Write Your Screenplay Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jacob Krueger Studio
Rather than looking at movies in terms of "two thumbs up" or "two thumbs down" Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger discusses what you can learn from them as a screenwriter. He looks at good movies, bad movies, movies we love, and movies we hate, exploring how they were built, and how you can apply those lessons to your own writing. More information and full archives at WriteYourScreenplay.com 831588
Learn how Adolescence Episode 3 (building upon structural techniques from The Wire) uses a Pattern Based Series Engine to navigate rare changes in characters and narrative form while still preserving the feeling of the series.
Learn how Adolescence grabs its audience in the first ten seconds—and what screenwriters can take from its naturalistic style, one-shot structure, and emotionally grounded approach to character.
Learn how The Last of Us Season 2 resets its story engine—and what it teaches about rebuilding character dynamics, stakes, and tension in your own TV series.
Learn how Engine and Theme function in all 3 seasons of The White Lotus and how slight changes in The White Lotus Season 3 massively affect the feeling of the series...
Discover why Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, rejects the idea that protagonists must drive the action and how its unconventional approach grows out of its thematic exploration of the immigrant experience.
Learn how to balance expert research and creative freedom in your screenwriting as we explore Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody.
Learn from The Apprentice the art of writing complex antagonists by connecting to the universal emotional needs that drive character choices
Learn from Sundance 2025 genre stand-outs Together and Didn’t Die how to explore deeply human characters and questions within an elevated horror or zombie format.
Learn from “A Real Pain” how to apply the concepts of vignettes to building character, structure and theme in your screenplay.
Learn what makes A Complete Unknown work as a biopic, and how to approach the complex relationship between truth and dramatization in the adaptation of any true life story.
Need help getting your 3 minute pitch ready for our free online pitching event on Jan 9 with Vanessa Johnston? Wondering how to build a short “elevator pitch” that communicates the essence of your project? Or just curious about pitching in general? Then check out this podcast recording of Jake’s recent Thursday Night Writes pitching class. https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/
Learn practical techniques for transforming your writing blocks into bridges by understanding the psychology of creative resistance and how to work with it rather than against it.Ready to kickstart your 2025 with access to one of the top producers in Hollywood? Get a chance to pitch your script to one of Hollywood’s top producers! FREE 2 DAY EVENT! - RSVP here - https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/
In this interview with Erin Brown Thomas, you’ll learn how to write an effective ensemble film through deep analysis of Erin’s Sundance film, Chasers and PT Anderson’s Magnolia.
Learn from The Penguin how to master the art of packaging complex, character-driven stories within commercial frameworks that can sell in today's Hollywood marketplace.
Learn how to strategically choose and attend film festivals, build meaningful industry relationships, and advance your screenwriting career through authentic networking and mentorship opportunities.
Learn from Erin Morganstern’s brilliant novel The Starless Sea how to harness your subconscious mind to create writing that resonates on both literal and metaphorical levels.
Learn from Between The Temples how to create compelling structure in your screenplay, even when working with passive main characters or unconventional narratives.
Learn from Strange Darling the difference between primary and secondary structure in screenwriting, and how to harness both to provide maximum impact for your audience.
This unlikely pairing of The Bear, Season 3 and Mad Max, Furiosa will teach you how to build an engine for a TV Series or Film Franchise, and how to avoid BREAKING that engine in later installments.
Learn the structure and engine of Deadpool & Wolverine and how to craft compelling set pieces with both visual and emotional stakes in your action writing.
Learn from The Boys how to develop a consistent yet evolving story engine across multiple seasons of a TV series, using theme as a guiding principle for character development and plot progression.
Learn the secrets of elevated psychological horror writing in this breakdown of the structure of two related scripts: Longlegs and Hereditary.
Learn the secrets of elevated psychological horror writing in this breakdown of the structure of two related scripts: Longlegs and Hereditary.
Learn life-changing techniques to silence the inner questions and doubts in your head, and know if it’s time to quit or time to redouble your efforts in pursuing your passion as a screenwriter. If you enjoyed our podcast, don't miss out on Thursday Night Writes – our lively writing exercises Happy Hour hosted by Jacob Krueger every Thursday at 7:00 pm ET! RSVP here: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/t...Discover more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com
Through a beat-by-beat analysis of the split-screen scene of The Fall Guy, discover how to find your voice within the container of a big Hollywood action movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, don't miss out on Thursday Night Writes – our lively writing exercises Happy Hour hosted by Jacob Krueger every Thursday at 7:00 pm ET! RSVP here: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/t...Discover more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com
Learn how Dev Patel uses expressionism within the action movie format of Monkey Man to explore class in India.Edit Snippet
“Civil War, like Apocalypse Now, doesn’t have the traditional Hollywood narrative structure. It’s built more like a zombie road trip into the heart of darkness….”
Learn the 7 forms of conflicts and how connecting to your character’s internal antagonist can provide a bedrock to your structure and the key to your personal wisdom.
Discover how Yórgos Lánthimos' Poor Things uses a simple theme to navigate profound questions about identity, the past, and the search for one's authentic voice.
Learn screenwriting tips from Sundance films Nocturnes, Every Little Thing, Black Box Diaries, Eno, Thelma, Kidnapping, Inc, and lectures from Jonathan Nolan and Steven Soderbergh.
Jacob Krueger and Christian Lybrook discuss some of the most exciting independent movies premiering at Sundance and what screenwriters can learn from them.
Learn how Past Lives both honors and subverts the genre elements implied by its premise, and how to apply those concepts to your own writing in any genre.
How can the new Nicholas Cage movie be a hit with the critics but leave audiences cold? Three words: Passive Main Character.
Learn 5 simple steps to set New Year’s Resolutions for your writing that actually stick!
Learn pitching from Jacob Krueger and top JKS faculty members.If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/t...Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com
Learn the secrets of a winning pitch for contests and festivals, and prepare your pitch for our upcoming Pitch Festivus! event.
Learn how to find your “take” and balance fiction and truth when adapting a true story or book from this script analysis of Killers of the Flower Moon.
Learn about the two forms of writer’s block and how to combat them in your writing career.
Learn mirrors and foils, an intuitive approach to world building, structure, character and theme in Jake’s script analysis of Talk to Me.
Learn the vital importance of your screenplay’s first 10 pages, and what it takes to make them successful on both a commercial and creative level.
Learn the vital importance of your screenplay’s first 10 pages, and what it takes to make them successful on both a commercial and creative level.
Learn to escape the “refrigerator” of doubt and negativity that gets in the way of your screenwriting through Jake’s analysis of The Bear, Season 2.
If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/
Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com
Learn from Barbie and Oppenheimer the vital role of theme in writing a screenplay adaptation.
