Oscar-Winning Writer Teaches Storytelling (Michael Arndt Interview)

Michael Arndt, the Academy-Award-winning screen writer, is on the show today to teach us how to write great stories. We start the conversation, talk about his time at Pixar, and I said, "Michael, you worked on movies like Toy Story 3. What is it about the DNA of Pixar that has made them so successful for so long?" And then we talked about Little Miss Sunshine, the movie that won them an Oscar award in 2007. This is a guy who's read thousands of screenplays. He's got a good sense of what makes for a bad screenplay, what makes for a good one, what's the difference between them. He's the script doctor. He's the storytelling scientist, and he's here to teach us how to write great stories.

Tell me about Pixar. What is it like working at Pixar? Why has Pixar been so successful for so long? What's different about it? >> Oh my god, I think Pixar I To me, I feel like Pixar really kind of cracked the code of storytelling, and I think that one of it is Well, first of all, I'll I'll tell you this. When I got there, I was like, "What's the secret sauce? Is it the people or is it the system?" And after about 6 months, I realized it's really both. Like, you got to have the system in place, and you got to have the right people. You know, when I wrote Little Miss Sunshine, I was total prickly loner. I was like, "Everybody shut the [ __ ] up and leave me alone." They hired me having read the script of Little Miss Sunshine, but they didn't even know it was being made. They just like the script as a sample. Like, my agent said, "Oh, if you work at Pixar, well, is there any reason you can't move to San

Francisco?" And I was like, "Well, I I'd love to work for Pixar. I'd love to write for them, but I live in New York. Can I just stay in New York?" And my agent was like, "Nope, that's not how they do things. You've got to go there. You've got to be in the building." And this was sort of Steve Jobs's philosophy. I think that it was sort of the core of success is that, you know, you've got you're there in this big building, and you're trying to make these movies that are very difficult and complicated to make.

But the great thing is that there's always three or four films that are all in development at the same time, and everybody's helping each other out. Core thing is that they make a movie, they have an iterative process. So, they make you make a rough version of movie seven or eight times before you go to final animation. So, we made Toy Story 3, you know, I wrote the first draft, we made what they call a set of reels, which is a rough animatic of the movie. And then based on the feedback that we got to that, I wrote another draft or 10 10 more drafts and then we made a second set of reels. What's great about the Pixar system is that you write and then you direct and then you edit and then you write and then you direct and you edit and you write and it's an iterative system. So, you're really able to really hyper focus everything. There's a way that you beta test your story, you put in front of the audience. So, the

audience you can hear the audience react. Like if you write a joke and nobody laughs, like you just have proof, like it's not a it's not a funny joke. >> So, you invite people to watch the early versions of the movie? >> Totally. And it starts with the their system there is that it's sort of a series of concentric rings. So, the first set of reels, which is usually pretty terrible, you show to 20 25 30 people. And then you always want to preserve fresh eyes, right? Cuz you want have have people who never seen the film before come. So, the second screening you'll have a few more people come in, the third screening a few more people.

By the time you get up to your seventh or eighth screening, like you're showing it to like, you know, everybody and his grandmother that even that be that you can pull in. They're just extremely patient, you know, they're just like they give you three years to come up with um with with with with a good story and the it's this very forgiving process where you can fail. You can go out I mean, one of their one of their tenets is like fail as quickly as possible.

Just go out, get it up on its feet and and and and don't hesitate. >> Tell me about the way that Pixar would break down the movie into what, 20 25 different sequences? >> Yeah, it was interesting that that they would because it's it's for animation basically and it's so labor intensive that they had to just break down the script into a 25 or 30 different sequences and to talk about the story, you're talking about, you know, what happens in each sequence. You know, the first act is going to be five or six sequences. The second quarter to what they call 2A up to your midpoint is going to be five or six sequences. Third quarter is going to be five or six and the and the fourth quarter, you know, five or six sequences. But I feel like that's a very like the way of breaking down a story so you always have a very clear goal. Like at the end of sequence six is going to lead to sequence seven.

End of sequence seven is going to lead to sequence eight. But um it was mostly for production. That was mostly done for production so that you were always keeping track of like what sequence was fixed and working and what sequence was still problematic. So they got made uh non-sequentially. So if there was a I'll just give you the example, the first uh scene uh in Toy Story 3 that got finaled for production was and and it they're like you're done, you don't get to write anymore. The scene was when uh Woody wakes up in Bonnie's room and he's trying to figure out how to get back to Andy and he goes and he goes on the internet and he finds where he is and uh and and then he says goodbye and and then he learns about Lotso.

And that sequence was called map quest. I did about five or six drafts of that. And it was a simple scene so it got finished first. And then the last I think the last sequence that I was working on was the staff meeting scene which is right at the beginning. Those are the hardest scenes to write because you're juggling so much exposition in those scenes. So I did about 60 drafts

of that scene. >> How does Pixar balance the kind of support, the nurturing that you need to be creative um and also just deal with the pressure of making a Pixar movie? How do they balance that kind of nurturing motherly support with kind of the dude, this isn't good enough, make it great, keep going which is more of this like masculine toughness? >> Yeah, I mean they do it they they have Do you know they have this thing trust the process? Like the process is going to work. You know what's interesting was I remember being in story meetings and they would say for where you are in the process, you're fine. Like a lot of the story still doesn't work. Like some of the story is working, some of the story still isn't working, but we're 1 year into a 3-year process, so based on our expectations or based on our experience, where you are is fine.

There was, you know, there was a sort of an unhappy side to Pixar, which is directors getting fired off a project and getting replaced by by other directors. So, there there was a you know, you always kind of felt like, you know, there was a sort of Damocles hanging over you. Like, you you you kind of like at a certain point you needed to make something. I know. I know. I I lived in I lived in fear and terror for 3 years that I was about to get fired.

And the other thing is that they just say, you know, storytelling is a team effort. Like, it takes everybody. So, it's not just your problem that you got to solve. It's like our problem that we're all trying to solve together. What does Pixar understand about the structure of teams to make it work? Like, it seems like a lot of crap is made by groups and collaboration. There's kind of a regression to the mean, but Pixar seems like a crazy exception to this. You know, we're talking about the Beatles before. Four-person team.

Yeah. What is required in a good team from what you learned at Pixar to make it people more creative rather than less? I think the main thing is that it was sort of non-hierarchical. It's democratic, right? And so, you could go to I'll just say an early version of Wall-E, you know, which was a really really difficult script to write because you have a hero who can't talk. So, you just have to tell your whole story visually, which is really hard to do.

>> Wow. >> The main thing is that your your your you're really investing the director with all the authority, right? He's not getting notes from executives, he's not getting notes from producers who are saying you have to do this. He's not getting notes from marketing people. Like, it's really the final decision comes down to the directors, but everyone else who comes into that space, you know, you screen the movie, you watch it, is just there to help out, you know? And you can just you know, a a good Brain Trust meeting you'll you know, come come up with a big bagful of ideas, and it's really a director's job to pick and choose like, "Okay, I like this. I don't like this. You know, I think I'm going to make this work. I don't know. We've already tried that. I you know, I can't make that work." To me, the thing that was so great about it was that it was a it creatively democratic system where a

good idea can come from anywhere. And you were very open. People there just wasn't a lot ego there. There was sort of a a soft taboo of about claiming credit for anyone idea because it was like it wasn't you that came up with the idea. It was like we came up with this

idea. >> Can you take me into what it's like being in a brainstorm meeting? Like if I'm in the room, what is it like? Who's there? What's the conversation? >> great I'll give you a great example. This is the or This is my my I could be wrong, but this is my recollection of the origin of Spanish Buzz was I wrote a first draft of the script and it was based on the treatment that Andrew Stanton did. The twist sort of halfway through was that Buzz gets reset back to his original factory settings and he becomes a space ranger again. And so that's how I wrote the first draft.

And then there was an offsite meeting where I'm telling you it was literally for like 3 days, two or three days. It was like everybody left Pixar. They went to a like an inn in like Napa Valley. And we sat in a giant conference room around a giant table and again like 25 or 30 people who had all worked on the Toy Story films sitting there trying to help me fix my my my first draft of the script. I know. And it's just like you couldn't get a bigger set of training wheels.

