"Right now on "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "If she's just like, I know what to do, I know what to do!" "You'd be like..." "You know?" "I want to be very clear." "I did not distort any facts about Steve Jobs." "I was like, what's it like, being, like, really rich?" "And he was just, like, "There's, like, nothing to buy."" "(Stephen VO) You'll hear from the writers who crafted the year's best scripts." "Aaron Sorkin, "Steve Jobs."" "Meg Lefauve, "Inside Out."" "Nick Hornby, "Brooklyn."" "Emma Donoghue, "Room."" "Tom McCarthy, "Spotlight."" "Amy Schumer, "Trainwreck."" "Hello and welcome to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "I'm Stephen Galloway, executive editor, features." "And I'm Matt Bellony, executive editor." "And let's get started." "Do you have a routine that you follow before you write?" "Well, I mean, it looks a lot like lying on a couch and watching ESPN, to the untrained eye." "I don't know about you guys." "I'm not a speedster, uh, uh-- as a writer." "It takes me a while before I even start typing anything." "You also have executives giving you notes and they're not always good notes." "Uh, I don't have an executive giving me notes." "I've had, for the last few movies, Scott Rudin, a fantastic script editor." "By the way, 120 pages would not get me to the end of the first act, so I like Scott's notes, a lot." "And then, you know, I've worked with great directors like Danny Boyle and David Fincher and they'll--they'll have some good notes, too." "I really like the collaborative aspect of it." "Did the criticism from Apple sting you at all, about Steve Jobs?" "Not really, no." "For one thing, uh, um, I understand it." "Tim Cook, Laurene Powell, wanting to protect the memory of their friend." "For another, they hadn't seen the movie and people very close to Steve who had, like Woz, like John Sculley, former CEO, had been very enthusiastic about it." "The thing that has surprised me is how surprised some people have been that it's not a literal biopic, that it's not a cradle-to-grave story where you land on the greatest hits of the character along the way." "I can tell you that I--I didn't, uh, distort, pervert or invent any facts, uh, about Steve Jobs for this movie at all, except one, which is that Steve did not have confrontations" "with the same five people 40 minutes before every product launch that he did." "That's plainly a writer's construct, just like if I wanted to write a movie about you, an interesting way to do it might be to have the whole thing set, uh, right here" "Right at this round table, and moreover, it isn't-- and I don't think it should be, journalism." "I don't think what you want from art is a Wikipedia page... shot nicely." "I started with the Apple II team because we don't, you know, make that anymore." "Just acknowledge the top guys." "Have a mimosa and relax." "You will not blow me off right now, Steve." "The top guys deserve-- There are no top guys, all right?" "On the Apple II team, there are no top guys." "They're B-players, and B-players discourage the A-players." "I have a question, 'cause I'm really curious about this." "I love the structure of the film." "I thought it was really inventive and original, um..." "And I've had several people who I also consider to be smart film and theatergoers say to me, there's something about the structure of the film that feels very theatrical, Mm-hmm." "it feels like it could have been a play." "Knowing you have written very successfully for the theater," "I just wondered what your thoughts were on that, 'cause I think that's really interesting and valid to some degree." "Yeah." "I enjoyed it as a movie, but...." "No, it is valid and I think that the reason why they're saying that-- I think there are two reasons, uh, why they're saying that." "Uh, one is simply, the amount of language in it, but the other is that in the theater, we're very used to things not being literal, Yeah-- that's what, yeah" "Uh, and in the movies, we are not so much used to things being literal." "It's interesting, right?" "That..." "Uh, uh-- it is." "Anyway, again, I want to be very clear." "I did not distort or invent any facts about Steve Jobs except the one." "Okay, coming to Nick, you did "Brooklyn," which is based on-- Ugh." "How much do you feel you can stretch historical truth?" "Well, I mean, it's a very simple storybook, and it's, um, the story of a, like, a girl, who emigrates from Ireland to" "New York during the 1950s, which was true of hundreds of thousands of people, and so you could more or less come up with any version of that and you would be able to find the historical counterpart." "I also trusted Colm Toibin, the author." "Because, you know, he's a great novelist and I wrote the scene where Eilis, the lead character, arrives in New York and she comes to Ellis Island and Colm describes all this beautifully in the novel, and I did my own" "version of that, and then just before filming, one of the production team phoned up and said," ""You know that people stopped coming to New York through Ellis Island in about 1934?"" "And I said, "No, I did not know that."" "And I called Colm and he said, "Oh, that's interesting."" "But he didn't care." "We need Irish girls in Brooklyn." "I wish that I could stop feeling that I want to be an Irish girl in Ireland." "All I can say is that it will pass." "Homesickness is like most sicknesses." "It'll make you feel wretched, and it'll move on to somebody else." "I have a question for Amy." "What do you do when you have writer's block?" "Or do you have writer's block ever?" "No, 'cause I usually sit down with something pretty specific." "Again, I feel like, very honored to be at this table, someone who's written one movie." "For me, I don't know if I would make the mistake of ever writing something so autobiographical again, because then you have to talk about how-- how true is this, how true is this?" "And you're like, who cares?" "And basically, with the nature of my movie, they were just like, how many dicks have you seen?" "Like, how many dicks have been dangling in front of you?" "And, uh, I was very protective of the character I was playing." "It was sort of me if I had been suspended in where I was sort of sophomore year of college." "With sleeping around and drinking a lot, and I think knowing people are so quick to dismiss a woman as, like," ""Oh, well, okay, so she's a slut."" "So I was really careful with her and one of the opening scenes of the movie, they wanted me to shoot it where it was, like, my POV, a lot of guys on top of me, and I was like," "no, that makes everyone think, "Oh, okay."" "I said, "They're at the door." Like, you just" "You have to be, just, real careful with what people are willing to sort