Learn how to write flashbacks that work and how to handle exposition in your screenplay from Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3
Jake compares the famous “adventure book” scene from Pixar’s Up! and the photo-album scene from Shrinking to show you how to turn a familiar scene into something fresh and new.
Learn from Shrinking about therapeutic and anti-therapeutic writing structures, the challenges of writing therapy scenes, and the links between writing and therapy.
If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/
Learn an intuitive approach to character building through A Man Called Otto, and how to write characters more truthfully by connecting to your own emotional needs.
Jake does a deep, line by line analysis of the opening sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once to help you understand how to write a great opening sequence for your own movie.
Understand the structure of Everything Everywhere All at Once and how Evelyn’s journey relates to the journey of every screenwriter trying to build structure in their screenplay.
Learn the difference between plot and structure through Jake’s deep structural analysis of Succession, Season 4, Episode 1
A deep analysis of Episodes 1-3 of HBO’s series The Last of Us, and how you can use theme to push against the normal expectations of your TV series.
Learn how Series Engine works in a limited series through Jake’s analysis of The White Lotus and The White Lotus, Season 2.
Jake analyzes the meaning and structure of Triangle of Sadness, and how to build your visual acuity as a writer through the use of location in your screenplay
Learn about the meaning of The Banshees of Inisherin and how Martin McDonough builds a feeling of high stakes in the structure of his allegory.
Jake analyzes the structure of both Avatar screenplays and shows you the how to harness the power of spectacle in your own writing.
Learn why most New Year’s Resolutions fail, and how to set Resolutions for your writing that actually work, by understanding the dance between the conscious and subconscious parts of writer’s mind.
Jake and JKS faculty members Steven Bagatourian, Keatyn Lee, Ron McCants, Karin Partin Wells and Jonathan Redding blow the lid off of pitching in our annual 3 hour pitching extravaganza.
Jake explodes the myths about pitching, helps you understand the real purpose of a pitch and how to make your pitch most effective.
Getting back to writing after you’ve stopped for awhile can be like entering a creepy shed covered with cobwebs. Here’s how you can overcome procrastination and writer’s block to make it safe to write again.
Discover how understanding the format of a musical can allow you to master the two most vital elements of any genre.
Learn how to use The Audience Draft to surprise both your audience and your characters as you build the structure of your screenplay.
Learn about getting staffed on a TV show and the experience of working in the writer's room on Homeland from our newest faculty member, Jonathan Redding.
Learn from writer/producer/director Christian Lybrook about the inner work of becoming a professional screenwriter.
If you liked this Podcast, join us for Thursday Night Writes! Our Happy Hour of Writing Exercises with Jake every Thursday night at 7:00 pm ET, RSVP: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/free-writing-classes-thursday-night-writes/
Learn more about our programs: https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com
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Learn from The Bear the vital importance of the first image of your screenplay or pilot, and how to use that first image to build a successful opening sequence for your script, your pilot or your whole season
Learn the differences between plays and screenplays, and how you can use some of the skills you have as a playwright in order to make the transition into screenwriting or TV writing.
For all its impressive success, Top Gun: Maverick misses a tremendous opportunity to say something that matters. Jake talks about writing’s power to change the world and shares an exercise in writing for political change.
Learn from Winning Time how to adapt a true-life story into a TV show or feature film by focusing on your theme.
Learn how an effective TV Series Pilot, Show Bible and Pitch Deck work together to help you sell a TV Series.
Learn a new way of thinking about archetypes and the Hero’s Journey that will help you transcend stereotypes and create unforgettable characters and structure in your screenplay or TV Show.
Join us for Thursday Night Writes www.writeyourscreenplay.com/thursday/
Learn more about our programs: www.writeyourscreenplay.com
Learn how HBO’s series The Gilded Age creates high stakes around what appear to be low-stakes plot points and 5 simple steps to raise the stakes in your own screenplay or series pilot.
Learn the four elements of character development, and how thinking of characters as verbs instead of adjectives can help you write unforgettable characters.
Learn from acclaimed indie producer Noah Lang how to produce your own low-budget film, connect with producers, and build your career, even if you’re not independently wealthy.
Learn techniques for building relationships with the right people to pitch your script and sell your screenplay. Part 4 of How to Sell Your Screenplay
Learn how to identify and target the producers, managers, agents, directors and stars most likely to connect to your writing, not by selling out, but by selling into the very themes that made you want to write in the first place. Part 3 of the How To Sell Your Screenplay podcast series.
There are hundreds of screenwriting competitions and festivals. Can they help you sell your screenplay and break into the film industry?
Jake examines how emerging writers can break into the film industry and sell a screenplay or TV pilot. Part 1.
Jake shares 5 tips for making writing resolutions that work. Understand the Flash Flood Principle for setting goals for yourself learn how to make New Year’s resolutions for your writing that last a lifetime.
Pitch Festivus is almost here! Jake shares the secrets for how to make an elevator pitch that will help you master what you need for any pitch contest.
Learn how every TV series functions just like Thanksgiving dinner in this new podcast about how to build your TV series engine from pilot to series finale.
Learn how to write exposition without bogging down your screenplay through Jake’s script analysis of the Dune 2021 adaptation.
Using Dexter as a model, learn how to write action in a screenplay and how to turn cliché moments into unforgettable ones.
How can you overcome your fear of pitching? Learn Jake’s approach for overcoming fear and pitching your script like a pro.
Learn to write great dialogue and complex subtext by looking where you might least expect it: Netflix’s charming reality TV show Love on the Spectrum.
Jake shares professional tips for prioritizing your writing goals as well as personal experiences for how to create your own writing lifestyle.
Learn from Ted Lasso how to take a “seen it before” idea, and turn it into a transcendent screenplay.
Learn to develop multidimensional characters that you and your reader can care about, by connecting to your primal emotional needs.
Learn how to write the perfect logline for your movie or TV show by understanding the key elements of top films and TV shows like Jaws, Brokeback Mountain, Bojack Horseman and Get Out.
Learn from Halston what makes a character likable and how to make an audience root for an “unlikable” main character.
Through a deep analysis of Wandavision’s genre, structure, theme and engine, Jake shows you how to apply the lessons of Wandavision to finding your own voice as a writer.
How do you fulfill your destiny as a writer? In this #WriteYourScreenplayPodcast, Jake examines how Pete Docter explores this question in two of his best works, Up and Soul, and reveals how struggling to be the writer you want to be may be the very thing that’s holding you back from being the writer you already are.
In this #WriteYourScreenplayPodcast, Jake discusses the hook and engine of The Mandalorian, the structural, character and thematic challenges that limited the engine to only two seasons, and how to apply those lessons when crafting an engine for your own original series.
Jake discusses three elements of One Night in Miami: the way the screenplay lands its political message, the slightly old fashioned way it uses exposition (it’s not perfect), and the simple power of a character’s secret as a tool for building structure.
