Q&A: Screenwriter Liz Hannah Wants to Get Crazy

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 Liz Hannah — the Golden Globe-nominated screenwriter whose credits include the feature films The Post, Long Shot, and Lee and co-creating the TV mini-series “The Girl From Plainville”).

The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to tap on the podcast play button right now and 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 edited for length and clarity.

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

• Craft, craft, and more craft

• The challenge of creating meaningful art today – especially art that directly responds to the United States’ political landscape – under the corporate influence in Hollywood

• Why she couldn’t have written The Post at this point in her career (or: the advantage of being young, dumb, and fearless as an artist)

• What went into writing two pivotal scenes in her career, a monologue performed by Sarah Paulson in The Post and the interrogation of Charles Manson in Season 2 of “Mindhunter”

• The unintended resonance of The Post in Trump’s America, which provokes a heartbreaking observation about how her success was achieved

• Why she can’t rewatch films or TV she’s written

• Whether Hollywood is up to the challenge of confronting the major challenges of our day, from fascism to climate change (or: her thoughts on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners)

Oh, and a bonus episode is available, too. In it, Liz and I discuss a seminal piece of art from her life – David Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

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My guest this week is Liz Hannah, the screenwriter behind films like The Post, Long Shot, and Lee as well as the limited TV series “The Girl from Plainville”, which she co-created with Patrick Macmanus.

She wrote The Post, the script that launched her in Hollywood, in 2016. It was one of those miracle sales, scoring so much heat so quickly that Steven Spielberg quickly attached himself to direct. The true story about the decision of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee to risk ruin by publishing the Pentagon Papers in defiance of Richard Nixon's legal threats proved the perfect story for the time in the director's mind. Within a few months, Trump was in the White House though, and the story of journalistic resistance to political malfeasance took on even greater meaning when it was released in December 2017 with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the lead parts – just fifteen months after Liz sold it.

Liz followed this up with Long Shot, which is a painfully hilarious political comedy starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen and co-written by my friend Dan Sterling. I cannot stress enough how charming this film is. It's truly one of the better rom-coms of the 21st century. Other films followed, such as All the Bright Places starring Elle Fanning and Lee starring Kate Winslet, which came out last year. Lee, like The Post, is a true story about challenging the powerful and defiantly protecting the truth like everyone in Hollywood.

Liz has also worked extensively in television. Her stint on “Mindhunter” was especially remarkable, I think. But you might know her work as co-creator of “The Girl from Plainville” best. It again starred Elle Fanning and is an incredibly inventive take on a true crime story – invention that in the bonus episode you'll discover evolved from Liz's love affair with David Bowie – a love affair I happen to share.

As for that bonus episode, Liz returns to discuss a seminal piece of art from her life (and mine, as it turns out) – Bowie's 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Now, let's get into it with my guest this week, screenwriter Liz Hannah…

COLE HADDON: Liz, it's so great to meet you. Thank you so much for being here today. I wanted to start by asking what's giving you anxiety as a screenwriter this week?

LIZ HANNAH: Oh, wow. You know, I actually kind of good anxiety today, which is that I turned in a draft of an outline for a new show, for a pilot, to the network. So, I have both, [where] you click send and you have like one lovely moment of freedom and you're like, “It's done, I don't have to work on it anymore.” Which is now followed by the interminable anxiety of wondering what they will think and how the notes will come in and what the next evolution of it will be. So, that's my current anxiety – notes.

CH: When I hit send – and I’ve become better at this – but five minutes later I realized, oh, I forgot to make that change.

LH: Oh yeah.

CH: Do you send multiple drafts afterward? Apologizing each time for your changes?

LH: I don't do it all the time, but it definitely happens to me. For me, it's more of an obsessive [going] back and reading the email over and over again, and I'm like, “Did I say it all the right way? Is that funny? Will that be offensive?” And then I read the outline again and I'm like, “Okay, I'll go through the notes again even though I've turned it in already. So, I definitely overanalyze it, which I'm sure helps with the anxiety a ton.

CH: Well, congratulations for delivering it. Are you mostly working in television these days or is there a nice balance?

