DZ-107: Establishing Tone through Character — Transcript

Basically, they end up spinning a knife just laughing with each other. And we completely buy that they're like, yep, we're hanging out all the time now. Rather than them having hot sex, it's actually they have hot laughter.

I like that.

Hi, I'm Stu Willis.

And I'm Chas Fisher.

And welcome to Draft Zero, a podcast where we try to work out what makes great screenplays work.

And today we are diving back into Tone after having a mild reprieve into narrative fuel in between Tone Episode 1 and this Tone Episode 2. And in the future, we are going to have a third entry on Tone. But to save ourselves our usual epic foundation laying, if you haven't listened to Tone Episode 1, it's Episode 106. We recommend you go back and do so, where we looked at dark films with unusual tones. So, we did The Nice Guys, Yellow Jackets.

Banshees of Inner Sharon.

It was a good, fun episode. But this one, the initial approach was still to look for unusual tones to see how the writers bring that forth on the page and try and capture, you know, the magic that ends up on screen. And this time, the initial thought was, let's look for lighter genres, lighter films with unusual tones. But in that exploration and in polling our Patreons, who bring you more Draft Zero more often, believe it or not. And we ended up with Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig. Emily the Criminal, written and directed by John Patton Ford. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. And Spontaneous, written and directed by Brian Duffield. And I deliberately highlighted that we've chosen four writer-directors because it was completely unintentional. But I figure it'd be a good jumping off point to say, Stu, why do you think we, in looking for unusual tones in lighter genres of films, Do you think we ended up, A, with some quite dark films, and B, all writer-directors?

I think writer-directors, which we've mentioned before, is because I think being a director gives you more control over tone. But I have kind of dug up the foundations a little bit of the previous episode. Because I re-listened to it into the lead-up to doing this one, and I've kind of been pondering it for a while. And this is because I read a quote from an acquaintance of the podcast, Tom Vaughan.

So, Tom Vorman was defining what tone was to him, and he defined it as the range of emotions and actions that allows the audience to remain fully immersed in the story without breaking their suspension of disbelief.

So, that kind of got me thinking that our previous episode was very much focused on the audience experience. And I still think that is part of tone, but what we didn't really discuss was character experience. Right. So I'm going to say upfront that I've now introduced a new triangle. I had considered making it like a polyhedron, but I think a triangle will serve our purposes just fine.

Right.

So these are the things that I think lead to tone. Like there's two things on the bottom and then one on the top the two things on the bottom are the given circumstances in the moment and then how the characters act and react to those given circumstances and then how we are told to feel about that right yeah and i think they're the three elements that that make up tone and last episode we were more looking at the tools that the writers were using in the absence of the, I guess, non-diegetic tools that filmmakers get to use. Because what I'm putting at the top of the triangle, like how we are told to feel is through composition and lighting and cinematography and editing and music, non-diegetic music, basically all the literary devices that a filmmaker may use. Now, some of those devices, like something that a writer does have control of is, say, in flashbacks. Flashbacks could be presented in a way that the characters are unaware that there are flashbacks, right, that's literally an A line and a B line, or they could be used as something that's kind of imposing themselves on the characters, right, like flashbacks that are basically part of their PTSD or whatever, right? Right. And this was inspired by Tom's quote, but I think this is actually more useful because when you're talking about establishing tone, what you need to do in the first five-ish pages is what we look at. And I think all these scripts do is that they establish the kind of given circumstances. This is more, I think it's more useful than the rules of the world. Like a rule of the world may be, not that we're doing any science fiction, but a rule of the world might be there's faster than light travel. Right. But that doesn't really have much emotional information. But there's different ways you can think about what brings fast and light travel i just re-watched dune in the lead up to dune part two that fast and light travel is fueled by spice which is a rare, mineral mined on a particular planet through the exploitation of the indigenous population right that is actually the given circumstances and that has a different tone to it than star wars where as far as i can tell there's just faster than life travel and there's no cost to it have.

You you erased Solo and Origin Story from.

Your- Wait.

Wait, wait.

Do they use spice to say power's faster than life? Do they literally rip off a dune?

No, but they've got the fuel as a resource that's going to fuel the rebellion.

Mm. Yeah, it's very poorly developed in Star Wars, let's be real.

Oh, yeah.

And that's why people feel it's a bit weird, because Star Wars, and I think part of the, what he's talking about, the consistency, suspension, and the disbelief, is actually related to, you can think of them as rules, but, like, breaking the given circumstances in such a way that the audience doesn't know the given circumstances have changed, or changing the way that characters act and react. And yes, I do think there is kind of like a dynamic range or an emotional range within that, but there's not just within the character, but within the story, you get a story that is, takes itself super seriously, you know, coming back to Dune. I think it's interesting that both the Lynch version and the Villeneuve version choose to play the Baron as quite sinister rather than him being like a hedonist, right? Like, and it's kind of interesting. There is a version of that character that is actually having a lot more fun. Yes. Still evil, but having fun. But they have chosen to kind of like mute his emotional range in both those films. And I think what's interesting about what we're coming back to what we're looking at, all the scripts, maybe with the exception of Spontaneous, are focusing more on the dramatization, on the given circumstances of the characters and how the characters act and react to those circumstances in the moment. And I think the in the moment thing is important because what I like about Given Circumstances as a tool, as a writer and a director, is it's about what given circumstances are that every character has in the moment. You can literally write down what these things are that they're facing in this scene because it should inform how the characters are going to behave.

Yeah, I'm only hearing about your new triangle for the first time, so I'm letting it sink in a bit. But my first reactions are... I don't think it's the sum of everything that feeds into tone that a writer can do, but I think it's a really important tool that these four scripts do very well.

I mean, this is why it's a triangle and I'm not a dodecahedron, because I think I'm using broad umbrella terms. Like, there's the internal of the characters, there's the external of the world, and then there's the audience's experience of that is another way of thinking about them. And maybe there's specific levers that you can pull, but I'm just identifying them as broad categories.

Yeah. And going back to Tom's definition, it does link back to emotions. And we've spoken about in the last episode about tone as like perhaps a limiting instinct about what can go in and go out of a story. I like that he's framing it around tone is what keeps the audience, it's the emotions that allow the audience to remain fully immersed without breaking their suspension of disbelief. And I, out of your triangle, I find the peak of the triangle to be the most important for tone in terms of if I'm considering a script where I've got feedback about the tone isn't quite right, or just I know that it's not coming across, then it really is about at a script level, teaching the reader, but then at a screen level, it is about the relationship between the content and the audience more so than it is about the characters in the world. But to your point, these scripts show super well how just talking about the characters, just looking at their actions and their emotions as a tool to express tone is very different from what we had in the last episode where we had, you know, Shane Black and the writers of Yellowjackets like really going to town in the big print about trying to compensate for those literary devices, for those non-diegetic stuff. stuff. Whereas here in these four scripts, and I would even argue with Spontaneous as well, even though we'll get to the deliciousness of Duffield's big print, but even I think in all four of these films, the main way they get their tone across is through the characters.

And they're given circumstances. That's fundamental.

Yeah.

See, I'm going to disagree with you in terms of you're saying you're interested at the top of the triangle, and maybe the problem is maybe, and the thing is we're looking at finished scripts, not me diagnosing one one of yours but maybe in focusing on the audio like the words you're actually not going further you're staying on the top of the triangle and thinking about what words am i using to express this tone when what you actually need to be doing is looking at your character's actions and reactions the way you're talking about their emotional realities and how you're articulating the given circumstances that inform those realities so to be clear given circumstances So, we did a whole thing on Watchmen about given circumstances, but it comes from Stanislavski, and it's him talking about the conditions of the character's world. It's time and place, right? The history towards the character, right? To quote Stanislavski, it's the plot, the facts, the instance, the period, the time and place of the action, the way of life. Like, he's being deliberately vague.

You can imagine the exact same script on a page that just has pretty sparse, big print and dialogue, having a very different tone if it was Greta Gerwig directing it, if it was Quentin Tarantino directing it, or if it was David Fincher directing it. So, you could have the exact same given circumstances. You could have the exact same characters, but how those actors are being told to perform, how they're being lit, how they're being shot, what the music is behind it.

That's the first thing you reach for, how they're being told to perform. That is character.

Oh, 100%. But I'm saying from the page, how they're being told to perform. And I agree with you in that these four scripts really nail telling the actors how to perform the character beats and emotions that they have here. And I would say these films, again, spontaneous, mild exception to this. And we'll get into each of the scripts in more detail, but I think all of them, really do focus on uh there's very few quote-unquote unfilmables in there because anytime they even drift towards an unfilmable it's to give actors performance notes.

Yeah i hear what you're saying about whether or not you need to lean more into the big print to do it but the fact is the words you are choosing for the characters to say the words that using to describe them all of those things are going to inform tone yes if you were choosing to leave out one part of the triangle which is how is this you know how is the audience being told to feel then yes someone's going to can come in and can do a lot with that that's why it's a triangle because they're all dependent on on each other but like we're focusing on you are not tarantino you are not you know, You are not Nolan, but you can look at what Tarantino has done in terms of narrative, the kinds of given circumstances that he has, you know, the violence and the way that the characters react to those violence creates tone, right? And there is, in terms of his structural stuff that he's doing, all the dramatic irony in particularly that we talked way back in Tips from Tarantino, that is something that is in the script, that is informing the tone. And yes, he can go further, but that just comes back to your observation about why are we doing so many writer-directors? And the answer is because they want more control over how the audience is being told to feel. There are some writers that are going to be like, I want to do stuff that's more, for lack of a word, is cleaner, that doesn't push as far. And I still think you can communicate. There's some great moments, particularly in Buster Scruggs, that is just little delicate bits of big print that are indicating tone. And I think coming back to Banshees of Inner Sheeran, you know, from the previous episode, it was an example of something that was focusing on the bottom parts of the triangle. What are the given circumstances of the world? What are the diegetic parts of the world that can have emotional context? The loneliness of the place. That's very similar to, you know, speaking of Greta Gerwig, Barbie. You know, the given circumstances of the world includes this kind of like schema where, you know, Barbie land is pink and bright and people fly. Like, you know, she can fly down. That sense of the magical is tonal, right, and it's in there, and that is on the page. But you're not going to necessarily, like, go into heavy amounts of detail with some of that stuff, because you can't. You've got to focus on the plot and the characters and what you communicate on the script. So, two corners of the triangle and drawing a little bit way up to the top, but you can't go the whole way.

Oh, I'm not arguing with you that any one bit is more important than the other, and I appreciate the triangle. I think I think it's a good lens through which to look at this stuff. If we come out of this episode with tools to convey tone without doing a single unfilmable or a single piece of showy big print, that will be quite an achievement for me individually.

Maybe the way to think about it is there's diegetic at the bottom and non-diegetic at the top. And I'm just separating diegetic as, you know, internal to characters and external to the characters.

Right? Yeah.

But just finishing off that aesthetic discussion, like, you know, there's a difference between like lighting is interesting because lighting sits somewhere between non-diegetic and diegetic. Right? But, you know, something like Barbie where the world is pink has a mood to it, has a tone to it. But it's clearly diegetic. But something like The Matrix where they shoot, you know, The Matrix with a green filter and the real world with a blue filter is non-diegetic and I think sits more up the top. It may be reflecting the mood of the characters and it's trying to maybe help us connect to the separation of the worlds. But I think that is something that is non-diegetic and there's things that kind of sit on the border like wardrobe, you know.

So, shall we jump into Lady Bird?

Yes.

I hate California. I want to go to the East Coast. I want to go where culture is, like New York. How in the world did I raise such a small... Or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods. ...get into those schools anyway. Mom! You should just go to City College. You know, with your work ethic, just go to City College and then to jail, and then back to City College, and then maybe you'd learn to pull yourself up and not expect everybody to do everything. Lady Bird, is that your given name? Yeah. Why is it in quotes? I gave it to myself. It's given to me by me. Lady Bird always says that she lives on the wrong side of the tracks, but I always thought that that was like a metaphor. But there are actual train tracks. What she did was very baller. It was very anarchist. Put the magazine back! She has a big heart, your mom. She's warm, but she's also kind of scary. You can't be scary and warm. I think you can. Your mom is. So, you're not interested in any Catholic colleges? No way. I want schools like Yale, but not Yale, because I probably couldn't get in. him. You definitely couldn't get in.

Okay. To quote Wikipedia, Lady Bird is a 2017 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Greta Gerwig in her solo directorial debut. It's set in Sacramento, California from fall 2002 to fall 2003 and focuses on a high school senior who shares a turbulent relationship with her mother. And it really is, you know, the first five pages of this focus on the mother and Lady Bird returning from their college tour where they've already been and they're talking about it in the past. And this is just the drive home. And then the fifth page is Lady Bird arriving back at what feels like her first day of her senior year at high school. And yeah, and it is a very unusual tone. So what the scene the the bulk of the first five pages is just a scene where they're driving and the the movements of the scene are that marion ladybird's mother and ladybird they're listening to the grapes of wrath it finishes ladybird wants to listen to some music marion suggests that they just sit in the emotion that they've just felt from listening to the grapes Grapes of Wrath, and that leads very quickly into quite a high emotional argument that culminates in Lady Bird throwing herself out of the moving car. And I guess the main things that I want to get from this, so there's not a lot of, you know, flowery big print, although when the Grapes of Wrath finish, there is a moment of Greta Gerwig talking pretty much directly to the audience, where it says, they both laugh and then wipe their tears. It's a nice moment. They both had the same emotion. But as much as it's a nice moment, they both had the same emotion. Like, it is clearly, you know, to your earlier point, it's talking about how we feel about what we're watching. And they had the same emotions about what the characters are experiencing.

It's giving you the image or the action, and then it's giving us the emotional context for it. And in this case, the emotional context is the emotional context for the characters and the emotional context for the audience.

This first scene could possibly stand up as one of those key scenes that Stephen Cleary talked about where the beats of the scene actually are the beats of the entire movie. Not that Lady Bird throws herself off anything. She does not try to kill herself at the end. Spoilers.

What this first scene particularly tells me is, one, there's the given circumstances. One, she's in high school. You know, that she's looking at college. They had to do it a long way. There's a lot of information about her family and the pressures from her family and her mum, which is given circumstances, right? You know, it is kind of the facts of her life. But it's kind of setting the clear boundaries of what their emotional range is, what is the quote-unquote dynamic range of their emotions. And it's quite extreme. They listen to Grapes of Wrath and they are crying.

Right?

And then they have an argument. And in the film version, which is not in the script, is they step on each other's dialogue like fucking crazy.

Right?

Right. But like there could have, there's a version of this script, which they could have written a lot of it in dual dialogue because that's how it's effectively played. I mean, I know there's a couple- They do have one moment in.

Yeah, there's a couple of moments of dual dialogue in there. And certainly Little Women, Greta Gerwig's obviously perfected.

Yeah. So it's not just their actions. It's the fact that their reactions to each other, right? And I like reactions as a word because reactions can be both stuff that's unconscious and stuff that is kind of like has decisions behind it. Reactions could be both. But either way, they've basically got a kind of a bad relationship dynamic. Like, effectively, it escalates so far that Lady Bird throws herself out of the car.

Right?

You've been listening to The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Our college trip took 21 hours and five minutes. Hey, why don't we... Let's just sit with what we heard. Are you serious? Well, we don't have to constantly be entertaining ourselves, do we? I wish I could live through something. Aren't you? Nope. The only exciting thing about 2002 is that it's a palindrome. Okay, fine. Well, yours is the worst life of all, so you win. Oh, so now you're mad. No, it's just you're being ridiculous because you have a great life. I'm sorry, I'm not perfect. No one's asking you to be perfect. Just consider it. I don't even want to go to school in this state anyway. I hate California. I want to go to the East Coast. Your dad and I will barely be able to afford in-state tuition. They're alone. Scholarships. You're very smart, brother. He can't even find a job. He and Shelly work. They have jobs. They bagged at the grocery store. That is not a career. And they went to Berkeley. Your father's company is laying off people right and left. Did you even know that? No, of course you don't, because you don't think about anybody but yourself. An immaculate heart is already a luxury. Immaculate fart? You wanted that, not me. Miguel saw someone knifed in front of him at Sac High. Is that what you want? So you're telling me that you want to see somebody knifed right in front of you. He barely saw that. I want to go where culture is, like New York. But how in the world did I raise such a snob? Or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods. I don't get into those schools anyway. Mom! You can't even pass your driver's test. Because you wouldn't let me practice enough. The way that you work, or the way that you don't work, you're not even worth state tuition, Christine. My name is Lady Bird. Well, actually, it's not, and it's ridiculous. Call me Lady Bird like you said you would. You should just go to city college, you know, with your work ethic, just go to city college and then to jail and then back to city college. And then maybe you'd learn to pull yourself up and not expect everybody to do everything. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And it tells us this early, so we know that this is the temptuous relationship that they mentioned in the Wikipedia article, right? Straight up. What I think is really interesting about the writing style is it doesn't underline that stuff. I actually blinked and missed it that she jumped out of the car. I had to go back. I watched it and I went, oh, fuck, was that in the script? And I went back to script and yes, it's in the script because it's literally, this is just two sentences, but it's they slow for a stoplight and Lady Bird dramatically opens the door and rolls out of the car. Marion screams. And that's just a new page. I missed it. Whereas there's other, there's a version of this script that you could see that people could go, they slow for a stoplight and dash, dash, new line, Lady Bird dramatically opens the door and new line underlined rolls out of the car. Marion screams, you know, S space, C space, you know, like you could really make it, the writing style underplays it. So there's a contrast between what I am being told coming back to my triangle is that the given circumstances just grounds it in the real world, right? These are characters that take this stuff very seriously and their dynamic is that they emotionally escalate. But then I'm being told to feel about it in a way that I'm being told it in a very matter of fact kind of way. It feels like that's what it is, that the heightened emotions are being presented to me in a very matter-of-fact way.

So, the things that I want to highlight that Greta has done in these first five pages. First of all, you know, they start off the whole sequence just in a very quiet moment in a motel room. And I think they do that for that grounding reason. They don't start off in the car. So, they're grounding the reality and the drama. Like, this could- This script could be shot and played like a melodrama, were it not for your observation about the big print. But then what they're doing is the actions that are happening are so clear, right? The fact that as soon as Lady Bird doesn't get what she wants, she says, I wish I could live through something. Thing and then you know and her mum like their dynamic is established so quickly okay fine yours is the worst life of all you win and you know that very quickly gets to the ladybird saying i'm sorry i'm not perfect nobody's asking you to be perfect just consider it would do a lot of these are like non-secretary lines that are just clearly well they feel well trodden they feel like it feels like an argument they've had over and over again and it escalates so quickly but to the point The point of this film teaching you what the emotional- how the audience is to experience emotionally what they're seeing is two things. First of all, as a writer, like you've said, Greta really downplays Lady Bird throwing herself out of the car. But then also in the script, it has- They slow for a stoplight and Lady Bird dramatically opens the door. In the actual film, the car doesn't slow down at all. She just like casually unbuckles herself, opens the door and rolls out. But super important. So, that's the bottom of page four. And the immediate shot of page five is close on a cast in very small letters is written, fuck you, mum. The cast belongs to Lady Bird. She follows along with the mask.

It's a great laugh.

And it's teaching you that Lady Bird essentially trying to kill herself or risking her life just to win an argument with her mother is something that we can laugh at.

Yes. And it's doing it in a cut. It's using a cinematic technique, you know, a technique that the characters are unaware of.

And I could almost boil down tone for me, like from reading this is like, can the first five pages of your script teach the audience what they're supposed to find funny, which is different to what the characters will find funny.

Yes.

Like, I don't think Marion doesn't find Lady Bird throwing herself out of the car funny at all, but it's hilarious for us. But these characters take themselves very, very seriously.

Oh, incredibly seriously. Seriously. And so this is really interesting because they're playing it under. So the writing is not buying into the drama, right? So they're really the emotional range that kind of what we're talking about in terms of the characters is really heightened. They're going from like crying to killing themselves. And there's some laughs in this scene that comes a little bit after when she's at school. Some very subtle laughs, like what she does with her drawings and her friends and all that stuff. So we got quite a wide range of emotions. emotions, but we are not being put in sympathy with her. The writing on the page. Is telling me that I'm not meant to be experiencing this with her. I'm not meant to be feeling the same thing as her. In other words, as you say, she tries to self-harm, or she's basically just trying to hurt herself. It's not necessarily suicide. Let's be it's a teenage. She's got a terrible sense of risk. She's doing that, and it's coming in under, and then it's using a cut to make us laugh. But the laugh comes from her reaction to it, which is, fuck you, mum. It's not like, cut too close up on a cast. That's not what's funny. It's cut to the fuck you, mum, right? Like her reaction to it tells us to laugh, but, you know, it's the juxtaposition. So this is kind of working all those three elements. The given circumstances is a harder one to unpick here, but part of it is that she's still alive, you know, the kind of the pressure, the girls' school, the kind of the relationship. Like it is really interesting to compare this when we get to Spontaneous because Spontaneous is a lot more playful with the kind of, you know, What are the boundaries of the narrative tools that the writer is going to use? And spoiler alert for Spontaneous, I'll say now, Spontaneous has voiceover. It has pieces to camera. It has montage. It jumps around in time. It's using a lot of cinematic techniques in order to create a particular emotional experience that is very different from Lady Bird, which I assume is what I've been told in the first five plays is it's going to be straightforwardly told. Like I'm assuming it doesn't jump around.

No. And that it's going to be grounded and that it's going to be emotionally heightened, but not heightened characters in a world that feels very similar to our own.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think for a film that has such an unusual tone, I expected more handholding on the page. But I actually really love, you know, your observation about how underplayed that super dramatic moment is, is very important to both the reader experiencing that moment. Even though you missed it, but also the, you know, the joke. And then they, as I believe we'll get to in Emily the Criminal and the Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and what we observed in the Banshees of Innishirin, where they let the dialogue and the characters do a lot of the tone setting.

It's not like the writer doesn't write the dialogue. Clearly, the dialogue is both reflecting the characters, how they interact with the world. It's informed by the given circumstances, and it's what audiences hear. My name is Lady Bird is capitalized with an exclamation mark. It's dual dialogue with, well, actually, it's not, and it's ridiculous. Your name is Christine. Then it's Lady Bird. Call me Lady Bird like you said you would. That is tone, the fact that she's shouting. They're writing and shouting. shouting her emotional reaction to that the fact that they're kind of stepping on each other's dialogue is indicating tone right and the fact is it's not giving us much big print around this because it is going to be playing it very straightforwardly and pretty much from a cinematic point of view for those who haven't seen it is they basically just shot it with like a um front mount camera of two shot of them and then kind of two kind of strafing angles from the side It's very simple coverage. It's very unadorned. It's not doing anything fancy here. And that's because it is putting the emphasis on that. And I think that is part of the tone and maybe the tonal complexity. What I was like, I'm not sure about the tone about this is because I'm seeing something that is super heightened. That's got some stuff that we're not seeing in the script, but there's the production design, like the wardrobe, the fact that they've got, you know, the color story is a wardrobe designer would talk about it, which is that they've got contrasting colors. She's got the pink hair and pink clothes, but the mum's got some pink in her clothes so that we feel that there's a connection to them, but there's a bit of contrast. All that stuff that's in there is not in the script. Right. But it's picking up where the script is putting down.

Part of it is because there's, like you said, the dialogue is so fast and the emotions are escalating so quickly. But I think we'll get to with Emily and the criminal is they've written in some more performance beats, but it's interesting the only time between Lady Bird wanting to turn on the radio and find some music and her throwing herself out of the car, everything from those three pages is all dialogue except for one action line that interrupts it and it is ladybird's emotional shift so marion says we don't need to be constantly entertaining ourselves do we ladybird stares out the window now sullen so it points out her emotional shift and then it says then oh.

Man how great is then as an emotional shift.

Yeah one word colon then And then colon. Yeah. And you've made the observation about the use of caps in the dialogue. All the things that we're looking for, perhaps, or that I'm looking for in big print, Greta does play with in the dialogue. There's lots of underlined. There's lots of italics.

Lots of italics and underlined. There's literally stuff that's underlined. There's stuff that's italics. And there's stuff that is underlined and italics. She's got a hierarchy of emphasis.

Oh, and then the all caps.

And then all caps. So she, like, in a way, yeah, yeah, all caps and underline. How in the world did I raise such a snob? How in the underlying world did I raise such a snob? Underlined, all caps. What's interesting is she's clearly giving, she's indicating emphasis constantly. Yeah. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

But she's not doing it. And through parenthesis. So, it actually makes it feel, I think, I don't know, an actor may have a very different reaction to it. But when I read this, I didn't feel like she was doing, quote unquote, a lot of work in terms of directing the performance. But now that we've both looked at it, I'm like, she's doing shit tons of work in directing the dialogue. And she's doing it in a subtle way, which is pretty indicative, I think, of the tone of what I've seen of the film so far.

Yeah.

Anything else on Lady Bird?

No, I think that does quite neatly segue us into Emily the criminal.

So if you had some money, what would you do? I just want to be able to experience things. I just want to be free. Hi, I paid 400 and it was never applied to my balance. Sorry, how much interest is being added a month? How are you? I need a real job, just to, like, pay my loans. Emily, yo, let me hook you up. In the next hour, you will make 200 cash, but you will have to do something illegal. You won't be in danger, but you will be breaking the law. Yo, you gonna pay for that? Sorry? I said, are you gonna pay for that? Oh my god. Sorry man. Tomorrow you have the option to do another job, okay? What do I have to do?

Do you want to summarise Emily the Criminal?

It's not a synopsis, but I would describe Emily the Criminal as a minimalist Michael Mann. You know, when we're talking about, like, listener and patron of the podcast, Thomas Wood was keen for us to look at this for tone, because he was really impressed with the tone. And I can see why. And when we looked at it, we were like, this doesn't really fit into light tone, because the tone's interesting. It's not a dark film, but it's a very menacing film. There's this incredible sense of menace. So the kind of overall plot is it focuses on a character, Emily, unsurprisingly, played by Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance. She's basically saddled with student debt and she's kind of being locked out of the job market because she's got a criminal record and she gets involved in a credit card scam. And then that pulls her into a criminal underworld and that ultimately kind of escalates. And it escalates quite valiantly. And the end of the film has a really kind of interesting tone. I thought this was a great indie low-budget feature. Like, I think I told you to watch it because I was like, man, it's one of those, like, I wish I made that, you know. That's the pitch of the overall film. Kind of the two scenes that make up the first five pages is one is in a, quote, in a cluttered office is the slug line for it. This is very influenced. The writing style is very influenced by Walter Hill. A lot of like haiku impressionistic writing with, you know, new lines rather than carriage returns. And then the second scene is kind of her doing her actual job of working. Uber Eats catering company. So the first scene which we're locating on is it's her in the middle of a job interview with a office manager. And that's the only information we're given about him is he's called an office manager. You compare that to the choices that were made in like yellow jackets, which you can talk about, like he's not dickhead office manager. He's not lying on like they give us very little about him.

Or the office other than tiny and cluttered.

Yeah. Tiny, cluttered office. Emily sits in a job interview, 20s, buzzing with nervous energy. Something feral about her, right? That's the opening lines. And that is great because we're actually talking about the given circumstances of her. But something feral about her is actually also describing the way that she acts and reacts to situations. Okay.

So, Emily, I do see that you have something on your permanent record. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, yes, it is. We haven't run a background check. We don't usually do that. Could you fill us in on the details? Sure. I have a DUI, like a misdemeanor DUI. What happened exactly? I drove some friends home from a concert and I ran a red light. Everybody was fine, but... And you were intoxicated. I was less intoxicated than my friends, but yeah, that's what happened. Okay. So this is your official background check, which I have read, and according to the state, you were convicted of aggravated assault in 2016. Is that correct? So you do have all my information? I'm, uh, yeah. Yeah, I'm afraid we do. Okay. Why would you, uh? Well, if you want us to be generous with you, then you need to be generous with us and be honest. Okay? Okay. This is a very important job. You'd be handling private medical files. house. Right. Right, you're right. I'm sorry. Yeah, let's start over, okay? Okay. And you tell us what happened with the assault. No. No? No, why would you trick somebody like that? Oh, I did not trick you like that. Yeah, you did. What I did is very common. That's a very common technique. Oh, is that right? So you do that all the time? If people chose to be honest, then I wouldn't have to do that all the time. Well, you know what? Fuck this. I don't even want to work here. Emily, I'm sorry. You're upset, but... No, you're not. Calm down, please. I am calm. And you asked me why I want this job. Because I got $70,000 of student debt. There's your fucking answer right there. All right, yeah, you need to leave. Actually, you know what? Give me this. Okay, fine. Thank you. Thank you too. Excuse me.

And just to hone back in on the point that you just made, nearly every set of big print in these first five pages, it has new lines instead of carriage returns. So, those four sentences are one beneath the other with no spaces. So, it looks like one paragraph, but each line, each sentence has its own line. So, it has visually an interesting shape to the big print that, yeah, I think is quite effective and it leads to some later on when we'll get into it, some pattern building. So, what the writer-director tends to do is like be quite terse and to the point. With most of the lines, but that gives them, like you were saying with that anchoring with the visual earlier, gives them the space to have like one of those lines, push the envelope a little bit. But mostly where he does put the envelope, like something feral about her, it is about- Emotion. Yeah. Well, her performance, I guess, as well.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It kind of focuses almost exclusively on the given circumstances, what is happening and then how the characters feel about it.

And how the audience experiences that. Like something feral about her. It's not talking about it from the interviewer, the office manager's point of view there. That's to us.

A bit of both. I mean, I think he ends up saying what's feral about her.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

So the circumstances are, is that he's, you know, he basically brings up straight away, you know, okay, okay, you have some life experience, great. So Emily, you have something on your permanent record. Is that right? Yeah. I dash dash. Yeah, it is. is so immediately we know she's hiding something which he picks up on and he says we haven't run a background check we don't usually do that so you can you fill us in on the details so he's doing a lot of a lot of talking and she's being quite short sure i have a dui like in mr nema dui like so you've got kind of short punchy sentences he's pushing her asking lots of questions what happened exactly she talks about how she drove some friends and dui and then it kind of there's It's like a nice shift here. I was less intoxicated than my friends, but that's what happened. So she's being a little bit vague, right, about it. Kind of like, not weasel words, but there's probably a better description of what it is. Like, you know, that's what happened. So, you know, she's kind of not being definitive and assertive. Office manager, okay. He pulls out a yellow duck and adjusts his glasses. So this, dash, dash, this is your official background check, which I've read. According to the state, you were convicted of aggravated assault in 2016, is that correct? Emily feels a rush of blood to the head. Is her reaction to it. So they've chosen to write in her reaction to the fact that he'd lied about them not having done a background check in order to catch her out. But I love the power shift from, okay, he does something to this quite a lot of dialogue, and then she doesn't say anything.

But I really do like, I don't want to get nitpicky about this bullshit about unfilmables or not. I love unfilmables. But it's not like Emily is taken aback. It's talking about her feelings. And we can't see the blood rushing to her head, she doesn't go red, you know, pupils don't dilate, her temple doesn't pound, any of that kind of stuff. But it's telling the audience and the actor how Emily is feeling. And that can, you know, be performed any number of ways.

Yeah, taking it back doesn't give you as much emotional information as Emily feels a rush of blood to the head. And the blood, to me, kind of connects it to the feral thing, right? Like it's just got a little bit of an animalistic quality to it in terms of the kind of language system they're using it. And then you look at like the dialogue is doing a lot of work here. The way the dialogue is written with, you know, I don't dot, dot, dot. So you do have all my information. Like she's not being clear. She's kind of she's caught off guard. Office manager, I'm dash, dash. I'm afraid we do. Emily, why dot, dot, dot question mark. So the way they're putting the words on the page, like Lady Bird, and I've just realized this because we talked about Lady Bird, the way they're actually putting the dialogue on the page is indicating performance without it feeling like it's being overly directed.