Jake breaks down the hook, engine and structure of Cobra Kai, how to find your hook, and what to do if the engine of your TV series runs out of steam.
Jake dissects the trick ending of The Little Things and other great films like The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects and Se7en to answer the how do you write a trick ending in your screenplay?
Jake and special guest Steven Bagatouriandiscuss writing for hire screenwriting gigs, pitching and how building a career as a writer starts with finding your own voice.
Jake breaks down the many ways The Queen's Gambit flaunts the traditional rules of structure, and shows you how to overcome friction points in your own writing.
Keeping your New Year’s resolutions as a writer begins with learning to think a little more like your characters.
One of the ways that we tend to be a little bit different from our characters-- and not in a good way-- is that our characters in a movie or TV show are really good at relentlessly pursuing these hard things. That's what makes them so compelling as characters. It's what makes us fall in love with them. They are going for something they want so badly that they're making choices every day, every scene, to get them. Choices that are so big, that are so passionate, the kind of choices that we wish that we could make in our lives.
A poorly written life really is just like a poorly written screenplay. Everything falls apart when our goal setting, and our pursuit of our goals, gets diffuse.
Rather than feeling the drive of our passions in pursuit of the things that really matter to us, what we end up feeling is the diffusion of the many, many, many, many, many other goals and things and crap that we have to deal with: things that don't necessarily serve that big superobjective.
If you're a screenwriter, what you know is that the way movies and TV shows work is curiously similar to the way life works: the person you are today, is not the person you're going to be at the end of the movie.
The person you are today is not going to be the person you are at the end of the screenplay. And that's really true whether you make any choices or not. What ends up happening is one of two things: either we're going to take the world, or the world is going to take us. Either way, we're going on a journey.
The difference is, if we allow the world to take us, the journey is not going to be that interesting. It's going to be hard to root for yourself if you're simply getting swept along a river.
So here’s an exercise to help you create that river you want to be traveling… the one that’s driven by the force of your goals as a writer.
Whether you’re a total newbie who’s terrified of pitching, or a seasoned pro who lives to sell, this special seminar with Studio Founder Jacob Krueger and our world renowned faculty show you how to sell your script, without selling your soul!
Jake Krueger and Ron McCants discuss how to create the balance between thinking about your TV Drama pilot as an engineer, and getting your voice and the thing you need to say on the page.
Jacob interviews Broadway Playwright and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Lisa D'Amour about playwriting, and it's relationship to screenwriting.
Jacob Krueger interviews actor/director/writer and JKS alum about her smash hit film Lez Bomb and the spiritual side of screenwriting.
Jacob Krueger does a deep analysis of Ozark, Season 1, Episode 8, to show both the dangers of exposition and how to approach it in your own TV writing.
Jacob Krueger analyzes the pilot of Ozark and shows the link between theme, hook, engine and secondary structure.
Jacob Krueger interviews Legendary Comics Writer, Ron Marz about comics, comic book writing and the links between comic book writing and screenwriting.
ronmarz #greenlantern #thor #silversurfer #witchblade #superboy #marvelvsdc #crossover #starwars #darthvader #guardiansofthegalaxy #thanos #gamora #drax #spiderman #batman
Jacob Krueger analyzes 13th and how to use theme to focus the political power of your script.
Jacob Krueger analyzes the structure of Joe Exotic’s journey in Tiger King to demonstrate the concepts of structure, genre, hook, and engine in screenwriting and TV writing.
Jacob Krueger analyzes both the ethical shortcomings of Tiger King and the valuable lessons the structure of Tiger King holds for writers of all genres. Learn what made the ethically complicated Joe Exotic such a likable main character, and how to use the concept of genre to make an audience fall in love with your screenplay.
Jacob Krueger debunks the myths about procrastination, and teaches you a simple process for building a “river of creativity” one drip at a time.
In his second podcast about the film Parasite, Jacob Krueger discusses how thematic exploration not only informs the tone and structure of your screenwriting but allows your story to unfold more naturally and take your audience on a powerful journey that can help them see others through more understanding eyes.
In the first of a two-part podcast on the film Parasite, Jacob Krueger shares a new way of thinking about genre and how to connect to it in your screenwriting. He also discusses how to play with tone and use it as a powerful tool to draw your audience in and keep them invested in your characters and story.
What’s the “thing” that makes your character tick? In this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses The Irishman and demonstrates how understanding one simple element of character can help you build your structure, sharpen the focus of your rewrites, and create the kinds of characters that attract A-list stars..
Using examples from the Netflix series Living with Yourself and the film Michael Clayton, Jacob Krueger explains the importance of the very first image in your script: how it captures your audience’s attention, introduces them to your main character’s journey, and sets the tone and feel for your film or show. He then shares how to use the concept of the first image to successfully reach your writing goals in the new year.
Jacob Krueger addresses the more subtle and complex form of writer’s block in this week’s podcast. He examines the source of this block and shares how to begin overcoming it by learning how to safely look, listen, and feel your way back into your writing, which allows you to reconnect with your inner creative and your story.
This week, Jacob Krueger shares some simple steps toward overcoming the common form of writer’s block and explains how creating manageable goals will reshape the way your mind approaches writing, making it easier to develop a writing routine.
In this podcast, Jacob Krueger analyzes the Season 2 pilot episode of Succession and shares how building a series engine from a personal place of truth will help you create the roadmap for a show that can continue to grow for several seasons.
In this podcast, indie producer and filmmaker Ramfis Myrthil joins Jacob Krueger for a conversation on the business of self-producing: how to properly pitch your project, master the art of following up, attract financial backing and create the right team to make your movie a success.
This week, Jacob Krueger discusses Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and one of the most important skills a screenwriter needs: the ability to develop a distinctive take on historical material or a pitch for a work-for-hire project that makes your approach to a story unique from any other writer.
This week, Jacob Krueger discusses Chernobyl as an example of how to write an essential and effective miniseries, what makes the miniseries format so unique, and how to determine whether your project has the epic scope, relevant theme, visual beauty, and character journey needed to become a miniseries.
In his final Game of Thrones podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses the series finale and the lessons it has to offer screenwriters regarding the importance of compression in keeping your audience engaged and on the edge of their seats until the very end.
This week, Jacob Krueger analyzes Episode 5 and discusses how the three levels of structure - plot, emotion, and theme - need to tie together to create a powerful journey for both your characters and your audience.
For eight seasons, Game of Thrones has attracted and retained a devoted audience. Now drawing to a dramatic finale in Season 8, this week we take a look back at Season 1 and how by building a powerful series engine the show has kept viewers flocking back to this fantastical world year after year.