Like you could And then all these [ __ ] smart people who know these characters like the back of their hand are all trying to like help make something better. And my recollection about the origin of Spanish Buzz, which may be may be wrong, but this is what I remember was at a certain point John Lasseter goes, "You know, we've done turning Buzz into a space ranger before. It feels like we're just repeating ourselves. Is there something else, you know, that we could do?" And so people just started throwing out ideas like fast motion Buzz, slow motion Buzz, you know, electrified Buzz or something like that. And I was sitting next to Andrew and I just said I said, "Spanish Buzz."

like that. But it was like a little joke that I had between the two of us and and went "Spanish Buzz" to like the whole room. And everybody like all the animators like oh, I know that we can make Spanish Buzz funny. And it was a great example of you needed one guy to go you know what this is a problem that we need to fix. That was John. You got one idiot who comes up with the actual idea, but you need another person to go yes, that's the right idea. You know, and it's really that that creative ferment, the fact that like you can have half an idea and somebody else will come along and give the other half of the idea.

That uh it's just such a luxury. It's so great. And it teaches you humility. It really teaches you humility cuz a lot of times you think you're right and then after 10 minutes you go oh, wait a minute. I'm thinking of everyone else is right and I'm wrong. You know, and it gets you over that that writer ego that that the writer always has to be right about things. >> So what is the core thing that John Lasseter understands about stories that more writers need to know?

>> John was a freaking genius at if we screen an early version of something either from Pixar or from for Disney Feature Animation would bring something up. Usually, you know, the first draft is usually [ __ ] All first drafts are [ __ ] And there were screenings I walk out and I'll be like I don't know what to say. Like I don't I have no notes. Like I like there's so many problems with this like there's there's an infinite number of problems and I don't even know where to begin. Like I don't know how to talk to this director or like what can be done to rescue this thing.

And John was great about getting everybody in the room and I'm just like I don't even want to be here cuz I have nothing to say. And John would be like why do you want to make this movie? What was the Or he would he would pick up a little detail. He goes I love what you did with this thing. I love this detail that you created. I love that your character does this. Tell me more about that. And he was so good at like dialing into why do you want to tell the story?

Why is this important to you? Like going like let's go into the heart of going back to the very beginning of the process. Why did you decide this was something a story that you wanted to tell? And then based on that little kernel, he could coax out, you know, how can we make this more emotional? How can we make this more meaningful? How can we get the audience on board with this character? And I think that um he was so good at running meetings and getting people to open up and share and then connecting your personal experience, like what you actually believe about the world, what you actually believe about how we should live our lives with what was up on screen and trying to get those married together.

>> Yeah, when I had Andrew Stanton on the show, what really stuck out was how much he was able to distill the stories that he was telling. Like I asked, what is the core thing about Wall-E? And he goes, Wall-E is all about one sentence. Irrational love defeats life's programming. And you hear that, you're like, "Ha." But then here's the thing is that it sounds so simple to get down to a bumper sticker like that. That's actually kind of the hardest thing to do in a story. I think the biggest misconception that people have about writers as storytellers is that you know what you want to say when you start out. No, the reason you're writing it If you knew what you wanted to say, you would just sit there and write it all out. You're trying to figure it out.

>> Yeah, exactly. And I think that it's actually a very, very helpful exercise to challenge yourself to distill everything down into a bumper sticker because that becomes your your your your your North Star in your story. That that becomes the thing that you can judge every other every scene in the story is like, is this serving our North Star or is it not serving men? >> What's the bumper sticker of Little Miss Sunshine?

>> The bumper sticker is that um I basically fun is more important than winning, you know. Like that that's basically yeah. >> Right, so you have the family dancing at the end. I was like, >> They're they're not going to win. They're going to They're going to lose, but they're going to lose in the funnest and most spectacular way possible. >> What is the core lesson of Toy Story 3? >> Oh, it's uh the impermanence of all things. It's letting go. Like the wisdom of letting go. And I think that um you know, I I say in my video what that I made about Toy Story 3 is that we all go through our lives like having these very close relationships with people, you know, and it's your best friend forever when you were 12 years old, it's your high school sweetheart, it's your buddies in college, it's your the co-workers of that first crazy job that you had. And you form these really tight bonds of attachment with them. And then

at a certain point your best friend moves away, your girlfriend dumps you, you're you you move on to a different job and you go like was that even real, you know? And this is what Woody is facing is that like I me and Andy were like this for 12 years or 18 years, right? And now he's going off to college and like did that just mean nothing? Like am I just being thrown on a scrap heap? Like was that all that all those emotions I felt with Andy, all that love that I had for him, you know, if And this is what Lots-o says, if your kid loves you so much, why is he leaving? You know, and what you realize is that as you go through life, sometimes the most loving thing you can do to somebody is to let them go and move on. And that's where the you know, the the the the the epiphany at the end is, you know, Andy's mom says I wish I could always be with you and Andy says, you will be mom. And you're just flipping

the meaning of what it means to be there for someone. From from from the sort of the the literal thing to the more poetic or metaphorical thing. >> This episode is sponsored by Alpha School. When you think of school, what comes to mind? For me it was lectures, homework, being stuck at a desk. And the worst part is that it doesn't even work. 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. That's over half of Americans. We need something new and that's why I'm excited to have Alpha School as the flagship sponsor of how I write.

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>> There's nothing more expensive than bad writing, and nothing cheaper than good writing. If something is written badly, especially in the movies, you you're spending a hundred million dollars making a movie. If it's badly written, you know, it's not going to do as well. It's not going to last as long. I'll say that. It won't last as long. So, and I do think that good writing tends to last longer than bad writing. And so, people are, you know, hesitant to spend money on writers or writing, because a lot of times it's a very uneven payoff.

Sometimes you can spend a lot of money, you get a draft turned in that that's not not any good. But, on the other hand, like good writing is is good writing, and it's going to it's going to last. That's one of the things I like so much about Pixar was Pixar was one of the few places that really recognized. I mean, we spent three years writing on Toy Story 3, and I feel like we needed every single week of that three years to come up with all the ideas, you know?

And if you had if we if you'd given us one year, it would it would you know, we would have worked our brains out. We would have worked just as hard as we did, but it would have been a bad movie, you know? Or it would have been a mediocre movie. And if you'd given us two years, it would have been like a, you know, B- movie, but we really needed three years to to make it whatever it turned into. >> You were script reviewer.

>> I was a script reader, yeah. >> Talk about that. >> I read a lot of screenplays. I went to film school. Um I got out. I wanted to be a director. The directors that I really admired were the ones who wrote their own stuff. So, I was like, "Oh, I'll I'll do this writing thing for a while, and then I'll turn to directing. Like, how hard can it be?" And then just to learn how to be a screenwriter, this was before the internet, so it was actually hard to find screenplays. Like you couldn't just go into a store and buy them. And so I got a job I should I just like I should just get a job reading screenplays. So I got a job as a freelance script reader, 50 bucks a script. You go in there, you pick up a stack of scripts, you go home, you you read them, you write a like a page and a half synopsis, and then a half a page comment on it. And you usually it's like you know, thumbs up, thumbs down, or or you know, maybe uh in

the middle. But I do that for about Oh my god. Off and on I did it for about 10 years, you know, and I probably read I'm guessing about a thousand screenplays. And there were a handful that I really wholeheartedly recommended that were great. I read Election, you know, when I was when I was working for Matthew Broderick. I remember sitting on the L train and reading Election thinking, "Oh, wow, this is really good." And I went in the next day and I was like, "You should You should read this script." You know, and then a couple of weeks later he he was like, "You know that script you told me I should read?"

He's like, "I'm thinking I'm going to do it." So that was one of the few times the system instead of worked the way it was supposed to.

>> And what was sure about great scripts, great stories that the mediocre ones don't have? Two elements, two things that you just sort of felt or they had a smell to them. Number one, well, the good scripts felt like they were set in a in the real world. They were located in a specific place with specific characters. So a bad script would just be like generic American city, you know, and generic American character, you know. And a good script would would be really rooted in like what that local location was. So it was off the it was the specificity. And then the other thing that I came to realize or I came to feel was that a lot of scripts felt like they were imitation movies.

