Transcript
Speaker 1: You are listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture. We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process to how to build a successful career in media and entertainment.
Peter Straughan: Hello, I’m Peter Straughan. I’m excited to speak with Zach Baylin whose screenwriting credits this year include The Order and Bob Marley, One Love. Zach’s other credits include Gran Turismo, Creed III and King Richard.
Zach Baylin: Thanks, Peter. I’m Zach Baylin and I’m excited to speak with Peter Straughan, the screenwriter of the excellent Conclave. Peter’s other screenwriting credits include The Goldfinch, Our Brand is Crisis, Frank and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Really nice to meet you, Peter.
Peter Straughan: Really nice to meet you, Zach.
Zach Baylin: Where are you?
Peter Straughan: I’m at home. I’m in Brighton.
Zach Baylin: Oh, nice.
Peter Straughan: Yeah, so about an hour south of London. Where are you?
Zach Baylin: I’m at home in Los Angeles.
Peter Straughan: Okay. Should we start with the recent films?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, let’s get into it. I should say, this is off prompt, but I saw Conclave. I absolutely loved it, and my wife and I went in the theater in Los Angeles the day after, I think it was the day after election day here, and we were like, we have to get out of the house and sort of clear our heads and we’re a little bit unaware of what we were walking into, but it was absolutely fantastic.
Peter Straughan: Oh, thanks so much. I really, really like The Order, so I’m looking forward to hearing about it. I thought it was terrific. I really did. And I read the script and I love your writing. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Zach Baylin: Really excited to talk to you about the process. So why don’t we just start, how did you end up coming to Conclave? Was it a book that you were familiar with?
Peter Straughan: No, it wasn’t. It was two producers in touch with me, Robyn Slovo, who I’d worked with on a film called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and another producer called Tessa Ross, who I’d worked with on a film called Frank. I think Tessa had optioned the book to Robert Harris novel. I think she’d read the opening chapters and optioned it early on. And so when it was written, she sent it to me. And like I say, it was that thing where you already know the producers and you kind of want to work with them again. So that was a nice comfortable start to the process. And then I read the book and read it pretty much in a day. It was very gripping. I really liked the writing. He’s a really smart, intelligent, elegant writer. And it was, I say surprisingly gripping I guess because it was not a world I really knew very much about, it’s about papal election. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I think Robert’s really fundamentally always interested in politics one way or another, and this was another way for him to explore politics.
And I found it really gripping. And there were a couple of moments in it, which we can talk about later if you want, that were the moments where I thought, yeah, I want to do it. But yeah, I decided quite quickly really, which I think I tend to with a book, usually I get a big yes or if I don’t have that, I wouldn’t do it.
Zach Baylin: Yeah. And do you feel, this is maybe not in the sequence of this conversation, but when you’re adapting a book, obviously the story and the voice of the characters is something that you gravitate towards too. But when you’re adapting that into your screenplay, do you find that you’re in a way mimicking the voice of the author of the original book, but how do you think about capturing the tone and voice of the book in your screenplay and stage directions?
Peter Straughan: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, isn’t it? I think you’re right. I think that’s one of the things the adapter has to be able to do almost ventriloquize, because there may well be dialogue you’re coming up with, which isn’t in the book. Obviously, it’s a big spectrum, isn’t it, adapting the book? It could be a very, very close adaptation or it could just be a sort of stepping off stone for a film.
So sometimes you walk up with whole scenes, maybe even whole storylines that aren’t in the book, and you have to try and make it all sit together as a voice. So I find that quite interesting. And yes, sometimes I do. So Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was by John le Carré, who’s a great writer, and every time we had to do a line that wasn’t from the book, you were kind of thinking, is it a le Carré line? Have we got the forest right? Because it’s not that easy a voice to imitate, but I find that kind of interesting and fun. What about you? Do you find that as well?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, I’ve actually never done what I would consider a straight adaptation of anything. And I’m working on a project now that actually is the first time I’ve tried to adapt in a novel. But I’ve worked in a lot of true stories. And so most of the things I’ve adapted have been from reporters, or in this case with The Order, there’s a book called The Silent Brotherhood that was written in the early nineties by two Denver post reporters who had followed Alan Berg’s murder. So for people listening, Alan Berg was a Jewish radio host who was assassinated by a white supremacist group in the early eighties in Denver.
