084 Start with Mimicking Your Heroes

This week Charlie talks with professional film & television writer Graham Roland, whose most recent accomplishments include co-creator of Amazon's hit series Jack Ryan, and the creator of the excellent AMC series Dark Winds. Graham has been in the writer's rooms of some of televisions best shows, including Prison Break, Lost, and Fringe. He talks about writing at the highest level of the business, and what he has learned along the way. Charlie and Graham also take a deep dive into creating opportunity, the importance of stealing from your hero's, and what it means to pursue a creative life. You can follow CBP on Instagram @creatingbehavior, and Charlie's NYC acting conservatory, the Maggie Flanigan Studio @maggieflaniganstudio. Theme music by  https://www.thelawrencetrailer.com. For written transcripts, to leave a voicemail on SpeakPipe, or contact Charlie for private coaching, check out https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com

Transcript

Charlie Sandlan (00:02):

You just never know when opportunity is going to present itself. Most of us do not think that that would include the classroom, that your life could change based on how you conduct yourself in school. I can tell you in my class, professional acting training program, I can tell you in three classes, the students that are serious, that are going to end up working hard and the ones that are lazy that I'm going to have to push, that want to argue, that are defensive, that really don't want to be taught in some way.

(00:36):

Today, we're going to talk to Graham Roland. Graham is a professional screenwriter television writer. He is the co-creator of the hit Amazon series, Jack Ryan. He's the creator of the hit AMC show currently running, Dark Winds. He's been in the writer's room of Prison Break, Fringe, Lost. He wrote the feature film, Mile 22. Now, his life changed when he walked into a undergraduate writing class at Cal State Fullerton and happened to be taught by Robert Engels . The guy loved his work so much. He opened the entire professional world to him. That is opportunity. We're going to talk about that today, my friends, so put the phone back in your pocket. Creating Behavior starts now.

(01:48):

Well, hello, my fellow daydreamers. Luck. I don't know. It's a fickle thing. And there's this saying that preparation and opportunity, put those two together and you can get lucky. I think that's very true and today, we're going to talk to Graham Roland, who, I don't know, got lucky. How else can you say it? But he created it for himself. Walking into a classroom, I don't think necessarily everybody appreciates that opportunity. You just don't know, you walk into a class with 16 people, where those classmates are going to be in five years.

(02:36):

I don't think you sit down on that first day, first week and say to yourself, "Hmm. These people could be in my life for a long time. I could collaborate with these guys." I've got students. I have a student, graduated, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. She's one of the biggest agents at UTA right now. I have students that have become producers, directors, writers, playwrights and they reach out to me for names, recommendations. They reach out to their classmates, the people they were in school with and they collaborate with each other. Doors get opened all the time.

(03:16):

I have students, five years after they've gotten out of school, "Charlie, can I have a letter of recommendation for grad school? Charlie, I want to go to a school for psychology. Can you write me a letter of recommendation?" I'll have casting directors, directors, playwrights reach out to me. "Charlie, I have this audition. I have this film. I have this staged reading. I need this kind of actor. I'm looking for this type. Do you have any recommendation?" I'm certainly not going to be recommending the students that may be talented, but were a pain in the ass to teach, were lazy, had a little bit of an attitude, maybe unreliable, maybe he had some arrogance to them, rubbed people the wrong way. And I don't care how talented you were. Certainly not going to put my professional reputation on the line by recommending you.

(04:11):

It's these little things. So Graham, he enters a writing class at Cal State Fullerton and happened to be taught by a very serious professional writer, Robert Engels. The guy loved his homework assignment, has him stay after class, talks to him, gives him a different writing assignment and the course of his life changes and we're going to talk about that today. On a previous episode, I think one or two episodes ago, I talked about the importance of artistic heroes. It comes up in this conversation with Graham and what I found interesting, what I learned, it's not just having artistic heroes, which I think is important. You need mentors that are going to inspire you, but you have to mimic and steal from them.

(05:02):

Graham is going to talk about the influence Stephen King had on him as a child and how just trying to write like him started to teach him about storytelling. And it was fascinating and I look forward to sharing this with you. He's a very interesting guy. We're going to talk about growing up in Oklahoma and San Francisco, being part of the Chickasaw Tribal Nation and just what he's learned, being a professional writer at the highest level, okay? At the top of the conversation though, we're talking about his military career. He's a marine. He enlisted and ended up going to Iraq, served a tour of duty. We're going to talk about how all of that influenced his life, his writing. And at the top here, I asked him, "Why the fuck did you want to be a marine?" So I'll just say right now, thank you for your service, Graham. Appreciate that and this is how he responded. This is Graham Roland.

