This episode of Zack’s Film Talks at SDSU is hosted by Libsyn.

My guest is Michael Green, who wrote Blade Runner 2049 with Hampton Fancher.

Michael was raised in Mamaroneck, NY, and went to Stanford University. He wrote for Sex and the City and is the co-creator of American Gods.

In this episode, Michael talks about:

the importance of reading

why it's good to go to the movies, as opposed to just watching them

how he once made two stacks of film scripts—ones he felt were better than his, and those he felt he could do better than—and spent time studying and learning “by dissection” from the best

JohnAugust.com—a screenwriting website/podcast he highly recommends

Green Lantern and his early fascination with comics

the “constant battle” he undergoes between creating original projects and working on adaptations

To prep for Blade Runner 2049, Michael read the great noir novels. We collected a few lists here: https://www.amazon.com/Hardboiled-America-Lurid-Paperbacks-Masters/dp/0306807734, http://www.mensjournal.com/expert-advice/best-old-school-noir-novels-20160217, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/50-must-read-noir-detective-novels/.

Full interview transcription:

Hello, and welcome to Zack’s Film Talks at SDSU, a film podcast featuring interviews with screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, and more. This is Episode 1.

My guest today is screenwriter Michael Green, who co-wrote Blade Runner 2049. Michael talks about the importance of structure in a screenplay, and he warns writers not to become paralyzed by research. Our conversation was recorded November 9, 2017.

ZS: Hey, Michael, how are you?

MG: Hey, great.

ZS: Thank you so much for doing this, by the way.

So was there a particular moment in your life when you knew you wanted to be in the film industry or just screenwriting in general?

MG: … That question comes up from time to time, because people will often look for creation myths in writers and writing. Unfortunately, writers and writing tends to be a much less romantic profession—much more a slog. But what I can definitely track in myself is a persistent love of television and film. Even times when I wanted to be a doctor or a comedian or carpenter or doctor or any of the other things that seemed appealing, I did all that fantasizing while watching way too much TV and wanting to go to the movies. That’s where my passion lay. And I just got very fortunate that I had a moment of brain connection that perhaps I should do what I loved, and also even more fortunate that I was given the opportunities to do so.

ZS: Great. So is there anything in particular that gives you inspiration as a screenwriter?

MG: I think any screenwriter that doesn’t read a lot is probably not tapping into their best potential or inspiration. Reading has always been what makes for more writing—and going to the movies, and watching television shows that are great and wonderful. These days going to the movies as opposed to just watching them at home—they’re very different experiences. … [I]n television, [watch] the show on-air the way the audience would see it. So if it’s a network show … watch it on the air with commercials. …

ZS: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think going to the movies is probably just the best way to watch anything. It gives you a completely different experience than just watching it in your own home.

MG: Absolutely. It’s an indulgence. But one should indulge, especially if that’s your art.

What’s the last movie you saw in a theater?

ZS: It was actually Blade Runner.

MG: Oh! Good answer! I will take that!

ZS: It was great, by the way.

MG: I strongly recommend that the next movie you see be Murder on the Orient Express. …

ZS: So you mentioned reading in one of your answers. I saw that you—I read the Hollywood Reporter interview where you said that when you started writing you made two stacks of scripts: one that you thought your work was better than and work that you thought was better than yours. How did you differentiate that?

MG: You’re asking the right question because it was an incredibly arrogant statement I made—that I’m able to look at a stack and … determine with any accuracy whether I’m better or worse. … What that really means is that I started to have an opinion about what I thought was good—

ZS: Okay.

MG: —and applied that to my own writing. You might be wrong, but at least you’re starting to develop your own metronome that you’re going to start keeping time to. The more you read, the more you know what works, what doesn’t—what works for you, what doesn’t work for you, and how to approximate that.

When I was starting—it was twenty years ago exactly, and that makes me a very old person, especially compared to you ...—but scripts were very elusive then. It was like, “Oh my God, you got a copy of the script of Tim Burton's Batman…? How? They were these secret things—you could only get them if you knew someone . … People sold them on the streets in New York for five bucks. They were these magic things.

You could go to Sam French and read every play in the world—which you should. But screenplays now are generally available on the Internet, and every TV show—you can read all the scripts. You can read the scripts and reverse-engineer: how did they do that? How did they get that image on the page? … How did they—was that dialogue on the page, or was it adapted by the actor … or was that word-for-word what was written? How did they structure it?—secretly the hardest thing in screenwriting. And you can start to learn by dissection.

So I was fortunate that I lucked my way into a job where I had access to scripts. …And now they’re all PDFs. Get ’em all! Read them and understand. This person has a fancy reputation … but they’re terrible! Oh my gosh! I can have that job. Or: holy crap, this person wrote something that makes me think I suck. I want to be as good as that. … Get your ego invested, either positive or negative … because that’s your profession. … See how you feel about other people's work.

