Post by jo on Jan 30, 2019 18:29:16 GMT -5
Okay -- found a lot of stuff!
*It was a Black List script in 2013.
*It was initially bought by Legendary Pictures, but somehow the film was not made at that time.
*Lisa Joy has a very impressive background -- a Stanford/Harvard Law School graduate who also passed the Bar. But her passion has always been about writing. She also used to write poetry!
In this interview ( June 2018) -- it segues into REMINISCENCE, which shares insights on the character of Nick Bannister!
gointothestory.blcklst.com/go-into-the-story-interview-lisa-joy-896b92235428
It is a very long interview and it is focused on scriptwriting, but some details emerge on REMINISCENCE.
There could also be POTENTIAL SPOILERS!
Excerpts :
Interview: Lisa Joy
Scott Myers
Jun 22, 2018
My in-depth conversation with the creator and co-executive producer of the hit HBO series “Westworld”.
Lisa Joy got her start as a Hollywood writer working for the ABC television series “Pushing Daisies,” then as writer-producer on the USA series “Burn Notice.” She wrote the spec script “Reminiscence” which made the 2013 Black List and sold to Legendary Pictures for a reported $1.75M. In addition, she (along with her husband Jonathan Nolan) is creator and co-executive producer of the HBO series “Westworld”.
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Scott: Let’s jump to another sci‑fi project, another big project from last year, your script “Reminiscence” which you wrote on spec. Terrific script, Lisa. You made your teacher very proud.
Lisa: Oh, thank you.
Scott: Here’s a description of the plot: “An ‘archaeologist’ whose technology allows you to relive your past, abuses his own science to find the love of his life.”
This is set in the near‑future. It’s a fascinating science fiction, crime‑thriller script with a very strong emotional core to it. What was the inspiration for this idea?
Lisa: I think it was floating around in my mind. It’s hard to say where inspiration comes from. I remember I was in New York, and I just woke up one morning and I was like, “Oh, I think I have an idea.” It had been something that I was kicking around as an idea for a TV show for awhile.
But at the time, I’d actually found out that I was pregnant, and it was hard for me to staff and everything. The Writers Guild does not have maternity leave, and I was scared that I’d worked so hard to get into this career and what if it was all over.
Suddenly, when I’m thinking of this idea, I was like, “I have absolutely nothing to lose. I might as well write this exactly the way that I want to write it, with no thoughts about ‘sellability’ and no thoughts about appealing to certain people. I’m just going to write something that amuses myself, because there’s really nothing else for me to do for the next nine months.”
It’s a mix of some of the things I love. I love the movies To Have and Have Not, Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine, and the novel “Slaughterhouse Five.” If you took all of those things, and some of my favorite poems, and put them in a blender, I think you’d see a lot of those influences and the kinds of themes and world that I wanted to explore.
Once I had the idea and I thought, “I’m not going to do this as a TV pilot,” which when you do something for TV, on network especially, there are certain places you don’t go, certain things you can’t do. You have to self-censor.
When I took away the idea it was going to be a TV pilot, I said, “Write a feature. Write it exactly as you want it.” Shortly after I let myself off the hook that way, the structure for it fell into place easily.
It’s a complicated structure, the piece, but it has a symmetry to it that was poetic in the way that it fell upon itself. As soon as I found those kind of buoys bobbing in the water I knew I had to hit and that made the whole piece float, I just swam for those buoys and wrote the thing. That became the script.
It’s funny because there are scripts I’ve worked on, this one that I’m now using for the idea for “Westworld,” I worked on it for over seven years I would say, and never got it to quite the place I wanted to.
For “Reminiscence,” most of the time I spent on it in pregnancy trimesters. It was the first trimester I thought of it. My second trimester I finished the script. I just wrote in this delirious burst, and edited it for a while. We took it out and within two days it had sold.
Scott: The central idea of “Reminiscence”, that there’s this technology which exists in the near‑future where people can experience a startlingly real re-experience of events in the past, was that the very first thing you had for the story?
Lisa: Yeah, that was the core of the idea, the high‑concept hook. It came from a place where I’ve always been fascinated by memory. I think some poet said this, maybe, Billy Collins, I’m not sure, but he said that his biggest sins are cynicism and sentimentalism.