They It felt like they were just the what the writer was trying to do was just to do a a saleable facsimile of a a genre of movies that they had seen, right? And so it was sort of set in movie world and not in real world, and it felt like a fake story rather than a real story. And there's just a way when you're a reader that you can kind of feel and I guess it's as an audience member when you're sitting in a theater, you can kind of feel when something is a real story as opposed to a fake story, you know, or a simulation of a story. That the heartbreaking thing about being a script writer is you say no to like 90 95% of the stuff you read and I finally I mean the way I just sort of dealt with the guilt of it, the survivor's guilt of it was like if you're trying to tell a real story like you can kind of feel it.

>> Can you be concrete there like what does a fake story feel like versus a real story? >> say a fake story is one where you're I'll just give you an example which is you meet your hero and he's kind of a shallow jerk, right? And he goes through the story being a shallow jerk, but his flaws are very obvious. And then at the end of the movie he learns a lesson that could see coming a mile away and he becomes he's no longer shallow jerk. He becomes a decent person, but you're the meaning of your story is just a fairly banal cliche. But good writing is the back stage conversations that you have.

It's the stuff that you really believe in and that you're taking a risk by expressing it.

>> We're talking about the lessons that you learned reading all those screenplays. What did you learn about what makes for a good villain? >> Not all stories have to have villains, right? But a lot of stories do and I think your villain can be the centrifugal center of your story. And to me at least the reason they're the centrifugal center of your story is because they they represent the apotheosis, the quintessence of the negative values in your story which is the thing your hero is struggling against. And I think that your villain can be I mean that obviously like Darth Vader is is a villain who's all about violence and domination.

That's a pretty easy villain. You have Gordon Gekko, right? Who is the guy who's like greed is good. Greed works. Greed purifies. What's great about a strong villain is that they have a very clear and compelling worldview. And in a way what you want to do in a story is make it seem as though even though the villain is being a bit of a dick, even though the villain is not a nice guy, his worldview is right. Like it's irrefutable. You can't argue against it.

You know, I you know, we did this with Lotso on Toy Story 3. At a certain point he says, "You know, your kid is going to grow up and leave you and and toys are just trash waiting to be thrown away." And at that point in the story, they're standing over a dumpster, like it it's looks like they'll never see Andy again. You go while he's being kind of a dick about it, but he's right. He's basically right. Yeah, a good villain it doesn't have to be necessarily super powerful or super malevolent. They have to be super convincing. They have to convince you that their way of seeing the world is right.

>> One thing I'm hearing you say is that there's almost three things that you have in a story. You have say the main character. >> Mhm. >> But the main character, in order for them to feel real, alive, they have to be reacting against something. And so there we're talking about the villain. Yeah, but then there's also the reaction against the world. Is that right? >> Yeah, no, this is something I I I just made this new uh video about how to write a good first act and this is this was the big discovery for me in making this video, which I'm hoping to be finished in a couple of weeks, is that a lot of times again, I I hadn't quite appreciated how often they your hero and the world they live in are two sides of the same coin. And a lot of times your you you're introducing the world as a flawed world and let's just say a slightly poisoned world, right? It's poisoned by greed or it's poisoned by

racism or it's poisoned by like whatever. That your villain then represents the antidote to that thing. So, for example, Katniss Everdeen, like you introduce the world of Panem, right? And it's this repressive yada yada. And Katniss Everdeen starts off as a normal character. She's just a normal person, but the inciting incident getting drafted to the Hunger Games is going to set in motion a process whereby she becomes the antidote that's going to try and bring the system down or at least start the revolution. So, uh yeah, that was really really interesting to me that a lot of times when you're trying to figure out who your what your story is or who your hero is, your hero is the antidote to the problems that are in the in the rest of the world.

>> Yeah, I was thinking about uh Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. Like you can't really understand them without understanding the context of the world that they're reacting to. >> The thing that fighting against. I I always feel like Robin Hood is a great is a really interesting figure because Robin Hood in the classic like pale, he starts off as Robin of Loxley. He's just an ordinary nobleman. Like he's hanging out in his castle. He's just living his life.

As long as Richard Lionheart is king of England, everything's cool, right? And Richard Lionheart goes off to the Crusades, gets captured, King John comes in, takes over England, and then institutes this reign of abusive and unfair taxation. And that in itself, like that sense of injustice in the world, like this abusive, excessive taxation, is the thing that radicalizes your hero. He's got to leave his castle and and go off to live in Sherwood Forest, get a band of like radicalized uh uh thieves together, and they're going to rob from the rich and and and and and give to the poor. But what's interesting is that the world itself has created Robin Hood. Like the injustice of the world, the pervasiveness of the injustice of the world has created Robin Hood, that character.

>> Tell me about this idea about how if there's a problem in the second or the third act, often people go they try to fix the second or third act, but often the problem is just back in the first act. >> a I am such a believer in that, and I think that Billy Wilder has this very famous quote that if you have a problem in your third act, the real problem is in your first act, because they're they're sort of bookends to each other.

But I will go further. I'll also say that if you have a problem in your second act, the real problem is probably in your first act. Your second act is just an expression of whatever you set up in your first act. So if you set up all your ducks in a row right, when you get to your first act break, but boom, your hero shot out of a cannon, they have a clear goal, they have a clear long-term goal, they have a clear short-term plan for achieving that goal, you're going to go ABC through through through through the second act. If you get into the second act and you're going like, okay, wait a minute, what's at stake? What am I rooting for? You know, what is this story really about? That's because you haven't set up things properly in the first act. So I again and again I just see like, I mean, this is why I want to make a whole video about this is because I feel like first acts are very easy to

underestimate in their importance because I think first acts are are inherently deceiving. They're almost always entertaining. If you sit down and watch a movie, the first act, you're meeting new characters, you're getting into new situations, and it's all kind of engaging. Like, it's all you're getting new information all the time in every new scene, and so it's just automatically entertaining. The problem is is that a first act has to do a lot more than just be entertaining. You've got to set up the rest of your story.

The whole DNA of your story should be set up in that first act. >> Yeah, one of the things >> I'm thinking about just to completely bring this down to earth is like, you're at the bar with your friends, you're having a pint or whatever, and you're telling a story. I guess what I'm going to be thinking is, okay, where is this story going to end? What is going to be the pivot point in this story that makes people say, "Whoa." And then the beginning of that story sets those things up.

>> The main thing though is, and this is a point I make in the video, is that the number one, the first commandment of storytelling is make us care. So, it's got You've got to make your audience care about your lead character, and then you've got to make them care about the story. And so, if you're sitting at a bar with your friends, I'm just totally making this up, but you go, "Oh my god, I got to tell you a story about what happened to me yesterday, which is I was I was doing X, Y, and Z, and then I encountered problem, you know, Q, which I was totally unforeseen. You know, if I didn't fix Q, X was going to happen or or P was going to happen, you know. And so, I tried to fix Q, but then unexpectedly, like this other crazy thing happened, and now I was even more in the hole than I was at the beginning, and then then things kept getting worse and worse." All you're doing is you're establishing a sympathetic character,

you know, and you're establishing that they have a problem that they're trying to fix, and then you're establishing all of these unforeseen complications that come out of that, but you want to be pulling the thread of engagement with your audience forward, so they're going, "Okay, well, what happens at the end? He was just trying to, you know, go to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, and you know, that was your goal, and then you got you ended up getting out of a carjacking in Brooklyn or somewhere like that, but you still got, you know, if you don't meet your girlfriend and her parents, then you're not going to get married, and you're screwed."

>> One thing you hear in bar stories you don't really see in movies as much as you just tell them at the end. You tell them about the climax. Like, if this actually happened to me, uh I once pissed my pants on the Giant Dipper roller coaster in Santa Cruz. Brutal. Sitting next to a stranger at summer camp. Like, you want to hear that story, right? Uh but you hear that all the time when you're at a bar. You don't see that as much in movies.

>> Here's the thing, you don't have a captive audience in a bar. They can always get up and walk away and go get a drink. The audience in a theater has made a deal with you that they're going to sit there and in the first 10 minutes you're going to make them care about the story. So, I think that I feel like the first 10 minutes of a screenplay are sort of the most free time in your story because it's really before your your your narrative kicks in. Your audience will go along with almost anything you do in the first five or 10 minutes of a movie, and I think it's a novelist's mistake to start your story too quickly because the real work you're doing at that point is just getting your audience to buy the world that you're writing and to like the character that you're introducing.