And so these reporters followed that story and then ultimately wrote this incredibly well researched kind of totemic account of both that murder and the formation of this group and the police investigation that led to it. So it was this kind trove of research material for me, but it was less about trying that there was a voice in the book or even a structure in the book of the story that I felt with what would be the movie. It was an incredibly well-written book, but it was really just a mine of information for me.
Peter Straughan: Were you sent to books back or did you come across it yourself?
Zach Baylin: I found it with a producer. So I had become very interested in domestic terrorism and the militia, private militias in America in 2016, 2017. There was a lot of obviously changes going on in America at that time, and there’d been this rise of far right groups that seemed to, in my mind, felt like they were coming out of the woodwork. But I think looking back on it, these were groups that were always there, but maybe were feeling like an acceptance to sort of speak their views a little more openly. And so this producer, Bryan Haas and I, had been kind of just reading a lot of stories about the history of domestic terrorism and about white hate groups. And then we had gone on a bit of a deep dive about Timothy McVeigh. So Timothy McVeigh was the Oklahoma City Bomber, which was the biggest act of domestic terrorism in US history.
And Timothy McVeigh, we discovered, was influenced by the group, The Order, and that this guy Bob Matthews had ran. So in the research of McVeigh, we found a little bit about Bob and then wanting to read more about Bob we found this book that then the producer reached out and optioned. I had these strange personal connections to the authors it turned out because my wife is from Denver and her mother was a city council member there at the time, and one of the authors had left the newspaper and was now a city council member with her.
And so we had a bit of a personal connection to get to the book, but-
Peter Straughan: [inaudible 00:07:48] helps.
Zach Baylin: It helps, and especially when I think with a book like that that had been, I think well reviewed, but it was 20 years old. And I think it took a personal connection to entice and convince the authors that what we wanted to do was going to be something that would be worthy of their book.
Peter Straughan: Did you feel any pressure, Zach, or any kind of concern at all with the fact that it’s going to be a period story rather than a contemporary story about the Proud Boys? Or did it feel interesting to you to go back almost to the roots of maybe the [inaudible 00:08:20]?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, I mean, I think that was more what I was interested in is where, what were the seeds of these kind of movements? And I mean cynically and sort of cinematically, I thought it would be really appealing to write in that period and picturing the kind of movie and tone that I wanted it to be, which was sort of this throwback. In a way, a heist film, but that could live in the same world as a William Friedkin film.
So I think that the period was very helpful to me, and I liked that part of the research as well. And it may be a little bit comforting. I don’t know. I think it would come with its own complications to write about the Proud Boys or something that’s happening urgently now. And so it felt like, to me, that this would speak to the relevance of what’s happening today without having to take on something that was changing and so current. And so when you said yes that you love the book and you wanted to do it, what were your next steps? Did you dive right into… Did you have a conversation with the author or was the judge already involved?
Peter Straughan: We went and met with Robert and had a day with him and a long lunch and talked everything through. He was great. He was exactly kind of what you want from an author in that he was sort of saying, “I’m here if I can be of any use, but otherwise, if you want to go your own way, go your own way.” So it was the core plans to work it out whatever way you wanted to do. And I did every now and then ask his advice on things or run some ideas by him. And he was really helpful and really generous and open. But I mean, to be honest, it’s quite a faithful adaptation of the book. So I didn’t have to test his patience by wanting to complete change of plot or anything.
Zach Baylin: I thought never having experienced anything that’s in the book or the film, but it felt like an incredibly faithful depiction of what that process is and life inside the Vatican. And I mean, the sets are incredible. The Sistine Chapel set is just unbelievable. And did you do your own ancillary research about the process outside of what was in the book or was everything there [inaudible 00:10:48]?
Peter Straughan: Not so much the process, because Robert had done excellent research on the sort of ritual of the conclave itself, which is, as you say, it’s really interesting and strange, isn’t it? Obviously it’s ancient and still carried out the same way. But we did go to the Vatican and we were shown around the Vatican and given a tour, and there was a cardinal who gave us help on specific questions. But yeah, Robert had already done a lot of research, so a lot of it was already in the book.
