[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," Julie Plec, the creator, showrunner, and creative mind behind the lauded teen drama series, "The Vampire Diaries" divulges the essentials for a successful supernatural show.

And her process molding a series and its many spinoffs that captivated a generation.

- I always make the joke that like, we're all romantics until somebody literally steals that from us.

I can still hold onto those little feelings of when you're like 16 years old and the boy you like has to take the seat next to you and you spend that entire ride wondering if his knee just touched yours with intent or if it was a bump in the road.

I remember those feelings so vividly and I wish I could still have those feelings, you know, and I'm too cynical now.

So I like to write backwards into the time when those feelings were pure and unvarnished and meant possibility.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] - So tell us a little bit about how you became a writer.

I know you began in different roles and kind of worked your way up.

- I began, you know, I moved to Hollywood as one does out of college.

And you just take whatever job you can get.

I mean that is, if anybody's ever doling out advice, that is advice number one.

Just take the job that pays you.

Worry about how to get the job you really want later.

You know, use the job you have to pave the way for the job that you want.

So I did that.

I worked for a talent agent and, you know, it was miserable.

And then I went and worked for a director, Wes Craven, who was, it was right before we did "Scream."

And then over time, I just had guess I had done that enough that I started realizing like, "Oh, I can actually do this."

And I got hungry to work in television and you can't really work in television as a producer unless you're a writer, you know?

I mean, you can, it's just hard.

And yet when you're a writer there's a very clear track.

And, you know, I wanted to be a showrunner, so I just decided to try to find my way into the television business, which meant I had to pick up a pen and actually become a writer, which was weird.

I was like in my 30s, you know?

But I did, and it was a good choice.

It led there eventually it very long Winding Road and it was a good road and I wouldn't do it any other way, but I had to conquer this fundamental, pure belief that I had in my soul that I was not a good writer.

And that's still there.

Like that never goes away, unfortunately.

Television is a business of mimicry, right?

So you start by mimicking other people's voices and theoretically, eventually, you're supposed to develop your own.

You know with time and with experience and with your own lived experience and point of view.

And so I was a very good mimic.

I could copy the rhythms of other people and I would study the rhythms of other people.

And so I got to kind of ease my way into being a writer by trying to write like other people first, which is much less stressful than having to just like have your own voice, right?

So I got to like dance my way into it.

[typewriter ding] - Tell us about how "Vampire Diaries" came about.

- Oh, it's such a good story.

Kevin Williamson and I met on the set of "Scary" movie, which became "Scream," the movie "Scream."

It was his first movie, he wrote it.

I was Wes Craven's personal assistant, and I got to go on location and Kevin and I really hit it off, became friends.

And by the end of what was ultimately a two to three-year process of making "Scream" and "Scream 2," I became sort of the person that they looked to, to work with Kevin and help him with the script, with the rewrites and that kind of thing.

And so we developed both the friendship and a collaboration that was really special.

Ten years later, we were having lunch with a friend of ours who had been Kevin's assistant when I was working for him, who was now an executive at the CW, Jen Breslow.

And we were kind of saying how like the vampire genre is probably dead.

And Jen Breslow was like, "Well, I hope not.

'cause we have this book that we're trying to make."

And we were like, oh, cool, you know, just like making small talk.

And she said, "Do you guys wanna write it?"

And Kevin was like, "No."

And I said, "Yeah."

And Kevin said, "All right, yeah."

And then the just kind of the door opened and then we walked through it and lives were changed.

- Yeah.

[typewriter ding] Okay, let's start with world building.

The world that you build out is so complicated and there's so many different rules.

I wanna hear about the pacing, like how you release that information to the audience.

How much do you share up front and how do you get them to go with you when they don't know all the rules?

- Oh, it's a nightmare.

Half the battle of world build is just winning the battle in whatever form you can against needing to front load it all, right?

Now there are solutions to that.

And Vampire Academy, we tried so hard to layer in the world one little detail at a time as just like, we're just layering it in and allowing the audience to figure it out along the way.

And then they made us make a saga cell, which is the sort of, my name is Oliver Queen, you know.

Like that one minute, 30-second whatever bumper at the top of a certain shows or it just basically tells you what the show is.

So they made us do that.

And you know, the problem is if I were doing things all over again, I wouldn't have adapted a show that needed six different kinds of vampires that needed to be explained.

You know?

'Cause it just makes it harder.

On "Vampire Diaries," we had one rule really, which is that we wanted to make sure that all the magic felt grounded in some sort of quote unquote "scientific reality."

You know?

Because we knew that if the witches could do everything from minute one with no rules and no boundaries, then the witch stories we're going to cannibalize the show.

