Scriptnotes

A Book About
Screenwriting
and Things That
Are Interesting to
Screenwriters

JOHN
AUGUST
&
CRAIG
MAZIN
CR OWN

NEW YO R K

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 C!"#$
An imprint of the Crown Publishing Group
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Copyright © 2025 by John August and Craig Mazin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: August, John author | Mazin, Craig, 1971- author
Title: Scriptnotes : a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters / by John
August and Craig Mazin.
Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, 2025.
Identi%ers: LCCN 2025020367 (print) | LCCN 2025020368 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593728062 hardcover |
ISBN&9780593728079 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture authorship
Classi%cation: LCC PN1996 .A88 2025 (print) | LCC PN1996 (ebook) | DDC 808.2/3--dc23/eng/20250521
LC record available at [Link]
LC ebook record available at [Link]

Hardcover ISBN 978-0-593-72806-2

Ebook ISBN 978-0-593-72807-9

Editor: Matt Inman

Assistant Editor: Fariza Hawke
Production editor: Serena Wang
Text designer: Aubrey Khan
Production: Heather Williamson
Copy editor: Nancy Tan
Proofreaders: Christopher Pitts, Hope Clarke, Katy Miller
Publicist: Mary Moates
Marketer: Mason Eng

Manufactured in the United States of America

9'8'7'6'5'4'3'2'1

First Edition

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House
Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, [Link]

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 The material in this book is drawn from more

than 1,000 hours of audio, blog posts, and

transcripts. Interviews have been condensed

and lightly edited for clarity.

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Augu_9780593728062_all_3p_r1.[Link] 6 9/2/25 11:22 AM
 CONTENTS

Introduction xii

1 The Rules of Screenwriting 6

First Person: Christopher Nolan 15

2 Deciding What to Write 24

First Person: Michael Schur 36

3 Protagonists 42
First Person: Lulu Wang 50

4 Relationships 54
First Person: Lorene Scafaria 65

5 Conflict 70
First Person: Sam Esmail 79

6 Dialogue and Exposition 84

First Person: Greta Gerwig 94

7 Point of View 100

First Person: Justin Simien 106

vii

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 8 How to Write a Scene 112
First Person: David Koepp 119

9 Setting and World-Building 126

First Person: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss 132

10 Plot (and Plot Holes) 136

First Person: Damon Lindelof 148

11 Mystery, Confusion, and Suspense 154

First Person: Rian Johnson 162

12 Writing Action 166

Deep Dive: Die Hard 170
First Person: Christopher McQuarrie 187

13 Structure 194
First Person: Daniels 201

14 The Beginning 208

First Person: Aline Brosh McKenna 215

15 The End 220

First Person: Lawrence Kasdan 225

16 How to Write a Movie 230

First Person: Eric Roth 250
CONTENTS

17 Pitching 256
First Person: Seth Rogen 262

viii

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 18 Notes on Notes 268
First Person: John Lee Hancock 277

19 What It’s Like Being a Screenwriter 282

First Person: Mike Birbiglia 292

20 Patterns of Success 298

First Person: Ashley Nicole Black 311

21 A Final Word 320

An Oral History of Scriptnotes 325

Acknowledgments 333

CONTE NTS

ix

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Augu_9780593728062_all_3p_r1.[Link] 10 9/2/25 11:22 AM
 Scriptnotes

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 INTRODUCTION

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 H
ELLO AND WELCOME!
In 2011, we started recording Scriptnotes, a weekly podcast about
screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Like
prototypical heroes answering a call to adventure, we really didn’t know
what we were getting into.
At the time, both of us had screenwriting blogs in which we answered
questions about the craft and the industry. Blog posts are like monologues.
You get to say exactly what you want—no interruptions—but there’s no
real-time feedback. You’re speaking into the void. When you’re done typ-
ing, you hit “publish” and wait to see if your ideas connect with anyone.
With Scriptnotes, we were looking to have an honest conversation about
screenwriting—both the art and the business. Beyond that, we had no real
expectations going in. Craig wondered if anyone would listen. John !gured
we might hit !fty episodes and call it a wrap.
More than fourteen years and seven hundred episodes later, the conver-
sation continues. Every week, we discuss topics related to screenwriting,
often with guests who bring new perspectives and challenge our assump-
tions. We’ve added recurring segments like “How Would This Be a Movie?”
and the Three Page Challenge. We’ve sold out live shows across the coun-
try. We’ve advocated for higher assistant pay and called out charlatans try-
ing to make a buck o" aspiring writers. And we’ve watched as a string of
listeners and Scriptnotes producers have gone on to successful writing ca-
reers in the industry.

