A graveyard interview with Patrick McHale
A Scumbler exclusive.
This week’s newsletter is a little different. It’s an interview with Patrick McHale, an artist, writer, and animator whom I spoke with about his work over the summer. (McHale is a member of the Animation Guild, not the Writers Guild of America, so he could talk to me while the WGA was on strike.) If you enjoy this piece and think someone you know would like reading it, please consider sharing!
Love,
Eliza
New England graveyards are at their best during the autumn, when blazing leaves decorate the crumbly old stones, but they’re quite pretty during the summer, too. On a sunny morning in August, Patrick McHale and I picked up two enormous iced coffees at a cafe in Concord, Massachusetts, and walked down the street to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I went to high school in Concord, a quaint town that loves to publicize its Revolutionary War history, but McHale, a screenwriter and animator, is the local now. He lives there with his wife and son, having moved out east from Burbank, California, in 2014.
During a summer of hot and depressing weather, the day felt like a miracle: fresh and temperate, with almost no humidity. McHale, who is slight and bearded, wore jeans with holes in the knees and a toffee-colored cardigan over a C.W. Stoneking shirt. (McHale has designed other shirts and created a zombie-themed music video for the blues singer, who lent his voice to one of McHale’s animation projects.) There were no mourners in sight as we wound down the paved paths of Sleepy Hollow, and the grassy slopes of the cemetery felt generous and open in the sunshine. Small flocks of tourists gathered around the graves of Concord’s more famous residents.
McHale and I trudged to the top of a small hill called Authors’ Ridge, where a number of the town’s literary icons are buried. We passed Henry David Thoreau and a smattering of Hawthornes — Emerson must have been nearby — before settling on a low bench across from the Alcott family. Visitors had planted pencils and pens in the earth around a flat stone bearing Louisa May’s name, giving it the look of a solemn birthday cake.
A cemetery felt like the only sensible place to interview McHale, whom I talked to last year for an essay about spookiness, a subject on which he has some professional authority. McHale is the creator of Over the Garden Wall, a 2014 animated miniseries that’s like a bottle of boiled apple cider: autumn in its most concentrated form. Cozy, nostalgic, and a little scary, the show has amassed a cult following over the years. As fall approaches every year, fans start posting with excitement about preparing for their annual rewatch (accompanied, perhaps, by soup and weighted blankets).
I wanted to interview McHale again in part because I was curious about how he approaches his work, and in part because he lives in Concord. The town is quiet and idyllic, full of wooded trails, historic sites, and an excellent cheese shop. It’s a good place to be a writer, but it doesn’t facilitate Hollywood schmoozing. I wondered if McHale’s physical remove from the entertainment industry signaled a reclusive spirit or a principled rejection of overzealous careerism, despite his significant professional accomplishments. (In addition to his work on Over the Garden Wall and other animated shows like Adventure Time and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, he co-wrote the screenplay for Guillermo del Toro’s stop motion adaptation of Pinocchio, which won Best Animated Feature at the 2023 Oscars.)
When I asked McHale whether it was great and also difficult to live so far from the rest of his industry, he replied that it was. “I very often have felt, in the past, that I’m not really part of the industry. But I also don’t even like being a part of a industry. I think I’m interested in being in the animation field, but not the animation industry. So the feeling of being forgotten and not being the hip new thing that a studio would be interested in kind of hurt before it was even true.”
He corrected himself before I could tell him that I didn’t think he’d been forgotten.
“That wasn’t the case. It’s just that I wasn’t talking to people constantly, as I was before,” McHale said. “Now it might be more the case, a little bit. Maybe not. But I have reps now that assure me that I’m still part of that world. Then it’s like, okay, good! I can just work on my little weird things, and when they’re ready, I can be like, ‘Does anyone want this? No? Okay!’”
The pandemic made it easier for McHale to pitch his work from the suburbs of Boston. Before lockdown, people didn’t want to take video calls or couldn’t figure out how to schedule them. Then curmudgeons across the nation were forced to learn how to Zoom. “Suddenly I was getting meetings I wasn’t getting before, because it was no different meeting with me than meeting someone from LA. It opened up a lot of possibilities. People weren’t as shy about getting on video calls as they used to be, and that seems to have stuck around,” he said.
McHale recently finished a first pass on a spec script and is pitching a number of projects across TV, film, comics, and video games. While most of his professional output falls under the categories of animation and writing, he has a lot of creative pursuits. He has released two albums of music, and he’s interested in writing books and making toys. McHale was working on some horror stories in recent months, until he discovered that he had trouble exiting the headspace of one very troubled character and decided to take a break.
“It’s hard to wrangle all of those interests into something that will also make money,” he said of his many projects. “That’s always the hard part. If I’m going to invest six months in something, will I be creatively satisfied and also will it make any money for life?”
McHale doesn’t project Hollywood bluster — he can be soft-spoken and a bit nervous-looking — but he’s not a mysterious hermit. He appears, like any sane person, to have a nuanced and somewhat complicated relationship with productivity, success, and the machinations of the business in which he works. And he’s clearly ambitious about his creative output. A certain rigor and perfectionism threaded its way through our conversation; more than once, McHale halted himself mid-sentence to revise what he’d just said, searching for a better way to make his point.
So why did he move to Concord? McHale grew up in New Jersey, and the weather in Burbank, which he describes as “oppressive monotony,” was getting to him. Seasonal changes light up his brain, as does driving or working in a bustling coffee shop, and Concord does that dance better than many locations. It’s a good place to be a writer.
McHale turns 40 this month. He only ever had one age-based career goal, and that was to make a feature film before 30. Technically speaking, he missed that deadline, but a few weeks before he turned 31, Over the Garden Wall came out. Each of the miniseries’s 10 episodes is about 11 minutes long, meaning the full series is the length of a perfect weeknight movie.
“What’s that thing that you get for not winning a race but completing it?” McHale asked.
“Oh, yeah. Uh. Like a —”
“Participation trophy,” he said.
I was recently given a medal and a banana after finishing my first organized 10K. The difference between making Over the Garden Wall and running a 6.2-mile race is that people actually care about Over the Garden Wall. They care a lot. If you search for the show on social media, you’ll find euphoric reviews and gobs of fan art. My friend Fredi once corralled a bunch of her pals to shoot a live-action remake of the show’s third episode as a surprise birthday gift for a friend. For Halloween one year, my partner Alex and our former roommate Evan dressed up as its protagonists, Greg and Wirt. It’s a good costume: Wirt, a woeful teenager, wears a cape and a conical red hat, and his cheerful little brother, Greg, rocks an upside-down teapot on top of his head. (Because most standard teapots are too heavy to wear on one’s head all night, Evan got crafty and wrapped a plastic Disney princess teapot in silver duct tape.)
I resisted Alex’s recommendation to watch Over the Garden Wall for a long time, choosing instead to watch Wirt’s pointed red hat gather dust in a corner of our bedroom. During the pandemic, I gave in, and quickly felt stupid. The show is a delight.
Here’s the deal: Greg and Wirt have gotten lost in a forested land called the Unknown, where they meet a variety of characters — a thunderous woodsman, a reasonable cult of skeletons, a paranoid tea magnate — as they try to find their way home. McHale drew on American folklore, Grimms’ fairy tales, 19th century Sacred Harp singing traditions, vintage postcards, and Victorian illustrations while creating the show, and it feels old-timey in a way that’s difficult to date. Alex told me that when he watched Over the Garden Wall, it felt like uncovering something that had always existed. This was pretty much the point: The first time we talked, McHale said that his goal with the music and visuals was to make people feel nostalgic for things they hadn’t necessarily experienced before.
Even as I enjoyed the show’s comedy and warm autumnal aesthetic, my first viewing left me with a feeling of melancholy and dislocation. I didn’t understand why until McHale explained that each vignette exists in its own pocket of reality, and as Greg and Wirt stray further and further from their goal of getting home, the further back in time they go. By the seventh episode, the scariest of the bunch, they’re “pretty far gone.” With each passing chapter, I had been feeling increasingly lost and homesick, too.