ZS: I totally agree. Since I’ve been recently getting into screenwriting, I go on those websites that have all those PDFs, all the files. It’s great to look at it—especially with actions and sequences. If it’s a movie I’ve seen, like, five times, I go look at the screenplay and I can actually see it as it’s happening.

MG: Yeah! …There are a few screenwriters of note who have dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy to websites, especially John August—JohnAugust.com. John August is an incredible screenwriter, a very nice guy. … Anytime people ask me starting-out questions, I always refer them to his website, or [Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina's] Children of Tendu, because they’ve done all these wonderful podcasts with really, really smart answers to questions that everyone has. John August started an FAQ about screenwriting twelve years, ten years ago. And if you just started reading backwards from his recent posts back to the original, you would know a lifetime of screenwriting advice. It’s incredible.

All of this stuff used to be so esoteric—you couldn’t get answers to that. You didn’t have access to. … So it’s an incredible time to be an aspiring screenwriter—

ZS: Yeah.

MG: —because it’s all there for you to learn. The only thing is on top of that make sure to read things that aren’t just screenplays. … You still need to be someone who has something to write about, which means you have to cultivate interests. … No one wants a film about people who want to make films. … Not that there isn’t a good version of it, but there are a lot of them out there. Sometimes that’s the only experience people have. So make sure to have other experiences in your life. …

ZS: So I saw in another interview that you—

MG: —It’s a fancy way of saying: make sure to goof off!

ZS: Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

So I saw in another interview that you were very into comics growing up. Is that one way—one platform of reading that you kind of got motivated off of, since you’ve obviously written a few superhero-oriented movies?

MG: Ah, definitely, I mean, any reading is good reading. Anything that you gravitate to is worth doing. … I read a lot of comics growing up, but I wasn’t very thoughtful about it or reflective about why I liked these things, or didn’t even have a really strong sense of what I liked. I just wanted to consume it all. But I can look back on those experiences and see what my brain remembers from all that reading all these years later. And then there’s something very self-indulgent about writing. You’re taking time out of what could be an experience [to] put words down that you're certain other people should hear, and sometimes you do it for other people in your life, and sometimes you do it for yourself, and sometimes you write for your bar mitzvah self—for the 12-year-old- or 13-year-old version of yourself. …

ZS: So all the films that you’ve made have been adaptation projects, whether it be from a series, like Logan, or adapting Blade Runner. … Is that something that you want to stick with doing, or are you trying to come up with original concepts?

MG: You know, it’s a constant battle. If I’m not adapting things, then I’m coming up with originals. It happens to be that in the last few years, things were brought my way that were too irresistible to say no to. ...

We’re definitely in a time in the entertainment industry where studios feel most comfortable with developing properties that are known. Adaptations just happen more. It has a lot to do with what the audiences are willing to show up for.

There was a really pivotal moment a couple of years ago when this wonderful movie called Edge of Tomorrow came out, starring Tom Cruise. It’s a Warner Bros. film, directed by Doug Liman. It was an original film, but it actually was based on [Hiroshi Sakurazaka's] manga comic [All You Need Is Kill]. ... [Website here.] This was a new, fresh thing. It was such a great film. And there was ... a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking about why it didn’t do well. People didn’t show up! You had audiences looking for familiar things. … It became a cult film later, but that was the day Warner Bros. said, We might not want to do original stuff for a very long time. At studios you can see the reverberations of that. … you could see the business seismic shift after things like that happened.

As a working screenwriter, you get offered things … as opposed to when you say I want to do something original and you have to create time where you essentially say no to jobs. If I want to do something original, on spec … I’ll have to take as many weeks or months as that’ll take, not getting paid to do something else, to take a chance on something original. That’s a big lottery ticket. If it works well, you’ve now created something that you can enjoy, and that’s yours from the ground up. But if it doesn’t, you’ve now not worked during that slot of writing.… If you're not interested in high-risk kind of reward, don't be a screenwriter.

I'm not saying anything fresh or original in the adaptation-versus-original conversation. People spend a lot of time looking at the finances of [this].

ZS: So when adapting an existing project or a previous movie, how much research goes into it—how much time went into researching Blade Runner, and rereading the original script and watching the movie?

MG: Research is an important part of writing—you need to fill your mind with things of and around the piece, and internalize it. And it can mean different things on different projects. ...With Blade Runner, you certainly need to know that film. But there’s also a point that comes in every project where you have to stop. I’ve known writers who’ve paralyzed themselves ... using research as the excuse to not start.

At some point you have to say, I’ve read enough; I know enough. … For Blade Runner ... I obviously knew the film very well ... but I did put myself through Noir Writing School—which was nothing more than, I just hadn’t read a lot of the great noir novels, and I gave myself the license to take some time to read them.