And also, if you have a witch that's that powerful that can fix any problem, then any problem can be fixed by the witch, right?

Which is where we ended up with a lot of like problematic storytelling with the character of Bonnie.

- It was just a warning.

- I mean, what kind of warning?

- It's not important.

- Look, it is important to me, okay?

- It's a lot of power to have access to.

They're just telling me to be careful with it.

- Well, exactly how much power can you draw from 100 dead witches?

[mysterious music] ♪ ♪ - Basically, the more power she got and the more over the seasons that we expanded the rules and we expanded the scope of what she was capable of, the more she was capable of, the more she got called in to save the day.

And then suddenly you have like an actual trope that's a problem, right?

And so, you know, we stumbled into all those issues along the way, but it all comes out of this feeling that you need to top yourself episode to episode.

You need to escalate the stakes.

You need to escalate the supernatural world build.

And then you lose control of your own mythology.

You know, we'd start over every year being like, this year's the year we don't lose control of our mythology.

And by the end of the season, you're like, and then the world is, you know, gonna explode.

The whole world's gonna explode with this magical bubble, you know?

So it's hard.

So you have to exercise restraint and you have to have rules.

- One thing I love about your project's very graceful, the trust that you have for the audience, like you trust us to get it.

How do you do that?

- I look at genre, fantasy, etc., all of it as, and this is me.

This is probably antithetical to experts in the genre, right?

This is just the way I approach my storytelling.

I call it the sugar that makes the medicine go down.

Because I like to tell stories about love and family and friendship and loss and the search for your people and your squad, you know, and found family.

I like to tell very simple, relatable human stories.

And when I was growing up, those were the stories that always got canceled.

They just were always on the bubble.

They, you know, never were big runaway hits.

Over time, they turned out to be some of the best television shows that we've ever had and people discover them late and find them, but in the moment, they were not easy to keep on the air.

And you'd fall in love with the show like "My So-Called Life" and then it's gone after one season.

I just wanted to be able to tell those kind of stories.

But because I grew up reading so much genre and you know, and then worked for Wes and worked for Kevin and worked in the genre as a producer and as an executive, it was very easy for me to be like, yes, I'll tell these vampire stories.

Because what's sadder than being cursed with a life of immortality and walking that life alone?

You know what's sadder than being the child of domestic abuse but you have to carry that generational trauma for 1,000 years, you know?

And what's worse than being, you know, sort of cursed or plagued or blessed depending on your perspective of being a young teenager coming of age when the world is terrified of you because you're different and where do you go to try to find more people like you so you can have your squad?

Like, that's where I start all my stories.

And then I use the world build and the genre to make them entertaining and feel different than just like, you know, the little coming of age family drama that nobody wants to leave on the air.

[typewriter ding] - The themes that you're talking about are adult themes.

And I feel like sometimes when people start to write for younger audiences, it's almost like they think they can't handle these heavier things or that they don't feel heavier things.

- There's something that happens when people try to write family shows where all of a sudden, all the parents talk like this and they say, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry you're having a rough time, my dear.

You know, and like, but chin up and tomorrow will be a better day."

And like parents start talking like '50s like comic strip people and kids are like, "Well gee mom, you know, like, God, I had a hard day at school today, mom, I'm not really sure I'm I wanna go back tomorrow, mom.

The kids were not nice to me."

You know, and so it's like this weird switch flips in writers' heads where they suddenly feel like they have to write parents as these dodgy old people and these kids as like wide-eyed innocence.

And that is literally not how we, you know, think, talk, act.

If anything, teenagers are not great at communicating.

And I like to write teenagers who communicate.

And I think I learned that from Kevin because "Dawson's Creek" really was the one where he's like, oh, I'm gonna write kids talking like how adults talk.

And that was the gimmick of "Dawson's Creek."

And now that's what everybody does in YA.

you don't monosyllabize your teen characters anymore.

Because everyone realized that in the this perfect artful world where everybody could say everything they were feeling all the time and have like a really great way of communicating it.

Like that's fun storytelling.

'Cause none of us are capable of that in real life.

- What defines good YA drama?

- Well, I actually, I get a lot, I get testy about YA as a distinction because I think YA is just defined as television I wanna watch.

[audience laughing] And you know, often I guess that involves younger characters, which I guess makes it a YA thing.

But you know, you got a lot of buyers and platforms who are like, "Oh, we're not really in the YA business, we don't really want YA."

And I say, "Oh, I'm sorry, like you don't like hits?"

[audience laughing] You know, "Stranger Things" is YA.

"13 Reasons Why" is YA.

"The Hunger Games" is YA.

"Twilight" is YA.

Like, we're talking some of the biggest feature and television hits of the last 20 years are YA and you don't want YA.

Like well then what do you think it means?

And I think that the reason why people get so confused by it is because it really is a sort of a very large umbrella over a lot of things.

And it can be as niche and as tiny as the show on Freebie called "High School."

You know?

And it can be as big and spectacle as "Stranger Things" or as sexy and adventurous as "Outer Banks."

So I think what YA means to me is it is universal themes centering the experience and reflecting the experience of a young adult person.

You know, person or people.

I think that good YA doesn't shy away from adult themes and adult storytelling.

I think good YA respects the adult characters as well and lets them have a voice and a point of view that isn't necessarily the sweet sort of G-rated saccharine approach of some TV of the past.

I think that good YA has meaning but it doesn't have to have in your face meaning.

So there's some great YA that has in-your-face meaning, you know?

I think that it's pure.

I think that it approaches belonging and feelings and emotions from a very pure place.

And even if the voice is cynical, the intention is pure of like wanting to make a young person, a young audience, feel like they are reflected their feelings, their longings, their secrets are reflected in this story.

And wanting adults to feel like when they watch it, that they see themselves in it too.

- For me, at least when I'm watching YA stuff, that gives me permission as an adult to acknowledge feelings I have and wrap words around them that I wouldn't talk about otherwise, you know.

- I always make the joke that like we're all romantics until somebody literally steals that from us.

Whether it's a bad breakup or abuse.

In my case it's a therapist who's like, the world doesn't work like that, Julie.

That's not how it goes.

And you're like, [bleep].

So you get more and more cynical as you get older and older and you lose those pure feelings.

Like, I still can hold on 'cause I write it all the time.

I can still hold onto those little feelings of when you're like 16 years old and you're sitting down and the bus and going on the school field trip and the boy you like has to take the seat next to you.

And you spend that entire ride wondering if his knee just touched yours with intent or if it was a bump in the road.

[audience laughing] I mean I remember those feelings so vividly and I wish I could still have those feelings, you know, and I'm too cynical now.

So I like to write backwards into the time when those feelings were pure and unvarnished and meant like possibility.

[typewriter ding] - Okay, let's talk characters.

One of my favorite things in a show ever is when there's a character that I strongly dislike and I wake up a few episodes or a season later and they're like my favorite character and I don't know how it happened.

How did I come to like this villain?

You do that over and over.

- The Chuck Bass problem.

- Oh, 100%.

How do you do that?

Do you know that's gonna happen before it happens?

What's that arc like?

- I believe that the villain is the hero of their own story.

And so I try to never write anything where the villain is just being villainy and where I don't have a clear sense of what their emotional want is.

Obviously, there are exceptions to that because you have lore and you have canon, like Darth Vader was a villain and that's all that you needed to know in the first hour of the movie.

But eventually in the whole life of the world, you understood like his backstory and like what got him that way.

So the exceptions to the rulers, if you have a long standing plan.

But if you write a villain as the hero of their own story, then you're gonna root for them to get what they want in some way.

Like Thanos weirdly had a point, right?

So like when you give them that complexity and those emotional like needs, then someone's gonna root for them.

And then if you give them a pair of pretty blue eyes, a leather jacket and Ian Somerhalder, then suddenly in like a few funny lines about you know, Taylor Swift, then yeah people are gonna love to hate and then they're gonna really fall in love with them in their own way.

There's tricks, I mean obviously many people have made a lot of money and had a lot of great success portraying villains as villains only and being wicked and delicious and fun.

And by no means does that mean you can't do it that way?

I just personally like to, I call it the villain POV.

I don't cut to villain POV unless the POV I'm living in with the villain is the hero POV.

So I never cut to two scenes where the villains are in the layer talking about like, well we just, you know, cut them off at the pass and then we will end this war.

You know, I don't do that.

- How do you know how far is too far?

There's always moments in your shows where I'm like, how did they know that a character could come back from that?

Like, characters do terrible things and then we love them again.

- My relationship with the audience on "The Vampire Diaries" was very fraught for this exact reason because for the love of God, you know, it's like Damon and Klaus were terrible people who did horrific, awful, murderous things.

And people loved them.

And Damon was so, we needed to stall, like we did not want Damon and Elena to get together until well, well, well into the run of the series.

And we needed to make sure that Stefan and Elena were working for as long as humanly possible so that we could live in the want of Damon and Elena.

- Hey, where are you?

- Matt's taking me home.

- Stefan.

- Not just Stefan.

Damon too.

Tyler too, Caroline.

- Oh, I know, I get it.

So, since I'm possibly a dead man, can I ask you a question?

- Yeah, of course.

- If it was just down to him and me and you had to make a choice who got the goodbye,... who would it be?

- The old adage being the minute there's no more want and there just is, the minute people are happy, well then there's no drama anymore, right?

And then everybody wanted Damon and Elena 'cause it was a really juicy love triangle and that part of the writing and the casting was like really successful, right?

But then they just really loved that Damon.

And so we kept like trying to make him do [bleep] things.

[audience laughing] So that we could like make them be like, we love Damon, but no, Elena can't be with Damon.

Elena needs to be with Stefan, you know?

And the audience was like, "No, more Damon, Elena Damon."

And then we had him kill her brother in front of her because she wouldn't kiss him.

If there's not a single thing more toxic and horrible than that.

[audience laughing] And they yelled at us and they said that it was poor Damon.

Like how could we do that to poor Damon?

And I was like, "Oh, we have lost the disc.

Okay, we have lost this battle."

[audience laughing] So it is really specific.

It's not just writing, it's casting, it's chemistry, it's zeitgeist.

You have to kind of recognize what the audience is seeing this character as.

And in the case of Damon, they saw him as so lonely and so broken and so sad and all he needed was the love of this girl to become the man that he could be.

That's what the audience had decided.

And so then eventually, we just had to lean into that and give them that, you know.

And it put Damon on his hero's journey, which always, I take it, this is sort of meander, but I always go back to soap operas 'cause I was a huge fan of daytime soaps growing up.

Kevin was nighttime, I was daytime.

And there was no greater trope than the bad boy who became the good boy.

Like Scotty Baldwin.

Like there's no greater run on a soap than the villainous man or woman who over time through love, finds their hero's journey.

You do have to accept like there are some characters that you're gonna have that the audience has decided who that character's gonna be.

And if you don't fall in line, they will reject you.

[laughs] Not the character, you know?

And then there's the characters that you have a little bit more agency over as a storyteller because the audience is with you on the ride trying to figure out how they're supposed to feel about them.

You know, Caroline Forbes, classic example, pilot episode of "Vampire Diaries" is just kind of a knit with bobblehead, right?

And you don't like Caroline, why would you like Caroline?

But then a very end of the episode, the writer, in this case, Kevin decides to write just this little moment where she's like, "Why doesn't anybody ever pick me?

Like, what's so wrong with me?"

And the character was vulnerable and the actress struck that perfect chord of vulnerability.

And then after that episode, there were like five people that were like, "You know what?

I kinda like that Caroline Forbes."

You know?

And then when you feel that energy and you know you like this character and you know you want people to like this character, well then you have to map out the long game.

Like I talk about how I love the chemistry between Caroline and Stefan in the second episode of the second season.

Right after she's turned into a vampire and he has to help her out of a bind and calm her down and their scene together was so good.

- Gah, why does this keep happening to my face?

- Look at me, Caroline, look at me.

Look at me.

Look at me.

Look at my face, look at my face.

Shh, look, look, look.

See that?

You see that?

Yeah.

When you feel the blood rush and you tell yourself that you're gonna get through it, that you're strong enough.

Yes, yes.

No matter how good it feels, to give yourself over to it, you fight it off, you bury it.

Watch me, watch me.

That's the only way you're gonna survive this thing.

Try, shh, try.

[Caroline breathing heavily] That's good.

- Even though it's YA, and there is love, like a lot of love and a lot of sexual tension, those kinds of things, that doesn't feel like what it's about for me.

It feels like the relationships, the friendships, the family are really central, especially in the originals obviously.

Can you talk a little bit, was that intentional choice?

- I think that, I mean obviously, what really centered Elena is that she was an orphan.

You know, she had just lost her parents and she was literally trying to figure out how to get outta bed in the morning and go to school and put a smile on her face 'cause she didn't know how to do that.

So, when you have a character that starts sort of feeling dead inside, then you wanna pair them with a character that can kind of bring them to life, right?

And so that's love.

In our case, we decided it was romantic love 'cause that was the book.

So we were, you know, starting with the paradigm for the adaptation.

So that's love.

And when you are trying to tell a love story, then you need obstacles in that love story.

So then it's a love triangle, right?

Or it's the Romeo and Juliet.

It's trying to keep two people apart.

It's not necessarily that you're telling a story about love and sex.

It's a story that you're telling about a character healing, a character filling a hole.

And so if you can understand what it is the character needs and then how a romantic relationship or a sibling relationship or a friend relationship can give them what they need, that's the better way to approach it than just saying, "I wanna write an epic love story."

Because it's like, yeah, we all do.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching on young adult drama, a conversation with Julie Plec 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 Wittcliff 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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