Okay.

So he kind of pushes her, you know, this is an important job. You'd be handling private medical files. And then basically she turns on him and she just starts saying, no, no. Why would you trick someone like that? You know, yeah, you did. You do that all the time. She says, fuck this. I don't even want to work here. She jumps up and grabs the bag. And he's like, I'm sorry if I upset you. And he's like, no, you're not. So she basically, her emotion really goes up to the point where he actually asks her to leave. And she snatches the background check from the table. And I love they end with, thank you. Thank you too. You know, in terms of this idea of what the given circumstances are, we learn that she has a criminal record, right? And we've learned specifically, she says, you asked why I want this job, because I got $70,000 of student debt. There's your fucking answer right there. That is an important bit of tonal information to this story about why she becomes the criminal. It's in the fucking title. It's because she has a student debt of $70,000. So that is part of the terms, given circumstances. And we're seeing her in action, being feral, in response to someone who is a lying piece of shit.

Right?

But he's keeping his demeanor, right? Like, I think, particularly if you say that it's paid by the guy that was Neelix in Star Trek Voyager. So, he's being very corporate about it. But he completely lied to a face about not having done a background check, and then is like, ah, gotcha. Like, it's a police interrogation.

But in terms of what the, like you said, the dialogue, how it's written is providing great performance. The big print is quite sparse, other than some very targeted bits of direction that are going towards the performance. But to me, the main thing that I got from this in terms of tone setting was that they've decided to open the film with a scene of Emily not being in control and being threatened, like being put under pressure and her reaction to that pressure. So, it does have, you know, the office manager, you mentioned the private medical files. She says, right, dot, dot, dot, you're right. I'm sorry. And he says, let's start over. Can you tell me what happened with the assault? Sure. And then it's got in the big print, Emily thinking, and it's there that she makes a choice to go, fuck this. I don't want this job anymore. I'm not going to play your game. As you said, going back to her feralness to not get what she wants, but it is her, tactic strategy reaction and it is saying you know in a similar way to ladybird this is what the film is going to be about is how emily reacts to pressure and to menace.

Yeah and she becomes a little bit menacing herself but also kind of the film's commentary about kind of capitalism in this particular kind of world we we see people being exploited consistently i mean it is no mistake date, the next scene is basically saying, she says, fuck, this is the home of activity, which is inside a catering company's kitchen. Right.

Yeah.

And so we see her, you know, get condescended to by the office workers. Right.

Do you feel that they're being condescending?

Yeah. Yeah. She is feeling that being it, but it's not necessarily they are being it.

Says conference room banking firm. She arranges a big lunch on the table. New line. Employees shuffling in and talking among themselves. Carriage return. She spies on two female employees as she works. New line. Same age as herself. Dot, dot, dot. Hip outfits. fits, dot, dot, dot, talking shop, dot, dot, dot. New line, Emily feeling the familiar burn of jealousy. New line, flicker of eye contact and she glances away. So, you've got very, very observable, very sparse description. Then you've got what is the feeling, what is the emotion that the character is feeling from that and then it goes back to an action like a flicker of eye contact And because of that, just that moment of telling us what the actor is feeling within there, which is very playable, it's not an unfilmable, telling us what she's feeling is giving the reader so much of what that- You were talking about menace, like that threat, that feeling. Like, in her day-to-day job that she hates, you know, burdened by debt, we are feeling her, you know, sense of being trapped by this.

Yeah, you know, because in many ways, her becoming a criminal is like her becoming more and more trying to take control. But what's interesting is we see that this is kind of this pattern where she kind of, she doesn't like being exploited, but she's kind of pushed into circumstances where she is exploited and she kind of like snaps. apps.

And just making an observation that on the fifth page is one of her fellow catering company delivery people, Javier, is asking her for a favor to pull a double shift, like take over one of his shifts at night downtown, which she doesn't usually do and can imagine that she feels uncomfortable. But the fifth page ends with her considering, she looks at the kid for a second and then says, says, yeah, I got you. It's cool. So, it's ending with her making a decision. And, you know, whether you could say it for likability reasons or what have you, but it is, you know, working very hard to keep you in empathy with the character. It's important that, like, this film, you know, it's almost like a- it's called Emily the Criminal. It's almost like a Scarface kind of structure where you're witnessing the corruption and the rise to power that comes with that that corruption. I mean, the film's called Emily the Criminal. You're not like- As much as she is, you know, subject to menace, powerless, and it's, you know, got the capitalist commentary, she wins by embracing her criminality and stop trying to play the capitalist game.

Did you read this before seeing it?

No, I watched it first.

Yeah. I cannot help but read the menace that's like, it's beautiful. This film is really well directed. And that opening scene with just some triple shots, like you don't see the office manager's face. They just, they shoot like cropped, they crop his head out. So it's like focused on his body and the documents and stuff like that. So there's a lot of menace that's coming and tension that's coming from the directorial choices. And I'm just curious, it's kind of speculation about whether that comes across in the screenplay. And that comes back to your point that you're making, which is like, well, it feels like these scripts are missing the third element of what the director would bring. And it's like, is this giving enough? It's hard for me to say.

I mean, it gave enough to, you know, get Aubrey Plaza on board. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But these scripts are focusing in terms of conveying tone on dramatization, but they're not scared to talk about the internal. It is performable, but it is internal. They are giving voice to the emotions that these characters are feeling in the big print. We are told how Lady Bird and Marion feel. We're told how Emily feels in this situation.

So, coming back to Tom Vaughan's quote, it is very much setting what is the range of the character's emotions to it, right? That's what we're being told, that Emily will react aggressively when cornered, right? Like, that's her feral quality. When she feels cornered, she will act aggressively. And we are told that in the given circumstances that she has committed assault, but that specifically kept a mystery from us.

Right?

Yeah. So this is a good example of there's the given circumstances that the character is aware of and what we as an audience are aware of are differently. But that makes her threatening, obviously to this guy as well. I mean, I think what's interesting about the office manager, he is, when she's starting getting aggressive, he's like, oh, you're being convicted of aggressive assault. old and she's basically like, you know, fuck you. And it's, it's not quite like that, but he is reacting, particularly when you see the performance, he is like, oh boy, like have I poked a bear? And that's, I mean, you get a little bit of that with the, I'm sorry if I upset you. Calm down. He's trying to deescalate the situation, but he's incapable of, he doesn't have the skills to deescalate.

And like, it's important. One of the things that this, this does is it doesn't show her regretting her choice in that room. And she has several scenes like this, like this, her being offered an opportunity to play the game. It's almost like Promising Young Woman where she's being torn between the two worlds and in this it's the world of criminality and credit card fraud versus her world of advertising and using her artistic skills and the straighter capitalist American dream kind of thing. You know she's got a great scene where she's offered an intern position which she thought she was interviewing for a paid position with a with an advertising firm and she reacts very similarly like burns her bridge does not try to be polite in any way about it like has the same aggressive stance and you know you talk about the assault being a mystery i think keeping it a mystery and her not talking about it is so powerful because i don't know if this was your experience But it led me to think a whole way through, oh, she was in an abusive, toxic relationship and she had to fight her way out of it. But whether that's what actually happened or not is not clear. But the only time she talks about it is to say, I wish I'd like beaten him up more because then he never would have called the cops on me. He would have been afraid of me.

Yeah.

It's just the guy I was dating and we fought all the time. One day, I just... You know what my mistake really was, though? I didn't go far enough. I didn't really scare him. You know, because if I had, he would have never called the police.

Like, I just didn't go far enough. Like, that lack of regret that she has over her feralness is dramatized in this. Yeah. In these opening five pages.

Dramatization is a great catch-all word. You know, I'm just breaking the dramatization into kind of component parts because I think they're things that we can look at in our own work and go, oh, is this not clear enough? Is this not clear enough? Do we need to retool this aspect? Or you know is it going to be pruning some of the big print is it going to be adding more you know i mean i think what's interesting both lady burn and spontaneous their opening scenes are very dialogue heavy and the writers get out of the way of that dialogue right yeah and the dialogue is really well written and then but they're also really well written in terms of just the words that they're saying, but also then how their words are literally written with punctuation and styling in the case of Lady Bird in order to kind of indicate the tone of that. And we could probably spend a lot more time unpacking the dialogue in this, the use of repetition and the, these are questions I have to ask. Can you tell me anything? No. It's great. Just the fact that she goes to such short answers and stuff like that suggests a lot about who she is and how she reacts. How do you think when the script is telling us how we're meant to feel about the opening?

I think we are meant to feel- I don't know about whether it does the- like you said, I'm not sure if it conveys the menace that you feel in the- when watching the film, but it's definitely telling you that she's trapped, that she's trapped by, you know, this system of debt and, you know, employment. And that she will react aggressively when threatened. So is that tone? I mean, it feels very grounded again. And it'll be interesting. The next two films are very not grounded films. So it'll be maybe interesting to compare that. But yeah, I just, I love that they do it through what you've said. They convey the emotional relationship between the audience and this film is going to be the connection with, for both of these films, The emotional connection between the audience and Emily and in the previous film with Lady Bird.

I mean, I think maybe the difference in this, and again, like I feel that the film, unlike Lady Bird, Emily the criminal is choosing for me to have an experience that is much closer to the characters. I'm with the character a lot more. Yeah. And I think that example that you read out about her eye, you know, glancing away, the burn, familiar burn of jealousy, all that kind of stuff. I think it's making us really connecting our emotional experience to Emily's. Yeah. Whereas I think Lady Bird is a little bit kind of more presentational.

Although comparing that line about like her reaction to those female co-workers and her jealousy in comparison to something as high stakes as Lady Bird throwing herself in the car and how those are written very differently. Like the eye contact is underlined. And it is doing more work here to draw your attention to how Emily is feeling. And like you said, more of a relationship with her, whereas with Lady Bird, it is more, observational. Even when, you know, the biggest thing that happens in these five pages is her standing up and walking out of the office and coming back and grabbing the document. But that is very, you know, it says snatches her background check from the table. Like that's it.

I read my Letterboxd review of minimalist Michael Mann, but the minimalism is absolutely communicated in the way it's choosing to write.

Yeah, definitely.

It's really good.

But my way of segueing between this and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, now, we could have possibly done three episodes on tone using four different Coen Brothers films in each episode, because they've got such varying tone. Even though there's like a distinctive feel to a Coen Brothers movie, I think that's more of their perspective on the world and on perhaps their politics or their ethics.

I think they're really good at contrasting tones. I think their tonal complexity comes from contrast. You know, no country for old man has like, it's often really bright and daylight. And then we see Sugar, he's wearing like black and menacing in the white. And it's like, he smiles when he kills people and stuff like that. So, a lot of their tonal complexity comes from contrast, I think. Yeah. And I think what you'll see in this, it's coming from the contrast between Buster Scruggs and his emotional reaction to the actual given circumstances of what's going on.

Do you have anything to say before a sentence is carried out? Sentence? What's my sentence?

My connection to this is I expected when I chose Buster Scruggs, and it's one of the more out there tones from a common brother. We've done also A Serious Man for this podcast, Gus, which is also a comedy, but very different tone to this film. And obviously Buster Scruggs is an anthology and we're just looking at the first five pages of the whole script, which means we're just looking at the first five pages of the first story. This film is almost a Looney Tunes vibe to it. Like the violence is almost like Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. And even when he walks into the first cantina in the film, he pats himself off and he steps away and the dust hangs behind in his shape. But in the script, all it says is Buster Scruggs claps his hat against his clothes, raising a fine dust. That's it. Like it's not going to the lengths of conveying how visually ridiculous this presentation is. I mean, when we see him, it talks about he's He's distantly singing and he finishes the song holding the last note. That song, we get like a whole chorus and he's like harmonizing with his own echoes off the cliffs. Like we get a shot from inside his guitar looking out. There's a lot of tonal visual information that the Coen brothers are not writing into this script. They've gone for a much more, I want to say slightly, you know, sparse isn't the right word, but very kind of matter of fact description of the action that we're seeing, which surprised me.

Yeah. I mean, you're picking up on that. I'm picking up on the fact. The script just, the opening page is talking about this kind of like opening on the book and quite literally them turning the page. And it's quite descriptive of what we are seeing, right? You know, the page is turned again. The page on the left side is the table of contents. The page on the right is the list of color plates. Without pausing, the unseen hand turns the page again to the title page of the first story. We hold for the briefest moment and the page is turned again to reveal a translucent sheet of rice paper. Like, and this is what we see, right? Like, ignoring that. Yeah. Page two is the introduction to Buster. And, you know, it starts with Monument Valley, you know, tiny figure just visible to the naked eye, dressed in white and riding a white horse, is cornered a huge archway of zone close on the rider. His white clothing and tangle and how to blindingly clean. I love that blindingly. Yeah. He's singing. And then it says he finishes the song. The sequence of him singing is about a minute, a minute and a half.

It's quite long.

They've got shots from inside the guitar and all kinds of angles. They really kind of sit in it.

Which does a lot of tone setting for the story that is not on the page here.

And they embellish.

Yeah.

So, he finishes the song holding the last note. Coming to, like, the kind of sound design and the technique, the fact that they're echoing and he's harmonising himself. We are being told, even before this moment's about to happen, that the film is going to be quite playful about the relationship of the characters and what's happening in the audience. So, he finishes the song, holding the last note, then he hooks the guitar at the saddle horn and picks up the reins. He dresses the camera as he continues to ride. He talks to the audience, right? Yeah. And then he talks to the horse, and the horse understands him. So, he basically, you know, ain't that right, Dan? A confirming Hunts Hall from the horse. Right. Right. So, it's quite playful in this scene. Right.

Oh, and like as soon as he starts talking, then you really get the playful ridiculousness of it. But to me, you know, coming back to perhaps my flippant summarization of tone is teaching us what to laugh at is the expectation. Like they haven't, other than blindingly clean, they haven't gone to describing kind of how, little Buster is. Like, they've cast Tim Blake Nelson from My Brother Where Art Thou as well. They've cast him. He's a slender, unthreatening, unimposing person who's talking to camera, talking to us about how much he loves to sing. And they dramatize that by the bartender refusing to serve him whiskey. And he says, don't let my white duds and pleasant demeanor fool you. And it doesn't say that threateningly, but this script is going to teach us that the violence is funny. Yeah. And so, he's in the cantina and he's threatened by hard man.

The hardest of the hard men.

So, you know, the hard man says you're shooting ironwork and then it says in big print, in less time than it takes to tell, Buster draws and shoots the man in the head and twirls his gun and reholsters it. The hard man, a neat hole in his forehead, stands on his feet for a suspended moment, not yet aware that he is dead. So that is drifting into the Looney Tunes description. Right.

And I'm going to break that down a little bit further. But it doesn't just end there. The hard man, a neat hole in his forehead, stands on his feet for a suspended moment, not yet aware that he's dead. Buster appears to do so yet. The hard man drops. That's the punchline. Him suspended, not aware that he's dead yet. Buster talks to him as if he's still alive and then he's dead. Right? And you're describing that as a Looney Tunes moment. Yes. Yes, and this is the interesting thing about the relationship between given circumstances in the moment and character reaction. The given circumstances of the moment is he's been shot in the head. The character reaction is, A, he doesn't know he's dead yet, so, B, Buster talks to him as if he's dead yet, and then he dies. So, this is like the Looney Tunes moment, not the Roadrunner, the coyote running over a cliff. Waiting for a moment, looking down, and then falling. Yeah. Which is, the given circumstances is he's over the cliff. The character reaction is like, wait, I'm over the cliff. And then the reality catches up with him. So, you are absolutely right. But this is talking about what is the boundaries of the emotional relationship. And this is moving away from a more connected relationship between the given circumstances and the character emotions. In Lady Bird, the given circumstances led to really heightened reactions. Actions and this is the opposite it's kind of like these really heightened circumstances he's wearing a white wearing a white hearse he's singing as you explain the film does even more with this you know he talks about the katina being tiny and when you see in the film it's like this wide shot with his tiny little you know it's like a tardis thing where it's like a tiny little katina you go inside and it's enough for everyone right that's part of the charm is that the given circumstances and the way the characters react are very different.

But what i admire about the script is it is conveying the tone and the humor and the ridiculousness without doing a Shane Black, you know, it is hilarious or something like that, you know, like, and like Lady Bird where it's like, it's a nice moment. The Coen brothers are not telling us how to feel about it. They're just presenting it. And I really do like, one of the things is that this presentational stuff does does reflect Buster Scruggs. Like he is not someone who sets out to hurt anyone, right? He's not like going into these places, threatening people. He just wants to have whiskey or he wants to sit down and have a game of poker and people want to attack him. But once these people are threatening him, he has no compunction about killing them and seems to enjoy being the top dog, seems to to relish, you know, talking to us about how he's going to save ammunition by letting that guy starve to death and get eaten by the lizards.

Huh. It appears that the vitals of this lucky son of a gun remain unpunctured. Sloppy shooting on my part. Here now, I'll get that for you, partner. A coupe de grâce I'll leave to the wolves and gila monsters. Adios, amigo.

What I like about the writing is it doesn't dwell on it. And look, you get the emotional reaction stuff. So he basically ends up sticking the gun behind his left shoulder. And, you know, when I watched this, she was like, what? And this script calls that out. And for some reason, whips the gun around to point it backwards under his armpit. And M in the moment was like, what? So it worked. Like that translated directly. He holds that odd posture for a long moment and then slowly turns his head to look back over his left shoulder. Basically, the bartender's going for a gun. Buster winks at the bartender and bam, fires. Right? So that's a great bit of action underscoring. It's like the wink. It's the fact that he's playful in this violence. This is what I like. This is the contrasting tones. Jones the immediately next paragraph after he winks at the bartender and kills him is one man from among the group at the table is not dead he crawls pitifully towards the door of the cantina. Pitifully like it is giving us a like a moment of this is actually awful what he's done the man's groaning and scraping sounds of the noise in the cantina and then Buster talks about he's just going to leave him to die with the coyotes right so the script does the contrast it is telling us that this is actually kind of awful he's growing and escaping it's pitiful but his reaction to the violence is very cavalier and it's and this is very kind of tarantino you know we're talking you know tarantino tends to have these given circumstances that are quite heightened and violent and gory and the character reactions is they talk about like you know well with cheese you know that classic thing of like that's the tarantino kind of vibe early on was the contrast contrast of the casualness with which his characters approach the horrific violence. And it's a similar kind of contrast here.

And what this script seems to do very well is say that Buster is seemingly from another movie. They don't highlight that other than saying blindingly white, but it's like everyone else in this film is in Deadwood and then Buster is in the Looney Tunes. Like they even, I cheated a little bit on our homework and I kept reading into the first eight pages because there was a moment of violence from Buster Scruggs that has stayed made with me so long, which is he doesn't have a gun and someone else draws a gun on him and he uses a plank of wood, like almost a floorboard or a bit of the table, stomps on it to knock the guy's hand up so that the other guy is shooting himself. And I wanted to go, how have they described how hilariously ridiculous that is? Because it's shot as a wider two shot, right? With Buster on one side and the Selly man on the other. It's not like cutting between him stomping on one end and the the other plank going up. It's like, you know, comedies in the wide and they've done that very well. So, I was like, how did they write that? And it just says, Buster raises one leg and stamps smartly on the near side of the table. The far side flips up, knocking the man's gun hand upward to discharge into his face. The table settles and the hand drops, still clutching the gun. The surly man's face is half shot away. Buster stamps two more times in quick succession, session, slamming the gun hand up for two more shots. The Frenchman is splattered with blood. The ceiling gets a splatter of blood and brains. The man lingers on his feet long enough for us to look at his chewed away face, then drops. So again, so matter of fact, describing something so absurd and ridiculous and comical. I mean, at the end of the day, what I've learned is that this script is almost like the anti-nice guys. It's like refusing to indulge in the big print that it could have done and that you You can convey tone, especially what the audience is allowed to laugh at, with just very matter of fact description.

But description is a little bit more detailed than the nice guy. It's quite literally- More words. More words, more blow-by-blow. Buster redraws his and, fanning the hammer, lays the men down with four quick shots. He cocks the hammer one last time and, for some reason, whips the gun around to point it backward under his left armpit. Right, like, it's quite a lot. Like, I mean, going back to the first page, which we skipped over, about it's quite going into close on a heavy volume of rockabound. To the extent that the book does not fill the screen, we see that it rests on a knotty oaken table. A hand enters the bottom of the frame and opens the book to the title page. With its opposite page, the cream-coloured vellum now fills the screen. The title reads blah, blah, blah. The page is turned again. It is quite detailed about what you're seeing because I think they know that what you're seeing is going to be communicating a bit of the tone. But, like, they're good writers, so it's actually really quite engaging to read, even when it's just describing pages turning.