Zach Baylin: Yeah. And so the nuance of… I mean, there’s so many great details in the script and in the film, but little things of these kind of quiet moments of cardinals smoking or checking their phones or things that seem so almost anachronistic to the world that they’re in, were those things that were in the book, or had you found those also from talking to these cardinals?
Peter Straughan: I think the permission to do it was early on. There’s a line in the book where one of the cardinals, they found out that the previous Pope has died and he says, “Oh, we need to post the story otherwise we’ll fall behind in the news cycle or in the media cycle.” And it was that sort of weird clash of this ancient, very spiritual world with the kind of contemporary and the modern. And I suddenly thought, that’s interesting. That feels like a really interesting clash. So then you just started to look for other little ways of illustrating that.
And it’s obviously, it’s this… I mean, if you’ve been to the Vatican, those buildings are huge and they’re very grand and they’re very imperial. They’re kind of meant to bore you, I think. But then against that, you have these cardinals who are all fairly elderly men. They’re sort of have frail bodies. So there was lots of nice tensions. So like you say, seeing cardinals outside smoking felt kind of absurd and funny in a good way, or seeing, there’s a scene where Ralph is in the gym on the treadmill, and again, it’s like a cardinal on the treadmill. It’s basically anything from the contemporary world with the cardinals in the frame becomes kind of surreal and interesting. We look for where can we do that, where can we add those moments?
Zach Baylin: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, they’re very, very effective.
Peter Straughan: Can I ask that because I think the thing that’s really fascinating about the job you’ve done is, I don’t know all the facts of the story, but I think presumably you’ve been just presented with the kind of chaos of life to some extent, and from that you’re having to shape something that’s much more coherent narrative. I mean, how much was there in the book and how much have you come up with yourself?
Zach Baylin: The major crimes that the, let’s say, the procedural part of the build around are very accurate. So almost everything on the Bob Matthews side of the story is very accurate and based on really specific events. And something you said earlier that you find that you make a fairly quick determination of whether this is something you want to do or not. I’ve found a lot in talking about this project that I think I make pretty quick leaps into what I think the heart of the movie is or why I’m gravitated towards something or what form I think it might take. And one of the first things that I encountered when we were researching the group in Bob Matthews was this heist that they had pulled off on this mountainside in the Pacific Northwest in 1984, which at the time was the biggest armored car heist in US history, and it was a very elaborately choreographed robbery.
And so that being, in some ways, my entry point into this group, I think I immediately started seeing the film as a bit of a heist film. And so, that dictated a little bit to me about what the structure might be and also how I might divide my time between Terry Husk, who Jude Law Plays and Bob Matthews.
Peter Straughan: Were they based on real characters?
Zach Baylin: Bob is real, Terry, Jude’s character is in fictional, but amalgamated from… There was an FBI agent who went to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at the end of his career, a very storied career in undercover work, and sort of believed that he was going to kick his heels up a little bit and inadvertently found out that he had taken this post that was in the district where the Aryan Nation was, and then met with an undersheriff there who told him that he felt like there was a splinter cell who had splintered off from the Aryan Nation and might’ve been committing some crimes. So those beats were true, but the personification of who that guy was frankly, he was a little bit too well-adjusted, the real guy.
I think he was pretty heroic in this kind of real patriotic person who is very honorable and clean living. And I think in terms of trying to find a counterpoint to Bob Matthews that didn’t feel like the depiction of who I wanted the law enforcement person to be. And so almost all the law enforcement people are fictional, but the events that they cross are very accurate.
Peter Straughan: I mean, that’s a gift of a end of act one beat, isn’t it? That you’ve been going somewhere, some quiet backwater and that being presented to you?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, I find that, and this is probably the same experience you had in reading a novel that works. It’s like you start to do research and read about either an incredible character and then a turn that their life took and you start to just say, “Oh, wow. Well, that’s a scene in a movie,” where this conflict between, it’s a true that Bob Matthews had, was having these two relationships that with two women, his wife who they had had to adopt because they couldn’t have a biological child, and then a woman that he had met in his sort of recruitment of white supremacists who had become pregnant with his biological child. That was very important to him and that he was living these separate lives and that idea of immediately trying to introduce him in these two roles as someone who says he’s building a community and has these kind of Christian values, but then to immediately show the hypocrisy of it, that was something that kind of jumped out to me really early.
And I think I probably just started flagging moments and character things that I thought were, these are really fascinating and really nice contradictions, and these are big set pieces that I feel like can hold the story together and then begin to put those in some kind of form.
Peter Straughan: I mean, that’s exactly what I do with an [inaudible 00:17:40] as well. The first thing I do, I think, is I go through the book with a highlighter and just without any plan, just if something sticks out is-
Zach Baylin: Even on your read or-
Peter Straughan: No, not on first read, not like, am I going to do this or not? I’ll just try and read it as a reader. But definitely once I said yes, I go back through with a yellow highlighter and it’s like if it’s a good line or if it’s a good moment or if it’s a scene or best still, if it’s a big scene with a lot of dialogue, I mark it and I’ll maybe go through the book a few times doing that and see how much I’ve corrected. Which sounds like the process that you just went through of gathering the beads that you think, “Yeah, that’s filmic, that’s filmic, I can use that.” And then the process of arranging them, I guess. Does that sound right to you?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, yeah, that sounds exactly right. And then it’s, for me, a constant sort of effort of paring down and sort of trying to say, “Well, is there a more efficient way to get from here to here than…” And I can be a bit, I know it’s like a flaw of mine, I can be a bit indulgent in shoe leather and story. I kind of like just the meandering moments they get from one thing to the next. And I often find that I keep those in a lot longer than I probably should in a script. And.
Peter Straughan: Again, I guess when you’re working on actual events, there must be moments that you fall in love with, but that may be aren’t essential. Is it sometimes a struggle to have to lose them?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, for sure. I’m sure it is with fiction as well, but with this one I know for a long time, I mean I worked on this script for years, maybe for… The whole process from when we found an option in the book to when we actually shot, it was probably six or seven years. And so through that time, the script evolved in a lot of different ways, in part because it was very challenging to get made and in part too, because I was always trying to figure out how much information the audience needed. And so there was a point where almost the entire first act of the film was with the Bob Matthews character as he descended into this decision to become a criminal, to take his rhetoric and put it into action. And so he hadn’t recruited his group yet, and it was really trying to understand the basis of his Ideology.
And he had a father who had been a bit of a resistant force in his life who had held him back from really becoming this violent ideologue. And then what actually happened, he died and Bob sort of said, “I’m free. I can do what I have been planning on doing.” And so for a long time I had that as the first act of the movie and it just felt like it wanted to get going. And so, even though I thought that was really interesting character work, I think the movie really took off when we just said, “Let’s cut it. Let’s see if we can just jump right in.”
Peter Straughan: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting. I think nine times out of 10, the part of my script that will change the most is usually the first act or the beginning. I guess there’s usually a million ways you can start a film and there usually aren’t that many ways you’re going to end it, kind of funnels down, doesn’t it, to fewer and fewer choices. But that opens wide open, the various possibilities. Actually, I mean, that sounds also a great opening for a movie, the one you just described. Although I have to say I love your opening scene. I think it’s fantastic sequence.
Zach Baylin: Oh, thank you. Well, I was actually was going to ask you about yours too, because I think it’s so… Yours is it locates you in that place so immediately and you’re with, I believe Ralph Fiennes’ character is in every scene of the film, right?
Peter Straughan: Yeah.
Zach Baylin: And he is sort of the audience’s surrogate to moving through this space and really understand the location and the geography and the claustrophobia of the script are so important. And right from the beginning you do such an amazing job of laying out the landscape in which the characters are inhabiting. And can you talk about how I think that it’s really complicated to write geography in a script and have it feel like it’s part of the story as opposed to just instructive. And I thought you did an incredible job on the page.
Peter Straughan: Thank you.
Zach Baylin: Can you talk about that process?
