Oscar-nominated screenwriter Will Tracy, whose credits include Succession, The Menu and Bugonia, sat down with author and journalist Patrick Freyne at Dublin’s Storyhouse screenwriting festival where he discussed his career trajectory and writing processes.
Speaking to an audience at the Light House Cinema, Tracy outlined how his time working at The Onion paved the way for his comedy writing. Admitting he joined as “a fan” of the satirical news outlet, Tracy said that working there was “like the fantasy of a comedy writer show.”
“It was like the Dick Van Dyke Show,” he quipped, adding that the office was filled with a cohort of writers who were “drinking and shouting” in the office.
“They were these Gen X writers who were making this beloved thing, but the idea was that no one, for some reason – even though it had this high leadership and this great brand that people loved – they could never figure out a way to make any money off of it,”
Tracy then moved on to become a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver before becoming part of the team of writers for Succession. When pressed about how he boarded that hit HBO series, Tracy said: “It’s a show about America and I think Jesse [Armstrong] was looking for somebody who knew about politics and media and business in America, which I did because, even at The Onion, you still had to know how a bill was passed. We still had to do our research to give those pieces verisimility and so I knew a little bit about that world.”
For each season of Succession, Tracy said he always tried to come in with “an idea for an episode…a bottle episode as they call them…it’s trying to have my own little system within the season.”
Drawing inspiration from Rupert Murdoch’s long desire to acquire the Wall Street Journal to add prestige to his portfolio, Tracy pitched an idea for an episode where Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his family have to go to the house of a major competing media family with a legacy brand with Roy and his family required to “play happy families”.
“It was almost like a sitcom-reality episode,” he said. “You know those episodes of sitcom where it’s like dad’s business partners from Japan are in town and everything goes wrong? It was like that with a family like the Roys, who are so unbelievably insane, and they have to go to this house and pretend they’re politically tame and that they all love each other.”
Inspiration for The Menu, he said, came when he was on honeymoon in Bergen, Norway. A self-confessed “foodie” he recalled going to restaurant via boat which sat on a small island on its own “We got there and at some point, at the beginning of the dinner, we sat down and saw the boat leave,” he said. “I’m a little bit claustrophobic so I thought, ‘Well, we’re here for three hours. What if something goes wrong or someone has a heart attack or something? We were kind of putting our lives in their hands. And I did say at that moment in the dinner to my wife that that would be an interesting movie.”
When pressed about his writing process, Tracy admitted that the “first five pages are the hardest part.”
“You’re getting the car started and you’re kind of establishing for the reader what the story is going to be, who the characters are and how it’s going to feel and here is the tone of the movie, the vibe of it and the rhythm of it. Getting that down is the hardest part.”
