Hi folks, in today's episode there is some language, some salty language, so if you're in the car with your children go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuffs on them.

What are you talking about? Wow.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is episode 596 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In ancient times our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving in mid-the-stars.

Aristotle theorized these were dry exilations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere.

Later the Romans observed that these objects returned on a regular cycle like small planets with eccentric orbits.

Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.

For Script Notes, our comment is writer-director producer Christopher McQuarry, who first appeared on episode 300, then episode 400, and on that episode we invited him to come back on episode 600, which is very nearly here.

So as we prepared to record that, I asked Drew Markhart, our producer to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show.

So Drew, what are we going to hear today?

We're going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. I mean, obviously he's very good at that. And he's got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made, but where are these stories come from and where they're going in the future? Film and TV.

Great. So I recall these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris and he came to the hotel.

So I went to his hotel, he would just come back from filming Mission Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time.

And we had a great conversation and Craig was in theory kind of on the episode. He was like, he was skyped in a little bit. He comes at the end.

Yeah, there wasn't enough. It was basically me and Chris. But the other one was right, Chris McQuarry was sitting right in the chair that you're sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.

I'll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarry crush that if he does come back, if the comment returns, I'm going to have to comment a little short.

And you had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?

Correct. Right. And that was a whole summer ago. You were an intern right?

Yeah, that's been a year. A whole year has passed. And what was amazing kind of going through those two is he's working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.

Yeah, I find he's a good balance of sort of idealistic and pragmatic. And as I hear him talk about other films that he's worked on or helped out on, it's very much like sort of what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch.

And sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.

And he's never semicol, which is great. That's great.

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