Peter Straughan: Yeah, I mean, interesting at the beginning was the thing that I tried a few little variations on, and it originally started in a different location with Ralph asleep in his own apartment somewhere in Rome. And one of the things we kind wanted to thread through was the notion, you know those optical illusions where it’s a rabbit if you look at it one way, and it’s a duck if you look at it the other? I was sort of brought up Catholic, but I’m a non-believer now. And so I was one foot in that world and one foot out of the world, and I was interested in the ways in which for people who didn’t experience the world with the spiritual dimension, this was just a secular, political battle. But by sort of inhabiting Ralph’s character and seeing it through his eyes, the world’s shocked through with another dimension, the spiritual dimension.
And so we wanted to thread through these little moments that if you were Ralph and Ralph’s looking to receive guidance from on high, so you could put in these little moments that, “Is that a message I’m being sent?” So one of the ideas for the opening was Ralph’s asleep in his bed in the flat and we close on a window pane and it just cracks for no reason and it wakes him up and he looks at it and then the phone rings, and that’s the news that the Pope’s dead. And you just kind forget about the window cracking. But there was something about that I quite liked, was that something or was that just the ordinary world? But it’s kind of like you said, and it’s always the rule, isn’t it? It’s like you get in as late as you can to the story and you get out as early as you can and just in the end we cut it, we said it’s superfluous, and you started with him, with his back to you slogging up that hill going into the Vatican.
And then in terms of the geography of the thing, I mean, it’s kind of a gift because obviously it’s a closed city, and then they’re in the conclave and they’re sequestered, so they’re in this sort of locked space. It’s a bit, I always think of it was Murder Mysteries from the 1930s and stuff where the road’s cut off and you’re there for the night and it had that kind of feel to it. There’s no getting out and nobody can get in.
Zach Baylin: Yeah, it has that, I’m sure you’ve talked about this or looked at it, has that 12 Angry Men feel to it as well. So at what point did you feel like you had a draft that you were ready to look for directors? Or what was that process?
Peter Straughan: I always find this interesting talking to other writers, because I’m kind of a first drafter I think, in that I can take an awfully long time, but I’m not very good at thinking, I’m just going to put a rough shape on this for my first draft, and then I’ll polish it and then I’ll polish it. And I know some writers who do do that, who do it kind of layer by layer and end up with a fantastic piece, but that first one, they just want to roughly block it out.
I kind of feel like I need to be thinking it’s there and it isn’t there, obviously. But at the time you think it’s there. I’ve got it. So the first draft, and again, it’s a faithful adaptation of the book. So the first draft came pretty quickly, I think.
Zach Baylin: Quite quickly.
Peter Straughan: Yeah, I’m trying to think. Well, you know what, I’m always, always late. I was supposed to do it probably in 12 weeks and I wouldn’t have done, I would’ve taken longer than that, but in this case, if the producers were here, they’d probably be rolling their eyes. I don’t think it was that much longer than that for the first draft.
Zach Baylin: And do you tell them… This is getting off topic, but when they say 12 weeks, do you say, “Yeah, yeah, of course I’ll have it in 12 weeks. Don’t worry.”
Peter Straughan: I do. And you know what’s worse, I always genuinely think, yeah, of course it will take you about 12 weeks. And then, I don’t know, 20 years I’ve been doing this and I’m always late, and when am I going to just say it’s going to take me longer than that? Once, there was one film I worked on where I said, “Listen, it’s going to take me a long time to do this, but would you just let me and I’ll come back and tell you when I’ve done it?” And the producer in question was great and went, “Yeah, it’s fine.” But normally as you know, you don’t normally get that luxury, do we? So what about you? Are you first drafter or-
Zach Baylin: No, I like to think that I think the same as you, that when I’m ready to share something, I want to feel like this is exactly what I want this movie to be. And I know now enough that it is not going to be that, but I feel like one, it’s representative of how you see the film. It might be the last time you get to really own it. And I hate the idea of showing something that is unfinished. And so there are collaborators now who I have worked with a couple of times who I have more of a confidence that they know how to read something that might be not quite there. But certainly when it’s the first time, if I’m sending it to the producers and we’re saying, “It’s time to go and find a director,” or if it’s an assignment and I’m turning it into a studio or something, then I want to be able to say, “It’s here. The movie is done.”