Graham Roland (06:10):

That's an interesting question. So it was September, October of 2000 when I walked into the recruiter's office and I had gotten out of high school. My parents had gotten a divorce almost immediately after I graduated and there was real financial stress on my mom and I knew I wanted to go to college. I didn't want to burden her with another expense. So I had a couple friends that I went to high school with that had joined and gotten the G.I. Bill and I said, "Well, if I want to go to college, that seems like a good practical thing to do." And also, I was a writer. I knew I wanted to write. I didn't know it would take me into television writing or anything like that yet, but I knew I wanted to write for a long time and I felt like, hey, this will give me some life experience.

(06:58):

It'll give me something that other people don't have to write about. Now, with that said, I was a child of the 90s and wars lasted two or three days, and I just didn't think there would be another protracted war. I just thought we were past that period. I thought we bombed people and sent some ground troops in and then things resolved, so did not anticipate at all what happened. I guess it was only 10, 11 months later with 9/11 and then ultimately being deployed to Iraq or having friends that also went to Afghanistan, so all of those things I did not foresee, but my two motivations were get money for school and get something to write about. I did achieve both of those, but it just came with a bunch of other stuff I didn't anticipate.

Charlie Sandlan (07:49):

Why the marines? Because the marines are no fucking joke.

Graham Roland (07:53):

Because I had had two buddies, both of whom were fairly unimpressive individuals in high school, stoner kids and when they came back, the change was so dramatic, not only physically. They were just almost like different people and I was really impressed by that and by them and how much it had done for them and so I felt like, well, it got them straightened out. It could probably do the same for me.

Charlie Sandlan (08:24):

Why did you feel you needed to be straightened out?

Graham Roland (08:26):

I think I never liked school. I didn't really apply myself. Had a lot of stuff going on at home and things like that that I could blame and say, "Oh, that was the reason." But I didn't apply myself and really prepare for going to college, because I was just living day by day and I was also not getting into big trouble, not trouble with the law or anything, but I was cutting class and getting stoned and things like t

Charlie Sandlan (08:55):

 Yeah. So you're Chickasaw. You're a Chickasaw from the Chickasaw Nation. What was it like? Your broken home, you're spending half your time in liberal San Francisco Bay Area and then spending part of your year in Oklahoma. Is it two different worlds?

Graham Roland (09:18):

Two different worlds. I had a couple of instances in my life like that early on, where I felt like I was trespassing in these two very different worlds and that was the first one where when I was eight, my mom and I and my stepfather moved to the Bay Area from Oklahoma. I would spend the school year there and then in the summers, I would go home with my biological father and spend the summer with him in Oklahoma. And obviously, you have the culture differences, very much in the Bible Belt, all of those kinds of things. But looking back on it now, which one of the things that I didn't really think about at the time, but it crept up later in my artistic life, I was connected to the native community in Oklahoma by virtue of my relatives. The native side of my family was all there.

(10:11):

And not to say that we didn't live on a reservation. None of that, but I was still connected to the culture and to my heritage via my relatives. When I was taken out of that and moved to California, there was no native community at all where I was and so oftentimes, the other kids at school, they would either think I was Hispanic or white or Italian. It just never would cross their mind and so I disconnected from that when I was living in California, because it just wasn't a part of my life anymore. And then when I would go home in the summers, I would be reminded of it, but I also, as happens when you move great distances away, you start to lose contact with certain extended family and things like that.

(11:01):

When I did go back, then I felt outside of it and so I felt outside of both worlds and not really putting any of that together on a conscious level, but when I ended up doing Dark Winds, I wrote a storyline about one of the lead characters, the younger police officer, Jim Chee, and just was looking for a good storyline of what would be an interesting way to bring this guy into the show. And I thought, well, what if he grew up on the Navajo Reservation, but he's been gone since he was a kid and now he's coming back as a man in his mid-twenties who's now an FBI agent and he's not disclosing that to anybody, but more importantly, he feels completely disconnected from that part of his heritage and that part of his life, because he's been living this whole other life and he feels like a trespasser.

(11:53):

And I just wrote that thinking it was a good story, it had a good arc for that character to go, but then I was sitting with the actor after we'd already filmed everything, Kiowa Gordon, great actor who plays Jim Chee. We were talking for the first time about both of our backgrounds and he had a similar background where he was part of the community and then he moved away for a while and then so he had one foot in, one foot out. And when he was talking about his background, it started to make me realize, oh, well that's not too dissimilar from my own story and maybe subconsciously, that's how this all came about. Maybe I was trying to work something artistically out through that character.

Charlie Sandlan (12:41):

Well, you said you always knew you wanted to write and I think anybody that's drawn to a creative life has some sort of childhood passion or dream for that particular art form. Why writing? What was it about that art form that appealed to you?

Graham Roland (13:03):

It started with reading. It was funny, because I hated school, but I loved to read and so even the books that they would assign you in school, that would be my favorite part of school, would be getting the reading assignments and I would always-

Charlie Sandlan (13:19):

That's the shit everybody puts off. I remember it would be July and I've got five books to read and I'm like, "Goddamn, this is the worst."

Graham Roland (13:26):

And I used to do it too. I used to do it too and there was one, I think it was a spring break or something where you have the week off and I was grounded, because I had done something and so I couldn't watch TV. And so I remember distinctly thinking, "Well, I have this book that we're supposed to read a certain amount of chapters by the time we come back. What if I just finished this book over the break, because I don't have anything else to do? Then I could just do all this work and I would skate for the next couple weeks." And then I read the book and the book was Where the Red Fern Grows. I think I was in third grade or fourth grade or something like that and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And that was the discovery of like, "Oh, I really like reading."

(14:11):

I was enjoying that as much as I was enjoying watching television and watching a movie and then I started to pick up books around the house that my mom had read, probably too early for some of them, because she was a big Stephen King fan, but I started reading Stephen King at 9 or 10 that led to Peter Straub and all these different horrors. That was my thing at first, was the horror genre. And then as you get a little bit older, then you start reading Hemingway and you're still reading all the stuff that you have to read in school. I started reading Brett Easton Ellis when I was in eighth grade or high school and that was a whole other eyeopening thing and that was really where it started, was I loved to read and I loved what those books and the way these writers wrote, what they inspired me and what they did to me and so it started with trying to mimic them and really started trying to mimic Stephen King.

Charlie Sandlan (15:09):

And that's what artists do. I tell my students, "All artists steal. They take from what inspires them and try to make it your own." You need a launching point. You need some form of inspiration, I think, to just be driven, to start to do something, so Stephen King was it for you. Were you trying just his style and the way he would tell a story?

Graham Roland (15:34):

Yeah. It's funny, because I still have one of the first stories I ever wrote and it was so old, I wrote it by hand. We didn't even have a computer in the house and I dedicated it to him and you can see it's very bad, obviously. I was 11, but you can see me trying to imitate his writing style, but more than that, it was the imagination. He unlocked my imagination and maybe I was an anxious kid already. All the little mundane things of the world that he used to scare you in his books like a dog, or a broken marriage, or a family that goes to Colorado to caretake a hotel for the winter, these things that on their surface seem mundane and then spin wildly out of control. I started to notice those things in my own life and then that was the beginning of inventing stories. Well, what if that door was a mouth, or what if that car had a mind of its own? Which, again, was one of his stories. So that was really the beginning for me, because those stories unlocked my imagination.

Charlie Sandlan (16:39):

Yeah. You used, I think, the two most important words for any artist, are what if. It's to the key into your imagination and once you start with those two words, anything's possible. And did you journal as a kid or did you diary?

Graham Roland (16:54):

I did when I got into eighth grade high school years and my more angsty years, but really, it just started with writing fiction, just short fiction. That was the first thing that I did, was just write really bad short stories. And then when I became a teenager and I started to get more angsty and I started journaling and I still have a lot of those journals actually. Still was doing short stories and somewhere around high school, I started to realize I also had a dual love of movies. And that was the early 90s and so I remember seeing Reservoir Dogs on cable and thinking like, "Wow. I've never seen anything..." And I wasn't supposed to be watching that. I was watching it late in my bedroom when my parents weren't paying attention to what I was doing and that fueled for me looking for more movies. It was such a great time for independent film, obviously, so there was all these-

Charlie Sandlan (17:50):

Miramax and that whole independent when Tarantino came out and even just walking and talking and there's Catherine Keener films, there's Anne Heche and Lee Schriever. All those guys were doing them.

Graham Roland (18:05):

David Lynch. I was a huge Twin Peaks fan. The original Twin Peaks. The first one.

Charlie Sandlan (18:11):

Well, it's odd you say Twin Peaks, because I tell my students, "You need to come correct every single time you have an opportunity to do something, because you just don't know who is going to be reading something, watching something and you come back, you're at Cal State, you're in this writing class with..." Is it Robert Engels?

Graham Roland (18:31):

Robert Engels. That's right. Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan (18:33):

Wh o wrote Twin Peaks?

Graham Roland (18:34):

Yeah.

(18:36):

(18:36):

So that's a real full circle. I've had a couple of those moments where I was a big fan of something and then ended up connected with someone who was involved intimately in making the thing and so I was a big Twin Peaks fan. Just at that time, I'm sure you remember too, even now, if you put that on TV now, it would be so weird.

Charlie Sandlan (18:55):

It holds up and it's-

Graham Roland (18:56):

But that time on ABC, I believe it was, on ABC in 1990 or 91, there was nothing even close to that. It hit a nerve with people. Not only was it different in avant-garde, but it had a mass audience and that was really eyeopening too, that you could do something that different and people would tune in and do it.

Charlie Sandlan (19:17):

Well, so you're in class with this guy. He gives you an assignment to write a spec for something. It was the Sopranos?

Graham Roland (19:25):

Yeah. It was. So I had come back, so my journey was I had joined the marines. I had done about almost a year on active duty if you go through bootcamp, the School of Infantry, then the School of Artillery. I was constantly living this boy cried wolf kind of situation with the military of, "You guys are going to get activated. You're going to go to Iraq." And then we would sign wills and we would figure out where we're going to put all of our personal belongings when we went and we would go all the way up to doing all that, we'd get all the shots and then the last minute they'd say, "Oh, you're not going." So I spent two years going through that of every six months or so, we'd start hearing like, "Oh, you're going. You're going." And then, "Oh, you're not going."

Charlie Sandlan (20:10):

What was that like emotionally?

Graham Roland (20:12):

It was tough. Looking back on it, it was really tough, because I took college much more serious than I'd ever taken any schooling before and so I was doing well and it was also I was a film student, so I actually loved what I was doing. And then finally, I got to a point where I was just like, "I don't believe it anymore." And then sure enough, that's when it happened.

Charlie Sandlan (20:34):

That's when.

Graham Roland (20:35):

So it was in my junior year. We finally got called up and took a year off of school, deployed to Iraq, did a standard deployment. At that time, I think the standard combat deployment was seven months, so we were there from beginning of September 2005 to beginning of April or mid-April of '06. Something like that. Before I left, I'd taken every single writing class you could take. Getting back to your question about Robert Engels, there was a professor there who was teaching class for the first time. He was an actual television writer and so this was his first time teaching and it was my first time taking a class from somebody who actually had done and was doing what I wanted to do and so I enrolled in his class. It was a class that had never been offered before, called One Hour TV Drama and it was kind of the heyday of the one hour TV drama with The Sopranos and Deadwood and Big Love and all those great shows.

Charlie Sandlan (21:32):

Great shows.

Graham Roland (21:33):

Six Feet Under. And the semester assignment that we all had to do was write a spec of your favorite show and my favorite show at that time and the show that I had actually discovered in Iraq, I had some downtime and my mom had sent me a care package and then the care package was a box set of the first two seasons of The Sopranos. In my downtime, and we weren't doing missions and things like that, I went through those first two seasons and fell in love with the show and so when I came back, I said, "I'm going to do a spec of The Sopranos." We turned in our first 10 or 15 pages. I think it was 15 pages. After we turned them in, he gave his normal lecture class and then at the end of the class he said, "Who's Graham? Who's Graham Roland?" And I said, "Oh, that's me."

(22:23):

And he said, "Will you stay behind for a second?" And I said, "All right." So we get out and he's like, "Walk with me to my next class." And he said, "I liked your writing. I was looking back at the little bio or whatever that you wrote for when you came into the class and I saw that you just came back from Iraq. I'll make you a deal. I don't want you to write a spec of The Sopranos. I want you to write me an original pilot. It can be about anything you want. Just set it in Iraq and base it on your experience. And if you do that and you finish it, I don't care if it's good or bad, I'll give you an A." And I said, "Okay." And so I did that and he gave me notes throughout the whole process and I was also very into the show, Lost, at that time.

(23:06):

That was two shows and ended up being this very quasi-science fiction military thriller set in Iraq. When I was done with his help, as he's giving me all these notes, he managed to get it to a management company and it just went in a pile of scripts on submissions and stuff like that and a young manager named Michael Prevett there picked it up and I was still finishing school. I had a few weeks left. I think when I first met Michael in my last semester, I was getting ready to take finals and he said, "Can you drive out to LA and meet me for lunch?" And I said, "Yeah." I drove out there. We had lunch. He was like, "Oh, if you're interested in doing this and you want to move to LA, you're graduating soon, if you move to LA when you're done, that's your plan, I'll represent you."

(24:05):

And I said, "Yeah. Absolutely. That's my plan." Without Robert Engels not only giving me the idea to write a pilot based on something that I had experienced, which I think as you know, most good art comes from within, comes from something you're drawing from. And also, almost as importantly, if not more importantly, a professional writer who had done something that was so seminal in my formation as a writer and an artist and a TV fan with Twin Peaks, telling me at that time in my early twenties, "I think you could do this for a living," made all the difference in the world, because I had no friends in LA, I had no clue about how I was going to go about breaking into the business.

Charlie Sandlan (24:54):

So he really mentored you.

Graham Roland (24:56):

He mentored me that final year that I was in school. Even when the semester was over and I was fine-tuning the script, I would drive out to his house. He was living in Silver Lake. I would drive out to his house and he would give me notes. That ended up being the script that got me a manager, ended up being the script that got me my first agent, ended up being the script that got me my first job on a show called Prison Break.

Charlie Sandlan (25:21):

Oh, yeah. Wentworth Miller. Love that show.

