[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," we're joined by Max Borenstein, the creator of acclaimed series "Winning Time," and "The Terror Infamy," and writer on the larger-than-life Godzilla franchise.

Borenstein discusses his own experiences as a screenwriter falling in love with his projects, writing for production, and finding a story's emotional core.

- I had seen Godzilla movies and I had a preconception of what they were, which was like, they were cheesy.

When we were approaching Godzilla, it was not long after Katrina, and it felt like it feels nowadays where there are these very large scale disasters and other events that feel so out of our control, and horrific, and monstrous.

And it felt like Godzilla was a really great metaphor for that kind of thing.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [typewriter ding] - At what point did you get on the radar of the monster universe?

How did that happen?

- The paths we end up taking are so interesting.

In my last year of college, I wrote and directed a film that was, and I did it because the same guy who had taught me how to, that there was such a thing as screenwriting and mentored me, said, "Well, you really should make a movie while you're in college 'cause there's actors who will work for free and you'll never get that again."

And and I was like, so like a short, and he was like, "No, why don't you make something more ambitious?"

So I took that as a challenge, and I put aside the script I had been writing the summer before my senior year, which was some big blockbustery-type thing 'cause I knew I couldn't do that.

And so then I wrote something that I thought I could do that was much more, like, you know, like, dogma.

It was just easy and cheap and, you know, with people who I knew I could cast, and then made that and it was a feature, and it was a great experience.

And then I came outta college and was writing, I was like, I'm gonna be a writer director, and I wrote some movie that I thought I was gonna direct, and it actually got optioned but not for me to direct.

And that led me into a career as like a writer for a few years, doing rewrites and things.

And because it was more dramatic and they weren't making dramas very commonly at the time, even already then, it was, but if you did a dramatic thing you could write, I got hired to write, rewrite thrillers and horror movies and things that were not comedic, and that sort of pulled me in that direction.

And then during the last strike, I realized, okay, I've been doing these sort of rewrites on movies that hadn't gotten made, but they were kind of, horror, and thriller, and whatever.

And I wanted to write something more like something that I cared about more.

And the strike gave me a great opportunity to just sort of do that.

And I wrote something on spec, and it's a movie that then 12 years later, I ended up making with Michael Keaton a couple years ago, a few years ago.

But it took that long.

But it was this very serious drama about the guy who handled the 9/11 victim compensation fund.

That script got some good response, and in the system, it led to like me getting hired to write, weirdly, a movie about Jimi Hendrix.

And then that movie, which also didn't get made but was well received as a script.

The founder of Legendary, Thomas Tull, has two passions, rock and roll, actually three, he loves sports, but it's rock and roll and comic books and monsters.

He loves Godzilla.

And so he wanted to make this Jimi Hendrix movie.

When that didn't happen, it was like, what about Godzilla?

I'd never seen like the first movie.

And I fell in love with that and that kind of inspired me.

And so I came at it through a dramatic lens, not from the lens of being a "Godzilla" fanboy.

[soldier yelling] - But you have these circuitous roots.

And then took me like a long time to get back to doing things that were the kind of thing that I probably that like.

When I was a kid, I would've loved that.

[typewriter ding] - Yours was one that I kind of fell back in love with Godzilla again.

And yeah, and Mothra and all of the characters that sort of came out of that reboot.

But I think that part of the reason that I did was because I also really liked the characters that were in the movie that were not Godzilla, and sort of got invested in the whole drama around what happened, right.

How did you look at that story, seeing it at an older place and then also looking at, hey, what's this movie really about?

- I had seen Godzilla movies, and I had a preconception of what they were, which was from the sort of '60s, the sort of, the movies you're talking about where they got campier, and I thought they were fun, but I thought they were cheesy.

But then when I watched the original, the original is like a really harrowing, it was made nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima, and it's clearly like a really well, like a connected metaphor for that.

There are horrific scenes in it, but it feels very, you feel the visceral connection.

And I thought especially so when we were approaching Godzilla, it was like a little longer after, but not that much longer after 9/11, and not long after Katrina.

And it felt like it feels nowadays where there are these very large scale disasters, and other events that feel so out, out of our control and horrific and monstrous.

And it felt like Godzilla was a really great metaphor for that kind of thing.

