Writing Video Games and Andor (with Tom Bissell)

Triple Click brings on Tom Bissell, writer of video games, books, TV shows and the final three episodes of Andor season 2. They talk about how he went from reporting in Iraq to writing dialogue for Battlefield, his journey to become a writer on Andor, and what it was like to pen the conclusion to one of the most acclaimed TV shows of all time.

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

• 0:04Speaker 00

  It's like I always say, I have friends everywhere. And one of them is a really good writer. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you and the TV shows and books. And okay, this week we have a special guest. It's Tom Bissell, who's written video games and the last three episodes of season two of Andor.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:31Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:32Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 0:35Jason Schreier?

  Hello, my friends.

• 0:37Kirk Hamilton?

  It's been so long since we talked. It's so nice to see you.

• 0:40Jason Schreier?

  There's an in-joke that nobody will understand.

• 0:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Nobody will understand it, and it's fine. We can just keep moving. You don't, you don't always get to get all the inside jokes.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Or we could explain it by saying that, you know what? Sometimes we record episodes at a different time than we normally do. And we've seen each other a little more recently than usual, but you, the listener.

• 0:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Use your imagination.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  You get to use your imagination. You get to imagine that we're just seeing each other every single day. And there's hundreds of episodes you aren't hearing because we don't record them. It's just us hanging out. But actually.

• 1:12Jason Schreier?

  What?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:13Jason Schreier?

  That's just totally off the rails.

• 1:15Kirk Hamilton?

  People can imagine whatever they want.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  There actually are other episodes that you might not be hearing, dear listener. And there's a way to hear them. And here's what it is. You would go to maximumfun.org/join and you'd become a member of the Max Fun Network, just like us. And you'd be supporting our show if you do that. And you'd get a monthly bonus episode from us. And I'm really excited about the most recent episode on the bonus feed, which is a Beans Cast about Andor, a very cool Star Wars television show, my wife's favorite Star Wars thing. I can't make that decision, but she can. A very, very, very cool Star Wars thing. So if you want to become a member and get access to that and all of our backlog of bonus

• 1:59Speaker 00

  episodes, and also just get that warm, fuzzy feeling from supporting us. I mean, come on, that's actually the best part. You would go to maximumfun.org/join, support us, all that.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Good stuff. And also, another way to support us, if you happen to be in the Portland, Oregon area on July 11th, which is really coming up.

• 2:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Which is coming up.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Really soon, super soon, as you're listening to this. Please, check us out. We're doing a live show at the Alberta Rose Theater, and you should get a ticket. You still can. It's not too late. So, pick up a ticket, come see us. We're playing music, we're talking about video games like we usually do, but we're doing it live on a stage before your very eyes. And what's better than that, folks?

• 2:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Nothing.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Nothing. Nothing's better than that, except maybe the episode that we have planned for you today, which is a pretty cool episode. Kirk, what is the episode that we are doing today?

• 2:58Kirk Hamilton?

  So, we are going to have another guest on the show, a guest that I am very excited about, Mr. Tom Bissell, who is a writer. He's worked on video games and TV, and he's done a lot of different things. He's worked on games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. He wrote Battlefield Harline and Gears 5, so like, big-budget video games. Though, actually, my favorite game of his is one that we've talked about a lot on the show, a Twine game about game development that he made with our friend Matthew Burns called The Writer Will Do Something, that we always tell people to play.

• 3:28Jason Schreier?

  We'll throw a link to that in show notes.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:30Jason Schreier?

  Because it's free, and you can just go check it out.

• 3:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yes. He has also written a bunch of nonfiction, Magic Hours, God Lives in St. Petersburg and other stories. He wrote Extra Lives, a wonderful book about video games from quite a while back. And he wrote The Disaster Artist. I actually co-wrote that with Greg Sestra. That's about the movie The Room, and was adapted into a major motion picture starring James Franco. And most recently, he has been working in film and television. And his most recent gig, the one that he is coming on the show mostly to talk about, was in The Writer's Room on Andor, Season 2. He wrote the final three episodes of that season. So, the Beans cast that is in the bonus feed is going to kind of correspond to this, this interview as well.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Synergy.

• 4:13Kirk Hamilton?

  So, we are really excited to have Tom on. He is a good guy. He's just a friend and someone that, it's been a while since I've podcasted with, at least. So, I'm looking forward to talking with him. And yeah, after the break, we're going to have Tom on the show, so let's get to it.

• 4:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Tom Bissell, welcome to Triple Click.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Welcome back to Triple Click, I believe, because I was on this show and its previous incarnation years and years ago.

• 4:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Sure.

• 4:39Jason Schreier?

  The split screen days.

• 4:41Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. Welcome back to Triple Click. If you count split screen as being Triple Click.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 4:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Which I suppose, I suppose you probably should. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  It's like the prequels of Triple Click. Can we say that? It's the extended universe, maybe. It's the novels, but it hasn't been decanonized.

• 4:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Here is a little bit of lore for longtime fans of the show, and that is that one of the very first podcasts, if not the first, but maybe the second podcast that Jason and I recorded together, was recorded at Tom Bissell's place, at your place in Hollywood. This was a previous dwelling of yours.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  I have no memory of this. What the...

• 5:18Jason Schreier?

  You were there. We were there without you.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Wait. What? How did this happen?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  The two of them broken.

• 5:27Kirk Hamilton?

  You let us stay at your place. I can't remember. I think it was for one night. This was like the kind of apartment condo that you had in Hollywood.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:34Kirk Hamilton?

  And you were out of town.

• 5:35Jason Schreier?

  We were playing The Last of Us in your apartment.

• 5:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. And you let us stay there one night, and so we were just kind of there. And then we wanted to make a podcast, because Jason especially was always kind of on me. Let's make a podcast. And we're like, I think we just used my laptop or something. And we just talked for an hour about whatever we had seen. I think we were at E3.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  E3, yes.

• 5:52Kirk Hamilton?

  And it was, so you were there in spirit, if not in actual body.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  And do you know who moved into that apartment after we moved out?

• 5:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Someone awesome. But no, I don't know.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Logan Paul.

• 6:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, my gosh. Really?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  So awesome.

• 6:06Kirk Hamilton?

  I take back what I said about someone cool.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Someone so cool.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Logan Paul.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  The coolest possible person.

• 6:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Do you still have a key? Like, can you get in there?

• 6:13Speaker 03

  I don't know, but it does amuse me that Logan Paul got my Wayward Mail for at least several months after we left.

• 6:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Did he get in touch with you and forward it on? Hey, man, I've got some catalogs here.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  I don't think Mr. Paul is a... Helper in that sense. I suspect he was a straight into the garbage.

• 6:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, you never know. Well, we're here to talk about a lot of things. We're here to talk about your work writing video games. And of course, we're here to talk about Star Wars Andor, which has just wrapped its second season and in which he played an integral role.

• 6:44Jason Schreier?

  In which you stuck the landing, Tom. Nice work, we should say. Congratulations.

• 6:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. A show that I think listeners will know I absolutely love. I loved season two. We actually haven't had a chance to talk about that on the show just yet, though we're also doing a big spoiler cast for the bonus episode.

• 7:01Jason Schreier?

  Which will be live before this episode is.

• 7:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it'll actually go up at the exact same time. So if you listen to this conversation and like it and want to hear another hour and a half of us talking about Andor, become a member, maximumfun.org/join. But anyways, yeah, I mean, you crushed it, man. It was amazing. I felt really proud watching it, even though you've done so many amazing things. Like, and it feels stupid to feel proud of someone who is so accomplished. But just watching you pull off something that difficult was very cool. But that's how I feel. I'm curious how you feel. It's now been a little while. The dust has settled. The takes are out there. The season has been appraised. How are you feeling now that it's in the world?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  You have to remember that I turned in my third drafts a week before season one came out. So this has been an immensely long road. So it was written in a vacuum. Like, nobody had any idea how it was going to be received. I've talked about before how nervous I think everyone was before season one came out. Just, are people going to accept this? Are they going to embrace it? And watching the first season's reception, I kind of relaxed a lot. So I was like, okay, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna be all right. But I mean, it's been two and a half years of just waiting, waiting, waiting for this thing to come out. And I'm just delighted how it was received.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  There's a little bit of sadness there, especially a couple of weeks ago, Tony was in town and we were, it was a for your consideration screening of episodes eight and nine on the big screen here at a theater in Hollywood. And Tony was there and I was talking to him after.

• 8:39Jason Schreier?

  Tony Gilroy, creator of the show.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Tony Gilroy, creator of the show. And Tony said-

• 8:42Kirk Hamilton?

  This is Tony, we all know.

• 8:44Jason Schreier?

  I mean, people could think Tony the Tiger, or Tony Soprano.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Tony Montana, who's an unsung character in the Andor saga. So Tony, God, I asked him how he was feeling and he said, you know, it's weird. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to work on anything like this, this big and this acclaimed and this beloved again. And when he said that, I kind of looked at him in horror and I was like, well, dude, if you're saying that, what the hell hope is there for the rest of us? So I think there's a widespread recognition that this was a really special thing. I feel beyond honored to have been a small part of it. And I just, it's, you know, winding

• 9:28Speaker 03

  down now, but there's an immense sense of pride that I think, episode 210, the make it stop episode, which is the episode I think I'm proudest of, there's a real deep satisfaction that I think that became a superlative episode of television, you know, thanks to Tony's changes and all the work everyone else did. I think it's just an all-timer. And I think that's going to go down on my, you know, personal resume of things that I'm proudest of having worked on. So it's a good feeling. It's a slightly sad feeling and it's a feeling of, I wish I'd enjoyed it more when it was happening because I don't know if this is going to happen to me again. So, yeah.

• 10:11Kirk Hamilton?

  It's interesting. That episode is, of course, fantastic. This is the episode that focuses on Luthen and Clea and their relationship. And it's wild to think that you wrote that before anyone had seen Andor, in the public anyways, the first season. Only because it's easy to imagine how much pressure that would cause you to put on yourself, seeing especially, you know, kind of highbrow- Critics and people who didn't take Star Wars seriously reacting to Andor and, you know, being so ecstatic about it, that then you'd have in your head like, oh, man, I have to live up to this rapturous reception that the show received. But that, you didn't have that in your head. So you're writing this episode that focuses, for example, on Cleo, which is an interesting thing, given that she's such a kind of minor character in a

• 10:54Kirk Hamilton?

  cipher in season one. I don't know, it's just wild to think that you had to come up with that whole storyline and make it land the way that it did, even though you didn't really know what any of that meant in the broader context of the fandom or the people, the viewers.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're, you're trying to predict the future in a really odd way. And, and, you know, when you're trying to do this, you hope you land on something that is good and watched and all that. But then I'm realizing now when you're, you do have a show that is successful and you're lucky enough to be a part of it, you're kind of predicting future zeitgeist a little bit. And so many things in this season had weird mirrors in reality that we can talk about in the spoilers section. Like, I think I accidentally predicted Signal, Signal Gate.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  And, and there's a bunch of stuff for the second season that had weird resonance with things that are happening, all totally unintentional, all, you know, echoes of things that we were trying to sync to historically that wound up having present day resonance. And that's just, I think it's a combination of luck. I think it's a combination that authoritarians don't have a handbook so much as they have a pamphlet. It's not exactly the, this is the hardest series of moves to predict. And so things that feel like prescient and speaking to the moment are just, I think, kind of an accident. A lucky one for us, because I think it thrusts the show into, into, you know, the conversation that's happening now

• 12:32Speaker 03

  in ways that are harrowing, but interesting, but all totally inadvertent.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Did you know what the actors would be like when you were writing this so long ago? Because I feel like Capturing not just the character voices from reading the previous episodes, but also just the way that the actors will be. Was that a component? Or did you have to be like, okay, here's what Luthen's gonna be like, but also here's what he'll be like in the past? It just feels like it fits exactly with who he is. But did you know that or not?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, I'd seen the first season, obviously. So I knew what we were working with. And Clea, like right when we sat down, one of the things Tony told us, Tony Gilroy, creator of the show, Jason, just you don't have to chime in there.

• 13:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Not Tony the Tiger.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  One of the things Tony said early on was Willman, played by Mahad Baeir and Clea, played by Elizabeth Dulo, that they were gonna get a big vitamin B12 infusion, character wise. And so to keep that in our heads. And as we were discussing the breakdown of the episodes, I was just praying, hoping, hoping, hoping I'd get the Clea-Luthen episode. Because that was sort of like, you know, a planned episode. I'm a dad of an 11-year-old daughter. Dad-daughter stories are just like, I mean, I'm just a complete, completely ruined for them now. Like I can watch a commercial with a dad and a daughter having a tender moment, and I just start crying.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  So that I got to write, you know, the closest thing to a dad-daughter story in Andor was just immensely wonderful. And I tried to bring a lot of, you know, my own, drag my own baggage into that relationship. And I am not a budding terrorist, obviously, yet. But it was, we were banking on Elizabeth in particular coming through. And Tony said, this young actor is astonishingly good. And I'd seen the first season, and you can see that she's, she's a real star, you know? I mean, she had, whatever that thing is that goes beyond just being an excellent actor.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Is it presence? Is it gravitas? It's that strange X-factor that separates people who, when you point a camera at them, they transform. And people who don't. Elizabeth Dulo has that instant transformation thing. And I was expecting a lot. And when I saw the first cut of episode 10. I was just like, okay, well, I look like a genius because she just, she just plays everything well. And so, yeah, that was, that was just Tony banking on the right people. And, and, you know, the Dedra Stellan scene, where they confront each other, that was

• 15:30Speaker 03

  an example of hoping like hell, these two powerhouses would just show up and do what you're expecting them to do. And not only did they do that, they surpassed what I could have possibly hoped for that scene to become.

• 15:44Jason Schreier?

  Tom, I think we'll zoom out in a second and talk a little bit about your, your broader career. But I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how the Andor writers room actually functioned, because you've kind of, you talked about how you really hoped you would get that clay as stuff. How much of the story, did you like, how much of the story did Tony Gilroy come out and say, this is what the plan is here is like the chunk that you're gonna write? How much of that was actually, how much of the beats were actually outlined? How did the process work for you, winding up with these three episodes and getting these scripts? And how much did you actually get to decide versus how much of it was just like, here is what needs to happen, write the dialogue and the building blocks along the way?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  So maybe like 20 days before the writer room commenced, we got a big document. It's like a series, a season outline. Tony's outlines are really fascinating how they work, because sometimes they break into screenplay format, and sometimes they break back into just like prose. And the way I've put it is they kind of hover and pounce, hover and pounce. Like that Dedra Luthen confrontation scene I just mentioned, like a version of that existed in that outline. It was one of the most complete things that was there. So the things he was like, had locked into his head were sketches of them were already in this outline.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  A lot of the beats were, a lot of the big beats you see in the show were there. A lot of the stuff was discovered as we talked it over, but it was a 98-page or 100-page document, he calls it red meat, that he just throws in the middle of the table and then everyone just sits around and talks about it. Some of the stuff he got challenged on, there was tons of ideas that never went anywhere or got, you know, desiccated over the course of talking about where things could go. I mean, the way the room worked is, we had this outline to look back to. You have note takers. Bo Wielden, Bo Williman, Wielden, his whiteboards, and he was just constantly writing on the whiteboards. Dan Gilroy was

• 17:55Speaker 03

  beaming in from California on a laptop, and Tony was there, Zana Volenberg was there, who's the executive producer and who's Tony's like co-conspirator. Luke Hall, production designer, was there. And we had some note takers there. So Luke was a fascinating guy to have in that room because as we were talking stuff over, I'd look over and he'd just be sketching some new location that just came up two, two minutes before, and he'd just be drawing stuff. And he would chime in about, Tony'd say, Luke, is that location, does that sound doable? And he'd think a moment, and he'd like, he'd nod, yeah, I think we can think about, we could do that. So it was this really strange, organic thing that was growing, you know, right before our eyes. I mean, I talked probably the least of anybody

• 18:39Speaker 03

  in that room because I was new. I was, you know, I don't have anywhere near the botany of work that those guys have when it comes to television writing or feature writing. But I tried to use that as like a learning occasion. I think I was there as the, I mean, I was the closest thing to a big Star Wars fan in that writer's room, although Bo and Dan are both, you know, self-avowed fans of Star Wars. And I think the impression amongst Andor fans is that nobody in that room like even liked Star Wars. That is definitely not the case. And one funny thing I can tell you is being in that writer's room with

• 19:20Speaker 03

  these guys, and Tony like struggling to remember the name of Jabba the Hutt at one point, I remember. And I went back to my, my room that night, just a few blocks away from the Soho Grand Hotel. And I'd open up my laptop and I'd go to the Star Wars League subreddit and it'd be like, Andor's series prediction cameos. And it would just be like these really deep cut characters. And I'd just look at the list and I'd be like, boy, are you guys gonna be disappointed?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  I don't know who half these people are. I promise you that the people in that room don't know who any of these people are.

• 19:56Jason Schreier?

  But you managed to throw in, "May the force be with you," which I think was well timed.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I did, yeah.

• 20:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, so we'll get into some of this specifics, I suppose, some of the Star Wars specifics in a little bit. I think that's a good, a good place to pivot to talking a little bit about your work writing on video games, because I'd love to know a little about the differences in those two writing processes. Like, you talk about having basically a courtroom sketch artist in the room with you, drawing whatever you guys are dreaming. And also, because TV production works the way that it works, there's this, there's kind of just such a different pipeline for your ideas becoming real compared with video games.

• 20:34Jason Schreier?

  The writer's actually a power in TV.

• 20:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, it's, it's really, really different. And I think the role of the writer is very different. I always tell people my favorite game that you wrote is "The Writer Will Do Something," because it's just such a great self-analytical look at what it's like to be a writer in video games and to be cast as someone with power when in truth you have very little. And I know that you've worked, especially in the early stages, on more games than your big credited games. Like, you just kind of will consult on the story or do, I guess what would be given a story credit in a, in a film. And anyways, I guess just can you talk some about what that process is like and how it's different from something like Andor?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  When you're, when you're trying to come up with a game story, it's usually similar. There's a room, the creative director is there, maybe the lead level designer's there, maybe one of the lead artists is there, the narrative director will often be there.

• 21:23Jason Schreier?

  But not, not the sound people there.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  No, never, never the sound.

• 21:27Jason Schreier?

  Far, far away.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a "writer will do something" in-joke audience.

• 21:32Kirk Hamilton?

  They come barging into the meeting later pissed off about something that is being rammed down their throats.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Poor, poor audio. So, the way I would put it is a bunch of people get in the room and come up with the coolest ideas you possibly can. And because game storytelling is... You know, very distinct from like telling the story of Andor. Andor, you're constantly going to be thinking about character behavior and choices and setting things up and paying them off. And you're going to be thinking about constantly like emotional truth. Boy, would I love to say that's what happens in games, but it doesn't. Games, the coin of the realm, is a different brand of spectacle. And because games are constantly about doing things rather than, you know, a process of uncovering character and character discovery. Games can have that, right?

• 22:23Speaker 03

  It's just much harder to pull it off. And it's much harder to do because if you've got a big narrative moment hooked to an untested or untried gameplay hook, like maybe some big mid-game change up that makes it that kind of flips the table on the established gameplay. And then 14 months from ship, you decide to cut that part. And that happens over and over and over and over again. And then suddenly your your story is got three legs and it's wobbling. And everyone is scrambling to fix everything. It's just you never follow the north star of narrative in games, right?

• 23:05Speaker 03

  You come up with this story, you kick it over to some level designers and they come back with their story, which very rarely has anything to do with the story you were trying to tell. And, you know, a good creative director, and I've worked with really good ones and I've worked with some less successful ones. No shame to them. It's a hard job. It's a really hard job. But the number one thing a game creative director needs to do is just make sure everyone is making the same game. That's the one thing they need to do. And so many of the creative directors I've seen struggle are people that just have a hard time doing that. And that's when games go over budget. That's when games sort of care them out of control.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  And you write games as they're being made. That's the biggest difference. You maybe write a middle of the game cinematic and then you maybe do some like experimental kind of level scripts for like some gray box level that a level designer came up with. You're just trying to set your levels. You're just trying to discover what the tone is going to be. And then the game just, once it goes into full production, you are writing cutscenes before the levels have been built around them. And so you're trying to see into the future in a very difficult, hard to predict way. Whereas, you know, a TV script, once it's locked and everyone agrees and the network says, here's, you know, 11 million dollars to go shoot your pilot.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  And then you hire people up and everyone coming into it, oh, this is what we're making? Okay. It's just much easier to get everyone on the same page.

• 24:38Kirk Hamilton?

  So why do you keep writing video games? This is a question I've had. You've written so many different kinds, you've done so many kinds of writing. There's something in video games that draws you in. It sounds so difficult and stressful. What is it about it that makes you keep doing it?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  I like games. I used to think, I mean, I've been so disabused of so many of my early ambitions. I wrote a whole book called Extra Lives about why I wanted better storytelling.

• 25:06Kirk Hamilton?

  I love that book. That was the first book of yours that I read.

• 25:09Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's so funny, like, looking at that now, because it's just very much the kind of the idealistic, like, games would be so much better if they have these incredible stories and like, I, it's this kind of like ambitious, like, oh, man, we could strive for so much more. And then I feel like you've been knocked down to earth in your experience actually writing stories.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Completely, completely. Like, I just have much more modest hopes for what a talented writer can do in the game space. You're up against so many headwinds. I think as the games industry has gotten a lot more calcified. You know, I know there are studios right now, untouchable studios, that are now getting extensive notes from their corporate overlords. And these are studios that I worked for and there were never any notes. And now there are a lot of notes.

• 26:01Jason Schreier?

  No idea what you could possibly be talking about.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  No, I'm not just talking, I'm not just talking about one place. I'm talking about multiple places. And so this is happening all over. So that kind of... I think it's, you know, it's a lot of it's driven by fear and a lot of it's driven by, "Oh, my God." Just the ecosystem is completely different from what it was 10 years ago. You know, I think it was fun that game developers got on the forums and chatted with the fans and like there was a symbiotic feedback. And then, you know, the uglier tides were always sort of churning underneath that. And then, of course, those tides rose and kind of the industry reacted. And, you know, I think all of us on this call were kind of collectively traumatized by

• 26:44Speaker 03

  the forces that were, you know, churning around games in the early teens. And I don't know if my pure love of the medium ever really recovered from it. And, uh, but I still like writing for games. I still find it interesting. It's not like any other form of writing. Like, pros writing and screenwriting, believe it or not, have more in common with each other than either of them has in common with game writing. Game writing is, you kind of have to be good at writing like a user's manual. You have to kind of be, you have to know stuff about character. You also have to know, you just have to be good with transitions in and out of like

• 27:26Speaker 03

  cinematics to in-game scripts. You just have to develop, and it takes a long time to learn how to develop a sense for where the potholes are going to be and where you kind of have to barricade the story a little bit more in some places than others. That literally takes years to develop a sixth sense for that stuff. Whereas I think it's probably easier to learn good screenwriting principles earlier on. Like you do, maybe you go through the development process a few times, maybe even something gets shot. I think you can, you can learn a lot more from sort of one outing as a screenwriter than you can from, from multiple, you know, full production experiences on a game. Like, I didn't feel like I was really...

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Particularly good at it until two or three games into my sojourn as a game writer.

• 28:19Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that's also a very specific type of game, the big budget cinematic with cutscenes interspersed in between the gameplay. There's also, I mean, I feel like video games, sorry, one of the kind of differences between screenwriting and games writing is that games writing doesn't really have any established principles and rules yet because nobody really knows what it can be yet. I feel like we're still learning the rules of what a game story can be. I mean, we all, the three of us, have you played Blueprints, Tom? The three of us were raving about this game a few months ago.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  I have not played it yet.

• 28:51Jason Schreier?

  Oh, man. It's very cool.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  It's one I'm looking to play with my kiddo.

• 28:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, you'll like it.

• 28:56Jason Schreier?

  It's really cool. And from a storytelling perspective, it does so many interesting things that can only be done in a game and that other games haven't really spent a ton of time exploring. And that's the type of thing that makes me really excited about what game stories can be in almost a different way. Sort of like how Andor gets me excited about Star Wars in a way that like very few other Star Wars things don't. It feels like there's still room to really push the boundaries and like do things on a higher plane. Maybe it's just not the kind of like big budget, like Gears of War Uncharted approach. No shade on those games, they're a lot of fun, but like that's not how you push the boundaries of storytelling.

• 29:33Kirk Hamilton?

  We had Ray Chase on the show just a couple of weeks ago. He is a voice actor who is also the director of this game, Date Everything, which looks like a conventional dating sim. But then the more you play it, the more you realize that it's this incredibly complicated, interactive story with 100 characters and all of these branching narratives. And he was telling us basically that he is now addicted to, or he didn't use the word addicted, but he is really into directing games because as hard as it was to make the game, he had to solve a bunch of problems that had never been solved before, like no one had ever made a game quite like this before. And the sense I get from a lot of video games is that most games kind of feel that way. Whatever problems you're solving, you're solving for the first time. That's also kind of a source of inefficiency, right?

• 30:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Where you're reinventing the wheel every single time and as a result, you know, it's a really arduous process. But I guess it sounds a little like you're saying that, Tom, like some of the appeal is that you get to solve problems that have never been solved before that are just very different kinds of problems.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's true. And I do, and even though, like, if you ask me, my heart and hearts, in my heart of hearts, is the big, sort of, classic cinematic, big-budget game, are those kind of like, a creative dead end in some definitive sense? I don't know if I'd go quite as far as saying dead end, but I feel like we know what the extent of that kind of a game can be. You know, like, the Uncharted games, I think, did the action-adventure game as good as anybody is ever going to do it. I think Last of Us took, like, a zombie story, and just through the care it showed with the character, it really elevated it to something genuinely special. And that's the interesting thing about game storytelling.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  And if, I was gonna say, if Last of Us were a TV show, it is a TV show.

• 31:21Jason Schreier?

  If only someone was brave enough.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I don't think the show, I don't think the show is as, is as good as the game. You know, I think, I feel like the game does a better job with its story than, than the show does. And I like the show quite a bit, don't, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, someone said a long time ago, I think Michael Thompson, do you guys remember that?

• 31:39Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  He was a critic. He said something that I, the older I get, the more I think that it's true. Game storytelling, storytelling is to video games what lyrics are to rock and roll. That if you just put the lyrics of a rock song on a blank piece of paper and you read them, they would seem, like, ridiculously stupid. But you put a beat under it, you just, you create the aura of, the, the event of the song around it, and then suddenly it's elevated to something that feels spectacular. I think, like, you put a, a story in a video game, the gameplay, the art, the level design can all, like, elevate that story into something that feels really special, even if it's like, if, again, you just put it on paper, just

• 32:24Speaker 03

  described what happened, it would feel pretty mundane and maybe even a little dull. Like, I'm, I, I, and I really think that that is the sauce that, that...

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Games don't have to rely on story alone. Whereas if your story is faulty on a show like Andor, a story that is about people and their choices, well, then you're you're just hosed. You've got nowhere to go. You've got nowhere to hide. Games just have a lot more places to hide perception wise in terms of how their their stories are appreciated.

• 32:58Jason Schreier?

  Do you want to talk a little bit about your transition to Hollywood TV films? And eventually Andor? Because I know a lot of people out there might be curious because you you were a journalist for a long time. You wrote a lot of books. You went into Iraq. You did a lot of serious journalism. You also did some video game journalism. And then you started writing for games. And then eventually you moved into cinema. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if I've ever told this story publicly. It was around 2015. I'd been writing games for five years at that point. I'd never had any ambitions to be a screenwriter of any kind. It just never occurred to me as like a possible career. I didn't, you know, Hollywood is such a big locked door that it's just hard to even know. Even though I knew lots of screenwriters and actors and stuff, it just never occurred to me to to to try to get work there. So I had a cousin, a guy named Matt Bronker. He's a comedian. He's an actor, wonderful guy. He just said, hey, we should sell us. We should sell a show together. We should develop a show and sell it. And he's like, you're working the games industry. We should do a show about the video games industry.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  And I was like, oh, that seems cool. Yeah, so he and I spent a couple of weekends just kicking some stuff around. We came up with a show called T-Pose, which was about video game actors. And I didn't have a manager. I didn't have a law entertainment lawyer. I didn't have an agent, a film agent or anything. But Matt had his manager and agent, and they set us up in a bunch of meetings. And our first meeting was with Showtime. And we're going up in the elevator. And Matt's manager says, you know, it's good that we're starting with Showtime because they're never going to buy this show. So it'll be good practice for you. Because I'd never pitched anything before. I'd never gone in route into a room and pitched. So I'm nervous as hell. I don't What the hell is going on here? We get in the room.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  And what I didn't know is that these executives have been told the day before. Find our Silicon Valley. So me and Matt Baronger walk into this room and we start pitching our show about the video games industry. Jesse Dikovitsky was a wonderful executive at Showtime. Her husband was a developer at Infinity Ward. So she knew this world and I didn't know that either. So as we're just pitching this show. I can just see they're like really interested. And then as we're leaving Showtime, we get a phone call and they're like, can you come back and do that again tomorrow? And we did. The show was bought. The first time, my first time pitching something like, there it is. I sold a show. I was like, well, that was easy TV.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  And then. Obviously, Showtime did not make that show, but I got the bug, right? I was like, I want to keep doing this.

• 35:42Jason Schreier?

  Wait, why didn't they make the show? It sounds like they were really into it.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  I mean. Dude, I've sold so many shows that didn't get made at this point, like, who knows? It's just.

• 35:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I want to know, so did they ever T-Pose in T-Pose?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was basically a show about the world's biggest video game actor. But he didn't want to be. He wanted to be like a TV or feature actor, but he was huge in games and he was nobody anymore else.

• 36:07Jason Schreier?

  Interesting.

• 36:08Kirk Hamilton?

  So it's like about a guy who writes video games, but really secretly wishes he was writing TV shows?

• 36:13Speaker 03

  That's what the show is about. So that was my first sold show. And then right as that was happening, a disaster artist had gotten made. Or it was, it went into production. And so suddenly I got all these people reaching out to me being like, hey, have you thought about filming TV? And I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to barge through this door. Yes, in fact, I have. In fact, I recently sold a show to Showtime and they're like, but you didn't have a representation. And I'm like, I know, right? Crazy.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  It was a weird entree into this. And I just felt like, okay, this is a shot. I'm going to take it. And the disaster artist, I think, without that happening, like I have no, I have no foot in the door here at all. And so when people have asked me, like, I want to be a screenwriter. I want to work on a show like Andor. And they're like, well, step one is to co-write a book about the worst movie ever made that gets turned into a movie that gets a lot of buzz. Because I literally don't have any other. I didn't have any other path, you know, my cousin disaster orders happening at the same time. It's crazy story, but everyone's journey into this, I think is similarly circuitous.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  And it's, you know, has a lot to do with right place, right time, who you know. And that's in that sense, it's like every other industry in the world.

• 37:35Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:36Jason Schreier?

  Were you writing about a bunch of stuff for TV and film before you wound up on Andor? Like, what kind of stuff did you do?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:43Jason Schreier?

  Okay.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Yes, I have. I think I've sold like seven or eight shows at this point.

• 37:49Jason Schreier?

  Before Andor, before, because I want to get into the story of how you wound up on Andor.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of them was Mosquito Coast, which obviously got made by Apple. Another show was called Masters of Doom, based on the David Kushner book about John Romero and John Carmack. We actually shot that pilot. And then the decision about whether to order it to series was going to be on March 15th, 2020. So March 13th is when the world shut down and I think we were all holding our breath. I was very passionate about that show. I had a very strong sense that it was going to get sent ordered to series. And of course, you know, it didn't happen. And then like, you know, writing during the pandemic was crazy. I sold a show to FX. It didn't happen. I sold another show.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just been just trying to get something going and Andor happens, which we can maybe talk about that if I'm not jumping ahead too much.

• 38:49Jason Schreier?

  No, please. I want to hear the story of how you got into that in the first, like, how did Tony Gilroy just call you up and say, hello, Tom?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  So I loved Gears of War V.

• 39:00Jason Schreier?

  Battlefield Hardline sold Tony Gilroy.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  He. I'd gotten some, my throat slashed a couple of times on a couple of projects, Hollywood throat slashing, and I thought, okay, I need an agent, because I just had my manager and I just had my lawyer. And my manager's like, well, okay, we'll set you up with, you know, the three big agencies. So my very first meeting was with CAA, and there was five people there, including one person named Tiffany Ward, who was Tony Gilroy's agent, and, you know, she was going to be on my team, and they were talking to me about what CAA can do for me. And one of the things she brought up was the chance of working with Tony on Andor. She's like, look, we've been, look, we've been trying to find someone for

• 39:45Speaker 03

  him for like, four months, and he hasn't liked anyone. But hearing you, you know, hearing your interest and your background, I think you guys would like each other. Why, why don't I set you up together? And they sent him some of my scripts, but I don't even think he read them. He read my short fiction, because Tony's a very literary fellow, you know, all he really, I don't think he cares so much about, are you a good screenwriter as, you know, do you have an active imagination? I mean, that's the thing he talks about a lot, is imagination being the key ingredient. And he read my stories, and I think he liked them. And then, a couple of days after that, we were on a call together, and it just went

• 40:27Speaker 03

  really fantastically well. Because we talked about history, we talked about books we'd read, we talked about, like, you mentioned my jaunting off to Iraq to embed with the military to study how insurgency wars are fought. He was fascinated to hear about that, because I was there during the summer of the IED, when the IED sort of rose up, and I described that whole summer was like a chess game between the Marines and the insurgents about, like, IED procedures. He thought that was really interesting. I think that's probably what got me the job in that moment, was the, you know, my story of the summer of the IED, because I think he was like, oh, okay, like, this is this, I had a more than academic interest in insurgency, let's put it that way. And, and we just got along. And then...

• 41:12Speaker 03

  I had to wait a couple of months after that before it was official. But I just felt, I felt really good about, you know, our talk and, and I, I mean, I just don't know if I can admire a person more than I admire Tony. Not only is he as brilliant as you would expect, he's just also a very decent soul, you know? He, he has every reason to be full of himself and, and, you know, every reason to be like a jerk and unkind and dismissive and he's not. He's, he's a, just a wonderful collaborator and a wonderful leader. I cannot say enough good things about him.

• 41:47Kirk Hamilton?

  I think we can say here, this will be our spoiler warning. So we're going to talk about Andor and just more openly with specific spoilers, what happens to people at the end. Hopefully everyone listening to this has already watched the show. It's a good show, but if not, I'll drop a timestamp here for where you should skip ahead.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  If you haven't, you're a weirdo because why are you listening to a podcast about Andor if you haven't seen the show?

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Maybe they need to be convinced, okay? Like, they just wanted to hear what Tom Bissell says about it.

• 42:11Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. They haven't been convinced yet.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Another reading.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Bing, Kirk here editing the episode and I have that timestamp for those of you who don't want to hear any specific Andor spoilers. And the timestamp that you should jump to is 1:15:20. That's an hour, 15 minutes, 20 seconds. All right, let's pick it up with Tom. I think it was to Paste Magazine, you gave this great interview talking a lot about the writing process of this season of TV and your three episodes in particular. And you mentioned that the writer's room was, I believe the words were rough, but never cruel. Is that right?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:49Kirk Hamilton?

  And I think, I just thought that was very interesting, hearing about how it's not a gentle place. They don't really care about your feelings so much, but it was never cruel. Could you talk about that a little bit?

• 42:58Speaker 03

  So one of the things you learn when you work with people like Tony, and I've worked with some other directors on stuff that didn't happen. I worked with David Fincher briefly on something. I worked with Jim Engle briefly on something. I worked with Ryan Johnson on something. Um, the thing you realize very quickly when you're working with people sort of at that level is you never get a good job. You never get a, you never get a good work. You never went excellent. Like you come to learn that silence is praise. Like if they say nothing about something, that's them saying you're doing great. And that's, I think, an adjustment that you go through when you, when you march up through the ranks in this business is that just being in the room, the expectation is you're going to do superlative work. Because if you weren't capable of that, you wouldn't be in this room.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  And learning how to internalize that and without freaking yourself out and without putting pressure on yourself. I mean, it's a little bit of Stuart Smalley looking in the mirror and saying, you're good enough, you're smart enough and you can do it. Like there is, there is, there is a, an element of just looking at yourself in the mirror and being like, I can do this. They hired me for a reason.

• 44:03Jason Schreier?

  Darn it, I can do this.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Gosh darn it, I can write Luthen's suicide scene.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  So we were talking about ChatGPT before this all started. Like the number one problem with it, if you're using it creatively is how affirmative it is. Because that is, that will not be your experience as a TV writer in this business.

• 44:25Jason Schreier?

  That's funny. That's very true.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  That will not be your experience. You will be like, the worst thing is when you pitch something and then there's just silence. Like it's, it's in nobody's best interest to just say that idea sucks. Like just how silence is praise sometimes, but silence is also like recognition that you just put a big juicy turd on the middle of the.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Interpret the silences. Some are good, some are bad.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  And what, and watching Bo and Dan, who are two of the most incisive minds who've ever like, you know, screened a play. I don't know if that's, can you say that? Who've ever written a screenplay.

• 45:02Jason Schreier?

  Screened a play.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  They, they're, they're, they have just as many like wackadoodle ideas as anybody does, you know? And just learning to feel comfortable, it's just like thinking out loud and pitching stuff. Um, and not getting defensive, not getting your feelings hurt when your idea doesn't go. And this is a thing I've struggled with in games a little bit. The times I have worked with, you know, other writers, younger writers in particular. When people get hung up on my idea, but it was my idea. And you just want to grab them and shake them and just say, this job isn't having one good idea. It's having 20. It's having 20 good ideas a day. And if you're getting this hung up on your one idea, you might want to think about a different line of work. Because one idea is not enough.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  You have to have, you have to have 20, 30, 40. And you just have to be exploding with ideas constantly. And that's the thing that is, was harder for me to get going on. Because in that room, most of the ideas were pretty viable and pretty good. And you know, you throw out a couple that, you know, produce the cricket chorus. It's kind of hard to get right back in there and just start winging ideas out there again. So.

• 46:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Do you remember which of your ideas was the first one that you felt like, yeah, all right, they like that one. That one might, that one might work.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Um, so this is early on. This was an idea my daughter had, believe it or not. So I was reading over the Tony's outline and Cassian's stuck on a planet that you later realize is Yavin. And, uh, and we, you know, Tony's like, and we're going to get him off the planet somehow. He's going to escape from these two squadrons of goons that are kind of holding him hostage in this power struggle. And, uh, you know, Mina, because she's a avid little sponge, wanted to like, figure out like, you know, she's like, where's all, where's all this stuff taking place? So I signed her to an NDA and told her, you know, there was this, there was a sequence on, on Yavin. So she went off and got her rebel files book, right?

• 47:06Speaker 03

  And, um, and she was reading up on Yavin and she came to me, she's like, Dad, do you know there are all these monsters? Like on Yavin before the rebels got there? And wouldn't it be cool if the monsters came out and attacked? And I was like, Oh, that's not a bad idea.

• 47:20Jason Schreier?

  Wow.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  We got to the

• 47:21Jason Schreier?

  And she is what, eight at this point? She's eight and nine?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  And I wound up pitching that, I wound up pitching that beat during that sequence. And Tony was like, oh, I like that. Yeah, monsters. Okay, let's do that. And I thought, oh, my God, my eight year old, he just got an idea, a story idea into this episode. And she, uh, my daughter has writerly ambitions. She wants to be a screenwriter. God help her. And, and when that episode played and the monster came out and ate, ate the two guys, I don't know if I've ever seen two little eyes that were brighter than that. She was so proud that her, her story beat got in there. But that was, I remember that being the, that was day one or two. It was the first thing I pitched that Tony was like, yeah, I like that. And, you know, and then you just build off of that. And, and so many of the things that I'm proudest with having come up with weren't, weren't in the room.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  It was just stuff that, like, taking a episode of television from an outline to a script, you, they seem bulletproof in the room, scene by scene breakdown. And you're like, oh, boy, this is going to be easy. And then, and then when you're starting to turn it into full on scenes with transitions and character behavior that makes sense and getting the right people in the right rooms, as Tony often calls it, boy, a lot of your in the room kind of hot take solutions for problems just tend to fall apart pretty brutally when you're actually like fully inhabiting them as moments. So, uh, my, the ideas I'm happiest with, uh, which I've talked about before, which is this wonderful senile alien granny that Clay pushes around the hospital.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  That was, that was just a desperation move for me because I didn't know what a Star Wars hospital incursion looked like. I didn't know what it should feel like. I didn't know how a Star Wars hospital operated. I went to Tony at one point and was like, how am I going to do this? And he said, oh, just watch the embassy escape from the first born movie. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I'll do that. No, oh, my God, he was right. It was super helpful. Like, uh, it's this really high stress sequence and Matt Damon is using doors and staircases and window ledges. And, and it's, and, and I realized, oh, God.

• 49:19Kirk Hamilton?

  If this were a game, you want people going out windows and swinging from rooftop to rooftop. But like, if you're in it, locked in it with a character and it's on screen and there's no interactive element, man, you can do a lot with a little.

• 49:31Jason Schreier?

  So with that sequence specifically, I'm very curious about the logistics of this. Did you know, like, was it decided by Tony in his story bible or whatever, like, okay, we have Luthen, he tries to kill himself, he's injured, he's taken to the hospital. You need to get like, Claye from this point to that point? Is that how it was kind of?

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Yes. Yep. And the way we had it was, we'd put all of our work into the flashbacks, what the flashbacks were gonna be. And on Bo's whiteboard, whenever, you know, the next beat was, Claye continues incursion into hospital. And I only realized when I got home that we hadn't actually really worked any of that stuff out. So it was all on, all on me to figure that out. Similarly, in episode 11, figuring out the exact choreography of how everyone converged on the safe house at the same time was a bit of a nightmare. Episode 11 is definitely the episode that Tony had the heaviest hand with because that was like, so much stuff was so hard to, to plot outright.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  And getting just everybody there plausibly right at roughly the same time, oh my god, it was such a logistical challenge.

• 50:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Am I remembering right that it was him also, he made the call to not end that episode with the action sequence, but to start the next episode with it?

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:50Jason Schreier?

  And then when you're given a writing credit, I mean, how much of the dialogue and the kind of minute to minute scenes are you versus the entire writers room, just figuring it all out?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  It depends on the scene, depends on the episode, like, you know, Tony rewrites everybody.

• 51:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Did you write the line, "We used up all the perfect"?

• 51:05Speaker 03

  I did not. That is a Tony Gilroy line.

• 51:08Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a great line. I was wondering if that was you.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  That is a Tony line.

• 51:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, good on Tony, that's a great line. So you have talked about how your job writing the final three episodes was actually a little bit easier for some of those reasons you were just talking about, that there were fewer question marks on the whiteboard.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Because you had to just engineer the plot in order to line it up with the start of Rogue One. If you're writing like the Gorman arc seven through nine, that there's just a lot more question marks and that's a much more difficult writing undertaking, which I thought was really interesting, only because my initial reaction was the same as a lot of people, I think, when I heard that you were writing the final three episodes. I was like, whoa, holy shit. Not only is Tom joining for for season two, but he's gonna write the finale. That seems like the hardest thing. And of course, your explanation totally makes sense.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can you imagine writing the Gorman massacre episode? Like, how would you even begin to conceptualize?

• 52:00Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I have no idea how that was made or engineered. I can't even imagine what it would take. I can't even imagine what it would take to do what you had to do. And I guess I'm curious a little bit. I want to hear about the tonal shift that you had to manage, because I watched Rogue One after Andor, season two, and I've watched it a few times before, and it is really striking how different it is tonally. It feels like a Marvel movie compared to Andor. Like, I know Tony wrote a lot of the dialogue or whatever, like, he was very involved, but it just Andor hadn't happened yet. And so it was just such a different thing. And there are little hints of that that I noticed in the finale, particularly when Kay comes in and is kind of messing up stormtroopers, and it has a little bit of that humor. But man, I mean, it's still such a big shift.

• 52:43Kirk Hamilton?

  How did you think about managing that tonal shift? Or did you think about it at all?

• 52:47Speaker 03

  I didn't. I really didn't try to tonally join it to Rogue One in any kind of conscious overt sense. I mean, it's a movie that was made 10 years ago by a lot of people, some of whom, you know, were working on Andor. But I thought it was gonna be a Mugs game to try to do a one to one

• 53:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  tendril to tendril connection at every point. Because, I mean, yeah, like you say, Rogue One is a, I love Rogue One, but it's like a big, fast action movie. And Andor is a slow, deliberative John le Carré novel that happens to take place in the Star Wars universe, you know? And it is a very different vibe and spirit from Rogue. I think elements of it are really echo in an interesting way. I think Cassian's character is like way more interesting, knowing all this stuff you had behind him. And, you know, I think he has a, there's these glimmers of the darker Cassian in Rogue One that I thought were like really intriguing. And

• 53:49Speaker 03

  But I don't think anybody, and I don't think when Tony was doing that, you know, to 2015, I don't think he was under any impression that he'd ever be like telling 24 hours of sequential storytelling about this guy's life. So it's, it's like, it's a miracle that it lines up as well as it does. But, uh, you know, Rogue and A New Hope going into each other, very different vibes in every imaginable way. So I think we can be easy on ourselves and just recognize that all these things were made at radically different times and, and you could kind of intellectually squint and pretend that they're all like a continuous story, but, but like at any rational level, they're, they're not.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  They're individual stories that link up to each other. And I think they all, like, they're all wonderful and they all have their own, uh, au jus, I guess.

• 54:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. I read a piece, um, by Nicholas Quah that he wrote for Vulture where he was talking about a new trilogy that he's defined for himself, which is Andor to Rogue One to A New Hope as like the Death Star trilogy. And if you think of that trilogy, there's a huge tonal shift that happens from each entry to the next entry. And, and it kind of, it makes the tonal shifts de rigueur or something. Like you're kind of like, well, okay. Yeah. The next one's going to be really different and kind of more of a kind of fantastical, uh, blockbuster kind of a vibe.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  The Star Wars timeline is like so interesting. My mother, who's seen all the movies, she came to LA to watch my episodes when they came out. And then we watched Rogue One after. And when Darth Vader came out and the end of Rogue One, my mom was like, wait, isn't he dead? And I was like, and I was like, no, mom, that, that was, and, and, and then I just realized my mom's just like a normal person, right? She had no idea, like the order in which these things took place. And I think that's probably a lot more common amongst like non-Star Wars head people.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Based on how my wife reacted to that moment similarly, like the kind of normal person memory of Star Wars where like I'll be the one like annoyingly pausing Andor and being like, okay, so this guy's going to raise Princess Leia later. And she's like, I don't know who that- That is, and I just want to watch this show. That and it's, that's fine. That you can also enjoy it through that context, too. And it doesn't matter if you remember whether Anakin was alive or not, or going by Anakin, for that matter. Still good.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Well, I just realized that she thought that they took place. I think she thinks like they happened in the universe at the time they were released chronologically.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Which was, which is a totally normal assumption. I mean, like, and

• 56:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  I was just really amused by that, that this person who has seen them all and professes to love them just had absolutely no clue in which the order any of these things were supposed to take place in.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  There's a lot of them now. It's, it's tough.

• 56:38Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a lot to keep straight. One big shift that happens actually over that invented trilogy, that Death Star trilogy, is that the music significantly changes. Actually, from season one of Andor to season two of Andor, with Nicholas Britel doing season one and Brandon Roberts doing season two, reworking some of Britel's themes amid his own music. And then, of course, Giacchino doing Rogue One to Williams's score on, on A New Hope. I'd love to know a little bit more about that shift in season two, because you guys reused a lot of Britel's music cues from the first season. And I think that was a really good choice. I know he couldn't do it for like various reasons. Like he couldn't write a whole new score for the new season.

• 57:21Kirk Hamilton?

  You probably weren't involved in that at all, but I just have to ask about it because you worked on it. And I just found it so interesting how they wove new music in together with Britel's like iconic cues.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, Brandon and I, like, I met Brandon after, you know, we've done a bunch of events together and I just, I love him to death. He is such a

• 57:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, he's a great composer.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Such a good dude. And I remember I saw Tony, maybe, I don't know, a year ago? Maybe a little over a year ago here in LA. And he was here doing the music, he said. And then when we met for dinner, he's when he told me that Nick wasn't coming back. And I was like, oh, God, like, are we screwed? And he's like, don't worry, I found the, I found the perfect guy. And I was like, well, how can that be? And then, you know, hearing Brandon talk about the immense pressure. He called it a fear sandwich.

• 58:09Kirk Hamilton?

  I can't even imagine.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  One piece of bread is Nick Britel, the other piece of bread is John Williams. And, and, and, and don't worry, you just have to sort of figure out your way through them. But I'll be goddamned, like, there's moments of, of Brandon's score that are as good as anything in, in the first season. And I think he just murdered it and Such a case of like restraint and again, I'm just speaking as a someone who listens, you know, someone with two ears.

• 58:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, who watched the show.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Two ears and a heart. That's who I am right now. And I think he did an amazing job. And I know Tony was thrilled with it. And I know Brandon is relieved because he had a really hard go of it. But yeah, there was a very conscious effort as the show went on to get away from the synth stuff into more orchestral kind of vibe. Yeah.

• 59:00Jason Schreier?

  Tom, it's kind of like being in the middle of a Beau Willamond and Tony Gilroy sandwich, but pulling it off anyway and still killing it.

• 59:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, I want to ask some specific spoilery questions about various things that happened to people. The big one that I've been wondering is, did you guys always know that Dedra was going to wind up on Narkina?

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:20Kirk Hamilton?

  That was just, that's from the start. It was like, this horrible prison, this is where we're putting this lady in the end.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Perfect. She was going to wind up in prison. But the one thing I brought to the table, and this is something we hadn't really worked out, when I got to the drafting stage, we didn't really have an antagonist when the forces converged on the safe house, right? So I just put Hirt. I just elevated Hirt in my episodes, her old assistant. And it was only after I did that where I was like, oh, God, this works like really well.

• 59:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  We did not have a face antagonist for that sequence. And so I just grabbed Hirt and stuck him in front. So Hirt, like, and I really love that. It's a very strange decision for this antagonist to be built up for all of this time to just yank the rug out from underneath her. And I was a little worried about if people were going to object to it. But it's such a perfect object lesson in fascism eating its own, that I think it's like thematically on point. And I really do feel like the dynamic that Hirt and Dedra have, it just feels great that he, you know, marches off into that particular conflagration and gets his, he becomes a Gears of War meat shield for K2.

• 1:00:32Jason Schreier?

  Was it intentional, the subtext of Hirt and Lonnie being a little bit more than just friends? Because that's how I read it.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Same.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, maybe they were playing with that in performance, but it was never, it was never anything that came from any script that I saw.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm sure.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  But I don't, I don't dispute that moment.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  It is what it is.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  I read it that way, but I also like Lonnie has his own motivations. So I kind of took it as him just kind of being like, sure, I'll go with this and this conversation and then change whatever I'm doing in the next one. But I mean, here it also has his own All About Eve situation with Dedra where he's like, I'm gonna replace her, which is just, I don't know. I, he, I, I think it all works really well for him.

• 1:01:16Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, these side characters are also elliptical because they don't have a lot of time on screen. So the actors do so much with just a very little bit that you give them. But then it does turn into a whole, it's very vivid, even though.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  And you can paint the picture in your mind. I mean, clearly I've painted a picture in my mind of what all of them are thinking off screen. And some of that is the writing, but some of it is just these performances being really strong.

• 1:01:38Jason Schreier?

  How many of the endings did you get a chance to come up with yourself versus how many were plotted out by the time you already got the script? Yes.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Wheel of Fate at the end. I mean, that was a group effort. We just started throwing spokes out there. The only one I can remember contributing was the Force Healer. And again, Force Healer scene hadn't been written yet, maybe my favorite scene in the whole show.

• 1:02:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Really good.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  I, I get teary eyed every time that moment comes up. And that wonderful actor, Josie Walker, I believe her name is. Oh my God, I cannot, I think it's one of the most effective devastating sort of day player performances in the whole show. I love that moment and I love that moment with him and her. I think Cassian is effectively agnostic on the Force, but when he looks over at her and he gives her that little head nod, like indicating, I'm not sure I believe this yet, but I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I just, I just love that moment so much. So that was not what I wrote. I just wrote, he looked over and saw the Force Healer and she looked back and then, you know, he looks ahead and walks on. It's up to those actors and Alonso Ruas Palacios, who directed it, to really like bring home the staging of it.

• 1:02:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that must be really fun for you and sometimes frustrating to see like little flourishes that you didn't intend in the script to come out.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  It's the best. It's the best. When it, when it's better than what you were imagining, it's the greatest. And when it's not what you were imagining and it's worse, that's the worst. So it's, it's, it's, but like luckily on Endor, I can't think of a single instance where something was changed where it wasn't better than what I was imagining.

• 1:03:11Jason Schreier?

  Well, this cast.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  My career in games. Yeah. My career in games is a constant. They've changed things and I don't think they're notably better at all.

• 1:03:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. Well, this is like karmic payback for all the times that you put up with that in the world of games.

• 1:03:28Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, getting to work on like the top notch of top notch. Because really in that, there isn't a single weak link among the cast and like, I mean, some of the episodes I found, I mean, a couple are better than others. But, um, but it's like, really just like top of their craft people on every single discipline on this show. It's really, there's been very few shows like it.

• 1:03:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. So you guys referenced a lot of history when you were writing Andor and you've mentioned that Tony is a big history buff. And you've talked about reading the nine 11 report and going through some of the intelligence failures that are documented there to understand some of the ways that the ISB might have failed and, you know, how the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing often, especially in large state intelligence operations. And it's funny, you mentioned earlier that, you know, you inadvertently predicted Signal Gate just because these kinds of incompetencies tend to just happen again and again and again in this kind of a bureaucratic organization.

• 1:04:27Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm curious specifically if there's any recommended reading that our listeners could do if they want to read some of these, like about some of the historical reference points that you guys used for this show, because doing that reading would help you not only understand what inspired Andor, but also understand this terrible world that we live in and, you know, and all of like, all of these patterns that keep repeating.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  So there is a book called The House of Government.

• 1:04:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  It's the life's work of this historian who teaches at Berkeley, I believe, named Yuri Slajkeen.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  He's an immigrant, I believe, from the former Soviet Union. He's a wonderful historian. He's a brilliant writer. And it's like a thousand-page-long book about the first Bolshevik generation, all of whom lived in this massive shared apartment building across the street from the Kremlin. And you take them from the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution to the early 30s, when the forces of Stalinism start pounding on their doors, pulling them out in the middle of the night and dragging them to Le Bianca Prison, and in many cases, executing them. So it's really about how one revolution ate its children. But it's told through diaries, it's told through, it's, you know, a work of nonfiction. And it's a masterpiece. It's one of the best books I've ever read.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  So I started reading it while I was working on my episodes, because I'd heard it recommended on the Ezra Klein Show, right? So I start reading it, and I'm a bit of a Soviet history buff, having been a Peace Corps volunteer in the former Soviet Union, and then lived in a different former republic than the Soviet Union, Estonia, later in my life. So I've always been intrigued in the historical catastrophe of Soviet communism. And I started reading this book, and it was reminding me of Andor a lot. So I sent Tony a text, like, dude, there's this book called House of Government. You're probably sick of reading about revolutionaries, but it is blowing my mind. Tony texted back, and he said, "That was the source text for season one of Andor." And I was like, "Holy shit."

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  Like, I accidentally discovered the Rosetta Stone of the show after, you know... I think this is after I'd written my episodes. I don't think it was while I was working on them, it was after. So that is a book, if you want to see how Tony Gilroy sees into the hearts of these revolutionary characters, I think it's a very valuable book, it's a brilliant book. I mean, you kind of have to have some grounding in Soviet history to get the most out of it. You don't need it, but it's a truly fantastic book. And a book he talks a lot about is Hilary Mantel's book, A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution, which I haven't read. But I love Hilary Mantel. I love Wolf Hall, her book about Oliver Cromwell. So I think those are some, some books, if you want to like mainline it. Oh, and Lacare,

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  John Lacare, all of his stuff. I think that's the other big. I mean, we talked about Lacare, stuff we'd all remembered reading in Lacare novels over the years because Lacare is very dense and grounded about the spy craft, like real spy craft, not digital watches that shoot poison darts, but how to handle an agent. The fact that, you know, people that are on deep cover in intelligence jobs actually have to know how to do the jobs that they're pretending to do like really well, like lots of stuff like that. And, and there was a lot more spy craft earlier on in, in the writing process for Andor, as we were talking about this season,

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  like multiple sequences of Bix going on weapons inspections that I thought would have been really cool. So now they're referenced that they, you know, she does these inspections for Luthen, but it was a lot about showing up, looking at a bunch of weapons, figuring out, you know, are they traceable? Is this a setup? Are they just looking to see where these weapons go? And, and her developing this like eye for like real, real intelligence stuff. Cause if you're in insurgency, you have to be really careful about where you source your weapons for, because the number one thing, and you know, if you're, especially if you're fighting an occupier, they're going to want as many weapons to fall into insurgents' hands as possible, provided they're crappy weapons or unreliable weapons and stuff like

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  that. So there's that whole shell game of it. So there was a lot more of that texture of the show at one point, and I'm not sad it went. I just think it's kind of interesting that we were all thinking about the down and dirty, nitty gritty of spy craft.

• 1:08:56Jason Schreier?

  So we're gonna have to wrap up soon, but I have to ask about the end, end, ending, the very last scene. Speaking as a father, and you mentioned before that you've become this, this sap over the years of dad, dad stories. It is so tragic to know, know that Cassian Andor had a kid who will never know his or her dad. Tell me a little bit about, was that like always the plan to just like have this secret Andor baby? How did you go about like writing that scene?

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I took a lot of cuts at that because it's the last thing, right? And my first version of it was I wanted her looking into the night sky. And this is kind of a really corny idea, no wonder it didn't go, but I wanted her looking into the night sky. And then you just see like a tiny little shimmer in one of the stars and I was imagining that that was the uh, of the, the event of Scarif, of the Death Star hitting it. Like Tony thought it put, it put the B in subtle, as they say, and it was like, it'd just be hard to read that and hard to like.

• 1:10:06Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a good saying.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  And uh, and then like as, as that star shimmered, you'd hear a baby crying and she'd turn and she'd walk back into her little meena row hut. And that sort of hung in there for a minute and then Tony's like, no, I think we need to see the baby. And so me being a genius, coming into the scene, it was B2 like going around the, the hut and then bumping into the crib and then seeing the baby in the crib and then cutting to Bix out in the field looking up. So.

• 1:10:37Kirk Hamilton?

  How complicated can we make?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  I never put the baby in Bix's arms. Like a genius screenwriter here, like I kept trying to think, how do you show this baby? It's like, oh, maybe have the mom carrying it. Like maybe that would be useful. So I really like psyched myself out on that very final scene and it really took Tony coming in. It's like, why is she, maybe she should just be holding her. And I'm like, yeah, that's a pretty good idea.

• 1:11:01Jason Schreier?

  It's so funny by the way, people, I, I don't know how many people out there, listeners out there like think about screenwriting as a craft, but it's so funny to imagine it as it being, not that it's your job to come up with the fact that she had a baby. It's your job to figure out how that is shown and the kind of, yeah, stage it, which is so interesting, just like these logistics and building blocks. Um, and that is so much of your job, it sounded like on Andor.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Staging is everything. Like you, you, you have to write it in a way. And I don't mean this disrespectfully. I mean, if you're writing, if you're really hip firing on all cylinders and you're writing a screenplay, you kind of have to make it director proof in some way. And I don't, by that, I don't mean that the director doesn't add anything, but like the, the movement and the feeling, the vibe of the movie has to be there so purely that, that instead of a director coming in and like thinking, oh, you could do this a hundred different ways. Maybe you, you're only giving him three or four different ways to do it. Like if you're staging it that emphatically, you're kind of locking the director into uh,

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Just the logic, and especially in TV, the logic of the show. Features are a whole other thing. Like, you know, stories are legion of directors just coming in and taking screenplay and going, boop, and just throwing it away over the shoulder. But you can't afford to do that in TV, you know? Because everyone who's coming in is, they're creating another link in the chain. And the whole chain is only as strong as the links are. So you don't want to mess, directors don't want to mess too much with what is functioning already well. So I'm always trying to think really hard about how I stage things and making it feel as visual as possible without like doing that annoying screenwriter thing of medium close-up on Bix is the camera. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. But you just want to write it.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  And you want to do that without doing that. And you do that with like vivid, visual, forceful writing.

• 1:12:54Jason Schreier?

  Tom, you talked about the logistics, but just to follow up on that, the thing I asked before, like as a dad, what is it like for you writing the scene and knowing that now Cassian and/or like is, or this, this baby is growing up without a dad? Because for me as a father, that's like, like my biggest fear in the world is that like something will happen to me and my kids will grow up without a father. So tell me what that's like emotionally for you writing.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's, it's quietly devastating. Maybe not for me so much because it's kind of hard to, like, there's things about the show that catch me up and give me, put a lump in my throat. But it's hard to be too terribly moved by it when you've seen Inside the Machine, you know? Like, I've never worked on something, I think And/or more than any other thing I've worked on, I've actually felt myself like get moved by the things that happen in it. Whereas most of the things I've written, like, you're just, it's like that thing with comedians, you know? When you're watching a funny movie or a funny show with a comedian and they're just like staring at the screen dead-eyed and they're saying things like, "That's very funny."

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  That's really funny. That is, tends to be how I process the drama and things that I'm written. It's almost like a lizard-eyed, sort of evil scientist, kind of like, did you get sad? Did you feel tense? You know, like, you're almost like a doctor, taking someone's vitals, you know, like... But, uh, so I can't say that I ever went there in my head, like, poor Cassian's good kid is gonna grow up without a father, because I was just like, why the fuck didn't I put her in his mom's arms?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  I was too hung up on my idiotic inability to figure out a good way to stage a mother and a kid walking through a wheat field. But, um, so I'm one step removed from the, from the very sad fact that little, little Cass, or little Casa, or whatever, he or she winds up getting named their fate. But, uh, I do kinda hope that that kid is able to grow up anonymous and in a world that, uh, doesn't need more.

• 1:15:02Kirk Hamilton?

  I thought you were gonna say that that kid is gonna grow up to star in their own Andor spinoff.

• 1:15:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Turns out it's a Skywalker.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  That is not my call to make. That's true.

• 1:15:16Kirk Hamilton?

  So, of course, also, Bix is standing on the planet Mina Rao, which is named for your own daughter. Did you make that decision? Like, did you get to write, oh, and they should definitely be on Mina Rao at the end here, just, just for me?

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  So, well, the first times I spoke to Tony, I had mentioned that my daughter was, she was in a heavy Star Wars phase at that point. Like, heavy, heavy, obsessed with Star Wars. And when this possibility of this job came up, she was, like, you know, ecstatic. Uh, and she was just really wanted me to get it, obviously.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  And then I get it. And then she's just throwing, she's pitching me for like, three months, you know, like, what about this? What about this? I'm like, okay, you just have to stop.

• 1:15:56Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, she's already landing ideas in the writer's room, right?

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  She's, uh, she's pitching me. It's about 10 days before the writer's room commences, and I was watching Rebels with Mina, because we hadn't seen Rebels yet, and so we're watching, and we're like, oh, it takes place at the same time as Andor. You know, maybe maybe useful. So the phone rings and it's Tony and he's like, okay, I ask you a question. Uh, would your daughter object if we na- if I named a planet after her in season two? And I was like, oh my God. So she's sitting next to me, I'm like, would you object if we named a planet after you? And she went, oh my God, and just went like running around the house. And then she got really calm and she's like, yeah, it's cool. And I've often said to her, if, when I was your age, if I had a planet named after in Star Wars after me, I would not have slept for like a year.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  I would have just been wide awake every night, just like, oh my God, oh my God. So she's obviously having a different journey than I am through this franchise, uh, the one that I had. But during that call, Tony says, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm just watching Rebels with, with my daughter. And he was really quiet. And then he goes, do me a favor. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, stop watching it right now and don't watch any more of it. And I think there's one way to spin the story. Ha, ha, Tony Gilroy hates the cartoon. No, here's what he told me later, uh, when I asked about it. He said, I didn't want you showing up in my room with a bunch of other stories in your head. And it's like actually really good advice for a certain kind of show, like that, that, that, you know,

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  come in, we're going to do something totally self-contained and, and, and, and or it's just not that kind of show. And so I realized after like, cause I hadn't, you know, I'd barely seen the first season at that point. I think, no, I hadn't seen the first season, so I, I got, I got it. But, uh, I do think it was like a useful thing to remember that now whenever I'm coming in to like, do a piece of franchise storytelling, I don't automatically assume my number one job is to consume every piece of media from that franchise, which is what I used to do. Cause I've worked on a lot of franchises and now I think I'm just a little bit liberated from that. Cause you don't necessarily have to imprison your imagination in what other people have done so far. And to me, Andor is a, just a case study about how to escape the gravitational pull

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  of a massive IP in ways that are like really, I think creatively smashing and interesting.

• 1:18:16Kirk Hamilton?

  That is a great note to end on. I think that's very true and that's such a, a cool lesson to have taken away as a writer on the show. Cause it's definitely a lesson that I, I took away as a viewer anyways. Man, well, this was so much fun. Tom Bissell, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  I adored my time here and thank you guys for having me.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

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• 1:18:57Speaker 05

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• 1:18:58Jason Schreier?

  And Ryan Graham.

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  And in each episode, we dissect one pop culture topic that mainstream media doesn't associate with the black people, but we know that we like.

• 1:19:06Speaker 05

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• 1:19:12Jason Schreier?

  Tune in every other Thursday to the podcast that's dedicated to helping black people feel more seen. Find Black People Love Paramore on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19:22Speaker 06

  One thing we all have in common, we all have a mind. It makes me so scared because I'm like, when is the bad thing gonna happen? And minds can be kind of unpredictable and eccentric. Everybody wants to hear that they're not alone. Everybody wants to hear that someone else has those same thoughts. Depressh Mode with John Mo is about how interesting minds intersect with the lives and work of the people who have them. Comedians, authors, experts, all sorts of folks trying to make sense of their world.

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• 1:19:57Speaker 06

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• 1:20:06Kirk Hamilton?

  And we are back for one more thing. Thanks again to Tom Bissell for taking the time to come talk to us. That was a lot of fun. All right, one more thing. Maddie, you're first. What do you got?

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  Okay, so I decided to take advantage of just the great power of the Nintendo Switch 2 by playing a Game Boy Advance game called Metroid Zero Mission, which I've played before. And I don't know why, I just was really in the mood for this game. I've had a lot more gaming time since quitting my job. It's not to say I'm not getting writing done. Don't worry, everybody, you'll see my byline again soon. But I also just want to take a little break, play some games. I know I really love. And I wanted to super recommend this one. So here's the deal with Metroid Zero Mission. It is actually a remake of the original Metroid, which I've also played,

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  but which I don't really recommend anybody do unless they are whatever form of Metroid fan I am, because it's tedious, the rooms all look the same, it's kind of clunky feeling, like the way Samus moves, it just doesn't feel that good. She moves pretty slow, like her literal walk-in speed is slow, just doesn't, it's it's shades of what will come. It's of the 2D Metroids and it there's something there that I think is magical still, but it is tedious and it it kind of feels like the old game that it is, which is why Zero Mission exists. It's a remake of the first game, speeds up all of that,

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  makes some of the boss fights a little harder. I think Mother Brain is way harder in Zero Mission, by the way, but also it tacks on a bunch more stuff. So usually you'd beat Mother Brain at the end of Metroid, the original Metroid, and that's it. That's the video game. You did it, you're done. And this one, after that, Samus is trying to leave the planet and then she crash lands and she has to do this whole other series of missions, just starting out in her Zero suit. She loses all of her equipment again. Samus Aaron just can't seem to hold on to her equipment, folks. She just can't do it. And so Zero Mission just kind of adds on a bit more story of like what happens to Samus immediately after the events of the first Metroid game.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  So it's it's really cool. I think it's a cool concept and I also think it's super holds up. I mean, I'm the one saying this. I'm the person who really likes the 2D Metroid game. But if you've never played the first Metroid and you want to know what happens in it and you like 2D Metroids, maybe you played Metroid Dread, maybe you played Super Metroid and you want to know what to play next, I think this is a really good entry, especially if you just have heard that the original Metroid is like important canonically and you kind of feel bad that you don't want to play it. It's okay. Nobody wants to play it and they know that and that's why. This game exists. So Metroid Zero Mission, you can play it on the Switch too, just like I am. And then, and then you have save states,

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  which makes it way easier, because you can just use those fancy suspend points. So that's what I've been playing. Well, actually, I beat it. But yeah.

• 1:23:12Kirk Hamilton?

  If I were gonna play, if I were gonna play Metroid Zero Mission or Super Metroid first, which would you recommend?

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  Hmm, I mean, I like Super Metroid better personally.

• 1:23:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay.

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  But that's me.

• 1:23:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Say no more. Yeah, I think if I were gonna play one of those two, I would probably play Super Metroid. But that's good to know that Zero Mission is fun as well.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  It's very good. It's very good.

• 1:23:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. I'll go next. My one more thing is a book called James that I just finished by Percival Everett, a terrific book that I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of. It was very buzzy. It came out last year, won a bunch of awards and deserves every one of them. It's really, really something. So this is a reimagining of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, written from the perspective of Jim, or James, the title character, the enslaved man who accompanied Huck Finn during his adventure in that story. And it's really great. It's not what I was expecting in a lot of ways. I guess I wasn't really sure what to expect going in. I remember Huckleberry Finn fairly well. That's probably the Twain story that I remember best.

• 1:24:16Kirk Hamilton?

  And, you know, that, that book is notable in part because it's written in vernacular. And so a lot of the narration and just the way that Huck talks and the way that everyone talks, it's like southern vernacular and there's just a lot of like, everything is in dialect. And so, and that was kind of a new thing that Twain was playing around with in the 1800s. And the big kind of idea of James is that James and his family and other just enslaved characters all speak in a kind of, they kind of code switch in order to play the role of the slave and to speak in that like slave dialect. I don't really know how better to describe it, but that, that kind of way of speaking that is depicted in Twain and a lot of other older fiction.

• 1:25:01Kirk Hamilton?

  But that's a mask that these characters are wearing. It's not their true voice or their true self. So there's kind of like, it's a lot of playing with language and sort of playing with identity and the different ways that you hide who you really are when you're forced into slavery and when you're forced into such a, you know, kind of horrible situation. That's kind of one of the big, at least, it's not a twist, but it's the big sort of central idea that runs through the book. But the book is about a lot of different things. I mean, it's about the horrors of slavery, definitely. It's about the power of language and the power of thought. There are some really beautiful and moving passages in the book. Just where James is alone with a book that he is, maybe he's stolen or he's acquired

• 1:25:43Kirk Hamilton?

  somehow that he's able to read, where he realizes the freedom of thought that comes with reading, there are these really just incredibly evocative and powerful depictions of what it means to read and what it means to think and how language informs our thought that, you know, play out in that sort of linguistic setup that I was describing earlier. So it's a really, it's just a really great book. It's very funny at times. I wasn't expecting as much humor, but it makes sense because it's structured very much like Huckleberry Finn, which is also quite a comedic story, you know, as they just kind of bounce and roll along from encounter to encounter. But then there's this undercurrent of horror and fear because James, unlike Huck, is never safe. He's, he's always at risk because

• 1:26:26Kirk Hamilton?

  he is an escaped slave and anyone who sees him in the daytime knows that. And so he's always at risk of being captured. And so there's like this tension in the story that, of course, didn't exist in Huckleberry Finn. And then I, otherwise, it's just a really interesting book. You can see Everett himself speaking through James at times. There are some really interesting sequences where James imagines or dreams different intellectuals of the time period who wrote different justifications for slavery, or if not justifications, at least explanations of it, where he sort of challenges them and he wants them to better explain to him why it's okay, this horrible thing that's being done to him and his family.

• 1:27:09Kirk Hamilton?

  And they're completely incapable of it because when you're reading the book and you're seeing what happened to people, there is no philosophical- Justification that anyone could come up with for one human to do that to another one. And so it's very interesting just to see this idea explored in so many different ways. Anyways, really an amazing book. It's a pretty quick read. It's structured much like Huck Finn, and then it moves very quickly from chapter to chapter to chapter. I can't recommend it enough. It's a tremendous book. So that is James by Percival Everett. Big recommendation from me.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sounds cool.

• 1:27:42Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, Jason, you are, you're up. What's your one more thing?

• 1:27:45Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is also a book called Never Flinch by the master Stephen King. This is his latest book and yet another book to feature Holly Gibney, who is a character that he has relied upon for like six books now. He's obsessed with her.

• 1:28:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Does this take place after Holly?

• 1:28:03Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah, this is the most recent one.

• 1:28:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:28:06Jason Schreier?

  But it's not really connected. It's just kind of the ongoing stories of Holly Gibney. Holly Gibney is a fascinating character. She's this kind of middle aged to elderly woman who's maybe slightly neurodivergent, or I don't know where on the scale is, but she looks at the world in a different way, which helps her kind of helps her to be a detective and investigator. She's a private investigator and it helps her kind of make deductions that other people don't. So the story in Never Flinch is they're kind of two dueling stories. One story is that the police department in Buckeye City, which is where the novel takes place, the police department gets this letter from someone

• 1:28:47Jason Schreier?

  saying he is going to kill 13 innocent people and one guilty people as retribution for this kind of the death of an innocent man, the needless death of an innocent man, he says. And the innocent man in question, who he's referencing there, was stabbed in prison after being wrongfully accused of pedophilia. So this guy who's stabbed in prison is the innocent man. And so this new person who's sending the threatening letter is saying he's going to kill 13 innocents and one guilty as retribution for that. And so that sets off this chain of the police department and the, the, the police detective in charge, Izzy James, trying to figure Figure out what happened there with help from Holly. And then at the same time, there's

• 1:29:30Jason Schreier?

  another story, which is that this feminist critic and author and like political kind of advocate named Kate McKay. She is on this lecture tour where she's packing stadiums, and she starts getting harassed and threatened by some anonymous person who does not like her politics. And then we kind of we bounce back and forth between the two. Kate winds up hiring Holly to be her bodyguard, and Holly winds up coming in and trying to figure out what's going on with both of these cases. And we bounce back and forth between the two. And then eventually, they connect towards the end of the book. And it's just kind of a classic Stephen King book, especially along the lines of his more recent thrillers,

• 1:30:14Jason Schreier?

  as opposed to like, his big horror pieces. So it's more along the lines of like, Mr. Mercedes, or Holly, than it is some of the, I don't know, The Stand, or like, Under the Dome, or like, some other kind of big sprawling epics, or horror stories like Firestarter, or like, It, and stuff like that. This is more his kind of crime thriller, period. And it's good. It's not his best, by any means. And it has a lot of his kind of his modern quirks, such as just talking about Trump all the time, and COVID, and other modern things that just feel needlessly shoehorned in. But it's an enjoyable read, in the way that every Stephen King book is an enjoyable read. And the plot is fun,

• 1:30:56Jason Schreier?

  and the twists are good, and the mysteries itself are very entertaining and fun to read. And Holly is a great character. I can see why Stephen King wants to spend so much time with her, and keep her starring in all of these books. And it's fun. It's a thrill. It's just another, it's a fun summer read, I would say. It's a good, a good beach read, because it'll just keep you, it's a good page turner for the beach. It'll keep you entertained while you're sipping daiquiris by the pool. But it's not going to blow your mind, the way that like, his JFK book blew my mind, like, Under the Dome blew my mind. It's just a kind of another, just forgettable thriller, that I probably will forget the details of in a couple of years. So yeah, just another, I mean, every, even

• 1:31:40Jason Schreier?

  like, the middling Stephen King books are still better than most books out there. So, still recommend it.

• 1:31:47Kirk Hamilton?

  The thing Holly had going for it were the villains were Memorable. Does this one have memorable villain, like a memorable villain?

• 1:31:55Jason Schreier?

  Not quite on the level of The Elderly Couple that is eating people.

• 1:32:00Kirk Hamilton?

  That was killer. That was a great villain. They were very fun.

• 1:32:03Jason Schreier?

  But I will say the main villain whose perspective you get, I mean, you get the perspective of both villains. One of them is much stronger than the other one. The one who, the book kind of opens with the guy who goes by the name Trigg, and he's the one who sent the letter. He is a very compelling, very strong villain. The other one, a little bit less so, is a little bit more trope-y and problematic in some ways, I guess. I don't know. That's a little bit beyond my depth. I won't get into the specifics there. But that one is interesting. Trigg, I mean, kind of the villain who sends the letter, I would say, is a very interesting villain. But no, they're not along the line. They're not at the level of that elderly couple, who I think was pretty good at haunting dreams.

• 1:32:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I guess the elderly couple let King get into his own stuff, like where he's thinking about how to be a good old person. I guess we talked about this when we talked about Holly. And that gives them a little bit more, there's a little more meat there for him to work with.

• 1:32:58Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and I would say Holly is a better book overall, but this is still good. Again, like baseline Stephen King, the bar is so high that it's like you're not going to have a bad time reading one of his books in general.

• 1:33:10Kirk Hamilton?

  No, probably not.

• 1:33:11Jason Schreier?

  Well, I say that. I haven't read all 60 whatever, so maybe they're a couple of real clunkers.

• 1:33:15Kirk Hamilton?

  No, and some of those Bachmann books are pretty wretched, at least going by Just King Things recaps of them. But those are Bachmann books, not King.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like from listening to the Just King Things podcast, there's a few I'd skip. But hey, there's a lot of King books.

• 1:33:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, we can all skip Rage. But then again, Rage is not available in publishing anymore.

• 1:33:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, even Stephen King wants you to skip Rage. It's okay if you skip Rage.

• 1:33:37Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I would say of his more modern, au revoir, au revoir, au revoir, au revoir.

• 1:33:45Jason Schreier?

  This is like when I tried to pronounce boudoir.

• 1:33:46Kirk Hamilton?

  I know you're gonna do some French Duolingo.

• 1:33:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Oovra.

• 1:33:51Jason Schreier?

  It's like along the lines of many of the other ones, like the Mercedes trilogy, most of all.

• 1:33:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Cool. Yeah, I would read another one of those sometimes. Sounds like a good beach read.

• 1:34:01Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, next time you have a plane ride, Never Flinch, it's a good book to get at the airport.

• 1:34:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Well, all right. We've done it again, folks. We've

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  Did another episode of Triple.

• 1:34:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, thanks again to Tom. That was super fun.

• 1:34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Kirk Hamilton?

  That was great. And yeah, thanks to y'all for listening. Hope you enjoyed this supersized interview and how often sometimes when we have a guest. And yeah, that was a whole lot of fun. All right, let's go play some video games and I will see the two of you next week.

• 1:34:29Jason Schreier?

  In person next week.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. See you then.

• 1:34:33Jason Schreier?

  It'll be fun. See you in Portland and hopefully many of you listeners up there.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:34:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Find us on Twitter at Triple Click Pod, send email to [email protected], and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:35:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.