's first tirade against the church that he throws at Judd that was it was the same basic idea but it just went a lot shorter when a lot less hard it was just kind of more a little dismissive thing and this is where you know as a writing director you've learned to listen to your actors Daniel had the instinct of Blanc should come in and really both guns blazing on this and at first I was skeptical because I thought I don't know and and then we kept talking about it and I realized he's absolutely right because just dramatically as a writing thing to start them as far apart as possible in that first moment is going to make that journey where they then have to form a relationship and where Blanc actually learns something from Judd and vice versa by the end that much more satisfying over the course of it so yeah end up being a crucial thing to that relationship and something that I discovered through rewriting with Daniel can you articulate for me what it is for you that Blanc learns from that relationship because that first scene that first interaction between the two of them Blanc obviously has a problem with the church and the church's relationship with truth and Judd's kind of argument back is that perhaps the storytelling in the bible is a delivery mechanism for a moral truth and it seems that by the end of the film in kind of how how Blanc adopts that notion of grace and giving grace that he has kind of learned about like where kind of it's it's maybe kind of best to kind of give over a certain truth and in order to kind of like in order for a certain moral truth to rise or something like that you will have a better grasp of this on me what was your intention Ryan? I mean I think I think so let's look at Blanc's world first of all I was scared this is another thing that was very interesting to me when I started out in terms of overlying faith and and then mystery film Blanc's world kind of the standard thing of a murder mystery where which in some ways you can kind of blur your eyes a little bit and say okay this does have a semi religious arc to it because in the murder mystery there's a murder there's an original sin which creates from this kind of little paradise creates moral chaos in the universe the benevolent usually paternal detective descends into this chaos from the heavens he takes everyone's confession he questions all the suspects he separates the chef from the wheat he kind of finds the guilty party and and the innocence they partens the innocence and he punishes the guilty and he sets the you know moral universe back to right and so that kind of that kind of pattern is very much kind of what Blanc's used to following it's his purpose and it's also kind of his identity so his ego is caught up in in being that Juds and this is Blanc's arc and what he learns by the end is very much connected to Juds Road to Damascus moment where he realizes wait a minute I've let myself get caught up in this let's find the bad guy and punish them gamified version whereas what I'm here to do is actually be I should be tending my flock I should be counseling these people I should be trying to help them not trying to punish not trying to find the guilty and punish them and I should be extending grace to them and in that last moment I mean in that last scene Blanc I think does one of the most Christian gestures in the whole movie because he sacrifices the thing that's most important to him which is his ego his big checkmate moment is the thing we all show up to these movies to see which is Blanc pointing his finger and saying you are the guilty one and sending them to jail he realizes in that in a moment that by doing that he's going to be denying a moment of grace to the final moments of of of this person the guilty party who deserves it the least in the movie this is this is his enemy this is uh there was um it's interesting too I mean I it's funny how you and I think the writers will relate to this you you you write these things and then you discover things in them after you've written that are resonant a friend of mine Karin Kusama had seen the movie I showed her a rough cut of it and she she said oh my god because the whole thing of Blanc having this history with his mother and the notion of having this essential kind of like hatred of the church because of this conflict with his mother the idea that at the end and and we're full spoilers here right where yeah okay so the idea that at the end he's choosing he's standing in a church he's granting forgiveness and grace to this believer who has done this harm because she absolutely believes in this thing who is Martha who is an older woman you know who's who's walking down the altruism who could be seen as a surrogate for his mother that to me was something that I only put the pieces of the leg out to the fact which is crazy but those things happen when you're writing you know you you you excavate dinosaur bones and then it's it's something outside of you that you're discovering I guess you know I think the the two biggest laughs in my screening of the film were Judd's reaction to Wix's son's description of what's happening in Star Wars did they did they laugh so hard they didn't hear the actual punchline because sometimes that happens so because he says he says yo like in Star Wars and there's a big laugh but the real punchline is right after that did you hear it I don't think I did because it was just it all in Joshua Joshua Connor's reaction so yeah so yeah so he says because you know we he had said we can form a real empathy a real empire his father and son and you cut to Josh and he says like it's Star Wars and everyone laughs and so they missed the response line from side where he says yeah like the Rebels how you did you cut that okay good good good yeah everyone thinks they're the Rebels man well it was that moment and it was also the kind of reference to Blanc having been on the view oh yeah I bring that up to us yeah are you kind of like when you approach these films are you thinking about what has been happening in the life of Blanc between movies again like we were discussing earlier about the world feeling bigger the characters life feels bigger as well it seems like he has adventures beyond what we're seeing on screen yeah and I do think about that I also think the later a brush you used to paint stuff like that the the bigger and more expansive it'll seem I think that that's one thing is is you know the the the mammoth writing brain in me is definitely there the notion that characters are only revealed through action in the script and Blanc's action is to engage with and solve the mystery so I never want to be cutting to a flashback of Blanc as a ten-year-old seeing why he solves crimes or something I never want to you know have him have a long monologue about this or that you know I want to just glance on it and then move onward because it does hint in the bigger world out there which if for Blanc which I think is good but then it brings our focus straight back to he's got to convince this this priest to come on this journey with him so that they can find the killer in this murder mystery that we're watching I knew I think in my logical brain I knew that there hadn't been a resurrection as we got into that third act but some part of the storytelling kind of did lure me into into the into the question wait has there been tell me about that like the film goes there what's this what's the trick to that because you do lean in and you do suspend belief for a second despite knowing what type of movie we're in right how did you construct that I think that the trick is perspective the trick is whose perspective are we seeing this from and the fact that for that sequence it's from Judd's perspective who is somebody who could conceivably be susceptible to you know to believing this and then it is the fact that we that sequence is shot hopefully in such a way where your injured shoes emotionally where it's a very scary overwhelming sequence also you're not seeing just a clinical breakdown of what happened your emotional area it's intended that you're emotionally experiencing it from Judd's point of view and so that has an impact on you Josh Brolin's performance up to that point the notion that he's is this force of nature in this terrifying guy and my god holy shit if there anyone in this movie could come back from the grave or hopefully or then your brain hopefully starts going to well did he fake his own death is he like that so it's something that John Dixon Carr who's the author that we named check in in the movie it's one of many things that was very influenced by in Carr and this is something that he does in his books in in a lot of them is he'll do a faint towards the supernatural but he'll do it so effectively using those tools I just described that even though you know he's not gonna land it there because that would be a cheat you feel like there's no other explanation and we got maybe this is the one where he just says he just fuck it yeah it's ghosts so I don't know you do you kind of bake all that into the pie and then hope it comes out the other end what do you think there is to be extrapolated about real life figures like Wick in his attempt to kind of stage this oh well in in the kind of the ruse that's going on here right I think there's there's an illusion in the film to this idea that like these cults of personality figures who you know frame themselves as being in service to Christ they actually kind of want to be Christ themselves there's something in that realm like was there something you were you were gunning for it that so I think that's probably true I think the bigger thing at this point in the story though is and this is more applicable I think to the real world in terms of these you know proto-fascist figures who will go unnamed it is at this point in the story and it's also why I like the title of the hollow man for the book because at this point in the story wix is being used the court literal corpse of wix is being used as a tool by these by people with aspirations with like Martha Martha and and Dr. Nat we're going to use him as a tool to create this illusion of this of this Christ like figure in order to get what they want in terms of these these riches without understanding that once they get it the power of the corrupting power of that is going to destroy them as well so the notion that there are actual smart people who are not wix who think that they can harness this cult of personality in order to get what they want and not understanding that everyone's going to betray each other in the end and it's all going to come crumbling down in a horrible way I mean that that feels like that it feels like the New York Times right now a little bit to me so yeah you mentioned earlier about Blanc kind of foregoing that thing that he always chases in these stories which is that moment of fun as he describes it where he does get to kind of show off his intellect and kind of piece all the puzzle pieces together in this exciting way if that's what he's chasing when he goes on these adventures what is it Ryan that you're chasing when you make these films have you ever kind of got in touch with what it is that keeps you keeps you making movies and keeps you telling stories well I mean I think it's it's it's I guess it's not a specific simple answer of it's a general simple answer which is um I don't know these may which which is um the experience and growth that comes from the process of making them at every stage and um making a movie especially if you write it even if you don't but for me I write my own film so the process of writing the process then of prep and working with all the artists who are going to create it and perming firm and communication with them and making all those decisions process of shooting and working with the actors the process of post-production and that writing process using kind of these tools and then even this part of the process of putting it out in the world bouncing off it having conversations with people about it um it's an insane amount of personal if you engage with in it in an open-hearted way where you are trying to learn from every stage of it it is such a growth machine for the process of of doing it it's incredibly addictive and it's it's I think that's I mean you think about you know I don't know you the I'm a big Orson Wells fan you think about the fact that later in this life he was just chasing trying to get his next movie it it almost felt like he could have gone off and done anything but he just kept chasing this dream and making another movie I think this is why it gets in your blood and so addictive because there's no other all-encompassing experience like it and um I don't know for me it's specific to each project in terms of what I learned and what I'm reaching for with it but it's generally true that um I don't know it's such a it's a it's a if you come into it with an open heart it's such a rich experience in life of Schrodinger's life experience um and then hopefully you get a good movie out the other end too but the reality is would I take from it at the end of the day would I remember about the movies I made before or not the movies on the screen it's my experience and the people that I worked with making them I'll close out with this question Ryan because I think we've got about two minutes left having told this story that did involve you digging so deep into your own self and your own past did you discover something there is there a kind of a more nourishing reward from doing that that you think might affect the trajectory of what you do going forward do you think you'll continue to dig that deep in knives out for and everything else that's on the horizon I'll tell you it is I mean in I don't know I also feel like I'm just kind of also entering a phase where I want to I want to take away I don't know I just where exactly what you describe is what gets me excited about the process and so um and that's a couple that's that's getting as personal as you possibly can but it's also just in the notion of craft the idea of taking of breaking my own process and trying to take away things I'm comfortable with in order to maybe engage on a deeper level with with the creative process itself so that includes but isn't it just limited to the notion of just I don't know you you also just don't want these things to become therapy machines you're a craftsman and you're trying to make an entertainment for people that's a big part of what drives me to make these things of what satisfying about them but but doing that while also putting part of yourself in and also genuinely trying to kind of scare yourself with what you're attempting um I find that in you know I think in the beginning of your career you're just trying to be able to make movies and you're just trying to kind of like make things that you love and kind of turn yourself on with kind of like make chasing these different things um it's interesting to get to a point where at least in this moment I know this won't last forever at least in this moment if I write something I can get it made it's an incredible gift it also though takes away that urgency of the reason to get something missed because I want to make something it's okay what is the thing that is challenging me about this next thing I want to get made what is it that feels terrifying so stay scared yeah stay scared and make blonde calm Broadway by the sounds of things let's see let's see right this has been a pleasure thank you so much for coming on script a part it's a great conversation I appreciate it you've been listening to script a part thank you so much for tuning in a reminder that if you want to help the show continue to grow you can join us on patreon by visiting patreon.com forward slash script a part or clicking the link in today's show notes thanks again for joining us we'll see you next time