I believe the same thing could probably be said for me in that I honestly sometimes wake up at night so full of nostalgia for random things and moments in my life. Nostalgia’s its own kind of drug. There’s something beautiful about thinking back on a moment, and yet so tantalizingly frustrating about it, too…
It’s like when you look back at memory, you’re seeing things only in peripheral vision. Everything’s a little bit hazy, and you remember how special that moment was, but you can’t quite grasp it again with the same solidity you once experienced it. I thought, “What if you could?” I remember back in high school reading about the brain, and psychology has always been something that’s fascinated me.
I remember somebody told me when people have their brains operated on, sometimes when you touch certain parts of it with an electrical charge, it triggers memories. I don’t know how real that is. But for me it was an evocative enough thought.
What if every moment you ever experienced is still there locked inside you? Not just the thought of that moment, not just the memory of it, but the actual sensation of being in that moment. What if your own brain could be a time machine and take you back to a moment and immerse you fully in it?
What would you do with that power? How would you use it? How would you abuse it? What would the world look like? How would the world change? Out of those questions grew the script.
Scott: What’s fascinating about it is we always look for high concepts, strong concepts, and this one for a science‑fiction story is a terrific one. But also, it has an innate emotional and psychological element to it.
The idea that people would choose to pay money to have these reminiscing experiences, some of them even preferring to live in the past, suggests they are fundamentally connected to regret, or grief, or lust, or nostalgia, whatever. So what starts off as a technological idea really is a very human one.
Lisa: Yeah. For me, I’m always so interested in the emotional core and the character work of anything I write. I’ve written in a lot of different genres, I would say. But the thing that is first and foremost to me is, “Do I love the character? Do I empathize with them?” I even think you have to love and empathize with the villains you write, especially them, in a way. Otherwise it just becomes caricature.
For me it would be hard to write something where there wasn’t an emotional core to it. Memory has so much of that built into it. It’s a very ubiquitous human trait — to wonder about the past… the people you left behind… the things that could have been.
In physics they talk about time as being just another dimension. We think of it as very linear because that’s how we experience it. But what if you didn’t have to experience it in a linear fashion?
If you could go back as an old man to relive holding your child for the first time, or your wedding night, or talking to your parents again. If you could just relive that moment in all its fullness, would it be any less real or any less valuable than say sitting at the kitchen table eating some Cheerios in the present day? That’s one of the things that I wanted to explore.
Scott: One of the interesting themes of the story is time. You have the protagonist, a man called Bannister, and that’s the way in which he’s an archaeologist, he’s skilled in guiding clients into their memories and digging back through these layers of time back into their past. In fact, at one point he says, “I’m just a keeper of lost moments.” How would you describe Bannister as a character? What are his core issues?
Lisa: Bannister is a character who is a kind man, but it’s hard to see that kindness because he’s so buttoned up. Because of his job, because he’s so good at what he does…there’s an art to being an archaeologist, you have to give people the right prompt to lead people back into their memories.
But because he’s so good at that, and he’s seen so many people and the reasons that they go back in time to experience things, it’s given him a cynicism. It’s kept him at arm’s length from the rest of the world.
When he sees young lovers walk down the street, he knows that probably in five years they’ll be in the tank one of them thinking about the other. It’s made him a little bit jaded because he knows how ephemeral joy can be, how ephemeral love can be, and because of that he keeps life at a distance.
You get the feeling there’s something broken in him, something a little disconnected with the rest of the world, and something achingly lonely. He’s looking for a memory that’s worth keeping.
Scott: That dovetails right into the Mae character who becomes the object of Bannister’s rather obsessive pursuit. How would you describe her character?
Lisa: I was heavily influenced by classic noirs for the script and Mae’s character is no exception. Many noirs create very strong nuanced roles for women; but some noirs still have a bit of that femme fatale / damsel or sinner / saint dichotomy.
I wanted to work within the noir style, but subvert it a bit and flesh out the nuances in the female character to portray a complex and modern portrait of a woman.
I wrote this movie from Bannister’s perspective, a male perspective. This is a unique opportunity to write as a man observing a woman, to literally study the kind of masculine gaze it’s from. Bannister is an archaeologist and “archaeology” I think is the right word for how we find Mae’s character. It’s a dig. You have to search for who she really is.
