215 | Patton Oswalt On Embracing Risk as a Writer and Performer

When Patton Oswalt considers a part, he has a simple litmus test: "'When the movie is finished it's either gotta be, ‘I can't believe they pulled this off, or this movie should not have been made.’" Risk has always been an important part of Patton's life as an artist in every medium: writing, acting, performing, and stand-up. Enjoy this incredible conversation with one of our best working stand-ups.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve. 

Lorien: And I'm Lorien McKenna, and today we're welcoming the very funny Patton Oswalt to the show to talk about his career and writing for stand up. 

Meg: Across Patton's three decade career, he has worked as a stand up comedian, film actor, TV actor, voice actor, producer, and writer across nearly 250 projects.

He has starred in beloved multicam projects such as playing Spence in King of Queens, and in films such as Jason Reitman's Young Adult, starring opposite Charlize Theron, for which he received a Critics Choice Award nomination. To high end streaming content like Netflix, The Sandman, where he's currently starring as Matthew, the Raven.

And for you Pixar fans, he voices Remy in Ratatouille, which is my personal favorite Pixar movie, very much because of your performance in that round. So just throwing that in there. 

Patton: Thanks guys. Thanks for having me on the show, and thanks for getting all my credits right. 

Lorien: But wait, there's more! As a stand up, Patton has released 10 specials for HBO, Comedy Central, Epix, and Netflix, and is widely regarded as one of stand up's most celebrated voices, which is what we want to focus on today.

Hi Patton, welcome to the show! 

Patton: Hello sorry to jump in so early during my credits. I should have hung back for more accolades. 

Lorien: I have a question for you though. Were you on Modern Family? 

Patton: I was on Modern Family. 

Lorien: So my, I told my daughter this morning, we're having, you know, the voice of Remy on the show today.

And he said, and she said, Oh I was watching Modern Family and I heard Remy and I knew right away who it was. 

Patton: Oh my gosh, that, well, that's some good ears on your daughter. 

Lorien: She wants to be a director, you know, so she's very focused. 

Patton: Oh, okay. 

Meg: You know how it goes. 

Patton: Yeah. 

Meg: All right, so we're gonna, we're really excited to talk to you about your career, but first we're gonna start with adventures in screenwriting, or how was our week?

So we'll let Lorien start. Lorien, how was your week? 

Lorien: My week was actually really good, and I learned a lot about How to rewrite, you know, we're always, it's a process craft, right? So I had a play that I wrote a while ago read out loud by actors on a zoom and what was really great about it. You know, I was fine, super confident, actors are reading it.

No problem. These, like, real actors, right? Like looking at their IMDB and I've seen them and things. So, you know, totally confident, not worried. About an hour before the reading, before the Zoom. I was like, oh my God, I have to cancel. This is the worst. I have to run away. I'm so nervous, but then we had the reading and it was great.

And what was so amazing about it is right away I could tell what needed to be cut because I was watching the actors and in their discomfort and shifting around and I could tell when they were leaning forward and when they were excited and it was like, Oh, the play actually starts on page 22. The action doesn't actually start till page 34.

So I was like, all right, crash those things together. And then as I'm listening, I'm like, okay, so I really need to take the narrative drive and refocus it up front, get rid of all this exposition. But really it was about just hearing it out loud and hearing the actor's engagement in it mostly told me so much like their physical and their vocal engagement.

And then afterwards I listened to the notes and I agreed with almost all of them. And. Because I'd written this so long ago it was more like I didn't write it and so I was so open to the notes and I skipped right over fuck you and fuck me and I went right to what's next. Yeah, and I'm really clear on that it's not as big as I think it is, right?

It's about narrative drive. What do my characters want? And it's funny where it needs to be funny, and I just have to rearrange some things, but I'm also having a feature I wrote read out loud by actors next week, and I'm going to apply those same notes to the feature now. I mean, I have a day to rewrite it because I'm delivering it to them tomorrow, but it'll be fine.

Everything will be fine. But just in terms of that experience of listening to my play helped me prepare for how to listen to it, you know, for the feature with the actors and to sort of dissolve some of the self judgment and panic around I'm going to be judged and everyone's going to find out I'm a fraud.

Because it's my job now to watch how they're responding to it and what I'm responding to, right? And how my adrenaline was rising and falling apart. But just in terms of like hearing it out loud, it's so powerful because you're like, that's boring. That's funny, right? That doesn't work there. And it's so much better than just reading it out loud.

So that was my week. I'm rewriting a movie today. It's fine. Everything is fine. And how was your week? 

Patton: My week was, well, I was in motion this past week. I did a show in Baltimore. I did a show in Providence. I flew home Sunday, did a show Sunday night in Los Angeles at the Largo. Also dealt with all the, you know, insanity of the world.

I, when I flew back from Boston on Sunday. I have to drop a name in this story. Is that okay? 

Meg: Absolutely. 

Patton: I'm, I don't, I'm not trying to brag. This is what happened. I run into Courtney B. Vance, the actor Courtney B. Vance, one of those actors that has that memorable, smooth, authoritarian voice.

He's one of those voices of God actors, incredible. And we kind of know each other, so we're talking. And he had just been in Boston seeing a play. Long story short, we get on the plane. I Immediately go to sleep. I tried to stay awake for the flight, do some reading, and I was like, I need to sleep.

And I put my seat down flat. He's sitting next to me on the flight. I put my seat down flat, I go to sleep. Two hours into the flight, I kind of wake up, and he sees that my eyes are open. And he leans in close to me, and he says, Joe Biden has dropped out of the race. That is all I'm going to say. Go back to sleep.

So imagine being given that news with that voice and that, like, that level. It was, I want all of my news delivered by Courtney B. Vance. He needs to start a service where he delivers news and just, but he just gives you the one sentence and then tells you to go back to sleep. It was weirdly comforting, like, without him saying it, it was like, everything's going to be fine.

Meg: Just by the tone, it's all gonna be fine.

Patton: Just the smooth tones, my god. So that was, that's kind of how my week last week ended and this week began. With Courtney B. Vance reciting history to me as it was happening. 

Lorien: Love it. I love it so much. I think there's an app in that. Courtney B. Vance reads your headlines for you.

Patton: Exactly, yes. That would be amazing. 

Meg: I would get that app.

Lorien: Yeah.

Patton: Yeah. 

Meg: My week, working on new ideas with my writing partner husband. And at first I was like I don't know. Cause I don't know. I wasn't, I didn't have, I wasn't enough into the ideas to go into the naivete that you have to start something new.

And my brain was all up about, oh, it's not going to work because of this and that, but it's super fun. Cause once you get in and you start talking about character and actual specifics and the story starts growing, suddenly I'm back and I'm naive again. I can believe again that this story will work. It's awesome.

And the other, this is just. Crazy. But so I was working out, which I don't often do, but I'm trying people. I'm trying. 10 dollar planet fitness. You have to try. And I'm on the treadmill or whatever the hell I was on, listening to Barbara Streisand's book, which is amazing to listen to. And she's talking about the way we were.

And this goes to what we talk about on the show all the time. And she was talking about they could not get Robert Redford to do the part. He just kept turning it down. He turned it down like three times. And he knew Sidney Pollack. Sidney Pollack, the director, was trying to get him on. He couldn't, they couldn't get him to do it.

And finally he said, Who is this guy? He's talking about his part. He said he doesn't want anything. And it's why Redford would not take the part, because he said he's not a real person. He's just an object for her because he doesn't want anything in this story. And we talk about that all the time on the show.

And he's literally talking about the plot people. He's not talking about the, he doesn't want anything. So who cares? And I just was, I almost fell off the treadmill because I was like, Oh my God, we talk about this on the show all the time. So I thought that was super funny. 

Lorien: And it's so rarely a male character.

Especially in the time of the way we were right that a character would exist just to serve the main character story. 

Meg: She said that actually was to her a reverse right that normally the woman is the object, but that she agreed with him. She 100 percent agreed with him. So anyways, that was fun because we talked about want on the show all the time.

Lorien: I think the theme of today's show is how much actors actually reveal about our writing, right? I had that experience, right? You're having that experience, right? Like, we think we're doing all the things and then we have actors get engaged and they ask you, what do I want? Why do I leave the room here?

This is boring. I'm not like, you know, like, there's just, it's a part of the process. It's I mean, obviously necessary, but I think we forget it as writers. 

Patton: You said it earlier, Lorien, the if you can get past the fuck me and fuck this thing and just go get past your ego and go, these are good notes. These are helpful.

It doesn't have to be only my fingerprints are on this. I mean, very famously, you know, in, in Jaws, the whole, we need a bigger boat. That was completely from Shider and Carl Gottlieb was smart enough to go, Oh my God, that's a great, yes. Say that because. It's my name on the script. Like, what do you know, why would I fight this?

Lorien: Yeah, so.

Patton: And I remember I was, I just went to Pittsburgh and I got to visit the George Romero archives at the University of Pittsburgh and looked at a lot and there was an early script for Jaws, the one that Peter Benchley wrote, where he slavishly stuck to his novel and oh boy, was it horrible. That would have been a completely for–

Meg: What it a little long, 

Patton: It was a little long and it has that famous, you know, the in the book the shark dies because it just gets tired and stops. It just kind of dies. 

Lorien: I've never read the book, but now I want to. 

Patton: Oh, the book is so bad. I'm sorry. I know it was a bestseller for the time, but if you know the mood, it is one of those examples of a truly awful book that was completely elevated by the people that they brought in

Meg: The only thing I remember about

Patton: To adapt it.

Meg: To adapt it. The only thing I remember about that book is I was a kid and my mother cut out chapter four. And then she let my brothers read it because it was a sexy scene. And so, of course, the only part of that book I ever read was chapter four.

Because we all read chapter four, like immediately. 

Patton: And you know who's having sex in that chapter, yes? 

Meg: I don't remember. 

Patton: Brody's wife and Matt Hooper have an affair. 

Meg: Right. 

Patton: So there's a whole other, yeah, exactly. It was basically, it's a soap opera with a shark in it. 

Meg: Well, see, but you know, if you're an emerging writer out there, and you have a question about adaptation, read the original book of Jaws, and then you go watch the movie, and you're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna learn a whole lot. 

Patton: And on the opposite spectrum, hang on, I just read, I've really gotten into finding novelizations of movies. These are Midnight Cowboy Darks or just like the original novels, like Darkstar, Last Detail. Taxi Driver, Hickey and Boggs, and this one, Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker.

This is a kind of a cult 80s slasher film. But, this novel is the two guys who wrote the novel, Joseph Bergo and Richard Natal, I guess they gave them the screenplay. But in writing the novel, they added all this inner dialogue and, Back story to all these characters. You don't see in the, I finished reading this yesterday and then I watched the movie yesterday on shutter and all of the background stuff, all of the motivations, none of that is in the movie.

But if you've read this, you can assign it to all these characters and it makes the movie kind of richer. Cause back in the day, movie tie-ins were what we had instead of deleted scenes on DVDs. Like if you read. Alan Foster's Alien, he was going off the original Dan O'Bannon script, which had all this stuff that was taken out from the movie which made it a much richer experience.

So there is that, like, it's okay to put all kinds of crazy extra detail into your screenplay that might not make it to the screen, because as you said, it helps the actors out. Why wouldn't they want to have that on the page? They don't need to sit there and explain it, but it might change their performance.

Meg: It might yeah inform the performance. I love that. I didn't know, you know, I love Last Detail and Midnight Cowboy. Are those the original novels or is that the movie adaptation?

Patton: This is the original novel, James Leo Hurley. He wrote this novel first. But I think Alan Dean Foster, the king of movie tie-ins, took Dark Star, now Dark Star is a very early John Carpenter movie and a rough draft of the movie Alien, except it's a comedy, but I'm sure he puts in all kinds of weird background stuff that you don't know about.

Lorien: So the script was written, they gave it to the author to do a take in the novel form of the script. 

Patton: Yeah, now, and when the guy does a take in novel form, he's often, he or she is often writing scenes that are later going to be cut out. And back then that was the only way to get to see these scenes.

One of my favorite 70s movies is a movie called Hickey and Boggs. It's a little neo noir and this is Philip Rock based on an original screenplay by Walter Hill. Walter Hill was 

Lorien: Walter Hill, yes.

Patton: Just wrote the most concise, like stripped down, but there's stuff in here that is not in this movie dialogue and other scenes that makes it so fascinating because you see, it's almost like a way to look at the screenwriting process and look at what you were talking about, Lorien, the, Oh, This works great in the screenplay, but when they shot it, like, this scene doesn't work get rid of it.

Meg: Right, right, right. That's so interesting. 

Patton: Go find old movie tie-ins and read them and then re-watch the movie. It's a very educational experience. 

Lorien: It's legitimized fanfic in a way. 

Patton: Yes. Oh, wow. I never thought of it that way. Yeah. It is kind of, yeah, it's, I mean, didn't the surrealists used to take old silent movies and like cut them up and make their own kind of non sequitur movies, especially Nosferatu.

I think there's a movie called the Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich, early 30s movie and somebody, I remember they used to write all these character bios for the people, all the characters in the movie, because it's about a bunch of characters on a train, but then they, just to amuse themselves, like, well, what else were they doing?

Why did they show up at this? What was their backstory? And that just helps the writing process. 

Meg: It is fan fiction. 

Lorien: Yes. And I love it. 

Patton: And in a way, even screenplays, And books are sometimes fan fiction. I read Moby Dick for the first time last year, and the number of elements in Moby Dick that are in the movie, Jaws putting the barrels on the thing to keep the thing from going underwater, singing, farewell, and adieu to you, farewell, like, all that stuff is in the movie Moby Dick, and then they put those elements, you just hear echoes of it. 

