Q&A: Screenwriter Ryan J. Condal Is Playing with (Dragon) Fire
The 'House of the Dragon' co-creator/showrunner discusses breaking into the business, the mistakes he made as an emerging writer, and trying to replicate the success of that other show
When I landed my first manager — a man who insisted on wearing tracksuit pants to every meeting—he sent me a great spec script called GALAHAD to check out. It was by another newbie screenwriter client of his named Ryan J. Condal who, like me, was relatively new to Hollywood and focused on writing period action-adventures. The significant difference between the two of us was that Ryan had already sold his spec and was suddenly hot shit around town while I was still six-or-so months away from making a similar splash. Over the years, I’d always hoped to meet Ryan if only because I had imagined some kind of unrecognized bond between us in space and time; unwittingly, we had been hatched by the same rep, doing similar things, and found success at pretty much the same time. But that meet-up never managed to transpire, and so I’ve had to settle for finally getting to chat with Ryan for one of my artist-on-artist conversations.
Since GALAHAD, Ryan’s career has been on a steady climb. While I managed to get something produced first — this being the shitshow called “DRACULA” (2013) — he soon followed with HERCULES in 2014 and then kept racking up credits. The next was the television series “COLONY”, which he co-created with Carlton Cuse and showran; the sci-fi drama ran for three seasons on USA before being unceremoniously canceled. Then, another film, RAMPAGE, came in 2018. But I think it’s his most recent credit that represents the biggest professional — and perhaps — creative accomplishment: co-creating “HOUSE OF THE DRAGON” with the “GAME OF THRONES” author George R.R. Martin, writing its pilot, and then showrunning the whole damn thing. The series has become a massive hit, as you know unless you’ve been living with a lost Amazonian tribe for the past few years, and its second season will hit your TV screen this coming August.
For aspiring and emerging screenwriters, there is a great deal to learn here about what “breaking into the business” is really like - including the toll it can take on your mental health and your ability to be present enough to enjoy your accomplishments. For more established screenwriters, there’s an incredibly valuable lesson in here about how to trade on whatever success you find to forge friendships with fellow artists you admire. I’ll let Ryan explain it.
COLE HADDON: You and I share overlapping origin stories to a degree. We both broke into the U.S. film/TV industry with our first sales in 2008, both with period adventure feature scripts, both repped by the same manager. It took me a while to accept how wonderful this time in my life was — I think I was too focused on establishing my career at the time — but I’m curious what your memories of being a babe in the Hollywoods is like? I’ll add, I will forever be embarrassed about that pun, but also a little pleased with myself for thinking of it.
RYAN CONDAL: I really wasn’t ready for it. It was terrifying. I realized that because I had spent all my time trying to learn how to write scripts that I hadn’t really learned anything about how the movie business actually worked. I was working in advertising when I sold my first spec, so I was immediately disadvantaged to all the other writers who had worked as assistants. I was really blind to a number of now-very-obvious things, and while this knowledge had nothing to do with writing, I think this limitation did hinder me in those early years. I regret it. But of course, there was no one there to teach me anything and feature writers are fairly intentionally kept apart so that they don’t talk about everything. You live and learn and write another spec.
CH: It’s true, the intentional separation you describe. I know I asked to meet you a few times, thinking from your work that we’d hit it off enough to justify a lunch or beer, but, alas, we have had to finally meet this way. You just said you were “blind to a number of now-very-obvious things” regarding the business, but not necessarily writing. Can you give me any examples?
RC: When I broke in, I didn’t really understand how agents and producers and executives worked. I mean, I understood the roles, but I didn’t really know how it they all worked as a unit. I didn’t know simple things like terminology, or how to read the subtext? For example, the dreaded “This is a great first draft!” – meaning, “You fucked this all up.”
CH: [Laughter] I misunderstood that for longer than I should’ve, too.
“I didn’t know simple things like terminology, or how to read the subtext? For example, the dreaded ‘This is a great first draft!’ – meaning, ‘You fucked this all up.’”
RC: Because I had spent so much time studying movies and screenplays, I realized that I didn’t study “the business”. I had to learn very quickly. Unfortunately, there’s no real mentorship or peer system for feature screenwriters the way there naturally is in TV.
CH: You grew up on the East Coast and started your professional life there. I’m curious how easily you acclimated to life in Los Angeles in the aughts, including the sub-culture of screenwriters that existed at the time. I wrote about this period recently, about how cold and sometimes even cutthroat it often felt, especially amongst feature writers. I grew up in Michigan, and it was certainly hard for me. I don’t think I developed screenwriting friends — real friends — for the first three or so years of my life there.
RC: I didn’t even meet another feature writer who wasn’t “fresh to market” the way I was until two years into my career. Yeah, I found the first few years of my career very, deeply lonely. I definitely found myself suffering from a kind of low mood that I had not experienced before.
It was strange – I had accomplished everything I sought out to do. I sold my spec, I had booked three studio assignments in the first year I was working, but I felt like a fraud. I didn’t know what I was doing. Nothing seemed to be moving forward in a big way. I didn’t have anything really approaching a support system. I didn’t know anyone. And I had this shitty, un-airconditioned apartment in West L.A. where I lived and worked. I spent at least sixteen hours a day in there, sometimes a good bit more. I felt like Jack Torrance in THE SHINING – the boring version. It was not fun. I really, really needed a social outlet, other people who were doing what I was doing. But I had no idea how to find it. Or how to ask for help. I would do a lot of things differently if I could go back.
CH: Talk to me about what kind of writer you wanted to be when you moved to Hollywood, but also how that ambition for yourself reacted to the reality of pursuing a career in the American film business.
RC: I was pretty practical about it. I just wanted to make a living. I had worked bad jobs before in the corporate world. I liked the well-paying advertising job I was leaving — really, it was one of the two jobs I had actually liked since graduating college — to take the plunge into screenwriting, so I wasn’t in a rush to be poor or miserable. I just wanted to make an adventure out of it, make a living doing it, and try to make my way up the ladder. I think that romantically, I really wanted to be a John Milius – an in-demand feature writer who got hired to work on the really muscular genre stuff. That never really happened. But a boy can dream.
CH: I’m a great fan of Milius’s work, so I understand. CONAN THE BARBARIAN is easily one of my favorite films. It’s such a contrast to STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE, I think, in terms of how to call upon mythological tropes in your work – gritty, grounded, primal, never calling attention to itself. Unlike STAR WARS, it genuinely feels like a film plucked out of some kind of forgotten history of humankind. I know one involves space, but CONAN just seems like someone’s history in a way STAR WARS doesn’t.
RC: I agree! It is wonderful myth-making and world-building. It’s a proto-civilization. Like a journey into a forgotten human history.
CH: I have to segue for a moment, because you actually made a go at adapting Robert E. Howard’s Conan novels for TV a few years ago. It ultimately didn’t move forward. Can you tell me more about it? I’ve begun to believe we’ll never see the character on a screen again. I mean, with all these sequels decades later popping up, how did we not get a King Lear by way of KING CONAN starring Schwarzenegger again?
RC: It’s a crime that the cinema-going-public never got John Milius’s CROWN OF IRON. I got to tell Arnold that in person when I met him in London a few months ago at his book signing. It felt like squaring the circle, in a way. I love him and I love Conan. My love of his film CONAN led to a love of literary Conan, which is a much different animal. Because Howard published these stories serially in the pulp magazines of the nineteen-thirties — proto-adult comic books — they play like a really great, old-school serialized television series. The reason that everyone struggled to make Conan movies after 1982’s seminal, brilliant CONAN THE BARBARIAN is because the Howard stories are set up more like episodes of television versus a two-hour feature. So the adaptation is tricky. Milius did it perfectly, but his film is more of a John Milius fantasy-take-on-Genghis-Khan thing than a strict adaptation of Howard. I wanted to pursue the strict adaptation of Howard’s work, featuring his stories and updating them for a modern audience. I was telling the story through the lens of an indigenous person encountering civilization for the first time and what that was like for him and what it meant for him, his people, and their way of life. The irony, of course, on Conan’s long arc is that he becomes king of that civilization… which I can’t imagine was a great fit for him or for Aquilonia.
CH: Amazing. Speaking of television, where did TV fit into your ambitions at the time? We both landed our first string of sales before the rise of streaming TV. Cable was doing such exciting things. But even then, I hesitated. Cinema was where my heart was and still is even if I primarily write TV these days.
RC: I watched a lot of TV. It was always a part of my life – “THE SIMPSONS”, “SEINFELD”, THE EX-FILES”, “STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION” – and had become a growing part of my writerly life as I admired the bold things being done on cable from an artistic perspective such “THE SOPRANOS”, “DEADWOOD”, “THE SHIELD”, and “MAD MEN”. But it didn’t factor into my pursuit for years because I was so monastically dedicated to becoming a great writer of feature screenplays — feature structure, feature rules — that I felt, perhaps wrongly, that I had to learn an entirely new craft to even attempt TV. Looking back, during my years of struggles, I wish that I had tried to staff. I think it would have made a huge difference in my growth and my mental health to have a defined support structure instead of being a mercenary for hire.
“I wish that I had tried to staff. I think it would have made a huge difference in my growth and my mental health to have a defined support structure instead of being a mercenary for hire.”
CH: Okay, so it’s been fifteen years since you and I broke into screenwriting as professionals. We’ve clearly enjoyed the same career trajectory, too. I mean, you’ve had a couple of films made and, most recently, co-created and are currently showrunning one of the biggest shows in the world while I…well, I created a TV series a decade ago that crashed and burned at the end of its first season. Exactly. The same. Careers. [Laughter] Can you look back at the writer you were when you sold your first spec, GALAHAD. and reflect on how you’ve grown since then? But also, do you ever worry you’ve lost anything after so many years working within the Hollywood system?
RC: I’ve been very fortunate. It was a long, hard road, but my original goal to simply make a living at screenwriting had really worked out. I think I’ve reported some writing income for every quarter since I broke in. That’s a lot of hard work — and over-work — and dogged determination. I’ve definitely matured and become more cynical and wizened to how the business works, but I don’t think I’ve changed that much as a person or artist. I really do love the writing work, and I have never pursued a job cynically. I’ve always taken jobs for things I feel like I can write and write well and that I have something unique and “artistic” to say in the execution. Things are more complicated now — I have a home and a wife and kids and more responsibilities — but really, I pursue my day-to-day with the same sort of compass that I did back in 2008. I try to find stories to tell that I’m passionate about…and the occasional over-paid studio rewrite.
CH: You just said you’ve never pursued a job cynically, which is admirable and, for many screenwriters, I think enviable. But okay, have you ever got a job you wanted for the right reasons only to discover you were absolutely the wrong writer for the gig?
RC: More often than I care to remember. Sometimes, you just realize that your tone doesn’t vibe with the people you’re writing for. More often on the feature side — an endless pursuit of the PG-13 rating — versus the TV side where I’m encouraged to access my inner-Milius much more. My early drafts of HERCULES were so dark and violent - they would have suited HBO more than MGM.
CH: How do you internalize that kind of creative impasse? I used to take the failure — if you can call it that — very personally, but I also struggled with the alleged stakes of it. Mostly because your reps spend so much time trying to convince you this is the job that’s going to make you if you just don’t fuck it up.
RC: I’m a people-pleaser. It’s a trait that people are often surprised to find — now — in a showrunner as they expect a boxing match on every issue and debate, but I began my creative career in advertising, which is a massive collaboration between the client service people (the producers), the artists (the directors), and the writers, all trying to make the client (the studio) happy. I came very much out of that mold. I have things that I like from a taste perspective, but I’m also not trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole that’ll never go. So, I would take the notes aboard and try to give them what they wanted. But writers — myself included — often cannot write in a tone and sensibility that is not innate within them. The art is inert. And I think that was often the case with my “failures.”
“But writers — myself included — often cannot write in a tone and sensibility that is not innate within them. The art is inert. And I think that was often the case with my ‘failures.’”
CH: This is such a fascinating super-power you describe, being a people-pleaser based on your training in advertising. I started off in a line of work that taught me to have no patience for assholes…which, it turns out, was not the best “skill” to have in Hollywood where patience for assholes is absolutely necessary. I’m curious, did your background in advertising help you in any other ways? For example, knowing how to deal with unsure clients or package ideas in more economical ways?
RC: Advertising really turned out to be a good training ground for working in film and television production. You learn how to get up before a group and present ideas. You learn to work within budgets. To think laterally. To think visually. To interact with clients – who, like you, are people who want to own a house and who love their children and only rarely drink the blood of innocents. And most importantly, to not get too hung up on things because at the end of the day – you’re not saving lives. You’re selling hormone therapy pills…as I did for a few years.
CH: You just brought up some of the differences between film and TV, so let’s get into that. We’ve discussed those early years of your career, where you felt isolated and disconnected from your feature peers. A lot of working alone for endless hours. What was that initial adjustment to TV like for you, then?