Kelly talks to legendary screenwriter John August (“Big Fish,” “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory,” who co-hosts the “Scriptnotes” podcast with Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl,” “The Last of Us.”). They have a new book: “Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are interesting to Screenwriters.”  

You’ve had a very successful career as a screenwriter, but the podcast success is different, right? 

“It is interesting because generally as a screenwriter, every other year or something, you’re out there promoting a movie, a thing you’ve done. But to have an ongoing relationship with a group of listeners who are tuning in every week, it’s just a different thing. I listen to podcasts myself and you feel like you have a relationship with those people because they’re in your ears. It’s such an intimate thing that you feel like you know these folks. And sometimes it’s really jarring then when you see one of those people in real life and like they don’t look like you expect and that voice is coming out of an actual human being, it’s strange. But I’ve loved doing the podcast. It’s it’s weekly therapy for me. It’s a chance to talk about this crap that I love so much.” 

I loved the chapter on giving and receiving notes. At Second City, we have a philosophy of just taking the f’ing note. You don’t have to agree with it, just take it and see if there’s an idea in their you can work with. 

“The notes chapter came out of two experiences. First, as writers, we were constantly getting notes. And so, we wanted to have a conversation about how to ingest those notes, how to ‘take the note’ in Second City parlance. And at the same time, we wanted to have a conversation with folks who were giving us these notes, because we felt like they could be better. Those notes could do better. And so, we went and had a special session with about 20 or 30 different creative executives at DreamWorks and other companies and just had a really open forum about what we hear when we get this kind of note. Here are examples of notes that are actually useful and things that we can implement, and here are notes that are just going to throw us for a loop, and we’re not going to be able to process them. So, it’s both how do you receive a note, but honestly, more crucially, how do you give a note.” 

One of the things I love about working at Second City is that the audience is giving you notes every night in the form of their laughter or non-laughter. 

“So, the ability to get feedback and actually know what’s working with an audience is so crucial. I mean, don’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with that in the book. I will say that for the movies I’ve done with Tim Burton, Tim does not like to be in audience test screenings at all. He hates it. He won’t go. But I will go because I love it. And generally, at that point, I’m seeing this movie for the first time too. I’m seeing this cut for the first time. And so I get to see like, that joke worked. That didn’t work. I get a sense of what the energies are like in the room. And I can be the person with the biggest set of notes to the editor on the way out of that screening. Because I could see it with an audience. I could tell them it was working. I could really feel what it was like with that group. So that’s a really crucial part of the experience for me.” 

Photo Credit: Dustin Bocks 2025