>> Speaking of roller coasters, can you give me the >> Oh, yeah. Roller coaster analogy? >> Yeah, this is what I learned as a script reader is the analogy I came up with is a story is like you put your lead character into a a roller coaster and you send them up the big hill of the roller coaster and you're ticking upwards and you're getting all this like narrative energy, like latent emotional energy. You're stacking stacking the deck of like whatever the character wants, whatever they're passionate about. And when you get to the top of the hill and you come over the top of the hill, like the rest of the story stretches out in front of you.

That's the the first act break is when you just start going down the hill and you're going through all the twists and turns of the story. What makes this analogy work is the first thing you have to do as a storyteller is to get your audience on board in the roller coaster car with your hero. You've got to get them so that they're wedded, they're sitting right next to the hero. So, that when you go down the big hill, you're right there with them. Like, you know, and when you go through the loop-de-loop, you're right there with them. There's a big difference between standing on the on the ground in an amusement park and watching somebody else ride a roller coaster. You know it's very thrilling for them, but it's not thrilling for you. You're just You're just watching them from a distance. Yeah, audience automatically have a defensive barrier.

Audiences are automatically like, you know, I've seen a zillion movies, I've seen a zillion heroes. Like make me like this guy. And so you've got to actively take steps. You've got to have your hero do something or say something that's going to get your audience go, "Oh my god, I love this person. Oh my god, this person is cool. Like oh my god, I want to find out what happens next." But that was a mistake that I saw made over and over again in all the scripts that I was reading was just to presume audience sympathy for your hero. Just to think, you know, we all love our heroes. Like we sit down to write our story. We wouldn't write the story if we didn't love this hero, right? But as a writer, I think the most important thing, and this is something that's so easy to miss because you automatically love your hero, you've got to find a way, you've got to do something that's going to get your audience to sit

up, take notice, and go, "Oh, this this character is just different." Not only from any person I've met, but any other character I've seen on a screen. I think that's going to help a lot to get you into into the roller coaster car so that you're with them for the rest of the

story. Who's a hero from a story that you just love? Not in the sense like I love that hero, but you think that the writer, the creators of that story just nailed it. I think um Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is such a brilliant screenplay. It's so great. Um but it's a character who actually does start off as a sho- a bit of a shallow jerk, right? And you just kind of like him cuz Bill Murray is so funny and so engaging. A guy who is always living in the pres- uh always living in the future. Always living in the future. Always living in the future. He's like he he hates his present life, right? And all he's thinking about is I'm going to move on from here. I'm going to get get a network job or something like that. So what do you do with a character like that? You trap them in the present. You trap them in the same day. So they they just have to live in the same day over and over again. Here's one of the things

that's really brilliant about about Groundhog Day is that you get your second act problem, which is he's trapped in the same day and he doesn't know how to get out of it. And what's great is that you never explain the rules of it, right? He's really you're you're as an audience, you're with him going like, "How does he get out of this? Like how does he resolve this?" And then so all at the midpoint, you go always yeah, he's in love he's falling in love with Andie MacDowell.

And you think that true love is going to save the day, right? And so there's a way in which he's working on this problem. He's going to try to make Andie MacDowell fall in love with him. And then at the end of this act, he succeeds. He gets Andie MacDowell to fall in love with him and we've all been trained by movies go oh like true love is going to triumph. And he wakes up the day next day and it's the same thing. And she she's forgotten everything.

>> And is it too far to say that the lesson from that is that a character has to have some kind of weird thing about that. Maybe he has too much. But is it too far to say that a character often has something about them that they're stuck in this way and then you push them to the wall of having to deal with that value, that weird trope and then they either need to change, lean into it. Like that's the conflict. >> I now divide stories betw- in into sort of two categories, right? Or let's say three categories. And I call them the war movie and the therapy movie, right?

>> The war movie and the >> therapy movie. So let's say the therapy movie is Finding Nemo is a perfect example of a therapy movie. You have a guy, he's suffers a trauma in in the opening prologue of the movie. He's traumatized and therefore he decides in order to be a good dad, I'm going to do everything I can protect my son. He picks up that last little egg he goes I promise nothing bad will ever happen to you, right? And then, you know, for that character, what's the worst possible thing? His son gets taken Well, his son swims up says I hate you, Dad. Swims out, gets taken away. And now he's got to get A, go rescue his son to save his life, but B, win his son's love and respect back. In the course of that second act journey, he's got to face his his bias towards safety, right? And in the third act, he's got to let his son go. He's got to let his son be independent. And the whole movie is just

this character Marlin with his internal drama of dealing with trauma in unhealthy way. So it's a therapy movie and he's coming out of it and learning how to get over his trauma. Basically or heal his inner wound or something like that. So again, I call it a therapy movie because all the conflict in that story is happening within the the the main character. The opposite of that, I'll just I'm going to go picture a hypothetical story, right? Which is this the war movie now. This is the war movie. There's a little girl, she lives in the Warsaw Ghetto, she's 12 years old. Um the Nazis come in, kill everyone she knows, her family, friends, everybody, right? Put on a train, send her Auschwitz. She goes to Auschwitz, they goes into the showers, right? In inexplicably, like she survives. She There are examples of that, a few people survived. And so someone takes her, you know, smuggles her out of the camp and

goes, "I'm just going to keep you here. You're going to be nice and safe and warm, and you'll just like live out the war here like safely." And she goes, "No. I'm going to Like this world is so [ __ ] up, I'm going to go to Berlin, I'm going to find Hitler's bunker, I'm going to kill Hitler, right?" Okay, there's a great Like that's a great motivation, right? You have a totally unjust world, you have this character who's been unjustly acted upon. That character has a very clear goal, which is I'm going to make things right in the world. I am the antidote to whatever is poisoning the world. And it's a great It's a great uh second act goal, because you don't She doesn't even know where Hitler is. He's somewhere in Berlin. So I'm going to go to Berlin, I'm going to find where his bunker is, I'm going to infiltrate his bunker, I'm going to kill Hitler, right? That character has nothing has no internal

drama, right? They they they don't need to become a better person, they don't need to to to to fix themselves. The conflict, the problem in the world is in the out in the story is in the outside world, right? The drama is just trying to fix what's wrong with the world. Like that's a very extreme example of something where the character doesn't need to be complicated at all. Like all you all she's doing is trying to go kill Hitler, and we can all root for that. Um but it's very different from Marlin in Finding Nemo, who's just trying to fix something inside himself. I think that I'll just say Casablanca is sort of the middle way, right? Which is that you got Nazis and World War II and yada yada, but also Rick has this sort of flaw inside him, right? That he's got to fix at the end. And if I gave you a story that lacked those external stakes, how would you coach me through adding them back in? It's interesting, a lot of

times what you're doing is you can set up a story that has like a personal external set of stakes. Um so I'll just give you the example of Toy Story 5, which I helped out a little bit on. The initial conception of that was that oh, it's Jessie lives in Bonnie's room and uh Bonnie's playing with all the toys and then suddenly this device comes in and now Bonnie doesn't play with the toys anymore. She only plays with her Lily Pad device basically. And is it is it's a problem that it's only a problem within the within the the room. So what happens is Jessie goes next door and sees these kids playing on a device and she's like, "What are these kids doing?"

And another let's discarded toy goes, "Don't you know, like the age of toys is over. Kids don't play with toys anymore. Like it's an extinction-level event. Like the gadgets have taken over." And she's like, "No, I don't believe you. I don't believe that's true." And it goes, "Go go up on the roof and take a look." And there's a scene where she climbs up on the roof and she looks down to all the houses in the neighborhood and every single house has a little blue blowing light where like some kid is on a device. And then she looks around and she sees Bonnie's room, which has a orange light and Bonnie is still playing with her toys and you just go, "Oh, now you're taking what was at stake within Bonnie's room and making the stakes global and going like we got it like if you're going to solve this problem you got you can't just solve it for your your your individual here. You got to solve it for

the whole the whole universe you've created."

>> Earlier you were talking about how there's a implicit contract in a movie that the audience will give you 10 minutes or something. Is that still true in the Netflix day? And regardless, did Netflix and streaming services, did they change how movies need to be made? >> I think that I've heard all these stories. I haven't worked for Netflix. I've heard all these stories about you can eat to you need to kick it out you need to start with actually need to kick your story off as quickly as possible.

And you got to keep reminding your audience like what the movie's about cuz they're going to be looking at two other screens while they're watching Netflix. I'll just say that's not the business I'm in. Like I'm in the business of telling good story. I just saw a video actually on on on on on on YouTube where somebody was talking about inciting incidents. And this person's advice was you got to get to your inciting incident as quickly as possible, right? You got to get your story kicked off as soon as possible. I think that's absolutely the wrong advice. I've had terrible advice and I think that that's a note that I hear over and over again, which is you got to get your story started uh you got to get your plot set in motion as quickly as possible so your audience will care.

The note on the note of that is you got to get your audience to care. You got to get your audience to care about your hero. I will argue that there's a lot of great movies where you're just spending 20 25 minutes learning about your hero, learning about their world, learning about what they want, right? And then the inciting incident is actually going to happen about 25 minutes into the into the story and your hero's going to dither dither and then the first act break comes on page 30. So you have a very short period of time between your inciting incident and your first act break because what you're going to do then is your audience is going to be invested in that character and invested in the world and have a strong rooting interest, right?

When the inciting incident comes along and turns the hero's world upside down, you care. Like you care about what's going to happen to them. So I think that this person whose video I just saw was mistaking creating action for getting your audience on board with your character. I'll just give you the example of Tootsie. In Tootsie, the first the inciting incident is about 20 22 25 minutes into the film. It's you have the character, he's an actor in New York. He doesn't want to be rich and famous. He doesn't want to be a star. He just wants to be a working actor in New York. That's all he wants, right? So what is the worst possible thing for that character?

You just have him go to his agent and his agent says, "No one will hire you." "No one will hire you. You're out like you're too much of a pain in the ass. It doesn't matter if you don't want to be rich and famous like you your dream of being an actor is over. It's only like 4 minutes later that he's like, "Oh yeah, like I'm going to get hired." and he puts on a dress and a wig and he goes off and now he's in he's an actor and you're in your second act. A lot of people feel like you need to get your story started right away and I'm like I think that's a mistake. If you're playing the long game and you want your story to be remembered, if you want your story to be one of the few stories that year that people are going to go back and rewatch, you want to tell a really great story. And I think part of the real how a real great story works is that you're is that again you're just making your audience care and you're and you're

building a world with enough specificity and you're building your character with enough specificity that they that the problem that you're going to introduce let's say Andy's going to college is going to hit them hit your audience on a visceral level and make them care about what happens to these toys. And and I think part of the charm and and and just sort of the beauty of great storytelling is this opening 10 minutes where you're not sure what the story is about, you're not sure what's going on.

And you're you're opening that you're asking all these questions that you're not answering right away.

>> Are there other things that are tropes, common ways of thinking Hollywood that you just >> You know, the big thing is you you lobbed the softball across the plate and I'm going to go for it. The big thing is when people say oh I'm just trying to create entertainment. I'm just trying to trying to make a move an entertain movie. That drives me crazy because I think that stories in essence have to have some meaning to them. Like if you the more meaning you can put in your story, the more relevant it's going to be audience the more they're going to remember it. I think that there's a couple of there's a couple of ways you can create meaning in a story. There's as we've talked about the therapy model, right? Where something trauma happens to you, you respond in an unhealthy way and then the rest of the story is getting over that unhealthy way of responding to trauma. It's this you know, uh

psychoanalysis 101. Another way of creating meaning is and this is what I talk about in my in my video on endings is that you're creating two competing value systems and usually it's they're not equally weighted. Usually you have a dominant uh system of values in your story and you have an underdog set of values in your story. So I think like with Little Miss Sunshine what I talked about, I mean this is why I wanted to write Little Miss Sunshine was we're in this culture, right, that sees life as a competition where like everything is divided between winners and losers, you know, and the and the whole goal in life is to be a winner and avoid being a loser. A lot of times in a story you're creating you're sending two trains at each other or you're you're sending two competing value systems at each other that are going to collide at the climax of your story and this is what my video on endings is really all

about is that you want it to seem if you want to create maximum emotion and maximum meaning at the end of your story, you want to make it seem like your hero has been defeated externally, defeated internally, emotionally, but also been defeated philosophically. That's a really crucial thing. You want it to seem like the villain was right, you know, that greed is good, that might makes right. You know, I always love this the moment in a movie where the villain turns to hero and goes like, "Listen, you know, I'm sorry to burst your bubble. I'm not a bad guy. This is just the way the world works, you know, grow up." If you can flip things, you know, at the last moment and it gets very complicated here, but if you can flip things so that you go from external, internal, and philosophical failure to external, internal, and philosophical success in 45 seconds or less, then that's what I call an

insanely great ending. >> Okay, so define those. Internal, external, philosophical, and then what I'm taking is the flip that should happen as concurrently as possible. So then you just get the whole piñata. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that I'll just try and make this very brief. Your external stakes are anything outside your hero >> in the in the world. You want to rob a bank, you need want to get the million dollars, you want to blow up a bridge, you just want to do something in the outside world. And the crucial thing is that it's usually a a binary pass-fail thing. So you're either blow up the bridge or you're not going to blow up the bridge. You're either going to get million dollars or you're not going to get million dollars. You're either going to kill Hitler or not You're going to kill Hitler or you're not going to kill Hitler, but you have a very clearly defined goal, you know.

Uh and and in order to end the war, you got to kill Hitler, you know, so your your long-term goal is to end the war. Your short-term plan is I'm going to go find Hitler and kill him. Your internal stakes are the emotional stakes of your story, right? And it's it can be romantic love, it can be parent-child love, it can be The example I use is in Rocky, he's trying to win his own self-respect. Like he sort of considers himself a bum in the neighborhood. You see this in On the Waterfront, too, right? Like he's like, "I could have been a contender."

You know, so he's he's losing his own self-respect, and in the climax of the story, he gets his own self-respect back. And then the philosophical stakes of the story, this is where I feel like a lot of films or a lot of stories are not as clear or articulate as they could be because a lot of times the way you're creating a meaning in a story is by pitting two competing value systems against each other and having it seem like the dominant values are going to prevail, you know, and just like the underdog values are going to get wiped. And then, you know, this is the trick of a a good ending is having the the underdog values prevail at the end.

Trying to figure out how to frame this question, but if you want people to feel emotions, you want them to laugh, you want them to cry, you whatever it is, what is the line between being too desperate and like now you're being sentimental in a way that's annoying, or just like trusting that it's going to show up. It's amazing. You really got to earn it. Like I noticed that with Little Miss Sunshine. It's funny, but in all these very subtle ways where I was laughing, but no one's laughing, but I'm like, "That's a funny thing that's happening." And it's this kind of subtle humor. It's a really tricky thing in that like, you know, the most deadly thing about a bad screenplay is that it feels contrived, and you know exactly where it's going. So you've got to you can't The main thing is like either not overselling the humor or not overselling the uh the emotion. A lot of it has to just do with restraint. I remember when

I was writing the scene in Little Miss Sunshine where Dwayne has his freak out, right? And he and he gets out of the van, and he runs down the hill, and he's he turns to his family, goes, "I don't I hate you people. You're all [ __ ] losers. I'm not getting back in that van again." And he goes, "Mom, just leave me here. Just leave me here, you know. I don't want to I don't want to be your family anymore." As a writer, you're paying yourself in a corner. You go, "Oh god, how am I going to get out of this?" I was like, "Okay, Olive walks down the hill. She's obviously got to be the one who who who who convinces him to get in the van and go with them. And I remember writing the scene going, "Okay, what does Olive say to Dwayne?" And I was like, "No, the best thing is that she says nothing."

>> All right, you got to tell me, what is it like to win an Oscar? >> Um it's just terrifying, basically. You feel like if you say something stupid or do something stupid, that's all you're going to be remembered for for the rest of your life. So, I know a guy at the Pixar who uh Gary Rydstrom was a sound engineer. He worked with Spielberg, he worked with James Cameron. But uh he's won seven Oscars, and he said to me one time he goes, "You know, every single time they open up the envelope and I go, 'Oh god, not me.'" You know, cuz now you're going to have to get up on stage.

