Transcription
What was the stage that you were at? At what point did you think you wanted to be a writer, and you felt like that was something that you could do, that felt possible?
Um, that's a good question. I did a creative writing course at university, which not all universities had in those days. And I'm a fan of writing courses because I think anywhere that's a forum where you can have your work taken seriously and get given some deadlines is good. And if that's more formal with a friend or group of friends or a colleague, or semi-professional or pre-professional when you're thinking about getting into the industry, if you can find somewhere to someone to write for who you know is going to read with interest and with sort of good critical faculties, but also humane, and it's not going to crush you, that relationship can be really great.
And I got a bit of that, a taste of that writing process in a university creative writing course. But I think, you know, any course or forum where someone's going to read your stuff is really, really useful. Because one of the great challenges about all stages of writing, but especially at the beginning, is sort of taking yourself seriously and making it feel important that you finish this piece of work, not just drift off to the next idea or like the idea of yourself as a writer, but actually do it and have some stuff that you can show someone else if need be.
Yeah, and I imagine that sense of sort of accountability and deadlines and having to deliver something, because it's very easy to procrastinate, I imagine that's helpful.
Um, and to what extent have you consciously been sort of curating your career as a writer? Like, have you been thinking, as you've gone from project to project, do you think of yourself as being a particular kind of writer and wanting to be a particular kind of writer? Do you think of a sort of personal brand? And does that come into it, if we can use that horrible phrase, but does that sort of come into it?
No, not, not. I think this is actually the first moment in my whole career when I maybe would think about that. Because, really, you know, I did creative writing at university, came across Sam Bain, who was also at university with me, who I wrote Peep Show with. And after we left university, he worked doing vaguely literary kinds of things, he got some work adjacent to film and TV and stuff. And I was very much sort of just working in restaurants and painting and decorating, anything. As soon as we started writing together and then got an agent, which is a great, at that point, and I think to a certain extent still is, a gatekeeping role that it's really useful to pass through and get yourself an agent.
Once we entered that slightly more professional sphere, our aim was always just to earn enough money to be professional writers. And so we learned a great deal from working on kids' TV, which we did on "My Parents Are Aliens" and "Queen's Nose," old, old, old kids' shows now, and Tracy Beaker. But the main thing we were doing was just taking any gig that would pay us money so that we could carry on doing those projects, but also our own stuff.
So, yeah, I would, it's an interesting balance, right? There are probably some people who would sit here and say, "Just do your own stuff, [expletive] everything else. It's got to be your stuff, and everything else will waste your time." And that is true to an extent. Some people, you can drift off and suddenly find, "Oh, I've been writing for this sort of show or in this niche that wasn't what I really intended." And that can be great because you've earned a living being a creative person. Or you can have some regrets, and it's like, "Oh, I never really did my show, my thing." I don't think there's a perfect answer to that question. It's just, some personalities are suited to only ever doing their own stuff. Chris Morris, who I did, we wrote "Four Lions," is that kind of utter [expletive] who would never really probably do an episode of "Queen's Nose" or write links for techno games, the "Robot Wars," and like these money jobs that me and Sam did. And there are other people who do, who, you know, a lot of people learn their craft like Sally Wainwright and Russell T Davies, working on continuing dramas on soap operas and other things where you can earn a wage while you learn.
And you mentioned Chris Morris, and Armando Iannucci is another sort of great creative that you've worked with. Were you thinking at all about kind of mentorship and who are those people you might be able to learn from and that might be able to sort of shape you into a writer? Or were you just thinking, "I just need to work, and we will work on whatever and whoever gives us jobs"?
Yeah, we were very much of the latter. Like, whoever gives us a job, we would learn from. And then, if you're lucky, you start meeting people who you respect and think, "Oh, that's, if I ever got to be doing your job, that's how I would like to do it." And Armando, Chris, like that. And we worked with Danny Boyle on a cop show, sort of cop show, sort of office show called "Babylon." And yeah, he was, when you see someone like that work, and the way he works with actors, the way he works with a casting director, you start to realize there are big differences, right? That name director, or also even more so producer, can cover a multitude of ways of interacting with your writers, your producers, your all your creative collaborators. And the ones who do it in a way which you think is really good for the project, and also, I think, good as a human being, start to appeal to you.
