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 insider view, a podcast where we talk to writers about writing. I’m your host Pete D’ Alessandro.
Today our guests are the creators and showrunners of the show The Knick on Cinemax, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Their credits include Herman’s Head, Malcom in the Middle, Big Miracle, The Prince and Me, and now their writing The Knick. Thank you so much for being here.
Michael Begler: Thank you
Jack Amiel: Yea. Thanks so much, we’re happy to do it.
Pete D’ Alessandro: So what I want to start with is what got each of you interested in writing? When did this become a thing for you? Jack can we start with you?
Jack Amiel: You know, I’ve always had a facility with language and I’ve always been able to craft words the way I wanted to and I sort of love manipulating them and playing with them.
When Michael and I started out, we started as sitcom and comedy writers, and I was always funny being cue and it looked like the sort of thing that I envisioned myself doing and somehow when we started writing, we sort of encouraged each other. I kept feeling like “are we going to run out of words?” “Are we going to run out of things to do?” “Are we going to run out of things to say?” Michael kept going, “No, no, no, I think people write until they are 100.”
What’s nice is that even though Michael and I wrote separately at times in our lives, we grew up writing together, so that we fill in each other’s weak points and we lean on each other’s skills.
What interested me in it was that I got to tell stories, and it turns out that I got to do it in so many different ways.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s great. So what were some of your early influences in writing?
Jack Amiel: I think for both of us it’s Woody Allen who is a big one. I don’t think any of us can cite anyone more fully. An early influence for me was reading “Portnoy’s Complaint” and feeling like I wanted to have a voice like that.
For me an early influence was definitely that and also Hemmingway. Hemmingway’s “The Nick Adam Stories” really made an impact on me as a kid. Also Jim Carroll, “The Basketball Diaries,” was a really big influence. I think every kid in my school went nuts reading that book then tried desperately to copy all of the horrible, negative behaviors of Jim Carroll.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Michael, how about you? How did you first get interested in writing?
Michael Begler: Well, I guess what it was, was that after college I decided it. I started working in Television on The Cosby Show as a PA and during that time I wasn’t really thinking about writing, I thought, “Hey, why not go to film school, why don’t I try to be a director.” I’ve always loved film and I always loved TV and I thought it would be a really interesting world to work in.
Thankfully I got rejected from all of the film schools that I applied to and then I moved out to LA and that’s when Jack and I sort of partnered up.
I started working as a writer’s assistant on Herman’s Head and that was like going to graduate school for writing. I was in the writers’ room every day; I was learning the craft every day, and then going home at night and applying it with Jack to the various spec scripts that we were working on. It just sort of organically turned into a thing.
Jack and I really clicked in terms of our writing and just working where we started working as early writers was just like a factory. We were working at Witt/Thomas and each step along the way it just kept developing and developing.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s great. So what were some of your early influences in writing? Were they shows that you worked on or other stuff?
Michael Begler: No, if I break it between film and TV, I would say Woody Allen, Kubrick, , Network, Scorsese, and the Coen Brothers. But then on the TV side, I would say St. Elsewhere was probably one of my all-time favorite shows. Hill Street Blues, those dramas, those Bochco-esc dramas was what really sort of spoke to me.
Jack Amiel: I think also when we started out, I don’t know if Michael had this in mind, he may have had a broader horizon than I did, but we just wanted to write sitcoms and we loved them.
For us, Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers were really an extraordinary time for sitcoms.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Yea. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Jack Amiel: And so I think for us, this was the highest form of the art.
Michael Begler: Excuse me. Doesn’t get much better? Did you ever see the show Small Wonder?
Pete D’ Alessandro: I did, I did, it didn’t get much better than that either.
Jack Amiel: No it didn’t. When you have a robot living in your house the comedy possibilities are endless.
But I think for us, sitcom was giant back then. The four cameras, sound stage sitcom was everything on TV. While Bochco was doing great with Hill Street and St Elsewhere, LA Law and that whole MTM family kind of coming out, the real thing for us was also when you look at the landscape that we were looking at which is we were working for Witt/ Thomas, Tony Thomas’ father had been Danny Thomas that had produced everything from Dick Van Dyke, to his own Make Room for Daddy which he had obviously done. We were coming from a family and Danny Thomas had learned from Desilu, so he and Sheldon Leonard had come up through Desilu and came up through Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. So there was a lineage back to that.
