Q&A: John August Wants to Make Things Happen

Photo by Dustin Bocks. Source: John August

Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk’s podcast, a place to talk about stories in all their forms, the craft that goes into them, and the role that art plays in our lives. Today, I'm joined John August — screenwriter (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Aladdin), author (the Arlo Finch fantasy series), and co-host of the podcast Scriptnotes.

John is one of the most influential screenwriters of the 21^st century, educating scores of people around the globe about the medium for 14 years now, so it is with great delight that I welcome him to my own podcast this week to talk his life, his craft, and the power of cinema.

The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to tap on the podcast play button right now and just listen to an unabridged version of it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read these chats, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to the article below, which has been trimmed for length and edited for clarity.

John and I are going to cover a lot in this conversation including:

• Dead screenwriters from Hollywood’s past John would love to have on Scriptnotes if he got his hands on the TARDIS

• His relationship to screenwriting form, from its origins to William Goldman, to his own work and thoughts on attempts to subvert it

• The difficulties of the industry, including a traumatic early experience that drove him to a nervous breakdown

• Experiences and strategies that have shaped his career, touching upon how he chooses projects today…for better or worse

• The story behind Big Fish, how his father's death influenced it, and the enduring emotional resonance it holds across different formats and audiences

• Whether Hollywood storytelling still has the power to unite us

Oh, and a bonus episode is available now. John and I discuss a favorite piece of art from his life – the pilot episode of “Modern Family” (2009).

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My guest this week is John August, the screenwriter behind films like Go, Charlie's Angels and its sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Titan A.E., Corpse Bride, The Nines (which he also directed), Frankenweenie, Dark Shadows, Aladdin, and, of course, Big Fish – a film we will speak about at length. But you might know also know him from the screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes, which he’s co-hosted with Craig Mazin for the past 14 years. I would argue these two guys are the most influential screenwriters of the 21st century as their podcast has inspired and helped educate scores of people around the globe about the art of screenwriting. You might even say John and Craig walked so 5AM StoryTalk could run…but that would be stupid because Scriptnotes ran so that 5AM StoryTalk and countless other podcasts about screenwriting and such could fumble along in its wake, battling for crumbs in some kind of post-apocalyptic ’80s film starring Rutger Hauer or Van Damme.

John is more than just a screenwriter, though. He’s more than a podcaster, too. I'm not talking about the fact that he's an author either, though – which he is (his Arlo Finch middle grade fantasy books are a wonderful series that sit on my kids’ bookshelf). No, I'm talking about his commitment to screenwriters in the Writer's Guild of America. He has worked tirelessly over the years to make sure writers get what they deserve from their employers. I think that's a nuance of my observation about how influential John has been to screenwriting in the 21st century that could be lost on a lot of people. But he's not just out there promoting the craft on Scriptnotes. He's out there trying to protect screenwriters too.

In the conversation you're about to sit in on, I do my best to dig into aspects of John's life and work that I haven't heard enough about on Scriptnotes, which I won't pretend wasn't a challenge given the fact that John and Craig have recorded more than 600 episodes at this point. The conversation about Big Fish is especially interesting both because of how foundational it is to his career, but also because it gave me a chance to hear more about his relationship with his own father whose death dramatically informs his relationship to the story.

I re-watched Big Fish recently, which is about a son returning home to be with his estranged father as he dies. It's one hell of a gut punch for anyone who struggled to understand a parent or had to hold their hand as they died. It’s also a screenplay every screenwriter should read. In Hollywood, people talked about it like it was the Second Coming when it went out. I sometimes still hear execs who were around back then bring it up, that’s how good it is.

Now, let me introduce you to screenwriter, author, and podcast host John August…

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COLE HADDON: It’s great to see you, John. Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.

JOHN AUGUST: Absolutely delighted to do it.

