Episode 60: Transcript

Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:10] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] Today we’re going to be talking about dialogue, and we’ve got an incredible special guest, the supremely talented and wonderful Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who is the creator of one of our favorite TV shows, The Middleman and also the co-executive producer of both The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Cowboy Bebop. So, stick with us as we have a dialogue about… dialogue!

[00:00:42] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:08] Thank you so much for joining us, Javi.

Javier: [00:01:10] Oh my God, thank you for having me. Are you kidding? I’ve been seeing word of our podcast on Twitter for so long and I’m now on it. I’m so excited.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:19] Yay!

Javier: [00:01:19] I really am.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] It’s so awesome talking with you. So today’s episode actually comes about because of a question that we received from a listener named Len in Winnipeg, and this is Len had to say.

Len: [00:01:34] Hi there OOACpod people, it’s Len in Winnipeg. I’d love to eavesdrop on any sort of discussion you want to have of how dialogue relates to world building.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:44] Javi, how do people reveal something about the world they live in and their cultures and their cultural background in the way that they talk?

Javier: [00:01:54] I have been accused of, I have frequently been accused of having characters who all sound like each other because I think that when I write something like The Middleman, I have a very idiosyncratic personal voice that I’m basically trying to indulge. So I’ve been trying to figure out how does one have a voice and then have characters that also have their own individual voice and that their voice reveals all that stuff.

[00:02:18] I was reading a little bit about Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is sort of one of my lacunar voids. Not having English as a first language and a few other reasons, it’s never been for me the intense field of study that I think it is for a lot of other people who make English their language. So Shakespeare would write in iambic for certain characters, certain characters would be in rhyming iambic, some would be in just plain blank verse and all of that, depending on their social status and all of that.

[00:02:42] And it does make me think a lot about how I write characters and what their dialogue reveals about who they are. I think the root of all good drama is that the characters who are involved in a scene have very distinctive wants and desires out of the scene and out of the story. And how they pursue that is sort of the core of drama for me. So I think ultimately, being somebody who has that kind of Amy Sherman-Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, sort of ideation in that my characters all kind of do sound very similar, I think the thing that I definitely do to differentiate is to be very, very rigorous with myself about what the characters want and what they need and what the shape of the scene is rather than do I just love the sound of my own voice. 

[00:03:29] And I think that… and by the way, when I bring up Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin, I’m not comparing myself to them in any way. I think that they’re both vastly more accomplished than I am.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:39] We’re going to tweet right after this, Javi says he’s the new Amy Sherman-Palladino, you know.

Javier: [00:03:45] I should be so lucky. But, I think ultimately, the answer to your question is so intertwined with character and whether you as a writer have really really thought about what this character’s coming into scene wanting, you know?

Charlie Jane: [00:03:59] Right. But for example, when you’re writing The Dark Crystal, the Skeksis talk one way, the Gelflings talk one way. How do you kind of think about their cultures or their—

Annalee: [00:04:11] I think the question is kind of like, how is their dialogue part of building the world? You build the world with sets and with costumes, but also just talking.

Javier: [00:04:23] Well, to bring it back to what I was saying before, you know you’re watching one of my shows because everybody sounds the same, so that’s how I’m building that world. They take place in a very idiosyncratic personal space of mine. You watch The Middleman, it’s not hard to discern. I think when I’m doing stuff that is intended to have a more realistic or a worldbuilding kind of quality to it, I think with The Dark Crystal, it’s really interesting. The original dialogue in that film was written after the film was made because Jim Henson wanted the film to basically play in Skeksis, as its own language, Gelfling, I think would be English, and then the Podlings would speak their own language, right? So he literally just threw you in to that world and hoped that you would get it and then nobody got it. And so he had to go back with a VHS tape of the movie and rewrite all the dialogue with the screen writer so it would match—

Charlie Jane: [00:05:14] Oh, wow.

Javier: [00:05:14] —hand movements that had already been done.

[00:05:16] So with Dark Crystal, you’re looking at that, and you’re going, okay so the Skeksis have this, we’ve inherited this sort of stilted, idiosyncratic pattern for how they speak, right? So going back to just looking at that and that accident of creation created a very specific way for those characters to speak. I think the other great thing about the Skeksis is that every facet of the Skeksis was designed to make them just be awful. And there was a sort of delicious awfulness to them.

