237 | Malcolm Washington & Virgil Williams (The Piano Lesson) On Adapting August Wilson's Pulitzer-Winning Masterpiece

It's no secret that plays and movies are entirely different mediums, so how do you give the cinematic treatment to a play as celebrated as "The Piano Lesson" by Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson? From the start, co-writer and director Malcom Washington came in with a very specific take on the material, and was incredibly grateful when Oscar-nominated "Mudbound" co-writer Virgil Williams came on board to help nurture that take on the page. In today's conversation, you'll hear how the two of them wrote together in the desert, creating a routinized approach to the material, while still leaving space for discovery.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve. Lorien can't be here today, but I am thrilled to be welcoming Malcolm Washington and Virgil Williams, co writers of the acclaimed adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Piano Lesson. It's now streaming on Netflix.

Highly recommend. Lovely, amazing movie. The film, directed by Washington in his directorial debut, is the third of ten planned adaptations from August Wilson's acclaimed American Century Cycle. It was nominated for 14 NAACP Image Awards, including Outstanding Writing for Malcolm and Virgil, in addition to Outstanding Directing and Breakthrough Creative for Malcolm.

Virgil began his career as a TV writer on major network hits like 24, ER, Criminal Minds, and earned an Oscar nomination for co writing Mudbound. Incredible film. Malcolm and Virgil, welcome to the show.

Virgil: Thank you. 

Malcolm: Thank you. It's an honor. It's an honor to be here. When when Virgil calls and tells me to show up, I show up.

Meg: Well I'm such a huge fan of your film that I am so, so excited to talk about it and the craft of writing and partnership, working writer, director. There's so many things we're going to jump into. We usually start our show with something we call adventures in screenwriting. Or another way to think about it is how was your week?

Our listeners like to hear what's a what's a normal week, in a creative's life. I'll start because mine is super easy just to give you a sense of it. I have a writing partner and we sold a pitch to a streamer and you have that great kind of up yeah we figured it out. We figured out this pitch. We got a story. Let's go. And then you start to outline it and you're like, Oh my God, we don't need, we didn't even pitch to be at all. We literally went from the midpoint to the end of act two. Oh my gosh, this actually makes no sense. Like all of the, all of the stuff you just kind of glossed over cause it's just a pitch and who cares?

And oh my gosh, now I'm literally like, we have to kind of start over. There's no plot, really. These people are just standing around. It's that moment of, womp womp 

womp, 

Meg: It's always so much better in your head. It just always feels fresh and rich and so great and then you write it and you start and you see all the giant caverns that open up under your feet.

That's not my favorite part of the writing process. I mean, I intellectually know that you have to go through the caverns, you have to find the holes, you have to realize all the shit that isn't there so that you can create it. And you'll get to the other side. I've gotten to the other side many times.

And yet, you would think I'd never gotten to the other side in terms of my attitude. 

Malcolm: I love that feeling though when you're like, Oh, I just, I just hope I can get this job. Or I hope that I can, get the funding for this. And you get it and you're like, wait, now I have to make the movie? Wait, what? I have to write the script now? What? 

Meg: It's always so much better in our heads than on the page. When you see, oh crap, none of this works. But that was fine. I'm glad you could relate that it's not just me. The ups and downs of it all. And I'm lucky to have a job so I'm not at all complaining. It's more about the the process. This is the process. From the mountaintop right back down into the gully. 

Malcolm: Mm hmm. 

Meg: And up, up we go. Yeah. So how is your guys' week? Whoever wants to go first? 

Virgil: I mean, my weeks kind of blend into each other, cause my routine is, I mean like, I'm a, like a pro. So like I get up and I get up and go kids leave the house at eight o'clock and I blow the whistle. And that means different things, depending on what I'm working on. That could mean I'm in, if I'm in think stage, and I'm sitting reading or watching or just thinking. That's a difficult stage because it, it feels like I'm doing nothing.

If I'm in outline stage, then I'm doing a slightly like a lower altitude version of that. And if I'm at script stage, hopefully God, geez, God willing, I don't like to be on script stage unless I have momentum. Unless I'm, unless I'm on the sort of backside of the mountain, as it were. And I have way more answers and questions. 

Meg: Do you do all that thinking kind of in outline stage, or do you ever do like a puke draft, where you're just like, I don't know where I'm going, I'm just gonna write it? 

Virgil: Yeah, I don't really, I don't really fuck with puke drafts. I don't, I know writers that do that and end up doing draft after draft after draft after draft. That's just not, that's not how I came up. It's just not, it's not how I was sort of John Wells trained. And it's also not comfortable. It's not, it's, I feel a lot more nimble at think and outline stage. '

Meg: Because in television, of course, you do have to do outlines for the producer, for the studio. So your brain is trained, okay, and then we're gonna write that. 

Virgil: Shit, now you gotta do like a story document and then an outline. Like they've managed to find a way to to take advantage of the ambiguity of that story. Right? 

Malcolm: Wait, what, what is that? What's a story document? 

Virgil: Well, some places are asking for a little pre outline document that they'll ask you to write out and they'll note.

And then you'll have to I don't know, you'll have to go back and do more before, before you even turn in an outline. I'm finding this in TV, specifically. It's happening, I'm doing a pilot of Peacock and I'm stuck. I'm in like month two of story document. So there's a ambiguity in that story step that I think moving forward, I'll personally be specific about, but yes. You do it in certain TV situations. I have had to produce and get noted on outlines and pre-outlines. 