And looking back as I did and watching all the other Godzilla films, I realized that they, he had always kind of represented a different thing for a different era.

It was a kind of nuclear fear, and then it was like there were environmental themes, and there was like alien scare and all the different kinds of metaphors, and it felt like suddenly it was resonant to me this felt like, okay, maybe we can try to make it feel, you know, visceral now, and Gareth Edwards who had came on right before I came on.

We really sort of connected on that idea, and that became this core kind of principle for that movie.

[dog barking] [ocean water crashing] [suspenseful music] [people screaming] - Godzilla had a lot of humanity to me, obviously, it doesn't make any sense, and he certainly stepped on a number of people, but he did feel like you have somebody who on some level was an almost omnipotent presence in there, in that film.

And again, maybe it's because of the characters in the movie that sort of put that upon him, but how were you looking at that on the page?

- I mean, Godzilla is a really interesting one because, and we talked about it a lot and that's all like, Kong, which has become a part of that same franchise, and I worked on as well, is a much easier character to deal with because Kong is an ape and we're apes, and you can anthropomorphize as an ape.

Godzilla is and always has been, so not, like, inhuman and so big.

That's a real problem with Godzilla as a writer, is that Godzilla is so big that the scale, and we decided to make it as a disaster movie, which means that like in the scale of Godzilla, we are ants, and you don't think much about the ants and Godzilla is this sort of inhuman kind of force.

So the idea was for us like trying to really allow the human perspective on Godzilla to be something that that keeps Godzilla at a scale that is just like inconceivable.

But then in the Gareth film, like Godzilla, I don't think there's any, maybe one or two shots and this was kind of the plan where you're more at his level, but everything else is really through the lens of some human caught in it.

What it would be like is if, experiencing the scale of this thing from our scale.

But then there are moments gradually where you, and that was the hope was that eventually you kind of gain empathy for this thing that feels like it is just so beyond.

- You're actually thinking about all these things as you're writing this script.

- Yeah, definitely.

And I think like, and working with Gareth too, he has had this wonderful storyboard artist who, and the three of us would talk, but Gareth and I would talk sort of story and then they would go off and they would conceive these sequences and then feed back and we would, it was a really cool collaboration and a lot of it was about scale, and like where when we're gonna feel more of that personality to the character of Godzilla and how unknowable it should feel.

And there was a debate about whether anyone would ever like say the name of the creature.

There was all that, at some, you have these heady intellectual debates and then you go like, no [bleep], we have to say the name.

- What do you look back at now and think you got out of that project and that development and having an opportunity to restart something and really, really dig in and think about it.

And especially something with such a big fan base?

- One of the big things is that for me that was the first movie that got made, and I didn't direct, which a budget of nothing.

So you learn everything from that, you learn a lot about the translation of your imagination into actuality, and you keep learning that.

But that is just for every writer, it's a huge thing to finally have something actualized, and to realize the difference between imagining it and like what it takes to realize it.

So yeah, I mean I think that's, that for me was like mind- blowing and you keep learning it and relearning it, because every time you get on set, it's a really humbling experience having written things where you're just like, ooh, what about that?

And then you get there and you're like, oh, there's actual human beings who have to do that and take it really seriously.

And I remember sitting in our production meeting for Godzilla before, I had written the first draft and then I was fired and then I got rehired shortly before.

It was great, actually.

But it was like one of those painful first jobs where, and then I got back on it and one where I'm then sitting in like the production office and we were like talking to the actual VFX people and all the different department heads, and there was a sequence where, there was just something I wrote, his like Godzilla, like smashed, like stepped on someone.

It wasn't like the main thing, it was just, it was like a by the way, as he stepped on a car or whatever, and that was a big problem, and it was okay if he'd like stepped on it in the distance, but if he had to interact with a person and step on a person that was like hundreds of thousands of dollars more and a pain in the [bleep], and they were like, is it okay if we do it?

And I was like, oh yeah, I don't care.

'Cause it, but that's the interesting thing is you realize there's a great responsibility when you're writing it and they get that script and it's like, okay, how do we realize this?

And they look at it and they can freak out and you can think, like, what's so hard?

Oh yeah, just cut that.

And it like, as a writer there's a power and a danger to the fact that you have this sort of blue sky God-like ability to just do anything.

[upbeat music] [Kong screaming] [Barbara] So what was that, then weigh in when you move on to Kong.

'Cause now you're that guy, right?

To some extent.

- So Kong was, again, I think Thomas told, was, like, he was a great executive there because I mean he founded the company and he just had this passion for these projects.

So he desperately wanted to make, he wanted to make a Godzilla versus Kong movie, which sounded at the time absolutely absurd to everyone who heard it, which is this huge testament to him.

But anyway, part of that was make a Kong movie.

So he wanted to do a King Kong movie, and during the making of Godzilla was like, would you be interested in figuring it out?

And so, that was the sort of genesis of that.

And there for me it was, "Apocalypse Now" has always been one of my favorite movies.

Initially we were gonna set it in the past, the first draft I did was kind of like a heart of darkness thing, but it was like a journey up river, and it took a lot of turns and a lot of rewrites, and a lot of drafts with that movie.

And that was one where I was the first writer in.

And then again I came back later.

But that aspect of it stayed, it went from the World War I era to the Vietnam, and whatever.

But it was all sort of, it's interesting to see how when things develop certain things like end up remaining as the spine and some things like fall away, some things that felt key fall away.

[typewriter ding] - First of all, cool that anybody's making any kind of real ghost story.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause they don't happen anymore.

So how did that come about and how did you start to develop that idea?

- That was just such a serendipitous and interesting thing where, so I had a relationship with, so the AMC executives and just was having a sit down with them, and "The Terror" hadn't come out yet the first season, and they said they had this really wonderful first season, but it was this closed thing and they wanted to potentially do another.

And what that was in their mind, like the core common denominator would be some form of horror that was historic, like a historical moment that could have some kind of horror treatment over the course of a limited series.

And they were any ideas come back to us?

It was really just a general meeting.

But I was like, huh, I wonder just as a fun thing, I was like, I wonder if I can come up with anything.

And I was just looking at my bookshelves, and thinking about it, and this rarely if ever has happened, but at 3:00 in the morning, I woke up suddenly with this idea and wrote myself an email, and then it was still good in the morning, so I sent the email to them and they were like, that's great.

And truly it was that that was it, because I guess I was looking through books and I thought about the Japanese internment camps, and then was like, woo, a Japanese style horror ghost story.

'Cause they're such good Japanese horror movies would be really interesting.

And no one's ever done a show about the internment camps.

[suspenseful music] [jump-scare music] - So was that just your imagination or did you base it on some kind of, allure out of Japanese culture?

- Obviously like I had seen a lot of Japanese horror movies, but also, we did research into adapting kind of actual cultural notions of ghosts and from Japanese culture, and it dovetailed really well as like a way of embodying the horror of that moment in a genre way.

[typewriter ding] - So let's talk about "Winning Time" and how that sort of came about you, in this one space for a while now you get to sit down and write something that's funny and current, and sort of current, but still has a pretty crazy fan base, right?

- There's definitely, yes.

This guy Jim Hecht, who's a wonderful guy and great writer and a huge Lakers fan had optioned this book Showtime by Jeff Perlman about that era.

And he was looking, he had brought, was had brought it to McKay's company and he was, they and he was, they were bringing it to HBO and HBO wanted someone who, they had a relationship to write the pilot, create the show.

And Jim wanted to make sure that it was someone who actually had a connection to the material, and mutual friends told him, vouched for me that I was like actually a Lakers fan and I was born and raised in LA and it was that it would matter to me.

And we sat down for lunch and started talking, and he comes at it from the standpoint of he loves it so much and he had been trying to do it for a decade.

He'd been really desperate to make this story 'cause he saw it and I didn't see it yet.

And he saw it because he loves the story, and I was trying to find wh-what-- how I could connect to it?

And we were talking and I was challenging him and in the conversation came upon like, well if we could do it as like a origin story for where we are today.

And I think the way that they sort of invent reinvented a kind of American culture in that moment.

- It's good!

[Announcer] And what a great sign that is for the Lakers.

Out ahead, splits the defender, but Kareem is running in on defense, and Kareem with the block, taking it the other way.

Kareem is in the post.

Oh my, you're getting a lot more Sixers to stop the big man tonight.

Just like that, the Lakers are back at folks, and Kareem's ankle may be hurting him, but oh Lord, he is showing no signs of it tonight.

Under a minute now.

Sixers watches this one slip slide the way.

[upbeat music] Lakers win, Lakers win, and now they'll head back to Philadelphia with a three games to two lead and they are just one game away from glory.

Folks, you are looking at the children of destiny, and just when things look bleak, the captain returns to save his team.

- Jerry Bus is this incredibly charismatic figure, but a very American figure.

He is kind of like a PT Barnum who's sort of like, he was Bootstrap's guy.

He, I think, is the good version of it.

But there's a connection between him and a Trump-like figure, because there's this sort of like, I can make it up as I go along and you're, it's sort of a con quality to it.

He's the version that we as Americans look at as being like, what's beautiful about America, I think.

But there's a reason why that's an attractive thing to an American culture that sort of figure who can just sort of rules be damned.

I'll figure it out.

And Bus is I think the kind of version of that that we've lost, and it felt like there was something beautiful about that, that we could really lean in on.

- Claire.

Let's talk turkey.

What turns you on?

What gets your blood pumping?

'Cause me, I don't even get outta bed unless I have a hard on about something.

So what excites you?

- All right.

- What is it gonna take for you to turn the form itself into an attraction?

- Money, advertising, marketing, refurbishments, all of those are expensive.

- How much.

- If I had access to a budget.

- You have access to me, I'm the budget.

Now be creative.

No idea is too big.

We are building Shangri-La.

- And then we, they gave us complete sort of freedom to just, the thing that, I mean Adam got involved, it was his production company, but he kind of got involved once the script was written and really just fell in love with it and was like, I wanna direct it.

- There's also a pretty significant responsibility with that story because so many of these people are still around.

- Well it's like religion, I think it is a secular religion, and people are that passionate about it, and that irrational about it actually.

And very much like religion, there are beliefs, but a lot of them are not necessarily that people take for a fact.

One thing we dealt with in the show that was really interesting.

Obviously, yeaah, you're telling a story about people that are still alive and you're not doing it in the way that traditionally gets done, which is either it's a crime thing, in which case no one cares if it's, what's accurate, or it's past, enough past that people are gone, or it's a movie.

And when it's a movie, it ends.

There's something different about a continuing story that deals with people who are still alive.

Apart from "The Crown," I don't think it's really happened.

And that resulted in a few of the people which was inevitably able complaining about I don't like the way I am, I've been portrayed.

The irony of that is they both, the people who complained both admitted they never watched it.

And I know for a fact that, from a lot of people who were there and a lot of people we did portray that said, yeah, that's exact, you got it.

And we did a tremendous amount of research, and stand behind what we did.

Now obviously like there's compression of time here and there and the kind of normal thing you do, but the big things that became controversial, those were for the most part, based on people's own memoirs.

For me, ultimately, like, I don't think the point of telling any story is to tell facts about what happened.

I think the point is to tell a story and use it as a lens on something.

You have a fealty to being accurate as you do if you're making a movie about World War II or 9/11 or anything important.

I mean, this is just basketball, so it's important, but not like that.

And but in every story we make choices, and if we're doing the dramatic version of it, by the way, documentaries make choices too.

And so there's a responsibility, but there's a responsibility to why you're telling the story and what you're trying to say, and you have to have your own kind of barometer and then you're just gonna go with it.

- So how do you make something that's so big be digestible essentially, right?

- I happened to be a big Lakers fan, but I really, and I was adamant about it, and it was a thing that Jim and I talked about initially, was we can't be making this show for fans, and not, we want, it's also for fans.

But if that's all we're doing, then who cares?

I'm not a fan of the Mafia, for example, and I love "The Sopranos," and I'm not a fan of meth at all, but I love "Breaking Bad."

But the reason, the thing I love in those shows and all the shows I love is that they is that they don't try to spoonfeed the specificity of that world to the audience, they dive into the specificity of that world and they portray it authentically, and through that specificity they find things that connect with us as human beings.

'Cause we all have our own specific environments, and we can watch "Mad Men" for instance, and see some stuff about the advertising world.

And that's quite interesting to us.

And you can smell the difference between bull [bleep] and what feels authentic.

To me, that's what TV has to offer more than any, more than film even, because it gives you an opportunity to just live in these worlds.

And my favorite thing about it is when it can really just sort of let you, it transports you in that way.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Max Borenstein on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about "On Story" and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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