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 We’re proud of the show we’ve made and how it’s resonated and con-
nected. Craig is still amazed anyone is listening.
From the beginning, we’ve made transcripts of every episode available
free online. In addition to being a resource for writers—particularly deaf
and hearing-impaired writers—the transcripts help us remember the his-
tory of the show.
Have we done an episode on character names? A quick Google search
reveals the answer: Yes, episode 151.
With this giant corpus of text just sitting there, many listeners have
asked us if we’d ever publish a Scriptnotes book, but the scope of the work
felt too daunting. Simply printing the transcripts would result in thirty-
plus volumes, each more than !ve hundred pages.
Creating a proper Scriptnotes book required a massive amount of plan-
ning and editing to pare those transcripts down to a manageable size
and shape. That work fell on Chris Csont, Drew Marquardt, and Megana
Rao, who assembled the !rst drafts of most of the chapters in this book.
That process turned our conversations back into monologues, where
ideas aren’t attributed to John or Craig individually, but rather to a col-
lective “we.”
When you see direct quotes from us or other guests, they’ve been lightly
edited for concision and clarity. People speak di"erently than how they
write. They repeat words and trail o". Just as screenplay dialogue is an op-
timized version of how people actually speak, quoted sections in the book
are slightly improved versions of what was originally spoken.

Who is this book for?

For the last decade, when aspiring writers wanted to buy him co"ee to pick
his brain, Craig has had a go-to response: “If you want to learn about screen-
SCR IPTNOTES

writing, just listen to the free weekly podcast we do.”

After seven hundred episodes, it’s simply not realistic to expect some-
one to spend ninety full eight-hour days listening to Scriptnotes. Yes, peo-
ple really do go back and listen to the entire show from the beginning, but

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 it’s not e#cient. And even if you have listened to every word, you can’t eas-
ily refer back to something.
By pulling together our greatest hits into a single book, it feels like we’ve
boiled down our advice to the essence. To that aspiring writer, Craig can
now say, “Here’s a book. Have at it!”
As listeners know, we have con$icted feelings about screenwriting
books in general. The irony that we’re now writing one isn’t lost on us.
On the one hand, you have to start somewhere. We both read Syd Field’s
Screenplay when we !rst got to Los Angeles. It was our introduction to the
screenplay form. Field tells you a lot about the end result—Casablanca in
particular—without much insight into the process it takes to get there. Is
this idea better suited for movies or TV? How do you incorporate producer
notes? And more fundamentally, what’s it like being a screenwriter?
When John started his blog, his idealized reader was a kid in Iowa who
was curious about screenwriting but had no good way to learn about it.
That’s one target audience for this book: the aspiring writer who wants to
learn about the craft. Read this book and you’ll get a good understanding of
what it’s like being a screenwriter. We hope screenwriting classes will use
this book to continue the conversation in the classroom as well.
But this is not just a book for future professional screenwriters. Most of
our listeners have no screenwriting ambitions. Instead, they’re just curi-
ous about the work that goes into making the movies and shows they love.
This book should provide a peek into the creative process.
Finally, we hope anyone involved in making !lm and television (or judg-
ing the !nal product) will read it so they can better understand the journey
from script to screen. Whatever your connection to the industry, welcome
aboard!
INTRODU CTION

How should you read this book?

We’ve attempted to create an overall structure for this book. We start with
the screenwriting basics before moving on to meatier craft topics. We !n-
ish with chapters looking at screenwriting as a career. Interspersed, you’ll

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 !nd interviews with some of the amazing writers we’ve had on the show,
along with a deep-dive analysis of one of our favorite movies.
That said, you don’t have to read this book in order. Feel free to skip
around. Struggling with theme? You can jump right to that chapter.
We grew up with the D&D Player’s Handbook, a text that no person has
ever read from beginning to end. Rather, it’s the kind of book that sits next
to the toilet. You open it anywhere and just start reading, or rereading. If
Scriptnotes ends up becoming your bathroom book, there’s no higher com-
pliment for us.
Our goal with this book is to provide the wisdom we’ve gleaned over our
collective sixty years doing this job. It’s not really a how-to guide. We don’t
provide templates and formulas. We want to be descriptive rather than
prescriptive. We’re pointing out the choices writers make. In our chapter
on con$ict, we’re not saying, “This is how you write con$ict.” What we’re
saying is: “Here are di"erent kinds of con$ict. Here are ways you can ap-
proach it. Here are some things you should try to avoid. Here are some traps
we’ve fallen into.” To us, that’s how you learn.
Unlike a weekly podcast, books are !xed, frozen in time. What you’re
reading is our take on screenwriting as of mid-2025. We hope most of our
advice is timeless, but the industry will keep changing. If you enjoy reading
Scriptnotes, please listen to the podcast to see where the conversation
leads us next.
Thank you for picking up this book, and enjoy!
SCR IPTNOTES

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Augu_9780593728062_all_3p_r1.[Link] 5 9/2/25 11:22 AM
 1
THE RULES OF
SCREENWRITING

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 T
HIS IS A BOOK ABOUT SCREENWRITING, so we are con-
tractually obligated to provide at least one chapter about the invio-
lable tenets of the craft or else risk our spot on the bookstore shelf
next to Syd Field’s Screenplay and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!
So, let’s get this over with. Here are Twenty Essential Rules of Screen-
writing we’ve assembled from other books and websites.

1. Your script must be 120 pages or fewer.

2. 12-point Courier only.

3. The inciting incident must happen by page 15.

4. The !rst act break must be on page 30.

5. The midpoint is really important.

6. The second act break must be on page 90.

7. No scene may be longer than three pages.

8. Use only “DAY” or “NIGHT” in scene headings.

9. Never use “CUT TO:” (it’s unnecessary !ller).

10. No camera directions unless you’re also the director.

11. Don’t use “we see” or “we hear” in scene descriptions.

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 12. Use UPPERCASE only for sound e"ects and character
introductions.

13. No bold, italics, or asterisks.

14. No action in parentheticals.

15. Don’t make asides to the reader in your action descriptions. If it

can’t be seen or heard, cut it.

16. Don’t use the words “is” or “walks.”

17. Don’t use the passive voice.

18. No adverbs ending in “-ly.”

19. No “-ing” verbs.

20. No voice-over.

IF YOU FOLLOW these rules to the letter, congratulations! You’ll have

written a perfect screenplay. Please proceed to the gates of Hollywood to
receive your paycheck and commendation.
Obviously, these “rules” are bullshit. We’ve broken every one of them
over the course of our long careers. Pick up any award-winning screenplay
and you’ll !nd it violates at least half the items on this list.
Still, there’s a reason aspiring screenwriters love rules like these. We
crave order. Faced with a blank page, we’re desperate for any constraints
and guidelines. Just tell me what I can and can’t do. Newer writers in par-
ticular are afraid of making mistakes that might reveal their inexperience,
so they choose the absolute safest path. It’s the literary equivalent of driv-
ing !ve miles an hour under the speed limit.
SCR IPTNOTES

Before we dismiss these rules entirely, it’s worth considering how they
even came to exist in the !rst place.
There’s no screenwriting constitution. Billy Wilder and Paddy Chayef-
sky never convened a conference of acclaimed screenwriters to determine