Meg: When you get your outline for a feature now, let's say, cause I know in television, you have to hand in what you outlined because that's what they're expecting. But in a feature, if it's just you and your computer, does it ever, when you go to draft kind of go off and do something else? Does it ever, like your main character says, I'm not going that way? Or do you really keep a rain on that and really try to write the outline?

Virgil: This is a great question. It's situational. I know, I know me and Malc had to do sort of a distillation process first and sort of kind of create an outline ish. It was just a high altitude sort of snapshot. And I think for me the process is, is about increasingly becoming intimate enough with the story so that you can hear what it's saying.

So yeah, the character may do that and you have to be I don't know, I have to be in a sort of space where I can hear it. 

Malcolm: And I feel like when we were, this is our first time working together too, so I feel like coming in, we each had, we didn't read, obviously we didn't read it together for the first time. Like we each kind of had some idea of what the story was going to be, what the film was going to be. And it was great to kind of come in and just distill everything down to like, all the things that we-- first understanding the text just in what it's giving you, but then have all these little ideas that we've had and like the way that we've seen the story individually like coming together and put that in a shared super simple really clean document.

Meg: I have so many questions I'm so excited. You know we do have to get to your week too Malcolm I won't forget. I might find. So your coming with separate ideas about this IP which which is a play, and you're coming together to talk about your different ideas.

Number one, did you disagree on anything? And when you say high view, can you just describe for us like, was it like the ten big points? Were you doing it thematically? Were you doing it as a director? What that means to you. 

Malcolm: It wasn't like we were coming in I think it's this and you think it's that. We, we both immediately saw it as a ghost story. I think that one of the things that got me really excited about the material in the first place was the, the ideas and exercises and tone. And how visual this could be, how poetic it could be. And I think I had a strong urge to kind of get that going, because that was just what I was excited about. You chase the thing that you're excited about. And some of that was like in the prologue and some of it was just scattered throughout the whole thing. And so when we got together, it was like a lot of that. It was like talking about that, but Virgil was very, is he's like the elder statesman of the two of us.

He's a young, he's a young man. I don't get it twisted, but out of the two of us. And I think that we each have skill sets, right? He's like such a professional writer and it was, it was like going through like Virgil's writing camp a little bit too, in terms of what he, what he was discussing just minutes ago of the routine, the regiment. It became like, if you played sports or something like hell week or like training camp. We, we shared a space, like I moved in. He has a house in the desert and we'd go there together for a week at a time and live a really like simple regimented life. Show up , to work at 8am and kind of just start working through the story, working through everything very simply. 

Meg: Were you putting things on whiteboards? Were you trying to find plot first? Were you doing kind of the ghost story? What was the first entrance for you guys into how to adapt this award winning play?

Malcolm: Did we go line by line first, or did we? No, we beat it out first. 

Virgil: Yeah, the first thing was that distillation, was that like, was figuring out the movements. And it really breaks down .

Malcolm: That was on Zoom, too. That started on Zoom. 

Virgil: It started on Zoom. We started just going through and just I don't know, just what's this doing? The point of this is, Boy Willie comes home and shakes it up. What, like, where does it end? It ends, when, when Berniece sees the ghost upstairs.

What's this section doing? Sort of identifying what the sort of dramatic point was. What the sort of shape of it was, what's the beginning middle and end. Because you break it down in sections. You can't do you know, you can't eat the whole thing at once. 

Malcolm: And it's so much dialogue too. Like it was just walls of dialogue. And August layers so many things in there that he doesn't even always address or finish. It just kind of turned into us having having conversations like this, like figuring out what that means. What is he getting at? What's the historical context that he's referencing that isn't really mentioned and then distilling all of that down to the line.

Virgil: It's just framework. It's very architectural to me, the whole process. This, this initial part is you're framing. You're really just putting up where what's going to bear weight. Right. And then later you can start-- we just strip all the texts away. 

Meg: When you say bear weight, I think I know what you mean, but I want for our listeners, especially who are emerging, when you say finding a narrative movement and something, what's going to bear weight, can you just dig into that a little bit more? And then I also want to take a moment in a second and just talk to people about what the story is, though, they can follow along. But what do you mean bear weight?

Virgil: What I mean by that is the dramatic thrust of, of, of whatever section you're in. Right. So, the whole play is very symmetrical, very simple and genius in that way. And it rests on a very balanced conflict. The first question of that conflict is what do you do when your history gets stolen? And more importantly, what do you do with it after you steal it back? 

And obviously Berniece wants to let it sit there and ignore it and, and let it be a sort of memorial and that's it. Boy Willie obviously wants to monetize it and neither one of them is wrong. And starting with that piece of framing, you build off that. And then you know once you lay that text in, August has done all that heavy lifting for us, you can figure out what the scene's about.

Meg: But I love that your brain is intuitively starting with, here's the question that's being posed, and because it's an ensemble, different people have different views of that question. So now we can go explore that, almost like a symphony, right? 

Because that's the other thing about this incredible piece of writing that we're talking about, that you guys did, which is it's an ensemble. It's not even just Boy Willie's perspective of him coming home. Now we get her perspective. All the characters have their own moment to talk about their perspective or how they see it. I mean, it's a lot of balls in the air, I have to say. I'm very impressed. Because all of them had their moment. It was all very clear. It was all emotional, incredible performances.