[00:05:44] So the—

Charlie Jane: [00:05:44] Mm-hmm-HMMMM [some kind of muppety noise].

Javier: [00:05:45] —way the worldbuilding with Skeksis, and yeah, exactly. And they’re just horrible. And they’re so unabashed. Writing the Skeksis was kind of like wirting a character based on our current president, because they’re thoroughly unashamed of their own awfulness, and they revel in it in a way that is… So with the Skeksis, you have all of this fun, because you just get to be the biggest douchebag you ever wanted to be and then you’ve got nine of them to spread that around with, you know. And because as characters, they’re so clearly defined by occupation. The Collector, the Treasurer, the Emperor, the Scientist, the Chamberlain. That also kind of gives you an idea of how to just how to platform them. But it really was just about embracing the awfulness.

[00:06:30] And look, they all have very strong individual wants, also. The Scientist was very much about tinkering in his lab and using invention to get himself ahead in the political hierarchy of the Skeksis. And he’s always thwarted in it, and so his voice always has that bitterness to it. You get to look at those dynamics and build those exactly into their expression.

[00:06:50] One of the things you notice with The Scientist is he uses a lot of high level insults. He calls people things like prokaryotes and things like that. I don’t know if that word made it onto one of our scripts, but he always has that kind of a—

[00:07:02] So he’s basically, you’re writing him as a very enlightened, very smart person who thinks everybody else is a moron and yet he can’t get ahead. So I think we inherited a lot of great stuff with our characters and our job was to expand on that. 

[00:07:13] I think with the Gelfling, the Gelfling in many way were the weakest link in the original movie and we have to kind of build a civilization for them. And their speech was always kind of plain but noble. So that was kind of how we wrote them, and I think, look, I think with the worldbuilding, it’s like, with The Dark Crystal, we didn’t want to use accents. We didn’t want to use any racial cues to anybody.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:39] That seems wise.

Javier: [00:07:41] Because the last thing you want is for somebody is to say, oh, the Dousan are clearly a stand-in for the Arabs or what… you don’t want that. That’s just stupid.

Annalee: [00:07:48] Yeah, that’s kind of Star Wars stuff.

Javier: [00:07:51] And, uh, wow, yeah. Right. So we were very cognizant of that and I think it became about using some of their plain-but-noble spoken-ness to give them the character of a race that was entirely of their land and all of that. But then, you know, we also had different clans, that we would give them different. For example, the Dousan. The main Dousan in The Dark Crystal was Rek’yr, who was one of the two only pop culture jokes in that show. Because his name is an anagram for Riker, yeah. Because we always saw him as Riker. Because Riker is kind of a sexy dude, you know.

Annalee: [00:08:29] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:31] That’s awesome.

Javier: [00:08:33] But his culture was very sort of mystical and kind of death-obsessed, but in a positive way. So they were very poetic in their language. The stone in the wood Gelflings are sort of the salt of the earth warrior Gelflings, and I wrote an episode that featured this character Maudra Fara, who was the Maudra of the Gelfling clan, and I loved her. And I was trying to figure out how to write her and how to put all of those qualities that I felt were germane to her, and what I realized was, I really wanted to write her like Maximus in Gladiator. 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:02] Oh man.

Javier: [00:09:04] Sort of very mid-Atlantic, posh, but still rough, you know? So I just played Gladiator non-stop while I wrote all of her scenes, and that quality of that character, you can see, and the way that she spoke, you could see her nobility, but her also lack of bullshit.

Annalee: [00:09:21]I love that idea of having the voice of Maximus in your head for this character. I mean, it reminds me of, we were just watching Never Have I Ever on Netflix, which is a show about a South Asian teenager who has John McEnroe in her head as her voiceover and as the voice that speaks for her. And it created this really delightful cognitive dissonance to have this foul-mouthed white guy tennis player dude in the head of this teenage Indian girl. It gave this new side to her character. It’s kind of like bringing a Roman warrior into The Dark Crystal. It’s like, suddenly you have a really different feeling about that character just because of the voice. Just hearing that voice over top of another voice is really… it just adds a whole other layer.

Javier: [00:10:18] I was going to say, one of the things I like about Maximus is that for a character in a movie that is as male as Gladiator is, he’s weirdly sort of asexual. He has a wife and a kid, but they die. He has a woman that he was the lover of—

Annalee: [00:10:33] Yeah.