What was cool was that we were coming out of all of these groups with the Jim Brooks world at MTM that was coming out of Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda and Phyllis and going into Lou Grant, which was obviously a drama.
You had the other family which was Norman Lear. So you had these three bloodlines going forward that people were coming out of where you had All in the Family, The Jefferson’s, Maude, that was tackling stuff that was extraordinary. So sitcom was and is a very serious art form, especially after Norman Lear stood up and said “No, we can make massive statements here within the frame of comedy.”
Michael Begler: Jack and I grew up in New York so there was channel 5 and channel 11 and these things were just running and running every day and we knew the schedule; we knew when the Honeymooners was on and the Odd Couple. Everything was repeated so much that we basically memorized it.
Jack Amiel: I still worship what a show like the Odd Couple, Honeymooners, or All in the Family could do which is just 2 people, 3 people, 4 people in a room and that the characters are so good and the writing is so good. You don’t need anything else; you don’t need anything extraordinary when the writing, the actors, the directing and honestly it comes down to these extraordinarily well drawn characters. That’s the best lesson any writer can learn.
Michael Begler: Right, there are very little special effects in pretty much all of those sitcoms. Minimal effects; maximum writing.
Pete D’ Alessandro: How did you guys start working together, because I hadn’t got a good feel for that story; how did that happen?
Michael Begler: Well we met at the University of Wisconsin and we were both in a Fraternity together and there was a One Act competition where a fraternity and sorority team up and it was called humor-ology.
You basically took on a theme and you wrote a One Act musical about it and that’s really where we got together for the first time and wrote and basically stole a couple Woody Allen routines, thinking that nobody at Wisconsin in 1988 would know what we were talking about and I think 90% of the audience didn’t so I think we got away with it. We even took the exact line that Woody Allen says in Annie Hall on that stage for our performance, hoping we wouldn’t get struck by lightning.
We had a nice chemistry and were great friends and when we graduated, I went back to New York then, as I said earlier, I worked as a PA at The Cosby show. Jack moved to LA and worked as a PA on various different Fox sitcoms and we would just get on the phone and talk. We were seeing what these people were doing, “why don’t we just give it a shot?”
Jack actually came back to New York, and my parents had a place in Vermont, and we just went up there with this computer that probably took up the entire space of the trunk of our car and held up for two weeks. We wrote a couple of spec scripts, we wrote Roseanne and Home Improvement just to see if we could do it and we went out of there with knowing “Alright, this seems to work.” So I packed up my bags and headed out to LA and we’ve been writing ever since.
Pete D’ Alessandro: What happened up there? How did you guys perform together? I know you mentioned your skills complemented each other, is that something you knew early on? Did you know what you would be getting into?
Michael Begler: I think so. I think our minds work a little differently. I have a very logical mind; I think I can sort of see how things lay out story wise. I think Jack is a lot better with language and the emotional dialogue. He is a little better at it than I am; I feel my dialogue can be a little shorter at sometimes.
I think that we started to see those patterns from the beginning and then we just both started to learn from each other and use our strengths to help the other person while learning “How will Jack tell the story better and how could I learn from the way that he was approaching the dialogue?” So it was probably 50/50 on who got the jokes in.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s a good fight. Jack is that about the way you see it?
Jack Amiel: Yea, I think Michael sees stuff that I don’t see. It’s weird, but there are times that I would literally throw up my hands and go “You know how this is supposed to work right?” Because I don’t see the thing that isn’t working. I just know it’s not working.
Michael sees it and becomes a map to him like a tryptic. And suddenly he sees how things are laid out so he can smooth out the rough parts of the road. He’ll go “You said it four times, just say it once.” There’s a lot of things he does and I think he’s being humble when he says a lot of great moments, like for Eve Hewson in the season when she has a full page monologue, and Michael wrote something emotional and it’s one of my favorite things that we’ve done on the show.
Michael Begler: Thank you.
Jack Amiel: Yea. I didn’t touch it. If anything, I added one or two little tweaks at the end that made the scene a little sickening, but two pages of me just going “Great, Great, Great.”
I think when we started out we each had different strengths. I think we are both neurotic, but Michael is neurotic in a different “get it done” kind of way and I’m neurotic in a “procrastinate” kind of way. So I think we complemented each other in that way too. That Michael just put his head down and does the work sometimes when I’m freighting and that is really important because the ability to write emotions means I’m probably more emotional outwardly than he is; more demonstrative.
I could be pissed off about how to make a note and Michael is working on a different version of it. That’s really helpful because if not then I would be sitting alone in a room wondering if I could be a writer one day.
Pete D’ Alessandro: So what did happen when you got to be a writer one day? You guys broke in on Herman’s Head? Was that the first project that you got together?
Michael Begler: Yes.
Pete D’ Alessandro: What was that like?
Michael Begler: I was working on the show as a writer’s assistant and I remember we would be writing specs and I would tell Jack to go in there and tell them you want to be a writer and tell them you have spec scripts and let’s try to get a script. I was a little timid, but they were accepting and they just gave us a shot. And I think Jack and I still today quote our pitch meeting.
Whenever we come out of a meeting that doesn’t go well, we always come back to the same two words that we got at the end of that one that was very patronizing. We pitched out this whole episode; I’m sure you remember where Herman buys the bar on the Island and we probably pitched for 45 minutes on a 22 minute sitcom. The executive, who will remain nameless but has gone on to do some incredible things said, “Ok, good structure.” That was it. Everything else was just garbage. And even the structure was garbage. So it was really thrilling to get a first script, but it was also very humbling because any sort of ego you might have had goes away, because the entire thing was re-written two or three times before we actually taped the episode, but we were so thrilled to actually have achieved this in a very short amount of time.
I came out to LA in June of ’92 and we got this script in November of ’93, so it was like a year and a half. Once we got that one, we have just worked consistently since then. We just kept hustling. That was the moment we said “We got our foot in the door and we have to make sure that door never closes.”
Jack Amiel: I think that hustle is in our nature. We wrapped The Knick three weeks ago and I was home for a few days and I literally emailed Michael saying, “I’m going nuts man, we haven’t done anything in five days, I’m going crazy.” We were already jumping in on a million of thoughts and ideas we have. I think there’s a Lawrence Kasdan quote that says, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
It completely feels that way, but I can do my job any time. I don’t have to wait for someone to let me do my job. So I think it’s part of our ethos. If we’re not working on something then we’re just wasting time not writing something that we could fall in love with.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Well let’s talk about the something that you guys have fallen in love with in the past few years. Let’s talk about The Knick and how you guys brought that to Cinemax and how that came about.
Michael Begler: It came about creatively and it came about through our career. Career wise, we were actually getting a big frustrated with how things were going. We sort of hit a wall and were pitching on a lot of projects that we weren’t that thrilled about and were felt like anything we were trying was brought to us in a comedy / romantic-comedy type of genre.
Not only that which was being brought to us, but we were going up against 15 different writers so the chances of getting it were so slim and there was a day that we said “We’ve got to do something for ourselves.” It was making us crazy, even if it goes absolutely nowhere, let’s just stretch ourselves and see what might happen. The idea of The Knick came a few years ago before we even started it.
I was going through a health issue and I started going down the road of alternative medicine and just seeing regular western doctors and started thinking about what might my opportunities be 100 plus years ago.
So really out of curiosity, Jack and I bought a couple medical textbooks off of eBay and started looking through them, and they were just endlessly fascinating. But we didn’t anything with it for a while, but when we came to this point in our career we said “well what’s here?” And the more we dived in we couldn’t stop ourselves and it just sort of took off.
Pete D’ Alessandro: So how did you guys wind up formulating the ideas for the show? And what solidified after and what became the show?
Jack Amiel: What happened for us was as we dove into the research, characters began to emerge and characters began to form. I think one of the lovely things to find out was how brutal the era was. Once you start reading the brutality of the era, the infant mortality rate, how often people died under the knife, how new surgery was, you start to realize how new this all was and the effect it must have had on surgeons.
It was this brutal world, but at the same time, I remember something David McCullough said “The 1800’s was a time when people didn’t have self-pity. Everybody would put their heads down and try to improve their lot in life or just live with it.” All of that just kept brewing in our heads and the characters emerged out of conversations that Michael and I would have.
At one point I found a picture of two ambulance workers and I sent them to Michael and said, “These guys look like they would create more patients than they would save.” They were these big broods and what you start to realize is that they’re not there to administer any sort of health care, but there to wrangle horses, drive the ambulance, and if their strong enough, carry a stretcher up and down the stairs with a patient on it. They are really just big broods. So you start to realize, “Wait a second, medicine was very different.”
When you look at all the other pieces of what the American dream was, you realize that this was a city that was frothing with new human life, with immigrants that are showing up with African Americans coming from the south for a better life or Irish people coming to get out from the thumb of the British. You’ve got all of these people coming into New York. Eastern Europeans, different languages, different religions, different ethnic looks, all coming together into a city that everybody wants a piece of their pie. So that also really played into it. Then reading about William Stewart Halsted and reading about Franklin Mall and all of these other doctors; who at the time were experimenting, not only with the surgical techniques, but the medicines of the era and human anatomy.
What you would get are these guys who would take a drug like cocaine that was this miracle drug from Europe that was touted from Sigmund Freud and others that would say “Oh it’s supposed to numb things in your body. Ok, let me shoot it into my arm and see what it does. Well what it does it numbs my hands and numbs the nerves leading down to my hand but I also feel really good.”
Before you know it, these guys are addicted and they’re the surgeons of the day. They don’t realize they are addicted, they just think this stuff is awesome.
Characters really come alive suddenly when you start playing with that and the world really emerged through these wonderful characters and seeing people who could really play off each other and what’s the effect like this on people?
Pete D’ Alessandro: That was one of the things I loved most which was that opening sequence with Dr. Thackery and Dr. Christiansen, is that there is more blood in that scene than there is in any episode of Game of Thrones.
I just kept feeling like it was an overwhelming deluge heading toward him that he is helpless to stop and the futility of everything that he was doing really came across in that scene. Of course immediately afterwards, we see the consequences of not being able to shut that out emotionally where he loses his friend because of that.
I was really amazed by that and it kind of set up the whole tone of the show for me. Was that something that factor in for your guys early on?
Michael Begler: Some of the credit of that and the way it looks definitely goes to Steven Soderbergh and being able to show the amount of blood and watching the bottles fill up, but we also try to be descriptive in our stage direction of how brutal it was and show that there is a futility in what they’re doing.
It is so new, it is so possible, what Jack and I love about that scene is things that are routine today that you wouldn’t think twice, were impossible back then; they couldn’t do it. It was enough to drive them crazy and that drive was something important to establish early on. If you’re going to have your character be a cocaine addict, you need a reason more than, he likes to party.
For example, with House, he was an addict because he had an accident and got addicted. For us it was more about if you’re going to take part in so many deaths, how do you keep going? How do you block that out? So that was the power of cocaine for both of these mean, but unfortunately for Christenson, it was one too many.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Right. That certainly comes across in the first five minutes.
Jack Amiel: From the moment we open on Clive in the factory on the opium den to the moment when they leave the church after Christiansen’s eulogy, that was our way of saying, “Ok, this guy is getting into a carriage; he looks really cool and what Mirojnick is basically saying is he’s David Bowie.” The clothes aren’t correct, but this is the coolest guy of this period.
He gets in this carriage and shoots coke between his toes, cleans himself up; when his eyes clear up and he gets his energy back, he comes in and does this surgery on coke and this surgery is an absolutely bloodbath and nightmare. It’s a mess. And one of the surgeons can’t handle it, blows his own brains out and Clive gets up and gives this wonderful eulogy that talks about his own since of positivity and the feeling of blasting forward.
He’s in a personal war against nature and God to reverse all of these deaths and then to move forward. It was funny, because at the end of that scene, Clive was supposed to stop and talk to somebody, but Clive said, “No, no, no, no, Thackery is a guy that is always moving forward, he doesn’t want to stop, he doesn’t want to wait, and he is flying forward.” So in that scene someone says, “Lovely eulogy Dr. Thackery... Thank you” and he blasts by.
That was the moment that we knew Clive was as dialed into this character as he could be and he was dead on. This was an era where everyone and everything is thrusting forward into the future. We are blasting forward into the future of politically we are about to get a president who is the most modern president we have ever had.
We are blasting into the future in terms of technology, in terms of progressive though, in terms of science and in terms of invention. And we think the world is changing now because of iPhones; this was a world that was changing so vastly is such a short period of time. In 1898, no one had ever heard a recorded voice and in 1900 people had record players in their homes.
There’s a quote from Teddy Roosevelt which is something to the effect of , “ dark air rarely catches up to a rider whose speed is fast enough.” And it’s basically this idea that you can out run your troubles, you can outrun your demons if only you were moving quickly enough. Thackery is very much that guy.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s amazing. I get that 100% from watching your show. The other person who strikes me as moving forward that fast is Dr. Edwards who strikes me as a guy who is moving forward that he wants to leave his problems and prejudice behind him.
Is he a guy that you guys wanted to tie to that theme as well. Is that what happened for you guys?
Michael Begler: I think that we really wanted to explore what it meant to be. The more we were reading of how few black doctors there were and how could a black doctor make it in 1900. It was so appealing to look into.
You see so many period pieces that feel very floral and staged, but what you don’t see sometimes is, especially in the 1900, was seeing race explored in the way that it was. We wanted to show it in all its truth, and it’s not just about the poor black people, but the people of society. This was a guy who worked his way up.
Everything that we talked about with him was true, that if you were a black doctor you wouldn’t work in a hospital. The best you could do was work in a Negro informatory. But if you went over to Europe, like what our doctor did, you can study with the best doctors and work side by side with them, and be treated as an equal.
We thought that was so interesting, how do we weave that into the show? It shows that they are ahead of their time. And as Jack likes to say, we are 40 some odd years from Jackie Robinson and 35 years from emancipation. We are still, no pun intended, in the dark ages.
How does one move forward with that? This is one who is trying to move forward with his identity. He is not accepted in the white world but at the same time he’s not accepted in the black world because he sees himself differently.
We show that on episode 2 when he gets into a confrontation at his boarding house. It was a really difficult time to be black established male in New York.
Jack Amiel: I think we wanted to reflect today as well. It was really important that maybe by discussing how things were back then that we can really shine a light on things as well.
We have a president who went to Colombia and Harvard and was in the Harvard Law Review and is clearly very, very bright. And you have an African American community that you hear that sometimes says things he’s not black enough and for a huge swatch of our country, he’s way too black.
He’s another man that’s caught the twixt in between. And where does the anger go? And for us we kept asking “where does the anger go?”
It’s like that Langston Hughes poem which is, “What happens to a dream that deferred?” “Does it fester like a sore and then run?” And the last line is, “Does it explode?” The question is what happens when that anger explodes and when that anger says “I won’t it anymore?” What is the outlet for that?
For Edwards it became actually a physical outlet.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s actually a great segue that I wanted to ask about.
You guys had mentioned in some other interviews that you really laid out your characters’ arc for the whole season. Do you guys want to talk about what that process was like and maybe we could use Edward as a jumping off point there? Jack?
Jack Amiel: Well when we first created the show, we did a 7-8 page document that said what we wanted to do and we had been doing so much research. There were all these things that when Michael and I decided to sit down and talk, “Wouldn’t it be cool to go here, or do this or do that?” and before we knew it we started to have these shards and pieces that were moving around in our heads and on paper.
We had this wonderful moment when we went to New York and we sat with Soderbergh which was our first extensive time with Steven where we went to his office. When we walked in the door, he was making ten columns on a giant white board as we were walking in the room.
Steven is probably the most focused, hardest working guy you’re ever going to meet. He is just so unbelievably smart. And we walked into the room and were literally like, “Hey, cool space.” Then we were off and running.
He talked about all the cool things we wanted play with. We started to just lay them out across the board and move that here and move that there until it became a jigsaw puzzle. What was so cool about it was could combine the “hey wouldn’t this be cool, what about this, what about that?” with Steven’s visual idea of “Oh, that would be interesting.”
You know it’s not like that typical writer thing where you’re going “Oh wouldn’t it be cool if I wrote it like this?” or to keep waiting for our spec script to have this interesting moment in it that maybe in five years it would get shot. This was so much more than Steven Soderbergh saying, “This is how I want to shoot it.” And you’re going “OMG this is the greatest moment of my life.”
He’s visually putting the story together and it was this wonderful collaboration where for a day and a half, we laid out everything for a 10 hour movie; all these pieces that we had been playing with. Like at times with episode seven the column was “The Riot.” And in other places it would be “Cornelia and Algernon kiss.”
We had these very sketchy ideas of where the arcs of the characters were going within the two days and it was this great structuring and we really got along so well and we really complemented each other.
When we walked out of that room we had this amazing sort of idea of what the show was. Steven said “Okay, on Tuesday I want to give HBO (who is our production company) and Cinemax a very firm outline”, Steven said ok, I want to give HBO/Cinemax an outline of everything we want to do for the season and I want to schedule.” Steven was just like Thackery, blast forward, he’s always moving and “What is the next step in getting this process going?” He already had costume people; he had Ellen Mirojnick and Howard Cummings already doing their research. He already had Greg Jacobs and Jody Spilkoman starting to schedule and budget the show.
Our document that he wanted in one, two, three, four, five days would have to be off of something that we could schedule and start thinking about casting and all that. So Michael and I and we went back to our respective homes and luckily we work very much like a sweat shop.
Michael is a day person and a morning person and works throughout the morning and I work at night. So we had gotten into this thing over 20 years of working together of Michael works during the day and sends me what he does and sometimes we skype and stuff then I’ll take what he did and I’d re-write what he did, I’ll write new stuff and send it back to him, then he’ll see what I re-wrote of his and see what I wrote then go forward. We would just keep the process going. So in that way we are really good in pumping out 15 – 25 pages a day of anything we’re writing as long as we have a really good outline.
When we’re making our outlines, often we can do the same thing. So Michael and I were literally just working not only in shifts but simultaneously and sending stuff back and forth to each other. And then what would happen is that I would be writing everything out that was happening in episode two and I would be writing it with slug-lines, characters, day and night, and interiors and exteriors, then Michael would send me episode three and I would say, “Oh wait, wait, wait, there’s something cool I’m doing in episode two. There’s this thing where she says this to him, maybe we can play it back in Episode three.” Then Michael would take Episode two and say, “Oh, I did this thing in episode three, maybe you can set it up better.” And we just kept leap frogging each other for 20 hours a day for 5 days.
I think we ended up with about a 65-75 page outline that would tell every scene, every character, slug-lines, days, nights, interiors, and exteriors. Steven just had a bunch of notes and we did his notes. Before we knew it, all of the department heads had it and were working off of it and the Network had it. The great thing about the Network having it is that they said, “Oh, you know what you’re doing and wow, we really have confidence in this.” That was really a great thing for us.
Pete D’ Alessandro: So what else are you guys working on now other than Season 2 is coming back in October, but what else are you guys working on?
Michael Begler: We’re just starting to research a totally new show, which is very, very different. It’s more sci-fi thriller-esc show.
The nice thing about The Knick is that it’s sort of given us the confidence and given the community the confidence to explore a lot of different opportunities and different genres. A couple years ago it was really just family comedy, romantic-comedy, and this has really kind of busted the doors wide open. So that is where we work and are focusing on right now.
Now we’re just sort of waiting. We have a 10 page treatment about how to proceed with season 3 if it would come back and if they give us the go ahead then we’re ready to sort of jump in on that. In the meantime, I think we’re going to explore this and maybe explore another idea or two. I think it’s just too early to go into detail.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Sure.
Jack Amiel: I think for us it brings us great joy is the last two years in terms of collaboration with all of these artists and with all of these incredibly talented people. And getting to write with our supervising producer, Steven Katz, who was on season one and I think he’s the co-EP on Season 2. But getting to collaborate with all these people who you think are so smart and so talented and putting together 600 pages each season then watching them get shot. And watching them get shot in a way that elevates the work that allows actors to do incredible things. It allows department heads to have the freedom to be on set at the moment’s notice. Then they say, “Change this, this, this, and this.” And in the moment realize how we wrote the scene doesn’t fit with the space we’re in. It gives us the confidence to throw out large chunks then “Let’s just try this” or saying “well we should do it with this.”
It brings in all the fun working with people who just elevate everything has been so great. Either one of us wants to give up the fun or the enjoyments of getting to collaborate like that and to be a part of something special. The world that Steven creates with Greg Jacobs who is one of exec producers and ad and who is also one of our great creative partners as well.
I think we want to keep that going and to keep telling stories. That’s the fun of this, is telling stories and having it come to life and see where the characters go and watching the actors take over the roles in ways that they inhabit the character so fully you’re almost touched by how fully they’ve embraced the character and how fully they’ve placed themselves, their talent, and their skill into the moment.
To get to be a part of that every day is such a gift for a writer. I just want to keep on doing it and doing it and doing it because it’s so much fun and it’s the process that’s the thrill.
Pete D’ Alessandro: I could imagine. You’re immersed in this world and that actually really comes across in the characters, the world and environment itself.
The last question I wanted to ask you guys is, and Jack I’ll start with you, if you had one piece of advice for writers who are starting to write today and starting to break into the business today, what would that advice be?
Jack Amiel: Well it’s two halves of the same piece. This is, writers write and it’s very common that I get a lot of people asking me to read stuff. People fall in love with a piece of material so they keep rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it, which is great, but a lot of mistakes that people make in their first script or their second script, they would make in their third script because they already made it in their first and their second. I don’t know if I have ever seen anyone’s first script be great or good or even the sort of thing that you pass on to.
The more you write the better you get. If you concentrate on character, be true to your character, and be true to storytelling that’s where you can shine and you can shine then through your true voice. That’s what people are looking for.
If you look at every show on TV that you love or every movie that you love each one has a voice and we’re trying to bring that across into The Knick. I think writers write and the more you do it, the more you’re going to find your voice. And find what you’re going to say.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s great. And Michael how about yourself?
Michael Begler: What I would add to that is, what I think we take away from the whole experience with The Knick is that, just don’t wait for permission. If there is something that you really believe in your heart that you want to do, just do it.
If Jack and I had presented the idea to our reps or anyone who we were like “hey, we wanna do this show about 1900’s medicine,” they would say, “don’t waste your time; that’s not what you’re known for, just try to get onto Shaggy Dog 4.” No one is going to give you the permission that you want.
If there’s something that you’re passionate about, just do it and follow it through. If it goes nowhere that’s fine, but at least you did it and that’s to me more important.
I never in a million years expected to be sitting here 2 seasons into the show. I just expected to write this thing and have the experience of writing it and having the thrill of writing it. But it ended up being the greatest thing we could’ve ever done in our career.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s fantastic advice to leave us with. Now, that the show has been a big success. You guys have already won a Satellite award for best TV series drama, am I right?
Michael Begler: Yea. We won a Peabody, we were on the AFI list of the top ten shows of the year and we were nominated for the WGA.
Pete D’ Alessandro: That’s fantastic. Well congrats guys on all of your success. I know season 2 comes back in October, so if you’re listening you still have plenty of time to catch up before you’ve got to even watch more.
Well guys, thanks so much for joining us.
Michael Begler: Thanks man, appreciate it.
Jack Amiel: Thanks Pete.
Pete D’ Alessandro: Sure. And if you’re out there listening to us, please let us know what you think of the podcast by leaving us a review on iTunes or wherever you’re grabbing your podcasts from.
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