But okay, I have to pause because I do have to ask Malcolm what was your week like? And then we're going to talk a little bit about directing and how that came into this. 

Malcolm: Yeah, my week, this January has been like a year unto itself over here. I live in LA, I'm like a proud Angeleno. My city's been like under duress and it's been just personal stuff was going on, so it was like a pretty chaotic week for me. And in terms of like, how that's distilled in my work, I think right now in my work life, I'm just finished putting Piano Lesson kind of to bed and now my mind is like opening up again.

 I think of it pretty similarly to how Virgil is, and I'm in the stage now of just starting to put things back in. So I'm like watching and reading again and getting outside of myself and my own influences. I feel like a newborn child, that's like running around touching everything. " What is that? What does this do?" And just trying to fill myself back up again. 

Meg: The exploration phase. I love that. 

Malcolm: Yeah. 

Meg: So when you had this play, well, first of all, why this, why this play for you, Malcolm as a director? How did it come about that you were going to direct this or did Virgil bring you in? Did you bring Virgil in? How did you guys, how did this start? Let's just start there. 

Malcolm: It started with Virgil first. You, were connected to the play first. 

Virgil: Well, it came from mentorship. I was writing a movie for his father. And during the summer, that crazy summer of 2020, the Washington family was the only other family I saw besides my own, because I would go up to the house and work with D. And, so I'd wave at Malc and John David .

Malcolm: I would be outside on the porch.

Virgil: And during that process his father really taught me that, we rise by lifting others because he's the first in my career to have done it.

Plenty of people have given me advice, guidance, jobs, all that kind of stuff. But he's the first to have lifted me. And this came from that. He offered me, he came to me during that time, and said, read it, would you want to adapt it? And I was like, yes.

And then soon there after he was like, my son, Malc has a take. And I was like, okay, what do we do? I'm here. And then they had the idea of putting us together. 

Meg: You went with your take? 

Virgil: It wasn't like that though .

Malcolm: I remember we met with Todd, we went to Todd's office, and I remember like, it came to me in a time that I was like really just kind of wrestling with so many of the themes that are present in The Piano Lesson, just in my own life.

Like the ideas of like ancestry and legacy. And at the time I was digitizing my family photos and building out our family tree. So I was trying to understand myself in the context of my ancestors in so many ways. And when I read The Piano Lesson, I read it because my brother was about to do the play on Broadway. And we were all living together, like it was COVID. We all moved back home. And so we were like kids again, sharing a space. So what he's doing, we all know what each other's doing. And he was preparing for the play. So I read, I was like, I'm bored at the house, let me see what you're doing.

And I, and I read it and was like, Oh, whoa, this is like speaking exactly to just where I am in my life. Like I, I turned 30 in that moment too. So everything kind of just lined up where it was just putting it together. 

And I just had a really clear idea that I was talking to my brother about, of " if y'all make this a movie, I think it should be like this. I think you should start with this. I think it should go here. It should be a ghost story." I just kind of had immediate, intuitive thoughts about it. And then my dad and Todd were like, oh well, Virgil is like working on this y'all should meet and just see what, I don't know, like y'all should meet and just see what the vibe is. And I'd known Virgil, obviously, as he said, from coming to the house and we met with Todd and kind of like, just hit it off.

I was like, okay, let's, let's do it. It was just a great, we just sat down, it wasn't like a meeting, like formal, it was just very casually talking about the story. And I think that we saw it in a similar way and we were just like, okay, let's just start working on it and see what happens. It was very organic like that. 

Meg: When you had the ideas of "I think you should start like this," did you think that, were those ideas for you very cinematic? Because I'm very interested in, you took a play which is very, as plays are, they're very dialogue weighted to something that is quite cinematic.

I'm so impressed by that shift. Malcolm, how did you approach that as a director? And Virgil and Malcolm as the writers how did you make sure that got on the page? To take this dialogue centric idea and make it very cinematic.

Malcolm: Yeah. So I, I think I just really like visual movies, like movies that are feel epic and scale and sweeping. And this felt like, in my own kind of ideology at the time, I was really into this idea of Black American patriotism and like the story of America as told through the Black American identity. And I just, those are just things that are just always kind of floating around. But when we were working on the script, I'd never-- this is my first film as a director-- so I wasn't, I wasn't on as a director. We were, writing together and, and the script in so many ways was like the proof of concept of this is how we're going to break this story. This is how it's going to feel. Epic in scale and cinematic and tender and poetic, it all had to be on the page. And I think Virgil almost became like, Virgil was like the mentor that was like, he was in my corner like pouring gas on it like, "nah, we're gonna make this cold so that everybody sees what you're trying to do," because he understood what we were trying to do. And he was like just fanning the flame.

Virgil: I think intentionality was a big deal for us. It's funny I just screened the opening for the Sundance fellows for what's a good beginning? And there was a lot of intent. And then it really is about what do you see? What do you hear? And what does that mean? And we started talking about that. When you started talking about, he wanted the fireworks to sound like bombs, we wrote almost, almost violent. Like we started intentionally doing those things. We talked about canopies of color because we wanted these characters to be sort of like, under the flag as it were. I mean, you see how the piece opens, it opens on, on the flag and fireworks and all that and Americana.

