Go Into The Story Interview: Javier Grillo-Marxuach
An in-depth conversation with the television writer and producer about story structure, narrative flow, and how a great script leads to an “inevitable dramatic conclusion.”
I have followed the career of Javier Grillo-Marxuach since his days as a writer during the first two seasons of the hit TV series Lost. Since then his writing and producing credits include Medium, Helix, The 100, and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. He is also co-host (along with Jose Molina) of the popular podcast Children of Tendu.
Javi is active on Twitter (@OKBJGM) and for those interested in writing, he is a great follow as he often dispenses observations and insights about the craft on that social medium platform. Indeed, it was one of his tweets which inspired me to reach out to Javi to do an interview. Here it is in its entirety.
Scott Myers: You posted a tweet some time ago: “A great script creates an irresistible narrative flow that propels a reader to an inevitable dramatic conclusion.” I thought this was a compelling observation and I wanted to have a conversation with you about it. What was the inspiration for that?
Javier Grillo-Marxuach: I think it’s twofold. One of the things that I meant by that is about the physical flow of the words and paragraphs on the page. The other one is about the flow of the story itself.
I’ve been a big proponent of the idea that a script isn’t just a blueprint for a movie, but that it should be a work of prose that stands on its own. It’s so vital that we, as screenwriters, provide a very specific idea not just of what we think should be in front of the lens, but also of tone, of character. That is expressed with how you work on the page, with what your style is.
The other side of it is the story side of it: the idea that regardless of whether your screenplay is an action thriller, or a deeply character driven independent slice of life movie, the inevitability of the story should be the defining factor and the argument for your screenplay’s existence.
What I’m trying to say is that every scene should make the next scene inevitable.
Ultimately, when you read a great script, you feel you’ve been on a journey and that, in hindsight, the final destination could not have been any different. As a writer, it’s incumbent on us as screenwriters to be very rigorous about that, and to be rigorous about the experience of reading the script, and the experience of the reader living in that story while they’re reading the script.
Scott: That’s a little tricky, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, if that inevitability is there, as a writer, you don’t want to tip that off to the audience so much that they can forecast where it’s going.
Javier: Absolutely. Look, it’s not about predictability, and it’s not necessarily about the story being only action leading to the next scene, or what have you.
You can look at some of the most silent and contemplated films you’re going to see out there and when you’re done watching the movie, you go, “Well, that’s the only way that story could have played out.” Doesn’t mean that when the audience is watching the movie, they should be saying, “Oh, there’s only one way this movie can play out.”
The sense of inevitability is something that it’s the engine of the car, it’s not the driving experience of the car. When you finish driving your car, you say, “Hey, I’m at my destination.” You don’t say, “Of course, I’m at my destination. The pistons were firing.” It’s more about that.
I know it’s an elusive idea, especially when you talk about it in terms of movies that aren’t necessary the most basic action or one thing leads to another thing. Ultimately, only by providing that sense that the movie could have only played that way, after the fact, do you succeed as a storyteller.
Scott: Do you have some examples of that, like films or TV episodes that you feel reflect this basic sensibility?
Javier: Look, there’s the couple of “perfect screenplays” from the ’80s and ’90s that we all love. Something like Back to the Future, or Die Hard, or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those are examples very much within the action genre where the script writing is incredibly intricate and clever, but it’s very easy to say, “Well, this only applies to action.”
I saw a movie called Certain Women directed and written by Kelly Reichardt. An amazing filmmaker and her films are not about running and jumping, and screaming. They’re about very ordinary people living very ordinary lives. That’s a movie that takes place over three vignettes, but every vignette in that movie is one where the thoughts of the characters, the mental state of the character, things that are dropped in subtext early on, attitudes that you see early on in each story, all come together at the end of the story to give you that sense of inevitability.
It’s a very quiet movie. It’s not an insert tab A into slot B story — but you’re still getting that sense of this is what these characters were fated for. For me, it’s something that ultimately comes out of character, motivation, and how well you elucidate the psychology of your characters.
When you look at a movie like 8 1/2, not exactly a model of classical structure. In fact, the movie that defies it in a lot of ways, but because of Guido’s indolence, because of Guido’s inability to focus, because of the way that his relationships with women play out, every relationship in that movie works out in a way that you realize at the end, this is how this movie was going to end.
That’s one of the reasons why that movie in addition to being a great visionary work of cinema has remained fresh and interesting… it tells a story about the inner life of a person and how that triggers a chain of events that leads to a kind of magically realist ending which nevertheless feels exactly correct.
Scott: Joseph Campbell said that the external journey is really an internal journey. That the hero’s journey is not a journey of discovery, it’s a journey of rediscovery. It’s not a journey of attainment, it’s reattainment. That there’s something inside the Protagonist the character needs to discover, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Glinda the Good Witch tells her at the end, “Dorothy, you’ve always had the power to go home, you just needed to discover it.” Does that resonate with you at all?
Javier: Absolutely. I recently wrote an essay about Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s refuting this increasingly popular theory that “Indiana Jones’ actions have no bearing on the conclusion of the film.” Which is ridiculous.
You look at Raiders from a level of an action movie, it’s great. The action sequences are written in such a way that they unfold the same way that a great dramatic scene would unfold. It works on all of those levels.
If you think about Raiders of the Lost Ark on a character level. Rene Belloq, the antagonist in this film literally tells Indiana Jones, “We have both fallen from the light.” This is a line that happens an hour into the movie.
The climax of the movie is that Indiana Jones is given the opportunity to see the face of God, which is the only thing he’s wanted all this time, but because of how he has survived through this adventure, he is able to kind of muster the humility to not look at the face of God, which is why he survives this ordeal.
It’s him regaining a certain nobility that’s lost within his character. The movie is only about the attainment of the Ark of the Covenant on the purest level of plot — the story is about the attainment of grace. When you look at it on the psychological level, there are clues to the entire film that this is where it’s going, including the monologue in which the villain tells the hero exactly what his problem is.
It’s interesting because regardless of genre, if you’re thinking about story as the fusion of plot and character, character is every bit as important. Again, let’s talk about Die Hard. You look at Die Hard, it’s a movie about a guy trying to get his marriage back together.
Scott: Exactly.
Javier: It just so happens that terrorists stormed the therapy session. Again, all of the little clues and when you look back on that movie, you see that what the movie was leading to is not necessarily explosion of the Nakatomi Tower, but the explosion of John McClane’s ego in that bathroom after he’s injured his feet and all that. That’s the emotional climax of that movie certainly.
Scott: I know Steve de Souza, one of Die Hard’s screenwriters. We talked about that. I asked, “How important was that dynamic between McClane and Holly?” He said — and I’m paraphrasing here — “The whole emotional story is about them trying to get back together and him feeling bad about that argument they had.”
Let me ask you a question. This language system, Want and Need, which we’ve seen… It’s very helpful language system in terms of the protagonist. How important do you think in terms of this idea of the inevitability of the story is tied to their Need. For example, Luke Skywalker in Star Wars IV, living in the furthest edge of the galaxy, but he’s got Jedi DNA inside him. Will Turner in The Pirates of the Caribbean, despite attempting to live a normal life, he is at his core a pirate. Michael Corleone in The Godfather, his father doesn’t want him to become involved in the family business, but he’s got that mafia DNA. How much of that do you think is a relevant point to dig down into the character and discern what that deepest need is?
Javier: Wow. Ultimately, you can’t start writing a screenplay until you know that. Ultimately, if you want to boil it down to its most essential, you establish a character’s wants, needs, and desires. Then you give them to them in the worst possible way. I think we can all agree to that. One of the things that has stuck with me about my education in playwriting was the idea that the dramatist is basically a crazy train conductor who’s making all the trains crash.
You may not know how your movie ends. There’s things that I’ve written where I started writing them not knowing how they were going to end, but I knew what it was deep inside that the character was looking for, by going on that adventure or having that dramatic situation happening to him or her.
Ultimately, movies can be a three act structure, four act structure, or Save the Cat!, or Robert McKee, or Syd Field… or Syd Mead. I think I prefer Syd Mead, but let me tell you, when it’s you and the page, you need to forget all of your “education” when you’re writing a script.
You’re like an actor. You learn your lines, so you can forget them. You learn how to write, so you can forget how to write, so that the script tells you how to write it.
A lot of people mistake a certain kind of atomic detail of character knowledge — the kind that gets taught in schools — for real character. A lot of people tell you, “You need to know what your character has in his pocket.” To which I say, “I don’t know. I’d rather just know what my character’s biggest flaw a person is and how the story that I’m about to tell illuminates that flaw, and shows them either overcoming it heroically or succumbing to it tragically.”
If you don’t know that you don’t have you don’t have a film.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re one of those writers who starts with character, starts with plot. I’m a plot inward guy. I prefer to start with plot, and then work my way in, but none of it works until I know what’s in my character’s head, not my characters pocket.
Scott: Let’s talk about Breaking Bad. If you go to the pilot episode, you see two instances where Walter, his rage comes into play. One where he quits the job at the car wash, screams at the owner and attacks the air freshener display. The second and more important one is where Walt Jr. is buying some clothes in a clothing store with Walt and Skyler, and these three kids are making fun of him. Walt exits, and then comes back and assaults the lead jerk.
You see right from the very beginning, Walt’s got a level of rage and anger. Part of that’s tied to his deal where he sacrificed the money that he had with the fledgling company Gray Matters Technology. What’s interesting to me is that, who he becomes, this guy who is actually drug lord, the seeds that that are there at the very beginning.
Would you agree that basically, the essence of who the character becomes are there at the beginning of their journey?
Javier: I absolutely do. I think that’s what guides you in into… Again, you don’t have to know where the plot goes, but you have to know where the character goes. There may be room for surprises there, I would argue.
I think that I’m getting it right, but you can correct me because you’ve probably seen the Breaking Bad pilot more recently than I have. There’s also a scene in that pilot where Walter and Skyler have sex.
He sort of is very commanding during the sex and he gets rough with her in a way that shows you that… It’s still consensual, but you get the sense that he’s taking the power position because not by betraying, but by pushing that intimacy with her, can he be the powerful one in the relationship?
Scott: It happens just after he successfully makes drug money for the first time. The sex is essentially symbolic of the Heisenberg spirit aroused within him.
Javier: He can’t be Heisenberg without betraying the intimacy he has with Skyler. You’re seeing it there, too. It’s all over the show. I look at the end of Breaking Bad and it is dead solid perfect. The masterfulness of that show is that at the end of it, the audience gets a cathartic restoration of the moral order of the universe… but you’ve also gotten a good three hours where Walter White basically evil Batman and he takes down some people much worse than he. He’s literally going around getting vengeance on everybody, building machine guns out of garage door openers and crap like that.
It’s a great ending in that it gives the audience everything they want. They get their action. They get their vigilante antihero. Yet he dies because the moral order of the universe had to come back together for it to be an American television show.
Scott: I agree. I thought that it was a perfect ending because you think, well, he could go full Heisenberg. His last moment with Skyler was, “I did it because I enjoyed it. I’m good at it and I enjoyed it.” Of course, he’s shooting people and all that, that’s the Heisenberg.
But he’s also taking care of his family. He’s taking care of Jesse. That’s Walter White. At the end, there is a synergy between these two dynamics. He becomes in effect the merging of the two dynamics. It’s just great.
Javier: If you look at Mad Men, it’s a really interesting case of a show not having that propulsive plot. Breaking Bad, every episode leads into the other. Every episode ends on a cliffhanger or a question that is very vivid, very specific. You go episode by episode and you’re seeing a story unfold.
It’s one of those stories where the inevitability is a scene by scene, chapter by chapter. You take something like Mad Men, which is a lot looser, the serialization is not that building tension serialization, but it’s a serialization of characters moving through their world evolving.
The thing that’s fascinating about Don Draper is that the show ends very much as it begins, and it’s by telling you the only thing this guy is good at is advertising. That’s how the show begins. He’s given every opportunity to escape.
You, as an audience, want him to. You root for him. You want to stop being an alcoholic and a philanderer, and to find true love, and to find himself in all that. At the end of it, that’s saying the same thing it’s been saying season after season, which is this guy is too broken to have a healthy relationship with anybody.
So Don Draper is toxic to everybody he comes near, but he invents “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” because this is the thing he’s great at. Again, it’s inevitable. That’s not a show about crime or about things that one action leads to the next. It’s a much looser show, but you reach a similar climax.
Scott: That’s important, too. When you say inevitable, I suppose most people would think, “Well, the moralistic universe, it’s a positive outcome.” There are stories where characters refuse to change. Like Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane who is destroyed in the end.
From a writing standpoint, we are open to any and all of those possibilities. There’s still an inevitability to them in terms of the character as long as we understand them, but they don’t necessarily have to have a positive arc.
Javier: The genius of the storytelling, in Mad Men especially, is that Don is a horrible person. You wouldn’t want that guy in your life, but you’re rooting for him to get better because you recognize that he’s a horrible person because his father was abusive and he was raised in a whorehouse.
He was never loved. Society has given him an impossible standard to live up to, but he’s taken that as a messianic North Star that he’s got to get to… and then he’ll be fixed and perfect… but he never will be. You relate that. I think that’s why that show is masterful too.
Again, Charles Foster Kane, you bring him up and you really want for him to just love Susan Alexander for herself instead of… The only way that guy can show his love is by throwing money at it. Again, the end of that film that he’s going to die alone, unloved, is inevitable. You see it from the very beginning. He’s playing on the sled.
I have a friend who… I think that he got this idea from David Mamet… but he says that basically, the end of your movie has to be in the beginning of your movie. In a lot of ways, whether the character changes or not, you’re seeing a direct reflection of what you set up is at the end of this film.
Scott: Carl Jung, who is hugely influential in Joseph Campbell, talks about the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you are. That “are” state in some ways already exists there. It’s there.
Javier: Absolutely. I’m not as familiar with the details of Jung’s work, but what you’re saying resonates with me in terms of how… The trick of screenwriting is making that look fresh, making that unpredictable.
The inevitability shouldn’t become clear until you’re in the car on the way home. Or turning the TV off and going to make yourself a sandwich. Because the time between when the movie ends and the credits roll should be the time that you are in such a state of catharsis over having seen something that, maybe you can poke holes at the plot or whatever, but you’re ultimately satisfied because you’ve had that experience with the character in some way.
Scott: Practically speaking, let’s bring this down to writer to writer. How do you do that? How do you say, “I understand the character and I understand where they’re going to end up. Here’s the plot. How am I going to do this in a way that there is going to be that inevitability, that the character is going to have to go from here to here psychologically, physically, and geographically, yet at the same time, do it in a way that the reader or the audience is not going to be able to forecast where that’s going?” How do you do that?
Javier: That’s a great question. How do you do it? The last spec screenplay that I wrote, I set to myself the goal of I’m not going to know how it ends. I knew what I wanted the main character to do, and I literally just stopped writing whenever I didn’t know where it had to go.
There’s two things. One of them is on that one, my story-breaking process, which I was doing while I was writing, consisted of only asking the question “what needs to happen next?” based on what’s happened in the scene I just wrote.
Not what scene would I like to see, what would be cool, what would be a great visual. What needs to happen next to this character. This was fairly linear film, because it was a revenge action film. That was pretty clear.
One of the things I wanted was for the arc to be not the character changing, but rather proving herself to the world — showing the world that she has to be accommodated. It’s about a character bending the world to her will.
I’ll tell you something that I learned from writing comic books. I couldn’t believe that this never occurred to me. In the mid-aughts, I was doing a lot of comic book work, some from Marvel, some from DC.
I had never written comics before. I’d been writing on TV for ten years. I read a lot of comics. I realized that in comic books, you script every page as a discrete entity. The script says page one, and then you describe what happens in page one. Page two, and you describe that.
What I realized was that at the end of every page of the comic book, I needed to have a question. I don’t mean that prosaically like somebody literally asking a question, but I have to have… If I want you to turn the page, I need to end that page with something that needs to be answered.
It might be a character need. It might be a snappy line that demands a rejoinder, or it might be a literal question of, OK, where’s the Death Star so we can blow it up. I realized that if every page ends with an unknown, the reader will turn the page because they’ll want to find out what happens next.
That’s the clichè. It’s I want to find out what happens next. Again, for me, even in things that are softer and more character driven, wanting to know what happens next is the thing. I took that back into my writing in scenes and thinking, all scenes have a beginning, middle and end obviously, but how do I make that end an interesting dramatic question?
Once you zero in on what the dramatic question is at the end of your scene, that makes a lot easier to know what needs to happen next because you know what you’re answering.
Scott: How much of that is driven by, let’s say the Protagonist or at least the key characters in the thing.
Javier: It’s driven entirely by their needs and wants. Let me give you the simplest… I say simple and not simplistic, because there’s a huge art to doing this kind of writing and doing it well. It’s not to take away anything from this show.
You look at Law & Order, most popular show, one of the longest running shows in television, has had 25 spinoffs, continues to be on the air to this day. Every scene in Law & Order, especially in the first half, consists of this.
We restate what we learned in the last scene. We either learn, or in our discussion, realize that something from the last scene doesn’t quite jibe with this new thing we’ve either realized or learned. Then we end the scene by saying what do we do next?
They say, “We’ve got to go to the New York Public Library.” Chung-chung, New York Public Library. Writing that show well is an art form in and of itself because you have to disguise that from the audience. The people who do it well do it amazingly well.
That’s the most simple version of it. I worked with Glenn Gordon Caron, who created Moonlighting, which was a huge influence on me. He gave me one of the greatest insights into writing that I’ve ever received.
I started pitching him something long and convoluted. He said to me, “Pitch it like it’s a joke.” I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “It’s like you have a setup, you’ve got a middle, and you’ve got a punchline. Pitch it to me like it’s a joke.” At first, I thought he was being glib, and then I realized, “Oh my God. This is high order Jedi master brain surgery shit.”
I realized everything has that structure. A sentence has that structure subject, object, predicate. A movie has that structure. First act, setup, development, climax. You realize that there are these structures that exist in everything.
One of the things that I learned, just from that one sentence, is you go, “OK, how do I tell the joke but leave them wanting the sequel to the joke?” Scenes have shapes. A lot of the times you don’t realize until after you’ve written the scene, but then you look at it and you go, “Oh my God, this scene has a shape.”
It all conforms in some way to that setup, development, punchline idea, regardless of how nonlinear, and how character driven, and how soft, and how Sundance Mumblecore your movie is. Good drama naturally comes into that structure.
Between the idea of there’s this three part structure to everything, down to the sentence that you should mind, and the idea that if every scene ends on a metaphorical question, then you’re going to turn the page to read the next scene because you want the answer. That’s how these ideas began to form in my mind, that inevitability is the key to it.
Scott: If you’re writing TV and you’ve broken the story, again, you’ve got to write the episode so as not to forecast to the point where the audience is going to be able to figure out where you’re going. How do you do that?
Javier: There’s a certain amount of pleasure as writer in writing something where you don’t know where it’s going. The thing is, once you’re done writing and you go back, and you rewrite it because ideally, by the end of that first draft, you know where it’s going. If you don’t, then you’ve got a real problem.
One of the breaks is a draft of your teleplay. It’s a story break that becomes an outline, but you’re writing that story. You keep changing it to make sure that the story works, and then you go and you write your script. You build the inevitability into it by having a great story break that works.
There’s nothing natural about this. This doesn’t just come out of your brain. You sit in front of the whiteboard. You lay your scenes out on note cards. You shuffle the note cards around and you make sure that one thing leads to another exactly as it should.
As it should means that at some point, you don’t know where the story leads, but when you do, that’s when you go back and you start being clever. Ultimately, for me, rewriting is about, you have now found out where the story has to go, now you need to make sure that every element is driving in that direction. Hopefully, without tipping it off to the audience.
It’s like, I want to make sure that this is very clear because it’s not a process of naturally coming up with something. This is the art and craft of screenwriting for me. It’s what happens when you know what it is, and then you go back and you make it that.
I think that you accomplish it by having a great story break or by getting there through exploring your character, however you do it, but you complete it by rewriting.
There’s another essay that I wrote. It was published by Apex Magazine. You can find it on the Internet. It’s about a concept that I call “operational theme.” It means that — in TV — you need to have something inside of your character that cannot be solved.
A movie is about solving the problem of a character by the end of two hours. A TV show is about giving a character an unsolvable problem at the core of their being, that propels 10, 20, 30, 100 hours of narrative. Again, the simplest version of it is cop shows.
Cops are usually people who… They have some incredible internal aversion to the breaking of laws. For whatever reason, usually, their spouse was murdered by a serial killer. [laughs] Whatever it is, the classic TV cop is a narcissistic workaholic, who is deeply offended by crime, and that cannot be reconciled with the needs of an ordinary life.
That’s why they’re lone wolves. That’s why every Michael Mann movie is about this irresolvable contradiction. Again, you look at Breaking Bad. The operational theme in Breaking Bad is in order to save everything I love, I have to become something everybody hates.
What that does is every time Walter White walks into a scene past the first half hour of the pilot, he’s there under a lie. The dramatic condition of every scene is set before he even enters the scene.
With Don Draper, it’s the same thing. I am trying to become an ideal that cannot be reached, but it’s the only way to redeem my character. Don Draper spends seven seasons of Mad Men trying to be this man in the gray flannel suit that nobody can be.
I think that the trick to doing this successfully in television is making that motivational vector so irresolvable, that every episode creatively challenges the innermost core of the character, but doesn’t bring it to conclusion. I think that’s why Breaking Bad has such a great finale because it can only resolve it by killing the guy.
Scott: …and Don Draper not changing.
Javier: He never changes. Tony Soprano is either dead or he’s going to lead a life of endless paranoia because he’s an evil man and that’s his comeuppance.
Even though he gets away with it, he doesn’t… because he’s going to be sitting in a shitty diner with a shitty family, talking about shitty stuff, being an idiot, and looking over his shoulder because he thinks he’s going to be killed.
In a way, whether he dies or not is immaterial because sitting in that shitty diner with your shitty family being shitty to each other is as good as death for that character.
Scott: That was inevitable for him.
Javier: Yep.
I find this whole subject fascinating. As Javi says, “every scene should make the next scene inevitable.” Yet, also unexpected. I’ve thought a lot about that seeming dichotomy and my conversation with Javi, and as noted in our discussion, I’m convinced the path for a writer to discover that dynamic tension is through the characters.
Especially the Protagonist (I’m thinking about movies here). Their deepest Need is like an unconscious goal which pulls them inextricably toward the story’s conclusion. Yet along the way, because as a sentient being capable of making a limitless array of choices, they can do surprising things. Hearkening back to my theological training, it’s the juxtaposition of predestination and free will.
By the way, a great TV series which explores this precise subject as a central theme is Devs, created by Alex Garland.
Many thanks to Javi for the chat. He’s not only a talented writer, but also someone who has deep insights about the craft of writing.
For more Go Into The Story interviews, go here.
