Episode 1647 - Scott Frank

Summary

WTF with Marc Maron - Episode 1647: Scott Frank

Release Date: May 29, 2025
Guest: Scott Frank
Duration: Approximately 1 hour 45 minutes

Marc Maron sits down with Scott Frank, a distinguished writer, director, and producer known for his prolific contributions to Hollywood. Their conversation delves deep into Scott's career, creative processes, collaborations, and personal insights into the film industry.

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1. Introduction to Scott Frank’s Career

Marc begins by highlighting Scott Frank's impressive portfolio, including acclaimed screenplays such as Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, and Logan. Scott also shares his experiences with uncredited rewrites on major films like Saving Private Ryan and Gravity, emphasizing the often-overlooked craft of script doctoring.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "I have never in four decades ever made that deadline. Ever. Never once."
[35:03]

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2. The Art of Screenwriting and Rewriting

Scott delves into the intricacies of screenwriting, discussing the distinction between creation and collaboration. He articulates the challenge of maintaining the original voice of a script while making necessary revisions to enhance character development and plot coherence.

Key Points:

• The importance of understanding character motivations to drive the plot naturally.
• The role of a script doctor in refining and fixing existing scripts without overshadowing the original writer's vision.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "You need to constantly tell yourself that eventually, like, you have the flu, you know, you're gonna get better. Sure, you just tell yourself, I'm gonna get to the other end."
[15:31]

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3. Collaborations with Renowned Directors

The discussion transitions to Scott's collaborations with notable directors like Barry Sonnenfeld and Sidney Pollack. He reflects on how these partnerships influenced his writing and directing style, allowing him to infuse broader tones and maintain the integrity of the original material.

Key Points:

• Working with Barry Sonnenfeld on Get Shorty and the impact of a director's sensibility on the final product.
• His mentorship under Sidney Pollack and the valuable lessons learned from such a seasoned filmmaker.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "It's fascinating... how you have to create a whole new subplot... so we really did."
[57:45]

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4. Directing and Independent Projects

Scott discusses his ventures into directing with films like The Lookout and A Walk Among the Tombstones. He shares the challenges of balancing writing and directing, especially within the constraints of major studios versus independent filmmaking.

Key Points:

• The transition from screenwriting to directing and the learning curve involved.
• The balance between creative freedom and studio expectations in independent projects.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "The hardest thing I ever worked on."
[58:25]

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5. Mental Health and Creativity

A significant portion of the conversation touches on mental health, anxiety, and the pressures of maintaining a creative career. Scott opens up about his struggles with anxiety, the impact of familial relationships, and the coping mechanisms he employs to navigate the demanding world of Hollywood.

Key Points:

• The correlation between mental health challenges and creative processes.
• Strategies for managing anxiety while sustaining a productive work life.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "I have a very messy fucking head."
[85:34]

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6. Reflections on the Film Industry

Scott offers a candid critique of the current state of the film industry, pointing out the homogenization of creativity and the diminishing space for edgy, progressive art. He laments the loss of diverse and provocative storytelling in favor of more commercially safe endeavors.

Key Points:

• The decline of diverse and avant-garde narratives in mainstream cinema.
• The importance of preserving creative integrity amidst industry pressures.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "The movement to erase the kind of progressive and truly edgy creativity that was evolving and progressing in music and painting and dance and writing... it's just such a heartbreaking thing."
[09:45]

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7. Creating Engaging Narratives

Discussing his approach to storytelling, Scott emphasizes the necessity of character-driven plots. He advocates for letting characters evolve organically rather than forcing plot points, ensuring that stories remain authentic and emotionally resonant.

Key Points:

• Prioritizing character development over rigid plot structures.
• Allowing narratives to flow naturally to maintain engagement and depth.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "Character is what makes you care. Plot should really come from that."
[61:22]

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8. Future Projects and Industry Insights

In the latter part of the conversation, Scott shares insights into his upcoming projects, including the new Netflix series Department Q. He discusses the creative process behind adapting novels into screenplays and the challenges inherent in maintaining the source material's essence while making it suitable for television.

Key Points:

• The intricacies of adapting literary works into visual storytelling mediums.
• Balancing original narratives with the demands of serialized television formats.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "We're shooting like hoping it would be another season, but... it's a movie, so I have no idea how we got away with it."
[79:50]

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9. Conclusion

Marc and Scott wrap up the discussion by reflecting on the evolution of Scott's career, the lessons learned from various projects, and the enduring passion for storytelling that drives him. They underscore the importance of resilience, adaptability, and continuous learning in the ever-changing landscape of the entertainment industry.

Notable Quote:

Scott Frank: "You are telling stories. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's what you're doing."
[95:37]

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Final Thoughts:
This episode offers a profound exploration of the multifaceted world of screenwriting and directing through Scott Frank's experiences. Listeners gain valuable insights into the creative challenges and triumphs within Hollywood, complemented by candid discussions on mental health and the future of storytelling.

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Note: For full transcripts and additional content, consider subscribing to WTF+.

Transcript

[Marc Maron]

Let's face it, folks, life at work can kind of suck sometimes, and it's easy to feel stuck in your routine. Well, there's a podcast that can help make your work life not suck. It's called Work Life with Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist, and on work Life, he interviews experts who share their stories and offer tips that can help improve your 9 to 5. Hey, maybe it'll bring back a sense of excitement about your career. Check out Work Life with Adam Grant. Wherever you get podcasts, lock the gate. All right, let's do this. How are you? What the fuckers? What the fuck, buddies? What the fuck, Nicks? What the fuck? Adelecs. What's happening? I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast. WTF? It's been my podcast for almost 16 years. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. How you doing? Today on the show, I talk to Scott Frank. He's a writer, director, producer, and one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplays for Get Shorty, out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan, and a lot more, including dozens of uncredited rewrites on films like Saving Private Ryan and and Gravity. He's the writer and director of the Netflix series Godless and the Queen's Gambit, as well as the new crime thriller Department Q, which I watched. All of you know, I've never been a binge watching series guy, but I've had a few guests lately where I get it. I get how it's satisfying. And Department Q was very satisfying. And I also watched Friends and Neighbors, and now I didn't get all the screeners. So now I'm hanging out, just hanging here like everyone else, waiting for Friday for the end of that thing. Anyway, my buddy Jack came over, and I love Jack. I've known Jack for years. We became friends back in the San Francisco days. I guess that would have been. Geez, when was that, man? 92, 93. Somewhere in there. And we don't stay in touch as much as we should because sometimes, you know, friendships, it's not even that they get strained all of a sudden, just time flies. No, I don't even like that. You just kind of realize one day like, oh, fuck, I haven't talked to that guy in a month or two or three or six. I can't even really remember the last time we hung out, but it had been a while. And it's just an interesting moment when you haven't seen a friend in a while and your contemporaries, and you look at him and you go like, wow. We are old guys. And look, I'm not saying I'm old. I'm not whining about it, but I'm 61. You know, when I was 15 and someone told me they were 61, I'm like, holy shit, that guy's almost gone. But now I'm 61, and Jack's a couple years older than me. My buddy Steve, who I've known since college, he just turned 63. There's a zone of aging that seems to happen in, you know, around 60 to 65, where you make this one of the major turns physically. And that's just my speculating, but it just was this moment where I'm like, oh, man. Cause Jack doesn't have kids either. And so we can't really judge ourselves against their growth or anything else. So there's some part of us that are still 1994. There's some part of me, I think that's still, like, 1980. I think there's some part of me that's 1972. They all exist within me, and a lot of them haven't really aged, but there is this current of. I don't know if it's youthful thinking. It's just not really knowing if you're just spending most of the time alone or with one other person that you see a lot. You just don't know until you see a pal you haven't seen in a year or so with that, like, oh, my. It's happening, dude. Look at us. Because, like, so many of the cities I've lived in have changed dramatically over time. So many of the people that I knew are either gone or have disappeared to. To where. I don't even know where they are. He was talking about San Francisco, and we were there in the 90s and how amazing it was before it all crashed. Covid really knocked the. Out of that place. And all this stuff that him and I were brought up on, you know, I grew up in. I mean, in terms of formative years. So I graduated high school in 81, and I was 10 and 60 and 73, 15 and 78. And all the stuff that we were picking up was the stuff left over from the 70s and everything that San Francisco represented. All the free love and sort of celebration of. Of weirdness and the embracing of. Of the. The gay community and all the. The sort of wild underground comics, underground art, all the weirdness of New York and la, all the freedom of. Of expression that used to define some of these cities. All the beautiful diversity of creativity and just like, pushing the envelope to find out, you know, what the, what is the edge of the human expression. All that stuff is exactly what's being steamrolled and buried today with anti diversity policy, anti diversity movement, anti gay movement. All this stuff, you know, moving towards this, this homogenization of mediocrity and thick mindedness and bigotry is a fucking disaster for, for the arts, for creativity, for human potential, for things that are interesting and provocative. It's all being pushed aside in the name of anti woke policy or in the name of anti censorship so we can do hack jokes about vulnerable marginalized communities. It's just such a. It's so like when I was talking to Jack and what we kind of grew up with, you know, R. Crumb, weird records, all kinds of strange, like the residents, like just, just the entire expanse of. And I watched that Pee Wee Herman documentary, Half of it the World He Came from, the arts of the 70s. It's just all of that, it was defining and essential and interesting. And now we're just moving into this zone of authoritarian boredom and fear. And it's such a fucking shame, it's such a fucking shame to have people on podcasts looking at some of the greatest art of the 20th century and going like I could do that. Just so thick minded, out of context, without any sort of sense of, of, of open mindedness or exploration. And these are people that pay a lot of lip service to freedom of mind and freedom of speech. And I just, it just fits so snugly into a very fascist point of view. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. Above everything else, it's angering and it's scary, but above everything else, the sort of movement to erase the kind of progressive and truly edgy creativity that was evolving and progressing in music and painting and dance and writing, in, you know, live performance, it's just, it's such a heartbreaking thing to grow up with such an exciting full spectrum of human expression and just seeing that just bulldozed also just by the nature of media in general. It's just sad. And I guess this is like an old guy talking, hey, what about what's going on now? It's not the same. Doesn't have the same visceral connection. Doesn't have the blood, guts and soul and sweat of, you know, actually being around exciting things happening. But is this just me being old? I don't know. I don't know. I do know that I just did the beginning of the press junkets for the show Stick, which premieres June 4th on Apple TV. Me and Owen and Mariana and Peter and Lily, we're all doing sort of press tour stuff. That's. That's going to be exciting. I haven't watched any of it. I'm going to watch it with everybody else or maybe not watch it at all, because that's what Owen does. I can follow his lead. It's not great to watch yourself. Sometimes it is, but usually it's not great. But everybody seems to like the show. Also, if you're going to be in New York on June 14th or 15th and you want to come to the showings of Are We Good? The documentary about me, the premiere is on the 14th. You can go to wtfpod.com tour to get tickets to that. And. I don't know, a lot of things going on, a lot of things going on, a lot of them bad. But my life, you know, if I can continue to celebrate what I believe real creativity is and just hope to God that people are out there still doing it, still pushing the envelope in a way that takes real risks. God, I hope you're out there. I'll be looking for you. So, look, Scott Frank is here. His new series, Department Q, premieres on Netflix today. And it's good. It's a good watch. It's one of those kind of traumatized angry police situations, cold cases. You know, I. I don't know the genre, but it turns out that it's better that I don't binge these kind of shows because I can't stop. And I guess that's the idea. But I've managed not to get too, too completely absorbed by. By too many of them. But I really enjoyed this one and I enjoy talking to Scott. And so I'll let you listen to it now. And also before I got a pretty big announcement on Monday. Got a pretty big announcement on Monday. This is me talking to Scott Frank. Hey, folks, I'm not a big clothing shopper. I just usually stick with whatever I have in my closet, and I don't think about changing it up too much, but sometimes you need new things. And thankfully, Quints is a place where I can order some clothes without any stress or overthinking. Quints has all the things you actually want to wear and at this time of year, like organic cotton silk polos, stylish beach shorts, and comfortable pants that work for everything from backyard hangs to nice dinners. I just picked out some European linen relaxed shirts. Got the short sleeve and the long sleeve. There's a nice range of colors and styles. I Was able to pick one out in mineral blue and then another in chambray stripes. And none of the stuff on quinta is going to put you in the hole. Everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.com WTF for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com WTF to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com WTF I think people get very, you know, very comfortable with their discomfort. I don't know what do you. Mind manifests itself in catastrophic thinking and.

