519: Storytelling & Identity with Dave Callaham (Part 1 of 3): What it’s Like Writing Marvel Movies, Asian-American Representation in Hollywood, and Advice on Finding Your Voice

Dave Callaham  0:00  
About three or four days into that experience, I was writing the sequence when he's in San Francisco, and the version of it I had written maybe did trend a little bit more towards


anti Asian sentiment he might have been feeling at that moment in time. And that's a thing I felt in my life. And I just, I kind of had an emotional freak out. I love heavy metal. I love over dramatics. I love your bookshelves and bookshelves in general, especially when they're full of books. I love a fireplace. I suppose I love my job these days, sometimes I don't I love professional wrestling, which falls into the overdramatics category. I love my family and my daughter and the hilarious person that she's evolving into rapidly. I love swimming. I love the energy of large events that I don't always love going to them, and I love exploring new places.


Ethan Sawyer  1:12  
Awesome. Let's do there's a version of this called I know. So it's like just things you know a lot about, or could nerd out on. Sure, sometimes there's overlap. It's going to be a lot, yeah, but go, what's your, what's your I know list things you know. I


Dave Callaham  1:24  
know a lot about air conditioning,


which is not really a joke. I know a lot about movies and screenwriting. I know a lot about pop culture in general. It's a bit of a specialty of mine. I know a lot about rock and rock and metal music, but not other music genres. I know a lot about martial arts and working out in general, and physical fitness. I know a lot about competitive swimming. I know a lot about basic home handy Manning. I know a lot about H back. I'm


Ethan Sawyer  2:03  
that's good. That's great. That's awesome. I want to talk. I want to start at the start, which is, Oh, you don't have to do an I know I do. I can. Okay,


we would just cut mine.


I want a kid. Were you? What kind of high schooler were you


Dave Callaham  2:22  
I the kind of high schooler I was is probably a little bit different from the kind of kid I was. I was


very academically minded growing up. I grew up in the Bay Area and


did not have a lot of access to Western Western media and Western culture. I obviously lived in America in a very American school system, but we didn't have cable TV. We didn't have video games, and so that put me in a position to gravitate towards we had my parents sentenced to music, so it was kind of books or nothing growing up so I was very into books and reading and the Wizard of Oz books. And I was very, very academically minded, yeah, what


Ethan Sawyer  3:07  
did you read? What were you into? I


Dave Callaham  3:09  
read all


of the Oz books, like not just the Frank Baum, but everything that came after. I was not into deep fantasy. That was more my brother's territory. He was like a Tolkien kid. He was also a comic book guy. People are always surprised to hear. I didn't read any comic books growing up, considering how I get paid now. But I also I was very undersized, which is a big part of my story. I was born two and a half months prematurely. Let's start at the beginning. It's relevant because and I didn't even open my eyes for two months, like I was in the NICU. And so I was small my whole life. I was the smallest kid in my high school. Women, men included, I was under five feet tall. And so as I got older, junior high and high school, I started to become aware of my stature or lack thereof, and that became a huge part of my identity, feeling just being aware that I was small and that I was, you know, at the time, you think of it more like shrimpy or and then as you get into high school and you start going through puberty and becoming a young adult, you start thinking about it in terms of like virility and strength and masculinity. And so my there was no way for me to grow taller. I did start lifting weights at that age entirely as a defense mechanism against, you know, I would say the outside world that it was also against my own insecurity, right? But the other shield I picked up along the way was a sense of humor. I thought, Okay, well, there's no way for me to be a football player, so I'm going to be the funniest kid in the class. And that resulted in me. Me being pretty clever and quick witted, I would like to think, but it also definitely resulted in me being a pretty big asshole, just, you know the know it all, and I got in a lot of trouble with the teachers, because I was always trying to make the class laugh. My goal was always the popularity that I perceive that I am going to be missing out on because of being small, but also being one of the only Asian kids in the whole school, by the way, I'm going to get back by making everybody laugh. So that made me a nuisance to teachers, and it also actually got me beat up more than I would have by only being small, because I was frequently targeting the jocks. So I was I had identified at that point, well, these are the popular kids, and they have this thing that I want, which is popularity and good looks and all the trappings of American western male success, right, right? But I know that I'm smarter than them, and I know that they're not. They're not developing themselves in the same way I am intellectually. So I'm going to make sure everybody else knows it, too. And so I was a real loudmouth.


That's what I was like in high school.


Ethan Sawyer  6:15  
When did you start writing


Dave Callaham  6:20  
creatively? I would say, somewhere in that same vicinity. In high school, I was, I had never explored storytelling on paper at that point in my life, but I was, I was in public speaking. We had a very established public speaking program on my high school which included Student Congress and debate and the things that a lot of people are familiar with, but also a whole other swath of things, like where you would write a 10 minute speech, memorize it and deliver it, and that could be entirely original, and you you could play act parts inside of it. It could be a monolog. It could be a treatise on whatever you feel like taught. It could be anything. Was


Ethan Sawyer  7:01  
this, like speech and debate, like original oratory, original


Dave Callaham  7:05  
prose and poetry. This was my tech. Was my one. I chose. I also did expository, which was a speech category where you had props, not quite Carrot Top, but like usually, you would have an easel, and yeah, you would make your own displays, I suppose now you would sure do it all on a computer, yeah, some sort of slide deck, but I remember this


Ethan Sawyer  7:28  
world, I was in Speech and Debate world, just as an excuse to do more theater. And


Dave Callaham  7:31  
I I think of that as writing, when I look back at it, and I think of it as performing, which it definitely was, and all of that is part of my life now, because in addition to writing, I do have to pitch to get jobs, I have to go into a room and express this is what I'm envisioning for the characters. So that's a form of writing I did. And then the other form was, I was on a summer swim team my whole life, age about seven to 18, and it was a really unique environment where I my daughter's on the swimmers team now, and I know that it's not the same as what we have. And even other teams we competed against at the time were not the same. We had this, this beautiful lake up in the on the hillside that someone had 100 years ago, filled in with concrete. So it was not a swimming pool in the traditional square rectangle sense, and all around it was a park, like a giant Park. And there was a place where you could buy food, and there was a coach's office, and there were benches, but it was all fenced in, so it was a self contained environment, and people could play in the pool while swim team practice was going on because of the structure of the pool. There was sort of lanes in the middle, but otherwise you're just on a giant lake. And so you would get dropped off at like eight in the morning for your morning practice, whether you were six or 18, and then you would just stay there all day. It was like a free babysitter from parents. And so it taught me to when I was young, I looked up to the older kids, and when I was older, I took care of the younger kids. And as part of that process, as we prepared for the big heat at the end of the year, there were always skits and performances to cite people up. And I, around the time I was 14, I became and I was the person who was always assumed to be in charge of all the skits, because I had watched the skits growing up, and thought, I think, I think these are a little too standard, but I think there are ways to approach this that are more creative, yeah, and so I sort of like made that my thing, and I look back now, and I think of that as a form of writing as well.


Ethan Sawyer  9:36  
Totally. When did you realize you were a storyteller?


Dave Callaham  9:42  
I think probably around that time, especially public speaking was a really great tool to teach me how to feel comfortable, literally, verbally telling stories, but my ability to create sort of these inspirational skits that would appeal to. Six year olds and 18 year olds and then make the part of my goal was always like, make the parents laugh. And when I realized I could do that, and I was doing it at, like, a pretty high level, but that was the only environment I knew it, it was working at 100% success rate inside of that small,


Ethan Sawyer  10:17  
extremely high summer swim team level, yes, yeah, yeah.


Dave Callaham  10:21  
But, you know, because it was a different audiences, kids, grown ups, boys, girls, men, women, I knew that I was, like, tapping into something, yeah, it's like, oh, I I'm not so specific to myself that no one understands my storytelling. So, like, I think I know how to do this at a wider level,


Ethan Sawyer  10:41  
lovely. Did you study writing in college?


Dave Callaham  10:46  
Nominally, I was an English major,


only because I didn't really know what my plan was, and that was the easiest thing for me to wrap my head around. I was really interested in biology, but I don't have a science mind. I went to the University of Michigan, and that is one of, I assume, many schools that thinks of biology as, like, built out of chemistry. And because I am terrible at chemistry and math, I was basically disqualified from pursuing that at second college. So I went to into English and, you know, took all sorts of different classes. And there were writing class, no creative writing classes. I've ever taken a creative writing class. Taken poetry. I've taken, you know, most of my English focus was on literature and essay writing and comparative literature and that kind of thing. Yeah.


Ethan Sawyer  11:39  
So you wrote one of my favorite Marvel movies, Shawn Chi in the 10 Rings. And one of the things that you said in an interview was that on a quote, you said that you felt like your whole life was suddenly available to use. What would you mean with that?


Dave Callaham  11:54  
Well, so I have been writing now over 20 years professionally as a screenwriter in LA as member of the Writers Guild. At that point that I got hired on Shanxi, it had to be 1716, years. And all of those 17 or 616, 17 years, I had been writing stories that I hadn't considered this until Shaanxi happened. But none of those stories were about anybody that looked like me or that had had a life experience like me. Had written action movies and I had written dramas and I had written comedies, but they just never fell into a category that I considered anything resembling my own story. And you know, the thing is, it didn't bother me. I wasn't searching for it. I don't actually think I knew that I was missing it or that it was even possible, until Shang chi happened. And then Shang chi, obviously, listeners don't know, is a story of the Marvel's first Asian superhero. And I am despite, despite my last name, I'm half Chinese. It was suddenly a lot of the experiences that I had had with my own identity were available to me. You know, the stuff I was just describing. I don't know what this edits in, but being one of the only Asian kids in the school, feeling other, feeling self conscious about who I was, and I'll never fit in for a variety of reasons, but many, most of them, centered around that identity, and suddenly someone was asking me to tell the story about an Asian guy growing up in San Francisco, or not growing up, but living in San Francisco, what's that like for him? I know that the first time I've ever while I was writing, said, Oh, I


Ethan Sawyer  13:49  
know me, yeah. And I'm curious, like, to what extent, or if you can remember, like, examples or moments where it's in the film, where it's like, ah, that's where it's clearly, you well,


Dave Callaham  14:03  
the movie is edited in a way that there's a lot of different flashbacks to Shanxi origin and his upbringing in China. Well, we're not supposed to say it's China. It's China. But then he ends up in America, and he grows up being a little bit unaware of what's going on with his real family and what has become of his father and his experiences in America and specifically in the Bay Area. You know, that's very, very obviously drawn directly from my life. That is a place that I grew up. You know, there's an early sequence, the first time you meet, and he's a valet at the at the at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, which is a hotel I spent a lot of time in. You know, that's not an accident. That's stuff that I've thought, well, if I'm, if I'm going to do this, why don't I just lean all the way in, and why invent something I can just tap into stuff I know so that early time in the Bay Area, and then, you know, the. Sort of process of self discovery that he undergoes over the course of the movie, about finding out who he is and where he's from, is also something that I've experienced, and in a way, had experienced, but not really paid all that much attention to until I was writing that movie. So in a weird way, I felt like I was experiencing it with him as I was creating him. Yeah,


Ethan Sawyer  15:25  
that makes sense totally. And I want to double click on that. Say more about that, because I found, you know, with students, when they're working on college essays and personal students, there is that sort of like, art imitating life, life imitating art, going back and forth. How To what extent did you feel? Like, yeah, what was that like, discovering yourself through the writing? Like, how did that happen?