CH: So, you've had hundreds of guests on Scriptnotes by now. Many of them, the biggest names in the business. But you've only been hosting the podcast since 2011. I say that because a century of screenwriting preceded Scriptnotes’ premiere. And so, if the TARDIS landed in your living room tomorrow and Dr. Who said he could bring you any guest from screenwriting history, who would you have on the show next and why?

JA: Well, that's a great question and a challenging question because we've obviously had some real legends come through. But, I think I would want to reach back to writers who changed the form in meaningful ways and sort of got us to where we are right now. You know, William Goldman, we had a celebration of Princess Bride after he passed, which was, a great experience. But someone who I never met who I really wanted to talk to was Nora Ephron. She died in 2012. We started in 2011, so we didn't cross paths at all. What she was able to do with When Harry Met Sally and her other work is just so extraordinary in terms of finding the ways to be funny, but also dig deeper. She was just such a pro, and I just I never got the chance to tell her about sort of how influential her work was and really dig into the process.

The other sort of fantasy would be to reach back to the very early days of screenwriting before they knew what screenwriting was, before they actually had a term for it. Because the women – it was largely women who were putting together these documents that were really just, there were lists of shots – but they were the plan for making a thing. [I’d love to talk about] the start of when you're just finding a whole new art form and trying to figure out what actually makes sense.

We're working on the Scriptnotes book right now, and we do talk a little bit about the history of screenwriting – the stuff that's before Casablanca and after Casablanca [because] that's one of the first scripts that actually really looks like a modern screenplay, where there are scenes that just resemble the same way we do things today. [Nowadays], we're so used to how screenplays work that when you do see the odd project that has a very different format, it is just really jarring. The French film [Emilia Pérez] had a really strange screenplay, and it was fun to see, but also just a little hard to process because you're not used to things being outside of our 12-point career world.

CH: Do you ever find the format incredibly limiting? Do you ever find yourself wanting to rebel against this thing that does sort of provide your livelihood and your joy?

JA: Listen, there are, you know, when you first learn the screenwriting format and the way we present images on the page and sounds on the page, it can be, it can feel like a straitjacket. Like you're just not, like so many of your tools are removed from you. But I find that if I'm thinking to myself as an audience member who's sitting in a theater watching a thing, it becomes much easier to figure out how to convey that experience on the page.

And so, I'm a big fan of “we see” and “we hear” when we need to use those terms but really capturing the experience of what that's like. We just went through and did an episode with [screenwriter] Christina Hodson and we were talking about action sequences and the difference between reading a great action sequence and reading just an action sequence is really whether the screenwriter has a sense of the geography of what it feels like and how they can convey that using the tools that screenwriting has – which is sentence length and white space. Just how you're carrying the eye down the page and making the person who's reading the script feel like they're actually in a theater experiencing that.

So, getting back to your question, am I ever frustrated by the form? Not really that much. When I see people doing experiments with it, I understand why they're trying and why they're reaching for it. [For example], Christopher Nolan with the Oppenheimer script, which is from the first person and written in the first person. And sure, I get that. OIt's a way for him to place himself in the point of view of Oppenheimer as he's writing it. And yet it doesn't necessarily change the experience of the audience watching a thing. We're always going to be a collective group of people seeing a thing on a screen.

[Note to reader: You can read my own thoughts about the Oppenheimer script here.]

CH: So, I've chatted with approaching a hundred artists in the past two years for this interview series, and some have talked about being astonished that their careers stuck given how difficult they thought they could be to work with earlier in their careers – the reasons for that difficulty being manifold. So, what about you? Do you think you arrived in Hollywood with a knack for collaboration already? Or were you a pain in producer's asses? Maybe you still are. [Laughs]

JA: No, I think I'm very collaborative. I think I'm very much the teacher's pet, the grade grabber, the one who wants to sort of impress people. I also seemed young and harmless, and so people sort of like, you know, invited me in. I didn’t scare people too much, at least in collaborators. As I've gotten older and the people I'm working with get younger, that does shift and change. But I feel like I never had a hard time being with a group, making myself feel valuable and hearing people. I had those emotional skills pretty well developed right from when I got here.

CH: Did you ever have that traumatic experience that many writers do? I created a show, and I went through horrific abuse, which I think you know about. It laid me out for a couple years. Did you experience a lot of that when you were younger and, if so, how did you navigate it?

JA: Yeah. In the early part of my career, I was in my film program [when] I got an agent. I started taking the meetings at the same time I was answering phones and working for a bunch of other folks, writing coverage, and was able to land to writing jobs pretty quickly. They were small scale jobs, but great starter jobs. And then I was able to Go set up, go into production on go, and sort of really learn like, “Oh shit, this is how you actually make a movie.” It’s exhausting. But [Go was] a good experience with very few fights, with mostly just struggles to make the best movie possible.

Off that heat, I got a TV show called “DC”, which I set up at the WB Network. That was probably the equivalent of what you experienced, where things were really great until they got really bad and it just got worse and worse. And worse. To the point where, like, I just felt like I was watching this character with my name sort of just stumbling through this situation.

I had a nervous breakdown, but also, I was just fascinated to watch what was happening to this person who had my name. I just didn't have the support needed around it. It was just an awful situation, and I think if I had gone through that and I didn't have the balancing factor of like other things going really well around the same time, it really could have derailed me for years. I think at the same time that was going on, though, I was doing Charlie's Angels, which was exhausting but good. I was doing Big Fish, which was exhausting but good. There were enough other things to sort of balanced out the really shitty time I had on “DC”.

CH: Switching gears to your filmography. I've re-watched several lately. I find two major thematic sort of ideas underpinning a lot of them. The second one I'll get into in a moment because it overlaps with a lot of your work with Tim Burton, but the other seems to be all you – which is characters torn between or stuck between two worlds characters in transition becoming who they're meant to be. Are you aware of that yourself? Is that something that shows up in your unproduced work as well?

JA: Yeah, so a sense of like character stuck between two worlds feels very me and I think it's always been me. It's been me since I've been playing make believe, you know, as a kid on a Sunday morning while my parents were still asleep. I've always had that sense of, like, a character who goes through a portal and ends up in a different world and has to find their way back or sort of has to master those two things. A good chunk of my writing really does reflect that.

CH: Can you give me some examples in your mind?

JA: So, Go – its characters stepping into dangerous worlds that they really don't belong into and sort of having to find their way back. A lot of the Tim Burton projects are that way – The Corpse Bride most deliberately. A Big Fish –Edward Bloom’s journey is very much sort of going into, you know, strange worlds and navigating them and sort of learning how to master them.

So, yeah, that feels very consistent with stuff that I love to do. I can and I do other things, too, but even in like the books I've done, the three Arlo Finch books, are very much a kid who has to learn to navigate two worlds and cross back and forth between them. It's just feels very natural to my brain.

CH: Is there an explanation for that, do you think?

JA: It could be as simple as like what I was reading and watching at a certain critical time. I don't know that there's a huge Jungian explanation for sort of why I gravitate towards those themes. It just feels right to me. I've always loved fantasy, and fantasy is often sort of centered around that portal thing, especially when there's, a character in the real world and in the sense that there's a fantasy world beyond it that's always been super.

It's one of the reasons, though, why when I get stuff that's sort of outside of that, as a possibility to adapt … I kind of love it because it is exciting for me. There's a project I'm writing right now that on the surface very much has that portal-y thing, but I said, “Listen, I don't, I don't want to make another Alice in Wonderland. I don't want it to be ‘she crosses into the other world and spends the whole movie trying to get out of it.’ I want to see her really navigating how to juggle these two competing things.” And if I guess to the degree that it does reflect in my real life, I do exist in many worlds simultaneously, kind of in the sense of there's the screenwriter John August. There's the podcaster John August, which is related but not quite the same. There's the software company that I run. There's the charitable stuff that I do, which is really very disconnected from the other stuff. And yet they do all influence each other and they do have points of overlap. When I've gone off to do the Broadway show, when I've gone off to write these books, I am very much stepping into new worlds where I get to be the little kid, the explorer, and that's really appealing to me as an opportunity.

CH: As a storyteller too. I think just the ability to keep challenging yourself and growing in an industry that doesn't necessarily allow for innovation in long-term careers is great.

JA: Yeah, for sure. And listen, there are choices I made that I'm really happy I made, and there are choices where I pursued stuff that – as you know, one of the big frustrations of a feature screenwriter is so much of the work you do never shoots. And so, I went through a couple of years where I picked projects. I thought, “Oh, this, this will shoot, this will be great.” But I just picked the wrong things they didn't shoot. And I do wish that at certain points I would've, like, said no to some things and yes to directing projects and other things that are also really appealing to me. But you don't get a chance to rewind and sort of see how stuff would've sorted out differently.

CH: I'm curious, with those opportunities that you didn't necessarily take, what would've been the reasoning not to take them? Was it to play it safe?

JA: You know, weirdly, the projects I'm thinking of felt like really safe bets. They were like, “Oh yeah, that's a movie that's going to get made.” Like, “I should do that.” I did a Shazam movie many years ago, which was just a really good idea. You have a kid who – again, it's a very classically “two worlds” situation. You have a kid who has the power to become an adult suddenly and become a superhero, but he is also a real kid at the same time. So, it's big with superpowers and that's a great idea. Independent of its, you know, roots in DC Comics, it's a really strong idea. So, sure, I'll do that.

I did the prequel to the movie Grease. And that's a really good idea because there's a song in sort of Grease that says kind of what happened over the summer, but like, wait, “No, what really happened?” We sort of have like this this two-side story, but what actually happened over that summer? That's a great idea. The challenge is by the time we came to like figuring out, like getting a director and getting stuff going, all the musicals were tanking and nobody wanted to make a musical.

So, I was making choices that were they felt like solid movies to pursue and sometimes had big talent attached to them, and I got paid for them. On all those levels, it's great – except that you only have one life to make stuff and there are things that I could have made that didn't get made because I was doing these other projects.

CH: So, the other major theme I find in your work is one that certainly resonates with me. I write a lot about grief and death, and I think you've certainly done a lot of this with Burton about grief and death accepting, I guess, the transition in some way – maybe another, another transition conversation.

Your father died before Big Fish. I'd like to hear about this throughout your work, but also, was your father's death what prompted Big Fish or perhaps led to your first reaction to it and set you on this path in some way?

JA: Yeah. Especially with the Tim Burton movies, you can see, like, oh, there's a lot of death in those. Which is true. But I don't think I'm especially obsessed with it. It's not a thing that I keep coming back to again and again. But with Big Fish, specifically, that was a book I was sent clean. It was just a book that I could get the rights to, and, I had a weekend to read it. As I was flipping through pages, I really understood what the movie was. I could see the movie there even though it was vastly different the text that was on the page. I could make myself the age of Will in the story. I could make Edward Bloom's character my dad's age – the timelines would line up properly. I could really see what it was like. And because my father had died a few years before that, I knew what it was like to be in a house with a person who was dying. You try to have those last conversations, and it's really challenging and tough.

So, I really knew emotionally what that story was, and I very much approached it from Will's point of view because I was, you know, a journalism major going into it. So, I understood what Will wanted, and what his arc could be over the course of that story and, and what the fable-y arc of Edward Bloom could be. It was a story that fit where I was at very well. It was also the luxury of, like, it was just there and nobody else was attached. It was just me. It was just my vision for it. And because I did Go for Columbia Pictures, I was able to get them to buy the rights for me. And then I got producers on board, got [Steven] Spielberg on board. Spielberg dropped off. We got Tim Burton on board, and we were able to make a movie. It was very much the case of – like Go – this was the movie I set out to make. The scenes I wrote were the scenes that are in the movie, which is often an exception rather than rule.

