Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast: Recent Episodes
Final Draft
Designed to help you navigate the screenwriting industry, Final Draft, interviews working screenwriters, agents, managers, and producers to show you how successful executives and writers make a living writing and working with screenplays, and how you can use their knowledge to break into the industry. Subscribe today to catch every episode!
“In my mind, Belle is going through life, at least our version of Belle – I've never met the real Belle – she’s going through life with this hole inside, this overwhelming need for approval, that social media absolutely capitalizes on and she just keeps trying to feed the beast. She hasn't grown up with the healthiest of role models herself. She has learnt that being sick is a shortcut to being loved and to getting attention,” says Samantha Strauss, creator and showrunner for the Netflix limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, about understanding her main character’s disgraceful motivation to lie about having brain cancer.
Adapted from the book, The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, Apple Cider Vinegar chronicles the incredible and heartbreaking rise and fall of the real Belle Gibson (Kaitlin Dever), a notorious health and wellness “scamfluencer.”
Strauss talks about starting her young life in Australia as a ballet dancer before a terrible injury led her to discover TV writing. She also talks about how her previous TV show, The End, got the attention of Nicole Kidman, who championed her writing career. Strauss gushes about how she was inspired by Kidman’s, “Fierce intelligence, just exactly what you'd expect, and rigor. You know, she would be giving notes at the end of a really long day of filming. She wasn’t resting on her laurels at all. There's just such a generosity of spirit there and to think she’s helped other emerging Australian creatives is pretty special,” she says.
Strauss discusses the challenges of adapting a true story while the subject is still alive, tips and tricks for making the show feel immediate and seductive while mimicking the addictive nature of social media, and getting the primal relationship of mothers and daughters authentic on screen.
To hear more about Apple Cider Vinegar and Strauss’s advice for writers adapting true stories, listen to the podcast.
“The most important thing that I've learned as a storyteller is that I have to treat every character in the show as though they're the lead in the show, and they are never doing anything so that I can prompt a move from another character. They are doing things that are true to what they want and their motivation. So that's what makes that architecture hard, because you know you want things to happen, but they have to happen coming out of character, not coming out of what the room wants to see happen. So it's like the merging of those two. We know what architecture we want, but if it doesn't feel true to the character, the character wouldn't do it. Every time, you’ve got to say no, even though it's tempting, because that is who you have to protect – your characters,” says Jennie Snyder Urman, creator and showrunner of Matlock, about creating story architecture in a series.
On today’s episode, we talk with Jennie Snyder Urman, who created the reboot of Matlock starring Kathy Bates as Madeline Matlock. We chat about reinventing the beloved character once played by Andy Griffith, the joy of building a show around an older female lawyer and the generational changes in social attitudes women experience, and the sacrifices women often make when it comes to sexual harassment, including Matty herself.
“[Matty] realizes now, coming back [to the legal profession], what it cost her. And it's not like every day she was thinking about it. It was just, ‘Oh my gosh, I made these changes to avoid this. And why do I have to make these changes? Why didn't that person make the changes so I could be in the space where I was comfortable?’ And I think what's so exciting about Maddie is that she's still learning new things at 75. I think there’s also a little bit of a wish fulfillment, that you can still evolve, and you still learn, and you still feel new things,” says Urman.
To hear more about Matlock, what we can expect from season 2, and Urman’s advice for writers, listen to the podcast.
“It’s not ripped from the headlines. We’re not using any of [the Buss family’s] real-life stories and putting them into our show. Because Mindy [Kaling], Ike [Barinholtz], and I have so many influences like Arrested Development, 30 Rock, The Office and Succession, we’re coming up with our own fun stories and fun situations to put this dysfunctional, very wealthy, successful family into a blender and then have them going back and forth and arguing and solving problems together and against each other,” says David Stassen, showrunner of Running Point, about taking inspiration from Los Angeles Lakers’ President, Jeannie Buss’s family and turning it into a hit TV show.
In this episode, we chat with David Stassen, showrunner and co-creator of the Netflix show, Running Point, that’s just been given the greenlight for Season 2. The show centers on Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson), the daughter of a powerful basketball magnate. She’s now taken the helm of the legendary team with the help – or hindrance – of her four well-meaning but unpredictable brothers.
While firmly set in the brawny world of basketball, Stassen talks about the true core of Running Point, which revolves around the siblings trying to earn the love of their deceased father. To get this particular narrative right, Stassen says the writers room spent a lot of time focusing on the family dynamics and differentiating each character’s struggles and traits. Much of the comedy in the show comes from the clashes between the siblings and their attempts to live up to their father’s fierce expectations.