You know, I'm a writer, I'm not an actor. Like, I don't want to be up in front of the camera. So, you're just like, "Don't [ __ ] up. Don't [ __ ] up. Don't [ __ ] up." Like, the whole time you're walking up the stage, you're like, "Just don't [ __ ] up." You know, and I had really memorized the speech because I didn't want to [ __ ] up. So, so I actually I'll just tell you, when you go when when you're nominated, they really drill it in your head. You get 45 seconds, that's it. Like, we're cutting you off after 45 seconds. So, like, you know, write down a speech and memorize it. So, I wrote down a speech, and then I was just working at Pixar. So, every day I drove into Pixar, I would just recite the speech over and over again for like a month, basically. So, when I finally got up on the stage, like, there could have been like bombs going off in the theater and I would have just kept coping because I had just totally, yeah,

yeah, memorized the speech. >> I like the way you talk about your dad, you know, with that in spirit. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, my dad was I mean, the whole thing of pushing the bus to get it started, that was that came from my dad. That came from our real life. We we had a VW bus when I was a kid, and we were all up in Maine, and the clutch broke. And somebody told my dad, "Well, you can you know," and my dad was like, "I need to be at work, you know, like on Monday morning." We go from second to third.

Yeah, you can go from third Yeah, you can go from third to fourth without a clutch. But you need to start up in third gear, and the only way you can start up in third gear is to is to push the bus. And my dad like, "Kids, get in the car." So, yeah, yeah. And that's the that's the best part of writing is finding those things that happen to your real life. Someone made a joke once that writing is taking the most painful personal humiliating moments of your life and turning them into money, which is not quite what I did, but I it's the essential insight is to to take these like, you know, we had a the the horn used to get stuck on our on our VW bus. It's very embarrassing to drive around your hometown with a with a horn that gets stuck. So, but you put all that it's amazing. You put all that into movie and people just recognize it even if they haven't done it literally themselves.

>> So, as you're writing a movie like that, did you kind of feel like, "Wow, I really got something here?" Or was it >> It actually was exactly like that. I think that I had written five other scripts before that and I think that my problem had been A, I was making imitation movies. I wasn't I was just I wasn't setting the the the the those stories in in the actual real world. And B, I think I started with plot rather than characters. And Little Miss Sunshine was the first time that I started with characters rather than plot. My fear before I started writing it was that it was such a slight story. It was so small, you know, it's just you know, a road trip. And I was like, "Oh, I'm going to write 65 pages a 65 page script. Like it's just going to be too short." But having that slight story allowed me to just have the characters talk. And once they started talking to each other, I was like, "This is

working. Like I can tell this is working." And I got like halfway through and I called up my brother and I was like, "This is it. I'm writing I'm writing the script, you know, that's going to that's going to really work." >> What did you learn from your brother about writing? Cuz he just wrote a new book about writing, huh? >> Yes. Thank you for mentioning that. That was not a nudge for the plug at all. Yeah, no. I was saying I was I was coming on this podcast and yesterday I was like, "God, I wish I had something profound to say about like the act of writing itself and how writing fits into your life." It occurred to me I I realized, "Oh, I actually have a brother who's a professor of literature and philosophy and he wrote a book called The Philosophy of Writing. And like you go back to like um Marcus Aurelius or Montaigne, they were writing to understand themselves. That's where Montaigne's essays come from. That's

where the Marcus Aurelius' Meditations comes from. And my brother's basic point is that writing is a sort of form of writing is a form of thinking. And it's a way of thinking, you know, about yourself and figuring out sort of who you are and what you want to be. But I think that he actually talks about the act of writing as a sort of practice daily meditation on who you are and what you like it's an investigation in in what you really think. It actually reading that book changed my perspective on writing itself cuz I used to think that you sit around and wait for an idea to come and then you write it down. And his perspective is that the act of writing itself is going to generate ideas and make you figure out who you are.

>> And also make you figure out what you're doing. Like you were talking earlier about when you're writing, then you figure out what the one-liners from the story. But you don't always know what it is that you're writing at the beginning. >> I thought that I'll just say in Little Miss Sunshine, I thought that the the the the the Obi-Wan figure or the mentor figure was going to be Uncle Frank. And I thought it was a competition between Grandpa, excuse me, Richard, Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell, Uncle Frank.

And then I realized, oh, that's not actually it. It's actually Grandpa who's the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure. But I I figured that out like a year after the film came out. Like you you often don't really know the meaning of the story that you're writing until like, you know, a year or two after the movie comes out and you go, "Oh, that's what it means." But I think it's that was a good example of me just like following my gut instinct >> and having things inexplicably turn out well.

>> Yeah. >> How is AI going to change storytelling? >> I'll I'll give you a very practical answer, actually, which is right now a low-budget film is circumscribed in time and space, especially space, because like a typical low-budget film is like two or three characters and one location, right? Because you just don't have the budget for for more than one location. Even when I got to Pixar, I remember I was like, "Hey, it's computer generated. We can do anything." And they're like, "Actually, no. Like we have actually have to build every location in the movie. That costs money. So, like you know, the fewer locations the cheaper it's going to be. You're always trying to limit the locations that you have. I read that this this new Doug Lyman film, which is called Killing Satoshi, they shot it all on what they call a gray stage, um which is and they did it all in like 20 days. Like they did it really

quickly, but you bring the actors into a gray stage and you capture the performance. Like it's real writing like real human writing and real human acting, right? But the camera is just there to capture the performance and then everything is um filled in later on, the lighting, the backgrounds, everything. But what that allows you to do and one of the reasons they did it was because it had like, you know, 150 different locations. And so, to make that movie in practical terms with 150 locations, what what AI is going to allow you to do it it's going to free up it's going to change storytelling and that it's going to allow you to hopscotch through time and space very quickly and it's going to liberate films from the financial constraints that you had of like only having to, you know, Quentin Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs cuz like the whole thing is a bunch of guys in a warehouse like trying to deal with the aftermath

of a bank robbery. I wrote Little Miss Sunshine cuz I like the first act is dinner table. The second act is a VW bus and then, you know, the budget went up when I got to the third act, which was you know, but it was essentially three three locations. And um but now it's interesting that you are going to be able to do something like let's just say Alice in Wonderland and every new scene you can have a new location and it and it just sort of frees you up as a low-budget filmmaker to be able to do anything you want. It's going to just allow for the like for lack of a better term the the visual effects the background to be uh iterated and produced uh very quickly and cheaply.

>> When I talk to people from Hollywood, they seem so pessimistic and scared about AI. You're not like that. What accounts for the difference? What are you seeing that Hollywood isn't seeing? >> I guess the the basic thing is that I think AI is going to allow you to bring down costs significantly. Films now are so expensive. We spend 90% of our time chasing a green light, trying to get a green light from the money people, and there's a ton of films that just don't get made because like it becomes too expensive. And I think that again, I don't want to educate the legal issues. I don't want to educate the labor issues. I will say that that animated film that won the Oscar 2 years ago, which is called Flow, was made in Latvia. I think the budget was like 3 and 1/2 million dollars.

It was an odd little story because it's this about a dog and a cat on a raft in a world that had flooded, right? If you can I mean and you know, Pixar films cost 200 250 million dollars. But if you can reduce the cost, I think that you know, there's a lot of people at Pixar who want to be directors. But if you're a 250 million dollar movie, you can only make only one guy gets to be a director and everybody else has to work on it. If you cut the cost by 99% and now an animated feature costs 2 and 1/2 million dollars, now you have 100 times as many directing jobs because everybody who's a struggling story artist who secretly has an idea for a film in the in the back of their mind can now step up the ladder and become you know, the hierarchy and become a director themselves. And I think that maybe a lot of those won't be great. But again, I think you know, audiences are thirsty for authenticity. I think

they want to hear an authentic human voice and I think they want to see real people like up on the screen. But I think it's going to bring the cost down and this is you know, again beyond the legal issues, beyond the labor issues. If you just look 5 10 15 years down the road, if it brings the cost of filmmaking down as dramatically as that, you're going to see an abundance of films. But you also got to see abundance of creative freedom. What did you learn

from the movie My Neighbors the Yamadas? Oh, that's really that's a great question. You know, I I had the idea for Little Miss Sunshine in my head for a like a long long time, and I just hesitated to write it cuz it felt so uncommercial. Like it's it's like if you like had a lab experiment to come up with the least commercial idea, it's just like a an ensemble picture about a family like in a child beauty pageant. Like if I pitched that to Warner Brothers, they would laugh me like out of the office.

