Write Your Screenplay Podcast Jacob Krueger

As many of you know, every Thursday Night, we host a free screenwriting class called Thursday Night Writes. A recent installment with Steve Molton was so groundbreaking that we decided to release it as a podcast for our whole community. Enjoy!







Jake: Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday Night Writes! Our guest tonight is Steve Molton. 







Steve is a former HBO and Showtime executive, Columbia film school professor, and Pulitzer nominee. He wrote a movie with Frank Pugliese of House of Cards. He wrote limited series for Showtime. He has worked in television, novels, nonfiction, and film. He’s even penned an opera! 







He's also just one of the great human beings in the world and a good friend. We're so lucky to have him back on our team, mentoring students in our ProTrack program and offering a new TV Drama Writers Room.







Steve and I are going to be exploring the concept of internal antagonists in screenwriting and the role they play in your character’s journey. 







Often, when we're thinking about the “antagonist” or the opposing forces in our script, we think about the “bad guy” or the “obstacle.”







But today, we're going to focus on internal obstacles, things that get in the way of our characters on the inside, and the things that get in the way of us as writers on the inside. 







Steve: Part of the reason I wanted to do this subject tonight is that, having walked the picket line in the last year, we were besieged by the notion that somehow machines will be able to replicate what we do.







But as some great person had written on his sign while picketing, "Computers can't have childhood trauma." 







We are still human beings. The fact that we live and die, that we are shaping the world and must still shape the world, sometimes in ways to protect ourselves, requires us to go really deep. So that's what we’ll do today, working from the inside out.







I've been teaching at the French National Film School, doing a masterclass there for producers. These weren't people who were naturally thinking like writers, although they were storytellers of a kind. 







I pulled together notes from a series of talks I did there on the seven forms of conflict. 















There are seven forms of conflict that drive just about every great story.







Writers have probably heard about the seven forms of conflict. We forget them because they're so common and ubiquitous. They are: 







1) The self versus the self







2) Self versus another 







3) Self versus society 







4) Self versus technology 







5) Self versus nature 







6) Self versus the supernatural 







7) Self versus God, fate, or destiny







The first three of these are present in almost all strong movies and stories. The last four are genres unto themselves, but they often include those three forms as well.







For example, you might find the self versus the self, the self versus the other, and versus society within a movie about the self versus technology. These conflicts are ubiquitous and they flow into each other.







Jake: A question popped up in the chat. What's the difference between supernatural and God?







Steve: That is a fantastic question. 







Self versus the supernatural involves conflicts with inexplicable, otherworldly phenomena that defy scientific explanation.

This week, we are going to be talking about Poor Things, by Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara. 







You could describe Poor Things as a hyper-sexualized, dark, feminist, Forrest Gump. But what is the movie actually saying? 







How does Yórgos Lánthimos get away with such wildness while still telling a story that is both interesting and commercially successful? How does he both break the boundaries of what we typically think a movie or a screenplay could be, but also invite viewers in?







We’re not only going to be exploring the theme, structure and character development of Poor Things, but also connecting these concepts to profound questions about what holds us back as writers, and as human beings, from expressing our pure voices. 







Along the way we'll look at some of the countless movies that are referenced and twisted in the structure of Poor Things, from Frankenstein to The Wizard of Oz, and hopefully simplify this tremendously complex screenplay by exploring the core thematic oncepts that underlie its structure.















What is Poor Things actually about? What does the story mean? How did Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara build it as a screenplay? And what can we learn from Poor Things as screenwriters? 







The weirder your movie is, the more you need to understand what you are building. The more complicated your movie is, the simpler its premise needs to be.







Where does this begin in Poor Things? Like all screenwriting, it begins with character. In Poor Things, it begins with Emma Stone's character, Bella.







In order for you to understand the premise of Poor Things, I'll need to give you a couple of little spoilers from the beginning to the middle. I'm not going to spoil it all the way to the end without first warning you.







So here's the premise: God, or Godfrey (Willem Dafoe's character) has attempted to create a woman who has no shame, no past, no history, no external or internal factors standing in the way of just being herself. 







He has attempted to make a girl who is pure voice. 







God is the product of horrific experiments that his father performed upon him. Unlike Bella, he bears the scars of his history on his face and has spent his whole life trying to rationalize them. Bella, on the other hand, bears none of the scars of her history. She is coming at the world with fresh eyes. How has she been created?







I am going to spoil it a little bit more now.







A woman has killed herself for reasons we don't know. Even God, (the character), doesn't know. She has hurled herself from a bridge in the opening frames of the movie. And, as we'll find out later, the stories God has told Bella about her past aren’t true. He’s made up a false history to preserve her innocence and sense of herself. The truth is that God, a brilliant scientist and doctor, discovered the body of the suicidal, pregnant woman from the beginning of the movie, and he has implanted the baby's brain into the body of the woman. 







Poor Things is a Frankenstein story, inside out. 







In this case, the scientist, God, as Bella calls him, is a long, suffering, twisted, deformed creator, who carries the wounds of his tortured past. He's the one who looks like Frankenstein. 







And Frankenstein's monster looks like Emma Stone. She looks like perfection, or, to quote the film's ironic joke, like " what a very pretty retard." 







And she has no past.







Bella has been brought up inside a world that has been cultivated...

This week, we're going to discuss Beef, a fabulous limited series created by Lee Sung Jin.We will use Beef to explore two related and extremely valuable concepts for screenwriters: Game and Escalation. 







Game and Escalation are concepts that we're taking from improv. But as we look at the screenplay for Beef, you’ll see that the same tools used for improv can also be hugely valuable for screenwriters.







Usually, when we think about Game, we think about it as the funny thing in the scene. 







If you're doing something funny, they teach you in improv to do it again. That becomes the Game. 







And Escalation means you don't just want to do it exactly the same way again. You want to do it in a slightly different way that escalates it. You want to keep on building up, up, up, up. 







Now, many people think of Game as a comedy thing.It’s obvious how you might Game if you're writing a sitcom or a sketch. But what if you’re writing a drama? What if you’re doing a historical epic? Do you still need Game? Does Game matter outside of comedy? 







I'd like to suggest that dramas, and limited series like Beef, which mix dramatic and comedic elements, have Game, too, and that understanding Game is vital to writers in all genres. 







Game is also part of the way the audience tells themselves the story of who the characters are, of what's really happening in the story, of how the character is changing or not changing, and of how the character is relating to other characters.







Game and Structure are connected. When you become a master of Game, you also become a master of Structure. When you become a master of Escalation, you also become a master of Structure. So, we will be talking about all of that and more in this podcast.







Note that there will be a couple of spoilers for Beef. But we’re going to limit most of our conversation to the way the pilot is structured so that we can start to understand how Game works and how Escalation works. And I’ll warn you before we get to any major spoilers for the rest of the season…







Now, before we get rockin', there's some stuff I want to talk to you about that is coming up at the studio that is hugely valuable to you. So, if you enjoy this podcast, check us out live every Thursday night for free. We have a wonderful class with hundreds of writers from all over the world called Thursday Night Writes. So I'd like to invite you to join our community, where you can learn for free from me and top members of the Jacob Krueger Studio faculty. 































We discussed the idea that Game is a concept taken from improv. If you are a screenwriter, if you've taken any of our classes, you know that we integrate many concepts from improvisation into screenwriting. 







There’s a good reason for that: because most of what we are doing as screenwriters is improvising on the page.







We are faced, just like an improv troupe, with a blank page. We might have a sense of who our characters are, but we also might not. We might have, like an improv troupe, just a suggestion, a word, an idea, a premise, a hook…  maybe just an image that came into our minds. We have the barest sense of who are characters are. 







The truth is, even if we've done a whole outline and think we have figured out everything,

If you’ve watched the first episode of the Lessons from Sundance podcast, you know that JKS faculty member Christian Lybrook and I recently recorded a series of short form videos for our social media (@thejkstudio) about what you can learn as screenwriters from the films, lectures and documentaries we saw at Sundance. We’ve now compiled them into this two part podcast series, which we think is going to be tremendously valuable for all of you.In this second installment, we’re going to have a treat for you documentary filmmakers, looking at four vastly different documentaries, Nocturnes, (which won Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft), Every Little Thing, Black Box Diaries and Eno.If you’re not a documentarian, don’t worry, we’ll be gleaning lessons from the structure of these films that will be valuable for screenwriters and TV writers of any genre.We’ll also sharing some insights from lectures by Jonathan Nolan and Steven Soderbergh on the art of storytelling, the importance of theme, and the use of research in scriptwriting, as well as script analysis of two very unusual action comedy features, Thelma and Kidnapping, Inc, with a really cool discussion about the use of humor to tackle serious issues in your screenwriting.We’re going to learn about alternative forms of structure, how to build through big and small choices, how to use obstacle and threat in your writing, how to write believable antagonists, how to listen to your characters, how to find a balance between the subconscious and the conscious mind, how to find your voice as a writer, how to find your hook and your take on source material, how to develop hot relationships in screenwriting, form as function in screenwriting, how to use theme, and much much more.There will be some minimal spoilers, but we’ll keep you posted between each analysis so you can skip ahead if you want no spoilers at all.And if you’re listening instead of watching and the sound is a bit different than normal, know that’s because each video was recorded live from a unique location at Sundance to give you a feeling of the festival.We talk a lot in our classes about character driven structure. But how do you find structure when writing movies that aren’t driven by traditional characters, or by characters at all? Let’s jump in and find out with our discussion of Nocturnes, by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan and Every Little Thing by Sally Aitkin.







Nocturnes and Every Little Thing: Approaches To Structure























Jacob Krueger:   We're going to talk about two different documentaries in a way that will be valuable for you, whether you're a documentarian or writing a feature film or TV show. The two documentaries are Nocturnes, which is a beautiful meditation about moths shot in the Eastern Himalayas, and Every Little Thing, which is a story about a woman in Los Angeles who is rescuing thousands of hummingbirds. 







These two documentaries are fascinating, because they're built in the exact opposite way. And we’re going to be exploring how much your take and your premise matters in building a script.







Every Little Thing, even though it's actually about hummingbirds, is built around a traditional character journey. There is a particular hummingbird named Cactus. 







Christian Lybrook: Oh, poor Cactus. Cactus was found with barbs sticking out of her chest. A tiny, baby bird. And Terry, the hummingbird whisperer, it is her goal to get Cactus back out into the world.

Jacob Krueger Studio faculty member Christian Lybrook and I attended Sundance 2024 together, leading to this new series of short videos about the films we saw there, and what screenwriters could learn from them. These videos were first released on our social media during the festival (follow @thejkstudio for future updates). The response was so strong, and the lessons so valuable that we’ve compiled them into a two part podcast series, built around common themes. Whether you’ve seen these films or not, there are so many lessons you can benefit from through these discussions, including how to lean into the emotional logic of your structure, how to control tone, how to surprise genre expectations, how to get the most out of your first image, how to build central metaphors and image systems, how to build mirrors for your main characters, how to write movies about profound socio-political issues, how to build structure through emotional needs and much more…In this episode, we’ll be looking at feature films Your Monster, Layla, A Different Man, and Reinas, as well as Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize winning documentary Porcelain War. 







And for those of you listening rather than viewing… if you notice the sound is a little different in each of these podcasts, it’s because we’re trying to bring the Sundance Experience to you at home, by recording in lots of different locations– from the beloved Egyptian Theatre on main street to the Gondola at the Park City Mountain.The first film we’re going to be discussing is Your Monster, a sweet little Beauty and the Beast inspired– well let’s call it a “Romantic Comedy”-- with some other slightly less expected genre elements that we’re not going to give away. This is a film that moved, inspired, surprised and delighted us. And there’s so much you can learn from it as a screenwriter about leaning into the emotional (rather than the rational) logic of your screenplay, navigating toward the fun, establishing the tone of your screenplay, and squeezing out all the juice from a mash of different genre elements. It’s not yet in theatres, so we’re only going to talk about the opening sequence up to the inciting incident, so there will be minimal spoilers. 















Your Monster written and directed by Caroline Lindy







Jacob Krueger: Your Monster by Caroline Lindy is a relationship story about a girl and the monster who lives in her closet. One of the things that's really beautiful about this movie is it’s not just about her love story with a monster, it's really about a love story with herself.







Christian Lybrook:  It's a “Beauty and the Beast” story. Caroline Lindy takes a story that we're all familiar with and she starts to spin it, looking at it from all different angles: You think it's going to go this way? I'm going to give you something else. And that's a great exercise for us to do as screenwriters. 







Your Monster shows screenwriters the value of leaning into the emotional logic of the story, and navigating toward the fun, rather than getting caught up in the details.







Jacob Krueger: The film primarily leans into the emotional logic of the relationship between the main character, Laura, and the monster in her closet, rather than getting caught up in the “logical logic.” It’s magical realism. There are a lot of elements in the film where, if you get into your logical brain, you could say, Well, hold on a second, how did she get into the theater? How did she get into the audition? How did these things happen? 







And yet, as you're watching the film, you don't care at all. 







Christian Lybrook: My analytical brain, it's loud in my head. And those moments, they did pop up. But the emotional storyline is so powerful that it just sort of dissipat...

 Past Lives: Genre & Premise







This week, we are going to be analyzing the screenplay for Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song. We'll use Past Lives to explore the intersection of two key concepts: Premise and Genre. 







We'll look at the places where premise and genre meet and how they come together. And we’ll use that intersection to help you understand how to develop ideas, how to develop premises, how to develop the thing that's going to differentiate your script from other movies within your genre. 







Further on in this transcript, there will be some spoilers for Past Lives. If you've seen the movie, you know that the whole thing builds to the ending, and you cannot understand the screenplay for Past Lives without understanding the ending. So I will warn you before I spoil it, but I am going to eventually spoil the ending of this movie if you have not yet seen it.















Let’s start our screenplay analysis of Past Lives by defining some terms: What is genre and what is premise? 







We’ll start with genre. 







If you're old enough to remember Blockbuster Video, then you know that genre is what you and your partner fight about when trying to pick a movie. 







One of you is in the Drama aisle, looking for a beautiful little drama. The other is in the Action aisle, looking for a really exciting action movie.  







“Let’s watch Die Hard,” you try to convince your partner, “it’s a… love story!”“How about Remains of the Day,” they try to convince you, “it’s a… war movie!”







You're trying to convince each other that your emotional needs, the feelings that you're coming to the movie for, are going to be met. That's actually what genre is.







Genre is a feeling.







Even back in the Blockbuster era, genre was very hard to categorize. 







It’s 1987. You’re looking for, say, First Blood. You look all through the Action shelves and you can’t find it. Finally, you ask at the desk and the dude says, “It’s in Drama.” 







Even back in the day, when genres used to be really simple, it was still hard to categorize things. There's always crossover. A movie is not just one thing. So, it has always been hard to label movies as one single genre. 







Today, Netflix has something like 270,000 tags that they use to try to define a movie’s genre. So we think we know what genre is, but we kindof… don’t. 







We're going to a western, so we expect to see Cowboys… but Star Wars is a western, right? Or is it a sci-fi?







We think we know what genre is, but it actually becomes really hard to define. As soon as you put a label on it, you realize you're not completely right







And today, we have movies that are a mix of genres, really interesting mixes of genres– in ways they weren’t mashed up back in the Blockbuster days. So that means, in today’s market, it's even more complicated to ask, “What genre is this film?” 







So I want to give you a way of thinking about genre that is going to simplify it for you. A way to get past the confusing labels. 







Genre is a mixture of the feeling that the audience wants when they go to see your movie and the expectations they have of what's going to give them that feeling.  







Those expectations are based on other movies that gave them that feeling. 







Feeling is the only reason anyone ever tunes into a TV show or goes to see a movie. We go to see movies because we want a specific feeling...