of go along with you for." "I liked that sequence and how you handled it." "Was that something you addressed in the script stage or was that conversations with Judd directorially?" "Long conversations with Judd where I was like," ""Trust me, I know what pple are willing to forgive." Right." "A big part of our process was, 'cause I'm used to, you know," "I've been lucky, I'm a standup, my TV show, that's it, and so I have the final say in most things, so it was a lot of, trust me, "I'm gonna protect this girl,"" "and me being like, eh, you know, 'cause he had final cut and I" "He didn't even have to let me in editing if he didn't want, but it was a lot of conversations and fighting for" "Before you went into production or did some of that" "During production." "All right." "Yeah." "(Amy in scene) Hello?" "Oh, hey there, it's Aaron." "Oh, this is Amy." "I think you butt dialed me." "No, I" " I dialed you with my fingers." "What'd she say, what'd she say?" "Shh." "(hushed) He called me on purpose." "Hang up." "He's obviously, like, sick or something." "Um, yeah, what's up?" "I was calling to say I had a really good time last night." "I was wondering if you wanted to, um, hang out again." "Will you say that again, please?" "I was wondering if I could see you again." "You know what?" "I'm gonna call the police..." "What did Judd teach you?" "Judd Apatow, this is." "Thank you." "What did Judd Hirsch teach you?" "I'm like, "What other Judds are there?"" "Judd taught me a lot." "I was really lucky that I had someone I'm sending scenes to going, "That's good," just encouraging me, just 'cause of" "Had I" " Had he once said, "I don't--"" "I would have been like, "You're right." "I'm gonna go back to the Funny Bone in Bloomington, Illinois."" "But he was really encouraging me and he taught me to trust my instincts and the people I know are funny, and he taught me that, like, when you make a lot of money, there's really nothing to buy." "Is that true?" "Yeah." "You don't want an island?" "No" " Oh, well, I'm not an island" "You know, I still live in a one-bedroom walkup, but yeah, he just kind of took the" "I was like, what's it like being, like, really rich?" "And he was just like, "There's like nothing to buy."" "And I was like, "All right."" "(all laughing)" "Hit every mark." "Thread every needle." "Turn every ride into a thrill ride." "The power and precision of the Lexus performance line." "Now available with turbocharged engines for even more exhilaration." "Including the new 2016 GS." "Once driven, there's no going back." "Mastering irresistibly smooth." "The Lindor Truffle ...from the Lindt Master Chocolatiers." "A hard outer shell with a smooth center." "Welcome to the best time of your day." "Unwrap." "Unwind." "Experience... the melt." "Only the Lindor Truffle." "For the holidays, experience our meltingly-smooth" "LINDOR white chocolate peppermint truffles." "From the Lindt Master Chocolatiers." "♪ ♪" "♪ ♪" "♪ ♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with the writers behind the year's best screenplays." "Emma, your film "Room" is a fascinating situation about a woman who's been imprisoned in a dungeon-like setting with her kid." "What research did you do for that?" "And when you did, what surprised you?" "Well, I had done most of it for the original novel, and the funny thing was, a lot of my research sources," "I was just trying to get information from them, so I looked up things like, you know, video interviews with, say, Elizabeth Smart, and then I got fascinated by the form itself." "I mean, the horror of these interviews, how incredibly nosy and intrusive they were, so things that I was going to just to get information on the lives of those who'd been kidnapped, I actually got fascinated" "by the media around them, message boards about" "Elizabeth Fritzl in which total stranger would be saying," ""She's my hero," you know, and the putting people on pedestals and then knocking them down, so I got very interested in the kind of, you know, meta aspects of it." "And then when we were doing the film, we did a bit more and we found a few sort of extra details--, but it was" "It was mostly a matter of researching as many different situations that had anything in common with this five-year-old growing up in a locked room, so mostly, we didn't look at kidnappings, we looked at situations like refugees." "When I was a little older, when I was 17," "I was walking home from school-- Where was I?" "You were still up in heaven." "But there was a guy, he pretended that his dog was sick-- What guy?" "Old Nick." "We call him Old Nick." "I don't know what his real name is." "But he pretended his dog was sick" "What's the dog's name?" "Jack, there wasn't a dog." "He was trying to trick me, okay?" "There wasn't a dog." "Old Nick stole me." "I want a different story!" "No, this is the story that you get." "The performances, first of all, Brie Larson, and what's the boy's name?" "Jake" " Jacob Tremblay." "Oh, my gosh." "Yeah, he was seven when we cast him." "Oh." "The book was super" "I mean, the movie was also very disturbing, of course, but the book, there were more details, there was more" "And I was really wondering how that-- how you would handled that." "Did you just have a sense of sort of what would be kind of palatable for people to see in a movie theater?" "Do you know what I'm asking?" "We tried not to worry about that stuff too much." "We were aware that breastfeeding is a particularly disturbing thing to show on film." "That's except "The Hills Have Eyes." You know, cannibalism" "Something so unnatural as breastfeeding, yes." "Cannibalism would be fine, breastfeeding is really touchy." "How dare you?" "But also, we were being careful with our child star, too, you know." "Sure." "It's the thing he was touchiest about, too, so I would say, some young men watch the entire film and don't notice the breastfeeding, but, no, most of the time, we tried not to worry." "I remember" "And I had such a dream experience working with Lenny Abrahamson, our director." "There was no faceless executives telling you what to do, it was just one to one with Lenny around a kitchen table, you know?" "But I remember him saying to me, "Look, we could get" ""a mainstream audience for this film, but only if we make it withoutcompromise."" "You know, we can't pander to them all, we won't get them, so I just trusted him with that." "That's a choice in "Spotlight" as well." "How much did you think about what audiences would and would not want to see about the underlying behavior here?" "I don't think we really considered it." "It was more just our avenue into the movie, was through the journalists, and through their experiences, and so we were seeing what they were seeing, and the