And so, I had a bunch of other idea I quit my job. I was unemployed at that time cuz I quit my job to just spend like 1 year writing. I'd give myself a year off. I'd saved up a little bit of money working as assistant on Godzilla. And and I was going to spend that extra savings just on a year writing. So, I wrote like a bunch of other scripts first. And then I was kind of out of ideas and I just still had this like child beauty pageant idea in my head, but I was hesitating. And then it was in the summer of 2000 that the Museum of Modern Art did a retrospective of Studio Ghibli. And I went there and that was the first time I saw Totoro. I saw double feature of Totoro and My Neighbors the Yamadas, which was two blockbuster films, two of my favorite films of all time. What came out of that was My Neighbors the Yamadas is just about a typical Japanese family.

They're not that special. They're not but it's done with so much humor and warmth and empathy that I thought, "Oh, like every family has a story to them. Every family has a bunch of great little moments that are going to be entertaining and they're going to engage you." But for me to go, "I think this can be funny. I think I can write I want to write a school well comedy about a family." Like I think I could do with this. And so, it was but I wouldn't have done it without Isao Takahata and My Neighbors the Yamadas.

>> You talk about My Neighbors, you talk about Late Spring. What should storytellers in America be learning from Japanese films? >> Oh my god, that's such an interesting question. Um I think that what's interesting to me and it sort of contradicts all my videos about screenwriting are about like hooking your audience, making this happen, getting people to care, you know, having this propulsive sense of story momentum.

The other side of storytelling, and this is what I love about Ozu, it's what I love about Miyazaki, is the gentleness of the storytelling. I I recently watched the opening act of Totoro again, and like nothing happens in it. Like almost nothing happens. Two little girls move into a a house in the country. They go, they open all the shutters. They see those little bunnies dust bunnies scurrying around. They meet the neighbors, but like in terms of like actual storytelling, almost nothing happens. A lot of times in Western storytelling, it's a competition of selfishness. It's like, I want this, but I want this, you know, and we're going to struggle to see who's going to get what they want. And it becomes this ego competition. And a romance can be like that, or a friendship can be like that.

And you know, you put the friendship at stake, or you put the romance at stake because it's competing selfish interests. This is what's great about Late Spring, right? Is that uh the daughter is growing up, you know, she lives with her dad still. And at a certain point, you know, an aunt shows up and says, "The dad, you're being really selfish because you're keeping your daughter here at home. She's looking after you. You know, she says she loves you, but you need to you know, she needs to go off and live her own life, you know? And and you're being selfish by letting your daughter like stay here. You got to get her married so she can live her own life."

And so he goes to his daughter and he's like, "Okay, like you should you should you need to you know, get married." And and she's like, "No, I'm so happy being here with you. I couldn't be happier. I'm just going to stay here. That's all I want to do with my life." So she's being selfless, right? She's just like, "I want to stay here and take care of you. I'll look after you while you get older." And he's being selfless because he's like, "No, you need to go start your own life."

And what's great in in Late Spring, I don't want to ruin the ending, which is one of the greatest endings of all time. It's such a it's such a heartbreaking ending. And the final closing scene is the quietest. It's not a big bang. It's not but it's And so I think what we what we learn is number one, sort of that you can keep your audience hooked on just the faintest whisper of the story. But number two, a lot of times those characters, you see this in Shakespeare also. This is what happens between, I think, Lear and Gloucester, is that Gloucester says, "Sir, I want to stay with you and serve you." And he's like, "No, go away." And so, Gloucester has to disguise himself. So, it's actually this It's an inversion of the Western model.

You're actually have this competing selflessness.

>> How do you study a story? >> Thank you for asking this question. Um I I have I mean, again, I started off as a script reader. I read a gazillion stories. You know, when you get a story or you get a script that doesn't work, like, it's very easy to get confused. Like, it's very easy to go, "I don't know how to make this better." You can You can also be very superficial, like, "I didn't care about your lead character. I lost interest." Those are all superficial no's, you know?

And what I learned to do as a script reader and then subsequently as a script doctor, now >> A script doctor. That's a good Yeah, yeah. No, that's what they call them. >> Tag line. >> That's That's what they call them. With Michael Arndt, the script doctor. I'm not the first. I'm not the first. >> People use that line all the time. >> You You come in and you just give me a script. I'm going to I feel like I'm almost like a story mechanic at this point. I'm going to put the whole thing up on blocks. I'm going to open up the hood. I'm going to go look at like the engine that's going on. There's a couple of questions to ask yourself. The first question is, what is at stake in this story, right? That's what I find useful about breaking it down, not just like what's externally at stake in the story.

You want to go bloop go bloop through your river choir or you want to take out the guns in Navarone or whatever it is. Uh what's internally at stake in the story? Like, it's not just Marlin going and saving Nemo's life. It's also winning his son's love or respect back. That's even more important, right? But then also asking what's philosophically at stake in the story, cuz that's going to really help you sharpen the meaning of your story and is going to allow the ending to be more emotional more powerful at the end.

So, if you can just go there and write down like what's at stake in your story, that that really helps to clarify like what your story is about. You don't have to do it this way, but almost as a thought exercise a way to anchor your story is to get to the end of your story and go, "Now, what is the worst possible thing that could happen in all three sets of stakes?" Well, let's let's do Finding Nemo. What's the worst thing that could happen externally? Nemo gets killed, right? He promised his son, "I will always take care of you." and then Nemo gets killed.

The worst thing that could happen emotionally is that he never wins his son's love and respect back. He goes to save his son and his son like, "Fuck you. You ruined my life." And then philosophically, Marlin and always remains an overprotective parent. He never gives Nemo his independence. Nemo always has to stay under his thumb, right? And you can actually have an interesting bad ending of Finding Nemo where Marlin succeeds in protecting Nemo. He succeeds externally saving his life, but he fails philosophically because he remains an overprotective parent and therefore he fails emotionally because his he doesn't win his son's love and respect back.

A lot of times, I feel like one of the one of the ways to drill down to actually what is like uh important in your story is to ask yourself, "What's the worst possible thing that could happen?" externally, internally, and philosophically. And a lot of times, what you're trying to do is make all those things happen at the same time. And if you can do that, you're having a true low moment. And I think that one of the things you then then sort of the magic of storytelling is if you can turn everything around and have uh everything go from the worst possible thing to the best possible thing in 45 seconds or less. That's all That's that That's why I made that video about about endings.

So, and then part two, I'm answering part two of your question, which is what else do you look at? I'm a big believer there's an organic logic to storytelling. And I will credit the screenwriter David Magee pointed this out to me. He said, "In screenwriting, we have this vocabulary. What you have your opening, you introduce your hero, you introduce the world they live in, you have a stable sense of self, a stable sense of what the world is, and a fixed set of expectations for the future. Your inciting incident is the thing that comes along and disrupts all those things. Disrupts the future, disrupts your sense of self, disrupts your sense of what the world is. I'll just use Hamlet for example. You meet Hamlet, he's dissatisfied, Denmark is a prison, kind of upset that my My died and my mother has just moved on, but what can I do about it? The inciting incident is the father's the ghost of

the dead father appears and goes, "I didn't just die, I was murdered, you know, and now you got to go avenge my my death." And then in the wake of your inciting incident, your hero a lot of times doesn't know what they want to do, right? They're sort of thrown into this They they they they're not sure e- either A, should they pursue a goal or B, how to how to pursue that goal. So, Hamlet says, "Maybe this is a demon tempting me. Maybe Claudius is innocent.

Like I have to find out if Claudius is guilty or not before I I act on it, but then how do I do that? How do I do that?" And this when the players arrive at Elsinore Castle, that Hamlet goes, "Now I know I'm going to do it. My long-term goal is avenge my father's death. My short-term plan to achieve that goal is I'm going to stage a play, reenact the murder and watch Claudius and I can I'll be able to tell." So, the vocabulary that we use as storytelling echoes or mirrors the classic vocabulary of storytelling of fairy tales. So, your opening is once upon a time there was a person, there was a place, there was a daily routine and there was a fixed set of expectations of the future. Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived out French countryside and every day she rode her horse and fed her horse and and dreamed of being, you know, something and then one day something someone or something arrived in her life

and opened up some sort of opportunity. The vocabulary of fairy tales mirrors the vocabulary of storytelling in that your opening is your once upon a time. Your and then one day is your inciting incident. Your and therefore your hero embarked upon a journey like Hamlet. So, the quest begins. So, the quest began. That's your first act break. Suddenly and without warning is kind of your midpoint. Something unexpected happens.