[Scott Frank]

Dread and, you know, I catastrophize over everything.

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

And then I, I, it stays in my brain. And then I also spend the day with it. Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Why not?

[Scott Frank]

I would sit down to read a book.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I, I would still feel anxious, like, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. Maybe I should be working. Maybe I should be. And then.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

You know, and then in our, our world, our business, nothing is secure.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

You especially with kids and everything. And the more I, you know, and this is, it's just. It didn't get better. It started to get worse as I got older.

[Marc Maron]

You just pile it on. Yeah. That's what's happening. It's worse.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Everything gets worse as you get older.

[Marc Maron]

I know. But the odd thing is, is that now you're, you're financially more comfortable.

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

It's not necessarily that you have a guarantee of a job, but you're all. It seems like you do. All right. At some point you gotta look at your resume and go, like, I've never stopped working.

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

So.

[Scott Frank]

But still, it's like telling a manic depressant to just cheer up.

[Marc Maron]

Is it though?

[Scott Frank]

I think it is. I do. I is. I think that for me, I couldn't. I tried meditating. I tried a lot of different things. And I hear meditation is great. I was probably the wrong time to try it when I tried it.

[Marc Maron]

I mean, I've tried it. Yeah. I think if you get a practice going, like in, you know, like my late partner, you know, she would do it twice a day. She was tm twice a day. But yeah, she was, but she was strict, you know, TM, I mean, that's what you do. 20 minutes twice a day. And like 20 minutes twice a day, it's fucking nothing.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And there's some things become so big in my head, like, I don't have any sense of time. Like, you know, you're coming. You're supposed to be here too, but you're coming over. And I'm like, I'm up at 9, and I want to go to the gym before you come. And I'm like, oh, fuck, do I have enough time? It's like, you have four hours. I mean, what do you.

[Scott Frank]

So I am the same way. And I feel like 20 minutes in the morning. Are you fucking kidding me? I need to get going. That's my good writing time. That's my. You know, and. And especially when I started directing too, you know, everything. Everything was too big in my head, I realized. And my son said to me, my son, who's sober, a lot of people in my family are. And he would say to me, you're not dad. You don't enjoy anything. You have all these things. You have this great life, and you don't even seem to really enjoy it. It's like you're in, you know, in the same way, Fight or flight all the time.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm in fight or flight, but I don't. My whole new special that I just recorded has to do with this about the inability, some of the jokes, inability to identify happiness.

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

And, you know, anxiety and SSRIs. But, like. Like, you're saying this idea of identifying happiness one. Number one.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And then sort of like experiencing joy number two. I'm like, that sounds like bullshit.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, I know. Or being in the moment, being comfortable, being uncomfortable.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, I'm definitely.

[Scott Frank]

That you can do that. I don't know that I could. I had to kind of fix everything right away. And the irony is, in work, I'm a big believer, you know, when it comes to writing especially, it's messy. You have to be comfortable with it being wrong until it's right for a year or two or whenever, however long it takes. It's just mess.

[Marc Maron]

Don't know how you do it.

[Scott Frank]

And it's why I hate all these. You know, a lot of the film school programs and books and podcasts and things that try to organize it and turn you into a good student, you know, I really think that the great stuff comes from the mess and the happy accidents. But you have to really constantly tell yourself that eventually, like, you have the flu, you know, you're gonna get better. Sure, you just tell yourself, I'm gonna get to the other end.

[Marc Maron]

But also, you've gotta do the work.

[Scott Frank]

You have to do the work. You have to sit there and do the work.

[Marc Maron]

And I think that is the hardest thing. I think that people that are coming into writing without really doing it, they're looking for a system so they can write within the system. But if you don't have just the need or the compulsion or the discipline to just write the fuck out of things, what are you gonna do?

[Scott Frank]

No, listen, this is one of my favorite subjects. And it's the talent or the way of thinking even. And so they tell you if you just follow everything that's in here.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. And then you write.

[Scott Frank]

You have an outline, you have a. You read scripts and things that. Where people are behaving because the script says so.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, well, but also, it's just like, I hate it. I hate writing. And I'm a good writer, but I hate it. I've written scripts. I do this weekly thing that keeps me engaged with prose anyways and sort of first person stuff. But when I've done shows and I've had to write scripts, to me it's like, oh, my God, it's hard.

[Scott Frank]

It's miserable.

[Marc Maron]

And it's like, I just want it to be done. And, like, I'm not. You know, I'm not. But do you find. Is there a point, like I noticed with what I do with standup, where I work and I work and I work, and then it gets to a point where, yeah, I'm in it. I feel. I feel good about the work. You know, I perform it in a way that doesn't require me to life or death it. So is there a point where you're like, yeah, this is good. I'm writing?

[Scott Frank]

No, what it is, is there's a few minutes a day where it's going really well.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Where it's subconscious. And I always talk about it. It's like this ball of dough that lands on the board, and you start rolling out that ball of dough.

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

And as it gets thinner and thinner, you're hoping for another one, drop and hit.

[Marc Maron]

But I mean, this is like, you know, you've written some great movies. Little Man Tate was the big first one. Get Shorty out of Sight, which I just watched recently. The Interpreter, the Wolverine and Logan Marley and me, the Interpreter. For me, like, there are certain movies. I was trying to make a list for myself while I was on the treadmill today of modern masterpieces in terms of underappreciated movies. And one of the ones that you wrote, which is out of Sight, I think, is one. Michael Clayton is one.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. It's a perfect movie.

[Marc Maron]

It is, right?

[Scott Frank]

It's a perfect.

[Marc Maron]

I cannot shut up about it.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

I get excited and I'll tell you something. I'm gonna put Sicario on the list.

[Scott Frank]

I love Sicario.

[Marc Maron]

I'm gonna put Sicario on the list.

[Scott Frank]

There are a few movies that I. There's nothing wrong. They're absolutely perfect movies. Sicario. I would absolutely. You can put that on the list.

[Marc Maron]

Right? Three Kings.

[Scott Frank]

Love Three Kings.

[Marc Maron]

Right. And then like, but Pollock, you know, who did he direct? The Interpreter.

[Scott Frank]

He did. He directed it.

[Marc Maron]

So you work with Sidney?

[Scott Frank]

He was my mentor.

[Marc Maron]

The best. Yeah, the best. Like, and. And some of the movies he directed. Grown up movies for grown up people.

[Scott Frank]

Right. Where they never get together, the couple never gets together. That was his thing. And he. He. I. I've had some really good mentors in my life. I've been really lucky.

[Marc Maron]

Who was the first one?

[Scott Frank]

Lindsay Duran, great producer, was the first one who taught me how to write. Then Sidney, then Bill Goldman.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, Bill Goldman.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, Goldman. And he must have been old. This was 1990. I was 29.

[Marc Maron]

Well, just to blow some smoke up for a minute, like, Absence of Malice. The Firm.

[Scott Frank]

The Firm is great.

[Marc Maron]

What a great fucking movie.

[Scott Frank]

Great.

[Marc Maron]

Why isn't that celebrated?

[Scott Frank]

Right? It's a really good movie.

[Marc Maron]

Random Hearts.

[Scott Frank]

Random Hearts. I have more trouble with the later ones. Havana Random Hearts. Even the Interpreter. I have. I have some trouble with Jeremiah Johnson. I love Jeremiah. That's a perfect movie. Three Days of the Condor. You haven't mentioned that one. That's amazing. Amazing for that day. One of the greatest lines ever at the end.

[Marc Maron]

Jeremiah Johnson. For me, like, because no one really kind of lumps it in with those kind of revisionist Westerns. And it was.

[Scott Frank]

It's great.

[Marc Maron]

It's crazy.

[Scott Frank]

It's great. How about Will Gear in that, too? Oh, that's just unbelievable. I love that movie. That's a perfect movie. I. I used to watch that and Outlaw Josie Wales on the same day.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, my God.

[Scott Frank]

Another perfect movie.

[Marc Maron]

I watched, you know, I watched the. The Unforgiven.

[Scott Frank]

Pretty Fuqua on a perfect movie also.

[Marc Maron]

Totally. And you know what's interesting about it is, like, he gets all the motifs in. Right. Of all the westerns, and he does it pretty well. Maybe not all of them. That's not exactly true. There's some westerns where the ones that I think that are massive failures because of their need to. They overreached. Was like Silverado, like Kasdan. Smart guy.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Very smart.

[Marc Maron]

Smart writer. But, like, I don't know what happened in that movie. It should have been good, but it seemed like he was trying to do too much. You remember it?

[Scott Frank]

I do remember it. I remember it being a lot of fun.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

I remember it being a lot of fun. I remember. And listen, when I wrote and made my own Western, I watched everything for a year. I only read westerns and only watched.

[Marc Maron]

What, you mean godless or movie?

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, godless. That's all I looked at.

[Marc Maron]

So it was a genre study.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. I thought. I really. I loved them, but I thought I don't. If I can't make people talk, I can't write it. And I was worried about writing lines like, let's rustle up a bunch of grub or I write.

[Marc Maron]

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think oddly in my memory. And I'll watch it again. Is sort of a very finite and kind of a perfect Western is Pale Rider.

[Scott Frank]

Pale Rider's very good. It's very good. I like Pale Rider a lot.

[Marc Maron]

It's very much.

[Scott Frank]

It's a warmup, though, more for Unforgiven.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, totally. Because he kind of limited the scope. Outsider comes into the town, saves the town, people goes away.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Who was that guy? Right. Which is what? Shane.

[Scott Frank]

Kind of Shane, which I love, is for me, another perfect.

[Marc Maron]

Searchers.

[Scott Frank]

Searchers. I get bored with the Searchers.

[Marc Maron]

I like it because he's like a fraud guy.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, well, he's a racist, for starters. Totally. And there's a great moment in it, too. There's. First of all, there aren't a lot of close ups, which I think is great because everybody shoots. There are so many close ups today. And that movie proves that not every other shot has to be.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's because he was in love with the landscape.

[Scott Frank]

But there's one moment, though, where when he shows up and the wife. I forget her name now.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. She.

[Scott Frank]

She takes his coat and you see her just rub the coat as she's about to put it on the chair. And that tells you everything in that. In that I love little.

[Marc Maron]

Little moments like that. She settled.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Yeah. Butch and Sundance.

[Scott Frank]

That's also terrific. And that script is a ball to read. In fact, that's what made me want to write scripts. I read it when I was 11 and there was a line in it. Yeah, it was at the. It was at the Gem Company checkout. So I'm a little older than you.

[Marc Maron]

Probably, but I'm 61. How old could you. Oh, you look good.

[Scott Frank]

It's all that. SSRIs or all your insanity, they're both but there's. You know, when you're 11 years old and you read in a screenplay. Which I'd never read before. I'd never read a screenplay before. And it says, butch delivers the most aesthetically exquisite kick in the balls in the history of modern American cinema.

[Marc Maron]

And that was Goldman.

[Scott Frank]

Goldman. I went, I'm 11. I'm a young kid. This is what I want to do. I want to do that. And Dog Day Afternoon was the other one that did.

[Marc Maron]

Dude, I can't stop watching that. I had them screen it at Cinema Tech because they asked me, like, you know, you want to host a screening? And I'm like, yeah, let's do that.

