"Noah Hawley"

Have a spirulina shake, it’s Noah Hawley. Siberia with family restaurants, pitching the segue, and the Mayor of Childhood. “Family programming… that ship has sailed.” It’s an all-new SmartLess.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sean Hayes?

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• 0:44Sean Hayes?

  in select regions for 18-plus users. Check responses for accuracy. Supervise closely; interrupt when needed.

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• 1:34Sean Hayes?

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• 2:10Sean Hayes?

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• 2:56Sean Hayes?

  Hey, I'm Sean.

• 2:57Will Arnett?

  And I'm Will.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  And I'm Jason. Hey, Will, do you like golf?

• 3:03Will Arnett?

  Oh, I love golf. Let's talk about golf.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I hit a four. I hit it out of the park today on my niner.

• 3:11Will Arnett?

  Well, that's awesome. That's better than I.

• 3:13Sean Hayes?

  You guys, it's time to talk. Do we have to do a Smartless episode?

• 3:15Will Arnett?

  Ah, Sean, shut the fuck up.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah, what do you know?

• 3:19Sean Hayes?

  Welcome to Smartless.

• 3:39Jason Bateman?

  Shauny, are those glasses new?

• 3:41Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, what do you think?

• 3:42Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, they're not, they're not bad. I mean. Let's go higher.

• 3:46Sean Hayes?

  Really? No, you don't like them?

• 3:47Jason Bateman?

  Well.

• 3:48Sean Hayes?

  Do you not like them, seriously? I just put them on like five minutes ago.

• 3:51Jason Bateman?

  Lean closer to your camera.

• 3:53Sean Hayes?

  Do you like them?

• 3:53Jason Bateman?

  Oh, not, not that close. Yeah, no, they're good.

• 3:57Sean Hayes?

  What do you think, honestly?

• 3:58Jason Bateman?

  You look great in everything. You know, I was noticing you on Kimmel last night. Me too. You looked great on Kimmel. I was thinking the same thing.

• 4:04Sean Hayes?

  All right, everybody.

• 4:05Jason Bateman?

  Are you working with a new stylist or something?

• 4:07Sean Hayes?

  I am, actually.

• 4:08Jason Bateman?

  Are you?

• 4:09Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't dress myself like that.

• 4:11Jason Bateman?

  Shauny, you look really good.

• 4:13Sean Hayes?

  Thanks, you guys. That's so nice.

• 4:15Jason Bateman?

  You did for real. It's true.

• 4:16Sean Hayes?

  Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I, um, it's, it's.

• 4:18Jason Bateman?

  And you're a great guest.

• 4:19Sean Hayes?

  Like building a boat.

• 4:20Jason Bateman?

  You're a very good guest. You are a great guest.

• 4:22Sean Hayes?

  You know, I don't know how you guys feel about talk shows and stuff. Like, I get so nervous. I, um. I talk fast.

• 4:28Jason Bateman?

  Well, that's, that's, you know what's bad? A guest that talks slow and isn't nervous.

• 4:34Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Sean Hayes?

  So, wait, Will, are you still in New York?

• 4:36Will Arnett?

  I am, yeah.

• 4:37Sean Hayes?

  Wow. And it's still press for the movie?

• 4:41Will Arnett?

  Still doing press for the movie, yeah. Still, like, just kind of getting going, really. And, um, yeah.

• 4:46Sean Hayes?

  Busy, busy, busy.

• 4:47Will Arnett?

  Yeah, because it comes out, it does it, well, I don't know when this episode. December 19th is when the movie.

• 4:51Sean Hayes?

  December 19th?

• 4:52Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Sean Hayes?

  Yeah. Is this thing on? I can't wait for everybody to see you in it. It's so exciting.

• 4:56Jason Bateman?

  And what about you? You're in it too, mister.

• 4:58Will Arnett?

  And Sean, you're in it too.

• 4:59Sean Hayes?

  Sure, sure.

• 5:00Jason Bateman?

  Sean, he was doing press for it last night.

• 5:02Sean Hayes?

  My favorite line I had in the movie is, does anybody want to play Bananagrams?

• 5:05Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Jason Bateman?

  That's it.

• 5:10Will Arnett?

  What I loved about it was your line, the way you read it was as if you had said that a million times.

• 5:15Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, by the way, totally.

• 5:16Will Arnett?

  I know.

• 5:17Jason Bateman?

  You know, we don't often do these records here in the mid-afternoon. Here it is 3:00 PM here on the, on the West Coast, 6:00 PM there in the East. And, um, you know, listen, I think the audience is aware that the three of us are not in our twenties. Okay?

• 5:32Sean Hayes?

  What?

• 5:33Jason Bateman?

  Well, I just, what I want to say is, I get a little tie-tie right now.

• 5:37Sean Hayes?

  At three?

• 5:38Jason Bateman?

  This is not an ideal time for us to be doing the chat.

• 5:41Sean Hayes?

  Well, you gotta find it.

• 5:42Jason Bateman?

  Well, hey, listen, save it, okay, nappy poo? How do you guys get through the late afternoon? Okay? Sean, I've already explained your strategy. Will, how do you do it?

• 5:53Will Arnett?

  You know, I just, I just do stuff, you know, whatever. And, uh.

• 5:57Jason Bateman?

  Schnitzelero. Do you, or do you, or do you guys go to like an espresso at a certain time every day?

• 6:03Sean Hayes?

  No, I do, I do, I do not, now, what are you waving at?

• 6:07Jason Bateman?

  There's a fly. Is a fly in here, doc on it?

• 6:11Sean Hayes?

  Like an old gramp, like the up, the guy from Up.

• 6:14Will Arnett?

  He's an old man. He's, he's, he's grumbling about the time, he's waving at a fly.

• 6:20Jason Bateman?

  I've had a real high protein shake with spiruline and everything in it. I should be vibrating right now, but no, I was supplementing it with the ice green tea and I'm still sluggish.

• 6:31Sean Hayes?

  But if I don't, if I don't have anything going on, I'll feel sluggish about this time and I will listen to. My body and I'll lay down for sure.

• 6:38Jason Bateman?

  Wait a second, there's an if there? How often do you have shit going on at three in the afternoon?

• 6:42Sean Hayes?

  But I mean, like, if I keep, if I keep, if I'm, if I'm busy enough, I'll keep, it'll keep me awake. You know what I mean? Like, if I have a meeting or something, or whatever.

• 6:51Jason Bateman?

  I'm coming off of four consecutive Zooms right into this thing. So I've been, I've been up, I've been at it, but it's still.

• 6:57Sean Hayes?

  Did you work out?

• 6:57Jason Bateman?

  I did work out. That's the, that's my problem.

• 7:00Will Arnett?

  JB, it's not the problem, it's the Zooms, they suck, they suck the energy out of staring at the screen for those meetings. I'm telling you, it's the worst.

• 7:06Jason Bateman?

  In-person meetings, we should all get back to the office, right, Will?

• 7:09Will Arnett?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 7:10Jason Bateman?

  You hear that, America?

• 7:12Will Arnett?

  Well, you know what, you know what's funny, I will say, because I have been on the East Coast more this, this fall and summer, is because being in the city, I feel like kind of just more energized in general.

• 7:25Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:25Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, well, that's New York City. Never sleeps, never sleeps.

• 7:28Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Will Arnett?

  So.

• 7:30Jason Bateman?

  It's got a heartbeat.

• 7:31Will Arnett?

  It really does have a heartbeat.

• 7:33Sean Hayes?

  Do you have a T-shirt that says, I heart NY?

• 7:35Jason Bateman?

  It's a thong.

• 7:39Sean Hayes?

  That doubles into a T-shirt.

• 7:41Will Arnett?

  Yeah, go ahead, Jason, do you have something?

• 7:42Jason Bateman?

  Today, we got a big brain, okay? He's not one of your fancy, dancy celebs that are gonna clue you into the life of the rich and famous, okay? No, Sean, Will, this, today, we've got someone who's given you some of the best television available of the last 20 years. This is a writer, producer, director, and often all three on the projects that he gives us, giving us the kind of specific and singular experience that we look for on television nowadays. He's got the nominations, the awards, he's got the education, the credentials, he's also got the looks, the taste, the kids, the wife, the wind at his back, and he's gonna tell us how he keeps it all together while bringing us top entertainment, with shows like Bones, Legion, and the massive hit Fargo, and the new and spectacular Alien Earth. Folks, Noah Hawley.

• 8:25Sean Hayes?

  Whoa.

• 8:25Jason Bateman?

  Bring it out here, Noah. Take it easy, Sean, don't attack him just yet.

• 8:30Sean Hayes?

  This is exciting for me.

• 8:32Jason Bateman?

  Good afternoon, Noah.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Good afternoon. I'm not nervous and I'm gonna speak very slowly.

• 8:37Jason Bateman?

  Good, good, good.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:40Jason Bateman?

  Now, you're right in the middle of the country there, aren't you in Texas?

• 8:42Speaker 04

  I am, I'm in Austin, Texas, yes.

• 8:44Jason Bateman?

  So you're two hours.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  I married a seventh-generation Texan, I didn't read the fine print, so.

• 8:49Jason Bateman?

  You said we're going back to the motherland?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's good, I'm happy, I like it, it's my kind of place.

• 8:54Jason Bateman?

  You're not missing, where, where'd you come, where, where'd you move from?

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Well, I'm a New York City kid originally, and then there was a little San Francisco, there was some LA, and yeah, now I'm here.

• 9:04Jason Bateman?

  You're not missing those places. You're into Austin.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I mean, I was in New York last week. It's, you know, you reach a certain point where you're rarely home anyway, so.

• 9:13Jason Bateman?

  Word.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:14Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, it's W E R D, Sean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Welcome to the show, Noah. This is a long time coming.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 9:21Jason Bateman?

  Uh, we know each other a bit. Um, do you guys know him at all?

• 9:24Will Arnett?

  How do you guys know each other?

• 9:26Jason Bateman?

  Just through mixers, you know, get togethers.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Mixers.

• 9:29Jason Bateman?

  Um.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:30Jason Bateman?

  Someone set us up once.

• 9:32Will Arnett?

  Jason described you, and how did you feel, Jason's like, not one of your celebrity, like, he was, that felt like a real shot across your bow, Noah, if I'm being honest.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  It's good, I mean.

• 9:41Jason Bateman?

  He's not one of these, like, these, you know, tabloid celebs, you know, that sometimes we're lucky enough to book on this show.

• 9:48Will Arnett?

  That's you.

• 9:48Jason Bateman?

  I've never been on a tabloid. Unless I've caught in the background in one of Jen's shots, you know?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  I will say, you know, living in Austin, you know, I'll go to LA sometimes and I'll think, oh, right, I'm somebody.

• 10:01Will Arnett?

  Sure.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  At the same time.

• 10:04Sean Hayes?

  The second you leave, you're nobody.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Right. Well, but, no, sometimes there, I feel like, it's the only place I've ever been where you can feel like nobody also, right? It has that status game that is very specific.

• 10:17Jason Bateman?

  But talk about that, though, like, you are, for a lot of the people listening to this, um, and maybe only Tracy, um, will be like, well, this Noah Hawley, you know, who is this fellow? I'm gonna, for most people, they know exactly who you are, and you're enormously well-known and very, very powerful in this industry. But is there a part, um, let's put it this way, I've got a, I've got a, I've got a writer friend of mine.

• 10:45Will Arnett?

  Okay.

• 10:45Jason Bateman?

  Who, uh, likes to also act. And.

• 10:50Will Arnett?

  Is this you?

• 10:52Jason Bateman?

  No.

• 10:52Will Arnett?

  Okay.

• 10:53Jason Bateman?

  He's an enormous writer, but couldn't give a shit about the writing, just wants to act.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 10:59Jason Bateman?

  Do you see the kind of, of, of, of, of weight and, and power in, in the writing that, that, that you should and deserve? Cause he doesn't. Like, he doesn't get that, like, he's, he's, he's already got the gold medal there by being an incredibly successful writer. That's so hard to do.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  No, I'm very, I, look, I, I love all the parts of the job. I, I like to sit in a room and, and, and write a novel and the phone doesn't ring. And, and I like the writer's room element of it. I love to get on set and, and, and direct and the team support of it all. You know, I think what makes me happiest is the fact that I don't have to do just one of those things, that I can get my isolation and recharge and then I can go out and be in public, you know, and, and sort of command the ship and, and, you know, try to elevate everyone to do their best work and.

• 11:53Jason Bateman?

  And you're creating these projects, you're creating these jobs, you're creating all these, many, many, many people with employment and like, that's not something that often a, a, an actor or a star can do. I mean, they can generate heat for a project, but you're literally filling up blank pages and like creating a story and a world and a project. And I just think it's just incredible, so.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 12:15Will Arnett?

  And he's, Jason's not unlike our current president, he's just enamored with men of power, you know what I mean? Like he's, and so he's just in awe of your power.

• 12:23Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. You see the aura.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Well, I appreciate that. He can come over and tell my wife how powerful I am.

• 12:31Jason Bateman?

  Now, what about that, right? What about, like, how old are your kids?

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Uh, 13 and 18.

• 12:37Jason Bateman?

  Okay, now, so they're old enough to give it up, that's exactly the same age as mine. Do your kids give it up? Like, do they get what you do? Do they like what you do?

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think so. You know, I, I don't know how it is with you, but probably one more than the other, you know? I think, you know, my son loves to, he's, he's the 13-year-old. He loves to come to set, give me a headset, I'm gonna sit on the camera rig, you know?

• 13:00Jason Bateman?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  He's, you know, I call him the mayor of childhood, you know? And then, and, and then my daughter's a little more retiring, a little, you know, less, I, I don't know. I mean, she appreciates it in a different way, I think, you know? And he, I think he's like, you know, where's my director's chair?

• 13:18Jason Bateman?

  Right, right, right, yeah. Is she, is either one of them interested in the industry?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Early, too early to tell, I feel like, yeah. I mean, my son did ask me on Alien Earth. He's like, is there any role, like, could I do anything in there? And so I did put him in the, in the show, just in a sort of improv. He plays the young Alex Lothar character. And, you know, I wasn't going to write a scene, but I wanted that kind of feeling of that, that kind of Malachi feeling of, of the childhood thing. And I was like, I can't hire a day player to be his dad. And then I got, he's never acted before. And so, you know, I'm always the guy who's like, maximum creativity, maximum efficiency. I was like, the easiest thing to do is if I just get down on the floor and I play the dad and I'm there with him and.

• 14:04Jason Bateman?

  And you did that?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  I did, I did. It was a really kind of special day, certainly. And, and, and it, it did, I loosened him up. We, you know, we had a good time and it comes across.

• 14:15Will Arnett?

  Were you, at the end of that?

• 14:16Sean Hayes?

  I've seen every episode.

• 14:17Will Arnett?

  Were, at the end of that day, were you like, hey, hey, the dad character might need a spinoff?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:22Will Arnett?

  Because, you know, this guy's really guts.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:26Sean Hayes?

  But can you tell me, like, because I, I'm a massive, massive fan, and my husband Scotty, of the Alien series. We've seen every movie, everything in between, and all incarnations. And, and then when we saw this show coming up, Alien Earth, we're like, wait, finally somebody's like doing a series of it. And how did that come to you? And, and did you feel the weight of it? Because we're like, we did the nerd stuff. We're like, let's find out where it falls into the storyline, you know, and the history. And it's really cool. I love, I love it so much.

• 14:54Jason Bateman?

  It starts before the original Alien, correct?

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a couple of years before.

• 14:59Sean Hayes?

  And after the Prometheus and the Covenant, right? In between?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think that's accurate. You know, I, I felt like I wanted.

• 15:09Jason Bateman?

  Sean, don't, don't mess up your microphone here, okay? Put some plastic over it.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  One of us is an expert on Alien, but I don't think it's me.

• 15:18Sean Hayes?

  Okay, okay, yeah.

• 15:20Will Arnett?

  Because, Sean, according to your timeline, actually.

• 15:24Sean Hayes?

  Yeah. It's the glasses, I got the new glasses, so they make me Alien smart. Um, no, but, but yeah, did you feel the weight of it? And how did it come to you? And, and how did, how did you create it?

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I've now had this opportunity a couple of times, right, to take a classic film and, and turn it into a, a TV show and, and. You know, it's, for me, it's never about going back and re-watching the film, right? It's about thinking about, well, how does that film live in my imagination? And what are the feelings that it brings up in me? And how can I create those same feelings in an audience? By telling them a different story, you know? The thing with an alien movie is it's a two-hour survival story. But a TV show has to be the opposite, right? You have to invest in 10 or 30 or 50 hours about characters who don't die.

• 16:15Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  And so, so, well, what is it if it's not a two-hour survival story? And so, there needs to be, you know, even if you have 60% of the best action and horror, you still have 40% of what are we talking about, right? What's the show about and everything?

• 16:31Sean Hayes?

  Right.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  So, that's where it started for me. And it came down to this one moment in Ridley's movie, where, you know, the monster's out and Sigourney's in the communication room. And the computer is telling her that the crew is expendable. And she leans back and Ian Holm is there. And you realize he's an android.

• 16:52Sean Hayes?

  Right.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  And I thought, well, that moment in which humanity realizes it's trapped between nature and technology, and they're both trying to kill us, that feels like the moment we're living in.

• 17:02Sean Hayes?

  Right, totally.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  And that feels like what the show is about.

• 17:05Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, for sure. I got that. I got all that.

• 17:07Will Arnett?

  Scotty, lock the doors!

• 17:08Sean Hayes?

  Yeah. But also this, also that one char, that one creature that you created in the show, which is just the one eye, you know, like, and that inserts itself into other animals and humans. It's just the one eye, like, it's so creepy and clever. And it's like, and holds like all the mystery, like, I think it's so cool.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, like I said, what are the feelings that the original gave me? Well, the one feeling that the movie... Your first movie has, right, is the discovery of the life cycle of the creature. Wait, it's an egg and then the thing comes out and attaches to your face? I'm out, right? But then, no, it gets worse. Then it falls off and you think, oh, I'm hungry. And you have a meal and it

• 17:52Will Arnett?

  Pops out of your fucking chest.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  And then it grows to be 10 feet tall and, and but that's the one feeling we can never get back for an audience, right, is that discovery.

• 18:02Will Arnett?

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Unless we introduce these new creatures, right?

• 18:05Will Arnett?

  Right, right, right.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  All right, well, it's an eyeball with tentacles and how does it reproduce? And what does it eat? And I don't like that, you know?

• 18:12Will Arnett?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. So how do you, this is a great point.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  This is about my mom?

• 18:17Will Arnett?

  This is

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Took one eye.

• 18:18Will Arnett?

  No, Sean, I'm not gonna reach for the low hanging fruit, even though it's still fruit. That's the thing about low hanging fruit.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 18:27Will Arnett?

  No, is that, um, when you come up with a, when you come up with a creature like that, like, what are the things that's got the tentacles and stuff? What is that process? Are you guys in the writer's room going like, are you people pitching? Like, no, no, no, he's got eight tentacles.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:42Will Arnett?

  Because one of them, no, no, no, hang on a second. What, and like, how do you write that?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  No, it's really interesting, you know, the, the, the writer's room, you know, I have a kind of love hate relationship with the writer's room. I had to figure out how to use it for myself. And, and what I figured out about it is it's a, it's a really good way for, to help me think out loud, you know? So I don't tend to let the room dictate. Tell the story. I tend to go in there and I go, here, here's where we are. And then if I can't be in the room tomorrow, I'll say, all right, well, you know, it's like, let's say assimilation is a big theme in this story. Why don't you talk tomorrow about how that theme plays into all the characters? And then I'll come back and we'll talk about that and then we'll keep moving forward, so.

• 19:29Will Arnett?

  Sure, but, but, okay, so then, so then let's say you have an idea for a specific creature.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:36Will Arnett?

  Um, what do you, and are you talking with the folks, with like some of the design folks and the people about that? As you're coming up with it and are they talking to you about limitations or they're like, well, we don't know if we can have it, you know, suck its own eyeball out.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 19:51Will Arnett?

  Eyeball out.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Family programming.

• 19:53Will Arnett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Jason was immediately like, can they do that?

• 19:58Jason Bateman?

  Wait, what creep, what planet do I need?

• 20:03Will Arnett?

  But you know what I mean? Like, what is that process of figuring that out?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, first, it's a script process that, you know, that was my process. It's sort of function over form, right? It's, you know, what am I looking for out of this thing? And, you know, both in its how it presents to start and then, you know, well, okay, here's this other creature and, you know, it's a horrible thing that sucks your blood and then you realize that it lays its eggs in your drinking water. Well, that's worse, right?

• 20:35Will Arnett?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And so, and then, so then we go into a design process, which was with the folks at Weta. And, yeah, we kind of worked through it and...

• 20:46Will Arnett?

  And how long from concept and writing to the time I saw the first episode? How many years?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, that was four years, five years.

• 20:55Will Arnett?

  Wow.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there was, we all remember being on strike, right? That was in the middle and so that was tough. But it was like a full year of post-production, which...

• 21:04Will Arnett?

  By the way, and even after five years, still, like, the second you watch the first episode, you're like, oh, this is exactly what's happening in the world today.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  There was no ChatGPT when I started, right? So that's how the zeitgeist rose up to meet me.

• 21:18Will Arnett?

  Yeah, it's wild. Did you, when you were, when you were a young writer, just starting out, and forgive me, I don't know your origin story, to put it in Sean's terms. Do you, were you, did you always have a bent for writing? Because you've done a lot of different stuff. You've written all kinds of genres, you know, in your professional career. And novels, too. And novels. So did you, did you see yourself... You write novels? Did you see yourself... Six of them. ...writing this kind of stuff when you were young? Did you have a hankering for this? Did you have, was this a genre that you were into? I'm speaking specifically about the alien world.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a third...

• 21:54Will Arnett?

  Like, pretty Prometheus.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a third-generation writer. Both my mother and her mother were writers. And, you know, my grandma had an eighth-grade education off the boat from Ukraine and my mother had a high school education. And so I knew early on that writing is just, it's something you call yourself and then you have to earn it. There's no special degree or anything. And I think that's liberating because you're not...

• 22:24Speaker 04

  Learning how to write from people who are judging your work. You know, you got to assume that you're gonna write some bad things and then the next thing might be better and then the thing after that may be better. And, you know, I was, you know, I, I mean, the first writing I did was songwriting as a musician. Oh, wow. You know, I played guitar and had a band and then realized I'm not a night person, right? So that was not a line of work that was gonna work out really for me. Jason's not an afternoon person. Yeah.

• 22:53Jason Bateman?

  What was that first, what was the first thing, the little hit you got on the hook that like said, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm good. I, I know, I, I think I know how to write because, yeah, well, you didn't, you got a, you got a degree in political science, right? It wasn't in, in, in, in writing, was it? Or did you have a minor in that?

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Jeez, man. No. Yeah, I was just, you know, studying things that were interesting to me and then, and then, you know, writing on, on the side. Um, you know, it's interesting, there was in high school, you know, there was an assignment, we were reading the book Catch 22, right? And, and very specific voice in that book, comedic, satirical, and there was an assignment which is, write your own chapter of Catch 22, right? And I remember that being the first thing and kind of interesting considering I ended up, you know, write a Coen Brothers movie and write a Ridley Scott movie, that there was something to that exercise of, of Joseph Heller's voice, of finding it, going, oh, I

• 23:54Speaker 04

  know what that is and I know how to do it, that, that ended up being really seminal for me, I guess.

• 24:00Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 24:02Sean Hayes?

  We'll be right back. Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 24:48Jason Bateman?

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• 25:28Sean Hayes?

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• 26:08Sean Hayes?

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• 26:57Jason Bateman?

  And now, back to the show.

• 27:00Sean Hayes?

  I just have a quick question from Scotty, if that's okay?

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 27:04Jason Bateman?

  Oh, we're not really taking calls right now, but...

• 27:07Sean Hayes?

  But it's good.

• 27:08Jason Bateman?

  Open up the lines.

• 27:11Sean Hayes?

  He says, "It feels like with your show, with the upcoming release of the movie Predator: Badlands, which features a character from the Alien universe, that both the Alien franchise and the Predator franchise are finally being codified in the same universe. Do you see the world of Predator being folded into the world you created in Alien?" No, I've wrecked my microphone.

• 27:31Sean Hayes?

  Do you see them combined at all? Or Predator coming onto your show?

• 27:36Speaker 04

  No, not onto the show, I don't think. I mean, I think Dan Trachtenberg, who made Prey and has made the Badlands movie, and, you know, I mean, I loved Prey. I think he's doing a great job with that franchise. He clearly has a plan there. You know, I've met Dan once. We're not kind of coordinating any of that stuff, so...

• 27:57Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, fine.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  It's not really my plan to do it.

• 28:00Sean Hayes?

  Sure.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  So just tell Scotty to stand down.

• 28:03Sean Hayes?

  Thanks, Scotty.

• 28:05Sean Hayes?

  He just comes in in a Predator outfit.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:08Jason Bateman?

  Well, so, no, let me tell us about that moment, that the switch from political science to writing. Was there a first job? Was it a school paper? Like, what was that transition?

• 28:25Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I had done some fiction writing, you know, as a kid, and then in college, and as I said, I was, you know, I was trying to be a rock star. But, you know, to make ends meet, I took a job working as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society in New York City in family courts. So these are the lawyers who represent children in... Abuse and neglect cases, termination or parental right cases, but also juvenile delinquency cases, so both civil and criminal law. And what did you do, sorry, what did you do? I was a paralegal. I basically tried to help them, you know, case law, et cetera. And, you know, it was...

• 29:05Jason Bateman?

  If a dad took off in a, you know, in a car...

• 29:09Speaker 04

  In a Miata, let's say, let's say we're talking...

• 29:11Jason Bateman?

  Let's say it's a Miata, let's say there was a lot of wheel spin and...

• 29:13Speaker 04

  It was an MG.

• 29:15Jason Bateman?

  And there was four or five kids in the rearview. Would you, you would take that case on, yes, even if it was in Chicago?

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Those kids deserved their day in court, is all I can say.

• 29:25Jason Bateman?

  Yes, they do, sure, amen.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  All right, all right, I'm gonna tell my dad, I'll sue him in court, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, in the family court, the family court building at that time was this huge black obelisk. It looked like Darth Vader's helmet, right? And so every day I'd go to work and these kids would come in. And, you know, it's, obviously, it's heartbreaking, you know, it's outrageous, et cetera. And I started writing fiction as a way to kind of process. Yeah, escape a little. And, you know, when you're in a band, you're tied to these three filthy penniless men, right? And fiction writing was a... Believe me, I know. Yeah, fiction writing was a way to, I could just do it myself. And, you know, when you wrote 10 pages, you had 10 pages, right? Was your material dark at that time?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Was it a reflection of what you were going through? Well, no, I've always been playful and, you know, I've always been attracted to genre and elevating genre, you know, as character pieces, et cetera. So, I don't know, you know, the first novel I published was called A Conspiracy of Tall Men. And it was about a professor of conspiracy theories whose wife is killed in a plane crash. And he finally gets the conspiracy he's been looking for. But of course, it's no solace, because, you know, he had to lose his wife to get it. And it has a bit of a thriller quality, it's also a little satirical. You know, I'm always just trying to figure out what, how does the story want to be told?

• 30:48Sean Hayes?

  Wait, but, but, but the time is a paralegal and witnessing all of that, you know, horrible stuff to kids and the parents and the families. How did that affect you and do you, how do you see the, how did that change who you are as a person, as a writer, as a parent, um, after being experienced and to, after experiencing all of that?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, believe me, I tell my kids every day, you got it good, you don't know how good you got it.

• 31:12Sean Hayes?

  Right, right, for sure.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  No, it's interesting, you know, because I, my daughter is 18, as I said, and, and if I look back at the last 20 years of stories that I've told, really, you know, I can't separate my identity as a parent from the stories I'm telling. You know, I look at, at Alien Earth, which is about these children whose minds are put into adult bodies, or Fargo season four, which is about these two crime bosses who trade their youngest sons. There's always something that ties into like, who are we as a people? How are we raising our children and, and, you know, what is moral and what is cynical? And how are we preparing our kids for the world?

• 31:51Sean Hayes?

  Right, right, right, yeah.

• 31:52Jason Bateman?

  I mean, Noah, how do you, do you have a, um, a, a structured way in which you divvy up your day to, to, to tackle these, to allow your brain to think? What do I want to do? What do I want to say? Uh, what should this episode be about? What should my next project be about? Um, and then, and then do you have a certain time, like, is it in the afternoon? Where you actually then do the writing and then another period of time?

• 32:17Sean Hayes?

  The time management of it all.

• 32:18Jason Bateman?

  And like, how do you, I just can't imagine how you take on as much concentrated individual time along with all the time you need to spend with the teams that you're running.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  It kind of depends on what phase I'm in, right? It's, you know, right, right now, um, you know, I can look at, at, at having to have scripts do in a, in a few months and production coming up and, you know, I'm sort of in a phase right now, which is every day I'm like, where does my brain want to go? You know, and, and so, and some days that, that's like, you know, I want to watch movies or I, you know, I want to read this book and other days it's like, oh, I guess I'm going to think about, you know, Alien Earth today, or I'm going to think about Fargo today. And, and, you know, in that way. You know, when an idea is new, you don't want to look at it directly. You want to side eye it, you know? You're like, it's fragile.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  You're like, I don't know what this is yet and I don't want to scare it. So, and I don't want to tell anybody about it. And I just kind of, and then after, after a few days or a couple of weeks, you sort of go, okay, now I see a little more clearly. You know, I think I can start to make some hard, hard choices here.

• 33:29Jason Bateman?

  It starts chasing you.

• 33:30Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I like that idea. I like to like keep things out in a kind of a soft focus. I always say like, just keep it out there in a soft focus for now. And let it kind of, let it come into, let it sort of marinate and come into focus on its own a little bit. You know, Jason was saying, you've got all these different things that you're working on. And when they're in production, I imagine they're in production in lots of different locations as well, which must also be a, a big issue.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, we love Canada. We film a lot in Canada. It's, but no, I, I mean, I shot, I shot Alien Earth in Bangkok. We were in Thailand for, for, you know, what was probably a total of a year. You know, I wasn't there the whole time. I'm there for a couple of months here, a couple of months there. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And, and if I can time it to a kid's summer vacation, it's easier. And if not, we try to have a two week rule. But can't come back from Thailand for a weekend, you know what I mean?

• 34:25Jason Bateman?

  No, I was just going to ask to be, to mimic your son and say, look, there's a part in Alien Earth.

• 34:29Will Arnett?

  I always say you can't come back from a weekend in Thailand, you know what I mean?

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's metaphorical and literal, yeah.

• 34:35Will Arnett?

  Yeah. Jason, anything?

• 34:38Jason Bateman?

  No, there, I, I, it is, it's a coincidence? No, but incredible that you have adapted, as you said earlier, two iconic films into television series. Is, is that a coincidence or? Well, let's start with Fargo. How did you have the moxie to say, I want to approach the Coen brothers and talk to them about turning their iconic film into a television series? And then how did you do that again for Ridley, with Ridley Scott?

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, luckily, these were, these were both sort of incoming calls. I, I had written a couple of pilots for FX. I knew them. I was in talking to them about something else. They had optioned Fargo as a TV show. Joel and Ethan had signed on and they'd said, if we like the script, you can put our name on it. And if not, you know where to send the check and. You know, so the first process was to sell FX and to go through, you know, that process and write a script and then we sent that first script to Joel and Ethan and that was when I met them and.

• 35:47Jason Bateman?

  Well, when, sorry, when FX optioned it, was it always gonna be an anthology? Or was the original conceit to take the original characters and keep moving them?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, they wanted to make a TV show out of it, but they also said, do you think we could do it without Marge? Because who, how could you ever top Frances McDormand, right? And I said, well, well, first of all, everyone else is dead or in jail, so. All right, well, that's interesting. If you're adapting the movie without actually any of the characters in the movie, then what are you doing? And I said, look, it's not a TV show because the movie says it's a true story. And at the end of it, she's seen the craziest Coen Brothers case and tomorrow's a normal day and she's got two months left to have the baby and he got the three cent stamp and, and you know what I mean? It's a closed ended thing. If she woke up tomorrow and it was another crazy Coen Brothers case, you couldn't say it's a true story. No one would, would believe it, right?

• 36:39Speaker 04

  I said, but you could, you know, why is the movie called Fargo? It's set in Minnesota. Except that Fargo, the word is evocative of a place, right? What Joel and Ethan call Siberia with family restaurants.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  You know, but it's also after that movie, it's kind of a state of mind. It's a type of story. And so I said, you know, so you could tell this story about Fargo and this is a Fargo story. Or, you know, as proved out, it could also be a 1979 crime epic about the death of the family business and the rise of corporate America. Or it could be a 1950 story about, you know, the, the sort of alternate economy and immigration and et cetera. So every time I just try to push that envelope of what is a Fargo story.

• 37:27Jason Bateman?

  It would all need to take place in Fargo, though, yes?

• 37:29Speaker 04

  No, it all needs to, I mean, not, not even really.

• 37:31Jason Bateman?

  Fargo, North Dakota, yes?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Well, but it needs to have some connection, you know, whether there's a character. I mean, the, the fourth season took place in Kansas City, but Jessie Buckley's character was from North Dakota, you know, and. You know, this last season with Jon Hamm, you know, he was in North Dakota.

• 37:50Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  This fucking guy, I don't know how he gets fired.

• 37:53Will Arnett?

  Honestly.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:55Will Arnett?

  Noah, Noah.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Every fucking month, it's a new goddamn Hamm vehicle. Just let it out, man.

• 38:00Will Arnett?

  Hamm's fucking face everywhere.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 38:04Will Arnett?

  We get it, you're handsome and funny.

• 38:06Jason Bateman?

  All of that needs to be trimmed out, but I just needed to.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I'm glad you got that off your chest.

• 38:12Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. So, sorry. Okay, so we're back.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:16Jason Bateman?

  So, the fourth season was with the great Jon Hamm, right?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Fifth season, fourth season.

• 38:21Jason Bateman?

  Fifth season?

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:22Jason Bateman?

  Yep.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  That's your back end. Fifth season was Chris Rock, and anyway. So, yeah, so they came to me, but then, of course, I realized, look, you know, it's great. I wrote a script that the Coen Brothers, you know, when I spoke to them finally, and they said, it's, you know, we hate imitation, but this was, it was eerie reading this because it felt like you were channeling us, right? That's a great thing to hear. That makes my millennia, right? But then, but then you gotta film it. And, and, and there's, we know, we know that the Coens, they, they write or rewrite a lot of movies that they don't direct, and those movies never feel like Coen Brothers movies. So, there's something in the cinema, right, that turns those words into that thing, and

• 39:07Speaker 04

  I had to figure out what that was. Otherwise, I was gonna fail on my face, you know?

• 39:12Jason Bateman?

  Did you end up directing the first episode?

• 39:15Speaker 04

  I didn't because I wasn't really directing then, and so, you know, I had a director.

• 39:19Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, who was? Did somebody come in and say, yeah, here's the visual component that is the Coen Brothers?

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, Adam Bernstein came in, and he had shot a bunch of Breaking Bad, and, and we had a good collaboration. But, you know, he, he gave me his director's cut, and, and, and, you know, I, I recut it, you know? I recut it to find the tone of voice that, to me, felt like a Coen Brothers movie. It's not as comedic as you think, right? And, and a lot of the comedy is deployed, you know, like Anton Chigurh's haircut, it's deployed in a way where you're like, well, it's not funny, it's just really specific and kind of unsettling, right?

• 39:59Jason Bateman?

  Right, right. But it ends up being funny, you know?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the first things I did was I, I took like half the edits out of the episode, you know, because. Nothing makes something feel like television more than

• 40:13Will Arnett?

  Cutting to dialogue.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  You're cutting every time someone talks, right?

• 40:15Will Arnett?

  Right, right, right.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  There's a scene in the emergency room where Martin Freeman meets Billy Bob for the first time, and I'm in this master shot, sort of slowly pushing in, and, you know, Billy Bob gets up and moves over next to him, and that's the first cut, you know? But that's a long time, right? But that's what a movie feels like.

• 40:36Will Arnett?

  Sure.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  You trust the audience, so.

• 40:38Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Sean Hayes?

  Wait, so who, like, because you're right, it's

• 40:41Will Arnett?

  I love Martin Freeman, sorry, I just had to say that. Have you seen his show, by the way, no, have you seen the show The Responder that he did?

• 40:47Speaker 04

  No, I haven't.

• 40:48Will Arnett?

  In the UK?

• 40:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:49Will Arnett?

  Oh my god, he plays a cop in Liverpool, it's unbelievable, he's so good in that show, please, I

• 40:56Speaker 04

  I'll watch it.

• 40:57Will Arnett?

  Yeah, watch it, it's so, so, so.

• 40:59Sean Hayes?

  So the comedy that, like, comes, like you were talking about, from the Coen Brothers, who was that for you growing up? Who was the, who was the show, the movie, the people, the comedians that you're like, you know what, I really like that kind of style?

• 41:12Speaker 04

  Well, I grew up, because my father had studied acting in the UK, he came back with a lot of goon show records, which was Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and Harry Seacum, this radio, half hour radio show. It was that, it was Monty Python, it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There was a lot of that

• 41:32Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, for sure, all those, yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  British humor that really was seminal for me, and then, you know, because people ask me, when was the first time you saw Alien? And I say, well, I'll tell you, the first time I didn't see it was a nine year old's birthday party where my parents were like, yeah, you're not going to that. And so we went to see The In-Laws instead, right? With Alan Arkin and Peter Falk. And I was like, I think that explains everything about me, right?

• 42:01Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  You know, so, you know, that's the sort of thing, is the absurdism, but also, you know, the cinematic nature of it.

• 42:10Sean Hayes?

  Right, yeah.

• 42:11Will Arnett?

  Is there, is, go ahead, Jason.

• 42:14Jason Bateman?

  Well, this, the first television writing gig came on Bones, yes?

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:19Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, so you're a writer-producer on that, and then, then you start to create your own shows? So it started with The Unusuals of My Generation, were those two the first?

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Both for ABC, yeah.

• 42:32Jason Bateman?

  And was it, was it? Was it a difficult process to get the networks interested in your ideas? I mean, were they receptive right away based on your time there on Bones? Or was that kind of a tough transition into being a showrunner?

• 42:45Speaker 04

  I mean, I had come from being a novelist, you know, to writing an original spec feature film that I ended up selling and my first novel had been optioned and they said, all right, well, now you're a screenwriter, so give it a shot. So I did some feature writing and then, you know, the TV agents at the agency were like, would you ever think about doing TV? So I went out and I took some meetings and I ended up selling a couple of TV pilots that I wrote and I thought, well, if any of these ever get produced, I should know how to make a show. And so, whatever it was, 2004, I came, I was in San Francisco, I came down to LA and I staffed on Bones and I did it because Hart Hanson, who ran the show, said, well, you're going to learn how to make a show.

• 43:27Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  There were other shows where they're like, you're going to be in the room the whole time and I was like, well, I know how to write, but I need to know how to produce a thing. And then, but then while I was on staff, you know, I was still, I published another book, I sold a movie script each season. I didn't write a pilot the first year, but the second year I went into ABC and developed a show with them that they really liked, but they didn't make, right? Because it didn't really have a genre, right? That was the broadcast days where they're like lawyer, Dr. Cop, right? And so, the next year I thought-

• 43:59Will Arnett?

  Do you think that show, do you think that show would have been made today, Sir Dintor?

• 44:02Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. It was a sort of white trash dynasty about a guy who had a used car empire and he had four families and everybody worked for him and, you know, it was a really fun sort of

• 44:13Will Arnett?

  I want to watch that show.

• 44:14Jason Bateman?

  I see you as a lead on that, Willie.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. And they really liked it and the character work and so then strategically I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go back in the next year, what can I sell them that they would actually make? And I thought, well, let's sell them a cop show, not a procedural, but like a Hill Street or Barney Miller or something like that. And so that's the show I pitched them and then, you know, we got it through the process with Jeremy Renner and- And, you know, Goldberg and Harold Perrinow and, and, you know, we did the eight hours and then they said, "Thank you and, and don't let the door hit you on the way out." And then the next day Jeremy Renner was nominated for an Oscar for Hurt Locker.

• 44:53Jason Bateman?

  Uh huh, right.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  It was like, "You guys are real geniuses."

• 44:55Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. Yeah, how did, tell, talk to us about how the, the directing thing started to come about? Um, and, and what, and, and where did your confidence start to, when did your confidence start to grow for that, like, asking for the, the wheel?

• 45:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, what you realize, especially when there's comedy in the work, right, is, is that, is that, you know, where you see the joke is different than where somebody else sees the joke, right? Where, with a beat and, and even The Unusual's pilot, right, is like, Stephen Hopkins had directed it and, you know, he cut a much broader comedy than I saw, right? And so I would go in and, you know, so you start in the editing room to be a filmmaker.

• 45:40Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  You know, and, and where, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a big fan of melodrama. I like to keep the emotion sort of low until it's really earned and, you know, and, and then my generation was a, it was a fake documentary about the high school class of 2000 and where they were 10 years later. And so I had to approach it like I was making a documentary film. So, you know, when you watch a documentary, you're like, "Well, the cameras weren't there. They've got an audio recording or they've got still photographs or they've got, you know, or if the cameras were there and the couple had a fight and she ran off and he ran after her, well, the camera's not there waiting."

• 46:19Jason Bateman?

  Right, yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Right, the camera's chasing, right? So, so there was a cinematic mindset of making that. And then, of course, as I said, with the Coen Brothers film. You know, I started doing a lot of the second unit directing on the first season of Fargo. And then I just started doing the episodic world creation in season two.

• 46:40Jason Bateman?

  Did you find, did you find it, um, I think most people can read something or watch something. And from the comfort of their couch, the safety of their couch, they can say, oh, I would do this differently. Or I would do that differently.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 46:53Jason Bateman?

  And those are nine times out of 10, like really good ideas. They're, they're good catches, they're good fixes. But if you give them a blank page, or you give them a screen with no image on it. Or more pointedly, on a, on a set, standing in front of a bunch of actors and some cameras and a cameraman. Knowing how to create from the ground up, you know, to put this thing into three dimensions. Like, did you find that, that change in the process from just, from recutting stuff that's in front of you to actually creating it from the ground up on set? Was that a comfortable thing for you? Or did that, would that have some growing pains?

• 47:32Speaker 04

  You know, I'm sure you had that moment the first time you're on a set and, and they go, what's next, boss? And you don't know, right?

• 47:42Jason Bateman?

  That's so scary.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  And 200 people are staring at you. You know, I've gotten, I've gotten comfortable with that feeling, which is like, I just need a minute. I'm going to figure it out.

• 47:50Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Cause then, of course, people start to offer suggestions, which isn't helpful, right? And, and everything. No, it was just about, about finding the, again, as I said, the feeling. And I, I don't have any training on this. And, and, you know, so a lot of it for me, you know, there, there's a moment on Alien Earth. I did that, that fifth hour, which was the trapped in the spaceship, um, you know, hour where, where, um, you know, you see what happened before the ship crashed. And, and you know, this moment where, where Richard Morgeanni was running away from the, the xenomorph. And she was hiding and she was pressed against a wall. And we could see down the hallway and the xenomorph came out. And, and I thought.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Well, I want to do a push in here, but let's do a zoom. And what if we zoom on her? And then we, you know, we do it as a lock off. And then I do a longer zoom on the xenomorph. And then I marry those two things. It's kind of an impossible shot. I don't know if it's going to work or not work, but I know it'll give you a feeling, right? Which is like, something feels wrong here, right? Which you don't know is a cinematic thing. You just feel that feeling. And that's sort of how I approach it.

• 49:04Jason Bateman?

  Super cool. And we will be right back.

• 49:11Sean Hayes?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. And teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 49:53Will Arnett?

  Investing with Schwab might remind you of one of your friends. Yes, the one who is smart, good at finances, and loves having it all. That one effortlessly cool friend who likes to mix and match their style by dressing up and down at the same time. You know, that suit and sneakers kind of thing. One minute it's tailored jacket energy, the next it's casual Friday energy. But somehow, it always works. Because when you invest with Schwab, you can invest your way. Keep it casual by making your own trades here and there. Or keep it classy and put on your fancy pants with full service wealth management. Or be like your buddy and do a little bit of both. Because sometimes you want to be hands on. And other times,

• 50:38Will Arnett?

  you'd rather let someone else handle the details. So you can get back to building an outfit that says, board meeting up top, weekend vibes down below. Visit schwab.com to learn more. That's S-E-H-W-A-B dot com.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Can we talk about something embarrassing besides the sound of my voice? Imagine you're at lunch. The server brings a Coca-Cola Zero Sugar while the food is still on the way. You think, "Just a sip while I wait for my chili dog." So you take that sip, but suddenly you can't stop drinking that delicious ice cold Coke Zero. The food arrives and you're just sitting there emotionally unprepared, waiting for a lifesaving refill. Real Coca-Cola taste with zero sugar? It's hard to resist. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, too good to wait. Enjoy the delicious taste of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar today.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  And now, back to the show.

• 51:41Will Arnett?

  Did you find, did you find that once you got, kind of like JB was saying, like you could create from the ground up in real time as a director on set? Did you find that it took a step out of the process for you? Because as a writer, as a producer, as the showrunner, all these things, you're watching cuts or you're watching them shoot stuff and you're like, "Yeah," and you're trying to convey what it is that you want. And at a certain point, just being able to cut the middleman out, as it were.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:07Will Arnett?

  Was that satisfying?

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Well, look, my, my wife Kyle, who I love dearly, she said, you know, at one point to me, "Do you have to direct two?" Right? You know, and I said, "But here's the thing."

• 52:19Will Arnett?

  As opposed to just one?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  No, do you have to direct it all? Like you're all, you're writing, you're, you're showrunning, you also have to be a director. And I said, "Well, here's the thing, I'd have to be there anyway."

• 52:29Will Arnett?

  Right.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  The first episode of a new season, a new series, whatever, I gotta be there anyway. It's actually, you're gonna see me quicker if I do it myself.

• 52:38Will Arnett?

  Way more efficient, yeah, way more efficient.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so that's, that, and, and for me, look, it's, it's all an act of play, right? There's a, you know, I'm, as a writer, I'm a sort of yes and improv guy, you know, in the room. I'm like, "Okay, I like that, we're doing that, now what?" Right? I mean, I've heard these stories about Vince Gilligan where he's like, "That's good, let's spend two weeks seeing if we can top it." That would make me crazy.

• 53:04Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. For Tracy, he created Breaking Bad, yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so you get on set and, you know, I have a script I think is great and I get on the set with the actors and I'm not saying we're gonna change the words, but like, let's figure out what it would really be like and what it wants to be and you know, you gotta be open to play in that moment.

• 53:25Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. What about, so you wrote and directed a film as well, Lucy in the Sky with Natalie Portman. Was the film experience anything different than basically just a double-length episode for you? And I guess the question behind the question is, is there a desire to do film? Or do you see it as just simply arbitrarily a different medium that is every bit consistent with what you're doing on television anyway? And one could argue much more sort of creative control on television.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's its own unique medium, right? And I did like the experience of it, you know. I mean, one of the things that, you know, I'm such a use every part of the animal television filmmaker that, you know, sometimes a scene doesn't fit and you're like, I'll use it in episode four, you know, or I'll repurpose this and then, but with the movie, you're like, there is no episode four. It's either in this movie or it doesn't exist, right? And, you know, whenever I come into a project, my first question is always, what am I taking for granted? Right? As a storyteller or a filmmaker, whatever. And with Lucy, I was like, alright, well, this is a movie that's gonna be shown in theaters. Well, maybe I'm taking the movie theater itself for granted, the fact that it's a

• 54:46Speaker 04

  you got a giant rectangle at the front and all these speakers on the side and you're taking for granted that you wanna use the whole rectangle and all the speakers, but what if this woman goes to space and it's this huge, you know, spiritual experience and the screen is full and the sound is full and then she comes back down to earth, we see her in the pickup line, you know, to pick up her kid and now the image is small and the sound is in the front, right? But then, you know, she meets your friend Jon Hamm and you guys wanna grumble about Jon some more or...

• 55:17Jason Bateman?

  I mean, he's alright. He's alright. He's okay.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  But she meets Jon and they have an affair and so the feelings get big and the screen opens up, you know. So I'm always looking... For those sorts of of things, you know, the I think that the structure of a story should reflect the content of a story.

• 55:36Jason Bateman?

  And what was it about that story that you thought lent itself better to to to feature as opposed to long form in in in television? And how do you treat any idea that comes into your head, decide whether to, you know, write another book based on that idea? Or actually, this is something that could go into as a as a limited series or an ongoing or a feature?

• 55:57Speaker 04

  Some of it is how long you want to live with it. And and the other, you know, TV, we're we're interacting with the culture mostly in real time. You know, you might be eighteen months, a year away, like from writing to to production, airing, whatever. A book, you know, you might live with for five years. A film, you might live with for seven years before it hits the screen. And so it's sort of like, is this interesting enough? Is this going to hold my attention enough? Is there enough there for me to live with for that length of time? And do I have enough to say?

• 56:29Will Arnett?

  Were there any were there any sort of creative babies that you had to let go? That ideas that you loved for a long time? Do anyone that sticks out that you're like, I loved this so passionately for a year?

• 56:41Jason Bateman?

  And then you read someone else's doing something similar.

• 56:42Will Arnett?

  A year and a day later, you're like.

• 56:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, all the time.

• 56:45Will Arnett?

  Or you just or you just go, it doesn't really get me anymore.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Well, Will, I feel like you're looking for some free ideas here.

• 56:51Will Arnett?

  I'm just saying, you could DM me. All I'm saying is.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  What would it be? Can I produce it? Yeah, I mean, there's always stuff, but again, I'm not dead yet.

• 57:02Will Arnett?

  You don't have to say specifically the actual idea, but like just.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there are things and and there, you know, there's scripts that I wrote that I that I love and and, you know, I wrote this novel before the fall and and, you know, Sony owned it and I adapted it. I think it's great, but it's expensive, right? It's like a, you know, seventy million dollar drama thriller, and they don't make those right now. So I could beat my head against a wall for five years trying to get it made, or I could go, I'm going to bide my time and and.

• 57:32Jason Bateman?

  Or turn it into a limited series.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, or turn it into a limited series, yeah, so.

• 57:37Jason Bateman?

  What about other people's ideas?

• 57:38Will Arnett?

  Let me shoot you my number real quick.

• 57:39Jason Bateman?

  Like, are you, you're such an auteur, do you even spend any time considering other people's work and adapting that?

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. You know, Lucy in the Sky, I did not originate that project. Fox Searchlight brought that to me. It was a script that Reese Witherspoon was producing. The first draft, you know, it's sort of like a dramatization of this true, you know, this tabloid story about this astronaut who has an affair and, you know, drives across the country allegedly in a diaper, you know, to kidnap the, you know, it's a very tabloidy story. And the first script was kind of a diaper joke script and I passed on it. And then, you know, and then they came back to me with a script that began through magic realism to explore her psychological state of how she went from being that one person to being that other person.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  And I thought that was really interesting. And so I signed on and I developed it with John Henry Butterworth and then, you know, but it's, in the end, I feel like if I had had the idea and written it from scratch, it probably would have been a different movie. You know, when you get a script, you kind of can't see past what the script was. So, I don't know, it was, it was a $35 million magic realism astronaut movie and it turns out people don't want to see those.

• 59:02Jason Bateman?

  No, I'm not sure what they want to see nowadays. It's such a crapshoot, you know, it's really, really interesting.

• 59:08Sean Hayes?

  What about stuff for the stage or theater?

• 59:10Jason Bateman?

  Oh, here he comes.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think about it.

• 59:13Jason Bateman?

  Did you ever forget a line on stage and anybody ever have a heart attack?

• 59:17Speaker 04

  I think about it. You know, like I said, I'm a New York City kid. My dad had been an actor. I grew up going to all the, you know, the shows and, you know, and it's a different medium. It's an animal I haven't tried yet.

• 59:31Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, it's a good way to test the waters for, you know, bigger things, yeah.

• 59:37Jason Bateman?

  And then, and so, let's go back to music a little bit. Sean, will you be surprised to hear that he's a singer as well and has sung on his, on some of his shows? Yes?

• 59:50Speaker 04

  I didn't know that.

• 59:51Jason Bateman?

  You do a little bit of singing. I think that's, that's a, that's a big surprise. We like to know what would the audience be surprised about.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, can you give us a little something? A little, a little something, something.

• 1:00:01Jason Bateman?

  Just like happy birthday, you know, it's Sean's birthday today.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Happy birthday.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Jason Bateman?

  That's something you still do, yeah?

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  It is, yeah, and, and, you know, like I said, I wanted to be a musician. It wasn't really in the cards for me professionally, but I found a workaround, right? That's, that's what I try to do is what's the system and can I game it? And, you know, it started on, on season two of Fargo where I, where I decided I wanted songs in the, in the show that were covers of songs from Coen Brothers movies, you know? So Jeff Tweedy did the, did a cover of the Jose Feliciano song from the movie Fargo and, and.

• 1:00:42Jason Bateman?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  You know, there were a lot, you know, there were a lot of, of covers. And then I thought, well, why don't I, I do one? And so Jeffrey Russo, the composer, and I recorded the Go to Sleep, Your Little Baby from, from Oh Brother. And then, and then when I made Legion, which was a, you know, a very surreal, um, Marvel-inspired show, I wanted the songs to sound like score. I wanted, I wanted it to go from score into songs without feeling like there was any difference. So he and I just started recording. Again, it's like, I hear it in my head. I could try to explain it to somebody else or we could just do it, you know? And so that, that's what we ended up, ended up doing and now we do it.

• 1:01:26Jason Bateman?

  That's cool. Tell, tell the audience a bit of the, the, the torture, the horror or the pleasure, you tell me, of pitching. Um, what, what, what a writer, well, you explain what a writer has to do to get the people who write the checks to write the check. Like, you gotta basically tell them what's coming, right?

• 1:01:43Sean Hayes?

  And you gotta trick them sometimes.

• 1:01:45Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's fascinating that this visual medium is still rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, right? Which is, I walk into a room, I tell you a story.

• 1:01:54Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  Right? And if I'm charismatic and, you know, I've got good timing, you're gonna go, oh my God, that's amazing. I wanna, I wanna see that.

• 1:02:02Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  I did one, one pitch where I went in and, you know, I started.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  To talk about the segue, right? The segue, of course, is the segue from Small Talk to The Pitch, right? And we did the Small Talk and I was like, you know, I was thinking over, on the way over here about the segue, of how I was gonna get into The Pitch and I was thinking about how-

• 1:02:22Sean Hayes?

  Like, how are you to like the-

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was thinking about how recently my house got broken into and they stole some guitars. And then I was thinking, no, maybe I'll talk about how I was watching TV last night and Stripes was on. And I thought, we don't have that kind of Bill Murray anti-hero anymore. And I went through a couple of other things. And then at a certain point, they realized, oh, the segue is The Pitch, right? Cause it is an anti-hero story about a crime, you know, and, and-

• 1:02:45Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, oh, that's cool.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  It's, my feeling is always when you're asking someone to interact with the show in any way, whether it's an outline or a pitch, it's gotta feel like the show. And so I do these hair and makeup tests when we get on set, where it's, you know, it's grown to this thing where I'll have like a, a, a, you know, a crane on, on my hair and makeup. You know, cause I'll get the characters in, I'm like, what, let's not waste an opportunity just by looking at people in clothes, right? And we have an opportunity to like, you know, let's get, let's get David Thewlis and Michael Stuhlbarg and Ewan McGregor in a room and feel like what that dynamic is between them and, and, you know, and so I end up cutting these things together with music and I, and when I show, show it to them that they, this is what the show's gonna feel like, right?

• 1:03:32Will Arnett?

  I love that, yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, because it's not, I, I mean, we were kind of past the point of talking, just going in a room and pitching, telling a story. You, you need shiny objects, you need to excite them and you need to like, you know, sizzle reels and, or whatever or something.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  But it's great for the actors, cause they get to put the skin on without any pressure, right? For a day or two and, and then wakes the crew up, right? They're like, oh, we're, we're pushing Adali in the, in the hair and makeup test. Like, I'm laying track and we're doing this for real.

• 1:03:59Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:04:00Will Arnett?

  We, we did that, we did that actually on our film last year on this, this movie that I did. And we, uh, we did all this camera testing here in the city, outside, just me and Bradley and Matty Le Batteken and guys. And we went out and shot for a couple of days during the day, at night, we went and shot all this stuff. Um, and Bradley ended up cutting it together and, and- Putting together this reel that he was showing the studio and cut it with music and with stuff that happened. And it was so, A, it was great for them, but B, really for us, it really started to, it taught us the language of the film before we started.

• 1:04:32Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, you get to feel it.

• 1:04:33Will Arnett?

  Yeah, and it was, it was really, really helpful.

• 1:04:35Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is, it is. I find it, you know, and it, it becomes a sales document for them internally of like, "Look what, look what this guy's making for us," you know.

• 1:04:45Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  "We're making Alien Earth," and you feel like you're watching, you know, an alien movie for four minutes or whatever it is. Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:04:53Jason Bateman?

  We would be criminal if we let you go without giving you an opportunity to discuss with Sean. What, to the extent you're comfortable, and we can cut it if you're not. What happened with Star Trek and will it, will, will your participation with Star Trek be coming at any point?

• 1:05:12Will Arnett?

  Yeah, because you're supposed to write and direct it, right? Or was it?

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  I did. I, I, I signed on, you know, after Lucy in the Sky, I thought, "Oh, I like this movie thing. I'd like to do another one, but I think maybe I'd like to try something a little bigger." And, you know, it's all franchises and I thought, "Yeah, but everything's war, right? Star Wars is war and Marvel is war, and, but Star Trek isn't war. Star Trek is exploration, right? It's people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy." Like, the best movie from, the best moment from Star Trek is in Wrath of Khan, where, where, where Shatner puts on his reading glasses and like lowers the shields on the other shield. It costs like 45 cents, right? But it's like, you see, "Oh, he's smarter than Khan." He's, you know, and, and so I went in, I talked to Paramount.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  I sold them this original idea. It wasn't Chris Pine, it wasn't anything. I wrote it. They said, "We love it. Let's prep it." We were, you know, we were, I was gonna move to Australia, we were booking stages, whatever. And, and then, you know, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Gianopolis, who was running the studio at the time, he, he's like, "I'm gonna bring in somebody else under me and they're gonna take over the film studio." And the first thing that they did was kill the original Star Trek movie. Because, because they said, "Well..."

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  How do we know people are gonna like, like, you know, shouldn't we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe, you know, whatever, and so it kinda went away, but, you know, I do, I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently, and I was like, you still haven't made a Star Trek movie, I'm just saying, it's in there, I love it.

• 1:06:49Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, it's sort of like with all this new ownership and administration over there, I guess it's, you can just pick up the phone and say, hey, guys, wanna dust this off?

• 1:06:58Sean Hayes?

  Right, right. You just wait five minutes in Hollywood for everybody to get a new job and then

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  I know, it's true.

• 1:07:03Sean Hayes?

  Pitch the same stuff again.

• 1:07:04Will Arnett?

  Sean, what are you saying?

• 1:07:05Sean Hayes?

  Nothing.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  You know, but, I mean, I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but they, you know, to some degree, you really have to declare, this is my next thing, this is all I wanna do, all I wanna think about, and then, and then you can move the mountain, right? For, for me, I've got more Alien Earth, I could make more Fargo, like, it's a little, it's more like, well, you know, what I learned from Ridley Scott, you know, who, who I got to know some, you know, he'll develop three movies at the same time, and he'll say to Sony, I'm gonna make the Fox movie unless you guys...

• 1:07:35Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? So, you kinda have to try to get them to play your game, as opposed to play in their game.

• 1:07:43Jason Bateman?

  Create a little leverage there.

• 1:07:44Sean Hayes?

  Right, right.

• 1:07:44Jason Bateman?

  Uh huh, uh huh, well, you've certainly done your part with that. Keep it, keep it coming, please, Noah, it's, it's, it's an incredible body of work already, and, are you even forty yet? I mean, you know, I mean...

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  I am, I'm older than forty.

• 1:08:00Jason Bateman?

  Well, you've, you've got so much...

• 1:08:03Will Arnett?

  It's just impressive, it's so broad, and it's so diverse, and it's so, everything about it is just, it's really something.

• 1:08:08Jason Bateman?

  And the degree of difficulty is high on this stuff, you're not, you're not...

• 1:08:11Sean Hayes?

  And the novel, and the fact that you write novels and like the...

• 1:08:14Will Arnett?

  I know, all these novels that these guys will never read.

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Will Arnett?

  I am, I am gonna start, I am gonna buy some of your books.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  Well, I appreciate that, even if they're just on your shelf, it's meaningful to me.

• 1:08:25Jason Bateman?

  No, no, he reads these things, it's a very surprising element of Will Arnett, this guy knocks down books like Reese Witherspoon.

• 1:08:32Will Arnett?

  Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna check it out.

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:08:35Jason Bateman?

  All right, pal, well, thank you for doing this very much, I'm glad we got this done, and I'm glad you had time to squeeze this in, in your busy, busy schedule.

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys, I really appreciate it.

• 1:08:43Sean Hayes?

  So nice to meet you.

• 1:08:44Will Arnett?

  Yeah, nice to meet you, Noah, thanks, man.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  You too, guys.

• 1:08:46Jason Bateman?

  Talk soon, man.

• 1:08:49Jason Bateman?

  There goes Noah Hawley. I mean, I wish I was.

• 1:08:52Will Arnett?

  He's something else, man. What an impressive guy.

• 1:08:54Jason Bateman?

  I like to think I work hard, you know, but I don't.

• 1:08:58Will Arnett?

  What are you talking about? You're tired at two.

• 1:09:00Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. But I worked so hard until two.

• 1:09:02Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Will Arnett?

  How, let, let, let me, you like to think that you work hard and can I just say, and I want you to be honest, as honest as you can be.

• 1:09:09Jason Bateman?

  Okay, I'm ready.

• 1:09:10Will Arnett?

  How many golf games do you have scheduled this week, including yesterday?

• 1:09:16Jason Bateman?

  Uh, I will be playing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

• 1:09:20Jason Bateman?

  But I work, I work during the round, as you know, I'm returning emails and texts all the way through it. And I'm usually knocking down one of these goddamn things before I get out there. And then I make a more phone calls when I get home.

• 1:09:35Will Arnett?

  Sorry, we're getting in the way of your golf.

• 1:09:37Jason Bateman?

  This fucking podcast, man, is no good for my golf game.

• 1:09:41Will Arnett?

  By the way, Sean, you know what? My favorite thing about JB is sometimes we're playing golf and he won't pull out his phone. But you'll see him, all of a sudden he'll just wander off, talking into his apple, into his.

• 1:09:51Jason Bateman?

  My wrist.

• 1:09:51Will Arnett?

  And he's talking to his wrist and he's like, yeah, well, get them to send it. Tell them we'll look at it, the thing tomorrow if they're.

• 1:09:57Jason Bateman?

  Period. New paragraph.

• 1:09:59Sean Hayes?

  Why don't we try to do an episode of Smartless while you're playing golf?

• 1:10:03Jason Bateman?

  You know, because I don't play that much. Um, I, I work, I work a lot.

• 1:10:08Sean Hayes?

  No, but while you're on the course, just bring your phone and we'll just zoom in.

• 1:10:11Will Arnett?

  Why don't we go to Hawaii and play a round of golf?

• 1:10:14Jason Bateman?

  We've been invited and, uh, you know, we're actually, to be honest, we're all a little bit too busy to do that.

• 1:10:19Will Arnett?

  I know.

• 1:10:20Jason Bateman?

  You know, we're all, we're all doing a bunch of shit.

• 1:10:22Will Arnett?

  Should we, I think, and I know, again, we should talk about this privately, but we might as well do it here. We've talked about it. We should go back and, and do some shows, uh, some live shows.

• 1:10:33Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:10:34Jason Bateman?

  Start, get up back, get back out on the road.

• 1:10:36Will Arnett?

  Yeah, don't you think?

• 1:10:37Sean Hayes?

  Why wouldn't we?

• 1:10:38Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, at the very, at, at the, at a minimum, we should go and, and, and be on stage somewhere and doing it in front of a live audience.

• 1:10:44Sean Hayes?

  Why don't we do like at the end of next year?

• 1:10:47Will Arnett?

  We could. Could we do the spring or no? Is the spring off limits for us?

• 1:10:50Sean Hayes?

  I'm gonna be in New York.

• 1:10:52Jason Bateman?

  Can you guys hold on one second? Yeah?

• 1:10:53Will Arnett?

  Shawnee, when are you done the play?

• 1:10:55Sean Hayes?

  I'm doing the play, uh, January.

• 1:10:57Will Arnett?

  I love that we're doing this in real time on the show.

• 1:10:59Sean Hayes?

  I know. Doing the play January to April. Like, January 3rd, basically February 3rd.

• 1:11:02Will Arnett?

  I say we do like pre-summer, so it's nice out. That's what I'm saying, is that we can get out to some nice places.

• 1:11:07Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, it's not so cold.

• 1:11:08Will Arnett?

  Sort of like September. Remember we were gonna go, we were gonna go...

• 1:11:10Jason Bateman?

  You know, I might have a little bit of work, uh, as well.

• 1:11:13Will Arnett?

  Well, I know where you are.

• 1:11:14Jason Bateman?

  You're not planning on doing any work, Will? You done?

• 1:11:17Will Arnett?

  I am. I might, I might, I might retire.

• 1:11:18Jason Bateman?

  You're gonna pack it in now?

• 1:11:20Will Arnett?

  I might, yeah.

• 1:11:20Sean Hayes?

  You know what? We can, we can, we can talk about it. We can, we can keep talking about it. Like, we don't have to decide now.

• 1:11:26Will Arnett?

  We don't, we can make a decision by the end of the year.

• 1:11:30Sean Hayes?

  Bye, beer. No, God.

• 1:11:32Jason Bateman?

  No, Shawnee, what was yours gonna be?

• 1:11:34Sean Hayes?

  Mine was, we can just talk about it. We don't have to decide now. We can go day... Bye, day.

• 1:11:40Jason Bateman?

  Or, you know what? Better still, we just play it bye year.

• 1:11:44Will Arnett?

  Oh, a three bye bye.

• 1:11:46Sean Hayes?

  Hey.

• 1:11:47Jason Bateman?

  Triple bye.

• 1:11:48Sean Hayes?

  Pass.

• 1:11:49Will Arnett?

  Smartless.

• 1:11:55Will Arnett?

  Smartless.

• 1:12:00Will Arnett?

  Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbaco, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf.

• 1:12:13Will Arnett?

  Smartless.

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• 1:12:43Speaker 05

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