I remember thinking about that in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock had explored some of those themes. This is my meditation on that. You see her through Bannister’s eyes, and you see her as one thing. But what I wanted to do was to give her, her full depth as a character too. To peel back layer after layer and to go on this discovery with him, and as we learn more and more about Mae, we also learn more about Bannister — and the somewhat unreliable lens through which he views the world and Mae.
As a female screenwriter a lot of people say, “It’s harder for a female protagonist to open movies,” or “women can’t write men” or whatever. In my mind, that’s just all nonsense. You should ignore all that. What you should do is just write a character. Write a full, beautiful character that you fall in love with, man or woman. That’s how you get something true. Something that resonates.
Scott: In any science fiction story set in a different time or a different planet, there’s a certain amount of world‑building the writer needs to do. You’ve got that going on in “Reminiscence” with driverless cars, designer drugs, memory‑tank technology and whatnot.
But there’s a whole culture you develop around all of those technologies which is really interesting. Businesses like that Memorabilia Inc., a kind of chain store where people can go and get their memories fix. You’ve got these odd sort of New Orleans style funeral practices. Advertising in the sky, all this stuff. It feels very real and it’s quite entertaining. How did you go about creating that world?
Lisa: I had the luxury of time, in a way, where I sat down and I was writing the script spec, I was writing it to my own taste. Honestly, before I went into any theme, I would just close my eyes and sit there for quite awhile and think, “What is it like to move through this world?”
If it was boring me, I would say, “That’s not good enough.” I think the world that was created has bits of things that I love and find fascinating.
I’ve just taken little bits of culture that I witnessed when I traveled to Asia, or when I look at different parts of the United States, or when I’m in Europe, or anywhere, and I just take tons of things that seem strange to me at the time and just follow them through, strange but beautiful. That’s what I did.
I read this thing recently about how New York is built on the rubble of blasted European cities from World War II, and that if you were to dig down beneath say, FDR Drive, you’d find the landfill was composed of fragments of cathedrals, buildings and homes destroyed in the Blitz.
That’s how the archaeology of scripts sometimes works is that you have all these little pieces of the cities you’ve been to and the people you’ve seen. That part of creating the world of screenplays is to piece them back together, these broken Lego bits and create something all your own.
Scott: From a nuts and bolts perspective, much of the story is about creating a thread of clues Bannister has got to follow which in effect constructs the plot. I’m wondering how much of that came intuitively and how much do you think derived from your time working on TV with a series like “Burn Notice,” going from clue to clue, commercial break to commercial break.
Lisa: The most important one of the things about TV is it goes at such a pace that sometimes it can become predictable in some ways because you even know when the ad break is coming and what’s going to happen. You can just feel those rhythms. A part of it is it become intuitive.
But you also want to subvert that a little bit and make sure you throw in some surprises in TV and in film, keep things experimental a little bit and moving forward. I would say that from TV I learned the rigors of keep the story moving. Make sure something new is happening. Make sure you’re discovering new things at each turn. But not exactly in the same six act structure that TV would have necessarily.
To me, I wanted it to be more organic so there would be room for surprises that would surprise me. That I’d, if I stumbled across something and it seemed like a little bit of a digression, in TV I would normally cut that out, because frankly, you just don’t have time for network TV specifically. You have 52 pages.
Unless it’s really important, you just don’t have time for it on network TV. In the feature, you have a little more time to explore things and take small digressions, which you might not immediately understand the importance of those digressions, but later on I think they add to the fullness of the universe and help take a script to new level.
I tend to think that part of structure is learned. After writing and reading a lot of scripts, you start to get a feeling for: “Oh, God, the hero needs to be driving something forward at this point. He’s meandering around too much.” I guess its craft, and you just keep practicing until it becomes intuitive.
But I also think that part of it is like music. Not everybody’s a musician, but when you first hear a song, there’s a kind of “a priori” sense for the rhythm and flow of it. How things crescendo into a peak. Decrescendo into conclusion. When the chorus will come back and give you something to hang onto. When it’s going to really get going and have you swaying or clapping along.
Screenplays and music have that in common. Sometimes I don’t know why it doesn’t work, but I just know it doesn’t sound right. It’s not singing right, if that makes sense.
Scott: You mentioned the word “complicated” earlier in terms of your structure. You’ve got these reminiscing events and you have flashbacks, yet they’re distinct. I think in the script you say they have a distinctly different look.
Lisa: Right.
Scott: There are several of them. How challenging was that for you? How many to use? When to use them? How to use them? Did you do a lot of rewriting on that or did that lay out pretty easily for you?
Lisa: I did a lot of thinking on it beforehand, it wasn’t as much rewriting as it was a long and heavy meditation period beforehand.
I wanted to talk about memory’s fallibility and subjectivity. The thing about the archaeologist’s reminiscence machine is that when you go back in those memories, they are accurate. You are just pushing a button in your brain, and the exact replica of that memory is coming up. You don’t get the kind of subjective bias that you do in an organic memory.
Organic memories are fuzzy. They’re hazy, and you can get confused about did that really happen or was that something somebody told me? Did I embellish it over the years? Did I turn it to suit my purposes? Did I tell this memory as a funny anecdote so many times that the little embellishments I’ve added have now become fused in my mind to the actual memory? You do lie to yourself about your own past, and I think you do invariably lie to yourself about your own past. They can be white lies, or they can be more malicious lies. But the way in which we think about the past is not honest.
It cannot be honest because our brain just does not conjure it back up with that level of detail, we fill in the blanks. We fill them out to suit our purposes.
I wanted to be able to juxtapose from the way Bannister remembered things for himself, or the way things actually went to illustrate that point and understand the Bannister character in terms of the lies that he told himself about the past.
Scott: One final question about the script. The conventional last two words of a script: The End. Not in “Reminiscence.” In your script, you end with the words: “The Middle.”
Lisa: Right. The thing that influenced me structurally in writing “Reminiscence” was a format of a Rondel poem. In that poem, the first two lines of the first stanza are refrains, and they repeat at the last two lines of the second stanza and the third stanza. Basically, you have a poem progression where certain lines are echoed and tweaked in their repetition.
In a way, the structural underpinnings for “Reminiscence” are borrowed from that sort of poem. Because for me that kind of poem works like a memory, where certain memories tug you back again and again. I wanted to mimic that in the structure of the screenplay.
The last two lines, the words, of the screenplay wanted to point out that that was the structure that was happening, and to point out that an ending is not always an ending.
Scott: So you sell this thing to Legendary Pictures for a boatload of money. Then the script makes the Black List. Where are you with all the amazing buzz around this project?
Lisa: I don’t know. I’m so grateful for the interest that people took in it. Honestly, for me the most thrilling part of it was some of the directors and some of the producers who responded to it, and wanted to work on it were fantastic, and the fact that there were those options out there.
These were my idols, and to be able to just have them read something that I wrote, frankly, was so gratifying to me that it was probably the most meaningful part of the process. Not even the sale itself, but just hearing from people I admire, that they liked it and responded to it was truly, for me, fantastic.
The collaboration with Legendary is so fun. They’re a company that invests in big, bold worlds. They have this huge appetite to tell stories, and tell them provocatively. They’re not afraid to take chances and take on big things. To be in collaboration with somebody who’s as keen and driven to create a world that people believe, and love playing in it has been really gratifying.
It’s been really great because you have this baby, and it’s a script, and you just want to make sure you raise it with the right people. To have such great collaborators has been so gratifying, on so very many levels.
In terms of the actual feeling of selling a script — it was pretty unreal. But nothing really has changed in my life, [laughs] I have to say. Except I have some really great meetings with people, and there are more opportunities to work on really cool projects.
But I have this philosophy where, it’s going to sound pretentious…I’m even hesitant to bring up another poem. There’s a line in it, “When you meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Scott: Rudyard Kipling?
Lisa: Yeah, Kipling’s “If”. My grandmother used to love that poem and had it hung on her kitchen wall. It was a lesson to his son on how to be a “man”. But man or woman, the same lessons apply.
“When you meet with triumph and disaster, and treat these two impostors just the same”, you really have to have that mentality when you’re a screenwriter. Disaster comes, triumph comes, and they never last, either of them. The most you can hope for is that you love what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. I celebrated selling “Reminiscence” by getting back to work.
