680 - Writing Action Set Pieces
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John welcomes back Christina Hodson (The Flash, Bumblebee) to ask, how do you to construct a great action sequence? Using examples from three different movies, they discuss what good action looks like on the page, how to keep your reader from getting bored or confused, and why production can sometimes blow your plans to smithereens.
Then it’s a round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take four stories from the news and pitch how we might adapt them for the screen. Stories include a mysterious painting, a train trapped in a blizzard, a teen who sued his parents, and zombie colleges.
We also follow up on director’s chairs and mammograms, and answer listener questions on side characters and creating a healthy work/life balance.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Christina examine the do’s and don’ts of introducing yourself to a stranger through email.
Links:
- Christina Hodson
- That New York Times article with John and Christina
- Bamboo Director’s Chair
- Birdigo on Steam
- Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
- David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
- David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
- A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
- When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
- A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
- Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
- Mike Birbiglia
- The Onion in print
- Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
- Outro by Vance Kotrla (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There's some swearing in this episode. |
| 0:08.9 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You're listening to episode 680 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? |
| 0:21.3 | We'll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. |
| 0:23.8 | Then it's a new round of how would this be a movie, where we take stories from the news or history, |
| 0:28.1 | and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. |
| 0:30.3 | To help us do all this, let's welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and the Flash, Christina Hodson. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello. Christina Hudson, we're so happy to have you back. |
| 0:38.4 | I'm very happy to be back. |
| 0:39.4 | I cannot believe you are on 680. |
| 0:42.3 | It's so many episodes. |
| 0:43.8 | So many. |
| 0:45.1 | Yeah, but as we're doing the script notes book now, we're in sort of the last edits on script notes, it's book. |
| 0:48.9 | It feels like 680 episodes. |
| 0:51.0 | There's just a lot there. |
| 0:52.7 | It's been a lot of sifting through stuff. And the |
| 0:55.5 | culling phase now where it's like, we've had these amazing guests on. It's like, oh, we want to do |
| 0:59.1 | a little breakout chowder with them. It's like, oh, no, there's no room. There's no room for |
| 1:02.5 | these people. Ryan Reynolds, gone. He's gone. Ryan, if you're listening to this, sorry. You were |
| 1:07.2 | terrific. You're wonderful twice for me ryan christina no we want to bring you in here |
| 1:13.3 | right now just to let you know that you're such a valuable part of this shrimp notes community and yet you |
| 1:17.4 | don't have your own chapter well you can you can you can swear if you want to on the show |
| 1:22.5 | i forgot to apologize in advance i will be swearing all right uh we are going to have some swearing |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -12 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John August, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John August and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.