Dave Callaham  15:45  
It was really profound. You know, I know I maybe have told this story before, but I had a absolute freak out somewhere inside of the first several days of writing that script I had been the way it works at marbles you go into a room at, actually, at the Disney lot in the Marvel building, and you and the executive, when I say you, I mean me, me and the executive and the director, we all just sit there and we, we work on story for months until we feel like that's the story. And then they say, go and write it. Dave. So then I, then the the warm blanket of other people goes away, and I go into a hole, and I have to get interior. And about three or four days into that experience, I was writing the sequence when he's in San Francisco, and the version of it I had written maybe did trend a little bit more towards anti Asian sentiment he might have been feeling at that moment in time, and that's something I felt in my life. And I just, I kind of had an emotional freak out, and because it was the first time I'd ever written anything that, as you said that, I said, you know, it's the first time I ever done that. I didn't even understand why I was having the emotional freak out. And the realization was like, oh my god, this is the first time I've ever been asked to or given the opportunity to speak from my own perspective. And it turns out that there is some stuff in there. That was the experience I was having was I thought I was pretty okay with all of it, and I was okay with it, but I did need to express a lot of things. And so it was a combination of feeling a little bit overwhelmed by doors that I had closed off inside myself opening again. And then it was also a feeling of gratitude, like I cannot believe this is happening, and a feeling the fear of, Oh, I better not fuck this up, because that means it instantly became more important to me than many of my other jobs. I always try to be plugged into the work I do, but it was just going to be more important at that point, but that also meant that it was going to be more important to my family and to other people who've had those experiences, to people who look like me, or people who look not like me, but who have felt othered in that way. So the weight of it was very intense. I'm


Ethan Sawyer  18:13  
curious about that too, like I wonder to what extent you felt that responsibility, and how, how that responsibility actually ended up manifesting itself. In other words, I could imagine you going like, way more political, for example, with the script. Yeah,


Dave Callaham  18:29  
we tried, I tried a lot of stuff because I wasn't sure what the right balance was going to be. Because I think it's not uncommon, when the first time someone who has a lot to say is given a chance, is handed a microphone, you do have the instinct to just scream it all at once. You know it's and maybe that is appropriate in a particular situation. But you know, I wasn't writing an original piece of material. I was writing inside of the Marvel system, and that means that there is a well paved path that already sort of sets out the tone the world, the sort of, I don't want to say rules, but historically, you're not going to you haven't seen Marvel movies get really aggressively political, you know? I think Black Panther came pretty close. And I love it when they do that. And it doesn't mean that you can't do it, but you wouldn't do a lot of the same things in a Marvel movie that you might do if you were writing a movie for like Steven Soderbergh to direct at 824, right? And so I needed, I tried a lot of scenes that where I just had to get it out of my system, to just rail at the system and what it's like being an Asian man in America, and all the things I have felt for all this time, and then throw those scenes away, or show those scenes to Destin the director and my co writer, who is also an Asian American male, but who is. A very different experience as an Asian person in America than I did, because he grew up in Hawaii, and so he would read some of the stuff I would write and say, I haven't had this experience, and I think this is a little much. And sometimes he would write scenes, and I would say, I


think there's a spot in here


to say something. We don't have to go too hard at it, but, you know, so it was a balance of trying to figure out, what do we what how much do we want to say? What are we saving for later? What characters do we want verbalizing some of this stuff? Because my instinct was, Shang chi is the hero of movie, and it's me, quote, unquote, he should say a lot of this stuff. But what we found later was that it became helpful for us to have Tony Young's character verbalize a lot of his disgust with sort of the American prism of Asian experiences, because he's a person who lives outside of it and can look at it and point at it, versus when you're inside of it, sometimes you don't even notice what's happening to you. You're just a part of it. If that makes


Ethan Sawyer  21:12  
sense, right? I imagine that there were a lot of


competing interests in terms of writing an action film, an action film that's funny Marvel. And I want to talk a little bit about, I want to get into some of the sort of the trappings of that a little bit, but I'd love to talk a little bit about, a little more about process, because you mentioned that you were sort of given this thing, and there was some conversation. Can you talk a little bit more about, sort of, like, the source material that you were working with, and then What decision did you make to, like, embrace that or to throw that away? And let's we can talk generally about process. But I since we're talking about, sure, well, with Shang chi, the


Dave Callaham  21:49  
Marvel system in general, which I know because I've I had worked there Previous to this, and I had also pitched there a number of times where I had been the bridesmaid on a number of the screenwriting bridesmaid on a number of projects, which turned out great because Shang chi was the one that made the most sense. But what they do is they give you a giant packet, they send you a PDF, and it's all of the comics that they think are relevant, relevant to what they're looking for in a movie about so and so. In Shang Chi's case, it was every comic that had ever been published featuring Shang chi because he had a much thinner publication history. I, you know, I have not ever seen like a spider man packet, but I would imagine, but I have seen, I don't want to name movies I did not write, but I've seen the packets on characters with deep history. And what they do is they they parse out we like this version of a character. There's stuff, there's a storyline in this, this 10 issue run that we like. So take a look at that, and we can send you more if you want. And then they send you a document saying, These are the ideas we've been messing with that we think could be an interesting movie. So I got that. And the thing is, Shang chi was not a very well known character, and the vast majority of the publication history on Shang chi was like from the 70s. Shang chi was created as a response to basically Bruce Lee, this sort of trend in America of I don't think fetishizing is the right word, but like romanticizing, sort of the mystical Eastern philosophy of Bruce Lee, or even like Kung Fu,


Ethan Sawyer  23:28  
when there's only one example from the perspective of American culture that that can happen, right?


Dave Callaham  23:34  
So become super simplified, right? And and really reductive. And that's what the I don't think that there was no intent. But the creators of Shang chi were not Asian, and they created the first few issues of Shang chi. He's, he's


wearing like a guy in New York City,


just like literally wandering the streets, and again, a headband, yeah. And anytime he sees an injustice happening, he does come through on them while spouting these massive chunks of like, gobbledygook Eastern mysticism, yeah, right, just, just weird platitudes that make no sense if you actually try to pay attention what they're saying. But I think at the time it was thought. It was like, Ooh, how, how deep and mysterious this Asian culture is. It's also worth noting that Shang Chi in those books, the coloring that was used the inks, he was like, bright yellow.


Wow, bright Wow.


So you know, you you take one look at something like that as an Asian guy in 2017 like, we're not doing this, right? I was actually for a split second, like, I'm not even, I don't want to talk about this. It's so offensive, yeah, and the other main elements. So that's what Shawn chi was like as a character and as like, a tone and his. Father in the comic books was named Fu Manchu, and he was exactly what you imagined. He was literally the Fu Manchu caricature that we're all familiar with, which is a deep racist stereotype and imagery that was pretty common for a long time in American like pulp writing. But you know the long beard and the the very overly slanty eyes and sort of like the the sorcerer thing, you know the Asian sorcerer, which I do like Asian sorcerers, but it was a bit much. And so to marbles credit, they said, Look, we know this is all fucked up. Yeah, we're not after this. What we're after is we want to put an Asian superhero on screen, and we do think it would be interesting if we explored the notion of a family relationship, a father son, schism that has happened in the past. And do it, you know, Am I destined to follow my father's footsteps? That that was all in there. It was just completely shrouded in racist overtones and and so that I thought, okay, so they know that we're gonna throw this all out, which is really unusual Marvel because historically, like you would actually get in trouble for that Spider Man fans if you change the whole back, how dare you right rightly so. But with Shang chi, we basically were the only Marvel movie that I'm aware of up until that point, who were told you're basically creating something original, and you're going to use touch points from the comics and characters from the comics, but you're going to have to rebuild a huge swath of it. And so that was really exciting and freeing, also scary at that, because you don't have any guardrails. You don't I don't have a place where I can go and look up, what did he do in this period of his life? Like, I had to make, we had to make it all up. Yeah. So that was, that was the process. I don't remember where the question, yeah. I


Ethan Sawyer  27:08  
mean, that's it. It was, like, I was curious about the sort of beginnings of it, and then I'd love to just talk a little bit about, and you could talk about Shanxi, or just in general, when you're writing, when you're working on a movie, what's that routine? Like, do you have a routine? And what's that? How does that tend to go? Right?


Dave Callaham  27:22  
Go? I'd like to have a routine. I prefer to have a routine. It I am very much at the mercy. My job is so it changes so frequently because I'm on a project. Shawn sheep as an example. I was on for probably two years total of writing, but eventually it ends, and Shang chi is I was the first person hired on the movie, and I was the last person to lock the door behind me on the way out. Way I worked all the way through rewriting stuff right up until the premiere, but sometimes I write a single draft, and three months later I'm fired. And so every single job changes the pacing of it. You know, like I mentioned with shawshi, I was going into an office three times a week, which I had never done. But what I like the best is once I've been sent a script, which is the point at which I'm told by myself, usually, I do collaborate too time to go right? You have about three months, usually, to write a script. Generally, my general process would be, once I know what the movie is, we can talk about getting to that moment. You know, I get up in the morning with my family. I do the family stuff. I work out of space in our home, and I like to go out there. I basically have two chunks of time that I think of as, like blocks, and there's a third one available to me if everything is going terribly wrong, which I prefer not to have to use. But you know, some version of a morning block, which is not eight, but nine to noon or one, I will let that go as long or as short as the flow is carrying me somewhere in the middle of the day, I try to take a break, and usually that involves a workout or a lunch or yard work, something that is not front of a computer screen, which is what I do my work on. And then there's an afternoon block, which is whenever that break has ended, through to whenever family time starts again. So that's something that's different, depending on if I'm picking our daughter up. Sometimes I'm not picking our daughter up, so I'm writing deeper into the evening, typically the person cooking dinner, so that at some point, stop writing. I do family stuff. I would like to be done working at that moment. But if I'm on the deadline or where I've lost time elsewhere, there's a night block available, which is, you know, could be seven to whenever just. Catch a couple more hours of writing if I need to, and so that's how I like to structure it, if I can. But there's a billion distractions along the way,


Ethan Sawyer  30:07  
yeah, especially being a dad, yeah, it's easier now. I mean,


Dave Callaham  30:12  
the first couple years of her life, there was no structure. It was when can I steal writing time to keep this thing fit? Right? You


Ethan Sawyer  30:20  
mentioned, and we talked about this a while ago, but you mentioned, for example, with Spider Man, that there was writing until, like, the movie was even to come out a couple weeks later. And you were like, there's still writing happening. Can I say that?