Graham Roland (25:23):

Wentworth Miller. Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan (25:25):

That was a fun show, the first couple seasons. I feel like it jumped the shark after a while, but those first couple seasons were dope.

Graham Roland (25:32):

It's interesting, because if that show were to be made today, it would've been would've great the whole way through, because we made 88 or 90 episodes of that show.

Charlie Sandlan (25:42):

That's unbelievable.

Graham Roland (25:42):

90 hours. And today, in a world where you make eight episodes a season, you could have just done those first two seasons, or that would've been four seasons and you're like, "Oh my God. That's amazing." That was really my film school. As much as I got a little knowledge in school about story and why things were good and why certain things weren't good, really getting thrown into the fire, because I came out to LA in August of '07 and the writer's strike happened a couple weeks after I moved out here and then when the strike ended, I believe it was February of '08, I walked onto the Fox Lot to start my first day of work as a staff writer on Prison Break.

(26:34):

So I had a very fortuitous move out to LA and then started working almost immediately. I was working at a bookstore for about six months when the strike ended, or during the strike, actually, the showrunner of Prison Break had read my script and the one that I had written for Bob Engels and he invited me to coffee in Hancock Park, because he wasn't writing Prison Break, because he was on strike. He was at home. He had nothing to do. So that's another instance of just my timing could not have been better, because even though everyone was on strike, showrunners and agents and people who normally would not ever pick up a spec written by somebody who was in college less than a year ago, picked up my script and read it and not only read it, but took time out of his day to meet with me and have coffee with me and never offered me a job at the coffee, but offered me advice about being a professional writer.

Charlie Sandlan (27:36):

Yeah. Well, what does it mean? What did you learn about what it takes to be a professional? Because it's one thing to say, "I'm a writer," or, "I'm an actor," or, "I want to act." It's another thing to then they'll say, "Okay. Now I'm a professional." What did you learn in that writer's room on that first show?

Graham Roland (27:50):

You have to do it. You have to do it every day.

Charlie Sandlan (27:53):

Every day.

Graham Roland (27:53):

You have to work on your craft. It's a craft. It's not like, oh, I get a bolt of lightning and a great idea. Well, I got to write that. No. You got to find it. You got to be reading. You got to have your atteana up and you got to be sitting in the chair and writing when you don't feel like writing and you got to be writing a lot of bad stuff to get to something that's decent. He approached it more like an artisan, instead of, oh, I'm this mad genius who gets an idea and then goes off and writes it and comes back with an amazing story.

(28:27):

And then when he brought me on, the first thing he told me, he actually did not let me in the writer's room on the first day. He convened the room, he let me meet everybody, so I went in and met everybody and I was the only new writer in the four years that they'd had. Even the younger writers had been assistants before, so I was the only person who was just coming in cold that hadn't been there since the first season.

Charlie Sandlan (28:50):

So they're all friends, they've got history, they've got all of that.

Graham Roland (28:53):

Super tight room and still to this day, one of the most talented and best groups of writers I've ever had the privilege to be in a room with. So he let me meet everybody and then he's like, "Okay. Come with me." And I didn't have an office yet. They were cleaning out a storage room that was going to be my office and he put me at a desk in the bullpen area where all the assistants were and he dropped all three seasons of Prison Break to that point. 66 episodes or maybe more than that of scripts. He's like, "Read these. I know you watched the episodes, but read every single one of these." And I think for the first two days, all I did was read scripts and I think at the end of the week on Thursday or Friday, he let me come into the writer's room.

Charlie Sandlan (29:43):

What was the difference between watching all 60-something odd episodes and reading them?

Graham Roland (29:50):

I got to see all the revisions, because you know how the revisions are color coded in a script? And so you get to see how everything changed over the course of the production all the way up until some of the things that were in the script that didn't make it to the final edit. For me, the writing I was reading, all the writers were in the next room and so I got to read how their styles were different. And some shows you work on, and I went on to work on other shows like this, where you have to really mimic the style of the showrunner, Prison Break wasn't like that.

(30:22):

You had to stay within the framework of the characters and you couldn't have them doing things that they wouldn't do or have storylines that didn't feel true to the show, but you were free to write your prose the way you wanted to write it and a lot of them had unique writing styles and it was fun to see how certain people did certain things, whether it be a turn of phrase and dialogue, or whether it be even action lines that you would never be privy to, but you could see how those lines really evoke the sense of the scene and what the writer wanted. And so I started looking at that and I started being like, "Oh, that's really good. I'm going to take that and if I get a script, I'm going to do something like that from this person and I'm going to do something like that from that person." And so everybody had something that I really enjoyed.

(31:15):

So by dropping all those scripts in front of me and starting me off by reading those scripts before he let me in the room, what he was really signaling to me was, "Yes, you're getting paid. Yes, you're a professional writer now, but you're also still a student. I don't expect you to be as good of a writer as a co-EP. You're here to learn how to make a television show as much as you are to help us do our jobs." It freed me up tremendously. It took all the pressure off of like, "Oh my God." Because you step into the writer's room and I think the first instinct a lot of young writers have is to keep score of how often they're talking and, "Oh my God. This person's had three pitches today. I haven't said anything." And so take this opportunity to learn as much as you can. Treat it almost like a second film school.

(32:09):

And I did and the great thing about that show was it's still to this day, the only show that season we shot in Los Angeles. We worked on the Fox lot, so I'd drive around to the Fox lot, I'd walk to the writer's office. 100 feet from the writer's office were the stages. Beneath the writer's office was the production office and then beneath that was post and so every aspect of the TV show and how it's made was all within half of an acre. I got to see every single part of the process. The other great thing was that, and I never had this in any other show since, as a room, every single writer would watch the first cut that would come in of a show, whether you wrote it or not and we did 24 episodes that season. I watched 24 director's cuts.

(33:06):

I got to watch all of them give notes and talk about why that scene wasn't working or what needed to be done to fix that scene. So when I went to my next job, and I didn't get to watch every director's cut, but the showrunners of that show, Lost, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, both of those shows, not only was I the new guy, the new writer, was coming into a room and not only a room, but extending out into the production in Hawaii, but also the assistance. Everybody had been there. I think the PA on both jobs, the PA who got coffee and I were the only two new people coming into that season, so everybody knew each other.

Charlie Sandlan (33:50):

What was it like coming onto a show that you watched and loved and just as a fan?

Graham Roland (33:54):

Intimidating. At first, extremely exciting, but then also intimidating, because as a fan, you felt both giddy to be peeking behind the curtain to see how it was done, trying not to be a fan in the writer's room when you're sitting next to these people and they're talking about Damon and Carlton and the writers are talking about what's going to happen with Kate and Sawyer and Jack this episode, for your first instinct as a fan, it was like, "Oh my God. I can't believe I'm here." That and The Sopranos were my two favorite shows at the time and I think The Sopranos had ended at that time. So that was my favorite show. It was on the air. I watched it every episode every week. I had to get over that. I had to get over being a fanboy. I had to get over it and just be like, "I'm here to do a job."

Charlie Sandlan (34:40):

Well, how did Prison Break set you up for how you got through Lost?

Graham Roland (34:47):

It set me up very well. It set me up well, because the environment at Prison Break took an interest in mentorship. When I got to Lost, also doing that much post, also, I had been on set, which as a staff writer now is unheard of. Back then, it wasn't unheard of, but it also wasn't common. And so because they'd exposed me to all aspects of it, I felt more equipped than I think many staff writers would've. That said, both shows, but in particular Lost, was an extremely tight ship. They were moving at lightspeed. They didn't need to talk in full sentences to communicate or understand what the other person was saying and so part of the challenge of that show, the dual challenge was, okay, I'm not a fan anymore. I'm here to do a job.

(35:41):

And the second part of it was everything in the writer's room felt like it was moving so fast and I had to catch up. And that took some adjustment, because on that show, as a younger writer, I would write a lot of sides. I would write a lot of first drafts of scenes for other writers of their episodes and things like that, which was common when you're doing that many episodes and the time crunch is that fast. That was commonplace at that time in broadcast. When I got to my own episode, I felt like, "Oh, I can do this, because I've already done it and I've already proven to myself, to my bosses that I can write." So it took a bit of pressure off me.

Charlie Sandlan (36:46):

You're very lucky if you're an artist that's been mentored, because this kind of thing-

Graham Roland (36:52):

It makes all the difference.

Charlie Sandlan (36:53):

Yeah. You can't really seek them out. They find you. You have to stand out above everybody else that they're teaching or working with and they have to go, "You know what? There's something about you I'm willing to invest some time in." It's the same for me too. That's why I tell my students, "You show up here and you're lazy, or you don't know your lines, or you're half-assed, or you're defensive with criticism, or you want to argue, or you have an attitude. You just don't know who is in that class with you and what they're going to be doing in five years, or the opportunity that might come to you." You can only control so many things. The quality of your work and your reputation.

Graham Roland (37:33):

I'm very fortunate to have had the career that I've had and I absolutely, 100%, would not be where I'm at, had early on, people had not taken an interest in me and said, "Hey, come here. Let me show you how to do this." And I had that on my first three jobs.

Charlie Sandlan (37:51):

Well, so what's the difference between those early jobs getting into a room and then saying, "Hey, listen. We want you to take Tom Clancy's greatest character and create something." It's a whole nother beast and a process.

Graham Roland (38:09):

Yeah. At that time, I'd had a steady climb up the writing ranks, if you will. I'd skipped a couple levels, but for the most part, I checked the box and moved on. So at that time, I had probably been a part of making almost 100 hours of television at that point, if not more. I thought I was ready from a writing perspective. I really did. I felt like the stuff that I wasn't ready for, I hadn't really done a great deal of hiring, especially not department heads and things like that. Casting was also something that I had certainly weighed in on, but not-

Charlie Sandlan (38:51):

So you were sitting in auditions-

Graham Roland (38:53):

Sitting in auditions now and I had done a little bit of that, but not much. And then there's all this stuff, the non-sexy things as I call it like handling the budget and things like that. And also the interesting new thing about being a showrunner, creating your own show, is it's like the epitome of your writing career, because now you have not the final say, but you have creative control.

Charlie Sandlan (39:21):

You're the top dog creatively if you're the showrunner.

Graham Roland (39:22):

You're the top dog creatively, and certainly, you are collaborating with all of your partners at the studio, the network, your other writers, your other producers, your cast. So it's certainly a collaboration, but on one respect, it's I made it and now you have more writing to do than you've ever had to do in your life and you have less time to write than you've ever had to write in your entire career, because the majority of the job, as I found out, is not writing. Especially when you get into production, it's everything else. It's managing the production, it's dealing with your collaborators and your fellow people and that's the stuff that I feel like I had to learn a lot. I was certainly a better writer than I was a "showrunner" that first year.

Charlie Sandlan (40:12):

What makes a good showrunner?

Graham Roland (40:13):

What makes a good showrunner, you probably get a lot of different answers, but I think a good showrunner is yes, you have to be creatively confident and competent. You have to be confident enough to be open and collaborative.

Charlie Sandlan (40:27):

When you say that, confident enough to be open, a lot of people, that confidence leads to arrogance, which is not a good combination.

Graham Roland (40:37):

I feel like the people that I've worked with almost invariably, and whether this be a writer, or an actor, or a set designer, or whatever your job is, the people that are usually the best at their craft are oftentimes the most collaborative, because they're confident in their own ability. They're not threatened by you. They're not threatened by you coming in and saying, "I don't know about that." They'll listen. And I feel like that's something that comes with experience and time, but a good showrunner is also a good listener and a good collaborator .

(41:26):

I look at where we're at now with Dark Winds in the season we just finished and in a lot of ways, I'm not running that show by the way. John Wirth is running that show. I created it and I'm still learning things from other showrunners like John. A couple people have a huge influence over the culture of a show and one of them is the showrunner and the other one is the number one on the call sheet. And if that relationship is born of mutual respect and collaboration, it sets you up on a really good trajectory to have not only a good show, but a good experience making that show.

Charlie Sandlan (42:07):

Totally. It all goes downhill from number one on the call sheet in terms of just the overall just vibe of a set, the feel of a set, the way people are going to treat each other and talk to each other. Well, so all right, Dark Winds. Listen, Reservation Dogs came out. Incredible show. Great. Just Native American life and just seeing them as just real people, so Dark Winds is doing the same thing. What are you most proud of about what you put out there with it?

Graham Roland (42:44):

At the time that we started developing it, there was nothing on. Reservation Dogs hadn't come on yet, so when Reservation Dogs came on before we did and Rutherford Falls or a couple of other things, it really did us a great service, because before we ever came out, it proved that there was an audience for shows set in this world, in this community and they're two very different shows. Very different shows, but it dispelled this idea that, oh, you have to have all these known actors.

Charlie Sandlan (43:22):

It's so untrue. People just want good storytelling, good acting, good writing. Don't watch it. Don't watch it.

Graham Roland (43:29):

And so we owe a tremendous amount to them for paving the way a little bit for us and our lead is also in their show. The thing I'm most proud of, this show is probably the thing that is closest to my heart in terms of anything I've ever done. Not everything I've done I've cared a tremendous amount about, but this one really, it was a chance to bring a community, a culture to the screen in a way that hadn't been depicted, meaning the Navajo community, the Navajo Reservation hadn't been depicted on television before. And the reason I got involved with the project is it was an opportunity to bring an audience into that world and into that community through a native protagonist. In the course of making these two seasons, we've been very lucky and blessed to work with some very talented native artists across the board, whether that be in the writer's room, in the cast obviously, phenomenal cast, but also behind the scenes as well. That's been tremendously gratifying, seeing them rise to the occasion and step up and do fine work.

Charlie Sandlan (44:49):

Great show. Very compelling.

Graham Roland (44:50):

Thank you.

Charlie Sandlan (44:51):

Very interesting.

Graham Roland (44:51):

Thank you.

Charlie Sandlan (44:52):

And it also has a little bit of that other world supernatural kind of through line, which you've done a lot. It's got a little taste of it here and there. It unsettles you. It jolts you. It scares you. It's great. I'm curious, what's the most difficult thing about doing a period piece, setting something in 1971? I'll tell you guys, killed the cars. Your cars are unbelievable.

Graham Roland (45:18):

Thank you. One of the things that we have going for us is we have these tremendous novels written by a gentleman named Tony Hillerman and the two novels we've used so far in the first two seasons were written in the 1970s. First and foremost, we have his writing to turn to and look at and see. When I wrote the pilot, a great consultant who had been a Navajo police officer in the 70s and so I got to say, "Well, what kind of car did you drive and what kind of gun did you carry and what did the uniforms look like?" I like the challenge of trying to get it as accurate as possible. This year, we've played around a little bit more in the 70s, not only with the music, but if you've caught any of this season, you see that, I think it's Apollo 15, the moon landing, where they drove a car on the moon and you see the community reacting to that and what that means to the people here.

(46:15):

Taking some of those current events back then and trying to infuse them into the storyline that you're telling, we don't do that a lot, but that was an example of it. I have to give most of the credit, honestly, to the detail that the crew puts into it. Obviously, the writers do their part, but the production designer and the costumes, the hair and makeup and all that stuff in particular. It's not like we're trying to recreate New York and make it New York in 1971. So-

Charlie Sandlan (46:47):

It's a lot easier.

Graham Roland (46:47):

... it's a lot easier to do when you're trying to do it in that area, because not a lot has changed in some ways. Sadly, not a lot has changed. In some ways, you go on the reservation still and a lot of homes still do not have electricity. It's easier than trying to do it in a city.

Charlie Sandlan (47:09):

Yeah. I can't believe it's already been an hour. So I'm going to try to wrap this up here, but you have been on the other side of the table and I do teach actors. I'm curious, given the many auditions you've seen, is there anything you would say don't ever do or make sure you do do? What stands out to you in terms of just actors walking into a room and auditioning?

Graham Roland (47:32):

Most auditions that you watch are self tapes, unfortunately, but even when we were doing in-person auditions, I've never been in a cringeworthy audition where somebody just came in and was just so off the wall or wrong for the part. Everybody that I've ever been in an audition room with has come in and been professional, talking about being on the other side of the table and putting yourself in the other person's shoes. During the pandemic, my wife, Carly, wrote and directed a short film and she asked me if I wanted to play a part in the film. And I had done a little acting and stuff in college for other film students.

(48:15):

We would act in each other's films, but just messing around and this was a case where because she's an actor, everybody else in the film was a professional actor. And it really gave me, not that I didn't appreciate actors before, but a huge amount of appreciation, because I had to go through the process now. I had to do the rehearsals, I had to learn the lines, I had to show up on set and go to hair and makeup and I had to come into a scene with four other professional actors and not screw it up and hit my mark and remember my lines and do all those things. And by far, I was the worst part of the film, I'm sure, but not that I didn't look at it as a craft before, but all of the things that actors have to hold in their heads when they go to do an audition and then still be able to emotionally do something true and real while remembering all the practical things and getting direction from the director of like, "Oh, hey. Now try one like that."

Charlie Sandlan (49:22):

Yeah. It's hard.

Graham Roland (49:24):

Whole new respect after doing that.

Charlie Sandlan (49:26):

And listen, I got lots of love for Carly. You did marry a Maggie Flanigan Studio alone, so-

Graham Roland (49:31):

I know.

Charlie Sandlan (49:32):

... yeah, she knows what she's doing.

Graham Roland (49:35):

Yeah. Yeah. She definitely does.

Charlie Sandlan (49:37):

All right. All right. So last question and then we'll wrap it up. To close out on this, how would you describe the importance of artistry if you want to live a creative life?

Graham Roland (49:47):

How you begin is mimicking your idols, but at a certain point, you've got to let that go and I see a lot of young writers trying to write to what the successful movie was last summer, or what the successful show is on TV, how their favorite writer writes. I think it's a fine line, but you have to be able to walk it, of taking from your heroes and using them as inspiration and putting some of their tools in your toolbox, but you still, at the end of the day, have to find that thing in yourself about what you have to say about the world and how you feel about things and express it.

Charlie Sandlan (50:34):

Well, my fellow daydreamers, thank you for sticking around and keeping that phone in your pocket. Please, you can subscribe to this show wherever you get podcasts. Tell your friends about it. I've got this really great podcast about art and acting. You got a few minutes. Go to iTunes. Write a review for the show. That would help me out a hell of a lot. You can go to https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.comGo to the contact page, hit that red button. I use SpeakPipe. You can leave me a message, ask a question, share some thoughts with me. I'll get back to you. You can also go to https://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com if you are interested in training with me at my New York City conservatory. You can also follow me on Instagram, @CreatingBehavior, @Maggieflaniganstudio. Lawrence Trailer, thank you for the music, my man. My friends, come on. Stay resilient, play full out with yourself and don't ever settle for your second best. My name is Charlie Sandlan. Peace.