The Jordan Harbinger Show
1077: Michael Arndt | The Oscar-Winning Science of Storytelling
Tue, 12 Nov 2024
Want to write a great screenplay? Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt shares secrets from Pixar, Hollywood, and a decade of script doctoring! What We Discuss with Michael Arndt: Success in screenwriting often requires extreme persistence and resilience — Michael Arndt wrote 10 screenplays over 10 years before selling Little Miss Sunshine, and even then did about 100 drafts of that script before it was ready. The best stories often create a "tilted universe" where the protagonist is a response to or antidote to the negative values of their world (like Robin Hood emerging in response to an unjust system, or The Dude's laid-back nature contrasting with an aggressive world in The Big Lebowski). Audience feedback is crucial but challenging to balance — as Michael quotes Billy Wilder: "Individually they're idiots, but collectively they're a genius." You have to respect audience intelligence while still maintaining your creative vision. Great endings often work by creating a false binary (win/lose) and then revealing a surprising third option that exceeds audience expectations — like in Little Miss Sunshine where Olive neither wins nor loses but creates something entirely unexpected. Anyone can improve their storytelling by studying great stories and breaking them down systematically — Michael's own journey shows that storytelling is a craft that can be learned through careful analysis, practice, and continual refinement of understanding how stories work. His video essays on screenwriting (available on YouTube) offer concrete tools for developing these skills. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1077 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What are the secrets to great screenwriting?
Chapter 2: How does audience feedback influence storytelling?
Like that sort of gap between your expectations and like what actually happens is what makes it so it makes you kind of like emotional, have that emotional response.
I feel like the low moment before your climax is actually the centrifugal center of your story. A lot of times what you're doing with your story is trying to drive your character down to the place where the worst possible thing is going to happen to them. And that becomes the focus of the rest of your story, right? You're just trying to go to the worst possible place.
I'll just grab off the top of my head. An example in Fellini's Eight and a Half, right? Like he's trying to figure out a story that he can make into a movie and he's failing and failing and failing. And finally, he goes to this press conference and they're like, what's your next movie going to be about?
And he just doesn't have an answer, you know, and people are mocking him and making fun of him and he crawls on the table and has this fantasy about shooting himself in the head. And then, God, it's such a great, that is such a great ending. That ending is so great.
But the first two acts of that story and half of the third act is just getting your character to this lowest possible moment where they feel exposed, humiliated. The worst thing is happening. And so, yeah. And then the Houdini trick for screenwriting is to be able to turn things around in a second. And Fellini does that really, really well.
Yeah, I'm working on that in my real life. It's not working out so good. Yeah. I think you're only supposed to do that in movies, folks. Don't try this at home.
But it's funny because you seem to be interested in a few common themes in all of your movies, but one of them is failure. Like Olive's family gets on the brink of disaster in a number of ways. Woody in Toy Story is constantly at risk of losing Andy. Are you particularly fascinated by failure? Is that a Michael Arndt thing? Or is that a theme that makes every story interesting?
Yeah, I think it makes every story interesting. I mean, you're looking for the worst, again, like knowing what the worst possible thing for your hero is. What is your hero desiring and wanting and the best possible thing, but what is also the worst possible thing for your hero? It's interesting.
I mean, this is something that I've thought of that's really new is that not only do you have a low moment in your third act or a lowest possible moment in your third act, what I call a moment of despair in your third act.
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Chapter 3: What makes a compelling ending in screenplays?
But then you wouldn't have, of course, be where you are now, wouldn't have made Little Miss Sunshine and all these other amazing movies. But then there's also like a thousand other versions of you that just like never really cracked into it and are still picking up Target groceries for Gwyneth Paltrow or something, right? Like that's all they do.
You think Gwyneth goes to Target? I don't think so.
I know that was ridiculous. That was ridiculous. Whatever the equivalent of Target is for Gwyneth Paltrow, they're picking stuff up from there. Erewhon.
I thought a lot about this because I feel like when you are a young person, what you're, one of the things you're choosing is you're choosing to enter a field and that field is going to represent your values, right? So if you want to be a Marine, you go off and join the Marines, right? And you go from being a civilian, you become a Marine, right? Or if you want to be a Buddhist monk, right?
You go off and join a monastery. That institutional monastery is going to change you into the sort of the ideal of Buddhism, like, or the ideal of being a Marine or the ideal of whatever, right? And so when I chose to be a screenwriter, it's not just that you're trying to get movies made and make money and be a success, you're also just joining a community.
And you're finding people who share your values, share your interests. I think that if I hadn't ended up being a screenwriter, I would have been a development executive, I would have been a producer, I would have been something else, maybe a, I don't know, work as an editor or something like that. I would have done something just because I love filmmaking so much.
Yeah, I feel like I've been very, very lucky. And I think you have to acknowledge that luck plays an enormous role in whether you're able to break through or not. So, I mean, I was very persistent. I worked for 10 years. I failed a lot, you know, 10 years of failure and disappointment. But I also felt like I was very...
deliberate in doing due diligence on all my screenplays and trying to figure out like, does this work or not? And, you know, I wrote a hundred drafts of Little Miss Sunshine, like trying to get it to a point where it was going to work massive and overwhelming force. Like there was no way you can say no to the screenplay. So it's a big risk.
You kind of jump off a cliff, but I also feel like I did it in a very methodical or kind of cautious way. I feel like no one's going to be helped by putting another mediocre screenplay out in the world. And you've got to be hard on yourself. You've got to be hard on your own material. You've got to let it be judged by other people. And you've got to accept their judgments, right?
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Chapter 4: How can anyone improve their storytelling skills?
I'm mixing metaphors. As you can tell, I'm not a screenwriter. And those are always kind of getting fine-tuned at some level. And that's been happening for like a decade or whatever by this point.
There's a certain point where you just recognize you're not going to make everybody happy. Well, that's for sure. Yeah. There's just a certain point where you're just like, fuck it. This is a script I want to see. Or I think this joke is funny. I don't care. I'm putting it in there. Like, I think it's funny. There's a certain point where you just have to, you can't please everybody.
If you try, you'd never make a movie, right? There's a certain moment of madness where you just have to jump off the cliff and go, okay, we're doing this. Or I'm sending the script out or whatever it is.
You mentioned Pixar. I got to imagine, and I feel like I've heard this as well, working at Pixar is kind of like you mentioned the Marines before. It's like the Marines of storytelling. It sounds really intense, brutal at times. How did you end up at Pixar and what did you learn there?
It was completely out of the blue. I had written the script for Little Miss Sunshine. It was being shot actually in the summer of 2005. So the movie hadn't been released yet. They hadn't even finished shooting it yet. And Pixar had gotten their hands on a copy of the script and they read it and they really liked it. And they brought me up and interviewed me.
And they were looking for someone to work with the director, Lee Unkrich, on an original idea that he had. And so I met with Lee at sort of three interviews. I made it over the bar kind of each time. And they hired me. And then that was right before the merger with Disney happened. So when the Disney merger happened, that was when they sort of asked Lee to take over Toy Story 3 and do it.
And my joke is that they all go into a meeting and they're like, okay, this is it. We're going to make Toy Story 3. And then at the end of the meeting, they're like, wait a minute, we need somebody to write it. Uh, you. Yeah. What is it you do again over here? Projects assistant, get over here. You're writing the script.
Target bags in hand.
Exactly. The guy standing in the hallway was like, we need some poor schmuck to write this thing. How about you? Yeah, like, I just got to drop off this milk. I'll be right back. Yeah, so I feel like I was really lucky to be at Pixar from Ratatouille to Toy Story 3. It was Ratatouille, WALL-E, up, and then Toy Story 3, and then I worked on Inside Out while Toy Story 3 was still being finished.
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