Stassen also talks about how the character Isla, a woman at the center of a very male-dominated universe, relies on speeches from gangster films to communicate with her basketball team.
“Movies transcend our society. So, I think it’s a great way to connect and even if you haven’t seen Casino, most people know that Joe Pesci is viewed as a very scary person on film. We were lucky enough to get the rights to show a scene. So even if you didn’t know anything about it, you got to see the moment. It’s just a fun thing to have this beautiful, airy Kate Hudson taking on these roles of the tough Italian mobster or the contract killer getting revenge for his dead dog, like John Wick. And I guess it probably speaks to something bigger about this show – about a woman in a man’s world. But at the same time, Isla is powerful in her own way, right? She’s powerful 95% of the time just being herself and standing up for herself. And then the fun flourishes are maybe using a movie reference to illustrate a point,” says Stassen.
To hear more about Running Point and Stassen’s advice to TV writers, listen to the podcast.
“It was a lot of empathizing. I would do long phone calls with Abel (Tesfaye, aka the Weeknd) after we had met, just basically talking to him and finding out more of his history, where he was at in different phases of his life, where he’s at today, and using those to create a character. And part of creating that character is I’ll find my own personal stuff to attach to it… Portions of his life I can relate to very much. And past all of that, I think this is the deepest I’ve gone with my therapy background and my mom and stepdad being therapists. I tried to make the movie work to where if you just want to watch the movie at surface value and go on a ride with it and experience it and not think about it again, hopefully it works on that level. But also if you want to look at it and interpret it on a whole deeper, hopefully richer level, there’s a lot going on,” says Trey Edward Shults, director and co-writer of the new film Hurry Up Tomorrow on how he took Able “the Weeknd” Tesfaye’s story and made it personal to him.
On today’s episode, we sit down with writer/director Trey Edward Shults to discuss his new film Hurry Up Tomorrow that stars the Weeknd, Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, about a rock star who goes on an existential odyssey after losing his voice on stage.
Shults shares his journey to becoming a filmmaker, working with visionary director Terrence Malick, making the highly biographical film Krisha (2014), and the shockingly ominous horror film It Comes at Night (2017).
He also shares this advice for writing your first film:
“It has to be something you are so hungry to tell. And it has to be something you would die to make. You know what I mean? At least to me, my approach was I like to make stuff personal and they always say like, write what you know, write the personal thing. But I just think it needs to be something you’re crazy hungry to do no matter what,” says Shults.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“Sometimes it’s easier to find and access your truth through ‘pretend’ characters. So I had this embarrassment of riches of this true story but in my heart, I was like, ‘I totally get to tell my truth!’… So my advice is find a way to do it, and if you have to do a mind trick by saying, ‘I’m writing this pretend character’ that’s fine, but put all the stuff that’s real to you into that pretend character, because I find there is an immense amount of freedom in being able to write through these characters because they aren’t exactly my family, they are pieces of them. Writing your truth is possibly the scariest thing, but your truth only belongs to you, you are the person who experienced it in the exact way you experienced it. Know that you are giving a great gift to the world by doing it,” says Liz Maccie, screenwriter for the new film Nonnas, about how to make someone else’s story personal to you.
On today’s episode we chat with Nonnas screenwriter Liz Maccie and director Stephen Chbosky about turning this true story into a heartfelt movie about a man who risks everything to honor his late mother by opening an Italian restaurant with actual grandmothers as the chefs.
Maccie and Chbosky, a real-life married couple, talk about their own families and how they were able to put pieces of themselves on the screen. They discuss the hilarious Nonnas’ food fight scene and how to balance grief with humor in the writing.
“I feel that the other side of grief is hope,” says Maccie, adding, “Because I have lost so much of my family, sometimes you’re drowning in the grief. Then you have that moment when you suddenly feel that spark of hope again… we are all going to lose someone, even losing a pet. When we love something, someone and it goes away it’s a devastating feeling and I think that connects us.”
Chbosky shared this advice for writers:
“The one bit of solace or encouragement that any writer of any age can find is that sometimes, the more specific you write about your experience the more universal the script and the movie is… I really am a humanist at heart. I believe in using this art form to find ways to unify people, inspire them and certainly give them hope, put on their shoes and go at it the next day, I just think that when you write about your own personal experience it can lead to great things. And it doesn’t mean that it has to be a dramedy or comedy, it could be horror, it could be sci-fi, it could be any genre that you feel as long as it is specific to you.”.