Dave Callaham  30:33  
Yeah, my


Ethan Sawyer  30:35  
question is, like,


I imagine it varies, but when you say writing up until the premiere. Like, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I


Dave Callaham  30:43  
mean on Shang chi, I'm exaggerating a little bit. I only mean that I wrote until there was no more writing to be done. But on a Marvel movie, that does typically mean that you're doing reshoots, or you're writing ADR lines, or, you know, voiceover lines, as long as you can get away with it, until there's a there's there is a moment on a live action movie where you have to lock picture. You can't you just can't change anything anymore, because it's got to be dispersed to all these people, right? In animation you can do that much longer, because, yeah,


Ethan Sawyer  31:12  
talk about that difference writing for animation versus live action. Well, in animation you


Dave Callaham  31:16  
can just iterate forever. It. People tend to think it's free. It's not free. It costs a huge amount of money to do that, but with live action, generally speaking, and Marvel is the most iterative version of it, where you write a script, they go and shoot that script. They're usually changing things the entire time. And then at the end of the process, they've shot what they've shot, they put it together and edit. We work on it for a while, try to find the best version of edit, but the whole time, you're taking notes, knowing that you're going to write new stuff that's going to plug holes that you've discovered, right? So there's several different writing periods, but again, you're what ends up on screen is limited only to the moments in time where you have sent out a 200 plus person crew to go and rounded up your actors, and you've shot the material. Now, I don't know if this is going to change with where we're headed technologically, but that is currently what you're limited to with animation, the people making the movie that the animators, artists, everybody, they are in an office building, and you have access to them up until the day the movie comes out, which means that if you say, I want a new scene that does this, I mean, they can't do it overnight, but you can change things all the time, constantly in animation, as long as you're willing to pay the people who are putting in the


Ethan Sawyer  32:38  
work. And so How close was that with, for example, Spider Man, I writing, was happening up until, till what point before it premiered?


Dave Callaham  32:47  
I was told I was not a part of this process. And I won't, I won't cite what it was. There was a single line of dialog that was changed the week of the premiere, or it might have been after the premiere. There's a period, you know, the premiere of a movie is usually somewhere the week before, two weeks before the release of the movie. So whatever that window is, there was a line of dialog that, at the very last second we realized might be it wasn't intended to be offensive or even particularly comedic. It was just a thing a character said, and then something happened in the real world, like a big news event happened, yeah, and suddenly this line seemed to be a reference to it, so we changed it


a week out from the movie being in the theater. And we can do that. I


don't, I don't know how that would be possible in live action,


Ethan Sawyer  33:43  
one of the things I'm curious about, so to what extent, where is Dave? And I'm putting Dave in quotes for people who are listening in movies. So there are ways that you've talked about in Shang chi that you showed up, but when you talk about like the Expendables, for example, or like Mortal Kombat, like, where are you in those movies? Well, I mean, the truth is, frequently,


Dave Callaham  34:04  
just as often as I am in some of these movies. With Shanxi, I was always involved with spider verse, I was always involved a couple of the smaller movies I've written. I was involved a lot more, but with the Expendables as an example, and Mortal Kombat, I wrote early drafts of those scripts, and then they went away from me, and there were other writers involved. And that typically results in a final product where even even though my name is on those movies, that usually means that the structure and ideas started with me, but by the end of the process, a lot of character and dialog stuff is the stuff that changes the most as you get further down the line, because you're bringing in actors and maybe they have new ideas. So, you know, moral combat is a thing that I did because I love moral combat. I wasn't 100% sure I knew how to do moral. Combat or improve upon your first very campy but wonderful Mortal Kombat film that I still love to this day. But I do have a general rule where, if somebody brings me something that is meaningful to me from at some point my life, and I still spark to it, and I say, my Oh, man, that'd be a Mortal Kombat movie. That'd be awesome, and then you're giving me an opportunity to be a part of it. I try to figure out a way to find a story that I think I can make work for that like I just I'm always tickled by the idea that I can be working on something that what would seven year old Dave think when he was playing with he man toys. Now that I'm writing a he Man movie, for example, which is a thing I worked on for a period of time. I don't know what will happen with that movie, but so it's mostly just the joy of working on something that I love is in the movie, I would hope, you know The Expendables sort of was, I suppose, a reference to the movies I grew up on, you know, I said earlier that I didn't have a lot of Western culture. I grew up in the 80s, and so though we didn't watch movies in my household, once I started visiting friends houses, what everybody was watching was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and John right? And I fell in love with those movies just like everybody else did. This was, you know, that was the era, and that is what the Expendables is a love letter to, ultimately.


So, you know, that's I suppose


I'm always looking I only know how to write


stuff that I think I would love.


And so, you know, in terms of the sense of like Godzilla. I worked on the 2014, Godzilla film that is now spawned a number of increasingly fun, if not, if not scientifically implausible films, but I love them, and I was so happy to work on that I loved Godzilla as a kid. That was one of the very few things my mom did show me she loved Godzilla movies, and so when they came around, and there was an opportunity to write a Godzilla movie, and I thought of how much my mom loved it, and how much I love I had this memory of watching them with her, and the fantasy of that time when you couldn't make anything appear on screen magically with computers, right? Like it was like I had a giant rubber suit, and it still felt incredible to be, well, I cannot believe I'm seeing this. I always try to bring that wonder to what I'm doing.


Ethan Sawyer  37:30  
There was, I forget who said it. It was a screenwriter who said once that the most important decision you'll make as as a writer. I think he was particularly talking about screenwriters, is the decision about what to make next. So I'm curious, how do you decide what to write next, and to what extent do you get to choose? I mean, certainly you're always the one who's choosing, but what are the forces that


Dave Callaham  37:55  
are well, impacting that for you? I mean, for me, personally, I'm the one who's choosing? Because I'm in a very privileged position of having a long career and having a number of successful movies under my belt, which puts me in a position where people want to work with me. That has not always been the case in my career. So I do know what it is to not really have a choice. And so there's, there's, I guess, two parts of that question that might be more relevant to people listening. You know when, when there's many times as an artist, especially an artist for hire, which you are as a screenwriter, where you don't get to choose, you have the choice of writing a spec. For example, you can always write an original story, and that is a risk, because you may or may not make money doing it, but if it's for the endeavor of the creative process, then that's a thing you can do. But if you're looking for a job, quote, unquote, and you are relying on what is being offered to you or what you might have, you might be in a position to chase down. So you don't always have that many options, you know, and that can feel scary, and that is how you end up sometimes taking jobs that might not be 100% right for you, or that you don't feel confident that you can really do a great job on but you gotta pay the mortgage. You gotta you gotta buy groceries. And I've had that in my life and in those moments, all I've ever tried to do is think. I have tried to not let the full existential panic of existence and our capitalist society drive my decision making. Here we go. So I've always tried to like, don't, don't don't just take it because you need the money. I try not to do that. There have been moments where I just had to do it, and I will tell you, the result was never good. Creatively, I got paid. I was able to stay alive for a period of time longer, which landed me here to here to here to here. So I owe a lot to those moments, but the creative process was always. Tortured because it wasn't honest and the final result was usually terrible. Now, my process allows for me to be very picky, because I do get, I get to look at a lot of things that, of course, is still dictated by the ebbs and flows of Hollywood. You know, the number of superhero movies that I was hearing about three years ago is not the same as the number of superhero movies I hear about now. You know, now people are nervous about superhero movies for the first time in 15 years. So why? Because they haven't been performing as well financially. There's been a couple of Marvel movies that have not performed at the level that maybe the previous versions had. I think that there's a fatigue involved. I think that this streaming element resulted in over saturation of material. There were a lot of Disney plus Marvel shows. There were other studios making superhero movies. There were everybody's doing superhero movies, you know. And I think there's a point where the audience got, you know, stepped back and said, You need to show me a new version of this or or something just so excellent. You know, Glenn panther is not just a superhero movie. That's like a Best Picture candidate. You know that that breaks through, but it's changing every day, what what people are responding to, and that results in Hollywood panicking about what they're going to respond to in three years, which is the beginning you're trying to play. So what I'm seeing today is different than what I was seeing five years ago, but all of which is to say, I do have the ability to choose which is nice. And what I have been doing recently is you just don't know what's around the corner. And again, because I write material that has to be consumed by a mass audience to be successful, I'm following those trends. So what I try to do is be patient with it's very hard I get I get nervous all the time. I need to have a lot of jobs in front of me, but I try to be patient and not worry about what's going to happen. Because any day of the week, on a weekend, any time of the year, I can get a phone call and it's Shang chi, and I go, Holy shit, this is the thing I've been waiting for. And the day before, I thought I was never going to work again. So I try to just let, let it come


to me. And I don't


know what I'm going I don't know what I'm going to want to do. You know, I can tell myself. I think I you know, before Shawn Chiang, I was like, I think I'm done chasing Marvel movies. I love Marvel movies. I've tried to get hired on Marvel movies, and I've gotten so close. And everyone over there has always shoot me so well, but they it must just not be in the works. And it hurts. It hurts too much to keep chasing them and losing them. And then Shang chi came, and it changed everything again. So I have a sense of story telling, ID, you know, types like I do. I enjoy writing comedy a lot because the world sometimes feels heavy to me, and it's hard to write heavy material and then end my day and turn on the TV and I'm inundated with heavy life. I like when writing is an escape. But what I try to do on top of being patient with the material coming to me is I always have like, one or two secret things that my agents don't know about, that sometimes multiple people know about, and sometimes only my wife knows about. I have a thing now that I've been doing that I am not getting paid for it's just, it's an experiment that I'm trying something with a partner, and that allows me to not be confined to like, only being creative when I'm being paid for it, right? But also even when I'm being paid for it, and I'm getting to do really creative, fun stuff, Shang chi, or maybe like a zombie land, right? Where it's like this very free wheeling, fun world, and kind of everything is allowed, but you're still writing in those moments, knowing there's like large corporate overlords looking over your shoulder, right? So I know I could write the funniest thing in the world. It's a little and it's a little, you know, like little blue, and I figured, so I'll just cut it right now, right once you start doing that, you're writing for them. So the idea of having something that I'm writing on spec or experimenting with on the side at all times allows me to have a safe place to feel like I'm


I'm scratching that itch that makes sense. Yeah?


