Go Into The Story Interview (Part 5): Liz Hannah

My hour-long conversation with ‘The Post’ screenwriter Liz Hannah.

Sometimes the story behind the story is as compelling as the story itself and that’s the case with Liz Hannah, writer of the 2015 Black List script The Post which went on to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and star Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.

The Post goes into wide release this week, expanding into theaters across North America on today, January 12th. After reading this week-long interview series, I am sure you will want to see the movie. The story is both compelling in its historical context and relevant to the world we find ourselves in today. Plus, in our conversation, Liz provides deep insights into the inner workings of the script’s conception and creation.

In Part 5 of our six-part series, Liz provides insights into her own writing process.

Scott: There’s a timeliness to it [The Post], too. The movie’s getting rave reviews. It’s already receiving various critics’ awards and nominations. In fact, I just saw a Tweet today from David Chen. I don’t know if you saw this, but he said, “Watching The Post was a disorienting experience. Can’t believe we ever lived in a time when newspapers struggled financially, the media was considered abdicating its civic responsibilities, and the president was openly, violently, antagonistic to the press.”

Liz: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

Scott: You sell this thing, I believe, in October and then November 7th comes around.

Liz: Yeah.

Scott: The current occupant of the White House wins the Electoral College vote and ascends to the presidency. There does seem to be a really remarkable sense of relevance to The Post and events unfolding today.

Liz: Yeah. I sold this literally, I think, nine days before the election. The conversation Amy and I had the day she bought it was very much about a reality we thought we were going to be living in that we do not live in and that the parallels that we thought existed at that time in 2016 to 1971 were very different parallels than what ended up happening.

The thing that I always thought was relevant and the thing that is always relevant to me regardless, is the story of a woman finding her voice and the story of a woman being in a room filled with men and not knowing how to speak, or when to speak, or if she should speak.

That’s not something that’s necessarily specific to, at the time, 2016. It’s something that we definitely talk about more now, luckily and happily. It’s definitely something I think that needs to be conversed about and questioned.

Did I ever think that the assaults on the fourth estate would be something that was a connection between 2017 and 1971? Absolutely not. The stunning thing that happened over the last 10 months was seeing more and more things that happened in 1971 start to happen in 2017 and the similarities between the people who were in the White House at the time.

Scott: Well, frankly a clarion call to the journalists. You were quoted in a Vanity Fair article saying, “It doesn’t matter that in 1971 reporters didn’t have a cell phone. You’re still dealing with betrayal, your own ethics, your own idea of what yourself is.” We could arguably need legitimate journalism now more than ever.

Liz: That’s really been fun to see, in an exciting way, the work that the Post and the Times have been doing this year. I saw something on Twitter that would take way too long for me to find it, but it was the Twitter of the Times and the Twitter of the Post were backing each other up against something that had…some sort of attack that they’d been under.

For me having worked on this film, obviously, but also has the Times and Post battling, to see that coming together was really exciting and fun. I think there is a call to arms right now. The Fourth Estate exists for a reason.

I’ve been quoting this line from Lin-Manuel Miranda because I don’t think there’s anything better that’s been said about it, but they genuinely get to be “in the room where it happens” that we are not allowed to be in.

They exist for a very, very distinct reason, which is to hold the mirror up and show us what is out there, show us what we are doing, show us how our government is behaving or not behaving. That is something that, in 1971, they had to do as well. The interesting thing about the Pentagon Papers is that Nixon isn’t in them.

They were completed before Nixon became President and, yet, he had such an issue with publishing them because he knew it was a crack in the facade of the White House. He knew it was a crack in the facade of the indelibility of that role and that, now, people would learn that the president lies.

That’s something we all now know. Not just from this past year, but from decades and decades that started with the Pentagon Papers. It was the first time that the American public realized, “Oh, my God. The President lied to me,” and that’s an important reality to confront.

Scott: Again, congratulations on your success with The Post. I can’t wait to see the movie.

Liz: Thank you.

Scott: I want to jump to some of the projects that you’ve got going on and one in particular. You’re teaming up again with Amy Pascal, I just read recently, on “Mercury 13”, the untold story of thirteen American women and their dream of space flight, as a miniseries.

Liz: Yeah, so that was a book that Bradley Whitford optioned years ago. I worked with him on The Post. He, and Tim, and Trevor White who are executive producers and Amy and I all read this book and all felt, “This is the type of story we want to tell.”

The women, they went through the same program that NASA had designed for the men. It had to be conducted via a private foundation because NASA wouldn’t sponsor it. They passed it all and they were still not allowed to go up into space. It’s, I think, the story of these very, very, very strong women who the only reason they weren’t allowed to do what they were best at is because they were women.

Also, obviously, I’m a humongous Bradley Whitford fan, and his passion to make this story come to light was something that was very inspiring to me. So, yeah, we all decided, “Let’s try this one more time. It worked well the first time, so we might as well do it again.”

Scott: This project will be a long movie, essentially.

Liz: We haven’t decided on the episode count yet, but were doing it with Amazon, which is wonderful and they’ve been amazing. We’re going to tell it very much like a long film. I think limited series, the renewal of them in the last five or six years is absolutely incredible. Not every story is two hours long, not every story is 10 hours long, and not every story is 200 hours long.

Sometimes there are ones that fit in one of those and not all. It’s very exciting, as a content creator, to be able to figure out, “What’s the best version of this story? Where does this story exist the most and where is the audience for this story?”

Scott: I’d like to jump into some craft questions if I could.

Liz: Yeah. Go for it.

Scott: How do you come up with story ideas? Is it mostly just through material that you read or do you ever actually generate things conceptually? How do you come up with story ideas?

Liz: I think reading is huge. I’ve been very fortunate to be given a lot of opportunity to write in the non-fiction world in the past year. In terms of generating story, that…Honestly, it’s not necessarily generating story that is where I get inspired. It’s in characters.

The thing about “Mercury 13”, and the thing about The Post, and I just finished a feature called “Only Plane In The Sky,” which were all three true stories, was they’re all about the characters and about their stories, and their journeys, and their arcs and how I found that relatable or, if not relatable, some way that I could empathize with those people.

I think that’s the challenge in all of this, putting yourself in positions that are maybe a little scary or telling stories that are maybe a little different and challenging yourself to do that. In those true stories it’s really for me about the characters and less about the scope of it.

In the fictional world, I’ve been lucky to work with some really great talent. It’s between sitting there with a couple of people…I don’t really like to sit there by myself and come up with ideas because it’s…I think, again, collaboration is where it works best. I like to sit down with potential collaborators, or friends, or whatever and just toss ideas around until one thing hits.

Scott: Let’s talk about story prep — brainstorming, character develop, plotting, research, outlining. Do you have a process or does it vary from project to project?

Liz: I have different processes for different types of things. If it’s a nonfiction, if it’s based on something real, then there’s a really heavy research process that goes in. I have an amazing research assistant who can find anything and locate articles, and interviews, and things like that that I never knew that existed.

There’s that and then there’s also talking to real people. With “Only Plane in The Sky”, which follows George W. Bush on 9/11, I was able to speak to a number of the people who were really on Air Force One that day and they’ve given me amazing access.

While I was writing, if I came upon a scene that was like, “I don’t really know what happened here,” I could email them and they would tell me exactly what was happening. The process of writing a nonfiction, for me, is very research based to begin with, and as much research as I can do. Any questions I have or things like that, I try and answer them.

Then I have to go away and not think about it for a couple months and sit all the research aside because it does have to be a movie and you do have to let all of the stories percolate and then die down so that you can see what the arc is. I don’t like to do treatments because I end up writing a lot of dialogue.

Treatments, for me, tend to be hard because I just end up wanting to write the dialog and not paragraphs of what somebody is going to say. I write just a very straightforward outline, including act breaks, and turns, and all of the save the cat and all that just so I have a sense of where I’m going and if there are any points of issue.

With “Only Plane”, which was based on an article that was an amazing resource to have, it had the procedural arc of what happened that day so, so cleanly laid out. Then, with Mercury 13, obviously there’s the book but, since we’re expanding it, it’s also about…The research on that is a very wide net of trying to get all of these different stories and finding out who we can talk to and stuff.

That is all with the perspective of whose point of view you’re telling the story from, and what character you want your audience to empathize with, and what character you want to…At AFI we were taught this a lot and I feel this way, is that if you water down your POV too much, then the audience really loses sight of giving a shit, for lack of a better phrase.

I think you can really get your audience in on a couple characters. Don’t get me wrong. The ensemble movies that can do it, I’m very jealous of, but, for me, there’s just a few…I can only juggle a couple POVs at one time. The whole process of before I sit down to write interior or whatever, exterior or whatever, has to be “Whose POV am I telling? What perspective is each scene?”

Then it’s really writing the absolute worst first draft that’s ever existed and just trying to get through it. Once that’s done, I’m immediately rewriting it from basically page one.

Here is a short clip featuring many of the women involved in the production of The Post including Liz Hannah:

Tomorrow in Part 6, Liz delves more deeply into her creative process and offers advice to aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Movie Website

Twitter: @itslizhannah, @ThePostMovie.

The movie opens in theaters across North America today, January 12th.