[Scott Frank]

He's one of my favorite directors as well, the other Sidney. And there's no score in that movie. There's just the Elton John song at the beginning and then no music.

[Marc Maron]

And also. It's just one ride.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, it's one ride.

[Marc Maron]

It all happens in real time.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. And then makes this fucking left turn in the middle of it. And the audience goes with it. They go completely with it.

[Marc Maron]

With the lover.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, he's got a wife who's a guy.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Yeah. But it's just so. The intensity of it. And just like that moment where Cazale. Is that how you say his name? John Cazal?

[Scott Frank]

Cazale.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, Cazale. He's like, did you mean it? Cause I'll do it. When he said, I'll kill him.

[Scott Frank]

I'll kill him.

[Marc Maron]

And he realized, like, oh, no, he's gotta manage that guy.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Like this whole.

[Scott Frank]

And what country do you want to go to? Wyoming.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. And the fact that it's a botched robbery from the second the movie starts.

[Scott Frank]

Right. The kid who was supposed to drive, he says, I can't go. I can't. I have to go. Throws him the car and the gun. And the gun.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, my God.

[Scott Frank]

And then he tries to open the box with the flowers with the gun in it and in the bank, and it's a mess. As he tries to. You're laughing so hard, and I remember sitting there in the audience, and you're laughing at the beginning, and when he gets to the point where he's chanting, Attica, you know, the Attica, everyone in the audience is applauding and screaming with him. And then it gets dead silent at a certain point in the audience. It gets super quiet. And it was amazing. And you're looking around. There were three movies that I remember watching in that as a kid. As a kid when I was, like, I think, dogged Afternoon. I was probably 14, right. There was that. There was Harold and Maude, which did that cause. Hal Ashby, another of my favorite directors.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, my God. To watch, you know.

[Scott Frank]

Damn.

[Marc Maron]

There. Sure. Shampoo. Coming Home.

[Scott Frank]

Coming Home.

[Marc Maron]

The last detail in Coming Home.

[Scott Frank]

Fucking Jon Voight. What happened to that guy?

[Marc Maron]

Well, you know, who knows? Actors, you know, we all make assumptions because of what they do, but, you know, you don't know them, you know, And I don't know. I don't know what his dad was like. I don't know what any of them are like. But, you know, the gift of the actor is we never knew who they were as people.

[Scott Frank]

Well, I wish I still didn't know him.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's the problem. No one shuts up now. And everyone. You know, but he's particularly bad.

[Scott Frank]

But that movie is great. He's amazing. Bruce Dern is amazing in that movie. And the other one. Was that really. Believe it or not, Robert Aldrich. I think I really. And the Longest yard, his version of the longest yard.

[Marc Maron]

Was it worth it when you hit the.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

When he asked it. Game ball.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Was it when he didn't know if he was going to win or not? So would you call that. That's. That's the denouement. Yeah. That's the beginning of the third act.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Right, right.

[Marc Maron]

Is when he decides to win the game.

[Scott Frank]

Yes. Oh, it's so good.

[Marc Maron]

It's the best.

[Scott Frank]

Eddie Albert. Kill him. Kill him. Shoot him.

[Marc Maron]

He's trying to run.

[Scott Frank]

Shoot him.

[Marc Maron]

He's trying to run. And then that great character actor, Gabal.

[Scott Frank]

Ed. What is it, Ed?

[Marc Maron]

Oh, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

But Aldrich did. He'd been around a long time.

[Scott Frank]

Oh, yeah. Baby Jane. Whatever happened to Baby Jan, the Big Knife? I. I don't think I've seen it.

[Marc Maron]

Really?

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

With Rod Steiger and Jack Palance.

[Scott Frank]

I've never.

[Marc Maron]

Shelly Winter.

[Scott Frank]

I've never. I've never seen it.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, you got to find it. It's a Hollywood movie.

[Scott Frank]

And he.

[Marc Maron]

It's about an actor who, you know, gets, you know, does a contract. An actor who had integrity. Like, you know, imagine. Because it's Odettes. It was like he was part of the living theater, and now he's in Hollywood and he does this contract with this. With this studio, and Steiger plays the head of the studio and he sells his soul. And.

[Scott Frank]

Oh, boy, it's one. It's. It's. I've never seen. There's a few that are embarrassing that I've never seen. And. But he also did. Kiss Me Deadly which is great. Which is fun.

[Marc Maron]

He did the Frisco Kid.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, and the Frisco Kid.

[Marc Maron]

I just watched that again. What? It's great. Yeah, it's great. So funny, all of those. But. All right, so you read that at 11 and I imagine you saw the movie and. So what is it that, you know, sets. Sets you spinning. You mentioned there's some alcoholism in your family.

[Scott Frank]

In. Not my immediate family, but in my sort of chosen family.

[Marc Maron]

But how'd you grow up?

[Scott Frank]

I grew up. Very boring. I grew up. My dad was a pilot for.

[Marc Maron]

That's not boring. You get to go in the cockpit.

[Scott Frank]

Oh, yeah, all the time.

[Marc Maron]

That's not boring at all. That's crazy to know what goes on in a cockpit.

[Scott Frank]

It was great. And he loved to fly. And pilots are like cops. All they talk about are flying. They all get together and they sit around, they talk about flying.

[Marc Maron]

They love it.

[Scott Frank]

They love it. And they talk about. When you listen to the black box recordings, my dad would always say before they take off, they're always talking about the three S's. Sex, salary and seniority.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, well, I mean, have you watched this new Nathan Fielder thing?

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, I just started. Wow.

[Marc Maron]

Wow. They should probably manage those conversations better.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, they should. Yeah, they probably should.

[Marc Maron]

So. But yeah, because even when I'm on a plane now, and, you know, when. When. When a pilot has to take it out of autopilot and fly the plane and you can feel it, I'm like, he's having fun. Like, you know, I can. I love it when they're flying the plane.

[Scott Frank]

Well, they might not even be. You might not be. Right. Yeah. Autopilot. They can. I don't think they do, but the autopilot can. They can land everything now, and. And I'm not sure. It depends. Maybe they are. Maybe they are. And I'm always wondering. But he loved his job, and it was great. And he was a captain, and he flew everywhere. And it was before Pan Am. He used to fly all over the Asian Pacific routes. Those were his favorites.

[Marc Maron]

Did he have his own plane?

[Scott Frank]

He had a little Cessna that he used to pick me up at UC Santa Barbara in sometimes.

[Marc Maron]

Where'd you grow up?

[Scott Frank]

Northern California. Los Gatos.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, okay.

[Scott Frank]

In the Bay Area.

[Marc Maron]

So you just fly down?

[Scott Frank]

Just fly down.

[Marc Maron]

So did you fly?

[Scott Frank]

I flew, but then I stopped, and I still could. But I stopped because I'm a daydreamer and I thought, I'm a danger to myself and others. I should not be in a plane because I find myself driving and I go, wait, I was supposed to get off the freeway eight exits ago.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, I see.

[Scott Frank]

And flying, you have to. You can't make mistakes. And you're. So you have to really go through the checklist. And by the way, my dad was a lot like Sydney that way. Sidney Pollack believed, because he was a pilot. He was a really good pilot.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But if you just follow the checklist, everything will go fine.

[Marc Maron]

And so you had to, you know, I can't. Like, I don't know. So you're in the cockpit with your dad. Is he showing you how to fly?

[Scott Frank]

He's showing me how to fly. And just right away, whenever he takes anyone up, he just says, okay, you got it, and lets go of it and lets you fly. And the panic and the story I would always tell, which just contributes to my anxiety. I've told it a lot, but it's. He would say, okay, the engine cuts out. Where are you going to land right now? Where are you going to land right now? The engine's gone. Where are you going to land? And so it made me, in my life and career, always think about, where am I going to land? Okay, this isn't going to. I have to think about, where am I going to land? Nothing lasts. Also, you know, being a Jew, you're taught that nothing lasts because history has fucking proven that.

[Marc Maron]

Yes. Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

That you could be having a great life. And in they come with boots and guns and. And off you go.

[Marc Maron]

Sure. Yeah, I think we're probably a couple down on the list. But, you know, it's happening now. Yeah, not to Jews.

[Scott Frank]

I know. I'm trying to look to see where I can get a foreskin quickly.

[Marc Maron]

And it's not.

[Scott Frank]

Otherwise, I'll see you at Guantanamo. We can meet up there.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Your identity's in the cloud, buddy. There's no. You can't hide behind a foreskin anymore. They know where we are and what we're doing, whoever they. Whoever they decide to be.

[Scott Frank]

But it does teach you. And also, my parents grew up, you know, they were products of the Depression, too. So I got a lot of, you know, it's all going to be gone tomorrow. You never know. You might be doing well today, but you never know. And my mom constantly, you know, the other thing I love talking about is I would come home and she'd be watching Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin and to go, that's Bobby Sherman. He's broken. He lost everything.

[Marc Maron]

He's almost dead right now.

[Scott Frank]

That's so and so. They lost all their money there that's it.

[Marc Maron]

They're all done. Yeah, well, I. I grew up with different. Not that same kind of pressure. For some reason, my. My parents were self involved enough to believe that I had my shit together, which was its own problem, but they always thought I would be okay, you know, my grandfather was different. You know, he was like you, maybe you should get a job at the post office office because there's security and you get a pension.

[Scott Frank]

That was my mom and dad. What did your parents do?

[Marc Maron]

My dad was an orthopedic surgeon and my mom was. I think she wanted to be an artist, but, you know, she ended up being some variation of a surgeon's wife.

[Scott Frank]

Oh, okay.

[Marc Maron]

But, you know, they were just very, you know, they were not equipped to parent. They had me when they were very young. So I. What I usually say is I don't see them as parents. I see them as people with problems I grew up with, and I needed things from them emotionally that I didn't quite get. But you make a. You fix it or you live with it, whatever. That's my anxiety. It's like, who's going to take care of me?

[Scott Frank]

Right. That's a whole other thing.

[Marc Maron]

And who am I?

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

Those two.

[Scott Frank]

But not narcissists that way. Just. Or were they narcissists now?

[Marc Maron]

My dad, I think that word gets bandied about quite a bit. But I think both of my parents had empathy. And I think that my father was pretty close to a narcissist, but he was also bipolar, so that fortunately kind of breaks the narcissist shell in a way. And now he's like, you know, mostly demented, so he's become amazing. The depression goes away when they have dementia, but the.

[Scott Frank]

That's what it takes.

[Marc Maron]

That's all it takes. But the narcissism, not so much. But. Yeah, no, he was definitely a kind of megalomaniacal guy. Not really equipped to do that stuff, but that's my life. So you're growing up in this. You got siblings?

[Scott Frank]

I got two siblings. I have a twin sister and an older sister.

[Marc Maron]

Do they take normal lives?

[Scott Frank]

Very normal lives. Happy. Not a lot of anxiety going on there, huh?

[Marc Maron]

Really?

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And so you're the. You have a younger one and then a twin.

[Scott Frank]

I have a twin sister and an older sister.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

Almost four years years old, so.

[Marc Maron]

But you're the kid, like, you know, you're. You're interested in the arts early?

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, very much. I wanted to.

[Marc Maron]

So you're getting a pounding by them from day one?

[Scott Frank]

No, only when I wanted to take it seriously only when it was, I'm going to school and it's. I'm getting a lot of, you know, doctors can write, too. Michael Crichton is also a writer. You know. You know what? Being an airline pilot, that's good. I have sons of. I know a lot of. Of pilots who are writing at the same time.

[Marc Maron]

You have to get something with security.

