Poured Over: David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon From Page to Screen

“And so we wouldn’t be here without Natalie Portman, which isn’t a sentence I was expecting to say this evening. But if you ever watched this, Natalie, thank you. Really thank you.” That’s novelist and screenwriter David Mitchell explaining the genesis of his friendships and working relationships with Lana Wachowski and Aleksandar Hemon—which includes screenplay credits on Sense8 and now, The Matrix Resurrections. David and Aleksandar join us on the show to talk about creativity and collaboration, their writing partnership, how language changes from page to screen, envisioning the future, and much more. Featured books: Cloud Atlas, Utopia Avenue, The Bone Clocks and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You, Love & Obstacles and The Lazarus Man by Aleksandar Hemon. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. (P.S. We’re taking a little break for the rest of this year and returning with a new episode on 1/4/22.)

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

From this episode:

B&N: So language builds the script… In Sense8, you were able to film all around the world. And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is great. The settings are fantastic. It is absolutely an immersive viewing experience. And certainly, The Matrix is The Matrix. But how are you using language differently in a screenplay? Are you less self-indulgent when you’re drafting a screenplay?

Aleksandar Hemon: There is no narrator in the script, right? And so, you can have a narrator and a novel as a position, as a structural element, but also, I perceive myself as the narrator, as the storyteller, right? And I’m the source of the story as I’m making it up and it could be projected onto the role or the position of the narrator in the book, right, but there’s no narrator in the film. It just is. It is what they would call self-authenticating, right? Someone stood in front of the camera and delivered those lines, even if it’s CGI everywhere, but someone actually did that. And so, it means that the language, it could be controlled by us to whatever extent up to a point, and beyond that is the interpretation of language visually, or you know, actors reading lines. And David, we talked about it, the table readings of the script, the strangeness and the beauty of a table reading–never mind seeing it on the screen. I mean, seeing it on screen is exhilarating. But the table reading, it is amazing because someone else reads the line that we wrote, and they don’t have to act it even, they can read it in a flat voice….someone else reads the line and suddenly it becomes actualized…I might read them, but they don’t really read them aloud and then we write a line…And somehow it has substance because an actor, a good actor, delivers it in a way that I… you know, Where did this come from? What dimension was not aware of when we wrote that?

David Mitchell: Right. A great actor, or even a highly competent actor, they will find notes and chords in our lines whose existence we were unaware of, and that’s a part of the magic – that’s astonishing, I can’t phrase that any better than Sasha just did with his, Where did that come from? Because it shows that it wasn’t me. And I’m glad also Sasha gave me that long and eloquent answer to your question, Miwa, are we less self-indulgent? I’ve learnt you can take it as said, take it for granted, that any self-indulgence that you somehow smuggle into the first draft will be gone, it’ll be evaporated, it will just it’ll be ash, it’ll just be poof!, just mushrooms poured off in a North gale by the time the second draft comes around, no self-indulgence at all, there can’t be. On the slopes of Mount Screenwriting, I overwrote massively. Lana would ask for a two-page scene. We’d discuss it, this happened, maybe this beat, go away, see what you come up with. And what I came up with was eight pages. I still bring back four pages. Lord love her, it’s her job to pack it down still, but she’s really good at that. That’s where novelistic interference (might be the best word) comes in for me. I overwrite. I need to know all the details of the world and I need to know what all of the characters are taking for granted about their world. It’s this thing we take for granted, I think differentiates one millieu from another both in time, space, across boundaries of the culture. What is everybody taking for granted? What are the terms of the world? What is the unwritten constitution of their existence? I need to know it. In my novels, I tend to put quite a lot of this in there or let it to be seen. I’ve learnt that in screenwriting, you still have to know it. But it’s there as a bass string of the cello, you don’t actually have to write it; if you know the terms of the world sufficiently well, that will already be dictating what is happening in the world. I don’t know if this qualifies as self-indulgence or not. Maybe it doesn’t. But what can be quite appealing in a novel, needs to be invisible in the screenplay.