This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. To listen to the podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com. 

Pete D’Alessandro: You're listening to the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast where we talk to screenwriters, screenwriters like this one today who wrote The Theory of Everything, out in theatres now. His name is Anthony McCarten. Thank you so much for joining us, Anthony.

Anthony McCarten: Nice to be here.

Pete D’Alessandro: So I was really impressed by your list of credits. I mean, you were playwright, a novelist, filmmaker, screenwriter with Ladies’ Night, English Harem, Death of a Superhero, lots of stuff that you have under your belt…

Anthony McCarten: It's called an exaggerated desire to express yourself but it's treatable, I'm told, but I haven't found the medication yet.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, maybe they’ll find there’s nothing to medicate, because we're enjoying the output.

Anthony McCarten: [Chuckles] Yeah.

Pete D’Alessandro: So how did you first get interested in writing in general? Because I know that was really during school for you.

Anthony McCarten: Yeah. I wasn’t from a particularly literary household but I desperately wanted to leave school at a certain point. I’d just had enough and there was an announcement that came over the intercom in the classroom and it said, “Anyone interested in a career in journalism, line up outside the science lab,” and me and this other guy, we're the only two in the school who showed up. So I beat this other guy in the contest for the job and I became a journalist, and I kind of learned to write on demand on time and get rid of that, you know, that really, I think, which is a misapprehended idea of inspiration and learning the craft, which in the end is the thing that serves you better - inspiration. If you're waiting for it, whatever it is, then it can be a long time between drinks.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, if you're looking for inspiration then, what were some of the things that were back in your childhood, back in formative years for you that did inspire you – plays, movies, anything?

Anthony McCarten: Yeah. I still remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the little picture house where I was growing…in this small town in New Zealand where I was growing up, and just I remember the curtains going back and back and back and you saw this anamorphic widescreen and this, it was a sort of dimension for the screen and a dimension for the story I'd never had before, and it was really like just a perspective shift and I fell into that movie. And I don't know whether clicked there, but certainly my love of cinema I put back to watching the great David Lean.

Pete D’Alessandro: And then when you wound up getting into playwriting, I mean I know Ladies’ Night was the first thing that really took off for you and it became this massive success, New Zealand, America, all over the world. I mean, what was that like? What was writing that like?

Anthony McCarten: Well, writing for the theatre’s thrilling because it's so visceral and it's so immediate and you're literally in the room, you hear the reactions, and the actors onstage are walking that tightrope and they could fall off any given moment. So it's just an incredibly energetic, exciting medium to work in, so real, so immediate. And I kind of just accidentally fell into it because I was working as an actor in a Shakespeare in Schools program and one of the guys said there's a theatre that's gone black and they need a play, and I was the closest thing that they knew to a writer and they said, “Look, you have four days to write a play.” And I really wasn’t a particularly theatrical or literary person, so I went down to the local library and I asked to borrow…the librarian if she could recommend a play and she gave me Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and said, “That's a perfect example of what a play is.”

So I wrote a very Beckettian play that…it was quite terrible really. It was just full of pauses and meaningful “should I…” and half-finished sentences and so forth. The critics seemed to love it and this work was sort of applauded, and like any young person you're desperately searching for an identity and a vocation and it just takes someone to say that you're actually good at something for all that to galvanize.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what happened with the—the big hit was Ladies’ Night. How did you wind up coming up with the inspiration for that?

Anthony McCarten: Well, a pal of mine came over. He was also a playwright and New Zealand only has about six playwrights, so you're kind of forced together. And he came over one day and he said, “So I had this idea. What about the thing about male strippers?” And I went, “Well, that sounds very tacky to me,” because I had sort of Byronesque fantasies that I was going to be a high-art sort of type of writer. And we spit-balled the idea for a little bit and I came up with a comedic twist on the idea and said, “What about if it's working-class guys who just think they can be male strippers? Then we could have a whole lot of fun with their inept attempt.” And this play really just leapt straight out of the typewriter, because we were using typewriters then, and it has never not had a night where it's being performed somewhere in the world.

And from complete obscurity and a small place at the bottom of the world you realize that being a writer, if you can get that million-dollar idea, that thing that resonates across cultures, the universal constant, then it just explodes all ideas of boundaries and distance and then we're all the same audience. And that was the beginning of my real journey as a writer and my real desire to work with universal themes.

Pete D’Alessandro: So I don’t want to harp on that too long but what happened next in your career beyond that play? Did you wind up getting any work directly out of that?

Anthony McCarten: Yeah, I began 10 years in the theatre writing plays and I had all kinds of success, almost a successful…some of which were just complete flops, and along the way you learn a lot and, as they say, you learn more from the failures than you do the successes often, if only in that you think, “Boy, I'm not going to do that again.” And along the way when you're working in a medium like theatre which is quite high-profile, then usually someone says, “Have you thought of turning one into a movie?” So this was the sort of eventual path into movies, was people planning the idea that that play might be a good movie. So I eventually adapted one of the stage plays to the movies and that sort of began then my real apprenticeship in writing for the screen as opposed to the stage.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what were the big learning curves there to adapt to writing yourself in that format?

Anthony McCarten: Well, the musical language of dialogue was my foremost love and it remains so, but you have to use it in a different way, more sparing, and I had to explore silence in a way that I hadn't hitherto: action silence. And there's a scene in Theory of Everything towards the end of the movie where the couple go from a moment of marital triumph to a complete marital dissolution in one scene and there's only less than 70 words expended in that whole scene, and that whole journey is done really exploring silences.

So that's part of the demands of storytelling in the cinema but also structure. It's an entirely different structural challenge with cinema. You've got far less flexibility. You can't fool around in the same way. People’s patience is exhausted much quicker in the cinema.

Pete D’Alessandro: So how do you handle structure? How do you work for structure when you start a screenplay?

Anthony McCarten: I tend to need to know the ending and then retro-engineer the whole thing. So I don’t start with a concept of an ending. I have an initial idea and it may be something that finds its final place in the middle of the movie. But I never start writing until I know the end of it, and the end tells you how to set up the pre-conditions that will then make the ending the most satisfying ending you need or you can have.

So in the case of The Theory of Everything, I knew the theme would be time, what it does to us, what is time and what effect it has on our lives and our loves, and I struck on the idea that I would have the whole film wind itself backwards at the end, that time’s arrow would turn around. And once I had that I not only had a sort of structural guide, a compass if you like, I also…it provides the inspiration I needed and the safety net to know where I'm going for the writing to begin, and then you can embark on the writing process with a degree of confidence that you need, because it can be a very humbling thing to write a stage play or a screenplay if you don't know where it's going and you sort of run out of steam.

Pete D’Alessandro: And humbling just in the sense that you lose momentum and you can't finish?

Anthony McCarten: And self-doubt creeps in and you go, “I don't know where I'm going with this,” and “Maybe it's a terrible idea,” and “Oh my God, why are my ideas so bad?” you know, “Other people seem to be able to do these movies. Why can't I?” And this can strike you at any moment in your career, but if you have the certainty, almost the guarantee of knowing where the story’s going and loving where you're going to end up that sort of passionate commitment to the structure and the story you're telling, then you're kind of a little bit inoculated against that terrifying self-doubt.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, I guess the one thing I was really curious about when I read about how you kind of discovered the book on your own and you decided you wanted to try to get this made from day one, you were the first person involved, what was that realization for you when you picked up the book that you said, “This is the next thing I'm doing?”

Anthony McCarten: Well, I remember it clearly. I don’t remember exactly the page. That would be a little anal retentive to know the page, but I remember getting halfway through the book and thinking, “Wow, Stephen Hawking is this phenomenal character that is begging for dramatic treatment, but I'll never get the gig. I'm sure he's in talks with all kinds of studios around the world.” And reading Jane’s book, revealed was this one-of-a-kind love story that was so unorthodox for their time, for these people in this time, and their solutions were so interesting and the sort of shape of the love story was something I had never seen committed to the screen before and nobody’s contradicted me on that. The architecture of this love story is actually a really precarious one and it was really delicate, sensitive and complex emotional territory, and I thought, “If I can tell the incredible story of Stephen Hawking and his science and his refusal to be silenced by this brutal disease, but then I can wed in this one-of-a-kind love story…” These kind of stories just don’t come along very often in anyone’s career, so I thought I just had to do something a little bit out of character for me and just try and be a stalker and just beg either Jane or Stephen to give me permission.

And at this point in my career, my credits weren't so impressive that they would be overwhelmed by my achievements and just trust me, so it was a big long trust-building exercise that actually ended up taking eight years and I did it almost uninsured and I drafted the script with no rights, with no control of the underlying rights. So all the drafts and all the work were potentially without value, but there was just this chance at least that never died that they would one day just give me the rights and sign them over to me. And it finally did happen, and once the rights were in my possession then the movie just was off to the races. Everybody signed up for it and we got it made with almost a dream scenario, wonderful film company, fantastic talents, just the people we wanted, and the results and the reactions of people to the movie were what I'd hoped all those years ago.

Pete D’Alessandro: The other part of this I was really curious about with the rights, I mean I know for a little while you got the rights essentially to shop it around, you didn't own everything, you didn't know where that was going to go, but at that stage, I mean, how much of that free writing was going on? How much time were you putting into draft after draft?

Anthony McCarten: Yeah, a lot. I did a lot of drafts on my own and just polishing, refining it. And boy, I had time…I guess one of the consolations of spending eight years waiting to get the rights is you have adequate time to revise, but there's a certain point where you want to bring in other voices. The amount of redrafting I was doing was diminishing every year. I had the script in I thought a very solid state and the finished film is not very different from my original concept of the film and the early drafts, to be honest. So it was more a case of just spending time and money, actually my money because I was producing and bearing all the costs of this thing for all those years until we had it all tied up.

Pete D’Alessandro: How did it wind up becoming all tied up? I mean, they gave you the rights but then you got other people attached.

Anthony McCarten: Yeah.

Pete D’Alessandro: Who was that first set of snowballs that set off the avalanche?

Anthony McCarten: Well, along the journey, and it was 10 years ago now that it began, about five years into it my agent at ICM, he introduced me to another client of his, producer Lisa Bruce, and she became enamored of the whole concept. So she was a real good trooper and she was in the foxhole with me for the last five years. When we had the rights, Lisa had a relationship with Working Title and she sent the script to Eric Fellner of Working Title, and we heard back from him 11 hours later and he said, “Everyone at Working Title’s read it. You should come in for a meeting.” So that's how fast it started to happen once we had secured the underlying rights.

And then the process was to go out for directors and James Marsh was top of the list, and he read it and in double-quick time he came back and signed on. The market was very interested in James about what his next dramatic movie would be, and so we had no problem financing it. And Universal, they were the parent company of Working Title, we didn't necessarily think that a movie about a guy in a wheelchair, who will be the most brilliant man to have ever sat in a wheelchair probably, would interest them, but Universal said, “No, no, we're going to throw the studio behind this as well.” It was just a spark that just suddenly was just a creative fire. And then the casting happened, and then the chips fell very, very nicely for us.

Pete D’Alessandro: So getting to talking about the specifics of the movie, what was it like to research someone who’s this iconic, this famous? I mean, there's certainly no scientist on earth more famous than he is.

Anthony McCarten: Yeah.

Pete D’Alessandro: What was that like to try to do that research?

Anthony McCarten: It's an enormous presumption to put words into the mouth of anybody but to put words into the mouth of the smartest guy in the planet is an enormous leap of faith, but you just have to set that aside. And what I knew is just that he has to have a wit, a sort of impishness and a kind of, I don't know, he's got an incredible sort of rock star charm but he's mischievous and he's always going to surprise you with what he's going to do. So I had this sort of sense of that character very strongly that I was going to play him like that. And then there was Jane who on the surface people underestimated, but she had a spine of steel underneath it all. So I played with that quality, hung on to that very much during the whole drafting of that character.

And then of course you end up having to invent 95, 98% of the dialogue because you're not in the room, you don't know what they said to each other. So it's what I call emotional ventriloquism. You really are just trying to second-guess what the emotions would have been in any moment and how they would have expressed it or, increasingly in Stephen’s case, not expressing it because he simply can't.

And then you end up with a finished movie, and the elephant in the room is that one day Stephen and Jane themselves are going to sit there in judgment on this film. And that day, the inevitable day, did arrive and we had separate screenings for each of them, but Stephen watched it and when the lights came up at the end he wiped tears off his cheeks. He'd had a profound emotional reaction. He takes about 20 minutes to write anything because he can only write now by moving his cheek, and there's a camera on his spectacles and it picks up movement. And we talked as much as we could while he drafted this and it was very tense because he could have said anything, but he came out with the verdict of “broadly true” and later he added to that and said it was a surprisingly truthful portrait of his first marriage. So given all the guesswork that’s involved, you know, you take that any day.

Pete D’Alessandro: When…I mean, we're talking about this personal stuff and these two people who obviously have a lot invested in this movie. There's a lot of personal stuff that I would assume they would probably not want out in the open but…I mean, you've gone through divorce and the remarriages in there. How did you broach that topic with them? I mean, was there any time you had to let them know like this is going to go in the movie?

Anthony McCarten: Yeah. The first thing I laid down with Jane was, “Look, I know you haven't given me the rights to this thing yet but I'm going to proceed on the basis that you will and so that I will have final script control,” and to her credit she understood the reasons for that. She knew that in the end no studio would fund a movie where the subject of the movie had final script approval and could change it because they got nervous or something like that.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Anthony McCarten: But Jane did say to me, “Look, I won't give you the rights right away but you're free to go and write a draft if you want to and I'll read it, and then we'll talk again.” So I wrote. Because Jane’s book had been unflinching, I wanted the script and the movie to be unflinching. So I just put all the good stuff then, all the difficult stuff, stuff that had I been the subject of the movie would have made me squeamish and very nervous. But Jane and Stephen are not your average people and neither of them ever asked to tone the sensitive relationship beats down at all or soften anything or whitewash anything, and in the end they were strong enough to be able to embrace the idea that they would let the world in to their private life and that's extremely brave.

Pete D’Alessandro: I'm curious, you have this book to work from and you get to spend this amount of time with these two people and you see their bravery, you see all of what makes them them – was there a particularly poignant insight you remember from doing that research, from talking to them, spending time with them that makes something different in the movie?

Anthony McCarten: With Stephen it was the sense of humor. When I met him the first time, as I said, just before you have a lot of free time to just speak drivel because he, you know, it's so laborious the time it takes to write even a sentence, and he was giving me an opinion on the script, and while he was writing that and I was watching the words being written I just started cracking a few jokes, and this body which in incapable of voluntary movement almost broke into this big smile. And there's just something wonderful about that and it was a key moment for me because it's almost as if you can lose everything but if you keep a smile on your face, if you retain that ability, you can kind of withstand almost anything. So that was a really telling key moment with Stephen.

And with Jane, we just used to sit around in her front room and she would pour little glasses of sherry and make me sandwiches, and she would tell me stories about her life and the little struggles and huge struggles she had to face. And I remember once she told me, because I had small kids then and when you're getting everyone into a car it's a Sisyphean task sometimes, but I was thinking, “What car did you have?” and she said, “We had a little mini.” And I said, “You had three kids and Stephen in his wheelchair and you had to fit them all into a mini? It's almost like a joke.” And she told me how she managed it and she told me where she put the suitcases, and the wheelchair had to go up on top and she would load everything up on the front row and then sort of work out how to do it. That was in an early draft to the movie, the loading of the car. We didn't actually end up using it, but that moment was something that said everything about the burden, and that was something that sort of guided me, too.

Pete D’Alessandro: I think that actually really comes across with the trunk of the car.

Anthony McCarten: Mm-hmm.

Pete D’Alessandro: When you're on set at some point, what were the biggest challenges when you start shooting? What changes did you have to make on the fly?

Anthony McCarten: One of the things that Eddie brought back from…because he met Stephen a couple of times at the end of his research phase was that Stephen had asked him, “Are you going to do my voice towards the end of the period when I still had a voice?” and of course Eddie said yes he was, and Stephen said with his computer voice, “My voice was very slurred.” And I knew this of course, but Eddie came back and said, “Listen, I want to go all the way with the slurring. I want to be incoherent.” And this sort of suggested the specter of subtitles and none of us wanted to do that with an English-language film, but we came with the idea that, what if Jane is the only one who can understand him and that then would show how reliant Stephen was on Jane for communication with the outside world? So I ran back and we reworked the dialogue so that Jane would be the translator of Stephen, and you see that in the dialogue in many of the later scenes where Stephen says something basically incoherent and Jane repeats it and lets us in on what he's actually saying. So this is a moment where you're alive to the realities that are presenting themselves on set.

And then there's just all the stuff where just someone has a great idea. James had an idea at a certain point that one of the scenes that had been upstairs in the master bedroom should be relocated down into the kitchen because we had in the previous scene shown how arduous it was for Stephen to drag himself up the stairs, and that was a lovely revelation when we showed up on set that we walked in and the master bed was set up in the kitchen. And the actors were totally delighted with this idea so we reset it in the kitchen, and it showed that they were trying to anticipate kind of joyful way the tragic loss of his ability to get upstairs anymore.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, before we wrap up here, I want to ask you, I know you have some big new projects. What are you working on next, can you tell us?

Anthony McCarten: Yeah. I've been asked by George Clooney to write his next directorial effort. I have another big biopic project with Working Title, which is very exciting and we're just signing up an A-list director for that one. And there's another exciting one in the offing about the terrorist attack in Mumbai five years ago where Pakistani terrorists stormed the Taj Hotel in Mumbai and laid siege to it for three days. So they're three tantalizing projects and I'm very excited about the year to come.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, what about novels? Do you have a new novel out this year?

Anthony McCarten: Not coming out this year, but I have done a couple of drafts on a new novel that no one’s ever seen yet.

Pete D’Alessandro: Gotcha, okay. Then, I guess the other thing I'd like to ask before we sign off here is, if you have one piece of advice for writers out there, what would it be?

Anthony McCarten: What is the advice for writers? I don't know. Know your ending before you begin. That's a sort of practical procedural thing. Just wait for that…it's like fishing. Wait for that great idea, and if you get the chance to pursue it go all in. The Theory of Everything would not have come to me, I had to pursue it, and a lot of good things are happening as a result. So yeah, go all in when you find goals.

Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. Alright. Well, Anthony, thank you very much. If you're out there listening, The Theory of Everything is all over the place, theaters and lots of other places you can see it. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been great.

Anthony McCarten: Thanks, Pete.

This podcast was brought to you by Final Draft. When inspiration strikes, strike back. With the Final Draft Writer App for iPad, you can write, read and edit your script anytime, anywhere. Available on the Apple App Store. Be sure to join us next time as we meet new writers and discuss the craft and business of writing for film and television.