[Scott Frank]

What are you going to fall back on? You know, and I had a great teacher at. At Santa Barbara, you know, which was not a famous film program or anything, but he was great. And he was. He used to be a vice president under Harry Con at Columbia Pictures.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And he was teaching screenwriting, and he's a great teacher. And he said to me, you're 19 years old. If you have a fallback, you're going to fall back. You don't have a family, you don't have this. Just go for it, you know, and let's see if you know how to write. And if you can write, then you should chase it.

[Marc Maron]

And then you get to the point where there is no more fallback.

[Scott Frank]

There is no more fallback.

[Marc Maron]

And you know what? The fallback always is. So when things get dire. Let me guess. I could teach.

[Scott Frank]

I could teach. I could teach. And they are. Yeah, I could teach. I mean.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so that is. That's the thing. And so you just realize that you have to at least try. Let the universe tell you that it's not going to happen. You know, not, you know, as a parent. You want. You want to. I feel like.

[Marc Maron]

But if you're delusional, which you have to be to pursue a creative life.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

You know, you're going to push back on the universe.

[Scott Frank]

Well, I would say reasonably, deliberately.

[Marc Maron]

Okay. Okay. So how does that unfold? You go to. You. You study screenwriting.

[Scott Frank]

I studied film studies, which is.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, I did that minor than that. Yeah, it's good.

[Scott Frank]

And so. And at Santa Barbara, because it didn't have a lot of money or production facilities. That's super interdisciplinary. So you're taking art history.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, exactly.

[Scott Frank]

Other things. And you're kind of looking at other kinds of movies. And you're also really steeped in literature, art history and film history.

[Marc Maron]

Exactly.

[Scott Frank]

As well. Which is great. And as a writer and even as a director, all that stuff I still think about all the time.

[Marc Maron]

Well, what was the stuff where, you know, at that time. Because I remember, you know, I grew up. Okay, you're a little older than me. But there was, you know, I took a Screenwriting class, and I took a history of film class with Roger Manvel, and I took. I did an art history minor, you know, primarily focusing on the history of photography. So. But the. You know, there was always this kind of like. Well, Chinatown, right? I mean, Chinatown is Chinatown. That's the script.

[Scott Frank]

That's the easy go to, isn't it?

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, it is. Right. But then you sit there and you toil over it and you're like, yeah, I get it. It's great. Pretty perfect because of the levels, you know, because of. You know, what it's really about is political and about greed and real estate. I watch it once a year maybe. But then when you get into Lumet, you.

[Scott Frank]

Right, you met also.

[Marc Maron]

But he's very versatile.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Like, that movie is an anomaly for him. I mean, like, it is his movie.

[Scott Frank]

Well, it's a New York, I guess.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. But still. But stylistically, you know, you look at the black and white, you look at 12 angry men, and then if you move through his filmography, he's very adept at different styles.

[Scott Frank]

Yes, he is.

[Marc Maron]

And he's not locked in.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

But I mean, but that's. As a director.

[Scott Frank]

But I like directors like that. William Wyler is another one I love. You know, he does the Heiress. He does Best Years of Our Lives. You know, he's a really interesting filmmaker for me, who. They're just well crafted.

[Marc Maron]

Who is that noir guy? Like, I kind of went on a little thing with him, and now I'm forgetting his name.

[Scott Frank]

What movie?

[Marc Maron]

It was not the Kubra Killing. It was another killing. It was called the Killing.

[Scott Frank]

Oh, Siadmak.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, Siodnak.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. He's interesting, right? Yeah, very interesting. Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

I mean, just sort of like matter of fact and, you know, kind of blocked.

[Scott Frank]

And that's the. That when I went to college, film noir became the other thing. Like Sidney Lumet, that infected me deeply.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Out of the past, changed my life.

[Scott Frank]

Lady from Shanghai.

[Marc Maron]

That's when.

[Scott Frank]

Really big effect. Yeah. That really was, for me, something amazing. I just saw all the stuff going on and the stuff said and unsaid and they're all up.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Really? Really. Like that touch of evil.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, yeah. So, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Just unhinged. Just totally unhinged.

[Marc Maron]

Totally.

[Scott Frank]

You know, that.

[Marc Maron]

That was crazy.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

What, the famous tracking shot? Yeah, But. But. But also his. His sheriff was kind of something else.

[Scott Frank]

Just batshit. Totally. But. But also, you know, the. The Third Man.

[Marc Maron]

That's an amazing movie.

[Scott Frank]

An amazing movie.

[Marc Maron]

But in the arc of your life, though, what do you And I know this is kind of a shitty question. What do you see as the best screenplay that kind of like, works for you as a model of a lesson?

[Scott Frank]

I mean, that's a good question because it leads to the notion that you can be taught something.

[Marc Maron]

Which is problematic.

[Scott Frank]

Which is problematic.

[Marc Maron]

Right. And also there's, you know, we're talking different genres and, you know, and screenplays have different intentions. And, you know, story is. You have to. It's relative to the story.

[Scott Frank]

Screenwriting, unlike any other kind of writing, seems to be one of those things where on every side of the. Of. Of the equation, people think that there is. That there's a way of doing it. And especially in this world where we game everything now from politics to. To marketing to all these things.

[Marc Maron]

Well, yeah, everybody is. But everybody thinks they, you know, that all you have to do is have an idea. An idea. And then also. But. But there's also. The bar has been lowered tremendously.

[Scott Frank]

Well, yeah, because, I mean.

[Marc Maron]

And only certain things can be successful in. In a mainstream way. But any idiot can make himself a few bucks if he puts some together.

[Scott Frank]

Right?

[Marc Maron]

But you can't really, with screenwriting because ultimately, I mean, there are bad movies, but. But, you know, if a movie sells, it sells, right? And so you work within that. And if you're willing to sort of say, like, well, I don't care if this sells. This is my vision. And then it sells, you're like, wow, we got lucky. Or I knew it wouldn't sell. But I love the movie.

[Scott Frank]

But I love the movie. And, well, that's a good feeling. When you're done with something and you say, I don't care what happens to this. I love doing it and I'm happy with it. But the problem is, when you go to the movies, your disappointment 99.9% of the time is not with the cinematography or the acting or the direction or the music. It's with the story.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, blame the writer.

[Scott Frank]

But nobody even knows who wrote anything any. Anymore. That's really gotten kind of confused.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, but that's interesting you're saying it like that, given that, you know, you are part of, like, you know, dozens and dozens of movies in a capacity of fixing scripts that. And your name's not on it. You just get to say it now. And then people go like, really? What would you do?

[Scott Frank]

Right. And. And.

[Marc Maron]

But that's guild rules.

[Scott Frank]

Right, it's guild rules. But I don't even. Like, just. People dig it up. People will say, did you do this? Did you do that? And I'll say, no, no. Because I didn't. I came in.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, you didn't do the story?

[Scott Frank]

No. Or I came in and fixed something. But it's very different when you come in and you do something. You're not. 90% of the time, the writer or writers I'm fixing deserve the credit. I don't deserve the credit. But that just shows you the kind of peculiarities of creation in movie making. And the other thing is. But that's a problem. And those kinds of movies that I'm fixing are rarely sort of. No one's gonna fix a Wes Anderson movie or a Paul Thomas Anderson because they're so singular. And we're not taught to do that. The movies that I'm fixing are often approached so mechanically that you can fix them. Or the studio will say, you know.

[Marc Maron]

Just do a pass.

[Scott Frank]

Will you do a pass? Or actors are insecure. Can you just do. And writers might be good at structure, but the dialogue isn't good. Or they have a great idea. And. And screenwriters, because they've been taught this, I think, have confused participation with creation. So they think, well, I was there first. I should have a credit. I was there first. That means everything came for me. Not really. And it depends. It's more complicated than that. And the fact that you don't know it's more complicated than that is kind of interesting. So that's. And it's the third rail of guild politics is when you talk about that.

[Marc Maron]

Right, right. And then some people get their name on their. You know, one way or the other, there's two or three names on there.

[Scott Frank]

I share credit with a couple people that way. One of whom has a big award. Yeah, we're not gonna go there. But it's fascinating to me. And. Because I remember sitting there with the co writer, writing together for six weeks from a blank page, and that was that. And that happens a lot. And then you have people shamelessly either arguing that they deserve credit. There's a famous case. The movie. The Miracle on Ice movie. Miracle. The Hockey mov.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

The writer wrote the script for that movie and found out after the movie was done that somebody had written the same story. And the guild, in its infinite wisdom, gave the first guy sole credit because it was based on a true story. So he must have got. It's like, stuff like that happens all the time because they don't want to get sued, I think. So they're so careful. So they. Instead of playing to win, they play not to lose all the time. And so then it Becomes ingrained. And because I think it's hard to have a career in Hollywood that lasts. It's very difficult. And I think that you, you think the credit is the, the thing. And so there's a lot of fight over for credit. And I understand, because a lot of people are denied credit that deserve it as well. Yeah, but you listen to actors and directors going, yeah, I basically rewrote it.

[Marc Maron]

I wrote the book.

[Scott Frank]

And it's like, no, you didn't.

[Marc Maron]

No, you didn't.

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

So how do you end up like. Because you, you. No. In terms of the type of movies that you've written, I mean, they're kind of. They go a lot of different places. So when. But Little Man Tate was your first big movie, right?

[Scott Frank]

I wrote that in college. It didn't get made until 19.

[Marc Maron]

And that's an original screenplay.

[Scott Frank]

Yes, original screenplay.

[Marc Maron]

And that seems like an odd place to start. What was, you know, the impetus?

[Scott Frank]

It was a weird impetus. I was home for Christmas my sophomore year of school, and I remember the, the Iran hostage situation was all going on.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I remember watching it on TV and I just woke up in the middle of the night and I had this idea that I was gonna write a series of columns for the Daily Nexus. The school newspaper.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Written by, called Little Man Tate. And it was gonna be. The joke was it was a, you know, eight year old kid commenting on world politics because there was such petulance I felt watching everybody screaming and this. And I thought, I'm gonna have a kid talk about World now.

[Marc Maron]

There's like thousands and thousands of Little Man Tates.

[Scott Frank]

Yes, there are. Yes, there are. Yeah. And so that's how it started. And then I got into this screenwriting class with, with Paul Lazarus. And although he, he actually.

[Marc Maron]

Harry Cohn's guy.

[Scott Frank]

Harry Cohn's guy. Actually, it was a, a different teacher the first time, named Chuck Wolfe, who was also great. And I needed an idea for a movie and all I had was the kid and his mother, because he was always going to be talking about his mother. And I just started writing it as a script.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, okay.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And then it became a thing.

[Scott Frank]

And it became a thing.

[Marc Maron]

And that's what got you in.

[Scott Frank]

It's what got me in. But I had to rewrite it quite a bit, you know, because there were lots of movies being made, you know, Gary Coleman and the kid with the 200 IQ. And I would just see it's. No, so it's not a really original idea. So I have to do something else with It. To make it more interesting.

[Marc Maron]

Oh. And so in that script. Got you an agent and got.

[Scott Frank]

You Got me an agent. Got me an office on the Paramount lot when I was 24. 1984.

[Marc Maron]

Wow. So you're in. And Jodie Foster gets.

[Scott Frank]

Ends up direct later. She and Joe Dante was gonna direct it for a while. Oh, interesting.

[Marc Maron]

What would that movie have been?

[Scott Frank]

It was actually. The original version of the script was a very black comedy.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

And Jody and I really like her version of the movie, too. But she was more interested in alternative parenting and how that works.

[Marc Maron]

Oh. And that made it a broader appeal.

[Scott Frank]

I don't know what. It just made it a different movie. And I think that. And I really liked the movie, and I loved the experience of doing it with her, but it was different than what I had in my head. But we had a great time doing it also because it got made nine years later in some ways. And I'd written it at such a young age. It was a little like looking at a high school term paper. I lost the feel for it. You know, I just lost the feel for it.

[Marc Maron]

Right. But ultimately, once you write it and it's in the director's hands, I don't know what's your involvement?