To hear more, listen to the podcast. Nonnas is currently streaming on Netflix.
“For me, I don’t know how you could not make [a script] personal. I think drama allows you to hide how personal it is. I think that’s kind of what I like about writing in the genre space. On the outside looking in, it just looks like a big action movie. It doesn’t look like a personal story. But there are personal elements like my mom was a working mom as well. And so that’s why you have Kyra in the movie who has to come back to her son because she’s been working to protect him. That’s a very personal thing… but you would never assume that it’s a personal story because it’s wrapped up in the action,” says Leon Chills, co-writer of the new film Shadow Force, about writing action from a very personal point of view.
On today’s episode, we talk with director/co-writer Joe Carnahan and co-writer Leon Chills about the new action flick Shadow Force that puts a family at the center of the action. With a bounty on their heads, Kyra (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must go on the run with their young son (Jahleel Kamara) to avoid their former employer, a unit of shadow ops that has been sent to kill them.
Carnahan and Chills talk about the challenges of writing action set pieces and the power of giving the story emotional weight. We also discuss trying to push the boundaries of the action genre to invent set pieces that are fresh and inventive, and writing action scenes on the page that are compact and concise.
“As an older writer and doing it as long as I have, I’ll tell screenwriters, if I see four or five lines of scene description, I’m telling you, do it in two. Do it in one. Let people spend 40 minutes reading your script. No more. You know what I mean? Get through it with that kind of economy. If you’ve ever read M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense script – it’s an absolute masterclass in how to do that. Just so sparse and beautiful and pitch perfect the way that things are written,” says Carnahan.
To learn more about action writing and hear more advice, listen to the podcast.
On today’s episode, we speak to writer Brandon Osterman, whose short script ‘The Naughty List’ won last year’s Final Draft Big Break Short Screenplay Category. As part of his prize package, he received a consultation with Sav Rodgers, Marketing Manager for Seed&Spark, the film industry’s most popular crowdfunding platform. Sav joins the conversation to tell us exactly what crowdfunding is and help all writers understand that funding for their project is possible to achieve.
“Who is your audience? At Seed&Spark, we always say that great crowdfunding is audience building first and fundraising second. While there is definitely a fundraising need, finding your audience is invaluable… Something that I always tell prospective crowdfunders is you already have the tools you need to do this. You know how to tell a story. You're here because you're a storyteller. You know how to invite people in. You already know how to talk about yourself persuasively,” says Sav Rodgers.
Osterman also shares his journey creating his award-winning short script and gives advice to writers who are thinking of creating their own short film project.
“I don't think there's been a better time to be making short format content than right now. The demand for it seems to be expanding every time I turn around. I think if that's something that you're interested in, go after it. You know, I think there are more opportunities to distribute that form of content than there have ever been. I think we've got a generation now that's grown up with TikTok and social media and much shorter, digestible content that, whether it's conditioning or just sort of lowering of attention spans, I think more people are more tuned into short form content than they have ever been before. It's a really, really exciting time to be making shorts,” says Osterman.
To hear more about the short filmmaking process and crowdfunding, listen to the podcast.
“One of the things we talked a lot about in the room is that very rarely do people set about their day saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to go do some evil.’ But for most people, we’re all sort of the leads in our own stories and we’re all crafting the narrative of who we want the world to see us as. And we do start to believe that. You tell yourself these stories about yourself that you want to be true and you move through the world and you make decisions based on that narrative. And I think that one of the things that as writers, we really try to do is get into the shoes and the heads of the characters that we’re writing and really try to break down why they’re doing what they’re doing and make it feel as real and true as possible. The things that these characters believe – or convince themselves that they believe – have to feel really real and grounded to us,” says Katie Robbins, co-showrunner of Good American Family, on writing flawed characters who prefer to live in fantasy, not reality.
On today’s episode of Write On, we speak to Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland, co-showrunners on the explosive limited series, Good American Family. The show tells the story of a midwestern couple who adopts what they believe is little girl with dwarfism. Soon they are in the midst of a battle fought in the tabloids, the courtroom and ultimately their marriage. The show is based on the real-life story of Natalia Grace that made many headlines.