ZS: Cool.

MG: Pure joy. And then I would have them as the occasional tuning fork, till I felt I had a new voice in my head, or my version of all that. And then from time to time I might, while taking a lunch break, eating my … salad, pick up one of those [novels] and read a few pages to keep my mind occupied with those words and those cadences.

Research is very important and it’s very useful—to a point. At some point you have to trust yourself as a writer and say, Okay, I got it—or at least me right now has a version of this. And you can only be the writer you are at that moment. In a year’s time, you might pick up what you wrote and say, Oh, I can improve on that. Hopefully you’ll have that opportunity. But you do have to do your job as a writer and let go of the fear of not being comprehensive. You don’t have to give yourself a PhD in Civil War history before you write [a] Civil War [film]. You have to read some, to find your way around it. Don’t paralyze yourself with that—but don’t be lazy, either!

ZS: I know a lot of screenwriters like to direct and/or produce their own projects that they’ve written. Is there a reason that you haven’t really stepped into that? Or would you ever consider it?

MG: Well, I came out of television, where I am a producer—where I do produce. Features is the director-driven job. ...In television, one of the nice things about it, from my perspective, is the writer and show runner is in charge of the show—produces it, top to bottom, every last detail, almost to the point where it can produce a terrible job, because it's too much control over everything. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to write features but I'm also able to stay in television, where I do run a show. … I can have an insane amount of control over every detail, or decide for myself what I want to delegate and what I don't, and [keep to] a form of direction in that way, while still writing. And [I can] work on features in the margins of that time. I've enjoyed that a lot. As far as directing, it’s an ambition I have. Depending on how a few things go this year, I may direct an episode of American Gods.

ZS: Cool.

MG: Put my toe in those waters and dive on in. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while and just kept saying, I’ll do it next year; I'll do it on the next show. So it depends on how a few things shake out this year. …

ZS: Cool. So it sounds like you’re on set and involved in production for American Gods. Are you ever on set for the features that you write?

MG: Yes. For American Gods I’m on set as much as I’m able to be, with my good friend Bryan Fuller. Toronto, Los Angeles. … On the features, it’s sort of “as able”: Logan I was not on the set for. I didn’t finish out the writing on that. That was James Mangold and Scott Frank. They were more on the ground there. Blade Runner and Orient Express, I was very fortunate. Both directors were extremely inviting and just said, "Be here as much as you want to be here." I was very much a part of that process. … After a few weeks I felt like. Well, I might have a contribution here, but I also felt ... I had to get back to American Gods—you can’t run a show from Europe.

I would check in and out—spend a couple of weeks. Orient Express I was there the first week or two. Interestingly enough, it was essentially a year ago now, so I was there Election Day, when America shut down. Very strange thing to be there [for that]. … And then I came back later on in the production—trying to be helpful. It was also fortunate that I trusted both directors and enjoyed—I was able to watch dailies every day on both of them [Blade Runner and Orient Express] and feel like this was going really very well. …

ZS: What was it like being on the Blade Runner set? Because clearly a lot went into that movie’s production.

MG: Walking on the Blade Runner set was one of the silliest, funniest things I’ve ever done. It was so BIG. … I felt dwarfed, I felt … I felt like it was one of my first times on a set. …

ZS: Yeah.

MG: I’d never been on anything that scale. … A driver brought us into this campus. I looked up and I see these twelve buildings, each one a giant warehouse. ... I said, Which one’s ours? And he said, All of them. … In Budapest ... it was like an airplane hangar. … [You’re looking at] better versions of what you’d imagined. And you kind of have this weird gravitational shift in your brain, where you let go of how you’d imagined it. And you see the reality and sometimes certainly the reality is better. It was silly and hilarious. I just kept laughing. I couldn’t believe the gorgeousness of everything.

ZS: Definitely paid off. Because it looked amazing on screen.

MG: Thank you. I’m incredibly proud of it. … It was like a four-and-a-half, five-year job and I enjoyed every minute of it. … I just never stopped feeling grateful to be a part of it. And the fact that it turned out to be a movie people really enjoyed is beyond expectation. The whole thing was always beyond expectation. I couldn’t believe I was writing it, I couldn’t believe they liked what I was writing, I couldn’t believe they shot it, and I couldn’t believe it turned out great. Not surprised it turned out great, because of all the people involved.

ZS: Star-studded cast, great director.

MG: I’m sorry to have kept you waiting for weeks.

ZS: Thanks so much for doing this.

MG: Got everything you need?

ZS: I’ve got everything I need. Thanks so much.

MG: All right.

ZS: Bye.

That’s Episode 1 of Zack’s Film Talks at SDSU. Thanks for listening.

Episode edited by Chris Burke.