[Scott Frank]

Generally, it depends on the director. It depends on me. It depends on what the movie is and how it came together. And I was there with her in Cincinnati while she was shooting it. I came home because Ken Barana was gonna start shooting dead again right after that. So while that was shooting.

[Marc Maron]

And he wanted you on set, too.

[Scott Frank]

He did. And because he came from the theater, God bless him. And again, Jody and I. So two actors directing two of my earlier films. The first movie was called Plainclothes that Martha Coolidge directed that you really don't have to seek out or don't dig it up yet. You really don't need to. But Ken Barana came from the theater, so he wanted to have. And we were. What was also interesting is they were two actors, and we were all the same age.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so that was an interesting experience for me. And Ken would shoot a couple takes and say, anything you want me to try anything else? And I would look around wondering, who the fuck is he talking to?

[Marc Maron]

Not my job.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Wait. No. But it's great. But when he wants to do that. And so it was interesting. And then gradually, the more time I spent on the sets, I just realized it's so boring if I'm not directing. If I'm not directing it, I'm just sitting there. You have A voice.

[Marc Maron]

But no, say I find that as an actor.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

That the boredom is. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just like, I'm working on a script, I'm looking to direct and my buddy Sam Lipsite, you know, wrote this book and. And he hammered out. We've gone through. You know, he's writing the script, but, you know, I'm kind of coming in doing passes on it. We've been through five versions and I was sort of surprised at my instincts about taking something from a novel in terms of how is this a movie? Because there's so much more you can do in a novel. So you've really gotta figure out what the story is and say like all these other stories gotta go. Right, right. And I mean, I can't imagine what it's. To have to do that with Elmar Leonard stuff, but you had to deal with that. I mean, you had to take that writer and figure out how to make a movie out of those books. So what's the challenge there?

[Scott Frank]

It was hard and I had a lot of help. I had a lot of help. I had.

[Marc Maron]

From him.

[Scott Frank]

No. Although he and I were always talking about it. And I'll tell you a story about the ending about a site that he really helped me with in a second. But I had on Get Shorty, both of those movies. I had Jersey films. And people don't realize that Danny DeVito, this company. Danny was a real deal producer, an amazing producer. He had Stacey Sher working for him, who's another real deal producer.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so I had help. I had help from Barry Sonnenfeld on Get Shorty.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And the only reason I give the edged out of sight over over Get Shorty is Barry did a broader version of Get Shorty than I had in my head a little bit.

[Marc Maron]

He wrote a whole script?

[Scott Frank]

No, no, he. He directed. Barry was the director, Seinfeld was the director and he. His sensibility, which works great.

[Marc Maron]

He's a great guy. I interviewed that guy.

[Scott Frank]

He's so much fun. And I love the movie. So let's be clear. I really love the movie.

[Marc Maron]

Well, you got all those fucking actors, dude.

[Scott Frank]

But it was different for me in a way than what I had in my Same with Ken Branagh on Dead Again. I had written what I thought was this dark thing and he made it very theatrical in a way that works also. And so I'm learning all of that early on with Jodie. She made a different version.

[Marc Maron]

So what did Sonnenfeld make it funnier than you anticipated?

[Scott Frank]

He just made it broader. It was just a little broader in tone a little bit. But I really. I so enjoy it. And. And then on. Out of Sight, though it was. I thought I did it because we had three kids all in one room, and we needed a house, wanted to move to Pasadena. And I grabbed it because I thought I had gotten away with one Elmer Leonard adaptation. Because I remember when I met him, the first time I met. He was telling me story after story over lunch about all his books that had been fucked up as movies one after another. And so I thought, I don't want to end up another story at some other young asshole's lunch. And so I got a lot of help on Get Shorty, as I said. And so the script, the movie worked, but then I was in a panic because I needed a bigger house. Cause it was getting ridiculous. So I grabbed that and I thought, I'm going to write this really quickly. It took me over a year to.

[Marc Maron]

Do out of Sight. Heaven's Prisoners didn't get you the house.

[Scott Frank]

Heaven's Prisoners. You know what? Heaven's Prisoners got me a lot of things because it was a rewrite where I was paid a lot of money.

[Marc Maron]

While I was doing it.

[Scott Frank]

I have a few of those.

[Marc Maron]

When did you start getting that kind of work?

[Scott Frank]

Early on, very early on, when I was at Paramount, I got a call to rewrite a movie that Danny Houston was directing. Because we had the same agent at the time, briefly, and he was doing a Disney movie of the week called Sasquatch. Literally about Bigfoot.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And. And they paid me $11,000 to rewrite the whole movie over the weekend.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. And they were happy with it.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. And so you became the guy Ivan Reitman had me rewrite. His wife was doing a movie, a musical at the time called Casual Sex, based on the Groundlings.

[Marc Maron]

Yes.

[Scott Frank]

Show.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And he gave me the movie to rewrite and paid me some money and gave me, like, eight days to do it. And the first thing I did is made it not a musical.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And rewrote it. And I was probably the wrong guy for that, but I just started doing it and it just kind of escalated.

[Marc Maron]

Well, I imagine that helped you in the sense that you could interpret the voice and not structure, but at least the voice of other people's work.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

And so that, as an adaptive skill, enables you to broaden your own ability to certainly adapt from fiction.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. And in the case of someone like Elmore Leonard, who has a very specific voice, so you're trying to catch that voice, and you're trying to because in his case, we. You know, there's a need always to invent a lot of plot. You have to invent or invent some plot. You need to invent some things. Because oftentimes in his books, he'll be. He'll either introduce a new character toward the very end, all of a sudden, or he'll become disinterested in a character. And so you're trying to find a movie shape to it, you know, and that's what was really hard about it.

[Marc Maron]

Less.

[Scott Frank]

But the build ability to sort of catch a tone and do that. I don't know. I. It just. It was like those people who have a good ear for music and they can play the song.

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

I've always been that way with dialogue and tone.

[Marc Maron]

Does it help when you have actors attached?

[Scott Frank]

Yes. Yes. But they're usually not attached while I'm writing.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, okay.

[Scott Frank]

Rarely are they attached while I'm writing.

[Marc Maron]

Because, like, there's certain there. I mean, those roles and Get Shorty are crazy great.

[Scott Frank]

That's Barry.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Very something man.

[Scott Frank]

He's the best.

[Marc Maron]

I read his book and I interviewed him. Was great.

[Scott Frank]

Both of them are really fun.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. But I just watched out of Sight. I was like, I have to rewatch it. And what. And I'm sure I'm not the first to say this. It was sort of a. A throwback to a 70s movie that wasn't existentially challenging. It was just. It's sort of like it's a romance.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

But it's set in this way where you used to see this. It's almost like, I don't know, the leading guys, like Burt Reynolds. There were guys back in the day that would carry these movies that were relatively serious and had some menace to them.

[Scott Frank]

Paul Newman, Harp.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. But they were so charming that. What elevated the thing you didn't care about the dark backdrop. And I think that the dark backdrop of some 70s comedies is kind of like, have you ever seen how many people. People were killed in freebie and being.

[Scott Frank]

It's crazy.

[Marc Maron]

Crazy.

[Scott Frank]

It's crazy.

[Marc Maron]

And it's a comedy. And that was when I had that realization, like, they're not killing people anymore. You're not seeing that. I mean, they destroyed a city in a cop comedy. But. But nonetheless, I felt like it had. That. There was a lightness to it because you had. You know, you can get lightning in a bottle with those two, though.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Marc Maron]

I mean, Jesus.

[Scott Frank]

Absolutely. And. And the thing with. With also, you know, Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney. That was the right Time for them and out of sight. And Steven, I remember him coming to my office. Yeah. He would come to my office in Pasadena, and we would sit there and just go through the script and act it out. And it was an amazing experience.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

And we would just sit there and, you know, talk it through and work it out. And at one point, I panicked and. Because I'd sent the script to Elmore Leonard, and he said, I don't like the way it's all jumbled. The time. What are you doing? And I'm saying, well, Elmore, the.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, even going back.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, going. The book, you know, you open with the jailbreak, but then you flash back in the Trunk, you get 30 pages of history of this guy. So I'm trying to figure out how to do that and make. Give the illusion of the movie moving forward. And I being, you know, basically easily influenced, straightened it out, and I gave the script to Stephen, all straightened out. He said, what the fuck are you doing? Put it back.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, really?

[Scott Frank]

He said, yeah, put it back. What are you doing? That's crazy.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But the greatest thing Elmore did was the ending. I wasn't sure how to end it because the truck. The book ends. Yeah, the book ends where she busts him and she calls her dad on the phone and her dad says, you know, my daughter, the tough babe. That's it? Yeah, that's it. That's all. And in the movie, I thought in the book, she doesn't ever change as a character. Karen Sisko is sort of the same beginning to end, and she's defined by this kind of really sexy competence.

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

But he's really sad. He's all about the road not taken. He's like, if only I hadn't done all this stupid shit. I'm such a fucking idiot.

[Marc Maron]

So you took that?

[Scott Frank]

No, I put that in. I really leaned on that and made the movie about him so it couldn't end.

[Marc Maron]

But what was his regret?

[Scott Frank]

That he couldn't be with someone like her because.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, you mean on an emotional level. But he didn't regret his line of work?

[Scott Frank]

No, no. He just realized it was a stupid line of work.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. You know.

[Marc Maron]

You know, but he was good at it.

[Scott Frank]

He was good at it. Yeah. And so at the end, I was trying to figure out what to do, and I was just talking to Elmer one day, and he said, you know, he had just hung up with this guy he's been corresponding with in prison, and he was telling me that this guy's trying to write a book and he's talking to him all the time. And he said. He said, yeah. And Omar just throws out. Yeah. And he's, like, broken out from, like, 11 federal lockups. And I went. I have to go. I have to hang up now. I just need to go right now. And I just. It just hit me when he just said that. I went, of course. Of course I'm gonna put him in a van with that guy.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But I'm gonna do a different version of him. I'm gonna do. You know. But then it gives you Muslim version of him.

[Marc Maron]

Right. But then it gives you a romantic ending.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, exactly.

[Marc Maron]

And that, you know. And that, like, it seems like in the book, you know, she was not invested in her love.

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

And in the movie, you're like, here we go again.

[Scott Frank]

Right. But you don't even know. Maybe he will break out. Maybe.

[Marc Maron]

Like. But it's that look on her face.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, that look on her face.

[Marc Maron]

And you wrote that in.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, that's all in there. That's all. That's all in there. And. And. But that. That. When that happened, then I realized, okay, we're done. We're done now. Now we got it.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, it was great. And then. How do you go. And then you go to Minority Report.

[Scott Frank]

The hardest thing I ever worked on.

[Marc Maron]

It's a hard movie.

[Scott Frank]

Really hard movie. A really hard movie. And it. It. We spent a long time. Originally that was gonna be a job where I was gonna work for a few weeks and on the script. And he. Steven Spielberg was. Was just wanted to work on. Had a few things on the list he wanted to do with the script. And it was a very different movie. And it's a short story that's all of 11 or 12 pages. I think it's a very short short story.

[Marc Maron]

Who did it? Not JG Ballard.

[Scott Frank]

Who was it? Philip K. Dick.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, yeah. Philip K. Dick.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. And it also. It's sort of. He was an interesting guy as a writer. He seemed, you know, sort of seemed kind of, to me, almost fascist in some of the ways he thought about politics in his books, but also was really into drugs and experimenting and things like that. I find him endlessly fascinating. But the book, rather, the short story, ended with him sort of trying to support pre crime, which is terrible.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so it was. And they had a movie version that was very, very good, but it was a different movie.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And it made. It was about an America where everybody wants to live in the 1950s, and so their houses look like the cars. Everything sort of felt like the 1950s. It was a very different tone. There really wasn't a mystery in. Was very different, but it was. This guy, John Cohen, very good writer, had done a really interesting, Interesting job with it, but it didn't quite work. And so we began working on it, and then what happened is Tom Cruise is shooting Mission Impossible 2 in Australia, and his schedule, they shut down to rework that script. So now suddenly we have endless amounts of time in front of us.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And Stephen said, well, let's really look at this. So we ended up starting and.