So there was a lot of intentionality there. We wanted to also, I don't know, lock in rhythmically, because there's a rhythm that August has. It was also intentional about not having dialogue in the pieces that we added. That was intentional. 

Malcolm: In the rhythm in the prose, like the rhythm in the description. Even in how it's laid out on the page of like when you jump to the next line. When you just keep it in one block of paragraph, or if you break it up, just how you read, we were always like trying to make the movie. We were trying to present the movie in the in the document. I feel like some people write, and this is not a value judgment this is just different people have different things, but some people write as "this is, this is going to be a great piece of writing." The best version of it is in the writing. It's not necessarily for anything else. Other people write as, "this is just a blueprint." This is the blueprint for the movie. This is like the, "the beam will go here, and then that will go over there," and we were kind of trying to represent the movie in the document.

It wasn't just it wasn't just a blueprint so that the AD knew how many extras we needed. It would also give you a sense of the tone of the camera, a sense of the tone of the cutting, not by saying cut two, but just in the, in how it's written. The prose of it. 

Meg: The writing to move to the next thing, like you said, rhythm, because tone is my next question actually.

There's a lot of balls in the air in terms of tone, right? There's the ghost story kind of genre tone, there's a family drama going on tone, there's the larger historical things going on. Right? And yet, you guys on the page I'm sure, but also in the movie in its filming, really did a hat trick of It still all feels like the same movie.

It's still all tonally-- it's like one of those unicorns, I think. Like when people refer to tone and they say the movie Ghost, I'm like, yeah, you can't use Ghost. Nobody knows why that works. You cannot use that. And here's going to be the second movie that I'm going to use. You cannot use that. It's totally unique. Nobody else can do it. 

But I want to hear if you talked about tone and how to meld almost, it's not melding genre, but it kind of is. 

Malcolm: Yeah, it is. There's like some good comedy. There's some like slapstick comedy in there. There's some like borderline, like horror stuff. There's a thriller, there's all these kinds of different elements.

So yeah, that was something that we were definitely trying to understand first is like, how can we even do this? And then, and then really kind of craft and I wish we could take all the credit for it, but working with such great actors that under understand the material. With Samuel L. Jackson can make you laugh and make you cry within a minute of each other. And, Danielle Deadwyler and all, once they kind of helped, they really were the reason why it all worked, but we wanted to set that part up for them. Where our hands are on the knobs. 

Meg: And the cast is truly stellar. What amazing performances you got. I just, I could go on and on about that, but it's not about writing, so I won't. But you really did do it visually and like that opening matches in its own way the ghost story. It's like releasing the ghost again. And I know it has all those other implications and issues and thematics. 

Malcolm: But you're but you're absolutely right. And that and that's something that we discovered and we're intentional about on the page. That this visual motif, building that into the script of light and dark, shadow and light, we knew that that was going to be a thing. 

Actually, I think we got, I think we put it in the end and then went back. I think it was backwards, sorry. 

Meg: Often it is. 

Malcolm: I think, yeah, I think we were like, oh, this is like a big thing halfway through. And then we're like, okay, now we got to go set this up better. 

Meg: But you do, as soon as you see that opening, I know that I'm not going to be in, I don't use want to use the word typical, but an expected play adaptation. There's a mood being deeply established here.

Now, part of that mood of course is also driven by Berniece as a character psychologically. Because she's the one that believes the ghost is there. Can you talk a little bit about her character? Was there any development in her character from the play to writing the script and then, of course, directing Danielle Deadwyler, which must have been amazing. But can you talk about it a little bit? Did it change much from the play or your perception of it? Were you having to draw it out? She kind of becomes a fulcrum narratively. 

Malcolm: Yeah, you know what I feel like there was, first one of the first things that we first big things that we had to do is just really understand the text. Like Virgil was like such a stickler for it and in a great way where we literally went like word for word. And it took us a few sessions just to get through the whole thing of looking up what this meant. And then that turns into like character work of understanding who the characters are like really deeply like getting inside of them so that then later, once we're actually writing, we can we can understand who they are in their spirit, in their core and then build off of it, right?

And then now we can imagine, and now we can get into these other things. And with Berniece, I think that in some other iterations of it, I think that she's been less dimensional maybe and that was a big focus where we wanted to highlight like all the complexities of her life. All the complexities of her character. That she's a mother. Yeah. 

And she's holding this family together in so many ways, but she also has desires and wants and a sexuality and a vitality to her, too, like a fleshiness and we could help build all that out. And what that turned into on camera was seeing some of her imaginings and her desires, seeing seeing her with her dead lover and Crawley, and feeling the skin of their skin connecting with each other. And knowing that she has this sexuality to her too, this desire to her too and how that informs how she's navigating the Avery and Lymon of it all. And so it was, it was really about understanding to its core so that then we could build out from that. And I really credit Virgil for that. 

Virgil: Well, that's a, I mean we credit each other. There's a lot of layers on that character. I think one of the first things that happened was there were structural changes that we made to Berniece. There was a whole, like we cut, there's a character Grace that's in the play that's not in. And she's in it, but she doesn't occupy the page space or the amount of real estate. It really is. I keep calling it New York real estate. There's no space. So you either have to tear down and rebuild or remodel. And we did a tear down of, of a certain section and what I think it allowed it to do is it allowed all the light to shine on that particular female character and what she's going through.