Ethan Sawyer  44:44  
There's an interesting copy paste for between what you're talking about. In this position that I find students in when they're writing their personal statement is there's this interesting dance between the what they want, yeah, and versus the story that I wanted to. Or the student feels like, Ah, this is something that I find compelling, that I feel agency around. And then there's sort of that ambiguous, like, I don't know, I'm guessing that this is what people want, or, as you mentioned, in three years. And so there's like, that seems like


Dave Callaham  45:15  
there's that constant dance, yeah, it's really significant, and I can speak to it in terms of what I do for a living, but what I would say for students listening, and this does apply to how I approached the process back when I was applying to college, I would mention, yes, you're working, you're writing a thing that you know somebody's reading, and you're trying to please the person, right, or the people, or whoever it is, the institution, and that that's stressful and you're trying, that that's the what they want, what I would always recommend personally, and I I'm not responsible if this doesn't work, so I apologize. But what has worked for me, and I have seen, I've seen evidence that it might be a good path, is I believe that everyone should try to be to when creating in this situation, go as far in the what I want field as you can, as you believe you can get away with up until the fence of now you're gonna fall off the cliff and really, like, lose them and, well, here's what I mean by that. Like, as an example, I have a friend who is a very dynamic personality, and when you were around him in person or on text message, riotously funny, quick witted, just a great fun person to be around who. And this person is a screenwriter, and the material that he writes is so flat and boring. Wow. And it's in it. Every time I asked him that, he's like, Well, you know, the studio told me, and it bums me now he he's a working screenwriter, so obviously it has worked his in selected his writing ability is still what Excellent. But I've always felt like, man, if he was putting on the page, what I'm getting in the room. I do think that there are higher heights that he can achieve as a writer. Because Have you told him that? Yeah, I have, but, but that also supposes that puts my personality on him, and supposes that you are willing to do that. And you know, the first 10 years of my career, I was writing solely from a what they want perspective, because I was so happy to be there. I needed work. I didn't want to turn people off. It's so competitive. And I thought, I'll just be a good a good soldier, and I'll just write what I'm being asked. And I was, I was writing a very muted version of myself, but very functional writing, like high quality prose without a lot of voice. So I actually know this personally, and after I worked on Godzilla, I kind of felt really I just felt stifled. I felt and that was not anybody's fault on that project, or, you know, I had imposed upon myself this invisible stricture of I better just write it very down the middle thing that they want. After that project, I kind of lost my mind and said I needed to see what it would be like to write like, what what it sounds like in my head, what would that look like on the page? And what that meant for me was all of the rules of screenwriting needed to be thrown out, you know, I got you get told you can't write something down on the page that won't be on screen. Don't write like little asides to the reader. They're a waste of time. And I thought, yeah, but they'll also make the read more interesting, which will color the opinion that the person has at the material, which, you know, etc, etc. So I wrote. I was, I was hired to write. I pursued. In this case, I pursued a job came to me that was comedic. Was the first time anyone had ever thought of me for a comedy, and it was because it was a person who knew me and knew I probably, I suspect, actually had the same opinion of me that I had of this other writer, like Dave, is a lot more funny and dynamic than he his writing would suggest. I wonder if he'd want to do comedy. And I got really lucky, and I jumped on it. I got paid next to nothing because it was for a tiny company, but I was willing to sacrifice where my career was headed because I believe that this left turn was worth trying. And I wrote this really wild, Free Wheeling script with, like, a lot of very strange flourishes on the page. And it was the first time I ever felt like that's kind of what I sound like. This is like, this is Dave, and that script completely changed my career. It blew open every door so close to me, I got considered for jobs I would have never gotten considered for. And more importantly, I think people suddenly understood, oh, Dave, just not another person who kind of falls into the Pact of this genre writer like this. Person as a voice. And when we want something specific, we know this is one of those guys we can go to for that thing. So I and, you know, again, I was writing for a company, I knew that there were still rules, so all of that was up until that line of what they want. I here's as much as I think I can get away with, right? Is what I did, and now that's the only way I know how to write. So what I hear you talking


Ethan Sawyer  50:29  
about here feels to me like you mentioned voice a couple times. Voice is something that's so ineffable that i i Like, don't even want to tell students, I don't even want to use that term with them often, because it's so like, mystical and mysterious and like, well, what is my voice? I can do so many different voices, which I'm you know, sure as a writer, you find, well, I can do this voice or this voice or this voice. When we're talking about voice capital V for let's talk to students or young artists who are creating and struggling to find their voice. How does an artist find what we would call their voice.


Dave Callaham  51:08  
I mean, I think


I'm not sure how to answer this, because obviously, I think we all come into moments of understanding who we are, hopefully at different points in our life. I think that my voice wasn't fully accessible to me until I reached a certain level of maturity and understanding the business and therefore, like the structure of the art that I was operating within. Because my voice might be different in screenwriting than it would be in a visual medium. I don't know that for sure. I mean, I am still me, but let me ask something in a slightly


Ethan Sawyer  51:44  
different way. I haven't yet. I have a retake to do, dear editor, who's bringing this What advice would you give to people who are struggling to find their voice?


Dave Callaham  51:52  
I mean, I believe that your voice is just like the core elemental notion of who you are artistically, which is so obvious to say, but I think that so many people tend to, again, just mute it a little bit, or to to be scared of showing their true selves as an artist, you know, because of the expectations of the public or of themselves or of their family or loved ones. You know, voice to me is just being honest about how I want to express myself. Now I'm working in a medium in which I'm just writing, just quote, unquote writing, but now I know, for me personally, my voice is what that means to me, is how I express something on the page is just gonna be exactly how I would express it to you, and that's my voice that might not work for everybody, because how you express things in your head maybe isn't always appropriate or or, I mean, mine isn't either. But, you know, I am very colloquial in my writing now, because I believe that it expresses me and that it's also more fun screenplays are really boring to read. Yeah, if I can make it more fun for you, it's it's gonna have a better result for both of us. I


Ethan Sawyer  53:08  
wonder if you think of a specific example of that where, like, sort of Dave version one, first 10 years might have written it more in this way, but now, like, can you think of as an example from recent writing where you would express it in this because I'm constantly trying to get students to do this and be like, No, write it. How lucky. How you talk. Don't try to put on


Dave Callaham  53:25  
airs. I mean, again, it's, it's just, I do a lot of weird asides to the reader. Now where I say, or, I mean, this is not a specific example. I'm just going to try to free ball this great. But when I'm trying to describe something that I don't know expertly how to describe. I used to go online and say, Okay, what's the name? What? What is the technical name for the kind of door lock that looks like this? Because that's, it's what I'm picturing. And I want to make sure the director understands that that's the kind of lock that this guy would have on his door. And then I would find it, and I would write, he has a lock, right? He opened, and now you're past it. You don't remember that I ever wrote it. Who fucking cares what it was anyway, right? Now, I would write, he goes to his door and he's got one of those locks, you know, the kinds of locks it's like, kind of looks like a hook, and maybe there's an S in it, and maybe they're not as common, like with all the maybes and the, you knows, all of that will go on the page right? And it ultimately still doesn't matter, because at some point a production designer and a director will do what they do. But when when directors and executives read that, they feel like they're in conversation with me, and it makes the read more pleasant, and it also is just a much more honest way of speaking, I think. And so that's an example. It's not like something I set out to do. I don't want to say like, I'm always looking for ways to, like, wink at the reader. It's really just when those moments arise in the page, I just do what's natural. Now, instead of trying to, you know, really, there's a version of trying to do it in the more technical. Way that's not really that honest to me, and it feels more distancing in a way, like, here's an example that is not something I do, but I have done, and I see it all the time, because I operate so much inside of the action space. Some riders love to get very technical with their descriptions of weaponry and military equipment, yeah. And they'll be like, and then they get in a blah blah blah blah blah type of tank, and they pull out their blah blah blah guns and and it. And I simultaneously think when I read that, like, wow, this guy knows his stuff, which is worth something, but also it's so cold, yeah, and it doesn't matter on the page that you know your stuff, because what matters on the page that you know is the tension of the tension and terror of being in the military. Maybe as an example, if that's the kind of story you're telling, it does not matter at all that this character knows how to load his Sig Sauer, or whatever the case may be, and it's going to get changed anyway, when production team decides what kind of weapons they have access to, you know, like, all of that kind


Ethan Sawyer  56:09  
of thing and this. So I mentioned distancing, because it seems like when you're doing this and you're saying, you know, the kind of lock, but this and this, you're building rapport with the reader, and what you're saying to them is you are like me, and I'm like you, and we're on this right together, and we're looking at the thing neither of us knows the thing is, but we know the kind of thing it is, and we're looking at it from the same perspective. When I see that kind of language, whether it's a student writing it, or there's a kind of distancing thing that happens, and I'm like, Oh, we are not actually alike. And it seems to me, and I was re watching Shang chi last night, that, especially in for example, an action movie, you need those moments where the where you're like, oh, this person is like me. And I'll give an example. There's that plane scene when awkwafina and Seymour are flying to which Sean and Katie are flying, and the flight attendant comes and asks them, do they want vegetarian or beef? And they're out of they both say vegetarian, and they're out of it. And then she goes, Okay, well, beef, I guess. And then she's like, okay, one beef. And then she turns to, you know, Sean's character, and it's like, what about you? And he's like, beef, you know. And she, you know, Aquafina has this moment where she looks at her like, seriously, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm like her, and she's like me. And in a world where these folks are going to do incredible things and they're going to fight, you know, fight dragons and stuff, I feel like we need those moments. Yeah? I mean, that's,


Dave Callaham  57:29  
that's a thing I like to do in those types of movies, is to have humor based and, like, the banalities of life, yeah, you know, like, the weird, hilarious, like, you wouldn't probably even identify that as something funny that happened to you on an airplane. But when you see it happen other people, you realize, other people, you realize it's funny, right? And so that is definitely something I think is fun in those types of movies. I don't remember it used to be much longer. The first version of that I wrote was that like that stewardess, because that scene, I don't remember how it's edited now, but the first time I wrote that scene, he was explaining to her this very mind boggling back story. She was discovered for the first time. I don't know who you are, who are you? And he's like, Well, I'll tell you, my dad was a terrorist warlord who's lived for 1000s of years, you know. And it's insane to have to listen to something like that, and it's your best friend if you think you know the person. So the way I had written it understood was how funny it would be is you are telling the most incredible, mind boggling, like paradigm shifting story. You're not just telling this person. You don't know me, you're also telling this person. Well, there's magic in the world, right? And my dad is an eternal. Basically, he's an immortal. She, her whole vision of how the world operates would be changed, and then, like every every two minutes, it's interrupted by this steward, as he keeps coming back with something else and just obliterating the tension of the of the story. Yeah, it was very funny to write. It was a little much, but, well, it worked.


Ethan Sawyer  59:00  
I mean, so and there's like, the vegetarian or beef, it works earlier in the movie, when there's that bus scene and some serious stuff's about to go down, and then suddenly we get the guy live streaming, you know, on his phone, you know, and sharing with his followers. And so I want to talk a little bit about, I'd love to get into some of the sort of like structural, nerdy stuff that happens.


And I want to talk about what are


some of those different pieces that need to work well in order for, let's say, a Marvel movie, because I imagine that there are all these different competing things. And I want to talk about fight scenes, and I want to talk a little about the use of humor. So I want to nerd out for a little bit on structure, because it's a thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, particularly as it relates to movies and and also just storytelling. So how important is structure when it comes to screenwriting? Somewhat important


Dave Callaham  59:59  
in the. Yeah, it depends


on the project. You know, I think 75% of movies that you see follow a pretty standard, tried and true structure. There are a lot of wonderful movies that do not follow the structure of what you might be taught in film school, and those work too, but you generally have to be quite a steady hand and quite talented to pull off experimental structure, I would say. And like two examples might be on across the spider verse, which I did work on, though I am not responsible for the section I'm about to talk about. The movie opens with a 20 minute section that's focused entirely on Gwen and relationship with her father. So we were told many times along the way, and again, I didn't write that sequence, and for quite some time I was one of the people telling, oh, you can't do that. Gwen is not the main character. We need to see miles much sooner than this. But it worked. And it worked because the way that that sequence is written is really heartfelt. And it also worked because we were operating inside of a medium where the visuals of what was happening are astonishing, and so you're getting away with something. Another example might be probably


Oppenheimer.


If anyone has heard of that, it's a movie from last year, but Christopher Nolan made and you know, the structure of that movie is a little unusual as well, and it's the huge chunks of that movie are basically montages. And that is why that movie, even though it is about a historical event that we all know the history of, still feels like a thriller in my viewing, at least, I've heard other people say it. So those are examples of to get away with unusual structure you are operating inside of genre busting animation, or you're one of the great auteurs


of his generation, right?


I'm not sure I would recommend people blow away structure right out of the gate. I think, you know, the way I I learned to write was I followed very strict structural rules, and then I only once I felt like I understood those did I start pushing the boundaries and wondering what it might look like for me to question structure. What parts of structure are important to me. Parts of the structure are important to audiences and experimenting with that. And I do think that there's the wall is not made of steel, but, you know, between what's correct and what's incorrect, I think it's the rubbery. I think you can push and pull a little bit, but it's different for every project.


Ethan Sawyer  1:02:37  
Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about like, as you're sharing those, I'm going there are a couple structures when it comes to, like, students working on college essays that work. There's this sort of classic narrative structure, which is like, the challenge and then the impacts, and then here's what I did about it, and here's what I learned. And then there's this sort of like, what I would call a montage structure, which is like, here's some different moments from my life, and they're connected by this common thematic thread. Yeah. I


Dave Callaham  1:03:03  
mean, remember, I in college, was an English major and was mostly focused on, like, Comparative Literature, and that just means essay writing, essentially. And there is very strict structures that I was told I had to follow, and I messed around a little bit, but generally, my writing career and my writing experience as a human has been one of learning structure and sticking to structure. In college, in essay writing, in creative writing, in screenwriting for the majority of my life, up until a moment where it was finally time for me to explore around it. But, you know, I do believe pretty strongly that you have to learn structure before you can explode it. And


Ethan Sawyer  1:03:47  
how does that fit for you, in terms of the way you like to do things like in life, like, are you sort of like, you know, are were you sort of like, yes, give me the structures. Or were you one to be like, I was more resistant than like, No, I want to do it my own way. Like, what has been your relationship? I guess, to structure my


Dave Callaham  1:04:04  
personality type generally required. I'm


like a dog, I


guess, like, you know, they always say, like, no. Dogs


want a structure. They want


they need it. They like being in the crate. Yeah, I feel a little unsafe when I don't know what the parameters of something are at all. And so, you know, my memory of it might be a little hazy now in terms of, like, essay writing, but I want, I always want to know what the rules are. And it's only fairly recently that I felt comfortable enough with myself to know I can get away with breaking some of them without being, you know, like, bad, quote, unquote.


But yeah, I generally


so I want to know what the rules are. And then almost immediately, after hearing the rules, I will have a moment where I go, you can't tell me rules. Yeah, I do have that part of me, but so, like, it's a little bit at odds. I am, like, visual. I present as a person who might tell you, like, I don't live by any rules, but it's all it's all fake, it's all just, you know, armor I wear because of who I was when I was younger. And, yeah, the truth is, both of those things can be true, like I get sex. The duality of who I am is, I need structure. I need rules. I want to be a good person. I want to, I have a very strong moral compass. I want to, you know, do what I'm told. And I also want to push back, but I want to push back in a safe way. I want to push back what I don't, what I don't have in me is like, like, the desire to ever write a script that is, like, totally avant garde. It will always be reflective of the classic structure and just you will always be able to identify where the train track, where I left the tracks, versus something that is just amorphous. I don't have the ability to do that. I'm so in awe of artists, musicians, especially when you hear something that's just like genre busting in a way that you've never heard of before. I think I have an ability to have a very unique voice inside of set structures. I'm not sure I have the ability to change the notion of screenwriting, yeah. But


Ethan Sawyer  1:06:15  
so you mentioned armor and sort of like the way that you present, will you out yourself for a minute. Like, what are some of the ways that you mean, like, when you say, the armor, or the ways that yeah, like when you say, yeah, what? How do you present? And then what is actually true? I've


Dave Callaham  1:06:29  
been told that I present as very intimidating.


Ethan Sawyer  1:06:33  
Why do you think that is because


Dave Callaham  1:06:36  
I am covered in tattoos, my arms, my neck, is probably the area that really triggers people to suspect that there's something dangerous about me. I have long hair that's tied into what would be called a samurai bun, probably, if I was Japanese. I have a lot I wear. I have earrings. I don't know. I think I


Ethan Sawyer  1:07:03  
look you also Dress cool. Sure,


Dave Callaham  1:07:06  
I wear a lot of T shirts, black T shirts,


Ethan Sawyer  1:07:09  
but like, cool, black T shirts, cool, black T shirts. I


Dave Callaham  1:07:12  
do have a story about that that


might be relevant,


all of which is to say that this is what makes me feel comfortable, and how I feel safest. And I think that there is definitely a part of it that the part of me that enjoys, like, sending the message, like, please leave me alone. Yeah? Because I'm I'm scared of the world, yeah? But usually, when people get to know me, they do almost everybody who's gotten them, you know, like, going into the life of a parent has, like, has been a very wild experience for me, because it changes the way you interact with the world entirely, right? And I was tattooed before I had a kid, but became more tattooed afterwards, because I think I just became more comfortable and more confident in myself. But that also means that, like, a lot of the situations in which I'm meeting people are now like, parent based. It used to be like, the only times I meet people at work or socially, or


Ethan Sawyer  1:08:04  
that's like 80% of us hanging out too, is like, we're


at school, and now it's just like, go to


Dave Callaham  1:08:09  
a school event and I meet other parents, and everyone's a little nervous, and you're thinking, like, what are these people gonna be like? And I suck with these people for 12 years, and I get those and I've made wonderful friends like you, and a lot of great people along the way, at the school we're at now, the preschool we were at previously, and but almost every single person that I become friends with along those people, both of those situations, have told me, like, oh boy, I took one look at you, and it's like, there's the scary dad, but you're not scary at all. Thanks.


I guess it's working


allows me to choose,


yeah, the story I think I should tell, though, is that at the same period of my career where I was starting to feel a little flustered by structure and by not expressing my full voice that I was describing earlier, when I turned 30, so I broke in pretty young as a screenwriter. I broke in when I was, like 24 so when I turned 30, I thought, okay, 30 is grown up. 30 is a real man. I've been, you know, playing things a little fast and loose. I've been acting a little immature. I think, not taking jobs as seriously. I don't think, I don't think I was as professional as I wanted to be, and so when I turned 30, I thought, Okay, it's time to grow up. So I went out and went to the Grove, and it's a mall in Los Angeles, and I bought a bunch of, like, pleated khakis and button up shirts, wow.


And like shoes


I ignore. I'm a flip flop guy.


I bought, like, nice shoes, and I built this whole wardrobe. This is what a 30 year old, grown up professional looks like, and I did not have any visible tattoos. I had lots of tattoos, but they I had been very carefully making sure that they were all obscured, like the back of my neck was tattooed. I. To the exact line where a button up shirt would go, yeah? Because I'd had, like the artist, draw a line right there, and said, Do not go past this line, yeah. I don't want people to be scared of me. And I then proceeded to have the worst year of my career, because every year I went into I was cosplaying a person that I wasn't right. I was pretending this. And some people are very comfortable in that particular outfit, and that is who they are, and they're confident in meetings, and that gives them a power. It took my power away, and I felt awful. I felt like I left every single meeting like, boy, I don't I don't even know who they think I am. I'm not sure I know who I am. After a year of it, I said it's not working. I'm just going to go fully in the opposite direction and where exactly I'm going to look exactly like I feel on the inside. And so I started wearing basically a uniform of jeans and a T shirt, and I grew my hair out, and I was like, I've always wanted, like, my tattoos, to extend beyond this, and I was scared, and I'm just gonna do it, and we'll see if they hate it, they hate it, but at least I'm like, being honest with myself, because I do not want to feel like I fell for that year, right? And that was a very eye opening experience, because I and I think it's twofold, I think that I felt much more comfortable. Yeah, I felt like I was going into those rooms loose and like, Hey, man, this is who I am, and this is what you get. I will say I do also think that there was an effect on studio execs where they are, like, I'm I'm the librarian. I don't want to hire a creative person who is also an accountant. Like, I want someone who looks like a psychotic genius, right? Right? Right? Like, I want someone who looks just creative, right? I want to tell my boss I hired the guy who looks like he works down the hall from us. I want to tell my boss I hire the person who's totally, you're not gonna believe, like, how wild this person is. I'm not saying that that's how I present, but I do believe that there's an element of that that helped me anyway. That's my story about why I now, why I present the way. I love that God. I


love that who I am. And it is also


Ethan Sawyer  1:12:07  
beneficial that to me, feels like another,


not resisting, finding themes, another voice, finding moment, and I don't mean your writerly voice, but just the who you are, sort of identity. And it was like, well, here I'm going to present in this way. And that's stayed mostly, and maybe it was just so comfortable


Dave Callaham  1:12:26  
physically now, and like, when I look in the mirror, you know, I don't know this is like a whole other conversation, what you feel of yourself and you look in the mirror, but when I look in the mirror now, there's no there's no stranger, there's there's no disgust of, look at that puny little kid. There's no, I wish I could be something else, you know, which we all have versions of experiences along the way, like, you know, I mean, there's things I don't love about myself, that we're, that's, that's the human condition. We're always trying to work on that interior and exterior. But I will say that I do feel like I said before. Like, I feel like the what you see when you look at me is pretty much how I feel, yeah, which is important to me. Yeah. You know, it really affects, like, how I go out in the world when I'm when i My wife always laughs when we go to a wedding, and I'm like, Oh God, I have to put on a monkey suit, you know? And I make a big joke out of it. But the truth is, I can wear a suit, but I you will find that you are getting a like, a socially different


version of


me than getting right now, because it makes me feel buttoned up and not quite as myself as I'd like to do totally,


Ethan Sawyer  1:13:43  
totally Yeah, at a wedding last week, and I had the same feeling of like I'm in a costume. And so back to rules for a second. And as it relates to writing, what were some of the rules? As it were, of the Marvel Universe that you feel okay, we've got to make sure that we do these things, and yet, there's still this desire to, like, tell this story that you're excited about. Like, yeah,


Dave Callaham  1:14:11  
well, it just the same. It's not like, Marvel will give you a literal list of rules. They're very, I think, a thing that has led to their successes. They're very free, wheeling and open to new ideas and to change right? The thing that I love about them is, once they hire, the people that they hire, generally, they'll they trust you. They say, We hired you for a reason. If you believe in this and you are willing to stand up for it, go do it. Now, if it doesn't work, we're gonna chop your legs up the first chance we get, but we're gonna give you the opportunity, and I love that. And so in terms of, like, the larger rules of the universe, I think what they they don't tell you anything. They just don't think, they assume that you understand. Look, I'm not writing in a vacuum where it's a singular story that just happens in its own little world, right? There are. Or, I don't know how many movies now, but 20 something movies that have come before that have very clearly laid out certain things that have happened in this universe. There are things we respect rules of, you know, yeah, like, there are superheroes in this world, for example. There are aliens in this world, for example, that not only aliens, but aliens that everybody is aware of. Everybody in this world one time, had either vanished into thin air for five years or had all of their friends like we all, spoiler alert, we need to be told that these are the like, right? This is the world I'm operating inside. So there's those rules that just the understanding that you were operating inside of that, and you are to be you know, you might need to reference those things every now and again, and again. And you should also be respectful of those things, right, right? You can't just go half cocked and change things just because you want to, or violate, you know, sort of the rules. And then there's, you know, sort of also unwritten tonal rules, which is just to say, Marvel movies, generally, they can take a lot of forms, like there's black panther, which does lead more into like ideas of identity and colonialism. And then some of the Captain America movies, the earlier ones, trend more towards political thrillers.


But even inside of that,


I think every Marvel movie has action, has heart and has humor. There's not a lot of like if you as an example of what they're not, if you look at some of the movies that DC was making at the same time, some of the Zack Snyder movies there were he made, a couple of pretty humorless Batman and Superman movies have their fans, and they're great in their own ways. Maybe didn't resonate financially in the same way that the Marvel movies did, and draw your own conclusions. But point being, you would have no one would ever have allowed you to make that tone of movie, that Marvel if you came in and tried it.


Ethan Sawyer  1:16:59  
You know, what I realized as we're talking is it lacks that self awareness, but you see, to greater or lesser extent, you know, one like four, love and thunder, which goes way to like that. We were, we are making a movie, and we're having fun, and look at us, you know, in a way that I find really delightful. I'm curious. Let just to drill on because we talked about this right before we started recording. And when it comes to, like, fight scenes, will you talk a little bit about the how a fight scene, like, what did you learn about fight scenes? Or how did you play with it? For example, in Shang chi,


Dave Callaham  1:17:28  
Shang chi was like, for me, the ultimate opportunity to show everybody like this is my number one skill set as a writer, is fight sequences. Even though I find it rather boring to write fight sequences, and I believe that that's happened because I my writing career as a screenwriter started with more serious action and then segue into action comedy. But when you're writing more serious action, you have to learn how to write action, and most people can't do it. A lot of times you'll open an action screenplay, and what I'll say is, like, there's a fight here. Yeah, right. And you can get away with that, because the truth is, no action movie that you will ever see. The action on screen will never be based solely on the words on the page. There is a stunt team and a stunt coordinator who comes in and designs a fight sequence.


I've also dabbled in the martial arts.


So I have, like, personal experience. I know what it is to be punched and kicked in certain parts of my body. I know what it is to be choked unconscious, like I so between the history of writing action and personal experience. So I've never been in a street fight. But, you know, I know less than those people, and more than a person who has never been showed unconscious, and I bring that as well. And then I started writing comedy, so I started bringing that into the action. And so by the time I was hired at Marvel, I was like, you, you got the guy, I know how to do this and what I do now.


Ethan Sawyer  1:18:56  
Yeah, what is it that you know what? Why is it? Why are you good at it? So


Dave Callaham  1:18:59  
why I'm good at it is I know what the right because I again, you can write action scene happens here, and you'll get away with it. But if you are trying to write something again to the point I was making earlier, that is fun to read and makes you feel like I got I understand what this is. I know what this movie is. I know what the writer is trying to convey. I need a director to be able to read it, know exactly what I'm telling him or her, so that they can go shoot, or if they have a different idea, then I'll rewrite it. But I want there to be an expression of what the fight sequence is, and what I mean by that is that means, for me, a general description of the action on screen, which means, with that bus sequence as an example, you write all of the setup, you write the interaction that leads to the fight. And then the guy, in this case, has a sword for a hand that's important to note. And then, you know, instead of writing punch for punch, he throws right across the other guy slices. Then the other guy does a kick, and then a left cross, and then a jet like there are people who write like that too, and maybe that works for them. I find it boring to read. What I write is the fight begins, and very quickly it's apparent that Shang chi isn't or Sean in this moment in the movie, is an absolute Marvel like you. You have never seen anybody fight this quickly with his hands, and that's important, because what I'm actually doing is not describing the fight. I'm describing the story of what's happening for Katie. Yeah, because Katie thought that Sean was a valet who had never been in a fight in his life. And suddenly this mask, not literally, but this proverbial mask is coming off, and she is seeing something she didn't know people could do, and it's her friend doing it who she didn't know. And so I'm telling you the story of the fight, instead of the beat for beat of the fight, right? And then it just progresses. And so as I'm getting further into that, the story has to progress. And now he's in real danger. And now Katie's experience, and I'm telling all this to Katie's experience, because the truth is that's who this fight was for. So it was a moment in the movie where do you realize, like, this person's not who you think they are? Yeah, Sean knew he was that person deep down inside here. We


Ethan Sawyer  1:21:14  
just didn't know yet. And Katie is standing into the audience exactly


Dave Callaham  1:21:17  
right? We are learning this thing about Trump, and


Ethan Sawyer  1:21:19  
sometimes it's flipped, right? Sometimes we know Spider Man is, you know, has got this power, but we need to the joy is watching them learn it for a fun thing


Dave Callaham  1:21:27  
in an action movie is when you have the when you know who John Wick is and the bad guy is like, Hey buddy, yeah. And you like, oh, here we go. That's always fun, too.


And so then the move, the fight progresses,


and the story is changing, and now there's real danger. And then I start focusing on, how do I raise the tension of the fight now that the story is pretty well established, and that looks like the brakes get cut, the driver is knocked down, right, like all these increasingly insane things happen that require Sean to react in different ways. So now he's showing that he can fight. He's keeping himself safe. He's keeping civilians safe, right? He has to save other people. Everybody run to the front. Everybody around the front. And so that's what I'm trying to I want you to feel the excitement. I really like that bus sequence, and I have been told that a lot of people, people told me that they think it's one of the better Marvel action sequences, and I'm really proud of it. And you know, the goal was always to make it feel on the page like it felt when you watched it, so that there was never going to be a quick every single person who works in the movie knows exactly. Okay, I got it. I know what they're going for. Because if I just write a fight sequence, happens here. It could be anything, and it could be completely it could be a rad fight sequence that does not feel like it's part of the same movie, right? If it's not telling a story or relating to the characters. So those are the things I'm looking for when I write action. I'm looking for what is the characters perspective, what is the story of the sequence. And then, on top of all of that, I love escalation of stakes, the movie I always cite when I talk about this, I get laughed out of the room every time but Pirates of


the Caribbean two


opens, or somewhere inside of the first many hours of filmmaking, there's a very long sequence where Jack Sparrow is on an island and he's being rescued by his friends, and there are probably, probably the depiction of the people that he's the captive of is probably not appropriate at this point In what we know about how to make movies, but he's trying to escape, and he's got this big stick stuck to his back, and he first one thing happens, and then another thing happens. And right when you think it couldn't get any worse, another thing happens, and the creativity of that type of action


storytelling, I


find really intoxicating, just like you think you know what it is, and then it's worse, and then it's worse, and then it's worse. And that's like, just really classic, going back to your nerd stuff, like, that's just classic scene work. That's


Ethan Sawyer  1:24:10  
crazy mistakes,


Dave Callaham  1:24:11  
that's comedy where the joke gets funnier and funnier and funnier. That's drama where the tragedy gets more and more tragic. That should still apply to action.


Ethan Sawyer  1:24:20  
What did you What did you write your college essay about? Okay,


Dave Callaham  1:24:23  
the caveat here is, I wrote my college essay 30 years ago, uh huh, and it no longer it either no longer exists anywhere, or exists solely on a floppy disk somewhere inside of my parents basement or


Ethan Sawyer  1:24:39  
on this podcast is about to exist right now. So


Dave Callaham  1:24:41  
So I have not revisited my college essay, and I don't remember much about the mindset I might have been in when concocting it. I wrote my college essay about my admiration for a Norwegian speed skater named Johan olive costs. Yeah, like you do had at the time. I don't know if it was the year of the Winter Olympics or several years after a specific Winter Olympics, but this was a speed skater who had my memory of it is that he was essentially like the Usain Bolt of speed skaters. This guy kind of had been known, but in that particular Olympics, ended up beating people in a fashion that would have previously been thought unthinkable, and shattering records that were never going to be shot, etc, etc. I don't remember. I don't know. Why did I do that? Are you, you know, I'm


Ethan Sawyer  1:25:39  
so curious. I'm so curious, yes, and


Dave Callaham  1:25:41  
I'm mostly asking myself, why did I do that? I don't know that there was a prompt, though, if there was one, it was some version of someone you admire. And I think, Oh, interesting. I don't know. I guess all I can point to there is to say that is pretty typical of an attitude I've always carried with me when answering questions, which is, well, I know what you expect the answer to be, and I'm not going to go against it solely for the sake of it, but because most people are probably going to talk about family members or Gandhi, It's less like for the sake of just being difficult, and it's more just for like, you're gonna be so bored if I tell you about my dad, the surgeon who saves an actual, admirable person. Instead, what I'm gonna do is guarantee that you have not read another essay that's like this, right? And so that's what I did, and I think I wrote it in a style that was pretty similar to what I've been describing along the way, which is a little loose, a little looser than maybe what some people think that they should write for a college essay. You, I don't know what is happening in the world of college essays, right? Well,


Ethan Sawyer  1:26:59  
well, so let me, I want to offer this because as we're talking, I'm like, there's so much that you've been sharing with me in the last hour, plus that feels juicy and feels like so here I'm going to, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to give you a redo here, college essay. Redo ready? So here's the prompt, because I would be curious to hear you think through if I were to say to you, you had to write a page now. And the prompt is something like, describe the world you come from and how it's shaped your dreams and aspirations. I'd love to just hear your thought process, because that's that is a prompt that,


Dave Callaham  1:27:35  
yeah, this is not unlike what I do for a living, too, which is interesting, I uh, or not interesting, I don't know, not interesting, interesting


Ethan Sawyer  1:27:42  
to me, interesting to you. And that's okay, everybody


Dave Callaham  1:27:44  
else. My instinct the minute you said that is, I start thinking as you're still asking the question. Because professionally, when someone says, What would you do with Mortal Kombat? I'm already doing that. And my instinct immediately was like, Oh, I would describe a fantasy world, I would describe like this, this collage world of all of my interests as a real, physical space where I am living in an A place where heavy music is playing and professional wrestlers exist in the same place as Dante and I would try to express all of the things that I think, and, you know, my Asian heritage and all of these things, is there a way for me to get all of that into a globe that I can then describe myself standing inside of? That's how I would have attempted to do that. Yeah, which I think my instinct to do that again comes from the same place of I think it'll be more interesting, and I think it'll be more expressive, even if it's not as literal.


Ethan Sawyer  1:28:52  
Yeah, I love hearing that, and it's so I feel so aligned with you on this. And part of like when we when I work with students, it's about, how do you get all of that stuff? How do you get the heavy metal music and the interest in wrestlers and HVAC systems? Yeah, and


Dave Callaham  1:29:06  
the answer is, you can't do that in a page, unless you get weird. Get weird, yeah, unless you start using fragmented sentences and poetic imagery. So that's what I would attempt.


Ethan Sawyer  1:29:18  
Yeah. So it seems like, in terms of the phase of writing this, there's this sort of getting weirdness, which I would call brainstorming, and then at some point there comes All right, let's, let's figure out how all this connects or makes sense, right? So I'm assuming, but tell me how it goes for you when you're writing. Let's say you were to write something that is like a personal statement. How much time do you spend in the sort of get weird brainstorming time, and then before you're like, All right, let's, let's get in and figure out how all this stuff connects.


Dave Callaham  1:29:50  
I'll spend as much time as I need to in the brainstorming stage to make sure that it's not going to bore me to death to write. That's, that's the other thing I haven't mentioned, is I have. Write it right? And writing can be tedious, right? As an exercise, because it's a you're physically in one place, and you're looking at a screen that's inevitably breaking your brain. So yeah, I will very this is a big part of my process. Actually, is okay, I have to write a treatment. A treatment. A treatment is the most boring thing you could write. A treatment is a basically just prose explaining the script that you're going to write later, without any of the emotionality, right?


Ethan Sawyer  1:30:31  
It's sort of like the summary. It's like the 10 to 20 page, like, here's what this what you can expect.


Dave Callaham  1:30:35  
Wait. So I will sit down and I'll think, like, what is my approach to this that's going to make this readable, but also like achievable for me without wanting to blow my brains out, right? So I would do the same thing. In this case, I would make sure in my head I really understood what the approach would be. I'm much. I do outline a lot when I'm trying I outline for the purposes of story, I outline. Here's the story beats. Shawn, chi does this, and Shawn, she does that, and then there's a Fauci in here. I don't outline for structure generally. Like, I have a pretty good ability to in my head go like, Okay, I think I know what the introduction is going to look like, and I'll combine that with just winging it and trying things. I'm very willing to try a bunch of stuff on the page. But I always tell people, this applies to treatments. This applies to scripts. It applies to writing that is non creative that I still sometimes might end up doing if I'm an example would be like an arbitration letter that we have to do sometimes. There's an arbitration process that the Writer's Guild goes through when you are determining credit, and you have to write a letter to the Writers Guild explaining why you should have your name on the movie. That's not a legal brief. Yeah, super boring. But the same thing is true, which is, I always tell people, the first thing that you get from me in your brain will be a first draft, because it's the first time you've seen it. It will be the 50th draft that exists, right? You will. I will iterate on myself. I will change literal punk. I will experiment with different punctuation on every sentence of everything you've ever read, and by the time you've seen it, I'm confident, like no, the exclamation point was, right? You know, that's how I do it, so I'm willing to forego a lot of work upfront, outlining and planning and more, finding it in the rewriting, in the editing. Awesome.


Ethan Sawyer  1:32:39  
If you could, if you could go back and do college again? What would you do differently? Do


Dave Callaham  1:32:43  
college again? I had a great college experience. I will say. I went to the University of Michigan, which is a very, very large school. It's a great school. It's a great it's a great research facility, it's a great academic program. And obviously a lot of people are familiar with the school because of the same reason that I went there, which is it has really cool sports teams that do very well, which was important to me, because the result of that is not just that you get to watch football, it's that the entire campus, many times a year, gets swept up in a singular tidal wave of emotion and spirit and pride, which feels really exciting. So I wanted that large college experience, and I went to college in Michigan from the Bay Area, specifically to live life. I was looking at college as less of an academic pursuit and more as a time to learn how to be a human pursuit. I was pre reserved. I had, you're not asking this, but I think it's relevant. I, you know, I was very academic, but I was not great socially. Coming out of high school, I had never been to a party, not that a party is the critical element of college, but I hadn't been to one, and I didn't know how to make new friends. I'd had the same friends for my whole life because I grew up in a small community where my friends were basically just assigned to me by virtue of being having parents in the same socio economic environment, and they also weren't the popular kids. So for me, college was I need, I need to live life. I need to know what it is to wake up on my own in the morning and feed myself, meet new friends, to challenge myself academics. I was like, that'll be the easy part for me. And it was, and it was because I dropped out of the honors program the minute I got there, did my English thing? It was which I was good at. I didn't, and that's the thing I think I would change, which is so I did. I did a, I think, a very good job of learning to be a person and having great experiences. I looked very fondly back on college and make great friends. What I didn't do was because I was so far in the zone. Of trying desperately to live and be social. I always thought of the academics at college as, like, whatever, right? And I got a great English education there. I like, there was some there's obviously excellent, excellent professors and resources at a school like that. But I met what I didn't understand fully about college until my senior year was like, you don't have to just take the classes that you're supposed to take, right? You can take. I mean, I don't know, I don't know how all colleges work, but at Michigan, as long as I check off X amount of boxes to get the degree that I'm supposed to get, which I do need to do, then there's all this other space, and I have to fill it with credits of some kind. And when senior year was the first time, I was like, they have art here and spoiler at the University of Michigan, yes, there is art. Turns out it's on a different campus, which is why I didn't know about it, and why I was had always, like, reserved myself from exploring it. So I was like, I'm gonna take an art class. So I got on a bus every day, and I drove up to the North Campus, and I took jewelry making. I took a drawing class. I got back into my interest in biology, knowing that I couldn't major in it, but there were a lot of interesting classes inside of the major that I just could take. So I took, took a class called sharks. Wow, that was interested. You know, I just took a lot of weird classes that were specific to my interest. The thing I will, you know, I guess a thing I would just say about myself is that I am, and we joke about how much I like HVAC as an example. The reason I like HVAC is because I have HVAC in my house that I need to know how it works. But more specifically, when I go on, like, my Instagram, one day, I was influenced, like, the algorithm served me up an HVAC influencer. Oh, cool, which I did not know existed, yeah, like, a guy who's very popular in the HVAC world, and I just spent hours looking at all of his stuff. And then I was like, Well, who does he follow? Right? Like, all of which is, say, I have, I'm very intellectually curious in things that aren't the things that are central to my life I really love, and I'm super interested in, like, and not everything. I'm not interested in Bitcoin. I'm interested in but, and I don't know what it's gonna be until I find it. But like HVAC, I don't know why I am interested. I want to learn more. I wanted to learn more about sharks. And my point is, at a place like the University of Michigan, if that is the type of college environment you end up in, essentially, anything you can think of is probably available to you totally, either through direct classes or extension classes or campuses that might you know, in the example of Michigan, there are other campuses that you can take classes at as well. I am assuming things have changed radically from even when I was in college, and now there must be a lot of online opportunities, but also you can take that lesson social and go back to the thing. I went there for I made a lot of friends, and I went to a lot of parties, and I went to a lot of football games. What I didn't do was join a lot of clubs. What I didn't do is explore a lot of, you know, outreach beyond just being a social person. And I think most colleges have a lot of opportunities for that too. You know, my brother went to Michigan as well several years after me, and he had a very bad time. He didn't, he didn't explore anything even less than I did and and what I always tell people about Michigan is like, yeah, it's one of those places I a lot like LA is actually, I think of like LA as a city, yeah, if you can dream it, it's probably here somewhere, but you do have to work to find it sometimes, and you might have to step outside of your comfort zone to get to it. You know, if you want to go snowboarding and at the same day end up at the beach, you can do that in LA, not easy, but you can do it. You know, in Michigan, I just, I felt like I look back on it now, and I knew then to a degree, but I look back now having a much greater understanding of sort of like the world. I think, yeah, it was. It's all right there. Some of these college campuses are like small worlds to themselves. They're international students there, there. There's just so much going on. So I would have liked to have explored more, because I only found out I like HVAC from Instagram. Like, what if I had found that out in college, we wouldn't even be here? No, maybe, but we'd be talking about something different. I want


Ethan Sawyer  1:39:26  
to hear from your perspective. How do you think Hollywood's doing in terms of representation now? Like, what grade does Hollywood get?


Dave Callaham  1:39:34  
I will say that this is just my experience of it. I you know, I know that everybody is having different experiences with representation right now, so I want to be careful about that. I mean, look, I I've been doing what I've been doing for 20 years, and I think unequivocally representation has is better. I think that Hollywood is doing better than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. I mean, that sounds obvious, but it. It's not always obvious. I don't think 10 years ago, I would have said that of the previous 10 years, you know, I think that there's, I think there's been some very public movements towards putting more types of people on screen, different faces, different bodies, different experiences, different stories. And I think that's great. I think it's super important, you know, I It's interesting because with Shang chi as an example, because it's maybe the most, best example of representation on screen that I've worked on. You know, sometimes people don't understand why it's so important and, and it's only when I have to explain, like, imagine, like, the way that you grew up and everybody you saw on screen looked like, believed that you could be any of those things. The only thing I believed I could be based on Western media was like, like, an Asian man can't be an NFL player, an Asian man can't be a rock star. An Asian man can't be a movie star. He can maybe be a sidekick, and he can maybe be the butt of jokes. Like, imagine what that does to somebody. So that, to me, is why representation is super important on screen. Like, even I've had people I've said I think we're doing okay. I think we're doing better. I think it's good the direction we're headed in. And I've had people push back and say, we have so much further to go. It's like, of course, we have much further to go, but Shang chi is super important. Black Panther is super important, you know. And it's not just superhero movies, but those have a very wide audience reach, which is also important, crazy, Rich Asians before us. So I think that it's getting better. I think that people are more open to hearing stories when on the pitching stage, at the studio level, of people that don't look like them, and they're more aware now that there are audiences for


larger, diverse groups.


I do think there's still quite a bit of hesitance to actually spend money on those projects and put them on screen. I hear all the time about things that seem really obvious to me that are still have butting up against it, but, you know, I think we're doing better. What is it


Ethan Sawyer  1:42:10  
going to take when you hear folks say, well, we've got so much work to do. What are some of the things that will have to shift? Do you think it's


Dave Callaham  1:42:17  
just about being normalized? You know, I think that the reason people just don't bother making an Asian led superhero movie for the entire history of Hollywood. And I know there have been Asians in superhero movies, and I know, obviously outside of Hollywood, there's been plenty of movies that center Asian heroes, but it's just no one ever like if you don't notice, what's not there if you're not looking for it, and especially if you are a white male, as an example, there's so much other stuff for you being presented that you wouldn't maybe notice the what's not there for somebody else. And so the more you see those types of things, the more you know an Asian story is always going to I'm going to be very aware of all the Asian led movies that are out there, because I'm an Asian person who's looking for movies that speak to that part of me. But Black Panther opened my eyes in a certain way. And I think that, you know, if we can get more movies that are not just about like the ethnicity or the color of the skin of the person, but also, if we're talking about, like, able bodiedness versus disabled people, disabilities, or, you know, gender fluidity, all that kind of stuff, I think that would probably be a place I'd like to see a lot of improvement. And then the only way that that can be improved upon, I think, is if we just slowly normalize differentness inside of society, it's the only way to get people like right now, I don't imagine a week I could convince a certain type of person in Arkansas to go see a certain type of movie about queer identity, but maybe in a couple of years, if enough of the conversation is being had constantly. They no longer have the aversion to it or thinking of it as strange or niche. It's just another story. Why wouldn't we have stories for everybody?


Ethan Sawyer  1:44:11  
Is there anything that you people don't ask you about as it relates to screenwriting that you kind of love to talk about?


Dave Callaham  1:44:18  
I mean, my the soap box I like to stand on. Thank you, Ethan, for asking. Now's your chance is I just want to impress upon the general public, if I may, that the movies that you see are not the screenplays that are written, and that is meant both to defend writers, but also to not give us too much credit, sometimes credit is due, and sometimes it is not. But I think there's a there's a real misunderstanding, and this is reflected when you see people talking about movies, which everybody does now, and everybody always has, but now, with the advent of social media, I lucky me, I get to know. What every single person alive thinks of the movies I write, anytime, day or night. This is just be, I know what Roger Ebert thinks. And now it's, you know, if I were to look, I could find out, and I will frequently see, I saw this movie that the screenplay sucked. And I just, every time, I just want to say it might have sucked, but it also might not have sucked. And I feel very, very strongly that a screenplay is a different product from a movie. It is a part of the ingredients. The final product of a writer is part of the many ingredients that go into the final product of a film. But they're not the same thing, meaning I write a script, you could take a great script of mine hypothetically, because that doesn't usually exist, but you could take a great script and now there are so many other processes that have to happen to that script. You have to have a budget to be able to find locations that match what's on the page. You have to be able to do stunts, you have to find actors who may or may not be able to capture the essence of what's on the page, and by the end, the result could be terrible or great or just very different. More often than not, you could also take a very bad script, get several of the best actors in the world wing it on a couple of days, have a great dp and result and come out with a masterpiece, right? Those are it's harder to do that, because at some point you need good structure again. But all of, all of which is simply to say, I am appreciative when people tell me that they love the movies that I've written, and I'm always glad for it, and I don't take it personally. If they don't, I just want to say what you love is the movie. And if you're interested in knowing what screenplays look like, or judging screenplays, the screenplays are very readily available online now. And I'm always, I would always encourage people who are interested in filmmaking and like, know what those look like too, right? And it's, it can be connected. If you the if you were to read the screenplay it for the social network, you'd be like, yeah, uh huh. I understand entirely how a wonderful movie came out of this. But that's not only because of the excellent, excellent screenplay. It's because an excellent director then made every correct choice along the way to get it to the


Ethan Sawyer  1:47:18  
screen. Is being a screenwriter all it's cracked up to be. Excuse me,


Dave Callaham  1:47:28  
yeah, for me, I've had a really


fortuitous, lucky, hard, working career, and I've learned a lot along the way, and a lot of the stuff that I had hoped to get out of it, I've gotten so that's lucky for me. At the same time, screenwriting is is like not a totality. It is a Fauci it's a bill. It's literally, it could be an infinite number of jobs, because every single person who does it does it slightly differently. Hopes to get something different out of it. Is going to be doing it at a different moment in time where there are different elements in and out of your control. You know you can control more and more of it. The more you know what to look for, the more you can read the tea leaves. But if I had been doing this exact same job in the 80s, it'd be really different. I was doing this exact same job, same me, 20 years from now, I assume it will be very different then too. But right now,


screenwriting can be really great. It's it's creative.


The reason I started it way back when, to be honest, was just as much wanting to do something creative with my life as it was knowing that a structured nine to five have to go into an office lifestyle was never going to be for me. I was going to want a freedom that allowed me to travel and to have a family and spend time with my family, and to not have to ask anybody for permission if I want to go away for two days. And so it's definitely cracked up for that. I mean, it's been really good to me.


Ethan Sawyer  1:49:02  
What advice would you give to young writers? Young screenwriters were just young writers.


Dave Callaham  1:49:07  
I think the only advice I know how to give to young screenwriters right now, because we are living in a, I want to say a sea change, but it's actually been like a 10 year sea change. Now, there was no streamers when I started. There was still DVD. Everything is changing so rapidly, and now the technology is changing too. So I don't know what. I don't know what movie making and filmmaking in the entertainment industry is going to even look like. So I can't really speak to what a screen layers life will be like by the time that someone currently applying to college, coming out of college, even if that's how fast it's all moving. But I just feel really strongly that I have succeeded by virtue of hard work, which is going to be the case for most anything, I suspect, but also for, as I've described you, being willing to. To be my own voice and not try to be anything other than that. And it can feel scary, because maybe, maybe no one who's done it before you get there has done it the way you want to do it. But it doesn't mean it's not doable that way. You're just going to be the person who does it for the first time that way. I think there's space for that in every facet of life, whether it's professional or personal or anything else. So, you know, I guess my only advice to writers is just like, be the be the writer you want to be, and write about the things you want to write about. Don't write what you think they want. You know, I want


Ethan Sawyer  1:50:39  
to end with some rapid fire questions. I'm just going to fire off a few at you and see what happens. Ready,


best movie of the last five years, Barbie


movie moment that always makes you cry


Dave Callaham  1:51:00  
at the end of Armageddon, when Liv Tyler and Bruce Willis put their hands up to the screens and say goodbye to one another.


Ethan Sawyer  1:51:10  
A book that you wish you had written


Dave Callaham  1:51:14  
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Do you know that book? No, your reader,


your listeners probably are aware of it. It's a it's a book about video game designers that was has been very, very highly rated for the last couple of years. To be clear, I am not capable of writing it. It is astonishingly well written. Awesome


Ethan Sawyer  1:51:33  
guilty pleasure movie.


Dave Callaham  1:51:39  
Almost all my favorite movies are guilty pleasures. How about tremors?


Ethan Sawyer  1:51:44  
Yeah, I do


movie that not enough people have seen,


but is great in your mind,


Dave Callaham  1:51:58  
Hot Rod,


starring Andy Samberg, awesome.


That's a movie that was I was aware of it. It was not financially successful and written off when it initially came out. And when I finally saw it, I was like, How come no one told me about this movie? And so now I try to share the gospel


Ethan Sawyer  1:52:16  
movie that you would like to write before you die.


Dave Callaham  1:52:21  
I don't think I have one of those anymore.


I feel really lucky. I feel like I've explored so much. I'm I'm sure I'm gonna get my car. I'm like, oh, but I'm not pining after anything right now. I don't, I don't want for that, which is really, which is really fortunate for me, that is really cool.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai