Scriptnotes Recap: Ep. 736 -The Devil You Know with Aline Brosh McKenna
In Hollywood, when one of your best friends works on a movie, you're gonna hear about it a lot. You get all the details, from their excitement when it gets the green light, venting through the craziness of production, and surviving the carnival of releasing it out into the world. You get emotionally invested too, you want this to work out for your friend, and all the while you just keep thinking, Please god, let this movie be good.
As a member of the assistant mafia, I'm very close with Aline's former assistant (now creative executive) Kari, so I've been following The Devil Wears Prada 2 since basically the beginning. Most of last summer for our friend group was spent trying to spot her in the back of paparazzi photos from set, and we all preordered tickets for opening weekend. But the whole time I kept thinking, Don't get too excited, there's a better chance of any movie being meh than being great and you have a bad poker face.
When I finally saw it, I was blown away and so, so relieved. What a joy it is to tell your friend that their movie is not only great, but it's probably one of the best sequels ever made.
I shouldn't be surprised though – Aline Brosh McKenna is a master storyteller. I've learned so much from her during my time at Scriptnotes, but something that's always stood out to me is how plugged-into the world she is. She's interested in everything new, she is ahead of everyone I know on trends. When I wouldn't be aware of something she was talking about, she would send me all the TikToks I needed to be part of the conversation. She has a gift for taking in culture, teasing out what's interesting, and seeing the big currents of where it's heading towards. This is one of her superpowers, and I have a feeling it's the driving force behind why The Devil Wears Prada 2 resonates so deeply; Aline just knows what's up.
She also knows how to have fun. The whole episode is a blast (You can watch the whole thing on YouTube now!), everything she says is gold and her thoughts on AI are unsurprisingly incisive. A few favorites:
Finding the Cultural Necessity for a Sequel
John: Aline Brosh McKenna’s latest film, The Devil Wears Prada 2, is not only a critical hit and box office smash, it asks timely questions about art and human labor and the world in which we live. When did you know the why-now of it?
Aline: Watching name-brand cultural figures fall from grace in various ways over the last five years, I would think about Miranda Priestley and what kind of trouble she would be in. Also, how many times have you been with a young person and they’ve never heard of someone super famous to you? No one under the age of 50 will understand how famous John Denver was. I always was thinking, how would Miranda navigate this? I’m friends with a lot of journalists. My son’s a journalist. I remember talking to Franklin and he said, it’s like patrolling a graveyard. That really stuck with me. What would these two women be doing in the culture as it is now?
The first step of this process is always me pestering David and having him say, no, that’s not going to work. I started calling him and saying, I think this would be a good idea.
Craig: Devil Wears Prada was a hit, and it made a big cultural impact. Normally, if that were a movie about guys, there would have been a sequel in development before the movie even came out.
Aline: It became culturally more important as the time went on. It really became enshrined in the culture, I think largely because it was so embraced by the queer community. It ended up being quoted and memed. There was a sense that we had captured lightning in a bottle. The first movie is about Miranda being ascendant. It’s much more like Wall Street or Training Day - a rough mentor whose primacy is unquestioned. Doing a movie where they are in flux just didn’t occur to anybody. Then over time, I started calling Dave and saying, God, it would just be so funny to me to see Miranda in reduced circumstances. So many people, not just in the New York media world, but in a lot of businesses, it’s like, hey, man, you got to fly coach and stay at the Hilton Garden Inn. It just always made me laugh.
John: Had there been other discussions over the last 20 years of like, we should make a second movie?
Aline: There were a few, maybe five to seven years after the movie came out, and Lauren wrote a sequel. Then everyone really felt like there was no reason to do it that soon. Then in all this upheaval, I started calling Dave again.
Why You Should Pitch Theme Over Plot
John: You have a six-page outline for what you pitched to Meryl and then what you pitched to Fox/Disney. How close is what you pitched to the movie you ended up making?
Aline: I went back and reread it this week. It’s quite close because it was very thematic. It wasn’t super story-driven.
Craig: This is important for our friends listening. What the cottage screenwriting advice industry teaches is that what you pitch is plot. What is the point of this movie? What is it really about? Why would people get in their cars, drive, park, walk into a theater? You don’t need to obsess over every little dinky detail of how one scene gets to the next.
Aline: When someone’s pitching me something and it’s extremely detailed, I’m like, I don’t - what? I can’t scan it for meaning. Especially because these are not plot-heavy movies. You’re scanning it for theme. What I had was this idea that Andy is going back into the lion’s den because she’s got reduced circumstances. She’s going back to a workplace that she doesn’t love. Again, everyone in Hollywood’s been like, well, I guess I’ll go work for this guy. It wasn’t great the first time, but I guess I’ll see how it goes. I remember talking to David one day about theme, and he said - I actually screamed and dropped the phone when he said this - he said, “Well, it’s the devil you know.”
John: Come on. That could have been the title.
Aline: That works for everybody in the movie. Miranda’s dealing with her boss’s high anxiety and inability to promote her. Andy’s going somewhere where she knows the stakes are bad. Nigel sees the writing on the wall that all these businesses are going into the toilet. Emily is not in the workplace she wants to be. Everybody’s in diminished circumstances, but given the giant economic squeeze everyone is in, everyone’s going, “This is fine for now. This is the devil I know.”
John: I do want to talk about the script for a second. You have short scenes that accomplish their thing and it just keeps moving.
Aline: So many scenes. David’s cutting rhythm - that’s a feature of the first movie and this movie. He really works on pace and propulsion. We have so many scenes of Andy running down the street. I did learn that from David - they cut out of scenes in a way that I think sometimes my tendency is to really land on an emotion so that an audience sees it. David has tremendous confidence in the audience. Like, we got it, we’re moving on.
John: You also said this movie is not plotty, but there’s actually a plot this time.
Aline: Oh, yeah, there’s a plot this time. We have some twists and reversals, and it’s got a business plot. My husband is a businessman, and that was really fun to talk through some of the twists with him.
John: If you freeze-frame, could you look at all the characters and tell what they want? You can clearly do that in your movie. Each one has a thing they’re going for and an arc within it. No one is just there to service the main plot.
Aline: They pull levers. Even though Emily and Nigel were supporting in the first movie, they both pulled levers. In this movie, the young characters, only one of them pulls a plot lever. Simone’s character and Caleb Hearon’s character don’t really move plot as much as they are there for you to understand and inform the world - the modern incarnations of roles we saw in the first film.
Aline: Once again, the love interest does not pull plot levers. He is there to reflect values and themes. In the first movie, he’s the guy saying, this is Gordon Gekko, be careful. I see you changing into someone I don’t recognize. You’re on Training Day. You’re shooting innocent people. People really disliked him for it.
Craig: Do you know why? Because he’s playing the part that Skyler played on Breaking Bad. Stop the movie. Nobody wants the thing to stop.
...Like the Lava at Pompeii
John: The journey of the movie looks like Justin Theroux’s character is going to be the evil patron who’s coming in and taking over everything. The redemption is, oh, no, we can actually find a better patron in Lucy Liu. It’s still a patron and you’re still being held up by someone’s benevolence.
Aline: In the movie, there’s a nihilism to Justin’s character. He has a line about saying, it’s all going to come like the lava at Pompeii. There is a sense that you’re constantly being told about the technology like, just relax, and it’s coming anyway. It’s really the language of violation. We’re constantly being told, just relax into it. There’s a nihilistic deadness there about the inevitability around all these technologies.
Craig: The great robber barons of old were building railways, or manufacturing steel. There is actually no inherent value to Facebook at all. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, we'd all be fine. Arguably, we'd be much better.
Aline: When you buy publications that are responsible for telling us the truth about the world we live in, but you're treating it like - the thing that scares me the most is rich people buying things they don't care about or need, so that they just wake up and go, I don't feel like doing this anymore. I'm going to delete this publication.
John: My concern is that Lucy Liu buys Runway Magazine and buys the whole media group, and she gets bored with it, and what happens?
Aline: That's why the line in the movie is about we're just trying to find our piece of wood floating next to the Titanic. I think everybody who works in a creative field is like, well, I'm here now. I have this job now. I don't know what's going to happen. In the first movie, they're not very nice to each other because everyone's super ambitious. But in this movie, there's a much sweeter, sadder thing - it's a little bit World War I trenches, where you got to give someone a drink from your canteen or they're not going to make it.
Listen to the full episode on Scriptnotes or wherever you get your podcasts!
The full transcript is available at johnaugust.com