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 whether scene headers should be underlined. Nora Ephron never proposed
an amendment regarding dual dialogue.
Just as there’s no master document laying out the rules, there’s no
Screenwriting Supreme Court to decide whether a writer’s use of “SAME”
as the time marker in scene headers is appropriate.
Instead of laws and judges, all we have in screenwriting are conventions.
Most screenplays do most of the same things in most of the same ways. And
that’s helpful! If every screenplay came up with its own layout for action
and dialogue, it would be chaos.
So we’ve collectively, passively agreed on a set of norms and standards.
For example, nearly all scripts in English are delivered in 12-point Courier
font, not because it’s the best font but because everyone’s used to it. It’s the
same with the standard margins for dialogue and other elements. There’s
no Platonic ideal screenplay format; there’s just what people expect. In the
majority of cases, you’re best o" going with the $ow.
The prohibitions on what screenwriters can or can’t do on the page ulti-
mately comes down to taste. For example, some readers despise the terms
“we hear” and “we see.” We think that’s dumb. Modern screenplays are an
attempt to capture the experience of watching a movie or show, and “we” is
a very useful way of putting the reader in the seat of an audience member.
In some cases, it’s nearly essential, such as when you need to make it clear
that the audience has information the characters don’t.

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

Candace rifles through the clothes in her closet,
trying to decide on an outfit. In the mirror, we
see a DARK FIGURE standing at the door, watching
her. Ominous.
And then it’s gone.

You could absolutely write this without “we see,” but it would be clunkier.
We wish we could !nd the patient zero of “don’t use ‘we see’ in scene
descriptions.” We don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong.
And it has spread throughout all these mediocre schools. Waves of human

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 beings keep arriving on Reddit to explain to other people why you can’t use
“we see.” And the two of us have just been trying to rescue people from this
nonsense.
Can you overuse “we see”? Absolutely. Same with asterisks, adjectives,
and exclamation points. But that’s no reason to ban them.
So, how did we get to this overreliance on screenwriting rules, and why
do they persist? In addition to helping calm the nerves of nervous screen-
writers, screenwriting rules often serve as a !ltering mechanism.
Over their careers, producers, agents, executives, and paid analysts
read thousands of screenplays. Most of these screenplays are bad because
most screenplays are bad. Reading these bad screenplays, they inevitably
notice certain things that bother them, so they associate these character-
istics with bad screenplays. They extrapolate and say, “Stop doing this
thing. Here’s a rule, because I read all sorts of scripts that do this too much
and those scripts are bad. So this thing is always bad.” They’re identifying
a pattern.
Here’s the problem: There’s something called the “triangular nonrela-
tionship” in logic where something is correlated with something else but
one is not causing the other. They are both caused by the same thing.
In this case, a bad screenplay correlating with rule-breaking doesn’t
mean that rule-breaking causes bad screenwriting. It means that often-
times bad writers will tend to do certain things. They’ll write very long
scenes. They’ll use a lot of bold and underline. They’ll put a lot of extrane-
ous detail into parentheticals.

If a screenplay is good, and it articulates a

blueprint for a potentially great movie, no one

SCR IPTNOTES

cares how much it adheres to standards.

But good writers also break these rules, as do most professional screen-
plays, including Oscar-winning hits. When you point this out, pedants will

10

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 wave it aside, saying only produced writers or directors can get away with
violating these imaginary screenwriting precepts. The truth is much sim-
pler. If a screenplay is good, and it articulates a blueprint for a potentially
great movie, no one cares how much it adheres to standards.

A brief history of the screenplay

It’s important to remember that screenplays are a relatively new thing. For
early silent !lms, all you really needed was a shot list.

WIDE SHOT: Train pulls into station.

CLOSE-UP: Passenger looks up from newspaper.

MEDIUM: Woman looks out from train window.

It’s only as movies got longer—and added dialogue—that scripts started

to bring in elements of stage and radio plays. By the time you get to 1942’s
Casablanca, most of the elements we see in modern screenplays were es-
tablished, including the placement of dialogue and parentheticals.

