Aaron_Sorkin

YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID.

Ha! Here’s the worst and the best studio note I’ve ever gotten, early in run of The West Wing, there was an episode in which an US Air Force jet carrying a bunch of US doctors accidentally wandered into Syrian airspace and was shot down. The network, NBC and the studio, Warner Bros, both received letters from the Arab American Anti-Defamation League, strongly protesting that story. A few episodes later, I had Toby in a throwaway line make passing reference to hebrew slaves in Egypt 5000 years ago, the network and the studio had an issue and sent me back a note saying please show your research. So I sent them back a copy of the Old Testament with the chapter of Exodus highlighted.

Avocado, when I write something, I don’t hope for anything more than that you will enjoy yourself for however long I’ve asked for your attention. I don’t have a political or social agenda, with The Newsroom I wasn’t trying to tell the professionals how to do their job. For me it was just an interesting work place in which to set a drama.

That's a great question. I don't like to commit myself to anything in a character's backstory until I have to. I didn't know going into the West Wing that Bartlet had MS. Then, along came an episode where I needed to introduce the idea that the First Lady (Dr. Channing) was a medical doctor. And the way I did it was by giving Bartlet MS.

David Mamet have written some excellent essays on this subject. You can get lost in the weeds if you sit down and try to create an entire biography for your character. If this is what they were like when they were six years old, and this is what they did when they were seven years old, and they scraped their knee when they were eight years old. Your character, assuming your character is 50 years old, was never six years old, or seven years old or eight years old. Your character was born the moment the curtain goes up, the moment the movie begins, the moment the television show begins, and your character dies as soon as it's over. Your character only becomes seven years old when they say, "Well when I was seven years old, I fell in a well, and ever since then I've had terrible claustrophobia. Okay?

Characters and people aren't the same thing. They only look alike.

I write a lot of drafts of screenplays and plays. I keep writing and I keep writing; what I try to do at the beginning is just get to the end. Once I've gotten to the end, I know a lot more about the piece, and I'm able to go back to the beginning and touch stuff that never turned into anything, and highlight things that are going to become important later on. And I go back, and I keep doing that, and I keep doing that, and I'll retype the whole script, over and over again, just to make things sharper and sharper. That's for movies and plays. In television, there just isn't that kind of time. In television, I have to write a 55-minute movie every nine days, so we shoot my first draft.

Captain, you've asked just the right question in just the right moment. On November 1st, we'll begin principle photography on Molly's Game and Molly's Game is the name of a movie, which I both wrote and will be directing. The movie will be out late 2017.

By the way, we'll be doing a live production of A Few Good Men on NBC in early 2017.