Also, if you really want to know what, Jaws is Creature From the Black Lagoon fanfiction. Go watch that movie again, it's basically Jaws. It is Jaws. All the elements are there, they go down in a cage, they try to drug it. All the elements of Jaws are in that movie.

Meg: I remember once I was researching Westerns. I don't remember why, because I can't remember, I believe I would be writing one, but we went all the way back to like a very early, early film. It might even have been silent, but so early. And it was about two cowboys. 

And all of a sudden in this movie are two cowboys on a cliff arguing over having to jump off because they're being chased and they're arguing back and forth and it's literally the fall will kill you. It's literally the scene out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And I was like, holy shit. 

Patton: Yeah, everyone is influenced by stuff that they've seen before.

And if you can get over the anxiety of it, you know, that's why I think, it makes Quentin Tarantino such a brilliant filmmaker because he very openly, before he puts a new movie out, he will program a month at the New Beverly where he'll just go, Here are the movies I took from, come watch them and then you can see how I repurposed them to tell a different story. 

So before Django and Shane came out he showed all of these black westerns from the 70s black quotation westerns and american indian westerns and stuff like that he was going to use to tell his story it was fascinating.

Meg: That is fascinating.

Lorien: And here is my rant about that. This is why, if you're going to be a movie writer, or a director, or a TV writer, you must know, you must have watched all the TV shows, you must have watched all the movies.

I have meetings with people sometimes, and I bring up a specific episode of Laverne and Shirley because I find it hilarious, and they don't know what I'm talking about, and I'm like, what is happening? What is happening? Like, why don't you know Laverne and Shirley if you're a TV comedy executive? You know, so it's like if you're in the industry, love it. 

Meg: It's funny because I was an executive and I'm working for Jodie Foster and I'm talking to a director and I said, you're like in Bergman's film, when wild strawberries, when the coffin falls off and he just goes, wait, shut the fuck up. And I was like, what? He goes, what the fuck is an executive talking about Bergman? You know, Bergman? 

Patton: That's gotta feel good. 

Meg: I’m just like, of course I know Bergman. But, you know, especially nowadays, I have to say, I sound like an old lady. You know, people used to come to this business and loved movies and they'd seen all these. And sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's not true. And that may not be why they're here anymore.

But you as a creator to our audience, or if you're an executive out there and you want to distinguish yourself and your career as an executive, start knowing film. And my son is in Chapman and he just watched AFI's top 100 just to get started. At 20. 

Patton: Yeah, I'm a big believer in be a fan of the area that you're working in, or you're not going to be good at it.

I, you know, I think one of the reasons that I'm a good comedian is that I watch a lot of comedy. I watch a lot of comedians. I like watching comedy. I'm not one of these people that's like, I don't want to see what other, like, I want to see what other people are doing because I liked it before I started doing it.

And same with writing, I read a lot, I watch a lot of movies, you know, and the same thing happens, a lot of your great filmmakers are influenced by stuff they saw earlier and do, I mean, the exploitation movie Last House on the Left by Wes Craven is a remake of Bergman's Virgin Spring, it's a beat for beat remake of Virgin Spring. The first two acts of Jaws are just Ibsen's Enemy of the People, it's the exact same plot, 

Lorien: Okay, I need to take a beep for that one.

Patton: Alright. 

Lorien: Hold on, I'm thinking that one through. Okay. Alright. 

Patton: Yeah, there's a, this town makes money off this spa. Well, the spa is infected. It's killing people. Yeah, but, I mean, how many people are we talking? Because we make a lot of money, people coming to this town. So if we lose a few kids a year, isn't that like, that is literally the mayor's argument of like, who's a couple swimmers? Like two or three? Okay. Look at the money we're making like the same thing. 

Meg: I really want to repeat what you said. So I make sure that our listeners hear it. Write what you're a fan of, because, and I've made this mistake, I made it just recently, where I'm not a fan of horror, because I'm a big scaredy cat.

But, there was a project, and I thought I could do it, and my husband is a fan, so we were gonna write it, but you know what? I'm not a fan of horror. There's so much, there's such a learning curve, because I haven't watched all of them and seen every, you know, it's, it was a really steep learning curve, and it didn't work, by the way.

Patton: The stuff that you, that will end up being the best stuff that you do, is the stuff that, you know, you watch a lot of things and you're like, Oh, but why can't they do that? You end up making the movie that you want to see. I mean, what, one of the, one of the most captivating scenes in Star Wars is the cantina scene.

And that came from young George Lucas watching a million science fiction movies and going, where'd all these aliens go when they're not, you know, bothering our astronauts. I mean, they must go somewhere. They must have lives. So, and that scene was such a duh, of course, but it was him. It wasn't him going, these movies suck.

He was like, I love these movies. Why don't they do this? You know, it's always. I have a whole theory about Mel Brooks. One of the reasons that his early films are so good, The Producers, 12 Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, those are all things he truly loved and was obsessed with. But anything that you love, you're gonna notice things that are lacking or like, ah, why did they do that thing?

He loved Westerns, but also was like, these are pretty frigging racist. Like, you know, he loved the Frankenstein movie, to the point where he had bought all of Kenneth Strickfaden's props. He bought all of the lab equipment from the Frankenstein movie. He just had it in his garage.

And you're like, why do you have this? He goes, I don't know. I just, I love these movies so much. I'll figure out what to do with them. And then eventually they did Young Frankenstein. Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles and the 12 Chairs. He's obsessed with Russian literature.

You cannot, Spoof something that you hate. You can only spoof something that you love. And he loves those. And out of the, when you love someone, when you really love someone, you're also like, there's this stupid thing they do. It doesn't stop me loving them, but why do they do it? You know, that's what, that's where your best work comes out of.

Lorien: Would you say that's fair in the stand up world? Like roast, roasts? 

Patton: Oh yeah, I mean look, the whole roast thing, if you really look at the great ones, It's someone going, you're my friend, and I'm crazy about you, but you drive me fucking nuts sometimes, I don't know what is wrong with you, why do you do this, and so there's that, it's a safe way to vent your frustrations, you know, people that have a sense of humor can do it, and I think also, truly great stand up.

It's not about that, Oh, look at this stupid thing. I'm going to make fun of it. It's more like, I know this is completely ridiculous, but I love this. And if you embrace it, but you can embrace it to the point where you're almost strangling it because you're pointing out what's so crazy about it. That actually lands way more effectively than you just going, well, this is fucking stupid.

Right. Because then people can shut you off and go, well, I don't agree with that. But if you're going, oh my God, I love this thing. In fact, I love it so much that it bothers me that it can't do this. 

Meg: When I watch comedians interact with the crowd, they're loving the people as they're finding, they're really loving them.

Patton: Well, I mean, I think that comes from me being, I want to be a storyteller. I don't want to rip people apart in the crowd. I want to talk to them and get their story and see what's going on. You know, one of my running jokes when I do crowd work is, You seem very content and happy with your chosen profession and people are like, yeah, I'm like, well, this is comedy death.

I need unhappy. I need a meth cook or a divorcee. This is not helping me. Like there is that, like, you kind of want a little bit of chaos. You know? 

Meg: Yeah, absolutely. So, can you talk a little bit about what are the processes for you to put together a stand up? Like, what, you know, for all, for us complete novices, like, what is that process?

Are you at a desk? Are you in the crowd track? Like, how do you come to your comedy? 

Patton: This is my process. I'm not saying it should be everybody's. There's no right or wrong process to have, by the way. Don't, as much as it's cool to read biographies of other filmmakers, other screenwriters, other comedians, don't read it and go, well, that's what they did, so I need to do that.

Like, figure out the thing that works for you and then don't apologize for it. And my thing, the thing that works for me, is going on stage constantly and working things out on stage. I have an idea. I have a premise and a couple of little places that could maybe go, but I have to hear it like you were saying earlier, Lorien, I have to hear it coming out of my head because sometimes you can write something really funny on paper, but it doesn't work when you say it out, it has to sound to me conversational.

So I'm doing the standup equivalent of what Jordan Peele talks about, which is: you're making a sandcastle, and first you just gotta pile up a bunch of friggin sand. It's not gonna look great, and then you start messing around with it. But don't be scared of the big sloppy moment. 

I'm not scared of the, I mean, not anymore, I used to be very much, but you know, I've been doing it long enough that I can just go on stage and go, Okay, let's see where this goes. I hope this works. I have this worked out, and if it doesn't, I go, Okay, got it, like, message received. You know, you can, you know, write what you think is the best joke, and also what, I think it was William Goldman who said, You can make what you think is the best movie, but the audience will tell you how good or bad it is.

And that's just how it is. You can't argue with it. 

Lorien: So how then do you do, so you're setting yourself up, right, to, for failure, right, the fail, oh that didn't work, moving on or seeing if it works, so you have this very established career. You're still going up in front of crowds, you might bomb, how do you process that, you know, like, oh I went to see Patton Oswalt, wasn't that good, you know, like, that kind of energy.

Patton: Because, for me I am very lucky in that I have bombed so much in my career, and when I woke up the next day, the world hadn't ended, and when I showed up for my next show, the audience wasn't like, You bombed last night. They don't know what you've been through. They don't care. They want to be entertained.

So there, you always have second chances. 

Meg: I love that. That's the same with writing. When your script doesn't work or the studio says we want something completely different or whatever, you don't die. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, I've walked down a red carpet and people weren't all fans of the movie. You don't die. It's okay. 

Patton: I've written so many screenplays. I remember early on. I've written and sold screenplays that didn't get made and I would panic like oh my god I broke the screenplay and they decided to make it and like they paid me this money and this I'm just gonna poison my name and I talked to these other screenwriter friends of mine they're like, I own two houses off of screenplays that were never made what are you talking about. 

They don't care, they just, what's your next thing and they don't care how many bad ones you've written so you write a good one.

Doesn't matter. Keep going. 

Meg: Keep going, which we should make t-shirts. Just keep going. 

Lorien: There's such a fear among emerging and professional writers of this person, this executive, this producer, whomever is in power is going to read it and go and put you on some list, right? Now you're on the list of garbage people that are dead somehow to that person.

And that's not true, but there's still, any time I send something to somebody, even this play, I was like, these are real legitimate actors and they're going to make some assumption about me as a, you know, capital W, whatever, writer. And it was like, no, it was just this play was too long and it was a little messy.

Patton: And you're giving them something to do. Like they get to, they want to act in things. They want to work with new writers, even if it doesn't totally work, they get to discover something about themselves. Trying to make, everyone benefits from it. You're, everyone's doing everyone else a favor, so don't go into this like, that's it, they're gonna remember my name, they don't, that's not how people think.

Lorien: It's kind of, what I should have said is, you're welcome everybody, for giving you this work in progress. 

Meg: But it's also, we get so obsessed and so insecure about ourselves and our fraud syndrome, it's almost arrogance, because nobody's thinking about you that much. 

Patton: No one is.

Lorien: There's no list. 

Patton: Bob Hope, I'm going to quote Bob Hope.

He goes, When I was in my 20s, I was terrified of what people thought about me. And then I got to my 40s, and I didn't care what people thought about me. And now I'm in my 60s, and I'm realizing nobody was ever thinking about me. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody. Trust me. You can bet on that.

They're not thinking of you. When it was time for Francis Ford Coppola to do The Godfather, nobody went, Oh, well, he made Finnian's Rainbow and that was what, they don't give a shit. They just, they need a good director that can show up and do it. They don't care. 

Meg: It's true. It's true.

Patton: Scorsese, he got, Scorsese got fired from The Honeymoon Killers after two weeks.

He'll never work again. 

Meg: It's true. 

Patton: It doesn't make sense.

Meg: It's a little bit different sometimes for women because I think we get stained a little bit. But I think in general, there's power in this people. So was there any, was there ever a time you were going to quit? 

Patton: There was never a time that I would quit, but I did let, sometimes I would get low on the lows and not do anything for a while, like I wouldn't go on stage for a couple nights in a row, or I would stop writing every day because I was just like, what am I doing?

But you also have to allow yourself those times when you're a little bit, you feel fractured, even though again, the world is not thinking about you. You can just show up the next day and keep doing it. So, you know, I mean, Brad Bird did a movie called The Iron Giant that was such a bomb.

It actually, I think Warner Brothers had to shut down its animation division. And then he just kept going. A, the movie is now considered one of the best animated movies ever made. It's a complete film. And he's done nothing but great stuff since. 

Lorien: And out of that, he got hired to write and direct Ratatouille. And he brought most of his crew up. And it was a beautiful film. Right? 

Patton: So, just keep going, keep showing up. It's what you really love doing. 

Meg: If it's really what you love. So let's, I'd love to jump to Ratatouille. In terms of you taking parts, be that a voiceover part, an actor part what, how do you decide what to pursue? Or, I will take that. Like, what's the thing that makes you as an actor want to take that part? 

Patton: Look, they offered me the lead in a Pixar movie directed by Brad fucking Bird. Yeah, I think I'll take that one. Yeah, that one I'll do. Look I'm, I am always, I'm in this for the money and the anecdotes.

So necessarily doing a bad movie is to me, not a deal breaker. If I look at something and go, Oh, this might be a glorious disaster. I just want the stories, you know? And as long as they're paying me, it's just more experience for me to look at stuff and see weird, crazy drama going on, I love all of it.

So, I mean, doing a movie like Ratatouille is just as valuable to me as doing some indie by someone that's like, we've got 25 grand to make this, I don't know how we're going to do it. You know, when I did Big Fan, I took my money that the guy that directed it and wrote it, that script, which was originally called Paul Offiero, it made the rounds for a decade in Hollywood.

Everyone loved the script. Nobody wanted to make it. Everybody was attached to it at some point. At some point, everybody was, every actor was attached to that script. Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Adam Sandler, they were, everybody was attached and it never got made. And then he wrote The Wrestler, and took the money from the restaurant and goes, I'm just gonna shoot this myself. 

And so that kind of attitude, because I'm such a fan of, especially the early 70s, new Hollywood thing, where it's just like, ah, just get some, let's steal some equipment and shoot a movie. I couldn't say no to that. I could not say no to something that I have always celebrated and been fascinated with.

Meg: Well, when you do pass what's creating the pass? 

Patton: Right. The only things I've ever passed on were things where I just physically did not have the schedule to do it. Otherwise, I'll find a way to make time and go do it. I like working. I mean, I think that's why. 

Lorien: Well, boy, do I have a project for you.

Patton: I like doing stuff. I like reading things, especially if I knew, you know, that one I did. I love my dad, new writer, he'd only done one little movie for no money. It was fascinating. I was like, and I love the fact that this script was like, this thing is either going to really work or absolutely crash and burn.

There is not going to be a version of this movie where people go, yeah, that was all right. It's either going to be, I can't believe they pulled this off or this movie should not have been made. And that, I love that in a script. How the fuck are they going to pull this off? 

Lorien: What I'm getting from you is that you're not risk averse.

Patton: No, I mean, I love doing weird shit like that. 

Lorien: So did you start out like your childhood teenage you was like, I'm going to be a stand up comic. I'm going to put myself out there. 

Patton: When I was a teenager, again, I was living in the Virginia suburbs. I very much wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be Stephen King. I wanted to be Harlan Ellison. I wanted to write. 

And then I, for some reason, it was one of those, that summer, I'm sure you guys experienced something similar. For me, it was the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college. That's, I think, the first time in your life where you're going, I better figure out what I'm going to do because I've only got three more years of this and I'm out in the world. 

So I started doing every, I tried every job that summer and one of them was, I just started doing open mics in DC and open mics. There was no reward. I was not getting laughs, but the life, the hang, I love the whole atmosphere of it.

I'm like, Oh, this is the world for me. I found the world I want to be in. And when you're, when you find your world. Then you know, and I'm like, Oh, this is the world I want to live in. Even if I'm living broke, this is how I'd like to live broke for a while. 

Lorien: And by the world, you mean the people that you were with?

Patton: The people I'm like, I am upstream from everything cultural, all the jokes that get passed around in the office. I was working in an office during the day. I'm at the source of where they're coming out of. So I want to be up here at the source. I don't want to get anything secondhand anymore. I love that I was right there as it was being created.

Lorien: So a lot of stand ups and comics and comedians, I'm never quite sure what the right word is. Is there a, whatever the word is. 

Patton: Yeah. Leg pullers we call ourselves. 

Lorien: So a lot of the leg pullers that we are aware of, a lot of their, did I say that right? A lot of the–

Patton: rib ticklers.

Meg: Rib ticklers. 

Lorien: I really respond to stand-up specials and people I go see when the humor is very dark. And that I'm aware that it's coming from a very real place. Even though the stories are told from, you know, Ah ha, this horrible tragedy happened to me. 

How do you manage that? Like, is that something that you experience? 

Patton: I mean, yeah, I mean, I do, I have a special called Annihilation where I talk about the death of my wife. And so that was very much, How do I, I think it's about basically you have to be very honest in what you're talking about. I am talking about grief and fear and sadness and terror. 

But if you acknowledge it you can also just like anything else like I was talking about earlier with Mel Brooks. Even in grief and despair there are elements that are so ludicrous and absurd. And if you embrace those that can end up being funny. It's a weird thing to do, but I think that a lot of, I mean, it was Jews in the ghetto during the rise of Nazism had humor to deal with what was going on, you know. And even before, like in, in Vienna, the whole cafe culture, right before the Anschluss, they can see what was going on and that gallows humor that's going on. 

You know, I know paramedics, I talked to a paramedic as research for this comic that I'm doing and the kind of humor those guys do is insane to keep themselves from going nuts. Because they're just knee deep in tragedy and viscera. So of course they have like, you know, jokes all the time. 

Lorien: So what you're talking about, like focusing, I'm going to focus on grief and loss and pain and sort of being very clear about what it's about and how all those stories–

Patton: Not shy away from it, but the deeper you, the more accepting you are of it, the more you can then admit, this aspect is a little ridiculous. This is a little, you know, like, and start building some comedy from that. 

Lorien: Yeah I have a half hour comedy I wrote about a woman whose husband has had brain surgery. But it's actually a romantic comedy in a way, too. So, but for me, that was how I was processing all this hurt and loss I had around before the brain surgery, right?

So for me, it was very cathartic to write it, but not about myself, which is, I think, different than stand-up. So are you a character when you're on stage? 

Patton: No, I mean, when I was starting off, I very much tried to get into my stage persona, but I think that one of the big evolutionary leaps that any stand-up makes is, you get to a point where there's no difference between how you're talking off stage and how you're talking on stage.

The audience feels like they are seeing a 45 minute to an hour chunk of your day as you're actually being present and relating to them and then you're gonna like, rather than, oh, this guy was off stage, put on his, you know, stage personality and face and then went out like, when you make it. So that it's so much more immediate and they just connect with you so much better.

Meg: I also love what you're saying because as writers, we're often telling emerging writers, you know, the more specific you get, in going for that truth, it's strange, the more specific, the more universal it becomes. And kind of, if you stay too broad, people don't relate. And comics are geniuses at that, I think.

Patton: Yeah. I mean, a lot of my comedy, I talk about such specific, even local specific plays, but because I'm so into it that everybody understands it, you know, and I think that same with a lot of great screenplays, the other thing to remember about screenplays is: nobody knows what they want. Nobody wanted a movie about a kid that sees dead people until somebody wrote a really good one. Nobody.

I mean, there's a very famous thing Harlan Ellison wrote about this in a short story. I think it was called Killing Bernstein or Fear of K. But when the movie Jaws first came out, they were doing test screenings of it. And the theory was, and the test screenings were gangbusters, but they were showing it in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, they're like, yeah, in coastal cities, this thing's gonna kill. In the Midwest, they don't know from a shark, what, this isn't gonna land. 

And then the movie was this massive blockbuster and somebody said, well, you know, sharks never evolved. There's something in our DNA that remembers those teeth. That's one of the reasons we crawled out of the ocean, was to get away from those. 

And because the movie is so, Spielberg is such a, he just, he makes, you can smell the ocean. You can feel how things are. He grabs the, you know, just like, I'm sure there are people in, that were in Manhattan in 1977 that, when they watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they don't know from the suburbs, but he captures it so perfectly. 

The scenes between Terry Garan and Richard Dreyfus are some of the most heart wrenching scenes in 70s cinema. It happens to be in the middle of a UFO movie but he realized I gotta make this real before I introduce the other elements. 

So yeah and by the way, everyone's talking about, oh, with the Fablements, he finally did an autobiography. He actually did it with Close Encounters. Close Encounters is about his parents' marriage collapsing. With actual lines, scenes that happened with him are in that. And he made it so specific, like you said, it became universal. 

You know, no, no one probably came in on his dad crying and sort of screaming coward at him like the kid is yelling at Richard Dreyfuss when he's in the bathtub. But every kid remembers that feeling, that overall feeling when you realize, Oh, my parents are fallible. And that's a scary thing to realize. 

Meg: It's also in ET. His dad is also in it. 

Patton: The stuff with Dee Wallace in that movie, there's a whole other film going on with that woman. 

Meg: Totally. 

Patton: She's just trying to keep her family together and trying to make Halloween work for them. I mean, you just are, I, if they never, if you never even saw the alien and they just focus on De Wallace, you would still be on the edge of your seat there.

Lorien: There’s that scene in the kitchen, right? The opening with the kitchen, and she's in that robe and she's clearly been crying and like the older teenage brother's friend is like looking at her butt. It's like the whole thing and the little kids and everything. It's just like, oh my God, this is about the loss of this man and what he's, you know, it's really powerful. 

Meg: Right. Cause he's drawing on the specifics of his own childhood and what it felt like. And so, so, God, it's so right on. And then the solution is this alien, which is, you know, we all kind of want, I want to–

Lorien: Fly off on your bicycle at the end because of magic. 

Patton: Well, at the end of Close Encounters, and this is their nod too, all the new Hollywood guys basically remade The Searchers over and over again.

That last shot of John Wayne just walking away. That's the end of Close Encounters, the end of The Searchers. He just, but he leaves the friggin planet. He's like, my whole life has collapsed so hard that I leave the planet. 

So, you know, and I think later on, both Spielberg and Dreyfuss have said, we didn't have kids when we shot that scene. Like, I would never leave my kids. Like, you can't do that. But at the time, we didn't know any better. So, you know, so that again, very personal. The more of your embarrassing personal stuff you can put into things, that's usually the stuff that blows up, unfortunately. 

Meg: Listen to what he’s saying!

Patton: I mean, Stephen King was doing fine as a short story writer writing novels under the name Richard Bachman.

And then he wrote a novel where he really had to wrestle with what a shit he and his friends in the whole school were when they were in high school. He writes about it in On Writing. This girl, they bullied and tormented and basically destroyed her life. And he wrote it as his novel Carrie and then just went, oh my God.

Like he started as a short story and he was like, this is too, and then thank God Tabitha was like, this is a novel. Keep going, keep, this is where you do it. And of course it exploded, you know? 

Lorien: So how do you wrestle with that stuff? Right? Like, I wrote a script as a catharsis, but it also brings up so much other stuff, like in my day to day life, right?

And it's about how do I balance that?

Patton: It also brings up how much of my life belongs to other people. How much of this do I want to mine? You know, I ultimately have the right as to what gets out there and what doesn't. So, but that is something that each person has to decide for themselves. You know, and sometimes, also there is a risk that sometimes there is no reward for that.

When Hitchcock made Vertigo, that was his most personal movie, and at the time, the public recoiled. It took, a couple of generations had to pass before people realized how brilliant it was. 

There's a filmmaker named Andy Milligan. I'm not saying you should go watch his movie because they are horrible, but he basically, there's a great biography called The Ghastly One about his life. He was this exploitation filmmaker out of 42nd Street, made these horrible movies, The Ghastly One, Seeds, The Rats Are Coming, The Werewolves Are Here, just awful movies. But he was doing an autobiography about his horrible mother and how the mother tormented and abused the dad and abused him and was basically just doing these movies over and over again.

These were sleazy little movies that nobody saw. It took this biographer, Jimmy McDonough, to realize what he was doing. But that's a guy that laid it all on the line, and never saw any reward for it. Till after he was dead, unfortunately. Now, there's gorgeous, you know, retrospectives of his awful movies.

But, you know, it's, John Waters said about Andy Milligan, it raises a very disturbing question. Can a genius have no talent?

He was a genius, but he also didn't have the talent to put the genius out there. So there's something, but now, of course, his stuff is now watched and studied and looked at probably more than a lot of A list directors at the time that their stuff has been forgotten. So you never know. Put your stuff out there.

Meg: You never know. 

Lorien: You never know, but it's terrifying all the same. 

Patton: Listen, hang on. I can hear you guys. I just want to bring you something. As I said, Andy Milligan, one of the worst directors ever. You know, shot movies in like two days. Died, broke, hospice care in Los Feliz. Now, there is a gorgeous, massive volume about his life, The Ghastly One. This was Nicholas Winding Refn put this together. Jimmy McDonough, the 42nd Street Netherworld of director Andy Milligan. 

All of his god awful movies have been restored on this boxed thing. They also did it, they printed up a script book of all of his lost movies. A lot of his movies are lost because they would show in a 42nd Street grindhouse, and then the movie theater would call the distributor and go, Hey, where do we mail this? And they're like, we don't want it, just toss it. So they would get shown for one weekend and then gone. So, again, this is a guy, laid it out on the line, no reward in his lifetime, and now is–

Lorien: This story is inspiring, not because everyone's appreciating him now, but because he was doing what he was doing, right?

Patton: He did what he wanted to do. 

Lorien: We talk a lot in Hollywood, right? It's a business. We're here to make a living. 

Patton: Yep. 

Lorien: Right? It's a business to make a living. And for writers and actors, there is a, you know, you have to be known, you have to be considered to be part of the system, to get money, you know, you have to have power, right?

You have to leverage up, but there is that thing we always have to remember, is that we should be doing it because we love it. 

Patton: Yes. 

Lorien: And getting back to that point of, okay, I have, you know, my manager hasn't called me back. My agent hasn't called me. I didn't get those three jobs. I still have to go back and do the work, even though it feels hopeless because I love this, even though it's hard to remember that and I struggle with this a lot because I can fall into that shame hole and be like, well, what's the point? Right? Like, I don't know what is the fucking point of this? You know, like here I am and I'm not doing anything.

And so then it's like, okay, but I have to sit down and get in that place you were talking about Meg, of that like, the play space and shuns that business part off and it's so hard, right? Because I don't want to end up like your director, Mr. Milligan, right? I want to make something that's seen and affects people, but I also love this so much, even as messy and hard as it is.

Except for sometimes I hate it, really, honestly. 

Patton: Some days I hate stand-up. It happens. I mean, I was just talking to a comic book artist friend of mine who just got caught up in this huge scam. This guy that was repping all these artists, because artists will sell their original pages. You can make money through collectors, and this guy–

Lorien: Yes, I know, my husband is a deep comic book art collector. I am aware. 

Patton: So this guy, who was a broker for all these top artists, was ripping them all off. He would still give them some money, but a lot of the money he was keeping for himself, and not paying them. And what he said was, in this business a lot of the artists don't understand or want to deal with business. Which is why you always hear about business managers and agents ripping people off because I don't want to spend time pouring over my paychecks and my statements.

I want to be writing and there's people who don't have any creative talent but they have no problem spending hours every day figuring out: how can I move this much money here and this much and they look up copyright laws and weird obscure statutes. They're happy to spend their lives doing that to us.

That's a nightmare so you always have to be careful of that too. There is a business aspect that you have to learn some basic business skills, unfortunately 

Meg: In whatever you do, right

Patton: In whatever you do. I wish there was some course, like you remember that there's that Dove Simmons, the two day filmmaking course you can take over the week, and there should be like a two-day Finance For Artists or something like that to teach us this.

Someone could make a killing if they offered that class. 

Lorien: I mean, I think it starts with if you sell a project for a million dollars after all your fees and your taxes, here's how much you actually get . Yeah. Always. 35%. Which you live on, until you sell the next thing. 

Patton: My whole thing is I always operate as if I've made half of what I've been paid.

Meg: A hundred percent. At least that's how I live. That's minimum. Yeah. 

Patton: Yeah. 

Meg: So, Jeff, you had a question–

Jeff: Yeah. Speaking about the practical application of our art. One of the things that amazes me about your career patent is like we said, it's so prolific. You're stand up, you're a writer, tons of voice acting, prestige movies, whatever that means.

You know, like you mentioned low budget, cool indie stuff. How do you manage your time? It's like so inspiring and it's like practically I, the math isn't mathing for me. I'd love to hear you talk about that. 

Patton: I've never really thought about time management. I'm actually excited to get to do this stuff.

So I think that excitement gives me the extra energy. I still sleep eight hours a night. I'm not some weirdo that, you know, wakes up at 3am, but my, I, this is what I like to do. So what seems prolific to other people, it's like, but in a day you can read a book. You can watch a couple movies. You can write a few pages.

You can go, like, all of it is fun stuff. I'm not like, oh Jesus, I gotta, like, I like doing it, so it doesn't feel like, oh, here, I gotta drag myself out of the procrustean bed to get this stuff done. You know, I can, I like doing it. You know, it's not a problem, so. 

Jeff: Do you, I'm sure there are times you have to push yourself, though, I mean, I agree with you, like, we're all in here because we love it, but like, do you ever feel like you have to push through some kind of wall to go sit down and get pages done, or do you really feel like it's just kind of calling you?

Patton: Oh no, there are days, and especially now because I'm going through a lot of changes this year where I really want to, I'm just determined to direct a movie, and that's going to mean a disruption, a good disruption of my normal schedule of consuming stuff. Once you start making movies, you don't get to watch a lot of movies or read a lot of scripts.

You are making stuff. You're now, again, I want to go back to when I first started stand-up. Oh, I'm at the source again. I'm not, you know, right now, as far as movies are concerned, I'm downstream. I want to be upstream and adding to the flow. So I got to make that shift again. It was a big, scary leap to start doing stand up but I did that one. I'm going to do a big, scary leap and start making movies. 

Lorien: I love that. I can't wait. 

Patton: Big scary leap. 

Lorien: So, speaking of big scary leaps, you have a daughter, right? 

Patton: Oh god, yes. 

Lorien: I think, my daughter's 12, yours is around the same. 

Patton: Oh, 15, 

Lorien: Oh no. That's a whole other fun time. 

Patton: Yeah, you're just getting the beginning of the eye rolling and the, okay.

Lorien: Oh no, it's not. It's full body, full voice, eye roll. Oh, it is? It's a full drama thing. Yes. 

Patton: How was school today, sweetie? Fine. Fine. Yeah. 

Lorien: And that means it was so great. I can't imagine it. 

Patton: I gotta, I have stuff to do. What? Stuff. I have stuff I gotta go do. 

Lorien: The door slams, she goes and listens to Taylor Swift, vinyls, she calls them vinyls.

So, you mentioned Steven Spielberg was saying that they wouldn't have had him go off the planet if they had kids then. Have you noticed your writing, your creative expression, the projects you work on, have they changed at all since? 

Patton: Yeah, I mean, well, they've changed in that now I understand what a character, what somebody who has a kid that they really love and want to be part of every part of their life. And I can also still project myself into someone who has rightfully, there's plenty of child free people that are very happy with their choice and that's also a something that needs to be, a lot of people feel like need to be defended because there's people that are always pressuring you. 

Gotta have a kid. You haven't fully lived. You know, there's no right or wrong way to live a life. I just am of the type that's like I want to experience every possible sensation I can. Even the heartaches of it. There's a lot of heartache and raising a kid. Yeah, there's a lot of fears. 

So, yeah, anything you do changes you. Any life change, any new thing you do will change you. And I've said this before, even spending your life resisting change changes you, oddly enough, because it makes you more calcified. If you look at somebody, who vows at age 20, never getting married, never having kids, and that's how they are.

If they stick to that vow into their 50s, they're a different version of that person with that vow. Because they've had to defend it, put up new walls, put up new, you know, shoring up the bulwarks. So that is a change. 

Jeff: That is so wise. That's so interesting. 

Lorien: That's so interesting because we get a lot of emerging writers and writers like how do you write a character who seems like they're inactive, but they actually are active and that is such a good way to say it.

I want to not have kids. I want, and then that they are actually changing. I mean, Meg, you talk about this. You have a much better take on this, but I just think that's great. 

Meg: There's a way to be active as a passive character, which is you're actively passive. You're actively trying to stay out of life.

You're actively trying to not make a choice. And it, I think that's super high math in terms of story writing, but fascinating characters, too. 

Patton: Yeah, some of the best, two of the best movies I can think of right off the bat, A New Leaf and Being There, are about characters who are actively, Walter Matthau is doing everything he can to keep, I think one of the quotes was, you represent a way of life that should have died out a long time ago. But he is gonna, I want this crappy life, this privileged life, and Chance is just not a character, but the way that people bounce off of him becomes fascinating. 

Meg: Yes, 100 percent. 

Patton: So yeah, but again, that is advanced screenwriting. Yeah, so don't, you know, start off easy and then I think it's Ozzy Osbourne said every band does their first album and if it does well the like, It's time for us to do Rubber Soul.

No, it probably isn't. Why don't you just do another album? The Beatles, Rubber Soul is like their eighth one. Take a little bit of time, and you're probably not going to get there. So, you know, the same with The New Leaf. You're probably not her. You're not that level of screenwriter. Why don't you just chill out and do the best you can?

Jeff: Exactly. I feel like speaking about sort of prickly characters or inactive characters, I'm just like such a huge fan of Young Adult Patton, and I think you're so good in it. But Charlize's character is kind of like that a little bit. 

Patton: Oh, it's amazing how she has, and again, that's a great movie that shows you the whole thing of I'm never going to change.

And then when you go back, you realize, oh, I've actually changed in that I've become more of what I was. And that is a massive shift. She does not belong in that world. She is, you notice when you watch that movie, how whenever, when she's in the, at night with a couple of drinks in her, she is Charlize.

And then in the daytime, when they show her like walking along, she's so hunched over cause she's an alcoholic and her power is reduced. They never say she is, but she's an alcoholic and she plays it so brilliantly. And to have that. One of the best scene in the movie is between her and Colette Wolfe, who plays my sister.

When Charlize has slept with my character, you think that, oh, she's, because she opens up to my character a little bit, and like, Has she changed? Is she going to move forward? And my fucking sister comes along and puts her right back on the track she was on. And she's doomed. There is something so amazing to that that the movie took was that ballsy with the ending. 

Meg: 100 percent so ballsy. 

Patton: Yeah. 

Meg: And true. 

Patton: And look, I'm sorry. We've all encountered people that you're like, No, some people really don't change and they find a way to not change in a way that remains comfortable for them. That whole thing about, oh, the tragic unwed, you know, man or woman with no children who suddenly at 65, it all comes crashing in on them to a lot of people that doesn't happen.

They just, they stay in that delusion and they're perfectly fine. 

Meg: They're perfectly fine. 

Patton: But you're right, it's hard to do that dramatically. 

Meg: Yes, super hard.

Lorien: So this doesn't have to be in the show, but I know Colette because she took one of my writing classes. 

Patton: She's so, oh god, she's so great.

Lorien: She just wrote a short.

Patton: She did? 

Lorien: Yes. 

Patton: Good. 

Lorien: Yes. I really beat her up about it. I was like, you better write that. Yeah. So we worked on how to write it and get yeah. So she finally wrote it. 

Patton: She should be working all the time. 

Lorien: She's amazing. Yeah. A hundred percent. 

Patton: Yeah. 

Meg: This has been so wonderful to have you on the show. I could just talk to you for hours.

Patton: Thanks guys. 

Meg: We always end our show with the same three questions. So. 

Patton: Oh god, here we go. 

Meg: Here we go. Okay. I'll start. What brings you the most joy when it comes to your work? 

Patton: What brings me the most joy, and this doesn't happen all the time, but when I'm writing, and I know you've experienced this too, but it doesn't happen every single day. When I'm writing, and you, by the act of writing, you unlock a connection or something in your head that you didn't know was there, but was waiting for you to sit your ass down and shut up and start writing, and the muse goes, Okay, they're here, I'll give him this little tidbit. 

That moment when either a character gets out of your control or makes a choice that you didn't think. My brother wrote a screenplay where a guy, a main character gets killed in the middle of it, I was like, wow, that's a, he goes, yeah, I just realized when I started this scene, he was going to mouth off and get himself shot, but that was not in his outline.

But as he started writing it, I'm like that when those moments happen and you realize, oh, that brings me the most satisfaction doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, there's nothing like it. 

Meg: I love it. 

Patton: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve had those moments when you were writing something and go oh no, this person's going to do, oh shit. Okay. Okay. I guess I gotta do this now. 

Lorien: There's two ways to deal with that, right? One is, oh fuck, I can't do that, because this isn't in my outline or my plan, or I'm gonna do that, and now I have to restructure all of the parts that happen after. 

Patton: Yes. But when you do that, when that genuine surprise happens, the audience gets surprised. They're like, the fuck, oh god, what the, you know, that is genuinely great when that goes down. 

Lorien: Yes. All right, so I get to ask question number two, which is what pisses you off when it comes to your work?

Patton: What pisses me off when it comes to my work is when I fall victim, and this happens every now and then. It's happening less and less because I'm becoming more aware of it, is when I fall into my, I call them my comforting procrastinations. Re-alphabetizing, re-organizing books. Getting, making sure the dishes are done, making, like, little things where I'm like, no, you set aside these three hours, just fucking write, but you fall into these things that make it feel like you're accomplishing something, even though it's a fraud.

Meg: I'm really good at that. 

Lorien: Yeah, I just reorganized my entire iCloud, just in case you wanted to know. 

Patton: I'm so good at that. I, oh my god, it drives me crazy. 

Meg: There's a Zen saying that the highest form of laziness is busyness. 

Patton: That's true. That's absolutely true. Yes. That's yes. Absolutely. Oh my God. 

Jeff: There's also that saying that if you want to find a writer who's procrastinating, see how clean their house is.  I've heard that one too. 

Patton: You walk into a house every book is perfect, like this guy hasn't written shit. Yeah. They just missed a deadline. Yeah. 

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, my place is spotless right now, so I've got to get to work. 

Patton: There you go. 

Jeff: The last question we asked Patton is, if you could go back and have a coffee with your younger self, sort of right before, you know, the precipice of their career, what advice would you give that Patton?

Patton: I would say what I said earlier. I know you don't believe me right now, but I guarantee you nobody is thinking about you. Do whatever the hell you want. I promise you no one's thinking about you. You can do whatever you want. You can fail as big as you want. It doesn't matter. No one is thinking about you. And also, don't don't get a Jamba Juice and a Nose Bagel together after you've done a Barry's Boot Camp.Negate the whole hour. 

Jeff: And they're right there, too. And they're both right there. 

Lorien: Very practical and realistic advice. 

Patton: Right there. Right there. God damn it. 

Jeff: Oh that's amazing. 

Meg: It's like when the Waffle House down the street moved in next to Weight Watchers and I was like, who's gonna survive? Who's gonna stay? It was the Waffle House. The Weight Watchers left. 

Patton: You're almost like, is this a weird, is this a Stanley Milgram experiment going on right now? Is this all, did the government step in and set this up? What is happening? 

Jeff: Am I somehow being electrocuted without knowing? 

Meg: My son is certain that on every street corner is either a 7 Eleven or a Subway. And once you think about that, it's absolutely true, in LA, there's a Subway or a 7 Eleven. 

Lorien: Or Peeps. Or Happy Donuts. 

Patton: Oh, wait, yeah, oh, God, yeah, maybe this is a giant expo, oh man, wait a minute, yeah, you're right. 

Meg: Well, thank you so much for being here. 

Patton: Hey, this was awesome, thanks for having me on this show.

Jeff: Seriously. Well, when you direct your movie, we'll obviously have you back. We can't wait. 

Patton: Yes. No, I, actually, it'd be good to have me back, save certain clips from this interview and go, still feel this way? Like just, and now that I've gone through, just go, stop. How do you feel now? Yeah, that was actually bullshit. 

Lorien: Okay. We might do that. 

Jeff: Yeah, we will. All right. Yeah, it sounds like fun. 

Patton: Thank you. 

Meg: Thanks so much for tuning into The Screenwriting Life. Check out our Facebook group for more support. And remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.