*It was a Black List script in 2013.
*It was initially bought by Legendary Pictures, but somehow the film was not made at that time.
*Lisa Joy has a very impressive background -- a Stanford/Harvard Law School graduate who also passed the Bar. But her passion has always been about writing. She also used to write poetry!
In this interview ( June 2018) -- it segues into REMINISCENCE, which shares insights on the character of Nick Bannister!
gointothestory.blcklst.com/go-into-the-story-interview-lisa-joy-896b92235428
It is a very long interview and it is focused on scriptwriting, but some details emerge on REMINISCENCE.
There could also be POTENTIAL SPOILERS!
Excerpts :
Interview: Lisa Joy
Scott Myers
Jun 22, 2018
My in-depth conversation with the creator and co-executive producer of the hit HBO series “Westworld”.
Lisa Joy got her start as a Hollywood writer working for the ABC television series “Pushing Daisies,” then as writer-producer on the USA series “Burn Notice.” She wrote the spec script “Reminiscence” which made the 2013 Black List and sold to Legendary Pictures for a reported $1.75M. In addition, she (along with her husband Jonathan Nolan) is creator and co-executive producer of the HBO series “Westworld”.
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Scott: Let’s jump to another sci‑fi project, another big project from last year, your script “Reminiscence” which you wrote on spec. Terrific script, Lisa. You made your teacher very proud.
Lisa: Oh, thank you.
Scott: Here’s a description of the plot: “An ‘archaeologist’ whose technology allows you to relive your past, abuses his own science to find the love of his life.”
This is set in the near‑future. It’s a fascinating science fiction, crime‑thriller script with a very strong emotional core to it. What was the inspiration for this idea?
Lisa: I think it was floating around in my mind. It’s hard to say where inspiration comes from. I remember I was in New York, and I just woke up one morning and I was like, “Oh, I think I have an idea.” It had been something that I was kicking around as an idea for a TV show for awhile.
But at the time, I’d actually found out that I was pregnant, and it was hard for me to staff and everything. The Writers Guild does not have maternity leave, and I was scared that I’d worked so hard to get into this career and what if it was all over.
Suddenly, when I’m thinking of this idea, I was like, “I have absolutely nothing to lose. I might as well write this exactly the way that I want to write it, with no thoughts about ‘sellability’ and no thoughts about appealing to certain people. I’m just going to write something that amuses myself, because there’s really nothing else for me to do for the next nine months.”
It’s a mix of some of the things I love. I love the movies To Have and Have Not, Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine, and the novel “Slaughterhouse Five.” If you took all of those things, and some of my favorite poems, and put them in a blender, I think you’d see a lot of those influences and the kinds of themes and world that I wanted to explore.
Once I had the idea and I thought, “I’m not going to do this as a TV pilot,” which when you do something for TV, on network especially, there are certain places you don’t go, certain things you can’t do. You have to self-censor.
When I took away the idea it was going to be a TV pilot, I said, “Write a feature. Write it exactly as you want it.” Shortly after I let myself off the hook that way, the structure for it fell into place easily.
It’s a complicated structure, the piece, but it has a symmetry to it that was poetic in the way that it fell upon itself. As soon as I found those kind of buoys bobbing in the water I knew I had to hit and that made the whole piece float, I just swam for those buoys and wrote the thing. That became the script.
It’s funny because there are scripts I’ve worked on, this one that I’m now using for the idea for “Westworld,” I worked on it for over seven years I would say, and never got it to quite the place I wanted to.
For “Reminiscence,” most of the time I spent on it in pregnancy trimesters. It was the first trimester I thought of it. My second trimester I finished the script. I just wrote in this delirious burst, and edited it for a while. We took it out and within two days it had sold.
Scott: The central idea of “Reminiscence”, that there’s this technology which exists in the near‑future where people can experience a startlingly real re-experience of events in the past, was that the very first thing you had for the story?
Lisa: Yeah, that was the core of the idea, the high‑concept hook. It came from a place where I’ve always been fascinated by memory. I think some poet said this, maybe, Billy Collins, I’m not sure, but he said that his biggest sins are cynicism and sentimentalism.
I believe the same thing could probably be said for me in that I honestly sometimes wake up at night so full of nostalgia for random things and moments in my life. Nostalgia’s its own kind of drug. There’s something beautiful about thinking back on a moment, and yet so tantalizingly frustrating about it, too…
It’s like when you look back at memory, you’re seeing things only in peripheral vision. Everything’s a little bit hazy, and you remember how special that moment was, but you can’t quite grasp it again with the same solidity you once experienced it. I thought, “What if you could?” I remember back in high school reading about the brain, and psychology has always been something that’s fascinated me.
I remember somebody told me when people have their brains operated on, sometimes when you touch certain parts of it with an electrical charge, it triggers memories. I don’t know how real that is. But for me it was an evocative enough thought.
What if every moment you ever experienced is still there locked inside you? Not just the thought of that moment, not just the memory of it, but the actual sensation of being in that moment. What if your own brain could be a time machine and take you back to a moment and immerse you fully in it?
What would you do with that power? How would you use it? How would you abuse it? What would the world look like? How would the world change? Out of those questions grew the script.
Scott: What’s fascinating about it is we always look for high concepts, strong concepts, and this one for a science‑fiction story is a terrific one. But also, it has an innate emotional and psychological element to it.
The idea that people would choose to pay money to have these reminiscing experiences, some of them even preferring to live in the past, suggests they are fundamentally connected to regret, or grief, or lust, or nostalgia, whatever. So what starts off as a technological idea really is a very human one.
Lisa: Yeah. For me, I’m always so interested in the emotional core and the character work of anything I write. I’ve written in a lot of different genres, I would say. But the thing that is first and foremost to me is, “Do I love the character? Do I empathize with them?” I even think you have to love and empathize with the villains you write, especially them, in a way. Otherwise it just becomes caricature.
For me it would be hard to write something where there wasn’t an emotional core to it. Memory has so much of that built into it. It’s a very ubiquitous human trait — to wonder about the past… the people you left behind… the things that could have been.
In physics they talk about time as being just another dimension. We think of it as very linear because that’s how we experience it. But what if you didn’t have to experience it in a linear fashion?
If you could go back as an old man to relive holding your child for the first time, or your wedding night, or talking to your parents again. If you could just relive that moment in all its fullness, would it be any less real or any less valuable than say sitting at the kitchen table eating some Cheerios in the present day? That’s one of the things that I wanted to explore.
Scott: One of the interesting themes of the story is time. You have the protagonist, a man called Bannister, and that’s the way in which he’s an archaeologist, he’s skilled in guiding clients into their memories and digging back through these layers of time back into their past. In fact, at one point he says, “I’m just a keeper of lost moments.” How would you describe Bannister as a character? What are his core issues?
Lisa: Bannister is a character who is a kind man, but it’s hard to see that kindness because he’s so buttoned up. Because of his job, because he’s so good at what he does…there’s an art to being an archaeologist, you have to give people the right prompt to lead people back into their memories.
But because he’s so good at that, and he’s seen so many people and the reasons that they go back in time to experience things, it’s given him a cynicism. It’s kept him at arm’s length from the rest of the world.
When he sees young lovers walk down the street, he knows that probably in five years they’ll be in the tank one of them thinking about the other. It’s made him a little bit jaded because he knows how ephemeral joy can be, how ephemeral love can be, and because of that he keeps life at a distance.
You get the feeling there’s something broken in him, something a little disconnected with the rest of the world, and something achingly lonely. He’s looking for a memory that’s worth keeping.
Scott: That dovetails right into the Mae character who becomes the object of Bannister’s rather obsessive pursuit. How would you describe her character?
Lisa: I was heavily influenced by classic noirs for the script and Mae’s character is no exception. Many noirs create very strong nuanced roles for women; but some noirs still have a bit of that femme fatale / damsel or sinner / saint dichotomy.
I wanted to work within the noir style, but subvert it a bit and flesh out the nuances in the female character to portray a complex and modern portrait of a woman.
I wrote this movie from Bannister’s perspective, a male perspective. This is a unique opportunity to write as a man observing a woman, to literally study the kind of masculine gaze it’s from. Bannister is an archaeologist and “archaeology” I think is the right word for how we find Mae’s character. It’s a dig. You have to search for who she really is.