Javier: [00:10:35] —but he was her lover decades before. So he really only exists for his code of honor and all of that I feel like that was such an important thing to give Maudra Fara. Especially Maudra Fara. She is a warrior queen and she is a person of honor and all of that before any of the considerations of gender enter into how you see her, partially because the world of The Dark Crystal is a matriarchy so there’s no question that she—so you don’t have to address those issues. She can be anyone you want her to be and I just really appreciated being able to do that and to give a female character a voice that didn’t feel gendered but that existed only because of that inner sense of nobility. I just really liked that.

Annalee: [00:11:15] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:16] Right. So, we’ve got a couple of clips. One is from the book of A Game of Thrones from George R.R. Martin, and the other is from the TV show Game of Thrones, and they’re both the exact same scene, and I’d just like to play them right now, because I think they illustrate an interesting point.

GoT Book: [00:11:31] Direwolves loose in the realm, after so many years,” muttered Hullen, the master of horse. “I like it not.”

GoT TV: [00:11:40] There are no direwolves south of the wall.

Now there are five. You want to hold it?

Charlie Jane: [00:11:47] So what’s interesting about these clips is that the book version is a lot more formal and it kind of gets back to what you were saying before about slightly stilted dialogue, like, “I like it not.”

[00:11:58] And we all grew up on Marvel comics where people talked in big speech, and Star Trek where they’d be like, “It is the will of Landru” and stuff. It feels like—

Javier: [00:12:08] That’s the one you reach for, really? The Landru episode? Wow.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:10] I mean, it just popped up in my head. You know, let this be your last battleground.

Javier: [00:12:15] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:17] I feel like there’s a lot more tolerance, there’s a lot less tolerance, I guess, now, than there used to be for people speaking in these kind of heightened, faux-Shakespearian ways in pop culture. You worked on, I know, Shannara.

Javier: [00:12:30] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:30] Where they most talk like they’re on Smallville. They don’t talk like they’re in a fantasy narrative. So can you speak to that, about the kind of decreasing tolerance for high fantasy-speak?

Javier: [00:12:40] I find that ridiculous. First of all, there is, one of the tenets by which I live my life is that there is no such thing as naturalistic dialogue.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:49] Oh, interesting.

Javier: [00:12:51] I think all dialogue is artifice. I mean, even, you look at Flaubert, who is supposed to be one of the big naturalist writers of his time, and all of that stuff. And it’s like, everything they’re doing is invented. Any time you put dialogue on a page, you’re inventing something because real life scenes that you play out with people don’t have buttons. Unless you’re having a fight with your partner and they do that thing where they zing you and they walk out of the room.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:14] Can you explain what a button is for those of us who are button-ignorant?

Javier: [00:13:19] Okay. So, I look at all scenes, and pretty much everything, as a three act play. You can have the set-up, the development, and the prestige, or whatever you want to call it. And when you start looking at scenes that way, you see that every scene has what I call the button, which is that last line that ends the scene and makes you… it’s the line that goes, And, scene. It’s the line the person walks out of the room in, it’s—

Annalee: [00:13:44] The kicker.

Javier: [00:13:45] If you have a dramatic enough partner, sometimes your partner will try to button the fight. The partner will come in and say something horrible and then leave the room, and you’re like, you can’t button this fight, that’s not fair!

[00:13:56] So already, you’re talking about scenes, drama, these things all have structure, and when you’re writing to structure, everything is going to be artifice regardless of how naturalistic you want it to sound. For you to tell me that people have less of a tolerance for high fantasy dialogue, I think that’s interesting because I don’t have either a tolerance or an intolerance for it. I just find that what jars me isn’t whether language is one way or the other, it’s when it’s not consistent.

[00:14:20] For me, I don’t have an intolerance for high fantasy dialogue. I completely understand why the people who made Game of Thrones completely walk away from that and I think it was very successful for them, because they wanted these characters to be very relatable. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:31] So I had another clip I wanted to play, which is from one of my favorite TV shows, The Expanse.

The Expanse Clip: [00:14:37] Beltalowda! Listen up. This is your Captain, and this is your ship. This is your moment. You might think that you’re scared, but you’re not. That isn’t fear. That’s your sharpness. That’s your power. We are Belters. Nothing in the void is foreign to us. The place we go is the place we belong. This is no different! No one has more right to this, none more prepared. Inyalowda go through the Ring, call it their own. But a Belter opened it! We are the Belt! We are strong! We are sharp! And we don’t feel fear.

No! No!

This moment belongs to us! For Beltalowda!

Charlie Jane: [00:15:57] So what’s interesting about that is that they don’t just have their own way of speaking, but they have their own kind of Creole, their own kind of language and it comes out in everything that they say. How useful or how important is it to create a brand-new language or elements of a language when you’re trying to create another society. Like with the Klingons on Star Trek, for example.

Javier: [00:16:18] I think that when it works, it works really well. I actually think of Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange, both in the book and the movie, how much the droogs had their own sort of quasi-Russified English that they spoke in. I think that if you’re a writer or creator who is good with that sort of stuff, it’s great. I think with Klingon it’s phenomenal. I love the idea that Klingon is the most widely spoken artificial language in the world. I think that that culture really sort of was able to transcend going from being a pretty clumsy stand in for the Soviet Union, to being a pretty clumsy stand-in for Feudal Japan, to being it’s own thing. And I think part of that is that language and the way that the series sort of built on that.

[00:17:00] I couldn’t do it. Every time I try to create a Creole or a patois for my characters, it sounds horrible. I think the problem is that people aren’t very good judges of what they’re good and bad at. So I don’t know that it’s one of those things where it’s like, fundamentally bad or fundamentally good. I think that, especially, is so much in the execution.

[00:17:18] I mean, how do you approach that, creating that kind of artificial language for your characters when they’re of an alien race or something, since both of you have worked in that field extensively.

Annalee: [00:17:27] I think the thing that’s really interesting about Klingon, for example, which is not something that I could ever replicate in my writing, is that they hired this guy, Marc Okrand to write it. And he had a background in linguistics. They also hired an outside person to write the Belter Creole for The Expanse. So they brought in experts, basically, who were like, I know how to actually build a language, because I’ve studied linguistics and I’m like a brain farm. 

[00:17:55] And so I think that’s what’s so satisfying about Klingon. For me, what I tend to experiment with most is I have a lot of robot characters, and so… and in the novel I’m working on now, I have a lot of robots and uplifted animals. And they have all different kinds of cognition. And so I like to play around with the idea of people communicating not with an accent or with a specialized language, but maybe with different expectations about what language is for. I think that’s really fun.

[00:18:23] I think that’s probably the most that I’ve ever done with it. Charlie Jane, you invented a whole culture with its own language, and I feel like in City in the Middle of the Night, the Gelet have a psychic language that they’re using, where they’re communicating through touch and through sending each other images, um.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:41] I mean, in City in the Middle of the Night, I definitely tried to kind of imagine what it would be like to have non-verbal communication and how that would shape your cultural concepts, and it was really hard. And I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of it. Definitely in All the Birds of the Sky, I tried to have the birds, whenever the birds are talking, they’re a little bit more formal. They’re a little bit more high-faluting than anybody else. They talk in a slightly more fancy way, I feel like. It’s been a while since I looked back at it. But I love how your robots talk, Annalee.

Annalee: [00:19:11] Yeah, no, everybody seems to think that that’s really great, and I just based it on how computer networks function and how when one computer is sending data to another computer, the kinds of signals that they send each other, the kinds of information that they give about the information. Because that’s what computers do a lot is they’re sort of saying, like, all right. I’m giving you some information, it’s encrypted in this way. It’s formatted in this way, okay, here’s the information. And so for computers, talking isn’t just about what you’re saying, its about how you’re saying it, how it’s packaged, who can hear it…

Javier: [00:19:46] Well, you don’t want to have a syntax error, is the worst thing you can have in your computer, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:19:51] Right.

Annalee: [00:19:51] You certainly don’t want to have a syntax error. You don’t want to have things like dropped packets if you’re communicating over a network or if you do have dropped packets, you want to have your language set up so that if you lose some bits of it, you can still reconstruct what was actually said. And that’s one of the beauties of internet communication is that even when there’s dropped packets, you kind of can reconstruct the data because it’s built for unreliable networks. 

[00:20:16] And so I think, to me, like I said, that’s what’s fun is imagining cultures where language isn’t just about chit-chat. It has a kind of productive function, or it’s part of building something that isn’t just us talking about Star Trek, which is really… I guess language really is just for talking about Star Trek.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:33] Pretty much.

