Interview [Part 1]: Lisa Joy

“Scott, you are the only screenwriting teacher I’ve ever had.” This is what Lisa Joy shared with me when we had dinner together in L.A. last fall to celebrate the recent sale of her spec script “Reminiscence” which Legendary Pictures acquired in a deal worth a reported $1.75M. In addition to her screenwriting, Lisa has been on staff and written for TV (“Pushing Daisies,” “Burn Notice”), created a graphic novel “Athena” which has been developed for TV, and co-wrote the pilot with her husband Jonathan Nolan for a TV series adaptation of the classic 1973 science fiction movie Westworld for HBO in association with J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot, and producer Jerry Weintraub.

I was thrilled when Lisa agreed to an interview, not only because of the mark she is making in Hollywood, but also because she is a genuine human being: smart and insightful, but also grounded and generous in spirit. Yes, there are people like that in Hollywood… and Lisa is one of them.

In Part 1, Lisa recounts her unusual path into screenwriting, first as an avocation while working a full-time job.

Scott Myers: How important were movies and TV to you when you were growing up?

Lisa Joy: I feel like I have an unorthodox answer for this, for somebody who works in entertainment now. That book that came out about the Tiger Mom and everything [laughs], I guess I kind of had a tiger mom.

We weren’t really allowed to watch TV and movies in the house very much, at all. Then I hit those broke college years and didn’t have a TV, so I didn’t really have access to watching that sort of stuff there.

Until I graduated from college and invested in a TV of my own, I would say I did not have that much experience of so much TV at all, frankly.

It’s been interesting because people make fun of me sometimes as I’m learning some of the basics and classics at a relatively old age. But it’s great for me because it’s all fresh. Watching those films, I get that sense of wonderment that other people get in their childhood, but I experience now an over 30 year-old woman.

But the magic of a really great movie or a really great TV series is they never lose their luster, and they still have the ability to leave you awestruck with wonder and make you think — no matter how old you are when you watch them

Scott: You were at Stanford and you were eying law school. What was your major there?

Lisa: I was English and Chinese.

Scott: The English, was that literature or were there writing classes involved?

Lisa: I studied literature. I didn’t take a lot of creative writing because I was a bit shy and the classes seemed scary. You all sat in a circle and everybody seemed kind of ferociously intellectual. I was a little intimidated to share my stuff in that environment. I felt like I needed more anonymity.

I mostly stuck with analyzing literature. I focused a lot on the modernists. But literary theory is its own kind of curse because if you dissect literature too much, you start to become a critic more than a creator.

I didn’t want to pursue it too far into a PhD program or anything because I knew if I had that constant critic and that constant metafilter on all the time, it would make it even harder for me to write.

Scott: I remember we met right around the time you’d been out of Stanford and before you went to law school. Where was it that you said, “Writing is something I must explore”?

Lisa: Well, it was this crazy thing because before going back to law school, I spent a lot of time doing business. I was a consultant for a couple years, just traveling all over the place. Then after that, I worked in Universal Studios in their corporate strategy group.

It was that kind of thing where college is expensive and I didn’t have a lot of money, and I needed to get a job to pay back student loans and to figure out what I was doing with my life. Being a writer did not seem a viable career option because there’s so much risk involved and so much uncertainty.

I went into business and got health insurance, which made my parents happy, and a stable job and a 401(k). I got to see a lot of the world traveling for work. I got to learn about a lot of people and different industries. As Nora Ephron would say, it’s all copy.

But the whole time that I was doing this, I think if you love writing, it never quite leaves you. You’re always reading. You’re always writing. At the time, my focus was very much on poetry. I’ve loved poetry truly for as long I can remember, since I was a little kid actually. I wanted to pursue that even if it was just as an avocation. I figured I would write little poems in the evening and make Excel spreadsheets with financial models during the day, and that would be my life. I was content enough with that life.

Even though I lived in L.A., I didn’t really know anybody who was in the industry or anything. It never really occurred to me to try transitioning to screenplays until my boyfriend at the time, now my husband, for Christmas he said, “You know, you work really, really hard at your job. Then you stay up late writing all the time. You never have enough time to do all the writing you want. Maybe there’s a way that you can combine your day job with your passion. But it’s probably not poetry. Because you probably won’t be able to pay back your loans from poetry alone.”