[Marc Maron]

And you'd worked with him before Spielberg?

[Scott Frank]

I worked with him, yeah. I had done a rewrite with him before. Before.

[Marc Maron]

Of Saving Private Ryan.

[Scott Frank]

Yes. Yes.

[Marc Maron]

And it was just the two of you.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

What were the fundamental issues that he was worried about? The voice.

[Scott Frank]

He wanted to give the characters more individuality and to sort of give them.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, you had a Dirty Dozen. It.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, he wanted to sort of give them so that they could be a little more. A little more specific. And I, I. It's funny, I never ever really talked about that movie until Patrick Radden Keefe outed me in the New Yorker.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But it is, it is, it is a. It was a really good script and a really good idea by Robert Rodat.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And he deserves all the, all the, the credit for it.

[Marc Maron]

But it seemed like, you know, when, when, When a director or when you do rewrites, like in, in certain situations, it's really not about the story per se. It's about elements of language or character.

[Scott Frank]

Yes. Yes. And that's. Usually you read something and it's like the characters are not characters. They're attitudes or types or even worse, jobs or even worse, the actor. And so they're always looking to find a way to give them something to do, to make it. Because character is what makes you care.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

You know, that really is the thing. And plot should really come from that, not from sort of. And then this happens and then that.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, interesting.

[Scott Frank]

You know, because you don't want people doing things.

[Marc Maron]

You got to believe that the character is going to move through that plot.

[Scott Frank]

Yes. And you don't want people. My pet peeve is when you see characters doing something because the script said so.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

You know, where. Why are they arguing with each other? Right.

[Marc Maron]

Well, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Why don't they believe Jack Bauer, he saved the world 100,000 times. And. And now he's saying, I'm gonna save the world again. And then they say, no, you're not. You arrest him, lock him up. You're like, Wait, what? Or the little kid says, mom, I saw. No, that's just your imagination. And so that's lazy. You need to go figure out why they wouldn't believe him. Is it a boy who cried wolf? Is it a this? Otherwise, you're just annoyed. You're not feeling the tension of somebody not believing.

[Marc Maron]

Or worse, like in TV writing, like certain things that had to come up against as an actor is that, like, this wouldn't happen.

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

I mean, why do you have this guy doing this?

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

There's no way, no matter how ill defined the character would be, he's defined enough to know that he's not gonna do that. So what are we gonna do about that?

[Scott Frank]

Because the outline has him doing that.

[Marc Maron]

I know. It's just a guy in a room's decision.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Cause it's funny or whatever. And it's like a lot of times it doesn't make any emotional sense or character sense.

[Scott Frank]

Right. And so that is. So that's something that you find yourself fixing. And by the way, the other thing is, the way movies are developed isn't helpful to writers. So a lot of writers will get bounced off projects. There are things I just read something not too long ago where I said, you don't want to get rid of this writer. This writer can write. You're just not. No one is having the right conversation about the script. You don't want to get rid of them. And. And I wish I had been mature enough or smart enough to recognize that, because there are probably many times where that had happened. Of the 50 or 60 or so things I've done over the years, there's got a lot of them, and there are many jobs that I didn't.

[Marc Maron]

You didn't stand up for the other guy?

[Scott Frank]

Not that I didn't stand up for the other guy, but that I didn't realize that they don't need me. They need. There's something else going on here.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. You know that this is. Is. This is another thing. And. And listen, as writers, we're also frequently our own worst enemy. And sometimes.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, sometimes it's just a. A personal lack of communication.

[Scott Frank]

They don't. Or they don't want to do it, or they refuse to do it. There are a lot of those where. Or most of the time when I'm fixing things, there were already. Listen, I wasn't the first one on Private Ryan. Frank Darabont was in before me. You know, so. So there's a lot of times there are. Are, you know, people who are working on A lot of different. A lot of different scripts at the same. Or working, rather a lot of different writers on one script. And so you come and you see your number 8 on the list of all these people. In that case, I'm there for the. You know, I don't. I don't really care. I'm there for the money.

[Marc Maron]

Right. But also.

[Scott Frank]

And to do a good job, of course.

[Marc Maron]

Well, also, when you have somebody like Spielberg who, like, he knows that he makes big movies that are unique to him, and he's obviously, you know, beyond capable, so you're anyone he brings in, it's like, is that going to make it better?

[Scott Frank]

Right, Right.

[Marc Maron]

It's not like the other guy fucked up.

[Scott Frank]

No, it's because he. That's really smart because he has. He. The thing. The good thing is that he has endless resources in terms of people he can talk to.

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

So there's always ideas coming in, all new things. So if there's a way to make him better, he's agnostic in terms of who's making it better.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

You know, he has his ideas and he just wants to see those ideas, you know, made manifest.

[Marc Maron]

Interesting.

[Scott Frank]

So it's not really a personal thing for him. It's just like, I need this done.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Can this person get it done or can that person get it done?

[Marc Maron]

Right. You know, and then, like the Interpreter working with Sidney.

[Scott Frank]

What?

[Marc Maron]

That was a book?

[Scott Frank]

It was. No, it was an original script.

[Marc Maron]

By you?

[Scott Frank]

No, I came in later. I came in. Charles Randolph wrote an original script. And the problem with the script, from Sidney's point of view, is it had a very surprise ending, a kind of Sixth Sense y sort of ending. It was when they were all the vogue at that time, you know, so it no longer. It didn't work to kind of do that movie.

[Marc Maron]

It wasn't a human story.

[Scott Frank]

It was. But it also relied on this twist at the end. And everything was built toward the twist. And so what Sidney wanted to do, which was, I think, a great idea, what Sidney really wanted to do was make a movie about someone who believes with her whole heart in diplomacy but ends up with a gun in her hand at the end.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

How do you do that? How does that happen? And he thought, and I agree, I think that was a great idea. And he wanted to shoot in the un no one had ever shot it. The UN and fascinated with the way diplomacy works and how it's getting a bad name and how the UN was getting a bad name.

[Marc Maron]

So wait, in the original script, her family weren't Victims.

[Scott Frank]

They were. They were. All of that was there in the original script, but it was a very different kind of story. And I think that what he wanted to do also was focus on the relationship between the two of them.

[Marc Maron]

Sean Penn's character.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. And so I think that was a big. A big thing for him that he really wanted to. What is the dialogue they're gonna have? The running dialogue they're gonna have as this movie goes on. And is she really mysterious? Do you really. Could she be involved? We wanna know, might she be involved? What happened? We keep learning things about her that make her more suspicious. She's acting like she's afraid of something. And in the script, all the threats against her were fake. She was making it up. And so you had to believe that she was pretending to be scared by herself sometimes. And so the big change that we made in the final. In the film was to make it. She's really under threat, and yet he's not sure. He's trying to find out the mystery of who might be after her and why. And so we had to create a whole new subplot with other leaders from the country. And we had to make the guy she wants, that they want to protect. We had to make him a real person. So we really did. I read a lot about Mugabe, and they called him the Teacher and all these things that I loved and fucking sold out his country. And so we just sort of started going deeper and deeper.

[Marc Maron]

Sidney guided you there.

[Scott Frank]

He guided me there. But we also. It was hard, and I felt like I couldn't deliver for him. I felt like at a certain point, I gave up. He was very upset with me. I kept saying, I don't think I'm giving you what you want. And I don't. And it was interesting because his apartment in New York city overlooked the U.N. okay, on the East River. And out the window, you could. You could see the un And. And I just was feeling kind of stuck. And I felt like, you know, maybe I should go home and do this alone and see if I can do it alone.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I couldn't. I just couldn't. I couldn't figure it out. And I remember one day, all three kids, my wife and myself, we all had the stomach flu at once.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Awesome.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And yet nothing was coming out of me. I was sick, but nothing. And I thought, this is a sign. I go, this is a blocked very deeply. I'm blocked very deeply. And so I said, you know. And. And so I left the project. And then Steve came in and finished it because I just didn't feel like I was doing a good job. I wasn't making it.

[Marc Maron]

And did you and Sidney survive that?

[Scott Frank]

Yes, eventually. You know, he was really upset with me, and. But. But we. We talked later and made up.

[Marc Maron]

But after, like, so the. And then the next few movies, you know, Marley and Me. What was that?

[Scott Frank]

I know. That's. That's my. My son loves to make fun of me about that movie. You know, if he's. If he's trying to dig it, he'll go, yeah, well, dad, you wrote Marley and Me.

[Marc Maron]

It was a big movie.

[Scott Frank]

I love that movie. And we're big dog people, you know, and I.

[Marc Maron]

You needed a break.

[Scott Frank]

No, it was weird. I didn't want to do it. Elizabeth Gabler, who was running the studio, said, I need a rewrite on this movie. And Don Ruse, who wrote the first draft of the script, is going off to make his own movie, so he can't do this, which is usually a lot. A very common reason for why they need somebody else. Somebody's not available to finish or they don't want to. But Don was going off to make his own film. And I said, I've read that book. My daughter knows that book. And my daughter, every night we would take the dog for a walk. She would tell me another chapter that's so not me. And she goes, you know, it's a story, and the story needs fixing. And I think. And finishing, and I think you could do it. Just take a look at it. And so I read it, and I realized, oh, this isn't about the dog. It's about my marriage. I'm going to make this about my theory, messiness. And when I think about the history of our, you know, 37, whatever years, I think all you think about are the dogs and the different dogs and the this. And it's like this great metaphor. And so I really ended up having a ball doing it.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, that's great.

[Scott Frank]

And so that's how it happened.

[Marc Maron]

That's great. And. And then, like, I guess I. I mean, I'm not a Marvel guy, but the Wolverine and Logan are. Are pretty high up on sort of the list of great, you know, kind of different type of Marvel movie. Am I wrong?

[Scott Frank]

Logan, certainly.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Logan, certainly. Wolverine was. And, you know, I say this to Jim all the time, so it's no secret to Mango. Yeah. It was frustrating for me because at the studio, I read the script and I didn't know anything about Marvel.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

I. I really barely do now. Even I'D not read anything, Right. And so I read a script that I thought was really good, and I go, I don't know why you want me to come on here.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And he said, well, I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do something a little different. And he talked about it, and I said, well, the only thing I can think of is, you know, in the end of the movie, he loses his power for five minutes, and then he gets it back again. I go, what if he lost his power in the first 10 minutes or 20 minutes or even the first act, say? And now you have this guy who's immortal, and all of his problems come from his immortality because you watch people you love die. And now he's stuck in feudal Japan, hiding in feudal Japan. Like, witness Harrison Ford among the Amish. He's among the people in, well, not feudal Japan, but in rural Japan. Sorry. And he's with this woman that he actually really cares for. And the irony is he doesn't have any power to protect her. I go, that would be really interesting. And so we kind of wrote that all up. And the studio said, yes. And the movie that was written ended with a giant robot at the end and all these things. And I wrote the script, rewrote the script, and next thing you know, the studio was like, well, where's the robot? Where's the this? Where's the bullet? Train chase? Where's the that? And suddenly. So the first thing, third of it is one movie, and then it just becomes a marvel. So when Jim wanted to do Logan, I said to him, why, after all that happened before? He said, well, it's a different studio regime now, and they're telling me I can do what I want. And he would send me the scripts. And I was. I had just moved to New York, and I was working on my novel, and I was at the writer's room in. In New York, they have this place. It's, like, across from Tisch School of the Arts.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