Jacob Krueger discusses the unique structure of Roma, and how to use the lessons from Alfonso Cuarón’s script to a true life story from your own life as a screenplay or film.
Jacob Krueger shows you how to adapt a true life story, without falling into the many pitfalls of adaptation, using both the strengths and weaknesses of BlacKkKlansman as a model.
Jacob Krueger does a deep analysis of a scene from Succession to show you how to create subtext in your dialogue.
Learn how Succession and Arrested Development actually share the same foundational structure and series engine. Part 1.
Hereditary script analysis podcast with Jacob Krueger. Learn from the movie Hereditary how the first and last image of your script relate to screenplay structure.
Jacob Krueger talks about the role of tone in genre, and how the writers of Deadpool controlled the tone to handle heavy topics in such a lighthearted way.
In the first installment of this podcast, we looked at A Quiet Place in relation to writing action and discussed how all of screenplay formatting really exists for one purpose: to isolate visual moments of action. How does this relate to theme and character and dialogue and all those other elements of A Quiet Place and screenwriting in general? Well, that’s what we’re going to cover in this podcast.
Jacob Krueger analyzes the screenplay for A Quiet Place, and teaches you how great action and great screenplay formatting really boil down to four simple concepts.
In this podcast episode, Jacob Krueger analyzes the seemingly unrelated scripts for Isle of Dogs and the Roseanne reboot, and shows you what you can learn from each about writing for political change.
In this very special 100th Episode, Jacob Krueger and Audrey Sussman PhD discuss how learning to nurture the inner artist that is the source of your creativity can change not only your writing, but also your life.
Jacob Krueger breaks down Season 4, Episode 9 of Bojack Horseman to show you how the writers of Bojack break the rules of structure to create the tone of the series.
On this podcast episode, Jacob Krueger breaks down The Florida Project, to show the underlying structure that makes this seemingly structureless film so successful.
"...On this podcast episode, Jacob Krueger interviews Doug Jung, co-writer of Star Trek Beyond, and Emily Dell, indie writer & director of Compass Rose and Helen..."
"...Writing really is self-exploration. Facing certain things that you may not be dealing with in every day and recognizing those things and giving them a voice..." - Sebastian Stan
Building on the ideas from Part 1 of this series on how to revise your screenplay, Jacob Krueger shows you how to take your screenplay revision process to the next level.
In the first installment of this Revision Tips Podcast, Jacob Krueger shows you a simple approach to take your screenplay rewrite to the next level.
Jacob Krueger shows you how one song, "Remember Me", was used to build the structure for Coco's Screenplay.
Jacob Krueger analyzes the structure of the screenplay for Coco and the role of research when writing a script.
Jacob Krueger reveals the hidden keys to a successful TV pilot with a deep structural analysis comparing the Stranger Things 1 pilot and the first episode of Stranger Things 2.
Jacob Krueger analyzes the first episode of Stranger Things 2, to show you the difference between Primary and Secondary Structure in a TV pilot.
"...I got lucky. I got to work with David Fincher. He is willing to give anything to the creative process. He was willing to play with "what if". For me, it was about being of service to somebody else's story. I had to accept that the "nos" were part of the process of finding the "yes" and not taking any of it personally..." Pamela Cederquist.
Jacob Krueger breaks down the structure of mother! and the three simple screenwriting concepts that make it both succeed and struggle to connect to its audience.
Anything I am working on, that is really the first question I ask myself: “What is the point of the story? What is this about?” If I don’t have the answer to that, I almost am incapable of writing it...for me, I always have to really justify-- What is the point of the story? What are you going to get out of watching the story? I need it to be emotionally true, and then I will believe anything. As long as I believe that what the characters are feeling in the scenes feels right, then actually anything can happen!
Annabelle: Creation is not a fully successful film. For all that’s great about it, it’s also full of holes, gaps in logic, violations of its own rules, crappy dialogue… but there’s also a ton you can learn from it as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to how to write your first ten pages.
"...When we think about traditional television series, there are certain confines of the narrative structure. We have to be able to sustain a half-hour or an hour every week. But one of the things that I think is really exciting about Web Series is, because Web Series are so short, you can kind of blow the roof off the house...you have the freedom to do it your way"
"... The Big Sick is a hugely successful film adaptation of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s true life story. But the structure of the film actually differs in many ways from the true life events that inspired it. In this Podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger discusses how to adapt a true life story, and how to navigate the pressure between truth and fiction to get the real story on the page ..."
"There’s no doubt that some of the most successful movies ever, from Dead Poets Society to Little Miss Sunshine, have more than one main character. And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we start telling a story from the point-of-view of more than one main character. In this podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger shows you how to write a script with more than one main character and how to avoid the pitfalls when building this kind of complicated screenplay structure."
For all its many structural problems, Atomic Blonde succeeds in its fight sequences in the same way that Iron Man succeeds. Atomic Blonde and Iron Man both succeed because they realize that guns are no fun...
... in addition to being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre…”
"...and you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn't just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script.
Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that forces them to reveal their really strong “how”—the way that they pursue the things that they want differently from everybody else..."
"...one of the cool things about movies and one of the cool things about life is that pretty much everybody in the world thinks that they are the hero and that other people are the bad guys.
And that means that if we want to learn to write bad guys, we need to learn to step into their shoes, and see the world through their eyes-- to empathize with the people that we hate the most, the people that we don’t understand, the people that we think are horrible.
There are people who I might feel exist only to antagonize me; there are people who might drive me crazy. But the truth of the matter is, if I stepped in and saw the universe through their eyes, they don’t think of themselves as the antagonist. They think of themselves as the hero...”
"... As a screenwriter, you need to see, hear and feel everything. And this is really the hardest part, because we have this urge to finish. And that urge to finish makes it really hard to actually see, hear and feel everything.
We want to put a band aid on it.
If you’ve ever had a fight with a loved one, you have probably had the same urge, “I want the fight to end.” And the desire for the fight to end doesn’t allow you to actually see, hear and feel what is actually going on. So you just keep glossing over it.
And what happens is our little A.D.D. minds want us to escape, “okay over here…no, no, look over here, no, no, no look over here.” Because the other thing about seeing, hearing and feeling everything is it is scary. It is hard and it is scary..."
"...The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action. For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue. Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate that to anybody else. People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay; they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements. You get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called rehearsals. It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even though some of the really great film directors do rehearse-- for example Francis Ford Coppola had a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse-- most film directors don’t rehearse at all. That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks..."
"...If you’ve been following my podcast, you know that I’ve been talking for some time about the desperate need for some smart people to start writing superhero movies. Action movies and superhero movies are the mythologies of our time-- millions of people see them, and as much as we might like to dismiss them as pure entertainment, the truth is, they irrevocably shape our view of the world, our children’s view of the world, the stories we tell ourselves about how to be our best selves, how to solve our problems, and what it means to be a hero. In this way, all action movies are political. Which is why it’s so darn nice to see a movie like Wonder Woman kicking ass at the box office..."