‘Big Fish’. Source: Sony

CH: Was your relationship with your father remotely like what was expressed on screen? Did you have a strained relationship with his past?

JA: So, there's a line in the movie, “My father and I were strangers who knew each other very well,” which is true to me and my father. But my father was not the extrovert. He was not the center of attention that Edward Bloom was. He was the son of a poor farmer in Missouri who had made something of his life, but clearly carried with him a bunch of trauma. To this day, I don't know quite what all about it was. But he was very introverted. It was hard to get stuff out of him. Like Edward Bloom, I could predict my father, but I did not really understand what was happening in his head. And that was a, that was frustrating to me to some degree. So, I could understand that dynamic even though it was very different than the dynamic of Edward and Will is in the book.

CH: When I saw the film the first time my father was alive, my mother was alive as well. They're both dead now. And when I rewatched it recently it was – as I'm sure it is, for many people who have this experience, the before and after – it was devastating. I'm curious, because you've been working on this for so many years – such as the musical – how has your relationship to the text but also the ideas at the center of it changed over time?

JA: When I finally got around to writing the script, because it had sat there for like two years as I was doing Charlie’s Angels and other stuff, when I finally got down to do it, there were sequences like – Edward's death, like taking Edward to the river and that final conversation where I just I just went sort of fully method. I would sit in front of a mirror and I'd bring myself to tears and then loop the scene in my head, and then, like, write it down.

And so, I think sometimes just the words I chose were very much influenced by the fact that I was sobbing as I was writing them. And that feeling has stuck through in every incarnation. So, in, in the movie and in the Broadway version and all the versions we're doing – we just did a new version in New York – even though the text changes and the actors change and the staging changes, those underlying ideas are still there. The feeling is still there, and it can, it still resonates the same way. Like, I will still cry at the same moments, even though I fucking wrote those lines and I know exactly what's coming. That journey will still take me there.

So, it's a rare gift to have written something that sort of keeps going after you and that people keep discovering and people keep trying to find new connection to.

It was frustrating when the movie came out. It was successful, but it wasn't like the big hit. Like, we got like got a BAFTA nomination, but you would think that the movie, like, got a bunch of awards. It didn't. It’s a much more important movie to a lot of people than its overall critical reception was at the moment.

CH: It’s a screenplay that whenever I talked to anybody who in development at the time executives, agents, producers they talk about it like it was the Second Coming. And so, I'm curious emotionally, what was it like to have that made in the same year that those assholes at the Razzies give you a Worst Screenplay award for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle? What dissonance.

JA: Yeah, a giant shrug on that on that front. Listen, I have a frustrating relationship with the second Charlie's Angels because I love the first movie so much, and we really went into the second movie with such good intentions but also different intentions so that the result of the of the second movie is a bunch of different intentions.

And then 20 years later, people love the second movie, too. I let people love what they want to love. So no, I honestly did not remember that we got a Razzie nomination for the second Charlie's Angels. People are going to hate on things and that's absolutely fine. I think you'd rather have something that people react to than something that just like disappears into the void. That honestly is sometimes the most frustrating outcome as an artist where you feel like you threw a stone and it just disappeared in the water without making any ripples.

That's why I talk to so many writers who have had movies that have debuted on streaming or series that they kill themselves on that debuted on streaming. And it's just like they disappear or worse. I've known folks who worked on Batgirl. They shot a whole movie. It doesn't exist. Or the Looney Tunes movie, Coyote Vs. Acme. And so, I'd much rather get a Razzie nomination for something than for something to just not happen. And so much of what you and I write also just doesn't happen. They're just movies trapped in 12-point courier on paper.

CH: This is just a really bad lead up to this question, but when we talk about problematic artists these days, we sometimes ask if art does art exist apart from the artist. And in your case, Big Fish does seem to have evolved beyond you. It seems to exist as a sort of just miraculous little piece of art that 50 years from now is going to mean something well beyond John August. Does it feel like that to you? And does it feel like you're ever chasing writing something as good?