It's. It's a. Just a room where you get a desk.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I wanted to go someplace different to write a book because I wanted to feel. You know what that felt like? Because screenwriting, you have so many voices in your head. And I thought, this is going to. I want to try and purge all that.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I had a deal with Knopf, and so I thought, I'm going to do this.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But he would send me. Two things would happen. He would send me scripts all the time of what he was working on for Logan and I would go, this feels like a Marvel movie. This feels like every other Marvel. They're killing the vice president. They're. This. He's a cage fighter at the beginning. He's a. You know, there are all these characters from, you know, touchstones. And he had someone come in once and they. They did a version of it, then someone else did another version of it. And the thing that was so annoying is the reason I bring up the writers room is I was so happy. And I had told my agent, I'm gonna do nothing for a year. Now I have, for the first time in many years, cleared the deck. I shot a pilot that wasn't going to happen.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

So I had all this time in front of me. I don't want to do anything. And in the writers room, you're not allowed to answer your phone.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

So they. You have to get up and leave. And you can't be walking out going, hello? Or they have all these rules. And then they have this little area. So every time he fucking called me, it was a hassle to get on the phone to talk to him. I would have to walk out, call him back. Maybe I miss him. Maybe we. You know. And then he would send me these scripts, and I was just getting really annoyed with him. And then finally he said. And I was about to go shoot Godless in two months, and he said, I need you to do this. Can you do this? And he sort of. And what had happened, the way he got me on Wolverine was he sent me a comic book. And I'd never really read any of these comic books. And it was a different one. It was called Old Man Logan and it was Logan as Clint Eastwood.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I loved it. And so he sent me another comic book, and it was him with this little girl who has claws coming out of her hands for this one. And I thought, oh, fuck, it could be a super violent, like Paper Moon. What if we did that? And so it kind of. I despite myself, and so I said, okay, what if I write the opening scene? And Jim is. He's the best writing partner imaginable. He's so good, and he's so. And even if he's not writing, he's just giving you, you know, guidance as a director. He's so smart, a big brain, and he kind of is very clear with his intention all the time. And it really is a kind of one in one is three situation for me. I really enjoy doing it with him, and I hope we write some other things. He's one of the few directors that I'd still love to write for. But the last thing I was going to say is I said, I'll write the opening scene and if you don't like it, because it's going to be the key of the song. Yeah, then we'll park Company. And. And he said, well, why, what are you thinking? And I said, well, I'd always wanted to do a James Bond movie that opens with not a giant stunt, but it gets the shit kicked out of him.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And that's what I want to do here. And so he said, well, show me what that looks like. And so I started to do it and I was so mad that I had said, yes, as I'm writing and I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but it's coming out in the writing. I'm so angry that I literally stop and write this two or three paragraph, obnoxious as fuck manifesto about this movie will not be this. It will not be that. It will be this. If somebody falls out of a window, they're gonna fucking die. If somebody gets. It was like this awful, stupid thing that is still to this day in the shooting script. And then I wrote that opening scene that's in the movie. And they were like, yes, let's do this, let's go.

[Marc Maron]

So you were in.

[Scott Frank]

And then we just did it back and forth. We just literally. He was in California. We just passed the script back and forth. And I kept saying things like, I just wrote a scene where this whole family gets massacred. There's no way anyone's going to want to do this. And he's like, I love it. And. And so we. And then Shane, two things happened that were fascinating. He decided to use Shane. He was watching it and he said, we're going to use this in the movie in a great way. And it completely organized everything in my head.

[Marc Maron]

What was that element?

[Scott Frank]

It was the idea that the mentor, the violent mentor and the young kid, and the sort of using the tone of Shane for this and also the sort of Western feel because Jim loves Westerns. So. And so I thought that was a really good idea. It was so smart. And then I had this weird idea that just came out of me one day when I was just writing on it, which is, what if the whole thing this girl believes is true? This whole journey he's going on is based on a comic book, a Marvel comic book, where he realizes this whole place that she's got me taking her to, this Eden, isn't even maybe a real Place. And then the joke is, it turns out, of course, to be a real place. And then we finished the script, and I forgot about it. And he had had an outline that he wanted to follow, so we kind of knew the basic outline of it, and we wrote it. We wrote it very quickly. And then I went off to go shoot Godless, and he went off to go shoot Logan, and I forgot about it. And a year or so later, he said, you know, Godless was a long, long shoot because it was a long. It was, you know, seven episodes. So I finished after he did, and when I finished, he said, you know, I have a cut of the movie. And we tested it, and it tested incredibly high. And I said, that's impossible. And he showed it to me, and I watched it on my laptop. He sent me a link. I was so skeptical that I didn't even put it on a big screen. I just watched it on my laptop, and I thought, oh, my God, he stuck to his guns. He did everything. He said. Nobody got in his way. They let him make this movie. I can't believe they let him do some of the things he did in this. And it's one of the. Outside of. The first time I saw out of Sight, it's one of the happiest I'd ever been to see an early cut of something. And God bless him for dragging me into that.

[Marc Maron]

It's funny. It's the closest you've gotten to an independent film.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, exactly.

[Marc Maron]

You work with a guy who is in the biggest machine in Hollywood.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And you guys made an independent movie.

[Scott Frank]

I don't know how we got away with it. I have no idea how we got away with it, so.

[Marc Maron]

But you. But you don't do, like, that thing, the independent movie?

[Scott Frank]

Well, the Lookout was a small movie. Sure. You know, but not. I haven't really. I have for. I don't know why.

[Marc Maron]

Do you think it's. Cause, like, you work for a living?

[Scott Frank]

That could be. Could be the monthly nut, you mean?

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, but that was. The Lookout was the first one you directed.

[Scott Frank]

That was the first one I directed, yeah.

[Marc Maron]

And. And then what? You did one other film, directing and writing.

[Scott Frank]

I did A Walk among the Tombstones. I did this pilot called Hoak based on these Charles Williford novels I love. But for fx, that ultimately didn't happen, but it was. It was a great experience.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, good, man. And then with Godless Goddess.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Shoot a lot of those.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Did you shoot all of them?

[Scott Frank]

All of them, yeah, all of them. And all of the Queen's Gambit.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's interesting because, like, you know, you must have learned, you know, something from focusing on the novel in terms of your own voice.

[Scott Frank]

It freed me up. It was like, it was like. I mean, two things happened. One, I think going on Zoloft at that time.

[Marc Maron]

Yep.

[Scott Frank]

Two, I think working on the book and just hearing, just freeing up my brain just to be loose and more supple in terms of. And not so careful anymore.

[Marc Maron]

And also, you weren't limited to like, you know, with Queen's Gambit was a very interesting environment or world.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

Right. You know, no one's gonna come up with that idea.

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

You know what I mean? And. Well, God, wish you were able to exercise everything you wanted in terms of westerns.

[Scott Frank]

It was a great sandbox to play.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. But I, I, I assume it's just interesting to me that as opposed to, you know, playing the field of like, you know, being a big script writer and, and doctor and stuff, to, to just pull out and go, like, I'm gonna do an indie movie and not care, is that, you know, you, you, you picked a fairly big audience.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. Canvas.

[Marc Maron]

Canvas. To work your shit out with.

[Scott Frank]

With a, a lot of support. But this is where Steven Soderbergh comes in. Because on Walk among the Tombstone and Tony Gilroy, you know, two of my oldest friends and.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, those are great friends.

[Scott Frank]

And they're nasty when I show them stuff. Tony can be brutal.

[Marc Maron]

And he's Michael Clayton, right?

[Scott Frank]

Yes, he's Michael Clayton. He's. Andor right now. He's unbelievable.

[Marc Maron]

The best. Yeah, I talked to him. Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And, you know, we've known each other forever and, and maybe even longer than I've known Steven, I think. But I showed them a cut of A Walk among the Tombstones and the two of them just ate my lunch. I mean, I got vertigo walking home from that. They were so brutal. But they were right.

[Marc Maron]

In what way? What'd they say it was?

[Scott Frank]

Every scene was a new movie. I realized that there was a lot of. I didn't have rules for myself. There was a lot of. Look, mom directing.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And I over complicated. And Steven taught me. He came into the cutting room with me.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And we recut the movie together. And he said, I'll be your editor. Let me be your editor. And I said, well, I don't want to cut your movie. I want to cut my movie. And he said, well, we're gonna cut your movie. You have it all there, but you're using all of it.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And you need to simplify it. And what I learned going through the process in just a couple days with him. I mean, we spent a week together in the cutting room. But. But is that simpler? The effort to make something simpler as a filmmaker makes it more elegant. And in order to make it simpler, you need to have real rules for yourself. And so after that, I did hope, where I experimented on that, and then Godless really solidified that for me. And Queen's Gambit, well, Queen's Gambit, you had to be meticulous, absolutely meticulous. And it was really. Instead of trying to overcomplicate it, how do I really make this simple? How do I choreograph or block?

[Marc Maron]

You make it about her.

[Scott Frank]

You make it about her. But it's even the filmmaking, you know, how are you telling the story? And I relied more and more and on Miss yous Spade, I really experimented with this. How much story can you tell in a single composition?

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

How much can you tell?

[Marc Maron]

And in San.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, exactly. And how much? Because you don't have to cut a lot. And a lot of these young filmmakers. Ari Aster, I was watching Midsomer and I thought Midsummer, Midsummer, I don't know.

[Marc Maron]

How you say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But it was an amazing movie. And he would just have these wide shots and the story would play out. And I thought he really. He really has. There's. There's clear intention in everything that he's doing.

[Marc Maron]

He's a hell of a filmmaker.

[Scott Frank]

Hell of a filmmaker. And a lot of these young horror filmmakers are doing that.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's where it's all happening.

[Scott Frank]

It's fascinating to me. And so in Godless, I shot almost all of it with a 25 millimeter lens. And it's like, what can we do? And you're still. Instead of cutting just to cut, you cut when you need to cut. You cut when you need to punctuate something or when you need.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, but you're not making a gimmick out of it.

[Scott Frank]

No, no, no, no.

[Marc Maron]

You're just utilizing the. The.

[Scott Frank]

You shouldn't notice. It's like. I go back to William W. You shouldn't notice.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And it's still beautiful. It's still got its own rigorous palette. And it had a very strong look. It's still got all of those things and the performances. You're still directing it. Yeah, but you are. You're not running in front of it, waving.

[Marc Maron]

And also when you do these. These series or these miniseries or whatever they're called now, limited series or whatever they're called, you know, you, you're. You can make an eight hour movie.

[Scott Frank]

Yes, you can. And I shoot them like that. I don't shoot them episode by episode. I did on the, on Department Q recently, but that's just the way that came together. But normally I shoot them like a movie by location.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. I mean, I think it's. It must be very exciting to know the craft so well and then to engage in this other craft but being so adept at writing that it frees you. You're not insecure about that?

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

So you can really like. All right, if I'm insecure about being a director, I can go to my own scripts or I can go to these peers that will inform me.

[Scott Frank]

And again, Stephen said to me when he watched Walk among the Tombstones, he's. That it's very insecurely cut. You don't have. Those were these exact words. And then talk about shriveling. And so there are times I'm on the set where I'll be shooting and I'll realize because it's all about the story, it helps you have a conversation with your actors. Those conversations are better. I know I'm ocd, anal, whatever you want to call it. But prepping is really important to me to know just so I have freedom to work with the actors. It's my favorite part of directing, I think. But there'll be times I'll be shooting and I'll say to the crew, we have to stop. I made a mistake. We're not telling the right story here. It's the wrong point of view. Or we're not focused on this and I'm gonna have to shoot my way back to. So we need to stop right now rather than waste time. So I'm gonna figure out to create a scene I can cut. That's the wrong scene anyway. Yeah, let's, let's. And then I would tell the story to them. I would remind them of what it. The story here. And everybody gets excited and, and we, we go. And that happens at least once or twice on everything I've ever done.

[Marc Maron]

Now when you do like, you know, we'll talk about Department Q. But like just, you know, just. What did you learn from Goldman?