And what Malcolm mentioned also to, seeing Crawley makes her character spherical in a way that she's not in the play. Little things, more intention. She's playing with a crucifix that belonged to Crawley, like all, like these are little things that we put in the script. That framing that allowed growth later.

So when you see Danielle actually like breathe life into all that stuff, that conceptual stuff, it's fucking mind blowing because she's, she's brilliant. And we started with brilliance in August, so all we had to do was like kind of hand it off. 

Meg: More than hand it off. I mean, I love that analogy of New York real estate. Are you tearing down a remodeling? I think that's, I, I'm saying it out loud for our writers to hear. 

Virgil: But she benefited a great deal I think from that. And we did that for rhythm. Like we did that for pace and there was just, it flagged on the page. You can feel it on the page, but what, that was like one of the benefits was like, Oh shit look what it's doing. Particularly like one speech, the speech that she, I think that she gives to Avery, "Oh, I can't be a woman who doesn't love me." It does something to that speech that it allows all the light to be on that particular speech. Also rhythmically we separated the bath from, from Avery to Lymon. Those are all kind of on top of each other in the play.

Malcolm: And I think it also kind of puts, it makes it more of a two hander in the sense of Boy Willie is so much of the driving force of the first half of the story and then it kind of hands off to Berniece. And then they have to come together and find catharsis between the two of them at the end. Where that whole second part just becomes so much about Berniece. 

Meg: It does. And so, so, so well done. So I want to talk a lot of our writers, including myself have writing partners, and I realized this was for this particular project, but did you guys set up any kind of rules for writing together? Or what was the process? Did you do it together and then someone took pages and someone else took pages, or did you sit in the room and do it together? How did you actually write together? 

Virgil: Shoulder to shoulder. Like same room. 

Meg: Like page open on a screen kind of thing? 

Malcolm: It's funny because even talking about it now, like the Zoom, I completely forgot about the Zoom part of it in the beginning cause we were just together the whole time. 

Virgil: Yeah. I mean, we'd go out to the desert. We would sequester. Like he said, we'd go out to the desert and sequester and blow the whistle at eight. You start getting hungry around 11:30, eat some lunch, maybe work a little bit through lunch. You do your afternoon push by 3:30-4pm you're crispy.

Meg: But do you have the page open on one of your computers and you're both kind of writing? 

Virgil: I was usually at the keys and Malc had the football. There's a football in the room that you inevitably end up picking up. 

Malcolm: Yeah. And you walk around the room.

Virgil: And you walk around the room. So I was sort of like, it was like. I don't know, pilot, bombardier, like shooter, spotter, like that kind of thing. 

Meg: I love it. So what happens when-- did you ever have a disagreement and who won and how did you do it? 

Malcolm: For sure. For sure. But it wasn't like winning or losing. It was like often it would lead to the third thing, which was the actual right thing. And that's, what's good about having a partner. I feel like-- so intuition is great, I love, working from an intuitive space is amazing and you can do it more when you're writing by yourself. But what happens with a partner is you actually have to think through your thing. So you'll have an intuitive kind of thought of like I think it should be like this, and then they go I actually thought it should be-- "I think it should be red," "actually, I think it should be blue." But you don't really know why, then you kind of go back and forth. And then it's like you shave a little off the corner yours and he shaves a little off the corner for his, and you realize that purple was the answer all along. You have to first acknowledge your intuitive thought, but if you don't kind of articulate what you like about it, it's " oh, actually, I like that part of it, too. What doesn't work for me is this other part of it." And, you kind of just find the thing that works.

Virgil: We got super lucky, I think. I mean, I always knew that Malc was going to direct it. I always knew. He, he came into it and, the amount of respect I have for him for this is crazy, he didn't want to be given. He wanted to show everybody on the page this is what I'm going to do here. I'm not, I'm not going to just take this job. This is what I want to fucking do. And I was like, Oh, okay this motherfucker wants to roll up his sleeves. And so I knew that it was my job to, I don't know, be his corner man. 

To make sure that he was armed with a level of intimacy-- same thing I did for his father on A Journal for Jordan-- armed with a level of intimacy so that when he went into the ring with these like killers, these actors, that he would be fluid. That there would be a sort of a facility with the thing. So I knew that we were training him up. There was, there was also this element of we were both writing in service. We both knew that this was bigger than us and really had nothing to do with us. So disagreements? Meh. We brought our own different shit to it. 

Malcolm: Yeah. But it wasn't like ego.

Virgil: No. 

Meg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you say, just again for our newer writers, talk a little bit more about level of intimacy. Because I love the idea that you're getting him trained up to go into the ring with these incredible actors and he needs a level of intimacy with the story, with the characters, what does that mean? What specifically? Can you give me a specific? 

Virgil: Well, for me, that, I mean, I'll answer it generally first. What it means is being intimate and familiar enough with the thing so that you can, A, listen to it, and B, allow it to be whatever it's going to be, like, on the day, right? Because you don't know what's coming. You just set up space and pray and have intent. But you have to, I think, be close enough to it to be flexible.

Malcolm: And understand the logic behind everything, because what happens is you get to set, and Samuel L. Jackson has gotten to think about this for six months. John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler have got to think about what their characters are doing and what they're about for six months and so you need to understand and the script has to make sense.

If you write in this experience that Berniece had when she was a kid, it has to build in some way to what we're dealing with now. If it doesn't make sense there or if you don't understand what that moment was, on the day when she does come in with something that you didn't expect, you can't even engage with it because you don't even get the character. You don't understand the trajectory they're on. It's understanding beat by beat, who are these people outside the space of the story? Who are they before the movie started? Who are they going to be after? What's the family story? How did all of these events that take place in the past affect our story today? That's like the intimacy that he's talking about. We had to go into that. 

Virgil: Yeah. And we built that between each other too. Like the trust grew and the respect grew and then we became friends. Like now that dude's my friend, like it's, it's transcends this sort of-- then we can just play ball. Now we can just play ball. 

Meg: Now, certainly creating any kind of art as a team will create intimacy and vulnerability. On this podcast, we talk, I just term it lava, that often, and hopefully often in your stories, there's going to be something that you so deeply relate to or makes you feel so vulnerable and it's so personal to you.

And I don't mean in terms of how it's externalizing, but that emotional journey the characters on or some vein of gold inside of it really makes you feel. And it can feel like lava to get too close to it. Right? If you're going to really, are you going to really lean in to that and let it burn a little bit so that you can be the cathartic experience for the audience?

Was there something in the play itself beyond the social context, that was personal and emotional that both kind of drew you both to it individually? Like, why this play of all the plays? How did it relate to you or draw something out of you personally? 

Virgil: It's so funny that both me and Malc came together and came together in the way that we did with such, I would call, like synchronicity. Because I come from an incredibly sort fractured family of origin. Not united like we don't like, we don't speak to each other really. Malc comes from a super unified family of origin. I can remember one where we saw things differently. When the brothers were coming together. 

Malcolm: Exactly. Exactly. 

Virgil: He comes from a certain kind of experience where he's like "they're brothers," and I was like, "yeah, man, they're brothers." He's like, "they're brothers. They love each other." I was like, "no, they're brothers. They hate each other." So what made it personal to me is that sort of August gave me permission-- as did Malc by the way, with his kindness and generosity, his whole freaking family-- gave me permission to connect to my ancestors and connect to my history in a way that I just, I don't, I don't have it.

Logically, I can't open a book or look at pictures. Like my knowledge of my family history basically ends in my grandparents. From there it's just all just kind of shattered. And so the permission and empowerment, the permission to connect to my own self was for me, profound, like a real gift. A super gift. If that makes any sense whatsoever. 

Meg: No, it absolutely does. It absolutely does. Malcolm, what for you is kind of a more personal take? 

Malcolm: It wasn't like, neither one of us started like this is my family's story. It was never that, but you're just trying to tell the truth every day. Like you're trying to tell the truth of what would this, even the moment he's talking about, it's like, what would happen for real? What's the truth of this moment? Would they hug or would they not? Are they close? Do they love each other? Are they beefing? 

And you make a million little decisions throughout the whole process of just trying to get to the truth and the truth is like determined by your life experience, like your worldview, everything that you've been through of how you see the truth. What do you think that the reality of that matter is, and then you look up and the whole thing is lava. It's like the whole movie.

I remember I had a day in Post, it was like way later and I was like wait, this movie is too personal. It's too personal. The whole thing was like, I was sensitive to it. The dynamic between Berniece and Boy Willie, I'm a younger brother, like that was my sister there. Berniece in moments was my mother. Doaker in so many ways was my grandfather, my uncle and all of their stories were personified in this thing that was so charged with meaning and personal experience to the point where I had no other choice but to dedicate it to my mom. It felt like, to acknowledge that and understand like how scared it made me because it was too powerful, but to ultimately acknowledge it and say it's bigger than me. Like this is for all of my ancestors, my whole family tree, like their stories are cemented in this text now.

Meg: That's so beautiful. And I'd never thought of it that way before and yet, as you say it, it feels so true to me too, in terms of if you are trying in every beat, in every moment to push towards authenticity and truth, which is humanity, which can be contradictory. Humans are contradictory. Humans are fucked up. Humans are beautiful. Humans are nasty. And we're all of those things. But if you are truly pushing to that, the whole thing when you step back, you're like, oh my gosh. 

Malcolm: Whoa. 

Meg:  I didn't even know  how personal it was. 

Malcolm: This is a story about a son trying to make sense of his father's legacy? Oh my god, this is like, this has been the thing I'm wrestling with my whole life. This is a story about a mother and a daughter, this is a story about a father and a son. It's oh, Jesus. This is the story I've been running from trying to tell. And you look up and there it is in front of you. And what are you going to do at that point? It's too late. 

Meg: And look at the power. I just want to say to our audience who are beginning the power of the bravery of this creative team. That story you've been running from, to instead lean into it and say, okay, beat by beat, we're going to lean in, we're going to lean in, we're going to push it; that it creates such an incredible film for all of us to experience. Like that is the work of an artist versus a craftsman in my opinion. 

And I've had that moment too, where at Pixar, you watch the movie and storyboards. And I just, for Inside Out 1, the very first screening, I just felt myself getting lower and lower in the seat. Because I was like, oh my god, this is all really personal. And I didn't realize it until, Jesus, Jesus, that's me. 

Malcolm: And every scene, it's like, it's all over. And you're like, I'm an idiot. How did I not see this? 

Meg: How did I not see this? And then you're like, shit, now I gotta get notes. Crap, I gotta get notes on something really personal. Again, that's the work. That's why we are the warriors going into this, because you are gonna make it so authentic, so personal, then you're gonna get notes.

And you got to find that separation. So I do want to ask you about that, how you each approach notes. What is that like for you? Some people love them. Some people hate them. I'm generally on the hate them side, even though I appreciate them, but how did you guys approach getting notes?

Virgil: This notes process wasn't, I don't feel like painful. 

Malcolm: Yeah, although sometimes it is good regardless of how good or bad the note is sometimes. I feel like we built morale between us sometimes being like, you know what, fuck it. You know what I mean? Before you even read the notes you just kind of have a little bit of a fit, and then you go through it.

Meg: It does help to have a partner in the fuck it notes. 

Malcolm: Yeah, exactly. 

Virgil: I mean, we smirked at a couple. We were like that sounds like a TV note. A couple we kind of like, did that, but you know, compared to some notes processes, this was like a walk in Central Park on a beautiful day. 

Malcolm: And we were super lucky to work with really smart and talented, obviously producers and executives on the studio side where they understood what we're trying to do and they were trying to help us get to where we wanted to go which was great.

Virgil: They helped make that ending. They pushed the ending. I love it. I absolutely love it. And they helped. Because we resisted, we wanted it to be a little more, I don't know, more ambiguous. We were, I remember we were kind of messing with at first. But I think that they helped us into a really, something really beautiful.

Meg: That is the best, when the notes push you to be braver. 

Malcolm: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

Meg: Be more authentic. Even though they're all so hard. So, character introductions. Do you have any insight into character introductions? 

Malcolm: I love character intros. I don't know if I have any insight. Well, you know what I think? So what we were talking about earlier of understanding intimately the story you're trying, to tell really understanding who that character is and their wants and their and their obstacles. Like really simply and stirred to their core and then you, you put that in the character introduction. That helps you get to, how do I introduce them?

You know what, for Boy Willie, like we, we talked, we talked a long time about when we see adult Boy Willie, how are we going to introduce him to the world?

Meg: How did you get to the choice that you made? What for you, why is that the perfect introduction for him?

Malcolm: We introduced him as a, first, we introduced him as a kid wearing his father's, his dad gives him his hat. That's a legacy he has to live up to. But when we really see our Boy Willie, John David Washington and what he is after in this moment, we saw Boy Willie as a character who was just, had so much drive, could bang his head through a wall to get what he needs and what he wants. So we wanted to see him in action. We wanted to see him like, we introduced him trying to push a truck that won't move, that won't budge. 

Virgil: He's struggling against the machine when we meet Boy Willy. He's trying to push the fucking machine. He's pushing the fucking system. He's pushing this thing that's gonna carry him to freedom. Full of fucking watermelons and it's not starting and he's, and he's doing it anyway. 

Malcolm: Yeah. That's who he is. That's who he is.

Meg: And you hit the bar of, as Andrew Stanton says, I fucking love him. Because he's trying and he's not going to take no for an answer and he's got to fucking get it. And so you're right with him. You're just like with him. I'm getting on the truck with you, I'm in the story. 

Malcolm: And I might question your tactics, but I know what you're after. And you know what? It makes sense. It makes sense what you're after. 

Meg: It makes sense. 

Virgil: We meet Berniece and she's asleep. We meet Berniece and she's sound asleep because that's exactly what she's doing. She's ignoring her history. She's content to let it sit downstairs quietly. But we meet Avery, he's got his Bible and strutting through the neighborhood trying to charm congregants. We meet Doaker and he's taking care of that house, he's in and about that house. Everybody that we meet, we were intentional about how we met him.

Meg: I love it. And Doaker's on the porch, isn't he, when we meet him? 

Virgil: Doaker's inside. 

Malcolm: He's inside. Yeah. 

Meg: He's in the kitchen. 

Malcolm: Yeah. 

Meg: Cause it's about his house. You guys, I love all of that so much I can't even tell you. Like my brain is spinning right now in terms of this pitch. How am I going to meet them? I have to know them better. 

And I have to say John David Washington is just, was just a revelation to me. I thought he was, they're all so good don't get me wrong, all so good, but, Boy Willie's gotta hold that drive. At any point, Boy Willie goes, "well you know what," it's over, right?

Malcolm: It's over, there's no tension, yeah. 

Meg: The weight, to me, of the narrative is on that actor, and boy, he just, he just held my attention in that narrative. It's amazing. 

Malcolm: And to do that and still understand why, oh, that, see that there's a hurt boy inside of there. 

Meg: Yes. Yes. Oh, he's playing all those levels. I mean, it was truly a master symphony, those, all those actors together. All right. I, I, you guys, I could just go on and on, but I can't keep you anymore. So I'm going to go to our last three questions. We ask every guest, what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing? Or directing creatively, however you want to slice that.

Malcolm: Ooh. 

Virgil: Finishing. 

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. I hate writing, I love having written. I like when the part that you like hate the most, or the part that you're like, I just don't like this part of what we're doing, later turns into the thing that you like the most. And that can happen where it's like "I just don't, I don't know. We're not there, I don't think we nailed it," and then later you're like, actually, that's where all the character and all of this stuff is. Or when you have an idea that somebody else takes further than you. And this, this happens in partnership of writing together. This happens when you're on set and an actor takes an idea that you started with, but they carry it further to a place that you see, or even in the editing room where your editor takes all of those collaborations and then carries it to a new place. I think that that's so satisfying when you build-- you built the stage, but like somebody else is kind of doing their dance on it. That's the best feeling. 