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

11

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 Compared to a stage play, screenplays have a lot more scene description.
While a stage play is almost entirely dialogue, screenplays add all the con-
text and action as well. The director still has to make choices about how to
shoot the scene, but there’s a clear plan on the page for how the scene is
meant to go.
On the podcast, we’ve speculated about ways to update or reimagine the
screenplay format. After all, it’s not 1942 anymore. Adhering to the conven-
tions of notable screenplays from eighty years ago is part of why we’re
stuck with dumb “rules” today. Modern scripts could include embedded
music and images, citations, and alternate lines of dialogue. But very little
has changed.
It’s tempting to point the !nger at Final Draft, the dominant screen-
writing software for the past twenty-!ve years. It’s always been buggy,
frustrating, and overpriced. We both use alternative apps to write our own
scripts; John’s company makes one of them. But the reality is that if Final
Draft were to suddenly go away, screenplays wouldn’t change that quickly.
Inertia is a powerful force, and everyone is used to scripts looking a cer-
tain way.
While the screenplay itself hasn’t evolved much over the decades,
screenwriters are now doing a lot more work in apps like Keynote and
PowerPoint. For pitches, it’s become common to build a deck to show buy-
ers what a movie or series will look like. For certain projects—particularly
ones with a lot of world-building—there’s a growing expectation that you’ll
be delivering visuals along with the script. So even if the screenplay format
itself never changes, screenwriters will !nd themselves curating visuals to
accompany their words.

Follow your instincts, not the rules

SCR IPTNOTES

Every screenwriter is going to make di"erent choices about how to present

a scene on the page. It ultimately comes down to personal style and the
rules they set for themselves. For example, how much action can you shove
into parentheticals? Compare these two versions of the same moment:

12

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 ROBERT
It looks like it’s addressed to
Cynthia.
(opens the envelope, reading)
Oh god. No!

versus

ROBERT
It looks like it’s addressed to
Cynthia.

With a moment’s hesitation, he opens the envelope.

Pulls out a typed letter. He goes pale.

ROBERT (CONT’D)
Oh god. No!

Which version is correct? Both and neither. The decision comes down to
the writer’s personal style and what else is happening in the scene.
The general rule is that you should use an action line for action. Paren-
theticals are for terms that in$uence the way the line is read or are there to

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

imply that there’s a pause. But every now and then, if there is an action that
is super tiny and necessary to understand the dialogue properly, we would
place it in the parenthetical. For example, if someone lights a match or
shakes someone’s hand, that might go in a parenthetical.
Screenwriting involves making these judgment calls countless times
per script, per scene, and per line.
A similar issue arises with the passive voice. In general, in screenplays
we prefer to see characters as the subject of the sentence (“Marcus lights a
match”) rather than the object (“a match is lit by Marcus”). Movies are
about characters taking action.
But like all suggestions, it’s easy to overgeneralize.

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 A listener wrote in about coverage he had gotten on his script. (Coverage
is a written assessment of a script, typically by a junior studio executive or
intern.) The reader criticized the writer for using the passive voice, provid-
ing the example of: “Mary is cooking dinner.” The reader said, “It should be
‘Mary cooks dinner,’%” which is wrong on two levels.
First o", that’s not passive voice. “The dinner was cooked by Mary” is
passive voice. Second, there are times when the passive voice is simply bet-
ter. For example: “The casket is lowered into the ground.” That puts the em-
phasis on the casket, which may be what you want.
But with “Mary is cooking dinner,” that’s actually the present progres-
sive. It’s a remarkably useful thing in English that not every language has.
The present progressive is that “-ing” form. So, “Mary is cooking.” “Todd is
running.” What’s great about the present progressive for screenwriting is
that you can interrupt it. “Todd is running down the street when&.&.&.” some-
thing happens. You can stop that action.
If it’s “Todd runs down the street,” well, does he !nish running down the
street? It implies that something has been completed when it may be some-
thing that you want to stop midway.
Passive voice and the present progressive are two examples of why those
twenty rules of screenwriting at the start of the chapter deserve scrutiny, if
not mockery.
Again, the intention of the screenplay is to make the reader feel like they
are watching the movie. “Mary is cooking dinner when there is a knock at
the door” more e"ectively communicates the sudden disruption of a placid
domestic scene, the sudden startle for Mary and the viewer, than “Mary
cooks. There’s a knock at the door.”
Screenplays are not novels—but just imagine if novels were limited in
these same arbitrary ways, hemming in language’s ability to communicate
with precision action and drama. We want to use the language that gets us
SCR IPTNOTES

closest to how it will feel to experience the scene on-screen.