Uh your second act break is and then there was no going back. It's just like the Death Star is coming to blow up the Rebel base. Rebel base is trying to blow up the Death Star, but they can't exist in equilibrium anymore. One of them is going to survive and one of them is going to get destroyed. So, your second act break I think people misunderstand what a second act break is. A second act break is not the worst possible thing happening to your hero. The second act break is actually forcing the stakes of your story to go you're either getting a positive or negative. Like you're either going to get what you want you're going to blow the bridge or you're not going to blow the bridge. You're either going to win this girl's love or you're going to fail to win this girl's love. But or you're going to win your dad's respect or you're not going to win your dad's.

So your second act break is out of the frying pan into the fire but forcing the stakes of the story so that um so that and then and then the climax is just the resolution. You know, and it doesn't always have to be positive again. >> Why do you call it all or nothing? >> All or nothing, yeah. >> Why do you call it that? >> One of the problems in storytelling is having a muddy and fuzzy set of stakes. You know, your your hero's goal is to make the world a better place, you know, and the way he's going to do that is by spreading song everywhere, you know?

Like that's a vague and muddy goal and there's there's not a binary pass fail thing. So a lot of times what I'm doing is going like how can we make whatever the hero's goal is super specific and how can we make that plan to achieve that goal super specific. When it when you come to me as a script doctor and go how can I make this script better? I'm going to look at all these temporal points in the story. Those are the temporal moments where the direction of your story changes, right? So once upon a time, your hero is living this life of steady sort of unsteady equilibrium. And then one day the direction of the story changes, right?

And so your hero became embarked on a quest the story direction changes again. The midpoint reversal happens your story changes direction again. But I will go and look at each one of those temporal moments and try to sharpen them up and make them as distinct and powerful as they can be. And then I'm a big believer that you just want a clean trajectory from one uh temporal moment to another.

>> Hero's journey, overrated or underrated? >> Uh a little bit of both, I'd say. I think that there's a way Obviously there's a gazillion stories and a gazillion movies. I should say that like a movie is not just an illustrated screenplay. Like a movie can be just an experience and it doesn't even have to tell a story. So like like like narrative is sort of the necessary evil that we have to do to like keep the audience watching. But not all stories have to work that way. And novel stories have to be a hero's journey and especially I really strongly believe this, not every hero has to be flawed.

Like, your hero can essentially be innocent and the world out self them outside then is flawed and what your hero is doing is going to fixing what's wrong with with the world. That's what happens in Star Wars. Luke is is not a flawed character. He the the world itself is flawed and he goes and he blows up the Death Star. It's overrated if you think that's the only kind of story there is. But, it's underrated in terms of like the power of the underlying principles, which I again I think speak to just the organic logic of storytelling.

I I could be wrong about this, but I do feel like again you go back to fairy tales and the vocabulary of fairy tales, there is you know, stories are a way of thinking and making sense of our lives and especially adjudicating meaning and especially meaning between competing competing value systems. You know, competing visions of how we should let our lives. We can either be the dude or we can be the Big Lebowski, right? You can't be both and you've got to decide do you want to be the Big Lebowski and just be all about achievement and making money and winning respect or do you want to be the dude who's just going to sort of float through life and take things as they come, but also be a kind be the kindest person in his universe because he has no ambition.

Last question, I come to you and say, "Michael, Michael, I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer." Sit down, buy you a cup of coffee. What do you tell me? >> Uh go watch all my videos on on YouTube. >> I will say about your videos, if you like this and you want to get really technical and in the weeds, you want to see charts, diagrams, graphics, go watch Michael's videos. >> I they're all free and they're just the videos that I wish I had had when I started out, you know, and um I think that you know what? I the number one thing I would counsel is I remember when I started writing and and I sort of made a commitment as like if I'm going to be a writer, I'll probably write a screenplay a year and I'm probably going to live for 50 more years. So, I'm probably going to write 50 screenplays.

And when I started out, I bought a book that had listed every major screenwriter and all their credits. And what was great about that book was it showed all the scripts that they had written that got produced, but it also showed all their unproduced scripts. And so, it was really amazing that someone like William Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and All the President's Men and The Princess Bride, three absolute like Hall of Famers, had a list of like 15 scripts that he had written that never got made into movies.

>> at a Eric Roth's house. Same thing. He wrote Benjamin Button, won the Oscar for Forrest Gump. >> Oh, it's dumb, yeah. >> believe how many unmade movies he had written. >> Yeah, yeah. No, it's So, I think the main thing is realistically, I remember thinking, well, I'm going to probably write 50 scripts in my life, and if I'm lucky, five of them will get made into movies, and if I'm lucky, one of them will be a good movie. And I think that having that real success that you know, if you're if you're a startup founder, you're going to probably fail like seven six out of seven times, you know, and it's the seventh time it's going to do it. It's kind of same with screenwriting. Like, you're going to write, you know, I wrote 11 scripts before I sold my first script. Yeah, and um I and it's just like you got to be patient, and I think the my number one thing is you got to be humble. I'll say when Kurosawa won his Oscar, you know,

and he was at the end of his life, he made all these incredible films, they call him up, they give him an honorary Oscar. He gets up there, he's in his 80s, and he stands up and he goes, I don't feel I get to deserve this yet, cuz I'm only beginning to understand movies now. And I'm like, if Kurosawa can be that humble about movies and storytelling, right? We should all be humble. And you had that there you mentioned to me that great quote from Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder said like, he was talking about the audience, he goes, the audience individually, they're idiots. Collectively, they're genius.

And I think you have to respect the genius of the audience. The audience is smarter than you. The audience knows more about storytelling than you. The audience is going to be able to see through your little bag of tricks. And so, I just think good storytelling is really, really hard, and it takes a long, long time. I wrote 100 drafts of Little Miss Sunshine, you know, before it went into production. It just So, my my main advice is it's a lifelong commitment. It's a craft that you learn.

It's the same with playing a musical instrument or learning to be a chef. There's just a craft and it's going to take you about 10 years to learn that craft. But then also be humble because telling stories one most difficult things to do and one of the most important things to do. And so to recognize that what you're trying to do is so hard and there's so many people trying to do the same thing, but it's also it just requires on almost masochistic degree of humility that you're always going to go how can this be better? How can this be better? And uh uh uh but you got you know, if you love stories and you love movies, it beats working for a living, you know, I guess that's what I would say. I mean, it's amazing, right? You think of the Odyssey, you think of the Epic of Gilgamesh, you think of all these What do we know about so many of these cultures? Nothing. But then we know their stories. They're only stories

through the course of Stories have lasted longer than like the oldest cathedral. You know, the Epic of Gilgamesh is what like 3,000 years old or something like that. Yeah, stories like a good story is going to last freaking forever. And uh and it will be this enduring monument to like after the cities are dead and buried and after like, you know, the Great Pyramids have fallen, like there will still be Shakespeare, you know, when when you're out on the Crab Nebula or something like that. And so stories are actually the most enduring artifact of human culture and they're the most important artifact.

Like the way we make sense of our lives, the way the stories we tell of ourselves about our own lives make sense of who we are. I think, you know, my brother in his book he says we all live in darkness. Like we all actually don't know how to live. We actually don't know who we are. We don't know who you are individually or as a as a as human beings. Like like what are you know, are are humans selfish or are they altruistic? Like and stories are a way of figuring that stuff out. So stories not something ancillary to our existence, stories are our existence.

Stories are like how we make sense of ourselves in the the Stories are really important if you want to be a storyteller, and God bless you, but be humble because it's really it it took me again I wrote 11 scripts before I sold my first one. Good stuff. >> Great to meet you, man. And your YouTube channel? >> Well, you can just Google Michael Arndt screenwriting videos, and I also have a website uh my the name of my company is Panamanium Inc. I N C, so you can just go to panamaniuminc.com.

There's my scripts are there, my videos are there. I have a list of like 17 books that I've read that really changed the way I think about the world, so it's my list of like top books to read. I have a a mock-up of a four-page outline, so like this is how I organize stories. If any job I do, I'm going to do a four-page outline of it. That's mocked up on my website. And I have a I also every time I hand in a a script for feedback, I have a little reader questionnaire that I give to anyone who reads my scripts, so there's a mock-up of a of my reader questionnaire. So, there's a bunch of not just the videos, there's a bunch of little tools, screenwriting tools. There we go.

>> on my website. panamaniuminc.com. Thanks, Michael. Thanks so much.