Can you think of anything that you particularly learned from, you know, whether it's Danny or Armando or Chris, that you thought, "That has really stuck with me," whether it's when you came to be sort of running your own shows or at that time?
Yeah, I guess they're all really different human beings and personalities. And you don't have to be any sort of personality to be a writer or a director. There are some who are socially confident in the moment and are able to hold the room and be that sort of boss person. And there are others who want to retreat to behind the camera and they're not the sort of person who want to naturally hold a room. And the same goes for writers. There are people in my writers' rooms I've worked with who don't like pitching to the room in that very public way, and they'd rather listen and then contribute by email or in their drafts.
The key quality for, I guess I think about directors because they're the people whose skillset I don't have and I'm most often collaborating with. And what I love about working with Armando and Chris, I was less there on the shoot of "Four Lions," so I've seen him actually shooting a little bit less. But they both, and this maybe comes from my background in comedy, is they're very alive to capturing the precise moment at which something good is happening. And, you know, people who've made shorts and bigger pieces will know, you start with this feeling about maybe what you want to capture, what you want to do. And then you start hiring the cameras and working with your people, who you're very grateful to get them, whether you're paying them or not, to work with. And you get this architecture. And then there's the schedule. And it all becomes, even at a relatively small scale, it becomes very, a sort of bureaucracy and the sort of politics around it, and the call sheet. And there's this architecture which is quite nice because it makes you feel like, "Hey, I'm actually making something. I mean, this is a real film like other people make." And that's all good. But you can lose the bit of it which is, none of that matters. All that matters is what you capture on the sound and on that frame and on that day. And if you can keep alive to capturing the moments which are happening and forget all the architecture around it and the job titles and the peripheral stuff, if you can just remember, "We must get the good stuff," and it doesn't matter how we do it, at what part of the day, or whether we're meant to be rolling or if we're not meant to be rolling, or just get that over there. I love that feeling of slightly guerrilla, slightly light on your feet, slightly comedy. You might be capturing a moment of tragedy that's happening over there. But I think people who come from comedy, in my experience, are particularly alive to capturing those little moments.
Yeah, I think very much structure, structure, structure, structure. That's the toughest part, I think, of our jobs as writers, and the whole part of the whole creative endeavor that everyone who does the other jobs that people do in this room or want to do. Structure is everything, in my opinion. In that you can't have a joke unless you have a structure, right? You know, the most, you know, the old, the mo, every joke begins to structure. Do the doctor? Okay, we're in the doctor's office. The frame of a joke is, here's the situation, and now something can happen. Maybe you can have the wildest surreal comedy without structure, but even that is playing with structure. So you can have realism, you can't have it without structure. So creating structure is everything, and that's the toughest thing in the room. Usually, if you've got a creative group of people, you will find something funny. But finding out the logic behind the story that will keep your audience interested is the tough bit. And, you know, I often think about the jokes, those beats, as the like the eggs that you get once you've built a nest. And the nest is the episode, the show itself. Creating a tone like "Succession," and the characters, and then, "Oh, this is the business deal that's happening this week. This is the conflict between these characters." And then you've built, and this is the room in which it's happening, and this is the pressure. This person's hungry. This person's in love with the person. And now you've got a little nest. And if you know enough stuff, in a way, you can talk about my joke-writing abilities. And I work really hard on it. And we do read-throughs, a number of read-throughs. And then the edit helps you to weed out the bad jokes. But in some ways, you shouldn't have to work too hard to get that final joke if you've created a situation that's at least interesting, even if it's not funny. One person who's in love with the other person, the other person's only thinking about the [expletive] not the best scene, but it could work.