Yeah. And they're giving themselves the luxury of page space and paragraphs and description. But it's not florid or it's still very dry and matter-of-fact.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's even funny him talking, the man that's dying, groaning and scraping him saying, you know, adios amigos to that guy. Buster fetches up onto his horse and pulls out of the guitar. He sings Lonesome Cowboy. Behind him, we can see the dying man hauling himself out of the doorway into the vast dustiness of the desert, right? Like that's that kind of what I would call comedic irony, not dramatic irony. It's like the comedy version of dramatic ironic irony where the character's writing off and we see something in the background, you know, that comedic irony of seeing this guy. And it's kind of horrible. So, we are told to not feel that this guy is a hero, right? Yeah. You know, as you say, we kind of, the absurdity of it, but I don't, do we think he's I mean, when we're introduced to him, he holds up a sign that they call him the misanthrope.

But he's so well cast. He's so, like, personable and delightful and cheerful. Anyway, I'm glad we chose this one if only Only for me to feel that I got an anti-nice guys version where there is an approach where you can convey just as like a tone as heightened as Buster Scruggs without needing to hold the audience's hand.

In terms of the big print, but it is still doing things, coming back to my triangle, it is still going on like, well, he's talking to the camera, right? Yeah. More specifically, he's opening with the book. Look, there is moments where it's choosing for some reason he is doing this. So it's just choosing its moments very carefully to help create that tone. I mean, you know, the Coen brothers have their tone, their use of wide lenses. When he talks to the camera, it's not on a long lens. It's actually quite close and within their space, quite intimate. There's a bunch of that stuff going on.

Do you have any other observations from Buster Scruggs, or can we get into spontaneous?

Look, I'm just going to use this as an example to kind of unpack a little bit more of the given circumstances, and that will lead us into spontaneous. Because I think what is really interesting is, as you talked about, it's like two different movies. So, you've got this character dressed in white on a white horse, completely clean, singing a song, right? It creates the given circumstances, and that creates this other thing. That there's this triangle but sitting either in the middle of the triangle or on top of it is audience expectation and i think that's not connected to the triangle but it's something that we bring we bring our own given circumstances to a script the way that we interpret the world and understand the world to the work and we talked about this in character motivation we read character motivations to how we understand people right through our cultural context and filmmaking but i also think that then is connected kind of like genre expectations so you've got that and And then when he goes into this gingy bar, he asks for a whiskey and the bartender slowly shakes his head. Dry country, whiskey's illegal. Buster looks at the other customers. What are they drinking? Whiskey. A beat during which Buster tries to square the information. I love that. The Buster explains. They're outlaws. They could have done whiskey, dot, dot, dot, dot. They're outlaws. But I like how they let it hang a little bit. But when you see them, they're the hardest of hard men. The given circumstances and our expectations, how they relate to that, just that they're the hard men and he's about to pick a fight that he loses. But then, of course, he just kills them all effortlessly, not a splat of blood on him. This doesn't affect Buster at all. So it's given circumstances, but it's kind of leaning a little bit more into the rules of the world side of given circumstances, which he doesn't get dirty. Everyone else gets dirty. And is that diegetic or non-diegetic? I think that is one of those interesting things. It's sitting in that kind of liminal space between if he doesn't get Geordi and he's always white in this world where everyone else is dirty. It's not really a given circumstance, but it's kind of like sitting in how the audience experiences it. Does that make sense in terms of like?

Yeah. No.

No.

I feel like you're more hung up on establishing or you seem to get more from establishing, discussing and identifying what the given circumstances are than I do.

But I mean, spontaneous, like the whole concept is built around a pretty ridiculous set of given circumstances.

Oh, yes. Yes. A hundred percent.

I mean, given circumstances. Absolutely to how characters react and their understanding of it. So the characters, the outlaws in this are like, this is a guy that's wearing white and clean, has a guitar and talks funny. He's clearly not a violent man. So that leads them to behave in a particular way. Right? Yeah. And that's where the comedy kind of comes from.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think you have to set that up. Like you can only go from there. You can only do the ridiculous with the plank kind of slapstick. I mean, this guy is called Bustin, as in Buster Keaton. Like, he's kind of like a violent clown.

Yes. Oh, absolutely. And, I mean, look, I just know that for better or for worse, I would be having- I would be trying to hold the audience's hand more. You know, he walks in, Buster looks like he's from a different movie than everyone else, than the hard-nosed man in this bar, that kind of thing.

Yeah, that's a good counterpoint. All right. All right. All right. Speaking of unusual given circumstances, do you want to talk about Spontaneous? Did you end up reading both drafts or just the golden rod?

I just read the golden rod.

That's fine.

Same guy.

For our purposes, it's fine. But, I mean, Brian Duffield very kindly, if you go to his website, he's got a link to a media fire drive with, like, his director's notes, his work in progress lookbook, the letter he wrote to a musician about getting his song. And he's got the first and last draft of Spontaneous, which is an adaptation of a coming-of-age novel.

Hey, Mara. This is the guy. This is **** Dylan. Ew! You sent her a **** pic? No, that would be gross. He sent me pictures of Richards. That's worse. Tell me something, just for me. First time I saw you, Jed tried wrapping his arm around you. It was a good first impression. I mean, Brian Duffield is.

For long-term listeners, is a writer that we have been following right from the beginning of this podcast. You know, 10 years ago when we were starting out, he was always appearing on the blacklist, but not very little of his work was getting to be produced. And now I'm so glad that he's, you know, directing his own work because he has a very... A tone that I love. And I think often it comes across on the page because of his use of- very liberal use of unfilmables and the way he would create laughs and jokes in the big print. And in this, he still has that, but he still has the humor in the big print and how he describes action. But I think it's much more filmable than the way some of his earlier specs and blacklist scripts work.

Interesting work.

Like, if we go through the first page, which I think you'll identify, it very early sets a tone. It's doing everything that the previous three scripts haven't done by, like, being very specific and humorous in the words it uses in the action. But it's only using it to describe things that we're seeing.

Yeah, it's just giving us a little bit more of a tone. Look, let's give a summary of what the film is.

Yeah.

And then go into it. All right. So, when basically the plot of the film is when students in their high school begin explicably exploding, literally exploding like they're balloons, seniors Mara and Dylan struggle to survive in a world where each moment may be their last. And so, it's a bit of a love story between Mara, played by Catherine Langford, and Charlie Plummer plays- Is it Charlie Plummer? Is it Dylan? He plays Dylan. And so really what I'm talking about, the given circumstances is in this story, people spontaneously explode and pretty much the first five pages are setting up the exploding and the reactions of the characters to that and then how we're meant to feel about those reactions. You're right. There's amazing tonal writing. The opening line is, Mara is bored as unholy fuck. Her teacher Spiros drones on about some pre-calc bullshit. So that's interesting because it is color, right? But it's from the experience of Mara. Yeah.

Right?

So it's speaking to her about her emotional experience. There's a little bit more literary devices. Here she flicks a pencil up her desk. It rolls back down. She flicks it back up. It rolls back down. She flicks it back up and it rolls off the desk and hits the floor. Right? Right, and then she searches for it, and then she bends out of frame. So we're reminded it's at the camera. She bends out of frame to pick it up, and a strange puff is heard, followed by the sound of splattering in bold and italics, followed by the sound of gasping in bold and italics, followed by the sound of screaming in bold and italics. Mara pops upright, eyes wide open, voiceover. Caitlin Ogden was a lot of things, but she wasn't particularly explosive in any sense of the word. A student covered in blood behind Mara begins to scream. That's the opening scene and in the actual film it's a one shot Dolly in on her, the camera gets to the end position, she drops out of Fame, pop and she flops back up and then it's like what the fuck just happened You even laughed You.

Mentioned a literary or cinematic device, is the only bit of that whole page that Is literary or non-diegetic is bending out of Frame to pick it up, it could just be she bends over to pick it up Yeah. But I think it's important so that we understand why we're hearing that stuff and not seeing it. Her bending out of frame explains why that's done in sound and not watching the first spontaneous combustion. But, you know, like those first two lines, like it is capturing, I think he's writing the voice as Myra would describe it, right? Calling it pre-calc bullshit, borders unholy fuck. Like later when they talk about the first explosion in the big print, it says moments moments after the Caitlyn blast and Caitlyn blast is one word. Yeah.

It's bringing us into how the characters are thinking and feeling about what's just happened.

Yeah. And how they would describe it. So, you know, weirdly, this is perhaps a slightly odd way, but how we identified in- The Jane Austen- Sense and sensibility. Sensibility. Thank you. How we identified that when Emma Thompson was describing the character that was emotionally restrained, her writing became more restrained. And when she was talking about the character that was, you know, too emotional and too dramatic, the writing became more dramatic and more powerful. And in this instance, what the action lines are doing are helping us get into, yes, we've got voiceover from Mara, but it's almost like the big print is also Mara telling us the story i.

Mean i think the voiceover as we will talk about when we finally go to our voiceover episode is yeah her trying to make sense of what's happened so she's explaining it to us like this fucking weird thing happened and it's set up in the narrative style as in the way the film is structured because we go from her saying she wasn't in any particular sense of the explosive student begins to scream to to your class photo the late great caitlin ogden smiles for a class photo mara sends a line of dialogue then we cut to with some friends caitlin smokes a joint you know know they have a conversation mara says something and then we come back to the caitlin blast the caitlin blast and then we go back to caitlin ogan as a five-year-old then we get jed hayes declaring to camera i was going to ask for the prom she was so hot i even narrowed down the motel room options to two choices she was so open-minded i think in the final film it's like she was so hot she was so open-minded and they even i was going to ask her a problem they use repetition dialogue like he ends up saying exactly the same line later, right? So it's quite playful in terms of how it's telling the story. And Mara, as our kind of point of view character, it feels like she's kind of aware how the story is being unfolding. So, again, it's sitting in that interesting, more liminal space that it is. It's diegetic because I think she is telling us the story, but it's non-diegetic in the sense that I don't think that is actually impacting it because it's told in past tense.

Yes.

You know, I think this is her explaining it to us in the past tense as opposed to her explaining it as it happens.

Does the final voiceover go into present tense? It's like, is the voiceover from a specific point in time in the narrative?

I'd have to look. And the other thing related to this is we've got these obviously insane given circumstances, which is that Caitlin blew up. And then we've got the characters' reactions to it. So we've got the students reacting at studenty, but then we've got them being interviewed with the police. So after the unprecedented event, we got taken to the police station, which was very exciting. and we got asked lots of important questions. Officer, did Caitlin ever say anything suspicious? Have I wanted to blow up? All the time. The officer writes that down, Mara says. I was kidding. He shows that he wrote down, Mara Kyle, not helpful. Right? So even he is being funny in the face of something that is actually, it should be horrifying. So it's actually telling us that not to be horrified in some ways. But then after this, there's this whole bit about washing clothes. I mean, this is jumping past, this is page six. It happened again. It happened again a lot, right? Like, so that's kind of the button on the first five- it's five and a half pages, but it's contrasting the, like, both the absurdity of what the given circumstances are, but then saying that these characters are reacting to it in quite a complex range of emotions. Like, they're horrified by it, but they're also making jokes about it, you know? Yeah.

