Q&A: Screenwriter Matt Nix Gets to the Heart of the Conflict
Q&A: Screenwriter Matt Nix Gets to the Heart of the Conflict
The creator of 'Burn Notice', 'The Gifted', and 'True Lies' offers up an epic discussion about writing dramatic television
Matt Nix is one of those screenwriters whose name I heard a lot during my first few years in Hollywood back in the mid-aughts. This typically meant either as an example of a writer I should read because his name was popping up on producers’ lists all the time or because producers thought we’d hit it off. I don’t know how we never managed to meet, but the world kept turning, I moved overseas, and then, a few months ago, I saw Matt’s name pop up as one of 5AM StoryTalk’s latest subscribers. Being a long-time fan, going back to the first series he created/showran — “Burn Notice” — I immediately emailed him and asked if he’d like to join me for one of my artist-on-artist conversations. It was time to find out if we actually would hit it off…and we did. Or we didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I’m an asshole now, but on my end, I enjoyed the hell out of the sprawling, incredibly craft-fixated conversation we had. (Let’s do it over drinks next time, Matt!)
For those less familiar with Matt than I am, his espionage series “Burn Notice”, which premiered in 2007, ran for an astonishing seven seasons. He’s created seven produced TV series since then, including “The Comedians” (2015), “The Gifted” (2017), and, most recently, “Turner & Hooch” (2021) and “True Lies” (2023). If you’re a screenwriter of any kind, at any point in your career, I encourage you to pay attention to our very craft-centric chat, including his thoughts on core episodic character dynamics. This is an opportunity to hear a high-level showrunner discuss how they tackle creating and writing TV series. We’ll get into his backstory, his frustration with the narrative of “the artist against the world”, and a brief (albeit insightful) history of 21st century TV, too.
COLE HADDON: Matt, the two-hander is a tale as old as time in comedy, drama, and everything in between. That most of your produced TV series qualify as such is not extraordinary, I mean. But I would suggest you understand the dynamic better than most. So, why don’t we start by you telling me about the TV series that lives in your mind as the perfect demonstration of this narrative approach? In other words, the series – and the core relationship – that you will be chasing for the rest of your career.
MATT NIX: For me, the perfect demonstration of the narrative approach actually isn’t a two-hander, it’s a three-hander: the original “Star Trek”. That show had, for me, the perfect unity of character and procedure.
On the one hand, you had Spock. Procedurally, he always advocated doing the logical thing, approaching a problem rationally. He wanted to do the effective thing, even when that meant making terrible sacrifices. That perspective wasn’t arbitrary, it was deeply baked into his character – as a Vulcan, he had a profound, quasi-religious devotion to rationality. He’s the one arguing that the Enterprise should abandon the plague planet because we can’t risk spreading the disease to the rest of the galaxy.
On the other side, you had Dr. McCoy. He always advocated doing the humane thing, no matter what the consequences were. His “procedure” was completely wrapped up in his identity and profession. He was emotional, and empathetic, and committed to reducing suffering. He’s the one arguing that we should go down and minister to the sick on the plague planet, consequences be damned, “because they’re people, damnit!”
CH: I’m so glad you took this question this direction. Please, continue!
MN: In nearly every episode, Spock and McCoy would find themselves at odds, articulating their different perspectives and procedural approaches and nearly always concluding that there was simply no way to reconcile the two.
CH: Enter—
MN: Captain Kirk, whose job, in nearly every episode, was to find a way to do the impossible, to somehow square the circle and find a way to do something that was both effective and humane. Again, this was foundational to his character – he became the youngest Starship captain ever because he figured out how to reprogram the unwinnable Kobayashi Maru simulation so he could resolve the unresolvable. And that’s what he does. He’ll take that crazy risk to find a way to save the plague planet that doesn’t involve dooming billions or infecting the galaxy. A way that will probably also involve hooking up with some attractive alien, but hey, it was the late ’60s.
What I think is so utterly perfect about the setup is that every character is their procedure. The plot and the characters are inseparable. The central dramatic argument at the core of the show is evergreen. In every situation, Spock and McCoy have legitimate points of view. Neither one is right or wrong. And Captain Kirk isn’t just choosing one or the other, he’s synthesizing both and finding a third way. It makes all of the characters necessary in each episode. Kirk can’t do it on his own – he needs the skills and perspectives of Spock and McCoy to solve the problem.
CH: So, how does this early education in character/procedure show up in your own work?
MN: One of the things I look for in my own writing is what that unresolvable conflict is at the heart of the show, and how it plays out in the interactions between the characters. Is that basic dynamic something that will be interesting to examine over and over in different situations? If so, that’s a strong basis for a procedural. I also think that ideally, these perspectives need to mirror the internal psychology of the writer. If the characters at war in the show are also at war in the writer’s internal life, that’s a really good sign. Maybe not for the sanity of the writer, but it’s good for the show.
CH: [Laughs] I know what you mean. What I’ve always found fascinating about the holy trinity of the original “Trek” is how the series – and, later, the films – used them to dramatize internal struggle in contrast to the external threat the three were facing at any given time. Of course, this isn’t a universal rule, but it’s a general rule – which is, Kirk could only adequately deal with the external threat when he had adequately answered the psychological challenges thrown at him by his best friends Spock and McCoy. The layers of dramatic conflict were so much deeper and richer as a result. When the series or films didn’t adhere to this approach, the result was far more generic and forgettable.
MN: I agree entirely! So many movies and TV shows get caught up in spectacle and neglect the basic dramatic conflict. That shit’s just not that important, except maybe for a trailer. “Star Trek” was mostly people talking on kind of cheap-looking sets, and most aliens were basically humans with some kind of weird forehead. People will watch a puppet show with a great dramatic conflict. At the same time, though, I think it’s easy for people to beat up on over-emphasizing spectacle as the problem. Every exec in Hollywood will tell you “It’s the characters that matter.” And they demand endless backstory and trauma to “build out the characters” and get at “why they do what they do.” But a lot of times, drama is replaced with a lot of explaining and character exposition nobody cares about. What do we know about Captain Kirk’s backstory at the start of that series? Not much. Youngest starship captain, the Kobayashi Maru thing, and his middle name is Tiberius. He didn’t have a huge character biography – nobody did. But the dynamic between the characters was instantly interesting.
CH: Talk to me about the “unresolvable conflict” at the heart of your own shows. You say the best scenario is where your characters are also at war inside you, but are you really arguing that you don’t show your hand in resolutions? I’m thinking about how often Cold War films, from Westerns to thrillers – something like Red River or Panic in the Streets – always required two opposites to work together, but ultimately the filmmaker’s political leanings would be revealed in which direction the resolution leaned, so to say.
MN: Well, to be clear, I think it works very differently in movies and in TV shows. You’re referring to movies, where you need a resolution. Yes, there’s a conflict, but one side needs to win. It has to be resolvable – in Red River, you have a conflict between tyranny and empathy, and empathy wins. Everybody kind of knows where it’s going, and the satisfaction is in seeing how it gets there.
In a TV show, if the conflict is that obviously resolvable, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. In “House”, for example, you’ve got this constant tension. There’s an acerbic genius whose cynicism allows him to see situations clearly that others miss, but whose lack of empathy can cause real harm. He’s balanced by Wilson, who is deeply empathetic and can help patients with that, but lacks Dr. House’s clarity of vision. And both men are right in their way. And often, without both of them on the case, the patient’s dead. There is no leaning in one direction or another. And if you know David Shore – and I don’t think he’d mind me saying this – he’s both House and Wilson. He’s kind of cynical and dyspeptic and extremely smart, but he also has a deeply empathetic side.
CH: I know David a little bit. In fact, he joined me for one of these artist-on-artist conversations a couple of months ago. I found him to be pretty much exactly as you describe.
MN: I think it’s quite common for creators of procedurals to “feel” very similar to their shows. The dynamics at work under the surface of the drama they write are, not surprisingly, similar to the dynamics at work in their personalities.
In my own work, I tend to come back to certain tensions and themes and kinds of characters, playing out the conflicts within myself. My characters tend to be good guys, but with very different approaches. I tend to like anarchic characters who break rules and are highly emotionally expressive – a character I call the “prosocial sociopath”. They’re often paired with characters who are all about following the rules and doing the right thing the right way. To look at “Burn Notice” through that lens, on the one side you have Fiona approaching every situation without regard for the rules – she’s all about doing what’s emotionally satisfying and “right”, consequences be damned. Sam is generally the one pointing out the “correct” way of doing things and speaking up for a more conventional morality. Michael’s job is to figure out how to square both of those. He’s not taking sides, either – he’s with Fiona in that he’ll blow up every fucking car in Miami to save somebody, but he’s with Sam in the sense that he’s going to figure out how to avoid hurting innocents and sending people to jail. So, I guess I tip my hand in the sense that my answer to the question “should we kick ass and fuck the rules or carefully do things the right way” tends to be “both.”
MN (cont’d): I’m curious to know – I know you’re not really a procedural guy, but in your work, do you have those recurring character archetypes? Are there dramatic questions you return to, itches you can never quite scratch?
CH: It’s funny, over the years I’ve come to realize how much I actually bake procedural elements into my TV work. I think that’s a combination of the fact that television can be a very mathematical idea to me – which my wife would tell you is because I’m probably autistic – and the fact that I’ve become disenchanted with ongoing serialized TV series. Very few manage to justify themselves over the long run, in my estimation, because they lack that baked-in conflict that consistently makes episodes feel so necessary.
MN: I know what you mean, but I think it’s less about procedural versus serialized shows than it is about finding an interesting dramatic question to explore. It very much is mathematical. There’s a deep underlying dramatic math to every show. I mean, “Breaking Bad” was serialized, but it was always intensely concerned with the same thematic questions. Pretty much every episode was asking, “Can you be a good person who does bad things?” in different ways, and the characters and plot were all constructed to serve that. When a procedural show misses the mark, it’s often asking a not-very-compelling dramatic question that isn’t very personal to the creator, like “Is the bad guy going to be caught?” When a serialized show misses the mark, it’s usually for similar reasons – you end up with a show that’s just asking the question “What’s gonna happen next to these people?” or “What’s the big secret?” Of course, there are also shows that are asking really interesting questions that are deeply personal, but either don’t have a broad enough appeal or the audience somehow misses. That’s always sad to me, when someone’s doing something really interesting and deep and nobody gets it. But back to you – tell me about the math of your shows.
CH: I do think of character dynamics as an equation, similar to you, but they don’t necessarily break down like you describe them. I start with a character, then try to ask who the right foil for them will be. I do the same for antagonists. Across the board, I’m trying to create conflicts that can constantly escalate tension and stakes, while also each creating flexible dynamics with other characters so, for example, alliances can shift as a series progresses. I tend to think of character journeys as operatic, so I need a lot of turns and reversals, or at least the potential for them.
As for questions, I have a few that seem to never go away and probably reveal a lot about my own existential angst. How does fighting back against the powerful change us? How do you find meaning in a random universe? Will I ever get over the death of my parents? That last one is a joke, but also probably note. I’m very fixated on exploring how we reconcile ourselves with loss, grief, and such – probably to an unhealthy degree.
