Transcript
WGAE Narrator: Hello, you’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the writer’s Guild of America, East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the writers of your favorite films and television series. They’ll take you behind-the-scenes, go deep into the writing and production process, and explain how they got their project from the page to the screen.
Alison Herman: Hello, you’re listening to OnWriting, the podcast of the Writer’s Guild of America, East. My name is Alison Herman. I’m a WGAE member who’s also a staff writer for the Ringer where I am the staff television critic. You’re about to listen to my conversation with Amy Schumer, the writer, star director, and producer of Hulu’s Life and Beth. And Amy and I talked about how motherhood change your perspective as a writer, why she loves writing in bed and the differences between writing a sketch show like inside Amy Schumer versus a scripted show like Life and Beth. I hope you’ll give it a listen. Amy, thank you so much for joining to talk about this show.
Amy Schumer: Thank you for having me on.
Alison Herman: Of course. One thing I was really curious about to start off with was you pitched this show while I believe the term you used was violently pregnant.
Amy Schumer: That sounds right.
Alison Herman: The show is obviously quite a bit about the relationship between mothers and children and how that affects kids going into adulthood. And I was just wondering if that was something that you started to think about when you yourself were about to become a mother?
Amy Schumer: Definitely. It was on my mind a ton because as soon as you’re with child, there is an expectation for perfection and selflessness that only grows more and more as my son’s growing up. I really notice every day it’s like your children want you just to be their mom and anything else, even if I’m eating, he’s like, no don’t eat. I was playing with a volleyball the other day and it’s like, no, no, you are my mom and that’s it. And that’s something that I think a lot of children don’t even realize, but that’s sort of the expectation. And I was definitely feeling that just as a pregnant person trying to navigate this severe illness I had while I was pregnant and what I learned about myself and my expectations for my mother.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean, this is the OnWriting podcast so I was also wondering a little bit about just the process of it all, but you’ve obviously done so many things in your career. You have done standup, you have written movies, you have done a sketch show, but if I’m not mistaken, I think this is your first writing credit for scripted television. And it’s for your own show. What kind of learning curve goes into just figuring out how to do that?
Amy Schumer: Well, it was sort of like that I let myself off the hook and this is the advice I give writers is just I didn’t try to get it perfect right away. I wrote the pilot, there were 18 drafts before I even went into pitch it. My first drafts, they’re bad. They’re just bad writing and then you try to get rid of the bad writing as you improve hopefully on what you’ve written. But I think I tried to just use all of the tools that I had and apply them. Even though The Sketch Show wasn’t a scripted narrative show, there was still quite a bit of writing and I’d written this one episode where we did… The whole episode was parodying 12 angry men and I’d written Trainwreck. So I had enough narrative experience, but in terms of writing like a half hour television show, I just didn’t know how to do that.
And I still don’t really feel like I know how to do that. I sort of didn’t do it. Because there’s all these rules that I think are useful and helpful, but they can I think sometimes also hold you back. And once I see the format of something, you can feel it’ll taken out of it. So I also really like to hire writers that haven’t necessarily worked in that specific medium before. And on The Sketch Show, none of us even had final draft on our computers. It was like we were all figuring it out together. And I think with that comes some authenticity and then certainly mistakes. And I just thought, okay, well, this is hopefully the worst I’ll ever be at this and just do my best. But I think if I were to give myself criticism on Life and Beth, it would be that it probably plays a little bit more like a long movie. And it’s just because it’s just not in my skillset to write a narrative TV show in the way that we are used to consuming it.
Alison Herman: Totally. I mean, something that I think has really stood out about this show in your larger CV is how personal it is. And I guess I was wondering when you were conceiving this project, how did you decide which parts of yourself to put into this character of Beth and which parts you wanted to invent for the purposes of the show?
Amy Schumer: I think the invention came from wanting to protect the people I’m closest to. The stuff about me, I want to talk about my darkest traumas and my most painful moments because I think when someone’s going there, when someone’s going for it, it shows and it’s how I process things. It’s therapy for me. But when it came to telling other people’s stories, I wanted to be a little more protective. And so I would check in with my family, like what are you down for me to share? And my mom was very open to me being pretty transparent about our relationship and things that have happened with us, but the rest of my family, I just wanted to be a little more protective of.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean, I know the character of John in the show is partly inspired by your relationship with your husband. What were those conversations like going into making and then producing the show?
Amy Schumer: I mean, he loves it. He’s such a part of the show. And the second season he is going to be a writer. He’s not going to be in the writer’s room, but I just am feeling like I’m asking so much, I’m taking so many direct exact quotes from him that it just feels wrong to me to not have him credited. But I think we both really like living an examined life and dissecting our exchanges and it’s never been anything but positive in terms of me and Chris.
Alison Herman: That’s really beautiful. I mean, it also fits with what you said earlier.
Amy Schumer: He could be like, no, and I’d be like, oh God, I guess I got to cook something up.
Alison Herman: Makes it easy, cuts out a step.
Amy Schumer: Yeah. There’s a lot of quotes that he has said, but it’s just so inspired by him and his behavior. And we both are pretty good about laughing at ourselves. And so it’s fun. It’s a little bit of a video journal of our falling in love.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean it also fits with what you said earlier that you like to hire source writers from maybe not a conventional writing background for whichever project.
Amy Schumer: Yeah.
Alison Herman: When you were putting together the writer’s room for this project, who were the people that you went to and why to go on that journey with you?
Amy Schumer: So all different places, but a couple of them were people who I’d worked with on my Sketch Show, Tammy Sager is a tried and true. She has a lot of narrative experience, but she’s just a perfect writer. She’s so funny and she’s also really introspective and is down to share and be vulnerable and really give herself over to that process and teach while she’s doing it too. Ron Weiner is also a seasoned veteran who I met when I was doing an episode of 30 Rock a million years ago. And we became friends and most of the writers from Life and Beth switched over and they either came from my Sketch Show or we then went on to write more of The Sketch Show together.
And then a bunch of stand-ups, a lot of standup comics, Mia Jackson, Aaron Jackson, a couple of people who were on the show, Lava Walker who’s on the show. Yeah. It was just people I felt were really comfortable with who I just thought could bring different experiences to the room and a mix of people who really hadn’t… Claudia Dardi was in there and she’s a performer and was supposed to be on the show actually, but then just crazy stuff with her visa happened. But yeah, it was a real mix of people in there.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I’m always really interested in the tension on this kind of show between being such a personal narrative and an extension of you and your life experiences, but also the fact that TV is so inherently collaborative and involves working with other people. So when it came to translating your own story into a scripted show, what was it like to work with other people on work shopping? What was rooted in your own experience?
Amy Schumer: It’s just a testament to how talented they were and dedicated. It was just a lot of me processing my own life and sharing it and talking about it and wanting other people to share and taking bits of their own life. I just opened it up like as much of yourself as you want to share as you’re down to share please, but also respecting people’s boundaries. But I wrote a lot on all the episodes is the way it went down. And there were some instances where I was like I just needed to write that. I wound up writing more because when something’s so vivid to you, I don’t expect them to be able to recreate something that I lived.
So I think the second season will hopefully be even more collaborative, but it was just a very supportive room. We wrote out of my apartment and Chris would cook lunch for everybody every day. And our baby was running around and just had a very intimate familial vibe. We had rented space out of WeWork, but I don’t know if you know how authentic those feel, but we decided to just write out of here and I just felt very comfortable sharing the most intimate details in my life. We had my journals out or passing them around finding humiliating passages and sharing them and yeah.
Alison Herman: Are you usually a home writer or was that a break from previous routine for you?
Amy Schumer: I’m a bed writer. I really have written most things from right here in the bed. Probably mostly because of my back problems, but I’m either standing at a standing desk but I think part of why people come back and are willing to write with me on different projects is they know how respectful I am of everyone’s time. And I don’t expect people to sit in the office and write until it’s dark out. It’s like whatever your process is, however you write, do that. I write really fast, but I don’t expect other people to do that. So it was like we would come in for a couple of hours because we’re all creative people in this for a reason and go home and procrastinate, do whatever you do to produce your best work. And some people wanted to stay and write or go to WeWork and use their office and other people would go home and do whatever it is they do to produce.
Alison Herman: So you’re not summoning everyone to circle you in bed and just shout ideas of you while you’re laying down?
Amy Schumer: Yeah, no, no. If I had the episode I would go write it either standing at a desk or in bed.
Alison Herman: I’m also a bed writer and everyone thinks I’m crazy. So I’m glad to have found a kindred spirit on this podcast.
Amy Schumer: I write in bed, I want to be in bed all the time.
Alison Herman: The bed’s the best place. I mean, you’ve alluded to the fact that you’ve worked with a lot of people on the show before in various capacities, whether on your Sketch Show, I know Rachel Feinstein is a close friend of yours who also plays a close friend of yours on the show. And that’s something that’s stood out to me throughout your work is that you have a lot of consistent collaborators across projects. Well, I was just curious what that does for you and how that helps you as a writer when you’re working on these stories.
Amy Schumer: I think it’s like I want people who are going to do a great job. I don’t do anybody any favors. It’s like, who will do the best job at this? And sometimes a lot of the rules I write four people. So the big roles I would say 80% of them I have the person in mind and I’m writing for them. And then the other people it’s like, okay, well who’s hilarious? And it’s a New York show and it’s like, who do we have here? But then we also brought some people from overseas, like Phil Wang, but I don’t know. I mean, these are the people I think are the funniest people. I really do and performers.
I don’t really gravitate too much toward improvisers. I think that’s the tendency when you’re casting something funny is to use a lot of UCB people and I love them and they’re some of my favorite performers, but for my style, I want it to be really grounded. And I don’t want anyone to be trying to be funny. I think playing things more real is the funniest thing you can do. And so I really like to use a lot of stage actors and just New York comics that I know are depressed.
Alison Herman: I mean, that was a question I had in terms of the balance of improvisation and writing that I do feel like you’re right. The stereotype of a comedy show is that you bring everyone on and you have everyone just be a mess on set for five hours and you pick what works, but it sounds like this show was more written than improvised. Was that the case?
Amy Schumer: Yeah, because of coming off The Sketch Show where we had no money and no time and we would usually get a maximum of two takes of each shot. And so things had to be as close to perfect as possible. And especially with the show getting pushed back a year because of the pandemic, we read it on Zoom a lot and I talked to the actors a lot and I was just rewriting it up until the last day. So it was like I’ve been rewriting this show for years. So there wasn’t much improvising at all, but people definitely had the freedom to within their lines and within their role to add something here or there. Like the comics or just people who are really strong in that department, the last thing I would want to do is handcuff them to say this in there and I would never. But we stayed pretty close to the script I would say. And 90% of the lines.
Alison Herman: Yeah. But there wasn’t a ton of rewriting happening in the moment.
Amy Schumer: No, no, not at all.
Alison Herman: I mean, when you are on set, you’re wearing so many different hats. In some cases you’re directing, you’re acting the whole time as well. Would you say it was easy to transition between those roles or were you approaching it maybe principally as a writer, how was balancing all those different responsibilities for you?
Amy Schumer: I think I’d been directing almost all my projects always anyway. Thinking about the larger picture and what’s tracking and so I was always doing that even if it’s not my project, I can’t help it. If I’m on set, I’m thinking about that. So it felt more like finally just giving myself the title. I didn’t have trouble balancing it because the team I have around me, it was Ryan McFall who directed a bunch of the episodes, Dan Powell, Kevin Kane, we were all directing and just one of us would speak to the actors depending on… Like I spoke to the kids. But if I was in a scene with someone, I generally wouldn’t give them notes. I would maybe go whisper to Kevin or Dan or Ryan, just some thoughts, but we didn’t have to get comfortable and get to know each other. We all worked on The Sketch Show together. We’ve worked together for a really long time. So that was a luxury.
Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean, speaking of the kids, I related quite profoundly to middle school, which I feel like is just an incredibly awkward and painful time in a lot of people’s lives.
Amy Schumer: Yeah.
Alison Herman: Well, just structurally, the way these flashbacks are woven throughout the season, what made you want to fixate on that particular time in Beth’s life and how did you want the flashbacks to be woven in throughout?
Amy Schumer: I think to me, those early traumas in middle school, high school, and college, are a big part of what shapes you and I wanted to really examine that. And I loved the movie Eighth Grade. I loved Bo Burnham’s movie and there was this one scene where she’s in the back of the car and this guy wants to do more than she’s comfortable with sexually. And I was like, God, that age is just so traumatic. And I think it really needs to be unpacked more. And in a way that Pen15 is so funny and they do touch on that stuff a little bit.
I just thought I really wanted to look at how that stuff still affects you and how you have to deal with those traumas to move forward and it is just stuff that I’m processing in my own life that I want to share. And just have people look at themselves, that’s my goal. I’m so glad you connected with it. Because that was my goal. Just to have people think about their own lives and what that was for them like that we saw her first kiss. I hope it made people think about their first kiss and all of that.