But it's not like, you know, like when characters- I think I saw or Mel have some rant on Twitter about like presenting a character with unattractive traits in a piece of content is not endorsing those traits or beliefs. And these characters are making fun of it, but we're not being invited to judge them, right? We're not as a reader and as a viewer of the end film, we're not judging these teenagers for being flippant or joking in the face of this stuff. We're actually being invited. it. Like the fact that they call it the Caitlin Blast one word, that to me is him telling us we are to, even though this is a horrible thing, like these people are coated in blood and they're running around, we are supposed to be laughing at it. Going back to my, my flippant summary of what tone is, we are being told that, yes, this is horrific. Yes, people are coated in blood. Yes, there is tragedy. But the way that we are to feel about it is also to, you know, engage with the the humor of it. And it's not just, you know, the laughter from Jed Hayes repeating that he was going to ask her to the prom and that she was so open-minded and Mara's voiceover. It's the, everything is telling us that it's okay to laugh at it. Like the repetition, you know, Skye screaming, she's all fucking over me. And then Mara in VO saying, spraying all fucking over us. You know, there's lots of those kind of, you know, the investigator saying, this is fucking fucking disgusting and my own voiceover saying, and it was very fucking disgusting. Everything in these first five pages. Because let's be clear, this is a highly unusual tone. And I love that you chucked up a letter that Brian Duffield wrote to Swift John Stevens, was it? Asking for the use of a song and he's describing the tone in the letter. And I hadn't read that letter before I watched the movie and read this script. And there's something about- This is almost like, to my mind, I would have referenced more like a John Hughes coming of age movie where there's humor and it's teenagers and it's they're funny, but also the situations are funny. And then you add into that the fact that bodies are, it's like, you know, they even describe it jokingly. One of the characters describes it as it's like a Cronenberg movie. And it is like a Cronenberg movie. Like people are literally really exploding. And he manages to meld that. It's like there's a horror comedy happening and there's separately a really touching coming of age drama in here as well. You know, tonally, it almost felt like the age of 17, but with horror elements strewn throughout it. And that is an incredibly hard tone to pull off. And these first five pages work really hard, you know, using the the flashbacks to Caitlin Ogden. To me, the description of Caitlin Ogden and flashing back to her smoking joints, to her as a five-year-old, it is trying to say, this is not like a throwaway death. This was a real person to these other characters, like given circumstances, like she existed, we feel for her. This is traumatic, but we are reacting using humor as a self-defense, but also the audience, the audience's relationship to the content. We are being invited to laugh at it as well.

Yeah, we are. And I think that human- like, even her going, I wasn't close with Caitlin, but we weren't enemies or everything. She was just, you know, a classmate for a decade. Lots of people liked her. Guys especially. I think that is really- is very humanizing in terms of portray- like, and this is what makes that kind of emotional reaction. Like, there's, like, a beautiful complexity to this because it's, like, these characters- she's real to these characters. I think it shows an emotional maturity of my Mara to acknowledge that I didn't hate her. But we weren't close friends but i understand that people liked her it does a lot of that stuff and it's important because it's not that we need to feel for caitlin it's that we need to feel for the characters and how they're affected by caitlin's death but the script always to tell us to feel cohesive that there's going to be humor about it because possibly because it helps us maybe not take it seriously we're more likely to suspend disbelief right because it does get crazy spoilers for those who haven't seen it they do get like locked up by the government they do get a it a bit kind of ET about the whole thing and put them in like, oh, we should quarantine the whole fucking class and work out what's going on.

Like there is like, it treats this ridiculous concept very seriously, but with a certain tone, right? So everything that happens in the script is treated seriously. These are real people to other real people and they are experiencing real emotions to this absurd thing of their classmates just spontaneously combusting everywhere. You know, spoiler to the point where, like, it stops being funny at a lot of parts because it allows us to experience what the characters are experiencing. But at the same time, it is teaching us as a viewer, you know, to kind of roll with this, to bear with it, that this is not going to be a bleak ride. And I did just skip to the last page and Mara's voiceover does turn into present tense oh nice.

I don't know what's going to happen next I hope it's cool all I know is I could die any second now hell so could you nothing's fair but it's a beautiful world and I'm happy I get to be here, if only for a little while, the fuck else can you do.

So, you know, she is telling the story retrospectively. I mean, there's so many literary devices in here, especially in comparison to the three other scripts that we've read. But the things that really stand out to me is, you know, the big print aligns with the character experience as much as it's, you know, Brian Duffield big print. And those moments where it takes in between Caitlin Ogden blowing up and taking the time. And it's not a lot of time. It's like it's half a page of her smoking dope in the back of a truck and then the like not even an eighth of a page of the elementary school class photo. But it's taking the time to say these are real people. and that this is not just you know the the opposite end of of david cronenberg is like this being treated i know almost like a family guy episode or something.

Like that.

Where it's just so absurd and so extreme but it's only for laughs that there isn't that character pathos there that's possibly me being a bit mean to family guy i did.

Yes there's a lot of family guy yeah yeah i look no definitely lost its way after the first few seasons not lost its way it just became mean and just purely referential humor anyway what do you think i was gonna say what devices is brian using on the page but what do we think the tone is i'm describing it as complex because i actually think spontaneous has a really quite a large dynamic range of emotion and i'm allowed to feel and the characters are allowed to feel Right. Which is I'm allowed to be scared and horrified and laugh and cry. And it's got a romance plot, right?

Yeah.

It's actually really quite a complex film. I would say that Spontaneous is far more tonally complex than Dune. Right. Dune is a complex story. Yeah. Except they, to deal with that complexity, they just kind of sat it all in the mid-tones, both in terms of the cinematography and the character emotion and everything.

But Dune is almost by nature of its concept has to be monotonal because it's dealing with predestination and people knowing what the future is. Does it?

Okay.

You haven't read the book, have you?

I've only seen the date. I've seen the Alan Smithy cut of the David Lynch version, like the four-hour David Lynch version that he took his name off, and the Denis Villeneuve. So, I haven't read the book. But you can compare that to like, what's his name, Jotawoski, how do you ever say it? Like what Jotawoski intended.

Jotawoski.

Intended, you know, with the really Chris Voss-inspired art for the ships, lots of colour, you know, all that stuff is something that you could do with that. I'm just using it because I just watched it recently, and it just struck me how much that film was me, was a great experiencing of watching characters as opposed to a great experience with characters, and there is a difference. And Emily the Critter Mall and Spontaneous and Lady Bird, particularly Emily the Critter Mall and Spontaneous, are really putting me in the experience of the characters. And I love your observation that the big print, the language that Brian Duffield was choosing to use seems to reflect the worlds or the given circumstances, whatever you want to call it, the external realities and the internal realities of the characters that populate it. Right. And I think that's really powerful. But do you think there is a tone that is more than spontaneous? I mean, I guess it's like life affirming in a way.

I- the film really changed for me in the end, right? Because it stops being funny in the end. Yeah. And that became quite a confronting experience for me. It was something like, oh fuck, I'm really in this world where they could die at any minute. And the fact is like, that's the world we all live in right now. And that was, you know, the powerful metaphor of it it all. But I do think in these first five pages, he's going to great lengths to be extra funny in the first five pages because he has to teach us to enjoy young people blowing up. Like a balloon. Yeah.

Not like a suicide bomber, a joke that the script itself makes. Look, I'm just reading on Letterboxd, someone wrote this. Spontaneous is a sweet and charming love story, a darkly comic body horror, an observist dramedy, and a relatable coming-age story rolled into one. I think that is absolutely true. I think it's interesting, as we've alluded to before, but we've not really dug into, genre and tone are connected. But I think genre is the result of tone, not the other way around. Genre helps set the expectations. But drama to me is a recognition of the result, right? As opposed to, like, it's a categorization of the result rather than the underlining thing.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's an argument for another day.

But I would say the only thing is it's not doing. It hasn't introduced the romance, the love story yet. Right. But you are definitely getting the darkly comic body horror. You're getting the absurdity. You're getting the dramedy.

No, no. It is on page five. So, I mean, it's a massive cheat that then he recovers. Ah. In big print, she shrugs an apology to the boy who said that, who she will have some sex with later on in the movie. So that's the cheat, right? Like it's telling us what's going to happen later in the movie. But this is what I'm saying that I love. He smiles at her because he just read that too. And that to me makes it playable. It undoes the cheat. This is what I'm talking about with Brian Duffield kind of learning from his experiences. Because yes, he's talking about a character in his movie reading the script and knowing Knowing that this girl is going to have sex with him. But Brian also knows that that's going to be two characters in a traumatic situation looking at each other and going, hey. He's described it in a humorous way that teaches us about what the movie is going to be, but it is also eminently playable.

It's eminently playable because, and this is one of my big things, is that he makes a joke and she laughs at it. He makes the Cronenberg movie, she laughs, everyone else stares at them, so they share a moment of connection. I think shared laughter is actually one of the most important ways you can build connection. I mean, in real life and in characters too, you know, I just rewatched Crazy Stupid Love, talking about just interesting romances. And, you know, the way that that film understands the importance of laughter as like bringing couples together, bringing people together, actually is kind of what to me makes it effective, particularly the romance between the Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Basically they end up spinning a knife just laughing with each other and we completely buy that they're like yep we're hanging out all the time now rather than them having hot sex it's actually they have hot laughter i like that that is what this is but yeah you're right he has to underscore it a bit he has to cheat because he is saying that this is the moment that you would probably do something with the music or the performance to indicate they they both know they're going to hook up.

But he's cheating for the purposes of teaching the audience about all the film that's to come. He's laying that extra emotional track. Like, this is going to be a teen movie, this is going to be a body horror comedy, this is going to be a romance. Yeah. Yeah.

