Interview (Part 3): Max Taxe

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script Ripple.

Max Taxe wrote the screenplay Ripple which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Max about his creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Max gets philosophical talking about the dynamic of time-travel in Ripple and the importance of moments in an individual’s life.

Scott: Let’s talk about the story. I love the relationship between these two characters, and so let’s talk about them. First of all, Miles. He’s our protagonist, 35 years old, I think, at the beginning. How would you describe him, his state of life or state of being at the beginning of the story?

Max: He’s stuck in the past. He’s someone who, as we’ll find out, has recently gone through a terrible breakup where he was with someone for nine years, the bulk of his adult life. He thought that was the last relationship he would ever have until she cheated on him and kind of blew it up.

He felt that was an indictment of who he was, someone who knows you that well and then decides, I don’t want to be with that person. He rightfully takes it hard. He can’t escape that relationship and doesn’t think he can move past it and isn’t moving past it.

Scott: We first meet him, he’s literally trying to blow off someone setting him up on a blind date. He’s just not prepared.

Max: He’s not ready.

Scott: Then let’s talk about Sadie, who is this young woman he meets. First of all, let’s talk about The Apple Pan for people who don’t live in LA, right at the corner of Pico and Westwood. It’s been around forever, right? Like 1940s.

Max: Since the 40s, yeah. My dad moved to LA when he was — my dad is in his 80s now — he moved here when he was like 10. So he remembers going to Apple Pan in the ’50s, ’60s. He one time begged them to let him buy the recipe for their hickory sauce, he was obsessed. He goes deep. But, yeah, he brought me as a kid all the time. I have a long love affair with that place.

Scott: Let’s talk about Sadie because they do meet at The Apple Pan, which is this iconic place that’s amazing that it’s still in existence in Los Angeles, where everything just seems to get destroyed after about 5 or 10 years. What’s Sadie’s situation at the beginning of the story?

Max: She’s someone who starts out as someone who doesn’t… She doesn’t want any attachments. She moves constantly. She doesn’t really attach herself to anyone. She’s always has one foot out the door with people.

In a way that we can see through immediately, she’s someone who goes with the “I want to live my life and enjoy my life,” mentality but she’s running from something. It’s all a way to cope and rationalize this tragedy that happened with her dad when she was a teenager and the impact that it had on her life.

While Miles is steeped in the past and can’t leave it, she’s doing everything in power to never even acknowledge the past and become past-less.

Scott: You’ve got two people, they’re dealing with time. Time is right at the heart of this story. As I’m reading it, I was struck by several thoughts, one of which I was wondering whether you ever studied philosophy or a student of philosophy, because the story poses some really big questions like fate, how did we get here, and who am I?

Max: So funny. I technically was a philosophy minor, but never actually finished all the requirements. But I loved taking those classes. It’s something I’ve always been interested in and have tried to carve out more time to dig into, and… I mean, it links to writing, so they go hand in hand.

Really, one of the struggles with the script was, and will always be, was wanting to get into the deeper elements of how we treat memory and time, how we deal with our own pains, our traumas, and how, or even whether, we can move past them or come to terms with them, without all of that becoming arduous, prolonged discussion scenes. Putting those subjects, those issues into action.

Scott: Literally on page three, Miles’ voice-over: “How many other moments in that last day, month, three, five years, nudge me this way or that leading me to who I am now?” It’s just this kind of classic philosophical question.

It was reminding me of one of my favorite quotes from author Ann Beattie who said, “People forget years and remember moments.” I’m just curious what your reaction to that is?

Max: I love that quote. I wasn’t familiar with it. That’s the struggle of the whole script, for Miles, is as things start to change around you, how do you hold on to a person when it’s like, it’s not just the big memories, it’s not just the big events, it’s not just the small ones either. It’s how you felt in those and it becomes this impossible tangle of…intangibility.

I mean, to step further back, the initial question I started with on this was — in a time travel movie, we’re always following the time traveler. We’re always following the person who’s making the changes, accidentally or intentionally.

But for all the people who are impacted by that person’s choice, the world is just changing around them, you don’t have control over what aspects of your life have altered, or disappeared entirely, and at what point is this new version of your life not even you anymore, what are those fundamental parts of you. It’s the whole Ship of Theseus problem.

How much can you change until you’re a different person and what elements of you are unchangeable? Digging into that and being specific with these characters, both of whom have moments in their life that they would want to see changed, but if they were changed, then… Then you wouldn’t have ever met this person, this love. What are the costs of that and the emotional weight of each change as they happen?

Scott: You made a really interesting choice. You just brought it up, which is you’ve got this kind of science fiction hook in Ripple. There’s this mysterious character who claims to be a time traveler. He has The Post, he’s dubbed XxNavi47xX and the choice was not to follow him.

In fact, he’s a secondary character. You hardly even refer to him. It’s a QAnon type figure because there’s a cool thing that grows around him, but you don’t follow him. You follow these other people. Did you make that conscious choice or was that just an instinctual thing or how did that come?

Max: That was part of the design from its inception. I wanted to keep him, or her, or whoever that is, to be kind of — over there. I didn’t want the audience to ever think that there would be some reveal as to who the time traveler is, or that there would be a way for one of our characters to time travel. So I tried to make it clear that it’s not that kind of story. I didn’t want it to be clever, frankly. I wanted it to just be — this is what’s happening, and our characters will never have some sci-fi out to their problems, they’re going to have to deal with the major emotional hurdles in front of them.

Like, without the time travel element, this is a story about someone later in their adult lives finally finding the person they’re truly in love with and having them be ripped away from them. That’s it. I didn’t want any cute ways for them to resolve the real issues they were dealing with in their past by letting them mess with it.

So for the time travel element, I just wanted it to be like, “you and I are sitting here together, and Marty McFly is dicking around in the past. We don’t know what he’s doing, or why he’s doing it, but he’s definitely doing something.”

Scott: I mentioned to you that this script is an homage to great some memorable movie. In fact, the characters in the script mentioned Back to the Future and Sliding Doors.

It’s almost a meta kind of a thing, but think about moments that we were talking about earlier. When I was reading a couple of comments in there, it struck me. You remember the very, very, very end of Boyhood?

Max: I think so?

Scott: Where Nicole is sitting there with Mason. He’s gone to college finally, and he’s with this young student and he’s watching their friends, rustic West Texas environment. Nicole says, “You know, everyone’s always saying seize the moment. I don’t know. I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know. The moment seizes us.”

Mason goes, “Yeah, yeah, I know it’s constant. The moment. It’s just. It’s always right now, you know.” I’m curious, was that an inspiration for you, the movie, or just what your thoughts are in terms of that idea of moments?

Max: That sentiment, yeah. I’ve noticed that a lot of the stuff I write tends to center on someone who is really struggling to appreciate what’s right in front of them. They’re hyper-focused on some other goal, something that they think will fix their problems, but… The answers are right there in front of them. I mean, that’s something I struggle with, and I imagine most writers struggle with, most people…

We know the answer that we should appreciate what’s right in front of us. We should be present in the moment. That’s so easy to say and yet it’s impossible to do, especially as you carry more and more baggage as you get older.

It’s really hard to do that. For me, it was more of knowing the answer. All of us know that answer. But how the hell do we actually do it? How do we get to a place where we can have these awful things in our past and things that hurt us so badly and define who we are and still be present in our lives and let them… Let them be a part of who we are, they happened, but not let them consume us?

That’s, to go back, why I didn’t want the answer to this movie to be the time travel itself. Like Miles — spoiler — his past isn’t going to change. It is going to remain the same. His problems don’t just get erased, even though this time travel element offers a promise that maybe there is this easy path where the things that caused you pain magically disappear. So then the question is — how do you get past that? How do you move forward with this brick in your pocket, to steal from Rabbit Hole. I think all of us, especially in the last handful of years, have had to deal with that question.

If you’re lucky enough to age past — really any age, but — growing into adulthood, you’re going to be carrying a lot with you. How the hell do you manage that and not let it bury you at the same time? That was more of my question. It’s how do you to get to that revelation at the end of the movie, the play, the book, and actually internalize it and use it to navigate through your own life without it all sucking you under.

For both of these characters, that was the focus. For all the characters, actually. It was — how do you continue forward?

Tomorrow in Part 4, Max discusses the love story which lies at the heart of Ripple.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

Max is repped by Entertainment 360.

Twitter: @taxe

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.