Meg: I love that. I love both of those. 

Virgil: I've actually become quite amazed by the unseen flowers that grow. I have found that if you give to their craft, it's like Garrett Morris used to say on Saturday Night Live, " baseball been very very good to me," right? If you give to the craft and if you, you put in and you do all that honest work that Malc was talking about, things grow that you could not have imagined. There's a bunch of things that you can absolutely imagine. You can absolutely imagine your movie getting made, being on set, premiere, all that stuff.

Getting nominated for an Oscar, that's very imaginable. But the things that I love that bring me joy, the things that I could never have imagined-- my friendship with Malcolm, my friendship with his sister Katia, the day that I spent on that van at TIFF with the entire cast. I'll take that with me to my fucking grave, such a beautiful day this was.

Things like that, my, I'm still friends with Rob Morgan from Mudbound, this guy's like a brother to me now. These unseen things that grow when you give to the craft, I did not know that this happens, but it happens and has happened. And with enough consistency in my own experience, I know that it's fucking true. So that brings me a lot of joy. These unseeable gifts that you are gifted when you just give to the craft, when you just try and write and not expect anything from it, but just try and write well and create well and be kind and be respectful.

This whole thing was about writing in service. Single greatest blessing of my career because of all those unseen things that happened. My friendship with Danielle Deadwyler. I could not have imagined that. I could just text her. You know what I mean? And fucking write something for her.

Meg: Okay, but now I cannot wait for our second question. Which is what pisses you off about writing and creating?

Malcolm: This is a tough question. 

Meg: It's so funny, for some people it's not at all. 

Malcolm: Oh, really?

Virgil: I find myself frustrated by the system. Sometimes you get into a situation and you're not writing a thing, you're not in it to make that thing good, you're in it to make that thing sell.

You're in it to-- happens in television a lot-- you're in it to meet the needs of whoever the buyer is. And then you kind of turn into script monkey. Because then you're just, then you're a contractor. You're not a creator. You're like, okay, what kind of fixtures do you want?

Then it becomes that-- I don't know, pisses me off. I don't know if it's dramatic, but that's difficult. 

Malcolm: Mine's like a cousin of that, like a, where it's like you're making something or you're writing something and you get kind of lured or enticed away from the core idea that got you working on that project. And then you either finish the script or you make the thing and you look back and you're like, why did I do that? Why did I listen to-- not why did I listen to these people, but why did I allow myself to get taken outside of myself and do something that I don't believe in? And you look back on, it's like looking back on something and not seeing yourself in it, not feeling connected to it. And it's this abject thing that's you did, but why? Because I just get upset with-- you you get upset with yourself in those moments. 

Meg: But it happens all the time. 

Malcolm: Happens all the time. 

Meg: We don't know that it doesn't feel authentic until you do it. And then you're like, oh yeah, no, that doesn't.

Malcolm: Why did I, yeah. 

Meg: Why did I do that? Okay, the last question is, if you could have a coffee with your younger self, what advice would you give to that younger self?

Virgil: Would say calm down. I would say write more of your own stuff. And I would say direct now.

Meg: Don't wait to direct. 

Virgil: Don't wait. 

Malcolm: Do not wait. 

Virgil: Yeah, don't wait. Do it now. Go. Yeah.

Malcolm: That's tough. I second that, especially don't wait. Don't wait. You know what I would tell myself to do. I did it when I was in film school, just because I went to AFI. And everybody that ever went to AFI, they keep their thesis films there in the library. So you can watch, you can go watch like Darren Aronofsky's student film. And not him, like Darren's obviously amazing filmmaker and stuff, but you can go watch amazing filmmakers' early movies, and they're terrible. They're terrible. I would give myself. 

Meg: It's so liberating. 

Malcolm: It's so liberating. It's so liberating. Early on I'd say hey go watch other people's first features, their short film. 

I love movies, I love this stuff and that can make it feel so big because it's like these movies mean so much to me. Like I'll never be the genius that like makes the thing that meant what it meant to me for somebody else, you know and that can put so much distance between you and the thing that you really want to do, but collapsing that distance.

Meg: Yeah. We all have this crazy idea that these geniuses like their first drafts are perfect. Perfect. 

Malcolm: Yeah. 

Meg: Meanwhile, everybody's first draft sucks. I don't care who you are. The first draft . None of this works. Shit. Okay. You just got to learn that. I think it's such a great advice to go to AFI and watch those films. So great. I love it. 

Well, this has been amazing. Thank you guys so much for. Coming on our show, sharing so much with us. I'm inspired to go right, which I'll tell you for this I was not. Amazing ideas and congratulations on the film. It's truly incredibly special. 

Malcolm: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Virgil: Yeah. Thank you. It's been fun. 

Meg: Thanks so much to Malcolm and Virgil for coming on today's show. The Piano Lesson is available on Netflix. Take a look. And for more support, please check out our Facebook group. Come over to our workshop site. We're having a blast over there and really, really digging in and helping some people with their work.

And remember you are alone and keep writing.

Jonathan: You said, remember, we're alone. 

Meg: I did. I did! My god, I got all the way to the end and I fluffed it up. And remember, you are not alone, and keep writing. That's so funny.