So this brings us to a observation set by top tier patron of the podcast, Crob, because we asked our patrons, you know, if they had any follow-up on the previous episode. And he goes, he was interested in title sequence. He shared that there's, and I'll quote, I've always liked the story of Monsters, Inc., where it originally started with the scare in the test chamber bedroom, and then test audiences weren't laughing at the jokes throughout the film. Pixar concluded it was too scary to start with, and that people were expecting more scares through the film. So they added the bright and cheerful opening titles to set the expectation that this is a light, bouncy, and fun film. Then test audiences enjoyed the scare, but they were all also primed for the levity. That's what Krupp said, and I think he's true. Like, we're talking about what is the promise, which we talked about in our two genre episodes, which you haven't listened to, you should check out, talking about what is the promise to the audience. And what we're talking about is the tonal, of course, the emotional promise to the audience is connected to the tonal promise. So, here it's setting up the emotional promise. It's like saying that there is a love story. And then he actually sent us an example from Superbad. I was like, oh, I'm not sure a writer's really writing title sequences. And then he sent in Superbad opening credits over super funky flexploitation music, which builds through an exciting crescendo, filling us with the expectations of a thrilling action-packed opening sequence. Instead, we get interior Seth's car, Seth, 17, a bit heavy set in the midst of a sad attempt at growing a goatee and clearly a terrible driver. Talking about communicating tone actually like that really does communicate time it's juxtaposition right yeah tone coming through juxtaposition and contrast that's what we're seeing in spontaneous that's what we see in buster you know and you know in ladybird as well there's a contrast it's just not as dramatic between the heightened emotions and the very kind of reserved observant storytelling psi style and emily the critical the minimalism as well it's It's kind of a similar idea that even though it's putting us in. Emily's position the minimalism gives space for her feralness to kind of come to the fore i think did i just unintentionally segue this into wrap up learnings stray observations, sure did you have anything else to say in spontaneous because that would absolutely fit with stray observations no.

I i just think that brian duffield set himself a massive challenge and And I think it'd be worth reading that letter that he sent, like just the bit where he's describing his own film. Because it's different to my experience of the film, but it's great. It's the first movie I've directed and it's about a young girl in high school trying to survive her senior year while her classmates start randomly exploding for no reason. It's like a Hal Ashby movie if people exploded in Hal Ashby movies.

Yeah, I didn't get Hal Ashby.

Yeah. Yeah.

And maybe that's because he, that may have been a connection that he's trying to draw with Mr. Stevens. Right. There's a little bit of a Hal Ashby, stoner, folky 70s vibe, you know.

I think I can only reiterate, like, I was worried that this episode would feel too much like the previous episode where we weren't like being strict in choosing our homework enough to be a real contrast. But we've ended up having, I think, fabulous contrast that's well worth doing. I'm just going to note now before we dive into full on summaries is that the final entry in tone, whenever we get to it, I think we're going to focus on moments in films where the tone changes relatively abruptly or perhaps like over a spell. So, we're going to put out a poll to our patrons to do that, to see how writers on the page manage tonal shifts. Because nothing angers me more than the note, and I'm sorry, if one of the members of our writers group, who I love dearly, but he keeps saying like, oh, I just, I don't get the tone. It's all over the place tonally. And I'm just like, or he doesn't, he wants monotonal or consistent tonal things. Like that's what works for him. And that's what he wants as a note. Whereas I'm like, no, I want the tone to shift. If I haven't successfully taught you what the emotional engagement is such that you you won't suspend your disbelief as per Tom Vaughan, then that's my failing. Not that the tone shouldn't change. It is that I have not managed the first five pages well enough to set the emotional contract in the same way that genre is set. Like you said, it's sort of expectations contract. I think tone is about emotional contract.

Yeah. I'm just encouraging listeners, us particularly, to be thinking about what we're communicating about what is happening and how the characters react to that. And then how are we telling the audience the meant to feel about that and kind of thinking through that. And when I was discussing this at length with Emma, I was talking about, like, because we're talking about genre and me saying there's a difference in genre. And that's why, you know, I use the faster than light travel at the beginning as an example of difference between rules of the world and the importance of given circumstances. But fantasy is another one. You know, I'm picking extremes because I think dramas that are sitting more in the middle are a little bit harder. But, you know, like Game of Thrones, do characters die? Can they be resurrected? Are they heroic? Oh, you've got magic in your world. Is it good magic? Is it dark magic? Does the magic come with a cost? It's not just the rules. The rules of the world speak to the tone, and that's going to impact how the characters behave around that. And I just think, I don't know, I still think there's more thinking. I think there's more thinking to be done here, because ultimately you've got to take all these ideas and communicate it to your readers. Originally, my thinking about looking at this at characters was how to talk to actors. You're going to be communicating it to actors, your fellow filmmaking collaborators, and eventually the audience. and there's a lot to unpack here. I think, as you say, tone is ephemeral, but I think, I feel like we've gone into more, it's still kind of the result is ephemeral, but I think we've kind of indicated some levers or dials as, you know, you'd like the word dials, some dials you can kind of play with to communicate that.

Yeah, I, the last episode after doing the homework, I'm like, I can get away with more in my big print and this episode is like, I don't need to get away with more in in my big print, if I really nail the focusing on the characters.

I mean, it could just be that when people say they have a problem with their tone, what they actually have a problem with is they don't understand why your characters are reacting the way they do emotionally.

Right?

They haven't been taught what the boundaries of that are or the contrasts of that are. Like, you know, in comedy, and this is stuff we haven't unpacked, but in comedy, you often will have the character that is always a heightened reaction to everything, no matter how small. Classic kind of comedy thing. they drop their card and they react to as if it's the worst thing in the world or you get the opposite where you get the the character that's constantly coming in under you know who's down playing everything and you can kind of think of those attitudes of like the shtick as we talked about with alice fraser as like what is at the top of the triangle where you as a writer are sitting in terms of how you're communicating that into the audience shane black is telling it to you in this really excited ADHD kind of way. Look over here, look over here. It's so exciting. Boom, yeah. You know, and Lady Bird is very matter of fact. And then Buster Scrubs is like, I am telling you, I'm literally opening with the book. I'm telling you a really literary story. And Spontaneous is like, I'm one of the cool kids and I'm talking about it as if I'm one of the characters, you know? Yeah. Like, it's almost like... Mara herself is writing the big print. Yeah.

That's the vibe I get. The big print and the voiceover are so kind of aligned.

Yeah.

In their word choice and how they express themselves.

I mean, I didn't read the full Oppenheimer script, but hearing Christopher Nolan talk to script notes about why he chose to write sections of that in first person actually connects to this. Because effectively what he's saying is it helps me understand what the point of view of the character is and the language that I'm using if I'm writing it in first person. And he basically just didn't want to cheat in terms of giving access to interiority. None of this is telling you what your tone should be. No. And that's a different problem. What should my tone be? Well, what are you trying to say?

These two exercises are giving me a range of different dials that I can turn up or down when I get that note, like, ah, something just feels off about the tone for me on this. Yeah.

And you know, it could just be that you're making them feel uncomfortable and you might need to be like-

Which is also might be deliberate, you know, but then does that need extra handholding? Like don't worry that sense of discomfort you're feeling right now, you, you know, you're meant to feel that way.

Yeah.

Or do you do more hand-holding like that in the Shane Black way? Or do you like go down Greta Gerwig or John Patton Ford's approach here of really burrowing down into the presentation of the actors and their performances?

I think it really is going to depend on the script.

Right?

I think it's really depending on what I imagine the end of the script is and what I want the audience to feel. Like I could see that a certain thing that we're collaborating on, I could see it being a little bit more mentalistic, a little bit more like Emily the Criminal, maybe not the haiku style, but it actually, given it's something we're just intending to self-produce, maybe it'd be fun to do, right? Just to kind of kick the tires on that style. I do think those things are connected. And really what we are talking about is tone is an absolutely an important way that the audience understand the meaning in a very broad sense of what you're trying to say.

So, well, in one of our recent projects, I think one of the biggest differences between the two most recent drafts was what we were choosing to laugh at. We had a broader tone in the previous draft and we were inviting the audience to laugh at deliberately, like a dark sense of humor at some pretty horrific things. things. But by us deepening the script and the characters and their emotion of it, it has tonally shifted away from laughing at some of that stuff. We've changed how we want the audience to feel about certain moments. We want them to feel threatened as opposed to laughing.

Do you think that's changed the meaning?

No.

Okay. So if we've changed the audience experience of it, how does that disprove our thesis that tone affects meaning?

That was always your thesis, not mine. I'm like messages separate from experience. You could have the same, to my mind, theme or message conveyed with two different tones.

How? Like, war is bad, but here's the fun version.

Yeah. Yeah, so Dr. Strangelove is war is bad. He is the fun version. All right.

Anyway, yes, fair enough. Whatever. Well, thank you, Chaz.

Thank you, Stu. This was, I don't know, a lot more lively and fun than I thought it would be at the end of a long day for me. So thank you very much for bringing me to the microphone. And thank you, as always, to our amazing patrons who bring you more Draft Zero more often. And as threatened, we will be polling you soon for homework for the final, maybe final, hopefully final, could be final episode in our exploration on tone.

But we won't be doing that next. I think we've got an episode on the emotional event coming up. We've got stuff on talking to the audience. We're probably going to come up with some other crazy idea in between and abandon those ideas.

Don't make promises that, who knows? I mean, how long have we been threatening to do this episode on tone? Was it like the first episode of Draft Zero? This was one of our mooted topics.

Oh, let me find the Google Doc.

But whilst you's like tripping down memory lane in our 10-year mourning, special thanks to our superous patrons who bring you the most Draft Zero, the most often at Lily, Alexandra, Malay, Jen, Thomas, Randy, Jesse, Sandra, These, and Krob.

You are correct. This, I found the suggested episodes. So, voiceover is the first one. Adaptation. Look at the Star Trek script. That's very specific. And particularly the transition sequences. Writing transitions. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, we did do writing transitions. Unlike compelling protagonists, we did that.

We did do that.

Structure of films who protagonists do not change.

I'm still trying to bring that.

But one of your examples was American Hustle. And, you know, we did that in possibly the worst episode of Trails to the River of All Time. That should be your 10th anniversary. What is that worst episode? What questions can we ask that look at macro structure?

I mean, we've done a lot of those, but a lot more specific.

Films that ignore three-act structure. And the last one is tone. Look at films that successfully manage tonal shifts. For example, Django Unchanged, Argo, The King's Speech, Shaun of the Dead, Side Effects, American Hustle. You kept on running American Us all your ads for everything in 2015 2014, Cabin in the Woods Where's Anderson and Shane Black? Well, we did Shane Black Sofia Coppola? Well, I mean, we did a whole episode on her Tarantino, we did that Richard Curtis? Richard Curtis?

Shut up, I love Notting Hill Well.

We did that too Alright Goodbye.

Stu Cha-cha i hope you all feel like arguing with either stew or myself about anything on this episode or anything in general and you can find many ways of getting in touch with us at our website at draft-zero.com at the website you'll also find the show notes for this and all our other episodes as well as links to support us and spread the word for free via a rating and review on apple podcasts Very important for spreading the word. Or if you think that what we do here is worth a dollar or preferably more than a dollar, then you can also find links to our Patreon page to support us getting these episodes to you quicker. Thanks. And thanks for listening.