I remember thinking about that in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock had explored some of those themes. This is my meditation on that. You see her through Bannister’s eyes, and you see her as one thing. But what I wanted to do was to give her, her full depth as a character too. To peel back layer after layer and to go on this discovery with him, and as we learn more and more about Mae, we also learn more about Bannister — and the somewhat unreliable lens through which he views the world and Mae.
As a female screenwriter a lot of people say, “It’s harder for a female protagonist to open movies,” or “women can’t write men” or whatever. In my mind, that’s just all nonsense. You should ignore all that. What you should do is just write a character. Write a full, beautiful character that you fall in love with, man or woman. That’s how you get something true. Something that resonates.
Scott: In any science fiction story set in a different time or a different planet, there’s a certain amount of world‑building the writer needs to do. You’ve got that going on in “Reminiscence” with driverless cars, designer drugs, memory‑tank technology and whatnot.
But there’s a whole culture you develop around all of those technologies which is really interesting. Businesses like that Memorabilia Inc., a kind of chain store where people can go and get their memories fix. You’ve got these odd sort of New Orleans style funeral practices. Advertising in the sky, all this stuff. It feels very real and it’s quite entertaining. How did you go about creating that world?
Lisa: I had the luxury of time, in a way, where I sat down and I was writing the script spec, I was writing it to my own taste. Honestly, before I went into any theme, I would just close my eyes and sit there for quite awhile and think, “What is it like to move through this world?”
If it was boring me, I would say, “That’s not good enough.” I think the world that was created has bits of things that I love and find fascinating.
I’ve just taken little bits of culture that I witnessed when I traveled to Asia, or when I look at different parts of the United States, or when I’m in Europe, or anywhere, and I just take tons of things that seem strange to me at the time and just follow them through, strange but beautiful. That’s what I did.
I read this thing recently about how New York is built on the rubble of blasted European cities from World War II, and that if you were to dig down beneath say, FDR Drive, you’d find the landfill was composed of fragments of cathedrals, buildings and homes destroyed in the Blitz.
That’s how the archaeology of scripts sometimes works is that you have all these little pieces of the cities you’ve been to and the people you’ve seen. That part of creating the world of screenplays is to piece them back together, these broken Lego bits and create something all your own.
Scott: From a nuts and bolts perspective, much of the story is about creating a thread of clues Bannister has got to follow which in effect constructs the plot. I’m wondering how much of that came intuitively and how much do you think derived from your time working on TV with a series like “Burn Notice,” going from clue to clue, commercial break to commercial break.
Lisa: The most important one of the things about TV is it goes at such a pace that sometimes it can become predictable in some ways because you even know when the ad break is coming and what’s going to happen. You can just feel those rhythms. A part of it is it become intuitive.
But you also want to subvert that a little bit and make sure you throw in some surprises in TV and in film, keep things experimental a little bit and moving forward. I would say that from TV I learned the rigors of keep the story moving. Make sure something new is happening. Make sure you’re discovering new things at each turn. But not exactly in the same six act structure that TV would have necessarily.
To me, I wanted it to be more organic so there would be room for surprises that would surprise me. That I’d, if I stumbled across something and it seemed like a little bit of a digression, in TV I would normally cut that out, because frankly, you just don’t have time for network TV specifically. You have 52 pages.
Unless it’s really important, you just don’t have time for it on network TV. In the feature, you have a little more time to explore things and take small digressions, which you might not immediately understand the importance of those digressions, but later on I think they add to the fullness of the universe and help take a script to new level.
I tend to think that part of structure is learned. After writing and reading a lot of scripts, you start to get a feeling for: “Oh, God, the hero needs to be driving something forward at this point. He’s meandering around too much.” I guess its craft, and you just keep practicing until it becomes intuitive.
But I also think that part of it is like music. Not everybody’s a musician, but when you first hear a song, there’s a kind of “a priori” sense for the rhythm and flow of it. How things crescendo into a peak. Decrescendo into conclusion. When the chorus will come back and give you something to hang onto. When it’s going to really get going and have you swaying or clapping along.
Screenplays and music have that in common. Sometimes I don’t know why it doesn’t work, but I just know it doesn’t sound right. It’s not singing right, if that makes sense.