There are no rules of screenwriting, just conventions. You need to un-
derstand them, but don’t let them stop you.

14

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 F I R S T P E RSON
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

Backstory

M Episode 622, “The One with Christopher Nolan,”

December 19, 2023

M Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of

Memento, the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and
Oppenheimer.

M Chris’s brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan

Nolan, was an early Scriptnotes guest.

Starting out

For my whole childhood, I was always !lming things and putting images
together, trying to cut images together on the old Moviola. I was eight years
old, getting together with friends and doing ri"s on Star Wars. Writing

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

came to me over time as a way of formalizing my instinctive process of put-
ting one image after another to create some kind of sensation of narrative.
As these things become longer, as you move into 16mm and you start mak-
ing things that you need more structure to, then you start writing.
When you embrace the screenplay form, as I have over the years, you al-
ways have to remind yourself that the initial impulse, and therefore the
thing that people are watching !lms for, is that string of images telling a
visual narrative. It’s nice to have that recollection, to have that physicality
of holding images in my hand, taping them together. It stays with me as a
guiding principle as I’m getting lost in the words.

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 Editing

As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I love overwriting and

then editing the same way I edit the images and the dialogue when we get in
the edit suite.
One of the things that I try to do in my writing at a certain point—it’s not
usually with the !rst draft—I’ll try to start thinking like an editor as I’m
writing and how the juxtaposition of images is going to be something more.
The relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is
a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein sum-
marized it: Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.

Nonlinear structures

My process has tended to be one of spending months thinking about the

!lm, thinking about the script, what it’s going to be, and almost not letting
myself write until I feel like really I’m ready to go, like I really need to.
Structure to me is part of that.
My !rst !lm, Following, has a nonlinear structure. I came up with the
structure before I wrote the script. That’s what I generally do. It’s three
braided timelines. I decided to write the script chronologically, so that ev-
erything makes sense and I know that it all works, and then cut it up. I was
typing it out and then physically cutting and pasting it to the structure.
That didn’t work very well, because you then had to rewrite endlessly to try
and create the $ow. What I had uncovered is the reason why applying an
editorial structure to a project that didn’t have it baked into the script
never works.
Now, whatever the structure is, I write from page 1 through to page 123.
That way, when you’re doing a !lm like Memento, it’s actually very linear,
SCR IPTNOTES

it’s very connected, but it is inverted. I wrote that screenplay from the !rst
image that the audience would see to the last, so it has a conventional three-
act structure underpinning the more elaborate temporal construction of it.
That’s an important reason why the !lm worked for an audience.

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 Writing for different readers

I always try to view the screenplay !rst and foremost as a movie that I’m
watching with an audience. Then before I ever show it to anyone, there’s a
pass where I’m imagining the studio reading it. What do we actually have
on the page? What works?
One of the big di"erences I’ve found in terms of nonlinear construction
is when I’ve got into the edit suite, I have found the need to combine the
!rst two sections of any nonlinear, segmented timeline. I did it with Fol-
lowing. I did it with Memento, de!nitely. I did it with Batman Begins. Op-
penheimer.
When you show someone a screenplay with a nonlinear structure, you
have to teach the readers the structure right away. But movie audiences
don’t respond to that. If you’re jumping around too much at the beginning
of a movie, the audience just lets it wash over them, and they wait for the
movie to start. They wait to !nd their feet. With every project, I’ve simpli-
!ed the structure at the front end so that the audience can connect with the
characters and the type of narrative it is. Then you start jumping around.
I started o" in my early scripts being very, very rigid. I wouldn’t even use
a character name until somebody had called the character by name. That
was very useful for me as a screenwriter but also as a director, because it
meant that I was always aware: Have I communicated the information

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

about who this character is or haven’t I?
The problem is you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t
reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it as a screenplay.
They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing or
what costumes are going to be in the !lm or whatever that is. Over the years,
it varied project to project, but you try to !nd a middle ground where you’re
giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you
consider your basic principles as a writer.

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 Writing in the first person

With Oppenheimer, I decided to write the script in the !rst person. “I went
into the room. I sat down at the desk.” I love the e"ect that had on the writ-
ing and the relationship with the reader to the !lm, but I didn’t want to
cheat. And so what I did was I wrote quite a few scenes at the beginning,
maybe almost the whole !rst act, in the third person, conventionally, so
that I knew that everything worked technically the way it needed to for a
screenplay. Then I put it into !rst person without changing anything other
than the pronouns. That worked beautifully for me. That hooked me right
in. I knew I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t describing thoughts that no one would
be able to convey, that kind of thing.
It was a big breakthrough for me. I knew the structure I wanted. I knew
that I wanted to tell the story subjectively. But I knew that I didn’t want to
use voice-over. The thing about voice-over, it’s seductive when you’re look-
ing for a subjective storyteller, because of that !rst person.
My brother and I, we were quarantining in a house together during
Covid. I was writing downstairs. He was writing upstairs. I came up with
this idea, and I thought, I’m not going to say anything to him. I’m just going
to rewrite what I’ve done and then show him the !rst act, just say, “Look,
just gut check, what do you think?” without drawing any attention to it. He
read it and was like, “Yep, don’t know why no one’s done that before, but
that works.”
For years and years, I’ve written scripts where you have to read the stage
directions. I’ve never found any way to get anybody to read the stage direc-
tions. He said to me, “You !nally found a way to get people to read the stage
directions,” because when you put them in the !rst person, people value
them as information, so they read all of them.
SCR IPTNOTES

Adapting a nonfiction book

I can only start writing when I have the structure in place. For Oppen-
heimer, I was adapting American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin

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 Sherwin. It’s this incredible resource, but it’s seven hundred and some-
thing pages. It’s a massive tome. My approach was to read it, not take notes,
nothing, read it again. I read it a couple of times and then just spent a lot
of time thinking about what had struck me about it, about what I was in-
terested in, what I would tell somebody about this story. Based on those
notes, I started to feel out what were the things that were going to give me
the structure I wanted. I knew I wanted subjectivity. To do that, I felt like I
also needed objectivity crosscut with that. I needed two timelines braided
together.
About two-thirds of the way through American Prometheus, there’s a
reference to the Senate con!rmation hearings that Lewis Strauss, ulti-
mately the antagonist, was subjected to. I immediately grabbed that and
went, Oh, there’s a really interesting relationship between what he had
done to Oppenheimer and then what was done to him. As a writer, you’re
always looking for those kind of poetic echoes, those kind of rhyming rela-
tionships in narrative. I chased that down.
For example, I started to realize, while reading the objections in the Op-
penheimer transcript—which is about a thousand pages—I found things
like Oppenheimer and his lawyers strongly objecting to the fact they had no
list of witnesses. Strauss in the congressional testimony is making the
same complaint, that they’re not giving him a list of witnesses. Things like
that, that as a writer, you’re like, “This is such a gift.”

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

Then, of course, you have the fun of going into these written transcripts
that have no indication of tone, of voice. They’re very dry in terms of the
format. In a funny sort of way, not to sound massively pretentious, but you
have to interpret them. It felt a bit like what my friend Ken Branagh must
do when he does a Shakespeare !lm, where yeah, the words are there, but
what are you going to do with them?

