Write What Feels Real To You

“Write What Feels Real To You” Joel Fields & Joe Weisberg On ‘The Patient’:

Taught contained psychological thrillers are staples on our screens and continue to entertain audiences around the world. The aptly titled, The Patient is such an example, created by Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg (aka the Js) who also brought us gems like The Americans.

The premise of The Patient is succinct and simple – Sam Fortner (Domhnall Gleeson) kidnaps his therapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell) to potentially help him suppress his homicidal urges. Chained to a bed in the basement, Alan reflects, often in silence, as he strategizes his exit – living or not. Fields and Weisberg  explained their intuitive writing process on The Patient to Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

Much of the tension in a contained thriller relies on maintaining tension in a confined space. Rather than edifying their writing technique, Joel directed their praise to their director Chris Long and production designer Patricio M. Farrell in capturing both the constricted and expansive tone of The Patient.

“We’re also relying on our actors because the action relies on them mostly talking the words to each other,” Joel continued.

“Television is a visual medium and you’re doing a lot to limit your expanse visually. This means you have very little wiggle room in what you do visually,” commented Joe.

Who’s Story Is It?

The eponymous Sam Fortner is ostensibly the main character of The Patient, and by textbook definition, undergoes the greatest character journey in the story. Dr. Alan Strauss is by no means the secondary character who’s sole purpose is to free himself. He undergoes major spiritual, psychological, and emotional transformation through cutaway scenes with his former therapist Charlie (David Alan Grier) who helps Alan navigate the recent death of his wife Beth (Laura Niemi) and his gut-wrenching estrangement from his ultra-Orthodox Jewish son, Ezra (Andrew Leeds).

 - “I have shown more compassion to a killer than I have to my own son,” Alan wailed to Charlie.

While Sam’s character twists and turns, coils and recoils to control his dangerous impulses, Alan, arguably appears to undergo the larger transformation, blurring the lines between identifying the main character. Perhaps choosing a main character isn’t the right question to be asking? Both Sam and Alan have internal demons to wrestle so they feed off each other.

If Sam is indeed the main character as the title of the show suggests, the contortions, pivots, reversals in his choices hook and intrigue the audience throughout the season. Sam suffers bouts of uncontrollable rage targeted at those who have hurt him and made him feel small and worthless. Sam is aware of his failings and he desperately yearns for Alan to cure him. But psychology relies on both external and internal factors to crate lasting change. Sam needs to do the painful work of self-control. But can he? Sam’s seemingly irreconcilable grappling with this question evokes interest and compassion in his character.

“We don’t necessarily see Sam as the main character despite the title of the show,” said Joe. “We seem them both equally as main characters.”

 - Who is the patient after all?”

Joe added that the “dual protagonist” character dynamic is more aligned with the central premise of the show despite its title, The Patient. It wasn’t called The Therapist or The Patient And The Therapist. 

The showrunners built a show about two people each having something to teach each other. “What happens if you put not just anybody in that situation, but a therapist who’s life is built around self-reflection and self-awareness? Are they going to use the opportunity of being trapped in a basement to go to places they haven’t gone to before and delve further into who they are?” continued Joe. Dr. Strauss behaves very differently in captivity than is his office.

Fields and Weisberg deliberately treat their show like a riddle. It’s not clear who has the upper hand. And when one character has it, it doesn’t last long. Questions are responded to with further questions rather than answers.

Therein lies the answer in writing deeply-layered character studies – it’s about the journey of better understanding oneself more than reaching a predefined goal.

“We try to very respectful of the fact that members of the audience will answer these questions differently,” mused Joel. “It’s not up to the writers to come down and say ‘This is it.’ We want to leave the experience and interpretation up to the audience.”

Sam lives with his mother Candace (Linda Emond) who is aware of her son’s proclivities and therefore complicit in them by not releasing Alan and calling the police.

“We love her character because she turned the duo into a triangle,” added Joe. “We weren’t so much interested in her being complicit, but more a very real person drawn into an impossible situation. Perhaps she doesn’t do what we would do, but it’s not hard to understand that she chooses to protect her son above all else.”

Veteran writers like Joel Field and Joe Weisberg have written a thriller, but they don’t slavishly adhere to any particular tropes of the genre. The ado what feels right. “We try not to think of this as a thriller,” said Joe. “We try to think of this as a story. Let’s try to imagine that this was really happening. These are the characters. What would happen?”

Write from The Inside

The writers created tension by writing from the inside. “If we try to impose some device from the outside to create tension, it winds up feeling manufactured. When we follow what feels real to us and if the circumstance is genuinely disturbing, then it’s going to be really tense,” said Joe.

“For us the path to good tension is two characters who are deadlocked with the highest of stakes,” added Joel.

Creating tension in The Patient relied on constantly maintaining a simmering intensity throughout each episode which periodically boiled over. “The issue for us was how the relationship between Sam and Alan grew and changed,” said Joe. “Sam is direct, open and honest about what he wants when he’s in the basement, but he pretends when he’s not. The opposite is true of Alan. When Alan is in his office he can be himself, but when he’s chained in the basement he has a problem to solve – to survive – sentence by sentence, scene by scene. He decides when he needs to be honest with Sam, when he needs to be manipulative, when he’s going to be soft and harsh.”

The stakes were always kept high for each character. “We tried to find as much authenticity and humanity in all the character as we could,” declared Joel.

The writers didn’t use an algorithm to play out these character dynamics. “It wasn’t by design,” said Joe. They didn’t put their combined thumb on the scale. “The further we got along into the story, the more honest the characters became with each other. The scene progression illustrated their changing relationship.”

A paradoxical aspect of a contained thriller is creating space through protracted silence. This was a large part of Alan’s process as he faced the probability of imminent death. “This was both an organic and strategic process,” said Joel. “Alan is alone in the basement and haunted by the uncomfortable silence. He’s forced to reflect on his memories because they each have their own story to tell.”

“These silences were also apparent during Sam and Alan’s conversations,” added Joe. Each took a moment to pause and reflect following a tense exchange.

Despite their veteran writer status, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg write as their characters dictate. This comes with its own set of challenges because it isn’t freeform writing. There were practicalities to consider since much of The Patient is a two-hander.

“One of the challenges of The Patient was we had this interior world of Alan’s that we couldn’t quite figure out how to get it out,” said Joel. This was exacerbated by the fact that Alan only had Sam to talk to and he couldn’t reveal all his inner thoughts to him. “That’s when we decided on the Charlie character, his former therapist.“