Interview: Reid Carolin (“Magic Mike”) — Part 5

One of the surprise hit movies of 2012 was Magic Mike starring Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and Olivia Munn, and directed by Steven Soderbergh. With a modest production budget of $7M, the film grossed $167M worldwide. The screenwriter responsible for the script is Reid Carolin.

Recently Reid and I had an extensive conversation in which we covered a whole range of subjects including his diverse creative background, the production company he and Channing Tatum have, the stunning success of Magic Mike, the craft of screenwriting, and much more.

In Part 5, Reid digs into some key aspects of the screenwriting craft:

Scott: Let’s hit some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?

Reid: For me, it’s usually from just real life. It’s just from reading a story about somebody or something that gets you on to…I think Steven says all the time that he doesn’t understand how people can get bored or they can run out of ideas? I agree with him. I think there’s so many things that interest you and then you have to cull that list down to something that really means something to you and find a reason to develop it and make it stick, because there’s a lot of great little ideas out there.

There’s not a lot of great zeitgeist lightening in a bottle type ideas but I think there are a lot of great story ideas out there. And then you have to decide how to develop them into something that can really resonate, as opposed to something simplistic and overly serving a genre trope or whatever.

So for us, it’s usually just looking at our lives and people we know and stories that we read and finding something that we don’t think has really been done before in a certain way. And then we’ve been wanting to get into sci‑fi and all that sort of stuff. And you always have to start from some simple idea that you really gravitate to. Or just a nugget of truth that comes along and you go, “Oh. That’s really cool. Why don’t I develop a world around that?”

So, as far as original ideas are concerned, that’s the overly general idea of how we come up with them and then obviously we’re always after good material and books and stuff like that. And we’re constantly optioning things that we think are good ideas and hopefully some of them become good in their execution as well.

Scott: How about prep writing — brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining? How much time do you spend on that and what do you focus on?

Reid: I used to do a lot more and now I’m doing a lot less. I like to write a lot, and I love writing free hand. I love sitting down and just writing a bunch of just stream of consciousness and trying to craft a narrative out of nowhere. I think it’s almost like meditating. You sit down and you just work. You just put your hands to the keys and go and not care about who’s reading it or where it’s going to go or what’s going to happen. I think it’s important to just be in the process of writing.

I used to outline things until I was blue in the face and I’m trying to stop doing it as much. I want to see how that turns out. But what I notice is that the broad strokes of an outline, for me, are really important. I always need to know. I do use the whole three act thing because I do believe in it, but I hate trying to make people feel like they have to work in a box.

But I like knowing essentially what is a character’s status quo. Who are they at the beginning? What is the inciting incident that set’s the story in motion? What is their first act choice that they can’t go back from? What are the arising consequences of the middle of the movie where things are getting stacked against them? And what is the ultimate climax where the character learns something and their life is changed.

I do like thinking of…OK, if we’re making a movie and it’s going to be 90 minutes or whatever what is that basic box of the movie because I don’t want to make a crappy movie. I want to make something that people are entertained by. And I want to know, generally speaking, what we’re talking about there.

But the nuance within that, it’s really hard because when you’re outlining you’re not writing a character in the present tense. And a lot of the great stuff that was written in “Magic Mike” just came out of just like sitting down and like writing. You cannot preconceive the nuance and the little organic moments that happen in a movie that really, ultimately, define why people love certain characters like Dallas.

Dallas was made. I knew who he was and I knew the type of guy he was in the outlining phase but I could never have outlined that dialogue and that personality and the stuff that Matt does in the movie. That all had to come out of just knowing the basic bones of the movie and then just going and sitting at final draft and just trying things out.

So I think there’s probably an extra 60‑70 pages of stuff that didn’t make the movie. That happens on everything, and I’d rather be doing that then I would, like slogging in Microsoft Excel, going “OK, and in this scene Dallas does this and this and this”.

It’s also a hard thing when you give that to somebody, then they give you notes back on that. And you’re trying to communicate “Hey, this is going to be cool”. But if somebody reads it in outline form and they don’t think it’s cool then they go “No, don’t do that”, and the idea is already killed.

So as a producer I’m always thinking ahead about that and going, I don’t really want to show people a really detailed outline because I just want to show them what I think the basic movie is. And then I’ll show them the scenes when they’re written and they’ll like them better than if they just read an outline and said “OK. Why is everybody at Dallas’s beach house for a hurricane party? I don’t get it. What’s going on?” And you’ve got to show them on the page why that’s funny and cool, because sometimes in an outline form it’s just too dry.

So I still am anal retentive about preparing to write and it takes me more time to prepare to start writing then it does to write itself. But I want to lessen that, to be honest. I want to be more into just the writing because I think that’s where the magic is.

Scott: You know when you say magic, I tell my students writing a screenplay is like wrangling magic.

Reid: Yeah. It is.

Scott: The subtext of what you just said I was taking as you really are attracted to, interested in, and engaged by the characters in your story.

Reid: Yeah, because I’m a total structure person. Channing’s a very present person. He is in the moment and he is feeling‑‑as any good actor should be, they’re feeling a character out. They’re reacting in the moment to things. They’re making choices in the present tense. For me, as a writer, you sit in a vacuum, and you create something that people are going to do and work on in the future, you’re thinking through everything so much. But the scenes that I thought through completely, that feel like they’re preconceived, they work as far as the beats are concerned, but they’re usually the driest, most uninteresting scenes in the movie when it’s finally made.

There’s a magic to being present when you’re actually writing, and just writing a great character. There’s just something about the act of giving yourself over and giving your brain over to just typing, just going, just coming up with what…If you feel like that character feels, just spit it out and then go back and edit it later.

If you’re trying to think through everything, you’re trying to hit every beat, you write like molasses and at the same time, the finished product feels like the act of how you wrote it, in my opinion. Things tend to feel like the way in which they were constructed, and you want your characters to feel present, so be present when you write them as much as you possibly can. Which is my, I guess, advice.

Scott: What about dialogue? Is that a talent that writers are born with, or you think that can be developed?

Reid: Oh, no. No. Because everybody has a different sense of what dialogue is. I’m doing a rewrite for a director right now, and he basically said to me the other day, “Look, I love a lot of this dialogue. I have other ways that I would say this, so I’ll go in there and do this.” And I’m, “Of course.” You know? Everybody’s got a different sense of how they interpret dialogue, so I look at dialogue, and I go, “Look, it’s easy to judge that before the movie’s made when you’re just reading scripts and kind of judging them. But the movie always ends up being a reflection of the director and the actors and all sort of stuff.”

The dialogue is just there to service the writer’s interpretation of the character. And sometimes the writer writes such rich dialogue that everybody looks at it and goes, “Uh. That’s exactly what I’d want to say.” And that doesn’t happen all the time.

Then there’s different reasons why. If a writer’s a huge writer that everybody thinks is a genius, their dialogue is more likely to be…You watch an Aaron Sorkin…you watch “The Newsroom” or something, and everybody loves Aaron’s work. They are going to say exactly what he’s written, and he’s so good with dialogue that it doesn’t get changed.

But if he was a young writer, and nobody knew who he was, I don’t think any director would let scenes go on for that long with people talking like…There’s tons of reasons why dialogue gets manifested onto the screen. And I don’t think as a writer you can completely control how people perceive it, or if it’s going to work or if it’s not. You just have to do the best you can.

Some people are born with, I think, a sense of language that may be richer than others, but nobody knows exactly how everybody talks.

That’s just a subjective thing. I wouldn’t discourage anybody by saying, some people have it, some people don’t. Everybody has something to say, everybody knows certain characters in ways that other people don’t, and that’s why some directors who have been writers are so good at dialogue.

I watch David Russell’s movies and think, “God. Where does he come up with some of this stuff?” David knows who those characters he’s writing about are, and he knows how to write them because he’s lived them.

Think about it you’re writing about CIA agents all the time, and you haven’t been in the CIA, you know? Most writers haven’t been in the CIA, and that’s why those movies, typically speaking, rely on tropes.

If you create a guy like Dallas, all I had to do was really listen to Channing, who knew who that person was, and transcribe some of it, and then build on top of it. And people go, “God, the dialogue to that character is so great”! But I would never have been able to write that had I not gone and listened and participated in the world of that character.

I think if you don’t have good dialogue in a script or dialogue that you’re happy with, you should go out and just find yourself in that world and listen. All you really then have to do is just repeat it, repeat what you hear. [laughs]

Scott: When you finish a first draft and you’re faced with rewriting, what are some of the keys for you in terms of what you’re looking to do in the rewriting process?

Reid: First of all, have the courage to go back and re‑imagine things that you thought were unchangeable. I think that rewriting is a really nerve racking process and you’ve got to keep yourself open to people’s ideas and to the fact that things that you really love may not work. I don’t know if people know how hard that is. It’s easy to talk about, “That’s a tough mental process to go through,” but to me, it’s the toughest part of writing a script, is going back and re‑conceiving things that you thought were going to be pillars of your movie. First, I think it’s about keeping yourself open and having the courage to go in there and not be afraid to make drastic change.

Then B, is knowing, because nobody really is going to know the gears of the movie if you really conceive the structure correctly. Nobody is really going to know those like you. If they want to go and push over a domino, they may not be thinking about the other things that it knocks down. They’ll say, “Hey, you need to do this,” and you go like, in your mind, “OK, now I know I have to do that but I know that that’s not going to change 15 other scenes. They’re not even recognizing that.”

Now, I have to go back in and do that because I know I’ll turn the draft back in if I don’t do that they’re going to go “Oh shit, now all this other stuff doesn’t work.” As a writer you have the responsibility of keeping the gears of the script in your head and understanding when you’re doing a rewrite that if you change one thing, you’ve got to change the rest of it.

Every little thing that you do to a character has repercussions and ripples across an entire narrative, and if you don’t address the ripples, you’re hurting the movie. Rewriting, I think, really takes a lot of commitment and some people go, “Yeah, just rewrite it. Just take a week, like rewrite it.” I think if you’re going to do a substantial re‑write, it really takes understanding the nuance, and the affect of every change that you make. Being committed to doing all of it.

The studio will go “Hey, just reset the whole thing in Chicago. No problem, just change the scene headings.” I’m like “Now people need to talk like they’re in Chicago. They need to address things that are in Chicago. They need to act completely different because they’re in a big city.” You can’t just make a simple change here, or there to something as sensitive as a script, in my mind.

Scott: It’s a story universe you’ve created, and I love that image that you had. You can’t just drop the pebble in, you’ve got to check all the ripples of those changes.

Reid: You absolutely do. Some are so small, that by the end of the ripple, you almost wouldn’t even know they’re there, but they are, and when a movie is finally put up in front of an audience, a great movie is one that the ripple carries all the way out to the end. To the point you can’t see anymore. You can feel that as an audience member. You know when you’re in the presence of people that have conceived something so well, that it fills its whole possible spectrum. That pebble spreads out in all directions perfectly. If it doesn’t, you know that it’s fake, and it’s forced, and it’s not working correctly. It’s impossible as a writer to control that, because your work is always in the hands of someone else.

If you look at the page as your ultimate measure of success, you can do it on the page. It is possible to write a perfect movie on the page. For any writer that should be the goal. Hopefully though you can control the process of actually then getting it made, which is a whole other thing, and that’s the reason why I love being a producer because I have some, which I think most writers should try to be producers.

Because it really sucks to work on something for a year plus and then do something really well and have it hit the whims of other people and their politics. That’s no fun.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Reid talks more about the craft and offers advice about how to break into the business.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

For Part 4, go here.

Please stop by comments to thank Reid and ask any questions you may have.

Reid is repped by UTA.

Twitter: @reidcarolin.

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