Surprising yourself

Structure’s very important, but you have to leave room to play. I love to
overwrite. I tend to not write scenes that I don’t need at all. It’s more within

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 the scene, particularly with the dialogue. It’s almost like stream of con-
sciousness, monologues, kind of, that you can then winnow away, !nd
what’s in there that’s the thing you’re trying to express. I’ll write notes on
thematic connections and ideas, but some of those ultimately prove too
self-conscious. You don’t want to get caught doing it. I don’t use the outline.
I don’t use the notes. I’ll write the script. If I get stuck, I’ll then go back
through pages and pages of notes to see: Did I miss something? Sometimes
you pick things up and you put them back in.

Structure is very important, but you have to

leave room to play.

I read an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he talked about

things that you write into a script, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll !x that later.”
Quite often, it’s the things that don’t work or the mistakes or the things that
don’t quite !t the pattern that you wind up actually valuing, that give the
thing its idiosyncrasy. For my process, as I write, I’ve done a lot of thinking,
I’ve done a lot of notes about those kinds of elements, and then I want to
forget them and try and write from the point of view of character and story
and what’s really going on in the narrative, what feels necessary.

Evolving your screenwriting style

For me, it’s been a continual journey to try and strip it down. As the !lms
have gotten longer and I’m trying to stu" more and more into the sausage,
you really do try to strip it down. I try to write scripts that really will be a
page a minute—which, if you tend to over-describe things, the scripts are
going to get very long.
SCR IPTNOTES

I try to write in a way that re$ects screen time, that re$ects the kinetic
energy. Then you strip down to just the necessary beats.
The funny thing is when you’re in it, when you’re writing, these things
seem so important and unquestionable. I remember being at a party when

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 I was writing Dunkirk. I was talking to a fellow writer, who writes TV. I
said, “I’m doing this thing, and I’ve decided I want to write it with no dia-
logue.” Then he said, “Why?” Of course, I had no answer. It was so clear to
me that that would be a good thing to do, that that would be inherently
somehow positive to strip away dialogue and just go with action for this
cinematic thing.
You become very convinced—and I think you need to become very
convinced—that you’re doing it the only way that’s possible, the only way
that would ever make a good !lm. Of course, it’s not true, and there are a
million di"erent ways to approach things. You try and get the right ap-
proach for the !lm you’re going to make.

Finding your writing process

Writing’s very hard and very lonely. Like all writers, I try to !nd a way to
trick myself into it. I’ve learned a few things over the years.
I went to a lecture by [novelist and Booker Prize winner] Julian Barnes.
He said a thing that stuck with me: At the end of an evening’s or a day’s
work, he’ll try to !nish halfway through something, because then when he
comes back the next day, he knows where he’s going, and he can get started.
That’s something I’ve de!nitely tried to do. I try to be reasonably disci-
plined and then write o#ce hours for most of it, and then not do all-

THE RU LES OF SCR EEN WRITING

nighters or crazy hours until you absolutely have to, until you’re on the
case of something.
The thing that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know abso-
lutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you
know, “Okay, I’ve got it now”—you have to write exactly then and get it on
the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. You’ll
come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write
notes, but that’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it.
With Oppenheimer, I knew what the end of the !lm was going to be. It’s
always important to know where you’re going with the end with any movie.
But I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole last three or four

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 scenes !gured out. I got up in my underpants, went down, crossed the gar-
den into my o"ce, sat, and just wrote it. I think I wrote it on a legal pad. But
I wrote it as foreseen, and it never changed.

The thing that every writer needs to learn . . .

is that feeling you have that you can write

something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it

now”—you have to write exactly then and get

it on the page, because that feeling will

disappear like a fart in the wind.

It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is
so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk,
then sobering up. You’re a di#erent person the next day, and you don’t have
it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.
People always view writing as an intellectual process, but I think writ-
ing’s actually a very emotional process. Those elements that are about or
re$ect on the narrative or create connections, those are the intellectual
things. They’re the things we like to discuss. But they have to be emotional.
If they’re emotional in the story, then they work.
A lot of my note-taking process and a lot of my thinking about what I’m
going to do when I write, that is intellectual. I do a lot of diagrams. Big fan
of Venn diagrams for di#erent narratives or whatever. When I go to write,
then I have to be in an emotional state, and I have to write from an emo-
tional perspective.
SCR IPTNOTES

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