The night before I interviewed McHale in the cemetery, I made my family sit down and watch Over the Garden Wall in its entirety. It was my second full viewing, and this time around, relieved of the stress of wondering how it ends, all of its silliness and humor came racing to the fore. For instance, there’s a shadowy figure called the Beast stalking the woods of the Unknown. He’s a menacing villain, but — I hadn’t initially noticed this — you will sometimes hear him belting opera in the distant woods like an unholy shower singer.
The Beast was, in fact, voiced by the operatic bass Samuel Ramey. McHale discovered Ramey’s work in high school, thanks to a recording of his performance as Mephistopheles. “I was driving around in my grandma’s car playing Samuel Ramey’s devil music. It felt so powerful and cool,” McHale said. In addition to Ramey, the cast of Over the Garden Wall includes numerous beloved actors, including Melanie Lynskey, Christopher Lloyd, and Tim Curry. (Curry was a dream collaborator for McHale, who considers The Rocky Horror Picture Show a huge influence. The introduction to Over the Garden Wall, which features a frog playing a piano as it spins in a black void, was inspired by Rocky Horror’s disembodied lips.)
The key to assembling this roster was landing Elijah Wood, who voiced Wirt and whose sign-on made it easier to lock down the rest of the cast. Wirt is rather florid and tragic in the show, but he was originally written to be more scared and neurotic. In auditions, everyone sounded like Woody Allen. “I was like, ‘Nooo, everything’s crumbling! I hate my lines now,’” McHale said. “I was talking to the casting director, and I was like, ‘The main character needs to feel heroic in some way. Like Elijah Wood, you know?’ And she was like, ‘Well, why don’t we just reach out to Elijah Wood?’” McHale hadn’t realized that was an option. Wood said yes.
At the time when they were casting Greg, Wirt’s happy-go-lucky younger brother, McHale and his team weren’t sure whether Over the Garden Wall would be a miniseries or a multi-season show, so they held auditions for an adult actor to play the role, rather than a child whose voice would change over time. They all sounded wrong — too cute, too annoying.
“The best person, coincidentally, was Sean Astin,” said McHale. Sean Astin, as in the Samwise Gamgee to Wood’s Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings films. “To have those two together would have been so funny, but it just wasn’t ideal. He had the spirit, but the vocal quality I really wanted to sound like a kid. Finally I gave up on the idea of it being a forever voice.” The clear choice for Greg was a child actor named Collin Dean, who, in this reporter’s experience, effortlessly captures how wonderful and bothersome younger siblings can be.
Easily the most insane subplot in Over the Garden Wall is Greg’s visit to “Cloud City,” a surreal dream sequence full of angels, an anthropomorphic North Wind, and animals in top hats that pays homage to early Disney cartoons. “That was originally going to be heavenly stuff, like little cherubs and babies with clover, but it really looked weird and gross in animation,” said McHale. The scene was meant to represent a time before time — that’s how lost Greg and Wirt are at that point in the show — but it ended up as a bananas celebration of old cartoon styles. “In some ways, it’s like a pure essence of Greg, which is why it works better than the original idea,” said McHale.
While Greg is living his joyful truth in Cloud City, Wirt is sleeping under a tree in a frigid swamp, hopeless about their prospects of making it home. The moment is a distillation of the brothers’ opposite spirits, which may feel familiar to real-life siblings. I told McHale that during my family screening of Over the Garden Wall, my younger sister had leaned over to me and whispered, with a smug little smile, “We’re Greg and Wirt, and you’re Wirt.” (Rude, also accurate.) When the musicians Justin Rubenstein and J.R. Kaufman, of the band The Blasting Company, came on board to compose the soundtrack for Over the Garden Wall, they told McHale that they were just like Wirt and Greg: half-brothers, the elder poetic and the younger optimistic. McHale has gotten similar feedback from a lot of people. An only child, he sees himself in both characters.
Growing up in New Jersey, McHale spent a lot of time watching a public access program called Classic Arts Showcase, which ran videos pulled from operas, ballets, and classical music performances. “Sometimes there was just a weird video of someone’s collection of puppets,” said McHale. “It was really exciting, like my little secret thing that no one else cared about.” (It can be your secret little thing, too: Classic Arts Showcase is now streaming online 24/7.) It was on this program that McHale, who made stop motion videos as a middle and high schooler, first saw Winsor McCay’s 1921 short film “The Flying House.” At the time, McHale didn’t understand how 2D animation worked, and McCay’s film fueled his desire to learn that style, which he studied at the California Institute of the Arts.
Later, I watched “The Flying House” on YouTube and emailed McHale to ask what it was about the video that had grabbed him. He sent me back the following message:
i think the main thing was how simple it starts off, but then builds and builds, becoming more and more elaborate and grand as it goes. it wasn't just telling its story, it was creating a huge cinematic experience. that story could have told that story in a much simpler (and easier to produce) way, but it wouldn't have the same impact.
at the same time, you can SEE that the drawings are all hand drawn, the paintings are hand painted, the animation hand-photographed, etc. It feels both handmade AND grand. that blend is something that really resonates with me personally in most media. it makes it feel MORE grand to me, because i can feel a connection with another human being through the work.
McHale went to CalArts to learn animation — learn being the operative word. He never planned to work in animation for the entirety of his career. Even so, people sometimes suppose it was his life’s dream. McHale told me that after Over the Garden Wall came out, he got an interview question to the effect of: When did you decide that you would devote the rest of your life to animation? “I was like, ‘Ohh, is that what I’m doing?!’” he said, mock-panicked.
Hence McHale’s many creative pursuits, across screenwriting, books, games, and music. He has, like many freelancers, developed a variety of work habits to keep himself on track. He uses a planner of his own design, which has a slot for a single creative task that he wants to accomplish each day, followed by three wish list items that he can pursue after he completes that first task. At the bottom, there’s a section for chores, which help determine the ambition of his daily creative goal.
“I never have felt like I can take it easy after I finish things, because there are always more things I should be doing,” he said. “[This system] makes me feel satisfied on a daily basis. When I have weekly or monthly arbitrary deadlines, I always seem to be behind. I always feel like I’m failing.”
More recently, he incorporated into his work routine a 20-minute hourglass timer, which he bought on Etsy. Because he can almost always find a pocket of 20 minutes during the day, he tends to assign his daily creative task in segments of that length. “The sand runs down and makes a little calming noise,” McHale said, imitating its shhhhhh sound. “If I don’t want to work, the hourglass is still going, and I have to sit there and look at it. 20 minutes isn’t that long to just look at something and be bored.” Sooner or later, the boredom gives way. “Every single time, at some point you’re rereading and then you start working.”
If he’s so in the zone that he works for an hour without realizing that the hourglass has run out — great! That still only counts as one 20-minute session.
McHale doesn’t have any trouble getting things done when he’s working for someone else or leading a project that’s already funded. When he’s working for himself, he can complete small projects quickly. “If it’s my dream project, it’s nearly an impossible task,” he said, sighing heavily. This is why he has his daily planner. Stressing out about not getting things done is not helpful, McHale told me, a sentiment I’m sure my therapist would love to second. Rather than worrying about finishing a specific project by a certain date, he’s trying to focus on getting something done every day.
I asked McHale what he learned from writing Pinocchio with the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who is notably productive across his directing, writing, and producing work. “I was really expecting to learn the secrets of Hollywood screenwriting and filmmaking,” he said. Instead, he found that the process was much like working with any other collaborator. They hung out in a coffee shop, tossing forth ideas and hoping the story would work out. There’s no secret method or right way to write a movie, it turns out. You just have to write.
But McHale observed an uncommon decisiveness in del Toro. “The confidence that he has in any given moment to make decisions is a miracle to me. To see that in action, it’s like, ohhh, that’s why. That’s why I’m here, scribbling away on my script for months and months, and why he is constantly making new things,” McHale said, laughing.
I said that I’d noted a similar thing while interviewing the Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion curator Andrew Bolton, who has witnessed that kind of extraordinary decision-making ability in three people: Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Wintour, and his partner, the fashion designer Thom Browne. McHale grew more energetic. “What I didn’t realize is that you can make a decision and move on. You can make a completely opposite decision later and move on, too. You never have to go back and be like, ‘I’m sorry, everybody, I made the wrong decision!’”
McHale may have something to learn from colleagues like del Toro, but he also has a heap of experience to share. A few days after we visited Sleepy Hollow, he agreed to meet up at a local coffee shop so that I could take a look at a book he had written, of which there are a small number of physical copies. It’s a sort of handbook for showrunners, produced during a stint as a consultant for a streaming company. The text includes encouragement and storytelling advice, including a note on the value of giving the audience time to reflect on the world of a show as the series is coming to a close. (Inspired by The Wire, McHale added a montage to the end of Over the Garden Wall that spotlights key characters.) It also contains some wry humor. On one page, there’s a drawing of a scary-looking baby meant to represent a newborn television show. The caption: “A gift from heaven.”
McHale asked that I not take photos of the book, but he said that notes were okay. Here’s something I wrote down, for which I failed to provide my future self any context:
“YOU CAN WRITE ANYTHING YOU WANT.”
You can write anything you want, and you can also decide not to write something. “The people I look up to the most, creatively, are, like, notoriously not prolific,” said McHale. That list includes Jeff Mangum of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, which put out just two albums; Albert Pinkham Ryder, a late 19th and early 20th century painter who spent the back portion of his career reworking his earlier pieces; and the 82-year-old Russian animator Yuri Norstein, who has been working on a feature-length version of the Nikolai Gogol story “The Overcoat” since the 1980s. “I think he has like 30 minutes done, and it … is … amazing! I’ve seen it!” McHale said of Norstein’s long-awaited feature.
McHale isn’t sure if those artists influence him so much because he can sense that they put everything they had into what little they produced, or if their limited output gives him an excuse to do less.
“To a fault, I don’t want to make anything and release it unless it’s —” He stopped, looking for the right words. “There’s just too much stuff out there. I don’t need to add more to it, so unless it’s really delivering an experience for people or expressing something that I really think is the crystallized diamond form of that thing, I don’t really feel like I need to make anything. That’s frustrating, I think, to other people. If they like one thing you make, they’re like, ‘We want to see the next thing!’ And I’m like, ‘If I could, I think you might like it!’ But if I can’t get the funding to make this thing, I don’t want to make it in a different way.”
Again, he corrected himself. “Or I don’t mind making it in a different format, like a book. But if it’s a period film —” He adopted what appeared to be the perspective of an entertainment executive: “‘What if it’s set in modern times?’ Like, I’m not going to do it.”
McHale acknowledges that chronically refusing to make the lesser version of a project isn’t the way to become “successful” and “prolific.” Early on in our conversation, he had told me that one of his goals is to have his unfinished works in a state where, when he dies, “someone can find them and I won’t be super embarrassed.” Forget the self-imposed deadline of completing a feature by age 30, and forget the worry of not progressing on a specific project on a Tuesday afternoon. In McHale’s view, death is the only real deadline.
As we walked toward the exit of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I asked McHale if he thinks about death a lot.
“I try to,” he said in a bright voice. “It’s helpful for me. It makes me feel good about life.”
“Because you’re like, ‘It’s better than death?’”
“No!” he laughed. “If you remember how fleeting life is, I don’t know, it just feels better to be alive. And stay focused and maybe not spend quite so much time on the internet or whatever. If you’re on the internet, just reading news articles about whatnot, and then you remember, Oh! I’m going to die not that long from now! Like, maybe I don’t want to do this.”
Before talking to McHale, I hadn’t considered the idea of someone reading my unfinished work when I leave this plane of existence, much less that my immortal soul might be embarrassed by the quality of that work. Then again, it’s only recently that I’ve started writing anything that could make me feel exposed in that way — fiction, god help me, but also essays for this newsletter. My little weird things. These projects say a lot more about me than my journalism or copywriting work does, and with them, the gap between my drafts and my hope for the final version can be significant enough to cause actual humiliation. If anyone is reading my half-finished fiction after I pass, I hope it will be Alex, who is impossibly encouraging of my attempts. I’d still like to impress him, though.
But what would embarrass me even more than Alex opening up my desktop folders and discovering reams of trite, mealy prose would be him not finding much at all. Better to reveal yourself as a mediocre novelist than someone who couldn’t make the time to try. Accept your participation trophy with a smile.
Utterly beautiful- thank you for this!