Javier: [00:20:33] [crosstalk] But, having read a number of books written by each of you, I think what’s interesting is—

Charlie Jane: [00:20:41] What?

Javier: [00:20:41] Yes, yes. I am an avid reader of the Charlie Jane and Annalee starship.

Annalee: [00:20:46] Mutual fan club here.

Javier: [00:20:49] Absolutely. But here’s the thing. I think that in success, you don’t really. I think of any of the books that I have read that you guys have written and I never stop to say, oh, I’m reading this kind of constructed language now. I’m just reading a book that you wrote and the world seems to present itself in a very matter of fact way. That’s sort of the trick of it. At the end of the day, it’s not whether any one version of dialogue is good or bad, it’s a question of does it take you out of the narrative? 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:17] Right.

Javier: [00:21:17] Or does it just keep you seamed into it in a seamless way. The other thing I was going to mention is in The Dark Crystal, we actually had a constructed language, which was the Podling language. In the original film, the Podling language was, I believe Serbian. And the—

Charlie Jane: [00:21:33] Oh, wow.

Annalee: [00:21:33] Really?

Javier: [00:21:33] Yes.

Annalee: [00:21:35] That is so weird. Okay. I mean, it kind of makes sense, actually, because they are a people who are being genocided and stuff.

Javier: [00:21:42] The Serbs didn’t much like that, apparently. So for the series, we created. Well, not we. Joe Lee, J.M. Lee who wrote the YA novels and also has an education in linguistics went ahead and wrote this language and created its grammar and all that and there is a formal Gelfling language that then Victor Yerrid, he was the puppeteer behind Hup and did all of the production sound capture, and his voice, actually. He learned the language. And there were times when Victor would call Joey with a question, and Joe would be like, I just created the language, I don’t speak it.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:15] Wow.

Javier: [00:22:15] Which is another weird thing that happens when you have constructed language and all of that. I’ve worked on a number of shows that… because the 100 had a, David Peterson did a conlang for us on that show, the Grounder language was actually a completely created language. And David Peterson’s the guy who did the Dothraki language and the Valyrian language and all of that stuff. So he’s kind of the dean of creating fake languages for TV shows.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:37] I wanted to mention a fun thing about that, which is, I mean, I always have to mention Doctor Who in every episode of our podcast, it’s just a thing. So in the Doctor Who episode, “The Sontaran Experiment…”

Javier: [00:22:49] Oh, God bless you. I love that one.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:51] I know. So Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who wrote The Sontaran Experiment were obsessed, obsessed with trying to come up with future English. And in another one of their stories, The Invisible Enemy, all of the signs on the walls are written in this weird phonetic fake English. And like, the word “exit” is spelled E-G-G-S-I-T. Invisible Enemy is really fun if you just pay attention to the background.

Annalee: [00:23:14] This is just very Iain M. Banks—

Charlie Jane: [00:23:15] I know!

Annalee: [00:23:16] Iain M. Banks did a whole novel called Feersum Endjinnspelled phonetically where everything is phonetic. It drove me nuts, what the hell.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:25] Yeah, that is a little annoying, but he probably was paying attention to this. So anyway, in The Sontaran Experiment, Bob Baker and Dave Martin wanted all of the astronaut characters who are far future humans to speak a little bit different from normal people and so they wrote them that way, but then they also specified that the story had to have only South African actors playing those future humans.

Javier: [00:23:47] What!?

Charlie Jane: [00:23:48] Because their South African accents would be just a little bit different and the way talked would be a little bit different from modern British English. And it kind of gives them this weird different feel. And that was supposed to be the language of the future, was supposed to be how English would change over thousands of years.

Javier: [00:24:08] You know, if I can throw an interesting wrinkle into what you just described. I’ve seen The Sontaran Experiment twice, and it literally stuck with me from when I was nine years old because I watched it in Spanish.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:21] Oh!

Javier: [00:24:21] So everything that you’ve just said completely blew past me because when it was being shown in Puerto Rico, when I saw it those times, it was never in English. And I don’t know that the people that did the dubbing for it knew that.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:33] Probably not.

Javier: [00:24:33] So I remember watching it—no. And everything was fairly flat, sort of, in a kind of Latin American sort of accent, but none of that was there. That’s… now I want to go back and watch it in English.

Annalee: [00:24:46] Yeah, I had a long conversation with the Spanish translator for Autonomous, which is my novel about robots, because the robot’s gender changes, or the pronouns that the robot uses for itself change halfway through the novel, so he was really concerned that he wanted to show that, but of course robot in Spanish is la robota, I guess. And so it’s feminine and so he was like, how do I show that the robot is changing. So he came up with a whole scheme to represent the pronoun shift, but it’s really hard when you translate stuff like that, like accents or weird ticks of a language, you lose something.

Javier: [00:25:27] Well, I think, yeah, most romance languages have gendered nouns and I don’t think that’s something you hit as much on in English.

Annalee: [00:25:33] Nope. We don’t really have it. Well, we have it a tiny bit, like ships are feminine, right, it’s always she. But yeah, it’s not built into every pronoun that you use, or whatever.

Javier: [00:25:44] Which is bizarre. I don’t know how those choices were made or, I mean, obviously evolution made those choices. But it’s funny we should circle back to this and to my experience as writing in English and all of that. I think if you watch The Middleman and you feel like the dialogue is very weird and idiosyncratic and meter, I think that’s because it’s pretty much being translated, not from Spanish, but from the mind of somebody who spent the first ten years of his life being educated and thinking in Spanish and then had to learn English.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:13] Oh.

Javier: [00:26:13] And I think, my English isn’t terrible, but it’s very much informed by me not being a native speaker. And I think that that’s big part of. When people say, why do all the characters sound the same, I say because they’re all over-educated, neurotic Puerto Ricans. That’s how they speak.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:31] Yeah, and speaking of that, we’re going to take a really quick break and when we come back, we’re going to talk about dialogue and characterization.

[00:26:38] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee: [00:26:49] So we were talking about The Middleman, and by the way, if you haven’t watched this show, you should just stop listening to the podcast right now, go watch a season of The Middleman, and come back. One of the things that’s really interesting about that show is that the dialogue is really stylized in a lot of ways, in the same way that the setting is stylized. Everything in the show has a specific kind of look to it, including the monsters and the technologies. It’s all kind of mid-century, mid 20th-century-looking. 

[00:27:17] There’s a little bit of that in the dialogue, too. The dialogue feels a little bit like I’m watching a really smart cartoon from the early 1960s. Is that kind of the character voice that you hear in your head when you’re writing, or how does that come about? How does that come from your head and then appear in the characters’s mouths. 

Javier: [00:27:37] This takes me back to when we were talking about high fantasy dialogue. I think that there’s dialogue that’s really cool to write. And I think that there’s dialogue that looks good on the page. And then there’s dialogue that works well in somebody’s mouth, you know. When you’re reading something, you don’t necessarily have a performance attached to it, to figure out whether it’s naturalistic or not. So a lot of The Middleman, I wrote it as a script originally, and then it became a comic book and it just… sometimes I just wrote dialogue based on what I thought would look, like what would be a fun sentence would read. Like, that the sentence is taking you on a journey.

[00:28:09] And you guys have read enough of my prose to know that I sort of have these very labyrinthine sentences, and a lot of dashes and commas and joined clauses and things like that, because I think it’s fun to kind of, every idea, every sentence has an idea and it takes you through the idea, that’s a little bit of a trip. The way that that lays out on the page is sort of the map to that and it has to have a certain aesthetic balance to it, also.

[00:28:31] So when I write dialogue like the dialogue in The Middleman, I’m thinking of meter, I’m thinking of what the words look like, I’m thinking of the size and shape of the words, things like that. And what happened in The Middleman is I just decided, well what if I just write this without any concern for the actors. And it’s a very mean way to write, but I said, I don’t want these characters to sound like normal people. This is the first time that I’m going to get to write the way that I wish people could speak.

[00:28:53] The thing that bothers me is when people believe that the way that I wrote that show was not a deliberate choice, that it’s just sort of a… Look, I think ultimately The Middleman is a show about ideals, that’s about heroism, not being horrible. It’s about all of these things that are ideas that I’ve had and I think that there’s a kind of… a lot of the heightenedness is there because you wish you lived in a world where you always made the best quip at the best time and everybody’s dialogue popped and everybody had that synergistic rhythm that showed their community. Because everybody’s dialogue just pops and everybody bounces off of each other and all that, and everybody’s in a sort of Brownian motion.

[00:29:32] Whereas, when I want to write about isolated, lonely people, they don’t say much and there’s long pauses and stuff like that. But what fun is that? 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:41] So one thing that jumps out at me about The Middleman is that the characters are funny in different ways. Wendy is really sarcastic and The Middleman is just sort of funny in a very earnest way. He’s funny in a way that—and I actually, I have a clip that I wanted to play from Avengers: Infinity War, which I feel like illustrates this thing of characters being funny or having really different voices that humor kind of makes that pop.

Avengers Clip: [00:30:06] He could destroy life on a scale hitherto undreamt of.

Did you seriously just say hitherto undreamt of?

Are you seriously leaning on the cauldron of the cosmos?

Is that what this is? [clank]

Charlie Jane: [00:30:15] So, Javi, how do you do that? How do you have characters be funny in different ways and how does that reveal something about who they are and what their character is?

Javier: [00:30:24] Well, look. I think that Middleman specifically was such a pop culture-driven show that you gave everybody. The Middleman is a guy who made the choice to be Joe Friday from, like the way Dan Aykroyd played Joe Friday. When I met Matt Keeslar and we talked about the character, I said, this isn’t a guy who’s a weirdo who somehow grew up this way. This is a guy who used to be an a-hole who decided that he wanted to be Captain America, and at a certain point, he made the conscious choice of being that person. And that’s why his dialogue is that way and that’s why he hates communists. Which, his irrational hatred of communism was one of my favorite things to write in the show. Because it was long after the Cold War, so… this is a guy who made that choice.

[00:31:07] I think Wendy is somebody who doesn’t hide the fact that she’s smart. Wendy doesn’t feel the need to make you feel comfortable that she knows a lot and to make you have to meet her on her ground. And I think that’s one of the fun things about her character, and one of the things that makes her, for me, a really fun character to write. Is that she’s a very secure young woman. She has a great sense of self and the way she speaks shows that and that connotes a different kind of humor.

[00:31:39] The Middleman is sort of like Worf in that everything he says is about honor and duty and whatever, and then people make fun of him for that. Or the things he says are so pompous in the context that they’re funny.

[00:31:49] Wendy is funny in her context because she is the smartest person in the room most of the time and she doesn’t need to apologize for that. And I wanted to show women, especially a female character, having that attitude because it’s not something that you see in a lot of female characters, especially 13 years ago when the show was produced.

[00:32:08] Lacey, Wendy’s roommate, she developed into this sort of very idealistic character. Her entire thing is about pointing out absurdities, but then she’s also kind of really quirky in her own way, so what she sees as absurd is sometimes different from you see as absurd and then the way she addresses it is kind of different. Her mind works in a very different way. She’s a very associative character and she’s not a pop culture character. So she doesn’t have a lot of that stuff. She actually is just—that’s why she and the Middleman become a couple. It’s because they have the same kind of earnestness but it’s generationally divided. 

[00:32:42] And it’s also, he is a sort of analytical alpha male and she is very much like somebody whose mind free-associates its way into truth. So I think that knowing that about your characters before you start writing them is important and I think you can see it in The Middleman, that it took a little bit for those characters to hit those grooves because we were finding some of them. But I think by and large, dialogue reflects your cultural context, it reflects obviously where you grew up, it reflects how you were raised. I don’t know how germane this is to this particular topic, but one of the things I’ve noticed, is there’s a really interesting way to understand dialogue. And that is, if you stop looking at dialogue as the things people say, but you start seeing it more as their prayers.

[00:33:24] I don’t know. I find that I understand people a lot better if I start sort of looking at what they say as more of a reflection of either who they wish they could be, or what they wish the world could be. 

Annalee: [00:33:36] So dialogue is a kind of, in a way it’s the aspirational part of the character. And then does that mean that the places in the story where we’re not hearing dialogue, is that kind of where reality has a chance to assert itself a little bit?

Javier: [00:33:51] Oh my God, what hell are you talking about where people don’t speak all the time?

Annalee: [00:33:55] That’s why we had you on here because [crosstalk] dialogue-heavy guy. But I do think if you think of dialogue as aspirational in that way, and I think this goes way beyond your own writing, but I think it happens a lot, especially in genre shows, and in genre films. It is interesting to see the quiet places in the story as being the sort of reality and then the dialogue pops off of it as the heightened part where suddenly these characters are getting to be who they really want to be even though they’re living in a shack or in an abandoned space ship in the middle of the desert. Or wherever they’re living that sucks ass…

Javier: [00:34:37] One of the reasons why I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a singular film. 2001 is a movie where none of the dialogue is dramatic. Very little of the dialogue in that movie—

Annalee: [00:34:47] Yeah.

Javier: [00:34:47] I mean, there’s, Haywood Floyd and the Russian scientists and Dave Bowman and HAL and that’s two scenes in a movie that’s over two hours long. And those are the only—

Annalee: [00:34:57] I mean, and there’s the “It’s full of stars,” and that’s pretty much—

Javier: [00:35:00] Right. So I think one of the reasons that movie is so unsettling and that it’s so singular and so weird is how it lives in silence for so long and how it completely tells you that very little of human communication is anything other than banalities and just inconsequential. Kubrick was such a misanthrope and he was so convinced of the inscrutable indifference of the universe that he lets you sit in a lot of silence for a long time. I think one of the reasons people disliked that movie so much is that. Is that it is deeply, deeply unsettling and uncomfortable to go through those long stretches of quiet.

Annalee: [00:35:35] I also think that that was part of his effort to try to create something that was realistic. One of his big decisions was, no, we’re not going to have whooshing noises in space. You would not hear whooshing noises in space. You wouldn’t hear pew pew pew. And so he was like, we’re going to have this incredible music that’s really obviously not the—it’s obviously music that’s being pumped in by the film, extra-diagetic music as we used to say when we were studying film. And so it heightens the fact that yeah, we’re in this hyper-realistic space world where the space station is branded with Crest logos everywhere and everything is… almost disappointingly bland, even though it looks super awesome at the same time.

[00:36:20] So I do think that that’s right. That part of what’s unsettling about that film is like, this realistic silence of what it would really be to be in space, which is a lot of sitting around or running on your treadmill or talking to computers that are kind of grumpy.

Javier: [00:36:37] You know, it’s funny. There’s a movie that came out recently called Ad Astra. I know that the movie is considered by many people to be deeply flawed and perhaps even problematic, but I really enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed so much of it, and that movie and Apocalypse Now are two movies that I go, how much better would this movie… Have either one of you seen Ad Astra?

Charlie Jane: [00:36:58] Not yet, I’ve been meaning to.

Annalee: [00:37:00] I haven’t but I have seen, I’ve seen Apocalypse Now, of course.

Javier: [00:37:03] Well, both movies, I think, how much better would these movies have been without the voice over. As great as the voice over is in Apocalypse Now, and as well-written as it is, I mean Michael Herr is… I wonder how much harder that movie would be to watch in terms of your sense of discomfort and your sense of impending dread if you didn’t have Martin Sheen telling you everything.

Annalee: [00:37:22] Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting.

Javier: [00:37:25] I mean, look. My biggest fear in the world is silence. I don’t know if you can notice that. To be forced into silence or to be forced to witness silence is extraordinarily difficult for me so I think that I look at that as an object of fear. And I think you’re absolutely right, as I think about what you said. It’s like, a lot of silence is where you lose control. While you can speak you can control a situation, you can say what you wish it were, or what you wish it would be, or what you want from the other person. Where there’s no talking, there isn’t that.

Annalee: [00:37:52] All right, I think that’s actually a good place to end.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:54] So, thank you so much for joining us, Javi. Can you tell us where people can find you on the interwebs?

Javier: [00:38:00] On the interwebs. I can be found on Twitter at @OKBJGM, that’s my handle on Twitter and on Instagram. It’s also the name of my website, OKBJGM.com, which is where I have things like writing samples for bibles and scripts and stuff like that that aspiring writers have found useful. You can also see me on The Dark Crystal, or at least hear lines that I wrote. Age of Resistance on Netflix and coming soon, I’ll be, I’m one of the writers on the revival of Cowboy Bebop for Netflix, also.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:34] That’s so exciting.

Annalee: [00:38:34] So exciting.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:37] Oh my God.

Javier: [00:38:36] Talk about translation. That’s a really interesting one. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:40] Oh, yeah.

[00:38:41] So thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you like our podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to our podcast any way that podcasts are available. Apple, Google, Libsyn, all the places. And we’re on Twitter at @OOACpod and Facebook as Our Opinions Are Correct.

[00:39:01] And thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti for being an incredible, valiant audio producer. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks again to you for listening. And we’ll see you in two weeks. Bye!

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