"...As Dan O’Bannon has noted in interviews, the idea that actually spawned the original Alien, was the horror of rape and forced pregnancy-- a horror that so many women have gone through in their real world lives, but that few men could viscerally understand. So instead of going after women in an exploitative way, as so many horror movies have done, he wanted instead to go after the men-- to make that horror visceral to men, in a way that would make them, “Cross their legs” and feel what that is like.
And you can see that the entire structure of the Alien franchise, from the structure of each individual script, to the horrifying visuals, to the rules of the universe, down all the way to the production design, the way the alien creatures burst from the chests (and later, in Alien: Covenant from the backs) of impregnated males, every single decision grows from that one simple idea. The deeply personal why that the writer is actually writing it..."
"...hidden underneath this little character driven drama is actually an adaptation of three different stories. The first is the true life story of Chuck Wepner, a down and out fighter who went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali and was the inspiration for Rocky. At the same time, it is also an adaptation of the Rocky film. It is a reimagining of Rocky-- stripped all of Sylvester Stallone’s American dream sugar coating. And at the same time, it’s also an adaptation of a third film: an old movie from 1962 called Requiem for a Heavyweight. So here we have this unassuming character driven independent feeling little film, that looks like just a simple biopic, but under the surface, there is actually something very complicated going on...
"...If you listened to my podcast on Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 1, you know that I’m a huge fan of James Gunn’s writing. Not just for the brilliant execution of pretty much every moment of his scripts, but also for his overarching use of Theme to give real emotional resonance to these goofy action sci-fi comedies.
So, it’s interesting to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 to see James Gunn both succeeding and struggling in the places he’s most strong…"
"...as anyone who’s written comedy professionally can tell you, comedy is not about making the audience laugh. Comedy is about looking inside of yourself and making yourself laugh. Looking inside of yourself and laughing at the things that have hurt you: turning pain into laughter. Or, to quote How To Be a Latin Lover, turning sadness into Salsa... "
As Colossal illustrates so powerfully, our job as screenwriters is actually very simple: to look inside of ourselves and find the emotions, the characters, the questions that live there. To look inside of ourselves, find the things that are true, and then externalize the internal. To take the things that live under the surface for us, and put them up on the screen where everyone can see them. Sometimes that means our job is to look at our own monsters. And sometimes that means our job is to claw past the monsters that we believe ourselves to be to find the beauty that lives under the surface…”
Learn how to know if your screenplay rewrite is finished and how to deal with conflicting feedback and coverage notes about your script with Jacob Krueger.
Lear how to pitch your screenplay or TV show and advanced pitching techniques for Screenwriters, TV Writers, Web Series Writers, Novelists and Playwrights.
...Recently, we’re starting to see a shift with original movies like Get Out, La La Land, Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight and Arrival not only winning awards, but also hugely exceeding box office expectations. We’re also starting to see a trickle up effect, as companies like Amazon and Netflix have started entering the feature film market-- reinvigorating both writers and producers for the potential of a renaissance in feature films that can mirror the one in TV.
Which is why Beauty and the Beast’s success scared the crap out of so many big budget writers and producers, especially on the cusp of what seemed like a potential tipping point in the Hollywood model.
Horror movies are obviously about fear. But the best horror movies are not just about scaring the audience. They’re about scaring yourself. About scaring your characters.
They’re about reaching into those unexplored corners of yourself left over from childhood traumas, bad life experiences, emotional and physical wounds, paranoias and nightmares that you know you should be over emotionally-- but somehow just aren’t.
They’re about taking the childlike fears -- the nonsensical monsters under the bed-- we “know” we should dismiss -- the fears just too bizarre, too unlikely to be real-- and asking ourselves “what if they were?”
Allowing our worst nightmares to come to life on the page, and in that way to come to peace-- not with the reality which we depict these stories-- but with the real life experiences-- the metaphors-- that spawned them.
One of the truly interesting things about Inception is that its structure is actually based upon the principles of hypnosis. In fact, the organizing principles of the dream within a dream within a dream structure of the film almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training you’d receive during a basic hypnosis certification class.
Why is this important to you as a writer? Because as writers we all need organizing principles around which to structure our character’s journey…
This week we’ll be looking at Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Which is about as far as we can go from last installment’s Oscar Winner Manchester By The Sea.
Rogue One is a silly joyride of a script, built with half-drawn characters, nonsensical plot twists, and a hundred other flaws. And yet, while clearly feeling a bit trifling in scope compared to the other Star Wars films, it nevertheless delivers in a big way what its audience is seeking.
What’s also particularly interesting about Rogue One for screenwriters is the way it dives into a moment that is literally just a blip on the radar in Star Wars: Episode 4, and discovers there an entire backstory, worthy of a film itself.
The ability to dive deep into any moment and find drama is one of the most exciting things about screenwriting (and one of the most important skills you can develop as a screenwriter). It means that truly anything-- even just a little question like “how did they find those Death Star plans anyway?” can become a movie, if you’re willing to look closely enough.
But it’s also a reminder of how easy it is to get waylaid by backstory and exposition as we write and rewrite our scripts. Because as successful as Rogue One might be as a stand alone film, just imagine the effect it would have had if George Lucas had tried to squeeze all that exciting backstory into Star Wars: Episode 4, rather than just allowing the rebels to already have the plans.
He would have been 100 pages into the script, and Darth Vader wouldn’t even have boarded that first starship. We wouldn’t have met Luke Skywalker. We wouldn’t know the real story we were following.
So, we’re going to talk about what makes Rogue One work, and more importantly, we’re going to explore a concept called Structural Focus and how you can use it, both in writing and rewriting a script, to keep you focused on what really matters, whether that’s diving deep to find the drama in a specific moment, or keeping yourself above at a bird’s eye view, to keep your focus on the big picture of the story you’re telling.
So what makes Rogue One work?
If you’ve listened to my podcast on Star Wars: The Force Awakens then you know that these movies are being built more like a TV Series than like traditional Feature Films-- replicating the same Structural Engine over and over again to create a genre experience for the audience that feels the same as the one they got from previous episodes, but just different enough to make them feel like they got value for their money.
The elements that compose this Engine are always the same.
For the Star Wars franchise, it’s always some version of a Death Star, a McGuffin (usually plans) that everyone is trying to get their hands on, gorgeous space chase and fight sequences with super bad-ass technology, a juxtaposition of jaded “Hans Solo” and innocent “Luke Skywalker” characters working on the same team, a neurotic Droid, a complicated father/child relationship, and most importantly, a spiritual journey in relation to the Force.
As Episodes 1, 2 & 3 proved, Star Wars movies abandon these elements at their peril. Successful episodes can shake up these elements and approach them in different ways, but if they ignore them, the films stop feeling like Star Wars and start feeling like something else.
And of course if you’ve studied TV Drama, TV Comedy, or Web Series writing with us you know this is the exact same thing that happens in TV Series Writing.
Rogue One is just another reconstitution of these same elements-- some, in a vague way, and some in a very specific way.
At the core of the film are the characters we care about most. We don’t care about them because we haven’t seen them before. We care about them because we haven’t seen them this way before.
Whenever your character has a really strong backstory, one of the questions you need to ask yourself is: Does the movie take place then or does the movie take place now? Is this a movie about the present or a movie about the past? Or is it truly about both?
As Manchester By The Sea demonstrates, flashbacks work best when the most interesting part of the story takes place in the story between the past and the present. When two powerful stories are in dialogue with each other. And they work least the most interesting part of story is the stuff that’s happening in the past, or when the flashbacks exist to explain things to the audience, rather than to allow the character to wrestle with them himself.
But the most exciting thing about Manchester by the Sea is not just its use of flashbacks, but the unusual structure in which those flashbacks occur. A structure in which rather than changing over the course of the story, the main character refuses to change..."
Jacob Krueger finishes the 2017 Screenwriting Challenge with a special writing exercise!
The Second Check-In for the Jacob Krueger Studio 2017 Screenwriting Challenge! Jacob talks about the Writer's fear, and how to overcome it!
The First Check In for the 2017 Screenwriting Challenge! This week, Jacob Krueger has some inspiration and advice for our Challenge participants!
This week Jake has a special podcast featuring Jessica Hinds, and a New Year's Challenge!
This week, Jake analyzes Eric Heisserer's new sci-fi feature film Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner
This week, Jake analyzes how Hell or High Water breaks the typical cops-and-robbers movie mold.
This week, Jake takes a break from film analysis in order to share a lecture from his Screenwriting Masterclass.
This week, Jake analyzes the title character (Sully) in the new film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Clint Eastwood.
This week, Jake dives deeper into his analysis of the pilot for Netflix's new hit series, Stranger Things.
The Write Your Screenplay Podcast takes a break from its regular programming in order to share one of Jacob Krueger's Master Class lectures on the most important elements of writing for hire, as well as some valuable tips on how to get you there faster.
Join Jacob Krueger as he sifts through the Script Soup that is 'Suicide Squad' in order to find the truly great stories and themes that could have given more structure to this summer flop.
Recording of the Table Read My Script Teleconference with Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger
Jake's latest Write Your Screenplay podcast on the film by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
Part 2 of the Captain America Civil War podcast dives into emotional vs. logical or political motives and how stronger emotional triggers could have made audiences feel fulfilled vs. entertained.
A look at Richard Linklater's latest film and what screenwriters can learn from its unconventional story structure - Part 2!
A look at Richard Linklater's latest film and what screenwriters can learn from its unconventional story structure.
What they got right (and wrong) with Tina Fey's newest film, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and what you can learn from it to improve your own screenwriting techniques!
All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”
In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen…
Now, just a warning, there are major spoilers ahead.
What’s wonderful about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that we never know exactly what is true and what is not. In fact, we’re dropped directly into the experience of the main character.
It’s interesting that we’re looking at Room because, as screenwriters, we often lock ourselves in our own little rooms. Like the main characters of Room, we get bound up by other people’s rules, by our own comfort zone as screenwriters, by the movies that we have seen before. And we forget that every wall has another side, that there is actually something out there bigger than the story we know how to tell, than the movie that we’ve seen before, than the structure that we’ve been handed down, than the rules that have been imposed upon us.
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WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
The concepts of plot and structure are ideas that get mixed up all the time. They are words that are often used interchangeably, but that in my opinion actually mean very different things.
I like to think of plot as the crap that happens in your movie, or for that matter in your life. And I like to think of structure as the choices a character makes in relation to that plot. The choices that change their lives forever. Plot is the stuff that happens, but structure is your character’s change.
And if you think about your own life, you’ll probably realize that the difference between plot and structure matters to you as well. You’ve probably met the person who gets a hangnail and it destroys their whole day. And you’ve probably also met the person who gets cancer and gets a whole new lease on life.
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There’s just so much we can learn as writers from Deadpool, and not just because the film manages to do that rarest of feats: to be an intelligent, creatively successful superhero movie, but also because Deadpool manages to both follow the rules of superhero movies and break them in really exciting ways.
The first rule of superhero movies that every single person knows is that your super hero is supposed to be a super good guy.
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As we discussed in Part 1 of this podcast, when TV producers ask you to write a TV Bible with your pilot script, they usually request it in a pretty strange form. And a lot of writers get confused about what producers are actually looking for when they ask for a TV Bible and what’s supposed to go in it.
Most TV Bibles include a series logline, character bios for all the main characters, episode summaries for the first season, and often summaries of the future seasons as well. But the truth is, if that’s all you deliver, your TV Bible’s not going to take you very far.
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We’re going to take a little detour from our regularly scheduled podcast and bring you an interview by Jacob Krueger Studio Director Chris Littler, with filmmaker Adam Bowers.
Adam shot a feature film, New Low, for $2000 and ended up a official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He then managed to parlay that success into Paperback, a second feature at a much higher budget, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival this year.
If you are a film student here at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know it’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be a filmmaker. We are seeing more and more people like Adam, who are making their own material. These writers have stopped waiting for people to say “yes” to them, and instead started saying “yes” to themselves, developing great screenplays and going out and shooting them.
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Whether you are one of the many that loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens and saw it again and again, or one of the disappointed few who were frustrated with the rehashed scenes and safe choices of the film, there is no doubt that there is a ton that you can learn from this movie as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to rewriting your screenplay.
As I was watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it occurred to me that in many ways, this movie is just a rewrite of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back with a little spattering of Return of the Jedi splashed in there.
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What the heck is a TV Series Bible anyway? How do you write one? And why do you need one?
The truth is, the idea of a Show Bible, as many people talk about it today, is total fiction.But like many fictional ideas, it’s become a reality that we now need to deal with as TV writers.
If you ask Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes, he’ll tell you that in his entire thirty-some year career as a show runner on The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls, Married With Children, and about a dozen other hit shows, he never once made a bible.
Wondering if it’s different in TV Drama? Ask former Showtime Executive and Pulitzer Prize nominated writer Steve Molton, who teaches our TV Drama classes, and he’ll tell you the same thing.
In fact, on these shows the bible’s weren’t made by the writers at all. The show bibles were made by the assistants. And only after the show was up and running for a good long time, when the old staff writers were moving on, and the new staff writers started coming in to replace them.
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As we continue to build out the new home for Jacob Krueger Studio (in expectation of a Jan 1 move in!) this series of podcasts will explore the many ways in which building out a space is like building out a script, taking some of the lessons I’ve learned in our buildout, and applying them to writing.
Today’s podcast covers a topic that any screenwriter, and anyone who has ever built out a space, knows well. The millions of little decisions you have to make at every moment of your buildout, and on every page of your script.
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I recently had a student ask me a pretty interesting question: “What do you do when you realize that even though you think you’re writing all these different projects, you’re really just writing the same script over and over again?”
And this made me think about a couple of different questions facing writers as they move into their professional careers.
The first is an artistic question: What do you do when you’re following the same cycle again and again and again? What do you do when all your scripts seem to be converging around the same idea or the same themes?
The second is a question about branding: How do you brand yourself as a writer? How do you figure out what box to put yourself in? How do you figure out whether you should write a script that’s very different from the ones you’ve written before, or whether you should build a brand around scripts that are similar?
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Over the past six months I have probably looked at about five hundred spaces all throughout New York City. And I’m not even going to talk here about the spaces that were obviously not a fit for my school, I want to talk about the ones that potentially were.
Because the process of finding a space is a lot like that unenviable hunt for the perfect screenplay idea. Oftentimes during the process of searching, it feels like we’re never going to find that right idea or we’re never going to find that right space.
And that’s because spaces, like ideas, tend to fall into two categories…
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In Part 1 of this podcast, we used There Will Be Blood as a model for understanding the vital craft of externalizing the internal in a screenplay. But how do you go about using this technique in early drafts of your own screenplay, before you’ve got that perfect image in your head?
Today we’ve invited Jessica Hinds, who teaches our Weekend-Long Craft Intensive Nov 7-8th, to give you a sneak preview of some of the core concepts she’ll be covering, and speak about some practical things you can do right now to externalize the internal in your writing and reap the benefits in your career.
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Rather than looking at the structure of There Will Be Blood this podcast will be looking at There Will Be Blood in terms of a concept called externalizing the internal.
Often times when we're not externalizing the internal it's because we have not actually seen it yet in our own mind’s eyes. We haven't looked closely enough yet to see it exactly the way it needs to play out on screen. We've got a kind of sense of it, but we haven't taken the time to step inside and let it play frame by frame in the little movie screen in our mind, until we know exactly what we're seeing and exactly how we're seeing it.
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The success of The Martian is extremely exciting if you’re a screenwriter, especially because it breaks so much of the traditional Hollywood dogma. Often, as screenwriters, we think that our movies have to exist within some kind of orthodoxy: that there are certain things that you are just not allowed to do, and if you do them somehow you have no chance of writing a movie that’s a hit. And yet, The Martian seems to throw all of those cares to the wind.
If you’ve taken the average Screenwriting 101 class you’ve probably been taught a couple of concepts that are supposed to be the rules for all movies.
You’ve probably been taught that structure is always built on characters’ change. Yet, here is a character who doesn’t change at all.
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Now this is a really extraordinary true story, based on the life of Whitey Bulger, and featuring one of Johnny Depp’s all time best performances. And we’re going to be discussing some of its most compelling scenes and the elements that made them work in this podcast.
And yet, at the same time, despite the power of Johnny Depp’s and the supporting cast’s stellar performances, there is something about Black Mass that just leaves you (or at least left me) a little hollow– a little bit unsatisfied.
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Tone is one of those really challenging things for writers, particularly on a movie like Diary of a Teenage Girl, which touches on some extremely controversial, taboo and uncomfortable subjects. In lesser hands, rather than being the delightful (but disturbing) movie that we saw at the theatre, Diary of a Teenage Girl would be a Lifetime movie: yet another tear jerking melodrama about a child victimized by an unfair world.
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It’s an incredibly exciting time for writers of miniseries. The genre was all but dead in the water a couple of years ago, but recently we’ve seen a resurgence in miniseries sparked by the success of True Detective.
In a way, the miniseries is the ideal form of storytelling for a screenwriter. In feature films, we are limited in many ways by page count, trying to squeeze a life-changing journey into an hour and a half.
But in the world of miniseries, we actually have the one thing that most screenplays don’t have, the thing that novelists are blessed with and screenwriters long for: time.
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Often, as writers, we get so hung up on linear, narrative structure that we forget that there are completely different forms of screenplay structure that can be equally moving and powerful. So for today’s podcast we’re going to take a blast to the past, and look at a film that seems to diverge in almost every way from the traditional forms of structure we’ve been talking about on this podcast: Terence Malick’s, The Tree of Life.
What makes The Tree of Life so extraordinary is the effortless way it weaves traditional linear storytelling—the story of the family– with long meditative sequences of breathtaking images of the vast beauty and wanton destructiveness of the universe. But don’t let Malick fool you, underneath the melodic rambling of The Tree of Life is a rock solid structure, which provides the drum beat for the entire film.
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'Tangerine' is a brilliant illustration of just how little you need to actually succeed as a screenwriter or a filmmaker. To make a successful film you do not need millions of dollars. To make a successful film you do not need years and years and years of experience. To make a successful film you do not need to follow the rules or follow a formula. To make a successful film there are really only two things you need: You need a Want, and you need an iPhone.
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Often times we think of formatting as the grammar of the screenwriting. We think of it as this very simple, basic, elemental set of rules that you go and look up in The Hollywood Standard in order to do properly.
But the truth of the matter is formatting is much more than grammar. It's a way of speaking to your audience, thinking about your movie like a filmmaker, and capturing the visual eye of your reader.
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"Trainwreck" could so easily have been a movie about pointing fingers at the trainwreck girl that we all have known, or the trainwreck guy that we all have known.
But the truth of the matter is that "Trainwreck" is not about a skanky trainwreck of a girl. "Trainwreck" is about a beautiful and broken girl who's trying to fall in love, who's finally got an opportunity to be with someone good, but can't get out of her own way.
"Trainwreck" is a story about how hard it is to actually open yourself to another human being whether you're the famous doctor or the struggling journalist.
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Whether you loved or hated "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl," you have to admit that the movie is deeply emotionally moving, both in its humor and its sadness.
It’s not easy to move an audience emotionally. Especially when they come to a movie called "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl." It’s not easy to actually move them to a point of personal exposure with a film like this, because of the protective wall that the audience is naturally going to put up between themselves and the film.
So in this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses how to get an audience to take down their walls.
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As we watch INSIDE OUT, we're not just watching the story of the little girl, Riley, at the center of the movie. We’re also watching the story of the archetypes inside Riley’s head as they shape both Riley’s and their own realities.
READ PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: http://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/2015/07/11/podcast-inside-out/
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How do you write a script? You don't write a script by applying a bunch of principles. You write a script by looking inside and finding the piece of you that you're not inviting to the table.
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Forget whether ultra-violent action movies make you happy or make you want to run for the hills because we're going to talk about Mad Max: Fury Road in terms of the things that we can all learn from it, as screenwriters, regardless of the genre that we are writing in and regardless of the challenges that we're having in our writing.
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There are two right ways to build with Legos and there are also two right ways to build a film. There's the purely organic way, where you just follow all of your instincts. And then there's also the other way, where you sit down with a producer, manager, agent, writing partner, or director and you ask them, "what do you need?" And you find a way to deliver what they need.
In this podcast, Jacob Krueger talks about The LEGO Movie as a metaphor for what it really means to be a writer.
Today we are going to be talking about the genre of movies that I affectionately like to call “The Big Dumb Action Movie,” with the latest installment of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise, FURIOUS 7.
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BIRDMAN did not begin with a high-profile director saying, “let’s figure out a cool gimmick that nobody has ever done before.” BIRDMAN began with an observation by writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu. His observation was that life doesn’t happen in cuts. Life doesn’t feel like cuts.
Instead, he wanted to make a movie that felt more like life. He wanted to make a movie that felt cyclical, that felt like it didn’t have clear borders because our lives and our memories don’t have clear borders.
In this podcast, Jacob Krueger will discuss how Iñárritu's choice to simultaneously break and follow cinematic "rules" epitomized the poetic potential of filmmaking.
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Sometimes, even a flawed script can give you tremendous insights as a writer, not only as to what makes a screenplay succeed or fail, but also about the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing.
So, as we talk about 50 Shades of Grey, we're going to be setting aside the question of whether or not it is a good movie, whether or not you enjoyed 50 Shades of Grey or found it sexy, or even if you thought it was a reliable adaptation.
Instead, let's look at 50 Shades of Grey and think about what could have made it a great script. And how those lessons can apply to your own writing.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Jacob Krueger discussed one of the more controversial movies of this year: American Sniper by Jason Dean Hall.
"Let me just start off by saying that my politics are certainly not Clint Eastwood’s politics and that made American Sniper a hard movie for me. I think it made American Sniper a hard movie for a lot of people."
Listen to Jacob breakdown the elements in the movie that succeed as well as the areas that could have been pushed much further in both the script and in the movie.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
ADAPTATION SEMINAR: http://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/product/adapt-seminar/ WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Adapting a stage musical to the screen is never easy. On stage, musicals work because of their theatricality—the feeling of pretend, play, magic, and performance. Whereas in the relatively naturalistic world of film, those elements are very hard to pull off. Which makes the surprisingly successful film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s stage musical INTO THE WOODS even more worthy of study.
In this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses how adapting INTO THE WOODS for Disney might just have been one of the most challenging projects ever.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Sometimes, when we have a strong socio-political point that we want to make, as writers, the urge is to get up on our soapbox and start preaching. But Nightcrawler succeeds precisely because the screenwriter, Dan Gilroy, was able to step off the soapbox and trust his story.
In this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses Gilroy’s script for Nightcrawler and his spectacular ability to express a strong political message without shoving it down our throats.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Everyone agrees that some of the best writing in Hollywood right now is happening in television. And with brand new web networks like Netflix and Amazon hungry for quality new series, now is one of the most exciting times to be a TV Writer. So what do you need to break into this exciting industry?
In this podcast, three experts in the industry come together to teach you exactly what you need to succeed in the world of series. Whether you’re writing a half hour comedy, an hour-long drama, or an episode for your own web series, you’ll learn what you need not only to break in, but also to build a career as a series writer.
Learn the elements of a successful series, and what every network, studio and series producer is looking for when they read a series spec script or an original pilot. Understand how a TV Writers Room work, and what your role will be within a team of writers. And most importantly, learn what it takes to write a grade script that works within a series structure, without sacrificing your unique talent as a writer.
Panel members for the podcast include three faculty members from Jacob Krueger Studio: Jacob Krueger (Studio Founder & Award Winning Screenwriter), Jerome Perzigian (“The Jeffersons” and “The Golden Girls,”), and George Strayton ("Hercules" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").
Listen to Part 1: https://soundcloud.com/jacob-krueger-studio/tv-series-writing-1
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Everyone agrees that some of the best writing in Hollywood right now is happening in television. And with brand new web networks like Netflix and Amazon hungry for quality new series, now is one of the most exciting times to be a TV Writer. So what do you need to break into this exciting industry?
In this podcast, three experts in the industry come together to teach you exactly what you need to succeed in the world of series. Whether you’re writing a half hour comedy, an hour-long drama, or an episode for your own web series, you’ll learn what you need not only to break in, but also to build a career as a series writer.
Learn the elements of a successful series, and what every network, studio and series producer is looking for when they read a series spec script or an original pilot. Understand how a TV Writers Room work, and what your role will be within a team of writers. And most importantly, learn what it takes to write a grade script that works within a series structure, without sacrificing your unique talent as a writer.
Panel members for the podcast include three faculty members from Jacob Krueger Studio: Jacob Krueger (Studio Founder & Award Winning Screenwriter), Jerome Perzigian (“The Jeffersons” and “The Golden Girls,”), and George Strayton ("Hercules" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").
Listen to Part 2: https://soundcloud.com/jacob-krueger-studio/tv-series-writing-2
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
This week, Jake discusses James Gunn's script for "Guardians of the Galaxy." Jake calls the script "shockingly successful" and argues that the film "actually redefines our expectations for what a superhero movie can be... "Guardians of the Galaxy" is not a movie about capturing some crazy crystal, defeating some evil lord, or saving the galaxy. "Guardians of the Galaxy" is about coming to grips with the loss of the people you love and somehow holding onto your spirit of adventure, to your ability to connect to people, and to your ability to have family. "Guardians of the Galaxy" is just a giant metaphor for loss.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: http://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/screenwriting-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: http://writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Join Jake as he breaks down a new film each podcast, looking at movies from a unique and clever screenwriting perspective to find strengths and weaknesses that you can use in your own writing process. This week, Jake helps drive your story forward by filling necessary conflicts and character motivation with the following piece of advice: When in doubt, make it hard. To look at this, he analyzes the film "Blue Ruin" in the context of "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "Alien."
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
Jacob Krueger sits down with action movie screenwriter, George Strayton to discuss "The Amazing Spiderman 2" and what all writers can learn from these types of action movies.
Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:
ACTION MOVIE WORKSHOP: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/action WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes
How does a screenplay that seems to ditch all the formulas that Disney has relied on for generations turn into the highest grossing animated film of all time? Listen to Jacob Krueger discuss Jennifer Lee's screenplay for Disney's Frozen.
FROZEN SEMINAR: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/frozen WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/ WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes