00:00It's funny, I feel that's not very personal, those things were kind of like details along
00:05the way and along the process.
00:06The things that are really personal in the movie to me are like me talking about basically
00:10just the, I don't know, discomfort, struggles I've had in male relationships, basically
00:16in friend relationships.
00:17In this case, it's a cousin, but it can be a friend and just feeling completely envious
00:22of somebody whose life, you know, is materially and unsustainably much worse than yours.
00:28But just this deep feeling of envy and shame about being this self-conscious, you know,
00:36this self-conscious constantly questioning anxious person.
00:39And Kieran for me is kind of like the, you know, he's like my id, he's like my shadow,
00:44this guy who is so comfortable with himself, even to the point where he's comfortable talking
00:48about his own grief in a way that feels more earthy and rich than the way I talk about
00:52my own grief.
00:53And at the same time, I know that he has this unsustainable life and I just can't reconcile
00:58these two things, this great person and this person who's been hollowed out.
01:02And so that stuff is really personal and, you know, for me, I'm sitting there in the
01:05library writing it and I'm like, you know, crying over writing it and then I'm acting
01:09and it just feels like this almost like cathartic thing of all the stuff I've been feeling about
01:13certain things that I haven't been able to articulate, but that I can through when I'm
01:17writing because it feels like there's this bit of a separation.
01:19And then acting for me has always been this really cathartic thing.
01:22And so for me to get to kind of like bring that to fruition through performing it felt
01:27really cathartic, but ultimately completely unhelpful.
01:30You know, I'm still stuck in those feelings, but maybe in some ways it's good to exercise
01:35it.
01:36That's interesting.
01:37And it's a beautiful scene.
01:38It really is.
01:39Right.
01:41Payal, what for you was the scene?
01:43There's a scene which is like a kind of a magic realism in the film, which is going
01:48from a very realistic documentary kind of film to something that becomes almost dreamlike
01:53towards the end.
01:55And it was an important scene for me because it was the one I wrote first, which is odd
02:00for this movie when you see it.
02:02So it was kind of like for me, the way I write is that I have, I write random scenes which
02:07have nothing to do with each other, but just based on these characters and somewhere try
02:11to connect the dots.
02:13I still haven't gotten over the three act structure problems that I have, I'm struggling.
02:17I'm with you.
02:20That shit's hard.
02:21It's hard.
02:22So this is like the connecting dots that I like to do.
02:24And I enjoy that very much.
02:26It's like, and there's so many scenes that you write that don't make it to the film.
02:29And they just like the juice of it all.
02:32And it's so fun.
02:33But this scene I had from the start, which was, you know, where she where she sort of
02:37imagines her husband.
02:40And it was really important to me that because it's a story about a woman who is in a relationship,
02:45an arranged marriage with a guy who's vanished from her life.
02:49But that relationship is seen as something that is acceptable by society.
02:54And she really kind of looks down on her roommate who is having an affair with the person who,
02:59you know, the society would never accept because of a difference in identity and religion.
03:04And you know, she's like, this is not legitimate.
03:06This is not the right way to be.
03:08And so for me, this disappearing husband didn't really have to come back to tell her anything.
03:15She needed to sort of purge this morality out of her life.
03:19And in that sense, I connected a lot with Baby Girl because, you know, our codes of
03:25morality and sexuality and desire in different countries are different for women, but it's
03:30still the same fundamental struggle.
03:33And she needed to kind of, you know, see the light in a world where it was all dark for
03:39her.
03:40And that's also where the title comes from.
03:41And for me, the scene was difficult to do because it kind of is this.
03:44It could go either way.
03:45It could completely, you know, because it slips into a kind of a fantasy world in a
03:51very realistic film.
03:53So I was very afraid of how to pull this off.
03:56And I relied a lot on sound design to do it, a kind of an internal sound design.
04:01And I enjoy that very much because cinema gives you those palettes in your, I mean,
04:06the colors in your palette and one of them is sound.
04:09And I think, yeah, for me, it was a tough scene to do it.
04:15The result was magical.
04:16I thought it was absolutely magical, that's so poetic and beautiful and very clear also
04:21in that sense.
04:22Of course.
04:23Very well done.
04:24Yeah.
04:25Justin, from either of yours, was there one that was particularly daunting?
04:29Yeah, the ending of Challengers, you know, because I was pretty militant throughout the
04:38entire process of making the movie that we were never going to, this is a spoiler, but
04:43yeah, that we were never going to declare a winner of the match.
04:47Because for me, by the time they arrive at that final scene, all their cards are out
04:53on the table and they're having the most open and honest conversation of their lives all
04:58together and they're having it through tennis.
05:00And they're all really playing tennis again for the first time in years, you know, Tashi
05:04included.
05:05And so for me, the match doesn't matter anymore.
05:08You know, the score doesn't matter.
05:10And I felt like declaring a winner would cheapen that.
05:15But of course, because it's a movie at the scale that it was made, there's pressure from
05:19various points to, you know, this is a sports movie.
05:22We have to know who wins.
05:23If we don't say who wins, people are going to leave and give it a bad cinema score or
05:29something, you know.
05:32And that pressure was real and I respected it and I got where it was coming from.
05:38But I was, you know, really convinced that that was not the path.
05:43So in pre-production, I was finding ways to keep the fundamental truth of what I was going
05:51for in that ending while also figuring out a way to make it emotionally and sort of viscerally
05:58more satisfying and feel like something had been resolved.
06:03And that's when it sort of dawned on me one day in the production office that within tennis,
06:09there was an answer, which was that in tennis, sometimes the game itself actually brings
06:15the players closer together when there's a volley at the net.
06:18And that had not been in the script yet.
06:21This thing of them literally coming closer and closer together.
06:25And you know, if you think about tennis in relationship to boxing, you know, those being
06:32the two sort of gladiatorial sports where it's one on one, boxing is all about touching
06:37another person and tennis is all about not touching another person, which is why tennis
06:42is a game of repression, you know.
06:45And so it felt all of a sudden like that could be a way to have our cake and eat it, too,
06:52with the ending where finally they touch in the game.
06:55That's great.
06:57And a huge cinema score.
06:58Yes.
06:59Most importantly.
07:01And a cinema score went through.
07:05I am now the president of Paris.
07:09Helena, the scene for you?
07:12For me, there's a scene in my movie where they, where Harris Dickinson, who plays Samuel,
07:18her intern, and Nicole Kidman, who plays Romy, really have their first long meeting.
07:23And it's in, I call it the cheap hotel room.
07:26And the challenge of that whole scene is that for me, they go through a whole marriage within,
07:31let's say, 12 hours.
07:32And so they had to, you know, be able to play all those different things.
07:34And we build it.
07:35It was a build set.
07:36And I wanted nobody in there except my DP, Jasper Wolff, who's a genius, and them.
07:40And we put microphones everywhere so that they could be completely alone.
07:45There's a lot of intimacy in that scene, but it's also technically just very hard to do
07:48because what I was looking for is a tone where they kind of go in and out of their performance
07:52that sexuality sometimes is because they're trying out their dynamic.
07:56So I wanted him to give her an assignment and then at the same time be like, oh, sorry.
07:59I'm so sorry.
08:00Am I allowed to say this?
08:01And that tone, I was like, how am I going to write that on the page so that an actor
08:05can read that and actually understands what, because that's quite hard.
08:09So I spent a long time writing it out so that hopefully the actors would understand.
08:14And then when we were doing it, it was the final day and I was incredibly nervous, but
08:18they did such an amazing job and we prepared it very, very intensely.
08:22So they knew all the choreography and they were just amazing.
08:25So that in the moment it could be electrifying and they could even invent new stuff.
08:30So yeah, they're just amazing performers, but I was very nervous.
08:32Jason?
08:33I think it's really important to my writing process, which is at some point in life as
08:39a writer, you feel something.
08:41You feel something and it's really complicated.
08:44It's something that gives you joy, but heartbreak and loneliness and sadness.
08:49And it's like tasting something you've never tasted before.
08:51And as a writer, you go, how am I going to get an audience to feel that one day?
08:55And I think the technique that you build over the course of being a storyteller is figure
08:59out a way to get an audience to feel something really complex.
09:02And that's at the end of the day, really all we're after.
09:07On SNL, there was this thing that I had experienced not only when I was on the floor of Saturday
09:13Night Live, what it felt like right before it went to air, which even as an audience
09:19member, you're scared.
09:20There's no good reason to be scared, but you are.
09:27But I'd also felt it doing the high school play or like a summer camp musical.
09:34And it was how is the audience going to really understand not only that feeling, but how
09:37this whole group coalesces.
09:40And on our film, on Saturday Night, it's strange.
09:43It's not a movie with 90 scenes.
09:44It's a movie with one 90-minute scene.
09:47The entire thing connects from the moment you meet Lauren all the way to the very end
09:49until someone says, live from New York on Saturday night.
09:52And we knew we were going to meet all these characters.
09:55And it became a question of having, oddly, two scripts.
09:57We have the script that is the script, the producible script, which is 100 pages that
10:02we actually numbered backwards.
10:04The first page was page 100, and then it went 99, 98, 97, all the way to the last page.
10:11But then there was a second document that had everything else.
10:14Because we were going to be tracking 30 main characters, 80 speaking roles.
10:21We had days where our production mixer, Steve Morrow, had up to 58 mics going simultaneously.
10:26So many that he had to bring a second mixing board just to mix everything simultaneously.
10:30For us, the only way to actually get to know these characters and feel what it's like
10:35to really be there is for it to sound like you are really there.
10:38And that meant everyone needed dialogue.
10:40Not just the people in the foreground, but there needed to be layers of dialogue as you
10:43moved through rooms so that you were tracking individual storylines, even when you didn't
10:47think you were tracking them.
10:49And so the solution became, one, in our script, it's constant dual dialogue.
10:56That's when you have character dialogue left and right.
10:58And it's not because they're talking over each other.
11:00It's because these are simultaneous scenes that are happening, even though you were maybe
11:03hearing one versus the other.
11:05But then also having an additional document that had the storyline of every other character.
11:10Because in our film, we have to know not only where every person is at any given time, where
11:15every prop is at any given time, where every set piece, where the llama is.
11:19We need to know where everything is in the building so that every time someone walks
11:23through a hallway, up a stairway, or get into an elevator, we can keep track of five different
11:27storylines simultaneously.
11:28That's great.
11:29So great.
11:30Yeah.
11:31Kim.
11:32Thanks, Jesse.
11:33I don't know a scene, but the breakthrough I had or the kind of moment I felt as a writer
11:39I had figured something out was very early starting it, which was Jay Cox had written
11:46a script already that had some great moments in it.
11:49But as I said, was kind of, and I think Jay had handcuffs on, he was avoiding kind of
11:54the stuff between the music.
11:58But in going after that stuff, I also realized that I didn't want to do, you know, a long
12:05time ago, I co-wrote this movie called Girl Interrupted.
12:09And there's this one scene where Angelina Jolie's character comes up to Winona Ryder
12:12and goes, did you, talking about the therapy of the institution, she goes, did you cough
12:16up your secret?
12:17And Winona's character's like, what secret?
12:18And she goes, the one that you cough up and confess and then they let you fucking out.
12:23And it's essentially my own reference to what I think of as the ordinary people or goodwill
12:28hunting structure of movies where you have someone harboring and burying and there's
12:33nothing wrong with it.
12:34It's classic.
12:35I did it and walked the line essentially.
12:37But you have this thing where, and then suddenly somewhere in the third act, it comes out and
12:42then they're, due to modern psychoanalytical theory, they're essentially healed or passed
12:48through to a new, and that I knew I couldn't do that for this movie to Bob Dylan, that
12:55there was nothing he was going to vomit in the third act that was going to suddenly make
12:59you go.
13:00So it was in a way similar to what he was just talking about in terms of Saturday Night
13:06is that I realized, and I thought of my old mentor's movie Amadeus, Peter Schafer's script
13:13and play, and how meticulously it's a movie about genius in which you don't penetrate
13:20the genius nearly as much as you understand Salieri, his wife, the king, and everyone
13:25else in the wake they leave on others, which in its own way allows you to understand this
13:31other character, but you are not, you suddenly don't have to fulfill this other kind of Freudian
13:41scene that's such a staple, and a wonderful one that I enjoy of cinema, but that I knew
13:45wouldn't work in this particular script.
13:48There's one other thing I could say about the quote you used before about movies need
13:52to, a script's job is to sell or to get made.
13:56I didn't mean that in a cynical way.
13:59I meant it in the sense that I was speaking to film students, and very often when you
14:06read young screenwriters' scripts, including my own, they are extremely aggressive in terms
14:13of trying to make sure you see the whole fucking movie, and oftentimes they're told not to
14:21do this because it will offend the director, which is not the reason not to do it.
14:25The reason not to do it is because it's fucking boring to read, and that a great, if we're
14:32talking about someone a screenwriter could take away, there was a great piece of advice
14:36I once received, which is to write a script like you're in a theater watching the movie,
14:41and speaking to a blind person who couldn't see it, and if you took too long to describe
14:48what was going on, you'd get way fucking behind, so you'd go, there's a lot of clouds in a
14:52little house, and that's all you say.
14:53You don't go, it's a cupboard house with a peeling paint on the outside, and a few little
14:57nipples are arriving, and you'd lose the fucking movie, and then you just get out, you know,
15:02a small house in a field, and you try and write that way, and it gives you a sense of
15:07the impatience of your reader, who will stop reading after ten pages, of not, you bring
15:14all your intention, bring all the detail you see, but you can render that with less words,
15:22and make the reading, because it isn't just a list of ingredients, it isn't just a list
15:27of dialogue, it is something that's gonna have to win an actor, it's gonna have to win
15:31a studio, it's gonna have to win a crew, a DP, other people, they're gonna have to decide
15:35to do your movie and not someone else's, so that you can't ignore that the document is
15:40not only a dramatic thing, but a persuasive argument for the existence of the dramatic
15:47thing at the same time, and that's what I meant.