One thing which is really hard, which is tone. The tone of a show, and the tone of a show like "Succession" is everything. In fact, all almost all pieces, all short films, long films, are in some ways, I would say, pieces of tone. The tone of "Such Brave Girls" versus the tone of "I Don't Know," "Catastrophe," and "30 Rock." The that show, the nuance of them, is the most important thing that you could try and bring as a writer. I know what sort of show this is. And so when I first went to meet Armando about "The Thick of It," he had like some audition with him and Peter Capaldi, they were just messing around. But he gave, he had that frantic quality and the aggressive. Anyway, the tone. It would be, it's brilliant if, as a screenwriter, you can bring that to the piece. You might end up doing it in collaboration with the producer and director, and you might all create the tone because the director has a strong vision that can help you. And so, I guess rhythm is a subset of tone. So once you've set up the tone of a show like "The Thick of It," which shares some qualities, in a way, with "Succession," that there are quite a lot of high-pressure people in rooms arguing. Your rhythm becomes, the actors become attuned to that rhythm. And so the rhythm is there inherent. You don't then, on a smaller technical level, you should be able to hear in your head how you think it should go. Usually, the actor will pick up on it or make it better. Very occasionally, you think they've got the rhythm wrong. That, I think, is one of the toughest notes to give in film and TV. I hear it like this, and I think it should be like that. Because often those things are so internal that if you, you know, it's considered something of a faux pas to give an actor a line read, "This is how I think you should say it," understandably, because that's, I think they understandably feel a bit like, "All right, back off, mate. This is, this is, that's you're in my area now." But it should be inherent to a certain degree in the line. If you find yourself thinking, "They're doing it wrong," you can gently try to have that conversation. But at a certain point, I think you just have to step back and say, "I should have cast the right person who was going to be in the right area. Maybe I've miscast, and it's too late." Or maybe, guess what, I'm obsessed with it. But then you hopefully have a colleague and you go, "Does this sound wrong?" And they're like, "No, it sounds great to me." And you realize, you know what, that was just part of the many letting goes that have to happen on set with a writer. You know, the room doesn't look like you thought it would look. It doesn't matter. They're saying it slightly differently. It doesn't matter. There are hundreds of things that don't matter. And then there are a few things which really, really do matter. And if they're wrong, you need to intervene and have relationships which mean you can intervene in a way which will be accepted and part of a useful conversation.
Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I had, if I was talking to actors, I would say to try not to do that wholesale changing of lots of lines or lots of stuff. Maybe you could have a conversation early on with the writer and say, "I like this part, I like this, but I feel this is wrong about the way in which it's written for these reasons." And maybe we could work together. If things changed. But I think part of the contract between, you know, as you put together a film or a TV show, is this is what we think it is. The creative, whether it's the director, producer, writer, it's obviously my perspective. And then, do you want to come to this creative party? And if, broadly speaking, you're going to do the lines, this is, this is what this is. Can you change a line here because it doesn't feel natural to you rhythm-wise, or you spotted a little logic problem, or you don't know why I'm saying I'm hungry, I was eating in the last scene, it doesn't make sense? Stuff like that, it's all fine. But just like, "I want to do it different" is a bit of, I would say personally, as a professional, like, "Huh?" I might mention this to my fellow showrunner, like, "That actor just comes in and says they don't want to do it like that." Fine, but I need to know quite a lot more. And I, yeah, I'd have a little reaction to that. We, on "Succession" and "The Thick of It," and I've done a ton of things, especially comedies, where there's improvisation. So you would get the scene as written, and quite pretty close to what's written, because usually, you know, the writer's written it for a reason. And that's why you prickle when people want to change things a lot. But if you're in that improvisational process, and that's part of the show or the spirit of the endeavor, then great. When the moment comes to do that, go, you know, bring that stuff to the party. And indeed, because our show is improvisational, if on a take something extra gets thrown in, that's fine. I'm relaxed about that sort of thing. I'm not going to be like, "Oh, you didn't do that comma, and you added an extra clause in there." If it's in the spirit of the piece, I think that's all to the good.
Oh, thank you. Well, I think what you can't do it all just once, right? If you hear over a few days, talking, listening to different people, I imagine you might feel some moments of creative inspiration, and then you can feel overwhelmed because people like me say, "You need to do this," and then someone else says, "You need to do that." You need to do this. It's like, I need to do 12 things. It's too much. You, at a certain point, have to relax and just do your thing and develop. Because we aren't, and none of us are finished articles at any point, and you're learning all the time. So that is a health warning about don't get too stressed out. But I would, but I do also feel that if you are asking for people's attention with a film or a TV show, a short, it's increasingly in the world, right, that attention is an incredibly valuable commodity. And do not waste it. Like, if you've got a story to tell or a thing or an emotion to transmit, it's really, it's really a, it sounds maybe a bit wanky or highfalutin, but it's an honor to have people's attention for that time. So don't waste it. And therefore, put as much into it as you can.