JA: Oh, that's interesting. Listen, I would love if people still talked about Big Fish in 50 years the same way, but at the moment I have a very hard time envisioning like what five years looks like now from now, much less 50 years from now. But listen, I do love that people keep rediscovering and that it holds a place for so many people who have fathers –which most people have fathers –that there's a connection to it. That's great.

[As for the] sense of whether there's art that exists independent of their creators. We talk about it mostly when we discover people who are really good writers … have done monstrous things or say monstrous things. And we then go back and retroactively say like, “Oh, that thing they made wasn't actually good.” And I think that's foolish. If a movie doesn't hold up to the test of time, which some of them don't, great, that's fine. Like, that thing you enjoyed at the time, but you don't enjoy it now? That's fantastic. But if it's the reason why you've decided that this thing which was fantastic is now bad is because the creator is revealed to be shitty…I don't think that's a good use of artistic reinterpretation. A lot of the things that we love were made by people who, if you went back and really looked at who they are now, you would say, “Oh, that guy was a dick.”

CH: So, last question and then we're going to be back in a moment to discuss the “Modern Family” pilot – which I'm really excited about – but first I want to ask another big question. Do you think Hollywood still has the power to unite the world where the traditional delivery methods of film and TV have changed so dramatically over the past 15 years? For example, movie theater attendance has crashed. The ubiquity of streamer content means fewer of us are ever watching. The same thing as everyone around us. Zeitgeist moments like Star Wars or the “M*A*S*H” finale or “Friend's” finale seem impossible and the “Game of Thrones” finale numbers now seem like sort of a last gasp of a prior era of pop culture. Do we still have the power out of Hollywood in particular to do this?

JA: I think we have the power to do some pretty big things, and I think if we're comparing 2025 to 1975, it's never going to be the same thing. Stuff will keep shifting. There are some moments where we all sort of see the same thing. It's increasingly rare, but it does happen. Yes, streaming and where we're not watching all the same thing at the same time slows down the cultural conversation in ways that I find really frustrating. That's why I really believe that we need to – for most scripted series – we need to stick to a weekly release model so we're all seeing the same thing at the same time. So, we could talk about “White Lotus” and that episode that just happened and actually have a conversation because if that had all dumped at once, it would have like two days of notice and then it would just disappear.

And I think that is a detriment. I think we still have big movies that people go see. We have the Barbenheimer moments. We're going to keep having those. We had Wicked and Gladiator II this last time. I think there are ways in which we can be united in in seeing the same piece of entertainment. Listen, I think we just need to focus on those moments where we can come together and see things and feel like we're all on the same planet for these—

CH: For two hours. It’s the church of Cinema or whatever you want to call it, but it's sacred – at least in my world.

JA: There's a movie I'm hoping to do. We're seeing if we can get the rights to clear. But the reason I'm excited to write it is that it feels like, “Oh yeah, I can actually see a bunch of people in the theater together who who will just go to see this because it's a damn entertaining movie and there's a unifying message behind it, but it's not provocative.” It's just like, “Oh, that's actually an entertaining thing and we can all watch together, and that it could play across the States and around the world and everyone can see themselves reflected in it.” I'm hopeful, but I don't know.

I think there are reasons to make very specific, esoteric movies. There are reasons to make Anora, but there are also reasons to make Wicked. And I want to make sure we keep a, a broad idea of sort of what counts as a movie.

CH: Absolutely. Well, let me wrap this up. So, thank you so much for joining me today, John. We'll be back in a moment to discuss a seminal piece of art in your life, “Modern Family”. I'm looking forward to digging into this pilot with you.

JA: I'm looking forward to it. Delighted to talk about something I don't ever get to talk about.

As for you reading at home, you’ll want to come back for my bonus episode with John in which he and I discuss a favorite piece of art from his life — the pilot episode of “Modern Family” (2009). You can listen to that here.

Read John’s screenplay for Big Fish here. Subscribe to his newsletter Inneresting here.

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