Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to Episode 728 of Script Notes.

It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What is the basic unit of story? In the outline and treatment phase, it's probably the beat,

whereas in the script it is the scene. As film and TV writers, how do we move from beats to scenes?

I'd argue it's perhaps the fundamental skill in our craft.

Today on the show, we welcome back a guest to help us to discuss this transformational process.

Drew Goddard is a writer whose credits include Cloverfield, Cabot in the Woods,

The Martian, Bad Times of the El Royale, Daredevil, High Potential, and the new film Project Hail Mary, which is absolutely fantastic, Drew and I got to see this last week. So good. This is coming out presumably in the period of time where the embargo is off so we can say how good it is. Congratulations. Welcome back, Drew. I'm so happy to be back. Thank you for having me,

John. Yeah. It will not be confusing at all that you are both named Drew, Drew. Drew Goddard and Drew Mark Hart. We're interchangible. Yeah. All of the Drews, we're like the Borg. Yeah. You can just sort of move one Drew into another Drew. Were you ever an Andy? I never was an Andy.

All right, good.

That's right.

And Andy, of course, wrote The Martian.

And Andy, of course, wrote The Martian. So...

And we are, yeah.

Are you an Andrew, or did you start Drew?

I started Drew... I never was an Andy. All right, good. That's right. And Andy, of course, wrote The Martian.

So.

Andy, we are, yeah.

Are you an Andrew or did you start Drew?

I started Drew. I'm full Andrew, but yeah, always true. Yeah. Great. So it's always confusing when, like, our business manager will say, like, well, Andrew does a thing. Like, who is Andrew? Who is his person? And there were other times

while I'll be talking to my husband about Drew

and it's like,

...