Scott: You mentioned the word “complicated” earlier in terms of your structure. You’ve got these reminiscing events and you have flashbacks, yet they’re distinct. I think in the script you say they have a distinctly different look.
Lisa: Right.
Scott: There are several of them. How challenging was that for you? How many to use? When to use them? How to use them? Did you do a lot of rewriting on that or did that lay out pretty easily for you?
Lisa: I did a lot of thinking on it beforehand, it wasn’t as much rewriting as it was a long and heavy meditation period beforehand.
I wanted to talk about memory’s fallibility and subjectivity. The thing about the archaeologist’s reminiscence machine is that when you go back in those memories, they are accurate. You are just pushing a button in your brain, and the exact replica of that memory is coming up. You don’t get the kind of subjective bias that you do in an organic memory.
Organic memories are fuzzy. They’re hazy, and you can get confused about did that really happen or was that something somebody told me? Did I embellish it over the years? Did I turn it to suit my purposes? Did I tell this memory as a funny anecdote so many times that the little embellishments I’ve added have now become fused in my mind to the actual memory? You do lie to yourself about your own past, and I think you do invariably lie to yourself about your own past. They can be white lies, or they can be more malicious lies. But the way in which we think about the past is not honest.
It cannot be honest because our brain just does not conjure it back up with that level of detail, we fill in the blanks. We fill them out to suit our purposes.
I wanted to be able to juxtapose from the way Bannister remembered things for himself, or the way things actually went to illustrate that point and understand the Bannister character in terms of the lies that he told himself about the past.
Scott: One final question about the script. The conventional last two words of a script: The End. Not in “Reminiscence.” In your script, you end with the words: “The Middle.”
Lisa: Right. The thing that influenced me structurally in writing “Reminiscence” was a format of a Rondel poem. In that poem, the first two lines of the first stanza are refrains, and they repeat at the last two lines of the second stanza and the third stanza. Basically, you have a poem progression where certain lines are echoed and tweaked in their repetition.
In a way, the structural underpinnings for “Reminiscence” are borrowed from that sort of poem. Because for me that kind of poem works like a memory, where certain memories tug you back again and again. I wanted to mimic that in the structure of the screenplay.
The last two lines, the words, of the screenplay wanted to point out that that was the structure that was happening, and to point out that an ending is not always an ending.
Scott: So you sell this thing to Legendary Pictures for a boatload of money. Then the script makes the Black List. Where are you with all the amazing buzz around this project?
Lisa: I don’t know. I’m so grateful for the interest that people took in it. Honestly, for me the most thrilling part of it was some of the directors and some of the producers who responded to it, and wanted to work on it were fantastic, and the fact that there were those options out there.
These were my idols, and to be able to just have them read something that I wrote, frankly, was so gratifying to me that it was probably the most meaningful part of the process. Not even the sale itself, but just hearing from people I admire, that they liked it and responded to it was truly, for me, fantastic.
The collaboration with Legendary is so fun. They’re a company that invests in big, bold worlds. They have this huge appetite to tell stories, and tell them provocatively. They’re not afraid to take chances and take on big things. To be in collaboration with somebody who’s as keen and driven to create a world that people believe, and love playing in it has been really gratifying.
It’s been really great because you have this baby, and it’s a script, and you just want to make sure you raise it with the right people. To have such great collaborators has been so gratifying, on so very many levels.
In terms of the actual feeling of selling a script — it was pretty unreal. But nothing really has changed in my life, [laughs] I have to say. Except I have some really great meetings with people, and there are more opportunities to work on really cool projects.
But I have this philosophy where, it’s going to sound pretentious…I’m even hesitant to bring up another poem. There’s a line in it, “When you meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Scott: Rudyard Kipling?
Lisa: Yeah, Kipling’s “If”. My grandmother used to love that poem and had it hung on her kitchen wall. It was a lesson to his son on how to be a “man”. But man or woman, the same lessons apply.
“When you meet with triumph and disaster, and treat these two impostors just the same”, you really have to have that mentality when you’re a screenwriter. Disaster comes, triumph comes, and they never last, either of them. The most you can hope for is that you love what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. I celebrated selling “Reminiscence” by getting back to work.