What is the most, and this might be just, what is the most interesting thing I can show you about what I think? For me, this is the area that I'm interested in, how people interrelate. What can I show you? And I, I'm from the world of comedy. Other people might be from the world of horror or psychology, hopefully, I'm in psychology, but psychological thriller, or different areas of human experience. I tend towards, I think, human conflict, but in these kind of bureaucratic structures. So I like comedy. So what I would love in a line is for it to be human, real, maybe tell you about something of this world that we're in, that might be the police, might be politics, might be media, family. And have an ambition that every line could be fascinating because of the way the words that people use, right? Language is inherently interesting. It tells us so much about someone's background, what they, and how particularly how they want to portray themselves versus maybe vocabulary or the way they code-shift between different spaces depending on the audience they're talking to. So I love the texture of language. Can it be funny? Or not even funny funny, but have that twist of what you might call comic, even in a tragic or horror or other situation. So it, once you realize how much you could tell about a situation and a person and a relationship in a line of dialogue, then you can get a sort of feeling of vertigo, like, wow, you can put so much in there. And you can't think about that as you're doing every single line. But eventually, you can maybe go back over your script and go, "Actually, maybe this can go, this can go, this can go, but maybe this can get richer." That doesn't mean longer or more complicated. Often, it can be taking away more. Can we trust the audience more? Will they? That's very thrilling for an audience. You put less and less and less in, and they're watching for clues, more and more of faces and other clues they're given onto what's happening.
You know, probably most people know that TV and film are a little bit different. In, as a showrunner, especially American TV, you are the central creative voice in a way that in films, the director is. So if I was working in a film, I would expect Chris or Armando to be the voice, and you might, they might ask my advice or not, depending on the moment or the situation. On a TV show like "Succession," I would be heavily involved in all the bigger parts and at least watch and okay every single part in the show. And every, you know, it's a sort of cliché that every part is a big part when that person is on screen, but it's really true. You know, I've occasionally waved a small part through, and then on the day, that moment rests on that actor who's only maybe got a line in the show, but it might be quite important dynamically to make work. So every part can be a big part. And we've had a number of roles in "Succession" which started out as rather smaller, more peripheral, and because of the dramatic dynamic, but also the quality of the actor, it grows and grows and grows. So if there's, I think if you're thinking, often actors will have a feeling of like, "I'll do any work that's around." But if you, if you get to collaborate with people who you respect and like their work, even I would do a smaller piece of work with somebody who I found interesting and I might get to work with again, over something which was, if you're lucky enough to be in that position.
And tips, you're probably better to ask actors. We watch. There are a lot of since COVID, but also because it's easier for producers and casting directors, there's more and more self-tapes. I think that's very tough on people. I think it would be nice to come to a room and have a dialogue. There is also, but there is an advantage for people in my position, you get to watch more. It's worth, I'm afraid, it is worth thinking about the technical quality of your recording, that the sound is okay, and the technical aspects are good. And then what else do I think? And then it's worth trying it a few different ways. You know, we watch tapes, we watch different performances. I'm aware that what an actor is doing is them in isolation. They haven't seen the whole script, they don't know the whole story. There may be radically different ways of playing a scene. And I don't mind. I don't mind people playing and showing a range of stuff that you can do.
That's a very specific situation that, you know, I can't talk to the specifics. I guess I would say, I feel for you. And I think, you know, if you can find any supportive collaborators to make your work, then you can be protected a bit from the people who are less supportive around. In general, I guess I would say, on a creative level, right, this isn't personal, on a personal, human, day-to-day level, you need to protect yourself and protect the group that you make something so personal with. In terms of like, my public advice to anyone in a situation thinking about that, I think you have to decide what you think about the world, who you are, what you're comfortable with saying, and then you have to say, "[expletive], this is what I want to do. This is what I want to put out there. I think this is true and right." And I could, if I was talking to a friend, I could defend the position of this. If you're thinking about controversial material, and I have confidence in what I think, I know that some people might disagree with me, and I'm going to, this is going to be my creative expression of where I am on this topic. I think that if you do something with a good degree of thought, then a lot of, 90% of the audience, maybe more, will meet you in that place of good faith. It's some controversial topics, there's going to be some people who are going to be on a different side of the argument who you're never going to reach. But in my experience, most people respond, especially when you show the human part of any story. And people respond to that. And it's that's one of the great things about what we do is you can show people a great variety of experiences through stories.
Good. I think that's a nice compliment. I'm not sure I have great advice about it. It's one of those, you know, there's a lot in the room we can talk about, and there's a lot which is just how you work, how you write. There isn't a percentage. I think the only thing to say about it is that we do a, I do a lot of work, and we do a lot of work. It doesn't come naturally, right? All I think all the scripts. Yeah, this. I think all the episodes of "Succession" are good. You know, there's some that are better than others, but they weren't a couple of them came more easily, but most of them have gone through a stage where they were bad. They were like, "Ugh." We do a read. If we read, did a read-through in this room, you might go away, go, "I like that, and I like that, but kind of didn't really work, did it?" Every project will go through that moment of not working. And it doesn't mean that the project itself is not good or what couldn't be good. It just means that you haven't got there yet. And at that point, you need to apply your brain and maybe some friendly colleagues or people you can talk it through with about why didn't that work? You know, we were so sure that that area would be of interest to people, and that conflict should be in. Why doesn't, why could you feel it in a room? That's why if you're actors, and you can help your writer or director friends and do read-throughs, and if you're writers and directors, if you can encourage your actor friends to help you out and just read the scripts in hand, super casual, you don't need to put too much effort into it. It's incredible how quickly it becomes apparent what's working and what isn't working rhythmically, in how boring or interesting it is, the jokes. You will feel it, and it's a slightly undeniable feeling, even though you would like to deny it when it isn't working. Sometimes somebody might be hideously miscast, and it's just like, well, that's just not how we're going to do it. But you will feel a great deal from hearing your scripts read. So that's something to do quite early on if you've got a trusted group who aren't going to decide that you're an [expletive] just because you did one half-hour read-through that didn't work.
Well, I think anything can work as a writer if you find a way that works, go with it. There's no rule. I was working, I've been doing a little tiny bit of work with a brilliant writer, Alice Birch, who did "Lady Macbeth" and she just did "Dead Ringers." And she, people might know her theater work. I'm probably forgetting her most famous credit. And she did "Normal People," she did the adaptation with Sally Rooney's "Conversations with Friends" and "Conversations with Friends." So she's brilliant. And we were just talking about how we do it, which is what often writers, you don't know how other people do it. And she has a list of 500 questions that she asks her characters. I don't know if maybe people have heard that advice. And that's her, that's really important for her, and it builds up those people. I come a little bit more from the, "I don't need that. I just don't need that. I don't need any of that." I think I'm a little bit more, I was going to say Marxist, but it's not quite the word, sort of, or maybe it's capitalist. I'm the position that someone's relationship to the world, and often their job, tells me a lot. Maybe that's kind of some of the shows that I've written on, right? People who know "Succession," Greg is like an underling guy, and in a certain way, that is his character. He's like an underling guy. And it informs everything. And Logan Roy is the patriarch, the dad of the family, and he is a patriarchal monster, and he's the boss, and that is his character. And maybe it's a deficiency of the way I think about people, but there's, I think about people a little bit mechanically. And then guess what? It's fascinating because we aren't all just cogs in a wheel who are precisely where we fit in the machine of an economy, or indeed the machine of how a family works with a strong mom or a strong dad, and you're the third child with a brilliant brother or sister who takes the limelight, so therefore you have to act like this. But I tend to think of those quite mechanical ways into a character. And then all the other stuff about like, Alice needs to know whether how often they have sex, and what, whether they know who Miley Cyrus is or not. Like, those are some of her questions she asks her characters. I don't need to know that. I'm happy in the scene if it's funny that they know exactly who Miley Cyrus is, that's fine. And if they, it seems funny they don't, I can live with both those things. They're not important for me. But it is important for Alice. So I think you have to find your own ways into a character. But they can be multiple. The thing you do need is like a, "They wouldn't do that. They would do that." Things. But your way of getting there is fine. If you want to put Mark Ruffalo's picture up or Michaela Coel's, and it's like, it's that they're going to be that in my head, and that'll do because I can now write the character, then that's great.
So, just on a technical level, I would tend to not know what's going to happen in another season because, guess what, in TV, you might always get canceled, and you might not. You know, that may never happen. So we would tend, I would, and also creatively, I think it's too much to try and plan the whole season for me. So I would just try and get to the end of the next season. So when we went into the room for season three, we would plot season three and not worry too much about what happened next. However, as is a particular show, if you're doing a different kind of show, a sci-fi show, or a ghost story, or a world where there's a mystery to be resolved, I think that you maybe need to know where you're going. Because I guess what I know, no, I didn't know necessarily who was going to win, but I know the tone. I know that this isn't a triumphal show about, "[expletive], he did it, and he's going to be the best CEO in the world. Go and do it, dude." It's not that show. So I know where the tone is going to be. So I did decide quite a bit earlier that I thought it should be the person who eventually wins. I won't say that for a couple of people who haven't seen the show. But I knew what the tone would be. So if it had been another character, it would have been similarly contingent and grubby and unsatisfying to them in that kind of, "Hooray, you've won the game," because it, I guess the show is a bit about the game being [expletive] and terrifying and destroying of people's humanity. So I think it's legitimate for me not to know the precise ending because I know the tone, and that's not going to blow it. I'm not going to reveal, "Oh, guess what, they were all ghosts, so none of that mattered." Like, that would not be a satisfying ending. But for so, so, so I think some shows, you do need to know a bit more than I needed to know. But then I would try and do it. But then if you were, say, you do, if you know the big reveal at the end is they're in heaven or they're in hell, if it's just that kind of show, then you can then you can play with the arc. And in this season, we will find out this amount of information about the world-building that we've been doing, or that this character, there's a terrible reversal, and they're not what they seemed, or something.
I know you've got loads, loads, loads more questions, but we are almost out of time. So I think perhaps, Jesse, is there anything, any other sort of nuggets of wisdom you can leave us with?
I don't know. I wonder what's the, what's the, yeah, I always, I've just, I'm pleased to see everyone. I wish you well with your work. Yeah, I just want to give you as much as I possibly can. I don't, I can't, it's impossible to tell what the most pressing remaining question is. I guess, yeah, what is the most pressing remaining question? Who's got the most pressing remaining question? What's the most, what's the most difficult to imagine area? I guess, I would say, you.
The two things are equally important to remember: it's really, really, really hard. It's almost impossible to do the really brilliant thing. And yet, you can't think about that. And all you've got to do is go to your desk, or your camera, to do your audition, or, you know, read the script that you might direct, and put one foot in front of the other. That's something that occasionally would be told to me when I was in the midst of "Succession" and incredibly anxious about coming up with the ending of the show that might work for people. And you're trying to rewrite episode three, and yet you have this looming thing. And you know, if you don't stick the landing, as they say, the whole show may feel phony and bad to people. But you can't think about that. You can't, you can't, you can't. There's no way that a human brain can do all of that work. So all you can do is look at the scene you've got in front of you and try and make it as brilliant as possible. You won't be doing that every morning. Other mornings, you'll be trying to feel what the whole shape of the show is that you have to do all as one piece. But I guess you can console yourselves that you can't do everything at once. And some days you'll be thinking about, "Maybe I could write a Western." That's never, I've never liked Westerns, but I think I could see a way that would do, tell something about it, or a big tonal thought. But then, then you have to go to your desk and write scene one: "A woman walks into a bar in the West." And like, "I'll just try and make the next line as good as possible and as real and interesting." So you've got to hold those two things in your head, right? You can't do, aim for something amazing, which is the thing that only you can do, but don't be so terrified of getting there that you don't get up each day, or when you're able to work and do the next little tiny step which will get you there in the end.
Careers are careers are a marathon, not a sprint. Thank you, Jesse. That was fantastic. Thank you all for your brilliant questions. And I'm so sorry we didn't get through all of them, but I hope there was enough there that you found really interesting and useful. And the show writing panel tomorrow, I now know, is Martha Hiller, Rebecca Ruton, Camille Sha, and Bindu Daani. So that's, yeah, 11 o'clock tomorrow. So hopefully, you can go and ask all of your remaining questions of them. Jesse, thank you so much. Thank you, Rowan. Thank you. Good luck.
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