He scraped up his funds, he was a starving artist at the time, and bought me my first copy of Final Draft, and said, “Here’s the tools, now see if you can make something with it.”

After getting the software, I tinkered around with it a bit, and it seemed fun. I’d never read a screenplay or anything, I started reading a couple screenplays just to see what it looked like. It kind of struck me that there were some similarities between poetry, which I’d always loved and screenwriting. You don’t have that much space. You have to convey things very compactly.

You don’t want a script that’s 400 pages long, but you still want to create an evocative world. You only have a couple lines to do that, to set something up after you say like, “Interior hallway.”

What does that hallway look like? What does the man walking down it look like? You have a couple lines to say it, and to me it was the kind of challenge that I love in poetry, to find a word. It could be a very simple word. It doesn’t have to be a $10 word, but find it and try to make it count within the scene description. The same goes for dialogue.

So the format of scriptwriting itself was appealing to me, but I still had no idea what I was doing whatsoever, and I also had no community to talk about it with. I felt very embarrassed because in LA everybody will say, “They are an aspiring screenwriter.”

I was scared to say that myself. [laughs] It always sounded like once you’re an aspiring screenwriter, you’re never a screenwriter screenwriter. You’ve told too many people, “I’m the aspiring screenwriter,” and it somehow let’s the air out of bag, and you’ve got nothing left.

I didn’t tell anyone because I was embarrassed. That’s why I took your UCLA class. I read about it, and it sounded like a good program, and it was an online thing. I could do online classes and still do my day job which had pretty long hours.

The anonymity of it, really, really appealed to me. You get a little scared about your thoughts. [laughs] It was my way to put my toe in the water and find a community without feeling too terrified. It makes me sound like a coward, but it was great. You were my teacher there, and up to this day I have never had somebody who’s spent so much time and thought reading and responding to what I wrote.

I don’t know how you did it with all those students, but you were pouring over things, going over them in detail, providing emotional support to all these fledgling writers. It’s not just about the business, but about how are the characters appearing, and story structure, and all those things.

To have that kind of legitimizing voice to bandy ideas around with, and to have people who were supportive was extremely nice and extremely comforting even if I didn’t think what I was writing was any good yet, it kind of gave me a little bit of hope to keep going… “They haven’t laughed me out of the online chat yet.”

You also provided some structure with the classes and that pressure was very helpful for me. Once a week, you can submit something, and you also hear feedback about it during the week. I was always so excited to check my email, and to see if anybody had thoughts or to read other people’s things. It was a nice little break in my day.

It was like this secret life that I had between making financial models and PowerPoint presentations. I’d kind of slip away, and my personal inbox would be this little oasis where people were talking about writing — giving and getting feedback. It was truly a delight. It kept me kind of happy and fulfilled in those years, before I dared submit anything to anyone in terms of a real writing job or anything. But during those years when I was basically just writing for myself and trying to learn, that’s the kind of thing that kept me going.

Scott: Do you remember the script you were working on in that first class with me? It was this eccentric family, an offbeat comedy. Obviously you had talent, I could tell that right off the bat.

Lisa: Oh, thank you. It was a very quirky script. I think it was called “Spritzy and Blue.”

Scott: Yes, exactly.

Lisa: It was extremely quirky. I still feel like I never quite cracked it. I worked on it for about three years trying to crack it. It’s funny because I feel like it’s very similar to the first show I ever worked on, which was “Pushing Daisies.” I think there was some kind of sensibility there that translated, and that I was able to exercise when I was working on “Daisies.”

Scott: I never realized you had been so private about your writing back then. I guess that class was when you took your first step out of the little private sphere of writing?

Lisa: That was it. I’m still private. My husband and I are both writers. We’re co‑writing “Westworld,” but I never showed him “Reminiscence” until I sent it out to my agent.

Scott: Seriously.

Lisa: I don’t know. [laughs] It’s terrifying for me, frankly. I thought about writing under a pseudonym, but then I figured no one really knows who I am anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Lisa describes how she broke into Hollywood as a writer and the personal risk she took in making that plunge.

Lisa is repped by UTA.

Please feel free to stop by comments with any questions you may have. I can’t swear that Lisa will have the time to answer them, but I’ll pass along the best of the bunch.

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