victims, or survivors, I should say," "they were sitting with, at this point, had come forward, you know, 20, 30 years later, so we're meeting men, particularly, in their 30s and 40s, who are now coming forth with their stories," "and so there are a couple scenes where we see children, but not" "We never see the act, 'cause it really wasn't about that, it wasn't relative to the story or the reporter's experience, and I agree with Lenny, who I think is a great director" "and a really smart guy." "It sort of" "You just gotta forget about that stuff." "You always have an audience in mind, but you're just going after the story, you know?" "How much did you feel free to move away from the actual facts of what happened?" "Um, not that much, actually." "We really tried to stay as close as we could to the events." "We just found them too compelling." "We felt like we didn't need to invent that they were there." "It was more choosing what we could not include, 'cause it was a six-month investigation, we had two hours to tell the story." "And I just, then" " You know, spending so much time with reporters, and a movie about authenticity, which is what it is at the end of the day, we felt like we could not then be inauthentic." "We actually had a moment, we were halfway through this investigation, spoiler alert, 9/11 happens, and, as you know, a couple of planes left Logan, so everyone on the Globe team was taken off" "that investigation, which they were very close at that point to almost cracking it, and put on the 9/11 story, and when we were screening it early on, some people would say, like, "Wow, that's really-- having that moment" ""really takes me out of the movie." "Maybe you should remove it."" "I'm like, "How do you remove 9/11?"" "From a movie, again, about authenticity?" "So, they're wonderful challenges, you know, that I think you gotta deal with." "We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priests." "Practice and policy." "Show me the church manipulated the system so that these guys wouldn't have to face charges." "Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again." "Show me this was systemic, that it came from the top down." "Josh Singer, my co-writer and I on this film, we were doing a lot of research, sort of preliminary research on this, and we sat down with this guy, Clay Shirky," "I don't know if you ever heard anything about Clay, who's the" "Kind of, was one of the first guys out of the new media frontier, and had some interesting thoughts and sort of circled back after he saw where it was heading, which is, like, you have" "I think there's a little bit of a sort of disconnect from the general public of understanding new media." "There's so much more information that we're all better off, and our citizen journalists, and all the sort of aggregate, but the question is, where is it coming from?" "So you have legacy journalism, which has greatly diminished, you know, year by year it gets worse and worse." "What is that?" "Uh, newspapers, real-- real solid high-level investigative journalism, and, like, so who's supplying the news anymore?" "And you know, I think that's something we were sort of" "When we were dealing with the film, we're like, yeah," "I think there's a real-- And now talking with people as we're screening the movie, we realize that people are like," ""Well, there's more information than ever,"" "but the question is, how valid is it, you know?" "So in 2001, newspapers were at the height of their powers before the kind of crash in 2002-- 2005, 2006." "So we don't really deal with where we are now, we just sort of show by example when things worked and this investigation worked extremely well." "Um, but so we didn't have to really editorialize in that way, you know, we didn't have to comment on that, we just said, we'll show by example what it is and hope the discussion" "follows afterwards, people would say," ""Where are we now?"" "Which, it's pretty dire, the journalism industry." "Who has taught you all the most?" "Is there a script that you've learned the most from, or a person?" "I mean, certainly being in a brain trust at Pixar, teaches you a tremendous amount very fast." "The notes at Pixar, coming from the other filmmakers, they're coming from Lee Unkrich, and Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter, so you know, at Pixar, you're also screening the movie many, many, many times in storyboards," "so you're getting 300 sets of notes and then you're going to the brain trust, I mean, there's just tons and tons of voices coming in." "That seems like such a wonderfully unfair creative advantage, you know, like, I'm so jealous of that, they're rewriting as they're doing it and being less like, shooting a movie, watching a couple of cuts, being like..." "No, it is." "let's go back and shoot again." "You make the movie many, many times." "You literally watch the movie in storyboard-- Makes so much, so much sense." "I mean, it's so collaborative." "How is writing for animation different from live action?" "Oh, it's just" " I mean, collaboration doesn't even" "I don't know, what is a word bigger than "collaboration"?" "You know, the storyboard artists, I'm working with 12 storyboard artists." "Their department is called story because they are storytellers, they can change the scene if they want to." "You're working more, like, in television, I guess, where there's a lot of storytellers at the table, but you're still the writer, and I'm working with the director to get his vision and keep it a whole thing" "and keep that DNA moving and what is that big, beautiful idea that we're trying to communicate out to the world." "(Joy) What are your favorite things to do?" "My favorite?" "Um..." "Well, I like it when we're outside." "That's good." "Like, there's the beach and sunshine." "Oh, like, that time we buried Dad in the sand up to his neck." "(Sadness) I was thinking more like rain." "Rain..." "Rain is my favorite, too." "We can stomp around in puddles, you know?" "There's cool umbrellas." "Lightning storms." "(Sadness) More like when the rain runs down our back and makes our shoes soggy." "You're sitting in a room with Ronnie del Carmen, who is a genius, and Pete Docter, who's a genius and Josh Cooley, who's the funniest guy ever and then Amy Poehler comes on, the funniest," "nicest, sweetest person, who would-- That killed it, didn't it?" "Oh, my God, like, you know?" "It's just" "You know, so there are also times, like in any creative process where you're like," ""Okay, we've gone backwards,"" "or "Crap," there are those really, really hard times." "Did you change the script when Amy Poehler came on?" "In animation, they're doing their voices, but they can" "I mean, they're amazing comedians, so they can throw lines." "So she really fit Joy so perfectly, 'cause she has the great vulnerability that you need in Joy." "Otherwise, you know, an incessantly happy person is incredibly annoying." "We have to be really careful about that, and Pete Docter was such a genius in trying to, like, why" "What is her goal?" "It's this child." "Her goal has to be the happiness of this girl, not herself, and then always watching in the writing that her response to feeling vulnerable and out of control or upset is happiness, but you have to see first the, "Holy crap," you know," "the kind of upset vulnerability has to come up in her first, and then she can be like, okay, I know what to do." "But if she's just, like, I know what to do, I know what to do, you'd be, like..." "You know?" "(all laughing)" "Nothing seems to work." "Your hair is still thinning." "You may have inactive follicles." "Re-activate them with Women's ROGAINE®." "The only once a day foam, proven to regrow new hairs up to 48% thicker." "Revive your Va Va Voom." "Women's ROGAINE® Foam." "♪" "(VO) Some call it giving back." "We call it Share the Love." "During our Share the Love Event, get a new Subaru, and we'll donate $250 to those in need." "Bringing our total donations to over sixty-five million dollars." "And bringing love where it's needed most." "Love." "It's what makes a Subaru, a Subaru." "♪♪" "The way I see it, you have two choices;" "the easy way or the hard way." "You could choose a card that limits where you earn bonus cash back." "OR, you could make things easier on yourself." "That's right," "The Quicksilver Card from Capital One." "With Quicksilver you earn UNLIMITED 1.5% cash back on EVERY PURCHASE, EVERYWHERE." "So, let's try this again." "What's in your wallet?" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're sitting down with the voices behind the year's most acclaimed screenplays." "Question for the whole group." "What has been your most difficult moment, your biggest mistake you've made professionally and how did you recover from that?" "I would say this, this, and I don't know." "People I slept with in college are popping up in my mind, but nothing about my career." "I started trying to write scripts before I wrote books, and I didn't know what I was doing, who I was writing for, what they were, and there's a lot of time I won't get back." "Um, I think if I'd known what I know now, if I'd known that back then, then I would have saved myself quite a lot of work." "Have you revisited any of those scripts?" "Oh, God, no." "I don't even know if they exist." "They weren't written on computer, they were written on typewriter." "(Amy) What's that?" "Right." "Just recently, you know, with "The Newsroom,"" "the show's relationship with the critics kind of ran hot and cold and then in addition to that, I really struggled writing it." "It just always felt like I had a pebble in my shoe, that, you know, there was something wrong with my swing, and the way you get past it is, you start the next thing." "You know, if I can, I try to start the next thing before the-- the last thing is over, uh, you know, so, like, while we were shooting "Steve Jobs,"" "I was writing the next screenplay." "Why do you think you had trouble writing that?" "Why do I think I had trouble writing "The Newsroom"?" "It's 'cause Amy kept making fun of me." "Well, that's true." "I don't know what you're talking about, Aaron." "Did you have trouble spoofing him?" "I worked very hard on that scene." "I'm a huge, huge Sorkin fan and I'm very grateful for so much of his work, and I watched all of "Newsroom,"" "I enjoyed it, but it was fun to spoof." "I'm sure it was, and I loved" "So we're clear, I loved "Foodroom."" "I thought it was great, I thought it was really funny and mostly, I've thought," "I've got to get Amy Schumer to like me." "Oh, my gosh." "Now is the chance." "I" " I like-- We like each other." "It's done." "Your work is done." "Tom, how about you?" "You know, I don't know if I have one particular, you know, oh, I-- I don't regret any of it." "I mean, you make a lot of mistakes along the way." "The one thing I regret, I think early on, finding, like, as a young writer, or as an actor, also, which I was, and director, finding likeminded people that I could connect with" "and make myself better by, 'cause I always thought of, like, networking, I remember my father telling me," ""You have to network in this business," and I thought," "I'm never networking, I'm never gonna do it, and I'm not great at it, but," "I think as a result, I kind of shut myself off from some of that, and I think as I started to connect with people creatively, and even going to Pixar for the first time after I did "The Station Agent,"" "it was such an expanding experience for me, because suddenly, I was around all these, like, really odd, goofy, wonderful, smart, talented people doing exactly what they wanted to do and I think it started to unleash me in a different way," "so I feel like maybe I wasted time, shocker, as a young guy." "I love "The Station Agent." Oh, that's very kind." "Meg, how about you?" "Um, I would say it's similar in that I came out to L.A." "to be a writer and then immediately bailed, immediately thought it was too hard, there's no way, you know, all that talk in your head, one, and I immediately became an assistant and then I get to be an executive," "and so you know, you start to shadow artists, which I think it's incredibly dangerous for you, it's incredibly dangerous for the person who is the writer, because you shouldn't be trying to, even unconsciously," "write through that." "It's all very dangerous, but I can't say I regret it because I learned so much about writing and about the process, and I got an incredible mentor in that process, so I don't regret any of the" "I don't see that as a mistake, but there was a lot of time spent not writing, which now I use as a writer, but" "I don't know, I could have just written." "Who was the mentor?" "I ended up working at Egg Pictures," "Jodie Foster's production company." "So she really taught me story and storytelling, you know, she's so amazing at that, that it was a great way to learn storytelling." "Where did you go when you left?" "Well, you know, you do that crazy thing where you throw yourself off a cliff and you're like, you know, if I don't write, I'm never gonna do it," "I've got to just quit." "And everybody is like," ""What?" "You work for Jodie Foster." "You can't quit!"" "And I'm like, "No, but I think I'm gonna." "I think I'm gonna just quit."" "And I quit and immediately had two babies, because there is no better distraction from writing..." "Okay, I quit." "(Megan) Than having babies." "That's pretty good." "So, but then I wrote and had the babies and just, you know, did what every writer has to do." "Like, even if you can, let's say coach or develop at a high level..." "Yeah." "That doesn't mean you can write at a high level-- it's-- Right." "Completely different parts of your brain, so you have to go write the five bad scripts that nobody will ever see and go back to the bottom of the process and learn an entirely new thing, and it's hard because that part" "of your brain is always telling you that you're doing it wrong." "Nick, you said that you also threw stuff out." "You said you started on scripts before novels." "You gave up your work, you gave up teaching..." "Yeah." "To write." "Was it a difficult decision?" "No, no." "Not when I was" "You know, I was, whatever I was, 26 or 27 years old." "I didn't have a family." "I was with terrible teenagers all day, it wasn't a big decision and you can always make teaching money, um, by working in bars or teaching part time or whatever it is." "There was no money to give up, so it really didn't feel like a very high risk thing." "The thing that gets you down with writing I think, is you feel like you're walking a plank and everyone behind you has got jobs and mortgages and you're getting older and older, and you're still the guy who everybody else has to dip in for" "when you go out for a pizza, and that can become a bit embarrassing, but I've never regretted embarking on the journey, no." "Don't go away." "We'll be right back." "[ Julie ] THE WRINKLE CREAM GRAVEYARD." "IF IT DOESN'T WORK FAST..." "YOU'RE ON TO THE NEXT THING." "CLINICALLY PROVEN" "NEUTROGENA® RAPID WRINKLE REPAIR." "IT TARGETS FINE LINES AND WRINKLES" "WITH THE FASTEST RETINOL FORMULA AVAILABLE." "YOU'LL SEE YOUNGER LOOKING SKIN" "IN JUST ONE WEEK." "ONE WEEK?" "THIS ONE'S A KEEPER." "RAPID WRINKLE REPAIR." "AND FOR DARK SPOTS RAPID TONE REPAIR." "FROM NEUTROGENA®." "♪ ♪" "♪ ♪" "How else do you think he gets around so fast?" "Take the reins this holiday and get the Mercedes-Benz you've always wanted during the Winter Event." "Hurry, offers end January 4th!" "♪ ♪" "Are you sure that's gonna work here?" "Yeah, Why wouldn't it?" "I've just never seen anyone pay with their phone here." "I think those only work at like, fancy grocery stores." "We fancy." "Introducing Samsung Pay, the new mobile payment that works almost anywhere your cards can be swiped or tapped." "And now, get a $50 Best Buy gift card when you activate Samsung Pay and register a compatible card." "♪ ♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're getting the inside scoop from the writers behind the year's most riveting scripts." "Do you all tweet?" "I do not tweet." "Little and rarely and reluctantly." "I have never tweeted." "I do not tweet." "I do not tweet." "Oh, wow." "I tweet." "I'm a road comic." "I'm a twitterer." "(Matthew) Best and worst Twitter experiences." "I mean, I've gotten a lot of death threats, so those are the worst." "(Stephen) Oh, wow." "But the best, just like, Gloria Steinem tweeting at me, or just people that are, like, your heroes reaching out." "I remember during the first season of my TV show," "Puff Daddy was like, "That girl's funny."" "And I was like, "What?" Like, just" "And it connects you to people that you would ver be in communication with." "Do you ever feel a burden to tweet?" "I was going to ask, yeah." "No, and I hear that that's the fear, like, there'll be this, like, what do I write, like, you're gonna get writer's block from a tweet, but no, it's just," "if something occurs to me that I think is kind of funny, or if I-- to promote something or to help friends promote stuff." "Were any of these death threats real?" "I'm here." "I was just told by Barbara Walters that talking about them brings more, so..." "Gifts for the tech-savvy uncle." "And the 5-year-old." "Done and done." "With up to 50% off our hottest tablets, like the Ellipsis 10-inch tablet for $99.99." "Get the best deals AND the better network." "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with Hollywood's most acclaimed writers." "Is there anything you wish you could go back and completely rewrite or redo?" "Of ours or somebody else's?" "Actually, either one." "Is there a film you'd love to rewrite?" "There's nothing I've ever written, there isn't a single episode of television, there isn't a play, there isn't a movie that I don't badly wish" "I could have back and do again." "I don't feel that way." "I feel like I did it-- Go to hell." "Because I nailed it." "That's a great feeling" "No, because it's a process, right?" "(Megan) Yeah." "And it's-- What do we regret?" "Hopefully, we don't regret that much." "I think, like, that's what Amy's movie is so great about, right?" "It's like all the mistakes we made and the cumulative and the sloppiness of it." "That's what I love about your movie, the sloppiness of it and, in so many ways, and I feel like, it's what gets us to where we're going and I think better than regretting," "if you can kind of steel yourself for it and, like, accept it and work through it, like you were saying, jump back into the next project, it's just the best way to get work going," "it's a lot less painful." "I think the impulse to write" "(Tom) Mm-hmm." "is to take what went wrong before... and use it with the next thing and work on something fresh and the idea of going back on anything now is a nightmare to me, actually." "I just want to leave it there." "(Stephen) Do you feel that from "Trainwreck"?" "Did it make you want to write more or, more nervous about writing?" "Oh, no, I love writing." "Writing is my favorite thing." "I'm writing all day, all the time, anytime I don't have to be doing this." "(Stephen) But scripts or other things?" "Yeah, scripts, scenes for the TV show." "I love writing." "I'm an introvert and it's such an escape, it's just time well spent, and like you were saying, yeah, there is always somewhat of writing what you know, just something that feels important to me to communicate," "you know, even if it's nothing I've ever experienced, but this one thing that really struck a chord with me." "I saw and loved your movie, but if I had to guess between introvert and extrovert..." "(Amy) Yeah." "(Stephen) It is interesting." "I have a question, actually, just 'cause we'll never be around the table again maybe, but, like, you know," "I feel like comedians-- and I'm far from a comedian expert, so if this sounds dumb, forgive me." "Oh Tom, don't kill yourself." "I know, I know, I know." "But we were talking about writing what you know and that sort of comedians seem to really draw from, right?" "Yeah." "And you seem to do that wonderfully." "So have you ever done any in your comedy where you feel like-- You know, in your work where you feel like you're getting far from yourself?" "Or, have you...?" "No, I came from there." "Okay." "When you start out, you're just" "Everyone's just doing an impression of a comedian, pretty much." "You don't know." "I'm still figuring it out, but I used to play a character on stage and I would say really irreverent, kind of, some racist" "Just, I played, like, this very privileged kind of almost white, sort of Republican chick, and that's not who I am." "Right." "I did not grow up with money." "(Tom) Hm, right." "I'm a Democrat." "But I am white." "Um, and now, I'm" "I'm just keeping it closer and closer to myself on stage." "There are things I've said on stage that, you know, people kind of treat comedians like politicians now, where they go, "What was this?"" "And they'll pull a quote and take it out of my set from three or four years ago, and say, "What does that mean?"" "And it's like, it was a joke, like, it had a setup and a punch line, and I'm evolving, so I don't regret any jokes I've said, but yeah, and then I like a lot of different kinds of comedians," "but it" " There is something really appealing about people letting themselves be a little bit vulnerable, because being a comic is so much about control, it's like, such a yawn that we all had hard times as kids, and so," "as a comic, you get a lot of control, which, it's why it makes the introvert thing a little less surprising, because, you know, I'll be alone all day and my only interaction" "will be with thousands of people in the crowd that I don't have to talk back to, and if they talk back, I'm allowed to throw them out." "But, yeah." "Hopefully, you get closer and closer to yourself, I think." "As a writer, not just as a comedian, do you doubt what you do?" "I think any comedian who starts out is just delusional, like, the thought that you warrant people's attention on stage is very stupid." "It's less self-doubt and more experimentation." "It's like a science experiment." "By the time I film a special or do something on TV," "I've tested these jokes to the point of, it feels like science, like, this is where people laugh, and so I'll try it and if it doesn't work, then I stop doing it," "except for a couple times, where I'll get really indulgent and it just makes me laugh." "Aaron, do you deal with self-doubt as a writer?" "Ugh..." "Yeah" " No, sure." "You have to, it's part of the process." "I can't even expand on it." "Yes, all the time." "I mean, it's like Sisyphus." "There's never been a time when I haven't finished something and haven't felt like I just wrote the last thing" "I'm ever gonna write." "I'm not gonna have an idea." "Uh, nothing's gonna work." "I've used all the words I know in every order I know how to" "You know, that kind of thing." "Emma, what about you?" "This is gonna sound dreadful, but no." "I mean, I often doubt that the work is good, you know, line by line, I might be like, that's rubbish, that's no good, but I try and spend as little time as possible" "thinking about whether I'm any good." "I try not to have a sort of distinctive Donoghue style, and typically, people will have read four of my books before they realize they're all by the same person." "I just try and serve the story, you know, so if it needs to be contemporary and funny, great." "If it needs to be sort of fairy tale language, great, it's not me, it's not me." "So of course, it is just as egotistical as any other kind of writing." "Are you Elena Ferrante?" "(all laughing)" "No, I wish." "But I just try and think of it as, what does this project need?" "What style, what techniques, what vocabulary does this need?" "So that keeps all the pressure of me." "One of the things I've noticed working in films and books is that there's way more opportunity for self-doubt in movies, because you get turned down endlessly by endless numbers of people, whereas with my books," "I'm dealing with my editor, and it's a long-established relationship, and unless I've completely screwed up the book, they will publish it." "With movies, it's, every week, a financier," ""No, we're not interested, an actor's not interested, a director's not interested," and each one, I think, if you do have self-doubt, you're being hammered into the table just by the process and one of the great reliefs" "about writing fiction is not having to deal with that." "You adapt other people's novels and not your own." "Yes, yes." "Is that a formal decision you came to early?" "Yes." "Or did it sort of happen?" "I decided" "I did my first one, "Fever Pitch" I adapted myself, and I enjoyed it and it had to become something else, but when "High Fidelity,"" "the next book was optioned, I thought," "I don't want to do this, I don't want to spend three years writing a book and then five years taking out all the bits that I put into the book in the first place and dealing with the same characters," "for what would probably turn out to be eight years." "I mean, that's the maths of it, that it takes more or less, or it's taken five years for all the movies that I've been involved with to be made, so I would really rather do something else," "and the beautiful thing about adaptation is having access to somebody else's head." "I think with fiction, there's always a point where you think," ""No, this one's gonna be different, this one's gonna be different,"" "and then halfway through you think, "Oh, it's me again."" "And whereas something like" "You know, last year I adapted "Wild"" "and I could not have written that book, but you know, there's something I can do in the adaptation process, so it's really refreshing for me to adapt somebody's else's." "Stay tuned for more from the year's hottest writers." "Nothing seems to work." "Your hair is still thinning." "You may have inactive follicles." "Re-activate them with Women's ROGAINE®." "The only once a day foam, proven to regrow new hairs up to 48% thicker." "Revive your Va Va Voom." "Women's ROGAINE® Foam." "Gifts for the tech-savvy uncle." "And the 5-year-old." "Done and done." "With up to 50% off our hottest tablets, like the Ellipsis 10-inch tablet for $99.99." "Get the best deals AND the better network." "♪ ♪" "♪ ♪" "How else do you think he gets around so fast?" "Take the reins this holiday and get the Mercedes-Benz you've always wanted during the Winter Event." "Hurry, offers end January 4th!" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're hearing from the town's best writers, how they make the best scripts." "I have a question for the women here." "What annoys you most when you see female characters written on screen?" "I do get sick of seeing those endless girlfriend roles, you know?" "I" " In order to cast Ma in our movie "Room, "" "I think I watched every movie that featured a white woman between 20 and 30, and so often you see brilliant actors, like say Brie Larson, who we both worked with." "(Matthew) Great..." "And the number of small girlfriend roles they get, that are just so unworthy of them, so that annoys me in movies, where woman are so often the incredibly supportive element." "I mean, even a good movie, like, say, "Love  Mercy,"" "there would be some angelically supportive woman propping him up and there's just too many of these roles." "Do you find as women writers that you're not given the chance to write action pieces or male-centric pieces?" "Well, I'm gonna write Captain Marvel, so it's pretty action, so I think" "Is he gonna get his period?" "It's a woman, Captain Marvel." "(Megan) It's a woman, Captain Marvel." "Yeah, I don't know, I" " I think that" "I'm hoping, and perhaps this is naive, that if you're a great storyteller, that that's the first stop, but male/female, you're writing about emotion inside somebody's head, you're writing about a superhero," "you're writing about a historical figure, you're a great storyteller, so I'm hoping that's the first stop, but perhaps I'm naive in terms of what they're looking for, but yeah, I mean, right now," "I think it's not ideal, but I think it's fine that they want a woman to tell a woman's story." "I think that's pretty awesome." "Ideal, meaning that's all you get to do is do women, but that's okay, like, let's have women tell women's stories, that's" " Let's do that." "(Amy) Yeah." "They were asking me during the press about Judd and, like, how he's gotten a bad rep that isn't right enough for women, it's like, first of all, he has, and like, he's not a" "Like, why don't you write more for men?" "It's just-- It's just strange." "I think, yeah, if you sort of identify with that and you want to write about it, but I think it's a strange sort of criticism." "I think it's different than the sort of diversity issue, but with gender, it's just" "I think it's kind of like a strange observation." "It's exciting that we got six movies here and four of them feature great female roles." "I haven't seen your film, Nick." "I've seen the trailer, it looks great, but..." "But it's still rare." "(Amy) Oh, yeah." "Especially in Hollywood, I mean..." "Yeah, but I'm just saying, it's exciting that we're at this table and" "If you look at the statistics for, you know, women over 40, there are no major roles." "You know, except the ones that Meryl Streep takes, even with several women running the studios." "(Tom) Yeah, yeah." "It's just not happening." "My next movie is an action movie with a woman in her 60s." "Is this the one you're writing with Jennifer Lawrence or wrote?" "No." "(Stephen) Okay." "We're both very young." "(all laughing)" "And my next question:" "Is there a film or a writer that really influences and shapes your writing?" "Oh, a few." "I mean, when I was starting out," "William Goldman took me under his wing and he kept me there." "You know, he's still the person I show pages to..." "Oh, really?" "and talk to from time to time." "Did you show him the Steve Jobs' script?" "Sure." "What did he say?" "He said, "They're really gonna let you do this?"" "He was very helpful-- Is he as brutal as his reputation?" "I've never had the privilege of meeting that guy, but what I've read about him is he" "I mean, in a wonderfully smart way, but is he as brutal as he's made out to be?" "No, he's just wonderfully smart and he's, uh, uh" "Listen, there's a bit of a curmudgeon about him, but it's very charming, it's not threatening." "(Stephen) Nick and Emma, how about you?" "I've learned the most, being brand-new at this," "I've learned the most just from going through, from writing the script, based on my novel, right through to seeing it getting made and the individual scenes where all the dialogue fell away and I realized that's still my scene," "and I wouldn't have known that starting out." "I would have thought, the scene is really the words they speak." "You know, I was all about the dialogue at first, and I now realize that in almost a homeopathic way, they can take away all the dialogue and it's still the scene, and I even began enjoying when the actors improvised," "whereas I was really tense about the notion of them improvising before, I remember in the writing process, about draft three," "Lenny said, "Oh, that's a family meal, they can improvise."" "And I'm like, "No, no!" "I'll write them great lines!" "Let me write them great lines!"" "And then on the day, they were doing lots of improvising, and I, at that point, trusted them." "I trusted they had their characters and I liked what they came up with." "And because we were working with a child, it seemed to make sense to improvise a bit because when you want that completely naturalistic, you know, bouncing on the bed fun with Mom stuff, you have to let them improvise." "How much did you guys improv, like, with Bill Heder and LeBron James?" "There was a good amount of improv, yeah." "We would shoot it, sort of, as scripted, and then we'd play, and people would throw out all" "(Matthew) How much of the play takes made it into the film?" "Um..." "I don't know." "A bunch?" "Statistically speaking." "How much do you feel a writer should write what he or she knows?" "Oh, I don't know." "I think people should do what they're good at." "And, uh, some people are great at writing fiction," "I know I love reading fiction and historic fiction." "Um, I--I like to write what I know, you know?" "Is what you know the external situation or is it the internal, what you know about life and what your perspective on life is and what you've observed and seeing that can happen on Mars, that can happen in a room" "Like, I don't know that what you know has to be the external." "I mean, certainly for a beginning writer, that might be easier, because it's right there." "I think" " I think that's the thing." "That old Updike line about hugging the shore." "I think the process of getting older is pushing further out and, you say write about what you know." "I don't know that much." "I would run out of material very early." "(Nick) But my career is going on, so I've got to find some other stuff, and of course, maybe Aaron didn't know that much about Steve Jobs before he wrote the movie and you find out stuff" "and you dramatize it, and that's the joy of the job." "I didn't know actually anything about Steve Jobs, and more importantly, I didn't care that much." "Um, uh, and God knows I didn't know and still don't know anything about technology." "I'm technologically illiterate." "My point is, it can become what you know." "Your take on a particular story is gonna be framed by your subjective, uh, view and so I think if you lined up ten writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs," "I think you'd get ten very different movies." "We're well on our way to proving that." "Um, Santa Fe Opera Company just commissioned an opera about Steve Jobs." "And the Apple literalists, their heads are going to explode when they try to explain to people that Steve Jobs wasn't a tenor who sang an aria, uh, uh, you know, but it's gonna be those writers" "But the ride at Universal Studios is killer." "WE LOVE," "LOVE," "CHOCOLATY," "CREAMY," "WITH A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA." "MMM DELICIOUSNESS." "COOKIES" "OR ALMONDS." "YUMMINESS." "HERSHEY'S IS MINE," "YOURS," "OUR CHOCOLATE." "WHO WANTS TO TRY?" "BEFORE EARNING ENOUGH CASH BACK FROM BANK OF AMERICA" "TO STIR UP THE HOLIDAYS," "BEFORE EARNING 1% CASH BACK EVERYWHERE, EVERY TIME" "AND 2% BACK AT THE GROCERY STORE," "EVEN BEFORE THEY GOT 3% BACK ON GAS," "ALL WITH NO HOOPS TO JUMP THROUGH," "DANIEL, VANDI, AND SARAH DECIDED TO USE" "THEIR BANK AMERICARD CASH REWARDS CREDIT CARD" "TO SWEETEN THE HOLIDAY SEASON." "THAT'S THE SPIRIT OF REWARDING CONNECTIONS." "APPLY ONLINE OR AT" "A BANK OF AMERICA NEAR YOU." "Give the gift of the better network." "Save up to 50% on our hottest Android smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S6." "Get the best deals AND the better network." "[humming]" "Track 5 vocals." "Track 3 piano." "♪" "♪ Someday at Christmas, ♪" "♪ men won't be boys ♪" "♪ playing with bombs like kids play with toys. ♪" "♪ One warm December ♪" "♪ our hearts will see ♪" "♪ a world where men are free. ♪" "We swing it like that?" "♪ Someday all our dreams will come to be. ♪" "♪ Someday in a world where people are free. ♪" "♪ Maybe not in time for you and me, yeah ♪" "♪ but someday at Christmas time. ♪" "♪ Someday at Christmas time. ♪" "Yeah, give ourselves a hand." "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with the writers behind the year's most admired movies." "We wanted to ask everyone their favorite line of movie dialogue, something that has always stuck with you or that has influenced you in some way." "Not their own, presumably." "Not their own." "It could be your own, I guess." "What came to mind right away was, the movie "Jesus' Son."" "and Samantha Morton's character and Billy Crudup, they're like, you know, falling weirdly, quickly in love and she says," ""We're wrecking like trains."" "That's a good one." "I just love that." "That's great." "Others?" "One of the movies that made me want to write was Barry Levinson's "Diner."" "And I don't know why I always remember this line, but there's a scene where Mickey Rourke and I can't remember the other guy." "They meet this beautiful girl who's riding a horse and she says, "My name is Jane Chisholm, like the Chisholm Trail."" "And they go, "Oh, right."" "And then one turns to the other and says," ""What (bleep) Chisholm trail?"" "I don't know why, but I always" "That seems to sum up my attitude to writing, really." ""What (bleep) Chisholm Trail?" (Stephen) Emma?" "I'm so intimidated to be in this company," "I cannot think of a single line from a single movie." "(Megan) I can't either." "Just go on." "(Megan) I can't either, it's so funny." "(Stephen) Tom, what about you?" "You know, I--I" "I almost have the same thing and then I have too many and I'm like, who would I" "But for me, and this sounds a little bit like a cop out and maybe it is, but it's silent moments that I go to." "It's not having anything to say." "Yeah, that's..." "Oh, if we're allowed to pick them, the opening sequence of "Up." (Tom) Simple ideas seem easy at the time." "(Emma) The most perfect short film about any-- a whole life with no dialogue." "Well, Butch Cassidy jumping off the" "(Aaron) But that" " Butch Cassidy jumping off the cliff wouldn't have meant anything without the "I can't swim" scene." "Great." "(Aaron) That comes before, yeah." "(Nick) You're certainly right." "And you're right there, Tom, that there are silent moments in movies, like, for instance, Helen Mirren, looking across the stream at the stag that-- that stayed with us for a long time." "But generally, when we remember movies, we remember-- Snappy lines." "(Aaron) And I'm only mentioning this because this is a group of writers around this table, we remember lines of dialogue that stay with us, like," ""We're gonna need a bigger boat,"" "uh, or something like that, but, uh" "Great one." "Is that yours?" "That's Shakespeare." "Mine is actually from a movie that didn't quite work," "I think it was in the early '80s, called "The Competition,"" "with Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving." "I really like-- I'm drawn to people who are" "And especially writing about people, who are really good, uh, at something, and this movie was about two world-class pianists, uh, who fall in love during, uh, a piano competition and it really looks" "like Richard Dreyfuss is going to win this competition, and then he's standing backstage while Amy Irving plays her-- just ungodly difficult concerto out there, and she wins, and he's really dumbstruck, uh, and she says, uh," ""I mean, you had to know I could play."" "And he just says, "Not like that."" "Um, uh, and that line has always stuck with me." ""Not like that."" "(Megan) And I would say, I'm the opposite," "I don't remember the dialogue, I remember images, like, as soon as you asked that question," "I see images starting to flash, like, in "The Piano," he's dragging her over to cut off her finger, or I see in "Blue," she's coming up out of the water and hears" "the music and goes back under, or "Toy Story" when he looks out of the toy chest and the whole room turns into Buzz Lightyear, like there are these kind of intense visual character moments that have plot in them," "they have theme in them, they're visual, they're using the medium, they're emotional, like, they-- just these perfect moments, that's what I remember." "Those are" " They're like these collection of words." "(Tom) Maybe" "Maybe because Aaron's putting the screws to us now, maybe Meryl Streep, "How do I look?"" "at the end of "Kramer vs. Kramer,"" "right before the elevator." "(Megan) Oh, that's so good." "(Tom) That" " Just that question." "That also is a quote from "The Wire."" ""You look good, girl." (Stephen) By the way... (Tom) We can finally talk about" "Something about the vulnerability." "And it was improvised." "We didn't know that." "They were shooting the-- the scene, and Robert Benton overheard her say that and said "That's how we're gonna end it."" "Genius." "And that's how we're gonna end this." "I'd like to thank all of you for taking part in" ""Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "(Tom) Thank you." "(Aaron) Thanks very much." "(Nick) So it's just images..." "(Tom) Good to end with Robert Benton." "(Nick) This is really good." "(Amy) So we're useless, okay."