LH: I am working in both, which is lovely. My day to day right now is primarily television because I have this series and another one that I'm taking out next month. So, there's a balance there, but then I'm writing something for me right now in features, which is really lovely. But sort of going to your first question, the larger question of anxiety is definitely I'm writing something that I I've been wanting to write for a very long time, but I'm trying to balance how I feel about the current moment in our world and the politics of America as it affects the world and sort of how I, as an artist, am centered in it – at least in terms of like what I can do. Because there's nothing other than activism and being vocal that I can do as I'm not a policymaker or a politician [other] than my job. And so, it's a political film and it's something that I’m putting, I think, a lot of pressure on myself to say a lot of things. So, my anxiety is both like, “Just finish it asshole,” and, like, “Make it excellent.” That's the constant backdrop of my anxiety.

CH: Of course. I'm sure we're going to talk about politics quite a bit given the content, of your work so far. but I may maybe look backwards a bit. You began your career in the arts in film/TV development. What precipitated the leap to screenwriting?

LH: It wasn't a lack of interest or even, I would say, a lack of development of it. I was constantly writing things. It was just like a complete and total fear and insecurity that there were people much better at it than me, which I still maintain very obviously there are. But I kind of reached a moment in my mid-20s where I had something to say. That was the first movie I ever wrote, and it it was la very personal screenplay. It was never produced, will never be produced. It happily lives in a drawer. But it was a very important thing for me to get out into the world, to kind of, in terms of my world, out of my brain onto a page – to sort of realize that I had the ability to express something that I was feeling, something that I wanted to say.

Working in development in tandem with that was a way that, I really developed a skill of development, of reading, identifying projects that I found interesting, identifying different areas of interest, different stories, different people. But I started to not want to give those ideas away. I wanted to hold onto them, and work on them myself, and see how far I could go.

So, it was kind of a convergence of many different things, [including] being cocky and naive and 25 and also having, I would say, a modicum of life experience and trauma that I could put into something.

CH: I came to LA after 30, or right around 30, and I was still young enough to not know what I couldn't do and take stupid risks and have confidence in myself – while somehow being wildly insecure at the same time, of course. It sounds similar with you. I'm fascinated by this, the idea that we begin taking risks and doing things in our 20s that establish us only to then later become the establishment in some way, whether we mean to or not, and the fear that gets in the way after that. It's a different type of insecurity.

LH: A hundred percent, I think. It's also, like, once you get it, you don't want to lose it. So, you play it safe to keep it, which is the antithesis of how you got there in the first place. I firmly believe in challenging myself and, like, doing things that scare me. Even that if that's the harder thing to do – creatively, not personally. But I think that doing projects, writing about different stories, diving into different worlds that I haven't explored that and finding different ways to tell those stories, like “The Girl from Plainville”, was something that I was really hesitant to do [at first]. I had just come off “The Dropout” and on paper there are a lot of similarities between the two stories, and there wasn't at the time, but I think, very predictably, we all could see this kind of true crime fatigue that was going to be happening. And I was fatigued myself having worked on it, worked in that world for a long time, and yet I couldn't kind of get out of my head the idea of pushing ourselves creatively to tell this story in unique ways both structurally [and taking] risks from perspective and point of view and things like that.

LH (cont’d): On that show, we would do something called Crazy Idea Hour every Friday in the room. At the end of the day, anyone in the room, support staff included, could pitch anything and you didn't have to pitch on the same episode we were breaking that day or same characters. You could just pitch anything. And it was just so freeing and, like, such a reminder to continue to stretch ourselves and push ourselves, and also really challenge each other as well as reaffirm the safe space that we created. Because when you have people pitching really batshit crazy ideas, you do have to give them that space. You really have to put your money where your mouth is of the support – because I want that support, as well, when I'm going out on a limb.

So, those are the things that I – going to what you said I completely agree with – that I continue to try and push myself to do because there's no way I would've written The Post as, like, an unemployed 30-year-old who had never had any feature film produced. I would never have put my life on hold to do it had I not had some like completely insane belief that it would work. I definitely didn't ever think that it would get to where it went, but just having the idea that someone else would see what I saw in it and the belief I had in myself.

CH: Why don't I follow up about The Post? I imagine Washington Post publisher, Katharine “Kay” Graham, was the character that most attracted you to the story. But I find, there's always an idea, a question, sometimes even a potential scene that seals the deal for me when I consider pursuing a new story. What was it that compelled you to write it?

Note to Readers: You can read Liz’s script for The Post here.

LH: I really couldn't believe reading her memoir Personal History – which is exceptional and a Pulitzer Prize winner – I couldn't believe how much I, when I first read it – which I was probably 23, 24, 25 – just how much I related to her. She wrote it in her, I believe, eighties. At the time of the film, The Post, she was in her fifties. But I was in my early 20 and just found this like deep connection with this woman who was at this very pivotal turning point in her life, and was trying to find her voice, and trying to both find her voice personally and professionally. It was just something that I really connected with.

I was also sort of struck by [the thought], “I don't think I'm that unique. If I connect with her, there's definitely a universality to that story.” I think there's a universality to any coming-of-age story. So, that was kind of what couldn't get out of my head.

LH (cont’d): In total frankness, the scene of the movie that clicked to the whole thing for me is a scene actually about Sarah Paulson's character. She plays Tony Bradlee in the film and there's a monologue that she gives in it, that was kind of the thesis of the movie and the thesis of Kay for me, and I kind of built the whole movie in some ways around that scene for no other reason than I was following like a very classic storytelling Aaron Sorkin structure – which was that at some point somebody really smart is going to have to give a monologue and tell you what the movie's about. [This is because] I knew that there would be a lot of vagaries in the movie just in terms of how I wanted the characters to unfold, that it was going to be a slow burn of character evolution between her and between Kay and Bradley. There needed to be a central cog and a central piece of the story where there was an illumination for the audience and for, at the time, the reader.

And so, it wasn't until that scene existed that [the story] kind of all started to become three dimensional to me and begin to come alive.

CH: So, when you wrote the script, Donald Trump was just running for office for the first time, but the film was produced and released after he was in the White House. As a result, The Post accidentally wound up an incredibly powerful allegory for the press's abdication of its responsibilities at the time, I think. But in 2025, when I re-watched it for this conversation, it hit 10 times harder than it ever did then.

LH: Mm.

CH: Can you reflect on that? And especially given what we started the conversation talking about.

LH: Yeah. It's funny, I haven't really reflected upon it in that way with him back – unfortunately. At the time that I wrote it, as I said, I had been wanting to write it for years. So, it was really not intended to be a parallel of Trump's relationship to the press – nor Hillary to Kay – in any way.

There really was no intentional parallel. I finished it at the end of summer, early fall of 2016. So, it was done before the election actually happened. But having said that, there were very clear signs of how the press was going to be treated by Trump and by his…community, we'll say. That was only fueled after I sold it and after he was elected. So, the parallels were unfortunately clearer and clearer.

Having said that, when we were making the movie in May 2017, I don't think any of us had a perspective that it would – it could or would – get so exponentially worse over the course of the next eight years in terms of everything, but also in terms of the press, journalism, and the stakes. I think the stakes of the press are always high, but just how much higher they would get? So, the unfortunate reflection I have is that we didn't, as a global community, do anything to preserve print journalism, which then led to a lack of preservation of journalism in general – because I think when you tactically have to make decisions of what you're printing in ink, it is a much bigger decision than hitting enter on a website that I could buy that says, whatever without any support or standing. Yeah, the reflection I have is deep sadness and deep fear.

The thing I will say that is unchanged and unfailing is I believe in journalists. I believe in journalism. I believe that our only way forward is truth and that there is power in truth and that there is power in the press. Unfortunately, that power is given and not earned because, if it was earned, then we would still have the tent poles of our society that we have trusted for over a hundred years to define these things for us and to give us the truth, to give truth to power – they would still have any semblance of strength, and they no longer do.

CH: What I find fascinating about art is that there is what we put into it when we make it, and then how the times imbue it with additional meaning or transform it in some way – which I think is what you just described. You wrote what should have just been a timeless story – a timeless film – that by history's sick sense of humor was transformed into something significantly more.

LH: You know, I have friends that work on “Handmaid's Tale” and “Handmaid's Tale” and The Post had this very bizarre parallel where both projects became very prominent because of their connection to what was happening in the world and, specifically, our country in 2016 and 2017.

“Handmaid’s Tale”, obviously not a book that was written in 2016, The Post about something that happened in 1971. Neither of these things were present day, and yet were very reflective of society and therefore were actually quite prominent because of that. If you could tell me that I could throw away the last eight years and that meant that nobody ever read The Post, [I would be okay with that and] I think everybody on “Handmaid’s Tale” would agree. It's a very bizarre world to live in, where your success is in somewhat parallel to the destruction of the world. I think that the thing about The Post that I am – I mean, I'm obviously proud of it – but the thing about it that, if it must maintain relevance, then the relevance I hope it maintains is that people watch it and realize that history is cyclical. And because history is cyclical, we know the ways that we can defeat fascists, and we know the ways that we can defeat racists, and we know the ways that people who are brave and strong can stand up and win – and that we should just take notes and continue to listen to our elders and learn from the past, lest we continue to repeat it.

CH: What a horrible description of one's own work. It's just so traumatic to hear it – as another writer.

I can't help but draw comparisons between Katharine Graham the Atlantic publisher Laurene Powell Jobs who similarly took on the US government by publishing the Signalgate story that other editors – including, I think, the Washington Post’s current owner or publisher – wouldn’t have let them see the light of day. Have you made that observation yourself?

LH: [Long pause.] I would say no, but I would [share] the observation that I have more aptly made is that the current owner of the Washington Post doesn't bear an ounce of reflection of the former.

CH: Perfect response. So, one last question before we move on to talking about a seminal piece of art in your life – which I'm really excited about given the subject. We were talking about The Post. I've watched all of your other films, too – like Lee. These are two films, in particular, that are, in some way or another, about checks and balances. That the press is there as sort of a citizen check on Washington and on the world in general. I've always thought of Hollywood as a version of that, too. Messier, yes, but with a much grander reach. Yet I can't help feeling that, like much of the media, has largely abdicated its social responsibility. You started the conversation talking about how difficult it is to talk about these things, trying to put into this new project of yours, so it’s obviously on your mind. So, do you think Hollywood is up to the challenge posed by the Trump administration, the rise of popular fascism, climate change, just in general? It seems like things aren't as rosy as Hollywood wants to convince us it is, and as somebody who's worked on films that are directly confronting this, how do you feel about the state of things at the moment?

LH: You know, I saw Sinners yesterday. I am an enormous fan of Ryan Coogler and will watch anything that he does. The profoundness of that movie really has blown me away. It's a movie that has kind of – as much as I talked about it for the 24 hours after I watched it – I’ve become speechless in reflection now because there's not a better word for me to use other than profound. Because I think it is accomplishing all of the things that you are asking whether or not Hollywood can do in a way that is forcing you to ask yourself if you want to ask those questions, because there's a way to watch Sinners – not an easy way – but there is a way to watch Sinners, have a great time as a genre film and a horror film, and to not take away anything from it. So, there is a way to do that.

There is also a way to dive incredibly deep on it and to go down a very deep rabbit hole of sort of how Ryan Coogler got inspired, and what the inspiration was, and what he was trying to say. Which, spoiler alert, was what I did. For me, that was a very obvious reaction to the movie because there are things that he's saying in it that are just layered and nuanced and historical and prescient.

So, my response and my response to your question is that I do think the filmmakers of Hollywood are up to the challenge. I think that the creatives of Hollywood are up to the challenge. I think that as represented by Sinners, the public and audience is up to the challenge. And I think that the executives are up to the challenge for greenlighting that movie and giving it a theatrical release and putting it at IMAX and shooting it at Imax, releasing it at Imax, and for giving Coogler the rights back as part of his deal – in 25 years.

So, I think there is precedent to say that the answer to your question is yes. But there are a lot of things that we don't have control about in Hollywood. So, I think that is my answer. I will remain as the half glass full answer. I think that from the conversations I've had with my friends here, the anxiety that we feel – absent of the anxiety of what's happening in the world – is, “How do we respond and how do we put that into our art and how do we control that response?” I think people are thinking about it and trying to figure out how to say it. Whether or not there is an appetite [from studios and streamers] to be making those things – be they more provocative or less is really what – we will see. But Sinners feels like definitively there is, and I hope that everybody sees it and it makes a billion dollars so that this silly asterisk narrative never gets brought up again.

CH: Thank you for that answer and thank you for the conversation so far, Liz. It's, it's been a delight.

LH: Thank you.

CH: As for you, amazing people reading today, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with screenwriter Liz Hannah as much as I did, but don't go just yet. There's a bonus episode, and it's a great one for my money. Liz returns to discuss a seminal piece of art from her life – David Bowie's 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. We're going to get into why this glam rock masterpiece – but really Bowie himself – provides a roadmap for artists about how to create, how to discover their true selves, how to strive for originality, and so much more. What can we learn about the creative process from this glam rock masterpiece?

Listen to the bonus episode with Liz Hannah here.

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