[Scott Frank]

Essentially, Goldman was just a great yarn spinner. His instinct for going in the opposite direction.

[Marc Maron]

Okay.

[Scott Frank]

Where you. They think you're going to go.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

To not do. To lead people on like, this is what's gonna happen and that doesn't happen something else.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's Department Q, is all of that.

[Scott Frank]

That's all of that. It's all of that.

[Marc Maron]

It's like I'm pissed off because I only got five fucking episodes.

[Scott Frank]

That's all. I'll give you the rest.

[Marc Maron]

Tell them to give me the rest because now I'm in.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, last four are the best episodes.

[Marc Maron]

And is that it or you can do.

[Scott Frank]

I would love to do another season.

[Marc Maron]

But you shot this as if it was it.

[Scott Frank]

No, we shot it like hoping it would be another season, but.

[Marc Maron]

But this, this crime gets solved.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, well, I need the rest of it and I can't wait for however fucking long. When is it going to be out?

[Scott Frank]

May 29th.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, soon.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, soon. But I want to, I don't want you to forget the first five because.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, I'm locked in. I watched.

[Scott Frank]

I gotta give you. I'm gonna get you, I'm gonna get you the next.

[Marc Maron]

Tell them to send it to. Yeah, but, but like when you, when you're going to write a movie, what do you know you have to do in terms of. Yeah, we know there's a three act.

[Scott Frank]

Structure, but like, not necessarily.

[Marc Maron]

Okay, well. Okay, so that's out the door. But, but like in terms of, like, you know, what are the essentials, you know, in terms of style or in terms of form that you, you've. They're already ingrained in you.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah.

[Marc Maron]

But if you were to tell somebody, if, you know, not, not to make it easier for them, but from your point of view, what do you got to do once you have the story?

[Scott Frank]

So the idea is just the excuse to start with. The idea isn't everything. And you put too much pressure on the idea, you're in trouble.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so the thing I need to be really clear about is who, who am I writing about? And if I can't make two people talk to each other, I can't write them. I can't write characters if I can't, I don't know them well enough. And so no plot is going to come from these people if I just know, you know, slightly of them.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so that's one thing. Character, character, character. Who are these people?

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

I would say the other thing you need to know is you need to constantly be telling yourself, spinning. Do you have the ability to spin yarn? Can you do the once upon a time every time you're writing a scene, you know what comes next? What is surprising to you? When. That's why I don't outline, I outline a couple scenes at a time to know. But, but beyond that, I don't know where it's always going. I have an ending maybe in mind. I have an idea where it's going. But I feel like I just want to keep making it feel downhill as I'm telling the story. I don't know necessarily what the whole shape will be. I get ideas as I go. I'll spend months just writing about the script before I write it. Not doing exercises or things, just writing whatever. Whenever it comes to you, whatever I'm thinking about. And I. And then I'll reorganize that into kind of an order. But I think the, the main thing is to keep yourself open and to not do things again. To not give yourself these tasks that are more about being a good student than being a writer.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And a lot of people, they love their dry erase boards and their cards and their this and that works for them.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But I have a very neat desk because I have a very messy fucking head.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so, so that for me I need to be able to just go off and try and write. Because that's how you get the happy accidents. If you're careful, which I was sometimes early on, if you're too careful, you're not going to. It's going to feel that way. And so I would tell people when you start, just make it downhill. Don't have expectations as to how long it's going to take you to write because that's always disappointing.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And it's going to take you longer. And it does. No one wins prizes for getting a script done. You know, the contract in Hollywood is 10 or 12 weeks for a first draft. I have never in four decades ever made that deadline. Ever. Never once.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Because you can't. I don't know how you can.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And so, so that's where I would, where I would say that if you, if you approach it with these little bite sized things and you kind of make it downhill.

[Marc Maron]

Okay. And with Department Q, I mean, is this all original?

[Scott Frank]

No, Department Q is based on a novel. It's one of a series of novels from this Danish author, UC Adler Olsson.

[Marc Maron]

Because it's another one of these worlds where. Not unlike Queen's Gambit where you're like, how are we in Edinburgh with a cop with ptsd because of a very specific thing that he might have fucked up and kind of moved from there. But I don't watch a lot of that type of television. And because of that, and also because it's so good, I'm like, oh my God, why am I not watching more of this kind of, you Know.

[Scott Frank]

Well, you know, it's.

[Marc Maron]

There's like a little bit of a true detective element to it.

[Scott Frank]

Well, I love those British procedurals, and this is a Danish novel that I turned into a British procedural. And I'm obsessed with, like, Happy Valley and Broadchurch, and Lining of Duty was this fucking masterpiece that's like their Wire, I think, the blue lights, all these. Or going back to Prime Suspect. And they're great. And what I wanted to do, what was so fun about doing Godless, was to embrace every single Western cliche there is. The gunfight, the breaking of the horses, all this. The crazy bad guy, all this. And then turn it on its head somehow. And so I wanted to do a procedural that's also on tilt a little bit. And so that was the fun of it. And so I read these books. The author gave me the. Just gave me the books 15 years ago. He said, they're yours. And I was never gonna write or direct them. I just wanted to watch them. And so I kind of was trying here and there to get them made, and I couldn't do it. And I was in prep on Queen's Gambit when Rob Bullock, this terrific British producer at Left Banks, came to visit me in Berlin where I was shooting. And he said, listen, let me help you. We'll get a writer. You can work with somebody and you can develop it and you can. And then, you know. And I said, okay, but I'm not gonna direct it or do any of it. And we worked for a year with this lovely writer, Johnny Lakhani, who. Who I co created the show with. And then what happened was everything got escalated super fast. The strike came on and I had to stop working on the show. But the British writers were still working. They had two other writers. But the problem was I wasn't involved. So through no fault of their own, the strike ended. I'm reading scripts that we can't shoot because they're different than what I think the show should be. So I ended up writing and directing. I wrote them all. Co wrote. Well, wrote them all, essentially. Or co wrote with the other people and then directed six of the nine.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah. Well, no, because, like, you know, it's one of these things where there's a few turns, you know, like I just. Like within the last episode or two, or maybe even the fifth one that I watch, that it's not just penance.

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

And then you're like, oh, God. So all of this shit's connected.

[Scott Frank]

Yes.

[Marc Maron]

And now I don't know how. Well, right on the Precipice.

[Scott Frank]

Well, the good thing was, because I didn't shoot this because I wasn't gonna be directing it. It was set up to shoot in episode blocks, and I was writing it while we were shooting it. I was building the airplane while we were flying it. Yeah, it was. I've never done that before, and I don't think I'll ever do that again.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

But because we were going in order, I could do that because I didn't. I. So there were times where I didn't finish writing the last episode until two weeks before we wrapped the entire season shooting. And so I would say to the production designer, I think I need a. I think I need a Laundromat.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Scott Frank]

Gonna have a scene in a laundry mat. I think I needed this.

[Marc Maron]

Of that.

[Scott Frank]

And it was. It was crazy.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

And by the way, because of that, it was eight scripts that became nine episodes. And. And I've done that a few times. It happened on Godless Extra happened on. Because I don't know what I'm doing in terms of that stuff. I just. And then chop it up.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's interesting because it comes back around to. And sort of the way that I create comedy bits is that you don't know where it's coming from. So whether it's a muse or a gift or whatever. But when you're cornered and you've got no choice, you've got to find a place to land.

[Scott Frank]

Right. That's exactly it. You've got to. Where are you going to land?

[Marc Maron]

Right.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, that's exactly it. And sometimes when you're cornered, I find myself doing amazing work. And sometimes I find myself so frozen.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's when you bail. You not.

[Scott Frank]

Nothing happens.

[Marc Maron]

You eject with a chute.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah. I realize nothing is happening. I can't. You know, you're hoping here's this facility that's gonna kick in, and it just doesn't.

[Marc Maron]

Well, that's the risk. But it seemed to have worked out for this last one anyway.

[Scott Frank]

Yeah, it is. And that's why, again, going back to writing. And listen, you're storytelling. Your work is storytelling. You are telling stories. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that's what you're doing. And so. And the fun is that we can't guess where it's going.

[Marc Maron]

And also the liability of that is that once you get it all done a month later, you're like, no, I could have.

[Scott Frank]

I know. Well, that's just the part of us.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[Scott Frank]

That could have landed it could have.

[Marc Maron]

Tied the two landings together.

[Scott Frank]

The people who feel that way are usually really good at what they do. The people who say, I nailed it are usually not.

[Marc Maron]

Oh, good. I never.

[Scott Frank]

No, I just watch and I think, oh, man, If I had 10 more minutes on that day or if I'd written.

[Marc Maron]

Because my comedy is so fluid, you know, in terms of how it unfolds, you know, in real time, and then kind of builds itself. It doesn't stop building itself.

[Scott Frank]

No.

[Marc Maron]

Once I've shot it.

[Scott Frank]

Right.

[Marc Maron]

So, you know, what are you gonna do?

[Scott Frank]

You can add, you can do it later. You can keep going.

[Marc Maron]

Well, great talking to you.

[Scott Frank]

Likewise. Thank you so much.

[Marc Maron]

Thank you. There you go. You can stream Department Q on Netflix. It's a good show. It's engaging. I liked it. Hang out for a minute, folks. Hey, people, John Mulaney is back on the show next week and before his new episode on Monday. You can go back and listen to him on episode 551.

[John Mulaney]

You saw my worst set ever, I.

[Marc Maron]

Think, at that one man show.

[John Mulaney]

No. In Aspen.

[Marc Maron]

Did I?

[John Mulaney]

Yes. You don't remember that? Of course you wouldn't. That was a huge moment in my life. And not.

[Marc Maron]

But I was there.

[John Mulaney]

You were the host. I met you that weekend. I hosted for you and Tosh. You guys were co headlining a show. This was. You were wearing American Apparel jackets and overcoats a lot during that time.

[Marc Maron]

Sure, sure.

[John Mulaney]

So you were very nice to me.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[John Mulaney]

I had just seen you on Conan.

[Marc Maron]

Yeah.

[John Mulaney]

I really like that joke you did about your mom calling you and asking you what you thought of this guy Sabu. And you saying, mom, do you mean. Do you mean Barack Obama? So I told you that at the Tosh. I got to host for you and Tosh and I walked up on stage and I started to talk. It was. You reminded me of it when you said my laugh was up here. I couldn't breathe at all.

[Marc Maron]

Hard to breathe there.

[John Mulaney]

Couldn't breathe at all, though. And my first joke, I remember this. Died. It died. And then, oh, my God. I remember panic rolled over me.

[Marc Maron]

Right. But you were having trouble.

[John Mulaney]

I was having real trouble in the bombing sense. And also I couldn't breathe. And to this day, I don't know if I was having a panic attack or elevation sickness, but there was like, concern, like, you.

[Marc Maron]

You got off stage and it was like you were.

[John Mulaney]

Yeah, you and you and Mike D. Stefano were very nice to me. Backstage they cut me an oxygen tank.

[Marc Maron]

I remember this.

[John Mulaney]

Right, Right. And Mike DiStefano sat with me for a little while you came and checked on me, which I always never forgot. You were very cool in that moment and you came on stage and so I bomb and almost die. You come back on stage and said some nice things about my set and kind of used one of my jokes to get into one of your jokes. It was felt. I remember hearing it and going, oh, he's really trying to make it seem like that went fine.

[Marc Maron]

That's from episode 551, available for free on all podcasting apps. For every episode of WTF Ad free. Sign up for WTF plus Just go to the link in the episode description or go to wtfpod.com and click on WTF plus again. John Mulaney will be the guest on Monday show and I also have an important announcement at the beginning of that episode and a reminder before we go. This podcast is hosted by ACAST here. I'm just going to try to hold on to this riff. Boomer Lives Monkey and lafonda Cat Angels Everywhere.