Netflix hitmaker Scott Frank on Hollywood: 'People are afraid now.'
Scott Frank figured out how to thrive in Hollywood. Now he's doing it at Netflix.
But the writer/director has advice for young people who want to follow in his footsteps: Try something else.
If Frank were starting out his career in 2025, he said he wouldn't mess around with movies or television. "I'd want to go work in the gaming world, where I think there's some really interesting stuff going on," he told me this month.
That's quite a comment coming from someone who spent years as one of the most in-demand writers in the movie business, and has now established himself as a reliable hitmaker for Netflix. " Dept. Q" — his third series for the streamer, following his "Godless" western and the pandemic megahit "The Queen's Gambit" — is his take on the British mystery genre, and it's been near the top of the Netflix charts since it debuted in May.
But Frank says the wave of digital distractions and options makes it incredibly difficult for traditional movies and TV to capture audience attention today. For all of Netflix's massive success, it still lags behind YouTube in terms of time viewers spend on screens, he notes. And teens are now spending an astonishing two hours a day on TikTok.
"So, how do you get people to go to the movies? How do you get people to pay attention to your show? There's so much stuff," he tells me.
"Whereas gaming — you're not folding your laundry while you're playing a game. You're not texting while you're playing a game. You're involved. And that seems to me like an opportunity for storytelling."
That won't be an opportunity for Frank himself — "I'm too old," he says — and he says he'll continue to try making movies and TV shows. He'd love to make a second season of "Dept. Q," which is based on a series of crime novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen.
You can hear my full conversation with Frank on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt from our chat:
Peter Kafka: Some Netflix shows and movies seem like they'll generate huge numbers, but don't feel like they have cultural resonance. But it seems like people are talking about your show. Do you feel that?
Scott Frank: You're certainly correct in that a lot of the movies, in particular, don't leave much of a ripple. There's not a lot of cultural wake.
That being said, they are watched a lot, and people enjoy watching them and seek them out. And Netflix has 300 million worldwide subscribers, so way more people are going to watch your movie. As opposed to something getting released in theaters that no one watches, and it doesn't create any kind of long tail, either.
With the television shows, it's a little different. Because when they hit, they tend to leave a mark. They tend to resonate.
What accounts for that? Is it simply because there's more of it? There's 10 episodes, so you're spending more time? And there's more reason to talk about it, because it's episodic — you can tell people, "Wait till you get to episode five?"
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I think that's why. It's a different sort of investment. When you're sitting down to watch a show, you are hoping that it's something you're going to stick with. Whereas when you're watching a movie, you know: "I have a couple hours, an hour and a half, I'm gonna watch this thing."
I don't have an easy answer other than to say that, for me, the engagement and narrative in the world right now have never been higher.
During the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes a couple of years ago, AI didn't start off as the big issue, but then became one, or at least the dominant talking point. What did you make of that discussion then? And how are you thinking about AI and tech now?
Tech has been a bit of a disaster for the country in many ways, but it's also been an amazing boon to the world. I just think that these guys run the companies, so many of them are compromised and …
Let's narrow it down to your world. We could have the other discussion …
But I think it affects my world because they now own my world. We probably were striking against the wrong people that time. Because we're owned by tech people now. This is increasingly more and more a tech business. And so, ultimately, we're at the whim of these people at the very top of these companies.
We saw after, after the election, everybody's sort of paying, essentially bribes to [ Donald Trump ]. So that affects us. That really does affect the business. People are afraid now. And so you see that. You see people are too careful.
They're afraid because of the political climate, or they're afraid just because it's an era of consolidation and there just aren't that many places to go if you upset a studio chief?
I think all of the above. I just think it's all at the same time. Also, the ground is shifting. This business hasn't landed where it's going to land yet, and people keep looking backwards and saying, "No, we just need to get moviegoing back to where it was." That boat's sailed. That's not gonna happen anymore.
So we're not thinking about, "Well, what is the business now? What does the business want to be?" The audience is trying to tell us, and we're not listening.
How do you feel about using tech and AI in your work? There's one theory that says someone's going to type in a prompt and the AI spits out an entire movie. The more conservative argument is, "We're going to improve flows, and instead of using 10 visual-effects people, you could do it with four or eight." The even more positive spin is, "Those eight to 10 visual-effects people could do much better work."
We've always used versions of that. If it wasn't proper AI, there were always ways to shortcut those kinds of things, to create a smoother workflow and all of that. If an actor couldn't do a certain stunt, and we wanted to put their face on something else, that's been happening, and that's going to get easier. Which is scary if you're an actor.
I think the bigger problem is not making stuff with AI, but deciding what to make with AI. That's the bigger threat, at least for me, in the immediate sense.
Have you played around and asked ChatGPT to write a script in the mode of Scott Frank?
Yeah. It was silly.
But if you want to write a letter, a business letter or something … my wife needed to write this letter, and she just thought, "Let's see what ChatGPT said," and she sent me the letter and it was damn good. It was really good.
I think it's more about the future of the algorithm. The algorithm is great for marketing after something's done.
[But] it's death to the industry to use it to decide what to make because you're gaming something. And if everybody's using the same algorithm, it becomes a snake that eats its own tail eventually. That's my big fear.
You started in Hollywood the old-fashioned way — you moved there and spent years trying to get work as a writer.
I wrote one script over and over that no one wanted — " Little Man Tate" — until somebody wanted it.
What would that path look like for you now if you wanted to get into making movies or television? Would you move to LA, for starters?
That's easy. I wouldn't go into movies or television. I'd go into games.
If I were 24 now, I'm not gonna fuck around with movies or television. I want to go work in the gaming world, where I think there's some really interesting stuff going on.
Other than the fact that lots of people play games, what's appealing to you? They seem pretty narratively limited.
But they're at the beginning, in a way. I mean, the first movies were narratively limited, too.
And I wonder what you can do with them. I'm really curious. I just feel like that world is way more interesting.
You know, more people watch YouTube stuff and TikTok stuff than Netflix. YouTube is No. 1 [for time spent] and Netflix is way down [the list]. And then the next closest thing, Disney, is way down. And people on average spend two hours a day on TikTok.
So that's what you're competing with.
So your next project is an immersive game …
No. I'm too old.
There's a series of "Dept. Q" books. Will you do more of them?
I'd love to. It's up to Netflix. I would absolutely love to.
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