[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] "On Story" offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

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[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's "On Story," Tony Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and writer of "The Humans," Stephen Karam.

- I started to think about my love of scary movies and the thriller genre and psychological thrillers and psychological horror.

I mean, I'd never written a genre piece before.

And I thought about, you know, processing maybe the fears of a family through, through a story that might actually elicit the kind of scares or anxiety I was feeling.

I was like, that might be really fun.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, Stephen Karam discusses his directorial debut and highly anticipated adaptation of "The Humans."

Karam dissects the evolution of the Tony Award winning play and the difficulties in bringing his vision from stage to screen.

[typewriter ding] [Casey] So, Steven, where did the impetus to create that story and take it out to to the world really start from?

- I will say, I do remember specifically thinking about my own anxiety and fear and the things that were keeping me up at night.

And I started to think about-- I'm always interested in the questions I can't answer and the problems I can't solve in my own head and how to maybe think about turning those into stories or art or putting those questions into stories.

I started to think about my love of scary movies and the thriller genre and psychological thrillers and psychological horror.

And I'd never written a genre piece before but basically I thought the play was gonna be pretty camp and like a bit more running towards blood and gore.

And I thought about, you know, processing maybe the fears of a family through, through a story that might actually elicit the kind of scares or anxiety I was feeling.

I was like, that might be really fun.

- Even when she was saying real stuff, what's been coming out, it's still... [lady in wheelchair mumbles] The doctor says it's normal, the repeating.

[Mom] You can never come back.

- Oh mum, you can absolutely come back, anytime you want.

[Deirdre] Having her at home with us until it becomes too much, it's a blessing, you know.

Right Eric?

- Dad.

Whoa, come back to earth.

- Sorry.

Sorry.

Long drive.

[Aimee] Are you okay?

- Yeah, once I get some caffeine in me, I'll be good.

- I'm curious where some of that love and some of that passion originates for from you.

What were some of those earlier pieces like "Deathtrap" that really spoke to that.

So I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

I think there's some Pennsylvania in the house.

I spoke to someone before.

So in Scranton, I would say like my library had a very limited drama section but it had a drama section.

And so the things I did discover were like I remember discovering "Sleuth" and "Deathtrap," which were very popular commercial plays on Broadway back in the day.

And you know, if you guys have this experience as like making your own movies or writing your own stuff, that the, that feeling of like discovering a thing when you're young that you didn't even know existed.

So I'd say that's the earliest sort of awareness of it.

And then, there wasn't an art house in my neighborhood.

So I wasn't seeing, you know, early Polansky or the sort of some of the scary movies that were more visually maybe influential in the way I thought about the genre as time went on but, you know, even movies like when Wes Craven, you know, rebooted himself with the "Scream" franchise, you know.

I'm not embarrassed to say that was kind of my introduction to, I got a very late introduction to cinema.

My path to being a cinephile was not like, and at eight years old I was being led to the cinema.

It was much more like my curiosity stemmed from seeing that movie.

And I was like, what other movies are really scary?

- Well, and moving there to the setting, and the duality of it, too, the setting of New York but also the specific setting of the space and that haunted nature of it.

It's so interesting to see New York feel like, around this Thanksgiving holiday sort of time, feel so haunted instead of warm and sort of alluding to that familial sense.

What drew you to that?

And what were you really trying to invoke for the audience through that?

- Yeah, there's a lot of layers here to that.

That's a great question.

I, so I love the architecture of space.

I love empty space.

There's a really interesting essay about, I don't think it's called this, but in my head, it's called something like "The Horrors of Empty Space."

Like the idea being the more empty the frame, the more it implies horror.

[Deirdre] He had a rough night, he hasn't been sleeping.

- Deirdre.

[Brigid] Why haven't you been sleeping.

Are you okay?

- Eric.

- Yeah okay.

[Aimee] I forgot the toilet paper.

- Okay.

Hang on.

- I don't know if he's been having nightmares or what.

[Stephen] It's interesting, I find pre-war architecture and spaces with history-- like when you've about to move into a space and you see it naked, or you leave, have you ever had the last look on moving day where you actually see the dust bunnies and the cable wire that you almost forgot.

The things that were behind your television or, and I guess haunting feels like too dramatic a word, but I've always found like what the emptiness implies in terms of the cracks in the molding, the amount of families or people who've come before you, why the floor is tilted.

Just the history of the space itself.

The foundation is even, you know, in a lot of these tenements that I lived in, they're literally leaning.

And so I'm, I guess I'm really drawn to history and how the camera can hold so much story in or how space can tell such a story based on its existence.

And I don't know, there's something very comforting to me about, even though this space is very haunted, that where the story unfolds, I do find pre-war architecture kind of comforting.

So as warped as it might seem, I'm also, I find it, for as dingy and drab and depressing as it is, I also find it quite, I find myself more at home in a space that has been lived in and inhabited than a new shiny.

Like I saw "Candyman" and a lot of those opening scenes in those really sleek, you know, and I'm like, that implies a different kind of horror to me, that kind of erasure of, you know what was there in these glassy boxes.

- I wanna jump over to your characters.

They all feel so distinct and lived in but everyone's carrying a bit of pain, it seems, a bit of trauma.

Where did you find yourself pulling from to bring those characters to life?

- I really was putting a lot of the things that were keeping me up at night, and people I loved, up at night into these specific characters.

I was thinking about the start of a book, an epigraph that made me laugh out loud that was like an old self-help book called "Think and Grow Rich."

That had something that I found, do you ever find something like a little profound in something that you're making fun of?

And so the epigraph was like, there are six fears that every human being has and goes through.

And it was something like, I think the breakdown was like the fear of ill health, fear of criticism, fear of loss of love.

[Deirdre] It wouldn't have been any scarier than the, I made him watch this.

What was it called, Eric?

The movie, the lifetime movie about the housewife who got AIDS.

Guys, it was so cheesy, but really terrifying.

[Richard] What was so scary about it?

[Deirdre] Well, this housewife cheats on her husband and he comes home from work and asks her how her day was.

[laughing] I mean, what could she say, "Oh, today I cheated on you "and contracted the HIV virus, honey.

How was your day?"

[laughing] Can you imagine?

- You're trying to be a comedian, no more wine for you.

- Have you seen the one where, I think it's called "My Stepson, My Lover."

[Deirdre] Oh that was a classic, Rich.

[Brigid] No, mom, please don't be gross.

- She's fine.

Be nicer to your mom, babe.

- And it's a little funny, but I did build the play and the film a little bit like one of those thrillers where like, you know, you discover that each one is holding a, a lot of them have multiple, but like there is one that is suffering from a health condition.

There is one that is very much meditating on having lost her partner of eight years.

Anyone who's gone through a breakup probably knows what that strange space is like.

Fear of poverty is drip-- I think money anxiety is dripping throughout the play.

As an artist who started out as a playwright with a day job for a decade, it's, I don't have to explain to you where like money anxiety comes from.

[Aimee] I was informed that I'm no longer on the partner track which just means-- [Eric] Does that mean it just takes more time.

[Aimee] Nope.

It's a nice way of telling you to start looking for another job.

[Deirdre] Why would they do that?

[Aimee] I just, I missed a lot of time last year when I was sick and then.

- Oh, she has ulcerative colitis, Rich.

[Aimee] Mom.

- It affects the colon.

[Aimee] Okay.

Okay.

Mom.

So, and I missed, I missed even more time right before they made their decision.

So I had another flare up this month.

- Oh babe I'm sorry.

[Aimee] Yeah.

- Why didn't you tell us?

You know they can't fire you because of a medical condition.

- Well, they gave other reasons obviously, but, yeah, you get the sense that they support your chronic illness as long as it doesn't affect your billable hours.

- They don't deserve you.

- What about financially, are you okay?

- Yep, I'm set for a while.

- For a few months?

- Dad, I'm fine.

I'll let you know if I need money okay.

I don't wanna talk about my job.

- But I was surprised at how much the financial anxiety extended to the entire family and that was a bit unexpected.

I remember the first time it was in front of an audience and people bringing up the term money and I was like why is everyone talking about money?

I didn't write a play about money.

And I certainly didn't make a film about money.

And then you watch it after you hear people say that and you realize that there's almost not two minutes that go by that somehow finances are not like just bubbling up, you know, without people even trying.

[typewriter ding] - I just feel like you have this amazing capacity to hold tension and escalate it in such a gradual manner.

- Yeah, I mean, I was interested in this kind of undercover thriller aspect of it where it's not important that anyone watching the film even know that it's happening but it's embedded from the opening moments even in the terms of the way things are shot.

Everything is sort of, all these familiar things that you've seen in family dramas.

Oftentimes even when you're not processing it, something is very consciously, a little off.

And I think the mind, the body, just absorbs that information differently.

And so I think the idea of how you almost build a real house before you can haunt it, or the idea that you really mind the uncanny and get at the truest dread by... not starting with like a vampire but having the patience to sort of lay the groundwork for something where you don't, you almost don't know why that like sort of knot in your stomach is tightening.

My experience with the film is people don't know why they're getting scared.

And I love that.

It also is like very quietly a foreign film about an American family.

Like it has that feel.

It's not a foreign film.

But it has like a feel that I think, I think something about it feels unfamiliar and unsettling that maybe is hard to talk about because that's maybe an aspect of it too.

Like, the family feels very traditional.

Like, you know, this purple state family from Northeast PA and yet the movie, the structure, the thing that's holding it doesn't feel like the thing that you expect to hold it.

And so I think that contributes a little bit to the tension too.

[dramatic eerie strings music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Casey] The opening of the film, I find so fascinating because of the imagery, at least that I read personally through it.

It seemed like there was some hints to religion.

How you just frame the buildings as you curve through the camera shots.

There's the obvious just example of being at the bottom of these buildings and just the darkness that you can see veering upwards so that idea of almost feeling in a hole, feeling trapped, in a way.

- I love these buildings in my neighborhood.

I've lived in these buildings my entire time in New York city.

And I was always fascinated by before the laws were changed so that there had to be significant distance between tenements, you know the air shafts sort of existed to provide that, but have since been deemed, you know, not sufficient.

But again, I thought these buildings that are photographed all the times in movies and are very familiar to everyone.

What about just showing these architecture, these familiar spaces in an unfamiliar light, looking at the sky shapes from below.

And I was astonished when I took my iPhone around to as many, I got into about, over the summer, about 20 garbage air shafts, including the building that I lived in, of course.

But I was amazed that just with your, you know, and I guess the iPhone that I had at the time is probably like approximating like a an 18 millimeter sort of focal length.

And I couldn't believe how gorgeous it was.

- I read somewhere, there was a discourse about this film and the play in some form, starting a conversation about post 9/11 and sort of this idea of this terror haunting tied to that experience.

Not only obviously for the city of New York, our country, but also the specific characters within the play and the film.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, it was conscious in that in the stew of fear and anxiety that I was trying to process or make sense of or just hold.

I was someone who moved to New York right after 9/11.

And so what I was, I would say more interested in just observing was the thing that felt impossible to describe for obvious reasons, which was that, how do you reflect on just the word terror had become co-opted or used both because we were fighting wars on terror, we were, that I was more just curious about the feeling of, the feeling of a city in the aftermath of something that was almost impossible to process because it's so unthinkable.

And then the Genesis of the actual story though was still holding onto that tension post 9/11 but in the wake of the financial crisis.

Because, for where I was in my day job working at a law firm, I was more just intrigued at a city that seemed like it had barely gotten a foot out of trying to rebuild or heal and, you know, I was really just interested in the insane anxiety that erupted both in the midst of, you know, I was a legal assistant so I was essentially working as a assistant at a law firm watching all the higher ups.

It was sort of a crazy look at people who were scared for all different sorts of reasons and so it doesn't just permeate the air.

The idea was that it would just be, it just feels like it's a part of New York.

And so I don't, I feel like it, it sort of sits in in the story in a specific way, but also in a way that is mostly not talked about for that reason.

It's just sort of, it's just sort of part of the history.

- Terror in the sort of creative or literary device, idea versus horror, two completely separate things.

Why did you ultimately stick with terror?

- I think I've just always been, I don't want to make this too academic answer.

I think I've just always been most scared about the things that I can't quite see or that are... shadows in the dark and I've always paid really close attention to it.

And I've always been the person who's obsessed with Rosemary's Baby and then and loves the movie full stop.

But the least interesting part to me is the demon baby.

Like the actual visual site of the creature.

I always sort of ruins it for me because maybe cause my own imagination is more twisted than any CGI monster.

And so for me it was mostly just writing towards what the kind of movie I wanted to see and the kind of release that I thought, you know, the things that sort of scared me the most.

[typewriter ding] - You have characters that are everyday sort of characters.

Middle class family.

And at the same time, they have moments where they're speaking about just regular difficulties or disagreements, yet it can sound so lyrical even though it's everyday language.

I'm just curious how, as a playwright obviously, and a screenwriter, how did you develop that voice?

- My path as a writer was often, and as a film director, I would say is often about falling more and more in love with economy as a guide, like realizing how much I get out of stripping away.

And so I become a little obsessive and interested in things like the actress who plays the mother of this family, Jayne Houdyshell.

There's sort of like her at a table in front of some ranch dip.

[Eric] Okay.

[Aimee] And how's Aunt Mary?

- [laughs] She's hanging in there.

God love her.

Rich, this is their aunt who had both knees replaced.

I drive her to her physical therapy.

They got this contraption now to help load her into the pool.

[Aimee] Oh, fancy.

- Talking becomes like an aria to me.

And so it is, in moments like that, it becomes a little bit conscious where you're like oh she is, you almost see this, what you're getting out of this ordinary moment.

But the merger of that, my love of doing that with language with the ability to also hold her in a close up and divert your attention to only her and say don't look away from this woman.

That was a really, those moments and experiences felt like that merger of writing and directing is so exhilarating to me because you're, you know, it's where you understand like the idea of the director as the author of the film.

- What sort of affordances or opportunities did it put on the table?

As you mentioned, you were looking to like make this story in a new light in this different medium.

- A third of the dialogue was gone, which I would say for a right, being the playwright, being the playwright, you'd think I'd be most like protective of all of those lines and that was the biggest surprise to me was how easily that just fell away.

It almost made me want to go back to the play.

And I was like, is any of this dialogue needed?

Of course it was.

It's just, it's extraordinary what you can say with six incredible actors.

And I have the cast of my dreams and they were so wonderful that I'd say the screenplay is yeah, 33% of the dialogue's gone and then once we were filming, I realized how much even less I could say, because of course you fall in love with, you know, Beanie Feldstein and Steven Yeun's relationship is so much in the film about how they interact with each.

And so I, I really love like that the way a couple interacts, how much story is in what you as an audience if I played 15 seconds of them in the movie.

I could push stop and say, you know, what do you think you know about these people?

And it's astonishing, like and how much you can intuit based on their sense of humor with each other, the way they're a little, oh, she's a little spicy.

He seems a little, you know, he must, might be the people pleaser.

She's the one that is a bit of a steamroller, gotta watch out for her.

So just all of those things, you know, and then thinking in images, it's just, it becomes a really fun way to do the thing that I really like to do, which is like what is the thing that is the thing and how do you get everything else out of the way.

[fire crackles] [footsteps] - Richard.

- So nice.

It's so nice.

- I can't.

[footsteps] - The whole fire?

- Shut it down.

[footsteps] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching On Writing "The Humans": A Conversation with Steven Karam 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.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies]