[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's "On Story," "Westworld" co-creator, Lisa Joy.

- I write to feel less lonely, I think.

And I think when I read something and I connect with it, especially when I was growing up, that would always make me feel less lonely.

I'd be like, "Oh, this person understands.

I mean, they've been dead for two centuries, but that person got me."

[paper crumples] [typing] [Narrator] In this episode, Emmy award nominated writer, director and producer, Lisa Joy discusses her experience delving into the world of science fiction and the process of creating the television series "Westworld."

Joy speaks about the intersection of sci-fi and technology as well as the discovery of humanity in non-traditional narratives.

[typewriter ding] - I would love to just begin with the birth of you as a writer, specifically, if you don't mind talking to how you really became a big sci-fi fan and sci-fi writer as well.

Was there a particular moment or piece that opened up that world for you?

- I'm not like a sci-fi junkie.

I am more now.

I didn't consciously say I wanna write.

I mean, I told you what my first attempt at writing was about, it was about baked goods and romance.

That being said, I've always really been drawn to mythology and to stories with a fable-like quality.

I think it's almost, like, it's kind of old fashioned of me, or maybe just classical in its structure.

For me, I was always really interested in themes that kind of transcended the immediate place that we were in society.

A little more universal.

I think that is also probably because I don't think I grew up in the same world that a lot of people in America grow up in.

You know what I mean?

Like when people talk about the baseball games or the TV shows they used to watch as kids who are my age, I have truly no idea what they're talking about, you know?

And I think that's part of what happens when you're from an immigrant family.

I didn't speak the same language, eat the same food, go to the same stores, watch the same stuff.

And so, it's hard for me to capture what it's like to be American in that same way, because it feels alien to me.

And I think there's always been that kind of outsider gaze.

And to a Chinese community, I also have an outsider gaze because a lot of times they don't know I'm Chinese, right, so.

And look, I think this is not necessarily, I think all writers have that gaze, there's always that thing when you're a writer of standing back and observing the world and not feeling fully, it doesn't necessarily have to be a matter of race or gender or bringing up.

There's something lovely about writers, they're the people who sculpt in the corner watching a little bit, taking it in.

And I think I really love humanity and humans.

I'm a little scared to interact with humanity and humans.

[Lisa laughing] And so, you write the world that you imagine would exist if you were less scared to interact with it.

And so, science fiction kind of grew out of those impulses and that origin for me, like the idea of, I loved Greek mythology, I loved Chinese mythology, I grew up with all those huge stories.

And even though I couldn't find necessary American children's books that I related to, when I looked at the classics, there was something so timeless about it, those hero's journeys that they spoke to me.

And for me, science fiction is a way of treading in that same terrain.

So that's really how I came to science fiction, not so much because I was like a sci-fi geek, although I love sci-fi geeks and married one, but just because I love world-building and those kinds of epic themes.

- It's funny you mentioned world-building there because I'm curious, how did you come to discover that sort of skill from yourself and how did you nurture it as a writer?

- I think, if you're introverted, which I am, and especially growing up, I think you look at the world sometimes and it doesn't quite fit, you know?

And so you're always mapping a way in which the world might make more sense or be more beautiful.

The only person we can ultimately write for is ourselves.

I write to feel less lonely, I think.

And I think when I read something and I connect with it, especially when I was growing up, that would always make me feel less lonely.

I'd be like, "Oh, this person understands.

I mean, they've been dead for two centuries, but that person got me."

And so, for me, it's a really personal kind of internal thing.

- Your experiences as a staff writer, you mentioned how difficult some of those rooms could be potentially.

From an alternative side, what sort of gifts or perspective did it grant you having that opportunity?

- When I started in my first writer's room, I'd never been in a writer's room before.

I was working in Silicon Valley literally the day before and I had to fly back and start.

I had no idea what they were talking about.

They all sat there staring at this giant whiteboard and drawing lines on it and breaking things into acts, and it was very strange to me.

But very soon the structure of how to break and watching people actively iterate on ideas, it's the best way to learn.

Just like being in post is a great way to learn about writing because you see the things that you've done brought to life.

And then you have to basically rewrite by editing.

I mean, no matter how one-to-one your script is, there's just so much that happens in editing.

And so you learn a lot about writing or at least I do by observing the way other writers pitch and think, and by looking at the editing process.

I think Bryan Fuller is just a brilliant, he's a friend of mine and just wonderful.

And he has such a singular aesthetic.

He's so uncompromising.

And he writes from the page, which is something they tell you not to do as a writer, don't dictate from the page, and I think it's why his shows look really unique.

And I learned to write that way and that's something I picked up from Bryan.

It's not necessarily right or wrong, it's just my preference.

I also tend to think visually.

And when I write any script, I normally have the edit already playing in my head like a movie, like a finished movie.

- Who are some other influences that encapsulated who you think you are now as a writer?

- I didn't really watch TV or films until very late in life.

I wasn't really allowed to growing up.

And so I have been more affected by novels because simply that's what I had access to growing up.

And I think it explains, like, I can do the more Bantry kind of colloquial contemporary style.

And that's one of the great things about writing on staff is you just mimic the voice and aesthetic of whoever you're with.

I think my style tends to be more lyrical and poetic, which is not really the vogue right now, frankly, but it's because my favorite authors were, you know, I loved Nabokov, I loved Kurt Vonnegut.

I really loved poetry growing up, like Gates and Keats.

My husband Jonah has been, of course, an influence on me.

We work together so closely.

And I love that he just has some killer one-liners that are just like, I just, you know, it elevates the material when I see it from being too ponderous and he'll just throw something really irreverent in there, which I always appreciate.

[typewriter ding] - We are going to start talking about "Westworld" and I'm going to really try not to fan off, but our first clip is going to be, I believe, from episode 10 season one, and we're gonna get a little cool moment with Dolores and the Man in Black.

- You're just like all the rest.

- I'm nothing like the other.

I own this world.

And I know every trick in it, except for one last thing.

The same thing you were looking for when we first came here.

Where is the center of the maze, Dolores?

[Dolores crying] Oh yeah, cue the water works.

About time you realized the futility of your situation.

- I'm not crying for myself.

[dramatic music] I'm crying for you.

- That's actually the speech I gave my college boyfriend when I broke up with him.

[audience laughing] Not traumatic at all.

- Amazing scene.

And particularly, the turn from Dolores who in that first season our audience really follows going on a journey of self-discovery, rediscovery, among many other things.

Can you just talk about crafting that character with Evan Rachel Wood and what that process was like?

- You know how I was talking about how sci-fi and fables can also be personal, right?

It's almost a way of exploring things that are so personal without it being autobiographical.

You get in some ways to be more honest 'cause you're not afraid of exposing yourself in that literal way.

And I wasn't drawn to "Westworld" because it was sci-fi or a Western, I was drawn to it because it was a really great metaphor for the human condition, condition of women, what it's like to be kind of overlooked in a landscape and mistreated.

These are things that you can't easily talk about, right?

Especially because then you become that person who's talking about that all the time.

And as a writer, you wanna kind of, or at least I wanna kind of be invisible as a person.

I just wanna write what I wanna write.

But I wrote this coming off of a staff where I was the only woman and it was tough.

And I remember during some of the really difficult moments on it thinking, "Oh, you guys can say whatever you want to me and do whatever you want because there's no safety for me.

I can't complain."

This before Me Too.

"I can't do anything.

I just have to live in your world and somehow survive it."

And I was trying to kind of withstand it with a degree of dignity and without losing who I wanted to be.

And in a way, I started to think of it as a gift.

A very weird gift that I wouldn't like say, my daughter to inherit, but you know, life hands you what it hands you.

And what it handed me was the truth of a really dark side of people that to get through the day I would normally try to ignore, you know?

And it let me see that so clearly.

It's like Sisyphus surmounting his fate.

He pushes that boulder up and in the moment, he's toiling with his boulder, but he gets to surmount his fate for a moment by seeing the land below, seeing the whole landscape of the world.

And there's something sometimes about being underestimated, about being an outsider that allows you, I think, to see truths of things by standing outside of it that inform your worldview.

And so the idea of writing a character, couple characters who in westerns and sci-fi are traditionally overlooked, you know, it's the barmaid in the back or she's the hooker or the Madame or she's the sweet girl who waits for the boy.

And to say, "Okay, well they overlooked you and perhaps they overlooked me and maybe we could team up and do something."

And it's just literally expiation.

- At first, I thought you and the others were gods.

And then I realized you're just men.

And I know men.

You think I'm scared of death.

I've done it a million times.

I'm [bleep] great at it.

How many times have you died?

Because if you don't help me, I'll kill you.

[suspenseful music] - To be able to find that world, make a model, a metaphor for our world and watch this hero navigate it, and one day kind of start to live in it on her own terms.

I think writing is a tool for imagining a world that you wanna live in and imagining the kind of person you'd like to be one day.

Or even if that person makes mistakes, somehow if you can forgive the character those mistakes, you might be able to forgive yourself.

- I can't help but think about just trying to wrangle themes around human desire and consciousness and all those other sort of heavy ideas or heady ideas that you're all tackling in "Westworld."

What makes that such a fascinating playground for you?

Does it go back to the mythologies that you grew up loving or is it part of something else?

- One of the really fun luxuries of being a writer is, when you're a kid, people dismiss kids as having simple ideas, and they're just kids, right?

And I see this with my daughter and my son, and I remember it from myself.

When you're a child, again, you have that alien eye, you're looking around at a universe and you ask humongous questions.

And they are pretty universal questions about infinity and death and love and bravery.

Children's stories, children's films, they're not like cutesy little, they're like horror stories where parents die and people go on crazy journeys.

And there's something about it that's a primal thing for humans that you access when you're a child, these primary color questions that are epic in scope.

And I think those questions, which are ultimately unanswerable, you can choose your own terms for answering them in living life, but you can't find a definitive answer.

No one can.

But I think those questions linger throughout our lives.

And the one thing is, as you're an adult, you get busier.

There's taxes, dishes to do, job, driving, and like, so-and-so's a jerk and I love so-and-so.

Your mind gets really filled up with a bunch of other stressful things.

And you have less time to just sit there and gaze at the stars and be like, "Infinity, what is infinity?"

And one of the luxuries of being a writer is that is your job.

[laughing] So you can actually spend your time with a job you stress about making space to think about some of those things.

And I think the reason why people like entertainment is because we all, whether it's in a comedy or a superhero movie or whatever or a novel or a poem, those questions remain, they're these a priori questions.

And even if we don't have time to actively ponder them every day, I think when somebody does address them, there's that feeling of familiarity and like, "Oh yeah, I've been busy doing my taxes, but have you made any progress on this?"

What does this movie say to me?

Or what does this novel say to me?

And when you find something that resonates with you, it's lovely.

So I consider that kind of existential pondering to be a great perk of the job.

- Death is always true.

You haven't known a true thing in all your life.

You think you know death, but you don't.

- Is that so?

- You didn't recognize him sitting across from you this whole time.

[bottle shattering] - There's such an incredible sense of style, but also a clear visual language that you have showcased here in this scene, specifically in this episode also.

I'd love to just hear about how you sort of cultivated that and what the process was like for you to, specifically with this scene, put this together.

- I love fight scenes and I love action.

And so I think of it like dance, you know?

And so there's always something kind of balletic about the way that I want it to be.

There was something balletic about the way I wanted the camera work on this one to be, it's all Steadicam, it's basically one shot because I just wanted it to feel fluid and in the moment.

Now, Ed Harris, who suffers no fools, but I was terrified to direct him.

It was my first time directing and I was scared [Lisa laughing] because he's a director, he's just a formidable talent.

And so we had this scene to do, and he just looked so upset and I was like, "Is something wrong, Ed?"

And he's like, "The scene is like poetic."

[audience laughing] Just furious about it.

And then was like, "It's like poetry or something."

And I'm like, "Ah."

And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, it's kind of the point."

I wanted to do a scene.

I was so used to his character being unforgivable.

And in this episode, you get a hint of a different path that he could have taken.

This is just my belief.

My belief is that all humans, when they're being completely honest, like on their deathbed or love confession, when they are in the moment the most, that they do tend towards thinking with a bit of poetry, thinking in a lyrical almost, like emotionally free way, even if they never express it out loud.

And so for me, this was about wanting to see a vulnerability in the man in black.

Because let's face it, it's terrible because we empathize with Dolores what a villain he is.

He thinks he's in a video game.

And how many people have played Grand Theft Auto and just run over a bunch of people, right?

Where do you draw the line?

At what point do we get to be moralistic about violence in a simulation?

I don't have the answers, but I think it's a worthwhile question.

And so to take a moment to slip into his skin, which is not my predisposition to empathize with him.

And all the more reason why I wanted to be able to find that moment and to think about, "Well, what is his life like?

What drew him here?"

And to me, the echoes of the associative ways in which images link to other images for us, and the ways that memories work, these flashes of moments, that it's like a Proustian madeleine or something.

I'm really fascinated by the idea of memory and how images link for us and they become this sort of shorthand that evoke an entire sensation with just a flash.

And that, in every moment that we have a memory, we're kind of straddling a plethora of emotions from an array of timelines.

I think that's kind of fascinating.

And so I wanted to see what his thought pattern would be like.

And so much of the scene for me was about looking at Ed's face and trying to understand his thoughts and being close on his eyes and watching him take in his surrounding, watching him associate moments with other moments and trying to get a feel for what his character would be.

So it's wordless, but for me, that was the point of the scene.

So many times the most effective writing you can do is giving room for silence in my mind.

I know that Thandiwe a lot of the time just walking down a hallway, observing the behavioral labs and some music playing in the background and her face says it all more than any words can.

And that is the negative space of writing, that it's always wonderful when you can make room for an actor to do that.

- It's interesting you brought up the man in black having this perspective that he is in a simulation and he is in a game.

I've heard both you and Jonathan mention video games being a sort of linchpin and having an impact on how you all went about creating this narrative.

- So I'm more of a watcher of video games.

And then when I do play video games, I do perhaps because I'm watching them and not participating them actively, which is, again, goes back to kind of what's emerging as a theme of this rambling conversation.

But is like, because I'm watching them, when I watch Grand Theft Auto or whatever, I'm like, "You just ran that woman over.

She's just a pedestrian.

She was probably going to the grocery store, [audience laughing] what is wrong with you?

You're not gonna stop or call an ambulance?

What is wrong with you?"

It seems like people are much more interested in destroying things than fixing things.

And so, I did take a lot from video games, from BioShock and just watching them, watching the non-player characters and the design of them, the way the narratives worked.

We used that infrastructure for a lot of the narratives working in the behind the scenes of the park.

So it was very much an intellectual framework.

But also, emotionally, it was also interesting to me because of this conflict I felt with like, "This is so engaging.

Also, we're monsters."

[Lisa laughing] And some of that tension, I think, is in the series.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching On Writing Sci-Fi: A Conversation with Lisa Joy on On Story.

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project.

That also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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