MN: Hm. I get it, but I’d still challenge you to look under the hood a little harder. I mean, let’s take one of your questions: “How do you find meaning in a random universe?” I’d say that’s an interesting question, but it’s less of a dramatic question because it doesn’t have “sides” and it doesn’t generate conflict. Whereas a question like, “Does meaning and morality come from God or do we make our own morality?” is more of a dramatic question, in the sense that I can see how interesting drama rolls out from that. That suggests a show kind of adjacent to “Breaking Bad”, but more about faith. Similarly, “Will I get over the death of my parents?” is a yes or no question and probably not an engine for a show. But, “Do we owe anything to our dead ancestors or are our lives our own?” suggests a show about people struggling with the weight of a family name and history versus their own desire to live their lives on their own terms.
CH: To be clear, those are the questions I’m struggling with on a personal level that I return to over and over in my work, not necessarily ones I would build a TV series around without finding a specific expression of them, a way to dramatize them, as you just did. I expect a lot of readers are going to immensely benefit from what you just did, though.
MN: In my experience, just working with writers in development, it’s an exploration worth doing to find what those juicy, conflict-filled questions within us are. We all have them in our work. Sometimes we’re just too close to our own work to see what we’re really asking. It took me years to identify some of the themes I was coming back to, and I’m still discovering them. It’s why I think I should be able to write off my therapy bills as business expenses.
CH: [Laughs] It’s really a shame that we can’t as it’s so vital to many storyteller’s work!
CH (cont’d): Okay, so I don’t know nearly enough about your personal biography. Tell me about your childhood.
MN: My formative years were in the Palm Springs area, where I grew up as the child of a headmaster and…well, my mom did a lot of things, but one of them was write for nature magazines and things like that. My great-grandfather was an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter – he wrote Sergeant York and some Frank Capra films. My great-aunt was a Hollywood publicist who had worked with Clark Gable and Katherine Hepburn and a ton of other stars in the ’40s and ’50s, and my great-uncle had been a kid actor in the ’30s. That said, we didn’t feel like a “Hollywood family” at all. I had great connections to some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, except they were all long dead. So, it wasn’t so much that I had an “in” as that I had an awareness and a sense that it was possible.
CH: Which I’m glad you worded that way. I’ve talked often in this conversation series about how everyone around me growing up told me what I wanted was impossible, by contrast. It’s such a small, but critical advantage, I think.
MN: Oh, for sure. I think it’s crucial. It’s why role models are so important, though I think it’s a bit more subtle than just showing kids the big successes and telling them “you can be anything you want to be!” One of the most important things I got from my family background was a sense for the workaday realities of the writing life. My great-grandfather was successful, yeah, but I also grew up on the stories of his ups and downs – moving to a big house when he was doing well, moving out when he wasn’t working as much. My great-uncle did a little acting and made a run at being a writer like his dad. He had a short career in radio before he had a kid and had to get a “real” job. So yes, I knew it was possible. But more important in some ways was knowing that it was possible, and it was also a job, not some crazy fantasy life. When did the job become real for you?
CH: I think I’m unique amongst many writers I’ve known, in that I never thought of writing as a pathway to anything extraordinary. In fact, before I moved to Los Angeles, I would’ve told you that screenwriters made much, much less than WGA minimums require they do for their work. It wasn’t a get-rich scheme, I mean. I was never going to be famous. I was just going to write a lot and not complain about it because that’s what my father did when he got a job. The difference for me was that I was going to get to do for a living something I couldn’t stop myself from doing for fun, whereas my father hated what he did. I still remember calling my parents, to tell them I’d been hired to write my first script. I think realizing that I was about to make more in a year than my father ever had in the same period probably made it real in the way you’re describing, as I knew I would be able to do this forever if I just kept working my ass off and never took it for granted.
MN: I think that’s a really productive attitude. It’s great when the business rewards you, but you really can’t count on that. There are so many ups and downs and reversals, if you’re in it for money or fame, it’s going to be pretty disappointing. I remember years ago, I was nominated for a very fancy-sounding award for a show I did. I went to the gala to receive my award, feeling very good about myself. I’m getting recognized, Hollywood finally loves me! Only when I got there did I realize that I wasn’t originally even nominated for the award. They’d nominated a bunch of other showrunners and it was clear none of them was willing to go and accept the award. So, I “won” this award because I was the only guy willing to show up. It was a good reminder not to look to Hollywood for self-esteem.
That said, I’ve always been fortunate in that writing was just something I always did for fun. When I started out, I wrote anything. Video game dialogue? Sure. Actor showcase scene? On it. Midnight-showing play for an audience of twenty? Here you go! I made a couple of shorts a year starting in my mid-twenties and just kept at it into my thirties. Every year when my kids were little – even when I was doing multiple series - I spent all of Thanksgiving vacation making an action series with my kids and their cousins. Like, big scripted special-effects-driven superhero movies. Then, I’d spend weeks in post-production. Just to show it to the family next Thanksgiving. That’s a good way to arrive in Hollywood. “Hey, I’m going to do this no matter what. If somebody wants to pay me, awesome, but I’m going to do it either way.”
CH: So, what got you into writing?
MN: What got me into writing was reading. I read constantly as a kid. I wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist, so I drew single panel cartoons all the time for my parents. They’d compliment the good ones and help me make the bad ones better. I’d write stories. I made a lot of videos when we got a video camera. I wasn’t one of those “writer kids”, but I loved making stuff and that was always encouraged. When I wanted to go to law school after college, my dad sat me down and said, “This is a bad idea. You’ve never expressed any interest in law. I will only support you in going to law school if you can find a lawyer who does something you’re actually interested in doing.”
CH: Your father sounds amazing.
MF: He is amazing, truly. The thing he pounded into me was to pay attention to whether what I was doing required me – my unique combination of passions and skills. It was deeply true for him. He was this amazing, beloved headmaster who was a mentor to thousands of kids and loved what he did. He didn’t care what I did, but he told me, “Be sure you can say that ‘this work required this life.’ If your life’s work is being a corporate lawyer, fine, but don’t just do it because you’re a smart kid and you kind of can’t think of anything else to do at twenty-one.”
So, I bailed on law school, and basically a day later one of my best friends, the writer Ben Wexler, called me up randomly and said “You’re graduating, you’re not going to law school, I have an amazing apartment and I need a roommate. Move in with me and we’ll find you a job in Hollywood.” I was like “Okay. That sounds like fate. Done.” So, I moved back to L.A., got a job as a Hollywood assistant for a while, and then decided to write when I finally accepted that was what I really wanted to do. That’s actually where my family’s Hollywood roots were helpful. Everyone was like, “Screenwriting!? Terrific, kid. It got us through the Depression. You’ll never go hungry if you’re a screenwriter!” Which maybe wasn’t great advice, but it gave me some confidence. And again, as I said before, they very much saw it as a job you worked hard at every day, not a lottery ticket or a fantasy, so that was very helpful, too.
Another big influence for me was the bizarre environment of the Palm Springs area in the ’70s and ’80s. My friend Teddy from next door? His dad was also my pediatrician, and we used to go camping together until he got into a custody dispute with Teddy’s mom…and tried to hire a hitman to murder her. He got arrested – the hitman was an undercover cop. Then, he needed money to pay a lawyer, so he burned down his office for the insurance money.
CH: [Laughs] I don’t know, Teddy’s dad sounds like a Coen Brothers character.
MN: Oh, for sure he was a Coen Brothers character. My childhood was full of them. One of our good family friends got arrested by the FBI – he turned out to be the biggest real estate fraud con artist in California history. In an unrelated situation, the FBI showed up again to inform my dad that our phone line was being monitored because he was the headmaster at the school where the don of the Palm Springs mafia had his kids. I could go on and on with stories like this. Suffice it to say, it sparked my little kid imagination.
CH: How did that kid end up with “Burn Notice” on the air? I’m specifically curious how it happened. It’s such a transformative piece of art in your life and career, I’d love to know about its ideation – for example, did it start with learning about real intelligence agency burn notices?