Robbins and Sutherland talk about the unusual yet brilliant structure of telling various episodes from different characters’ points of view, and how the tone changed when they got to the episodes told from Natalia’s perspective. They also talked about the messiness of writing a dysfunctional family while still keeping the story grounded.
“We all know family is this wonderful, beautiful thing, but it’s so complex. And I think that it’s really hard to talk about the complexities of family because we’re afraid to undermine the sacredness of it. It’s my view that if we are actually more open about what is hard about coexisting as a unit who loves each other, but also what’s not perfect, it would make us all better. And I think that that’s true both for family but also even for our enemies. We’re not writing autobiographies, but I think that we take those very real emotional experiences that we all have and then put them into a story that is cinematic, that is more interesting than our lives, but that is deeply steeped in those real moments of heartache and joy and confusion,” says Sutherland.
To learn more, listen to the podcast but be aware there are SPOILERS ahead.
“If you can make the twists [in the story] hit your character in an emotional way and set up their emotional arc, then when the case twist intersects with them, if it's hitting them in the deepest way, in the most unexpected way, maybe – then you've done your job. So it's getting that emotional arc to really bounce off of the crime story in the most impactful way,” says Gina Lucita Monreal about the most powerful way to fuse together story and character.
On today’s episode, we talk with David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, showrunners and creators of the CBS show NCIS: Origins that brings a fresh perspective to one of television’s most beloved franchises as it dives into the early career of a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs (played by Mark Harmon in the original NCIS). Set in the 90s, NCIS: Origins taps into the nostalgia of the era, from great music from bands like Pearl Jam to life with pagers and payphones.
North and Monreal discuss getting to know each other a decade ago writing for the original NCIS, and how now they are pushing the boundaries of procedural television by creating more complex, character-driven storylines.
“The biggest challenge for us isn't the going back to the 90s. I mean, I think for a lot of procedural writers, that would have been a challenge, that you're losing the DNA and the fingerprints, all that stuff. But for Gina and I, that's not really ever the way we leaned into NCIS or wrote the show. Our episodes were definitely more about the characters, so that's what we looked forward to. And obviously in each episode of Origins, it's very character based. I would say the most difficult part of going back is just sticking to canon, knowing it. Weaving in and out, trying to, when you hit something and saying, ‘Okay, well, we know this happened in season three of NCIS,’ so trying to honor it while also using it to our advantage – that's difficult.
We get beat up a lot on X, and sometimes we have to just pick a path,” says North about the challenges of writing beloved characters with a lot of well-known history.
To learn more about North and Monreal’s writing process and hear their advice for emerging TV writers, listen to the podcast.
On today’s episode of Write On, we chat with Kim Rosenstock, co-creator and co-showrunner for the new limited series, Dying For Sex, starring Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate and Sissy Spacek.
Based on a true story, Dying for Sex is about a woman diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer who abandons her husband of 15 years to begin a journey of sexual discovery.
Rosenstock talks about her background as a playwright, nearly missing out on the opportunity to write for the hit show New Girl, and navigating the complicated tone of Dying For Sex that balances a woman having unconventional, often hilarious sexual escapades with facing her own mortality.
“We need humor the most as human beings, so don’t be afraid of injecting humor and joy and levity into these sort of subject matters… If you have the impulse to make it funny or to make it feel joyful or hopeful, lean into that and don’t be afraid of it. I also think that is what makes it feel real, actually. To me, that makes it feel more honest, not the other way around… I think what's exciting is that audiences are embracing these kinds of stories that can kind of go into darker and lighter places at the same time,” says Rosenstock about mixing joy and sadness in Dying For Sex.
To hear more, listen to the podcast. Please be advised the interview includes discussion of sexual abuse.
Dying for Sex is currently streaming on Hulu.
“I didn’t really set out to make Cordelia (Uzo Aduba) quirky. I just wanted to make her distinctive. I just really thought about who I wanted her to be and how I thought [birdwatching] would be an interesting way for her to approach her job. And the very first thing that came to me was just her use of silence and her ability to just be comfortable in situations that might make other people uncomfortable. And it’s a quality that I’ve seen in certain people that I’ve always admired and been fascinated with because there’s nobody quite like Cordelia, but I’ve seen glimmers of it,” says The Residence creator and showrunner Paul William Davies about creating his lead character Cordelia, a detective who uses her birdwatching skills as framework for solving cases.
On today’s episode, we talk with Paul William Davies about The Residence, the new Shondaland show streaming on Netflix. Set behind closed doors at the White House, The Residence follows an offbeat detective, Cordelia Cupp (Aduba), as she investigates the murder of a lead member of the White House staff. Davies says the idea came to him watching a hearing on C-SPAN that went into details of the White House’s layout. But the show is more than just a game of Clue set in the upstairs-downstairs world of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The show goes deep into character and offers plenty of laughs along the way.
Davies talks about what he’s learned working with television revolutionary Shonda Rhimes, the intense work that goes into structuring a murder mystery, and shares his advice for anyone who may be working on their own TV mystery.
“I think it’s really important that you think about what the environment is that you’re having this murder mystery in, and making the motive something that feels like it’s related to the world that you’re working in. In most murder mysteries, the murderer is doing it for money or for love or lust. And that’s probably in 98% of the ones that you read. And that’s fine… But I think really giving a lot of thought to, what is the motive here? How do I keep it organic to this world and these people, as opposed to it just being grafted onto it, which I think sometimes does happen. Make sure that the killer is doing something that feels like it’s part of that world for a reason that is related to that world,” he says.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“Sameness is terrible. Your goal is to cut through it. If you have a unique perspective, you’re going to take vampires or anything that everybody thinks they know and do it in a way that’s really exciting and gets people really pumped up about it. There are all these incredible worlds to explore, but there just needs to be somebody that can take you there that has a different way of doing it… I want to see creators that offer something specific and unique. Specificity is key to me. I don’t want a cover band. I don’t want people covering what has been before. I want to see something new. I want to see a badass band with a new singer or new lyrics, a new style of music,” says Peter Katz, founder of Story Driven, a literary management and production company.
On today’s episode, we speak to Peter Katz, a manager and producer championing writers with fresh, unique voices who are forging new ground. We talk about what he looks for in a writing sample, why he loves being a judge in Final Draft’s Big Break screenplay competition, and why short stories are having a bright moment in the film industry.
“Recently, I’ve actually seen TV executives starting to think about short stories as a foundation for potential shows. It’s a really effective way to communicate an idea quickly, in a really conceptual way, but also, it’s not like a pitch. It’s very tonal. You have character perspective and you have the style that the author brings to it. So I think it has a really unique marriage between pitching the concept, but also immersing you in a world in a very short period of time. That’s why I think it’s been effective in selling to a market, because you could share a short story with somebody and it doesn’t demand a lot of time. If it’s developed properly, you’re able to learn about the potential of this project and then quickly share with somebody else on your team. And overnight, a lot of people can sign on to a project because it doesn’t take as long as other mediums,” says Katz.
To hear more about Katz’s perspective on the industry and what he looks for in a writer’s voice, listen to the podcast.
“With an adaptation, you can never give back your first read. So, what are you taking away? What fills your soul? Why do you want to tell this story? And then that becomes sort of the North Star. And I’m tethered more by that North Star than by the actual moves that are happening in the book,” says Long Bright River showrunner, Nikki Toscano, about adapting Liz Moore’s best-selling novel for television.
Long Bright River is an emotional suspense thriller that follows Mickey (Amanda Seyfried), a police officer in a Philadelphia neighborhood hit hard by the opioid epidemic. As a string of murders unfolds, Mickey must find her missing sister who’s also battling addiction before it’s too late – but long buried family secrets stand in the way.
On the surface, the show is a highly engaging murder-mystery, but beneath the whodunnit is a love story between two sisters. We chat with Toscano about delving into the sisterly dynamic that is both compassionate and toxic at the same time.
Toscano shares tools for building an enticing mystery that includes giving your characters secrets to help drive the story.
“I think that in the beginning of anything, you have to determine what your character wants and then put a bunch of people or things in that character’s way. So that’s how secrets are born, right? And that’s how you have your audience leaning in. Is the secret going to come out? Who’s going to tell the secret? You and I could be having a conversation and I say, ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ And then the next scene is you being in a situation where do you tell, do you not tell? It’s about setting up those kinds of things. I mean, whenever building any kind of show, whether it’s an adaptation or not, determine what your character wants and then stick a bunch of people between them and that goal that either complement or compromise your character’s journey,” says Toscano.
To hear more, listen to the podcast. Long Bright River streams on Peacock March 13.
“My recommendation to anybody who is writing animation is to take advantage of the things you can do in animation that you can’t do in live action, which is to spend an infinite amount of money, right? If you and I are going to write a scene and you say, ‘Oh, let’s set it on a battleship, but then space aliens come and suddenly we’re transported to Jupiter,’ it better be animation because if it’s not, we’re never going to be able to shoot that. But if it is animation, that’s exactly what we should be doing all the time. You want to create the most expensive set in the world because it costs nothing to draw that battleship and send us to Jupiter. And that’s really the glory of an animated show,” says Brent Forrester, about what he learned writing for The Simpsons for three seasons.
On today’s episode, we chat with Emmy-winning writer Brent Forrester about his prolific comedy writing career that includes shows like The Office, King of the Hill and Space Force. He shares why the writing room for The Simpsons was so intimidating and his surprise when The Office showrunners had to teach him the specific tone and structure for the show after he turned in his first episode and just wasn’t getting it.
“I had gotten the tone wrong – it was largely my attempt to make it wall to wall funny. I wasn’t getting that you really had to make it serious. There were other aspects, too, that I had to pick up. One of them is the use of what are called ‘talking heads.’ It’s when the character speaks directly to camera. It comes from reality TV where they pull the subject of a reality show aside and ask them a question and they just speak directly to camera. So we stole that device and it’s a great crutch for writers because one of the hardest things for us is getting the exposition across,” says Forrester.
He also shares his advice for writing a great TV pilot that will hook the reader and offers a simple formula for writing jokes by mixing the sacred with the profane.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“Fugler (Robert Carlyle) was a character that I really connected with from the beginning. I know it sounds a little strange that the Nazi was my way into this, but it really was that idea of, ‘How can we get inside his head and make sure that he’s a fully fleshed out person that way?’” says Josh Salzberg about trying to make his villain, a Nazi named Damien Fugler, a three-dimensional character.
Josh Salzberg wrote the screenplay for The Performance with co-writer/director Shira Piven. In this episode, Salzberg talks about the challenges of adapting a short story by playwright Arthur Miller that’s about a Jewish-American tap dancer (Jeremy Piven), who’s willing to compromise his own core values to find fame and fortune in Nazi Germany.
“The idea of all [the characters] is that they’re all performing on some level. They all have another life. And that’s true to show business, that we all have sides of ourselves that we’re not sure we want everybody to see or that it’s okay for everybody to see. And then in Berlin in the ‘30s, there’s all these different communities that were impacted – not just the Jews in Germany,” he says.
Salzberg also talks about his background as a film editor, how it helped him transition to screenwriting, and the challenges of writing morally compromised characters like his protagonist, Harold.
“I think embracing the mistakes that they make, embracing those flaws and leaning into that is important. Sometimes we can care about our characters to the point where we want them to be likable, which is a note we always get, but we’ve got to be okay with the mistakes – and the consequences for those mistakes. And that was a lesson that Shira and I kept learning as we were developing the script,” he says.
To hear more about Salzberg’s writing process, listen to the podcast. Please note: this episode contains discussions regarding racism and anti-semitism.
“People think sequels are easier, and I’m like, ‘No, no, it’s much harder. It is much harder to write.’ They have never written sequels, those people, because you need to do everything as well as the first and yet better, and go to new places, follow all the world rules, but create new ones. I mean, it’s just so many balls in the air,” says Meg LeFauve, co-writer for Inside Out 2, along with Dave Holstein.
In this special live episode from the Writers Guild Foundation Library, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein talk about tackling a whole new set of challenges as they wrote the sequel to the beloved movie Inside Out. They also discuss the 5-year Pixar development process that includes the concept of failing fast.
“They really want you pushing to things that are new and innovative, so they expect you to fail. They actually want you to fail but they want you to do that quickly, right? Because we only have five years, so it’s always like, hurry up, hurry up. You know, fail. Go again. Go again,” she says.
Holstein shared some very personal advice for writing coming of age stories, like the Inside Out movies: get micro-focused.
“Sometimes it’s better to zoom in than to zoom out. For me, it helps to zoom in on a detail and let the detail be a microcosm for the rest of it. I know that when we were writing this film, I was thinking about my anxiety at that age and where that came from. I had a speech impediment, I had a stutter, so I hated Spanish class because I had to read out loud, and my stutter always came out in front of people, which made me very, very anxious. And I feel like, for Riley, there’s a three-day hockey camp that could determine the rest of her life. That’s where I sort of sunk into and if I was writing a different story about me, I would have gone into those details. But for me, it was about finding something very specific and very small,” says Holstein.
To hear more about the writing process, listen to the podcast.
“The most subversive thing this show could do is make you cry… If you really boil down television, really cook it in the pan, it’s the character business. I’m in the character business. Movies are in the plot and spectacle business, for television, there’s a thing about laying in bed and watching someone in your bedroom or living room that you really care about, you’re inviting these people into your house. The more you care about them, the more your show will succeed. There’s no simple formula, but you could boil down every single TV show to if the characters work, that show is likely going to work. If the characters don’t work, no matter what that show is, no matter how much money you throw at it, that show is not going to work,” says Eric Kripke, creator and showrunner for The Boys on Prime Video.
In this special episode hosted by screenwriting career coach Lee Jessup live from the Writers Guild Foundation in Los Angeles, Kripke talks about the functions of a showrunner, the excellent training he got doing 15 seasons of the show Supernatural, and what it’s like when the real world mirrors the darker aspects of The Boys.
Kripke also shares his sage advice for writing dialogue.
“I was interviewing people about their life experiences – it was a romantic comedy so I was asking people about their love lives. I wanted to transcribe it, so I had about 20 hours of material that I’m just transcribing and that’s how I learned to write dialogue, just from doing that because you learn how people really speak. No one speaks in straight, declarative sentences. It’s this weaving thing where they’ll start and they’ll back away and throw in a new idea. When you start to pay attention to what real language looks like on a page, it’s very different than what you think it looks like. So, to know what it looked like and how to recreate it, was huge. I recommend everyone try that,” says Kripke.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
You can also watch this episode here.
“If everything's being played on the surface, it's very hard to make that character come to life. You want hinterland, you want subtext. You want the things that are buried, the things that we don't know about them, the things that maybe they don't know about themselves. And always, the story is about this excavation of what's underneath the surface. One way or the other, that's kind of what story is. It's about bringing things to the surface,” says Conclave screenwriter Peter Straughan, about the importance of giving your characters secrets.
In this episode, we speak to Peter Straughan about his powerful film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow. Based on the book by Robert Harris, the movie follows five very different modern Catholic Cardinals as they go through the process of electing a new Pope. Straughan talks about why he loves a flawed hero, getting to tour the Vatican, what surprised him the most, and whether or not he thinks the real Pope will watch this movie.
Having also written the TV show Wolf Hall about Tudor England, Straughan also talks about the surprising connection between King Henry VIII and the modern Catholic Church.
“Both the world of the Tudors and the world of Conclave give us a way of looking at human behavior and the pursuit of power from a sort of angle that makes it particularly clear and fresh, without the clutter of the normal secular world of elections, that really anchors it in the human individual. So, Tudor England was maybe the last time where the sexual desires of one man was going to dominate the political landscape of an entire country. Maybe not the last time. Maybe this still happens in the world. But it becomes really pared down to basics, so you see very clearly what's going on. And I think it feels the same with Conclave, it's about the personalities and the morals of these few individuals,” says Straughan.
Just a warning, there are spoilers about the ending of Conclave in this episode, but we give you plenty of warning before they are discussed.
To hear more about Straughan’s writing process, listen to the podcast.
“There's no greater laugh than when you're at your most vulnerable. You're at a funeral, or you're in church and something's happening and there's great reprieve from the most human moments through humor. And even in those moments, something is funny or human and fumbling. And that scene itself [when Charles discovers Sazz’s ashes], when I was watching it, I really felt like this scene is encapsulating the whole experience of the best of this show for me when he is standing there and then watching him wipe her ashes off and he’s in deep pain over it, but caring so much. And then she pops in the doorway. I don't know, things like that just made me happy to have been able to do anything like that,” says John Hoffman, co-creator and showrunner for Only Murders in the Building, about balancing the humor and the grief in the show.
In this episode, we go deep into Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building with co-creator, showrunner and writer/director John Hoffman. He talks about writing from theme, shares details about that rip-roaring fight scene between Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy, and exploring visual motifs this season.
“The twins and the reflections made me think of so many of my favorite films and the way cinema is used to show reflections and to do parallels and the Bergman-esque stuff. And I mean, granted, none of that might relate to what you're watching on this show. But playing off that theme felt really good. We are a show that's about three isolated, very lonely people in New York City and finding connection and so I think that recognition of we're more alike than we're apart also plays a huge part in the telling of the stories of Season 4. I like organizing them that way,” he says.
Hoffman also shares his advice for writing great scenes: “Know what a scene is and know that a scene wants to move in a certain way, and flip in a certain way. It might not take you in the direction you thought it was going to, but sometimes it will give you something of great comfort. Check yourself over and over again… is it honest? And check yourself on the truth of a character's motivation. Would a human being do that, ever? And if not, what could compel them to do it? There are all those things that are just very basic to me,” he says.
To learn more about Hoffman’s writing process, listen to the podcast.
Please note: this episode contains mention of suicide.
“In most genre fiction where heroes and villains clash, the hero is intrinsically reactive. The villain starts making trouble and that’s the beginning of the story. If the villain had never showed up, the hero would have lived a pleasant and unremarkable life and had a lovely time. And nothing novel-worthy would have popped up. But the villain comes along and does something terrible and that makes heroic action necessary. So if that’s the function of the hero in the story, to be called to heroic action, then the first conflict that’s readily available to you is reluctance or a sense of being unworthy… and then after that, the hero will be called to take on a new shape and often that will be in response to the shape of the danger, in response to the shape of the wickedness a foot,” says Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Jon Spaihts, about the classic hero-villain relationship in Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, based on the books by Frank Herbert.
In this episode, Jon Spaihts talks about the importance of hand-to-hand combat in mythic storytelling, his favorite scene in Dune 2, and we do a deep dive into his most adored character, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. We explore the nature of her mystical powers and why she’s so feared by the men in the story.
Spaihts also shares his advice about what it really means to get personal with your writing.
“When people say to make your story personal, they don’t really mean look at yourself. You are the least qualified person to say something meaningful about yourself. What people are really talking about is that you should focus on the things that obsess you. You can look at the things that are most plangent to your feelings, that are most itchy and sticky for your intellect, the things you can’t stop thinking about. You can focus on the experiences that have impacted you most profoundly. Those things – the things that push on you and pull on you – that is personal storytelling. You look not at yourself, you look at the things that have moved you, that have affected you, that have changed you, redirected your life and the things that preoccupy you. Those are your seeds of personal storytelling,” says Spaihts.
To hear more about writing Dune 1 and 2, listen to the podcast.
“As someone who’s been obsessed with vampires since I was a little kid, I don’t totally know [why we love vampire movies so much]. Obviously, sex and death are always interesting and in vampire stories, including the very earliest accounts of folk vampirism in Eastern Europe, that connection has always been there. Some of these early folkloric vampires didn’t drink blood but fornicated with their widows until they died. And then, being undead, rising from the grave, you know Dracula and Jesus have had the most movies made about them of any popular characters in Western cultures, so there must be something to that as well,” says Robert Eggers, writer/director of Nosferatu, starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård.
In this episode, Eggers talks about the play-version of Nosferatu that he wrote and directed when he was in high school, writing the Ellen character (Depp) as a woman at war with herself, and making Orlok (Skarsgård) the villain without making him too arch or campy.
“[Orlok] has a sense of humor and he has a sense of poetry. He’s a well-learned man so that’s enjoyable. It’s fun to write dialogue for someone who had their heyday in the the 16th century and English was like their 17th language, that’s fun,” says Eggers.
We also asked Eggers about telling an old story but making it relevant to today. He says that while he doesn’t worry about making a film with a specific message, “I don’t live in a vacuum. So even if I’m not trying to write a film with a message, whatever is happening around me is coming out. Also, it’s interesting that the movie didn’t get made until when it did. The original Nosferatu came out a couple of years after the Spanish flu. This is coming out a couple of years after the pandemic. And I wrote all that stuff before the pandemic. In fact, they had face coverings originally, and I took them away because it felt too much on the nose. So, I think it’s all there for the taking,” he says.
To hear more about the power of vampires and Egger’s writing process, listen to the podcast.
“I would argue that the movies, the plays, the stories that endure and certainly that resonate in the most populist and global way are the ones where we’re not just observing a piece of storytelling, we’re participative in some way and it’s connective. How can any of us who are flawed humans connect with a flawless hero? The beauty of Wade [Deadpool] and Logan [Wolverine] is that really, they’re two anti-heroes. They do not abide by typical moral codes. They both have been scarred deeply. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about them is that the worst thing that’s ever happened to them is also the source of their superpowers. Which I think, by the way, is something worth thinking about in all our lives – that the things that we had to get over are also the source of our strength,” says writer/director of Deadpool & Wolverine Shawn Levy.
In this episode, we discuss the elements that Levy thinks make a great hero and also a powerful villain like Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).
“There was something really juicy about [Cassandra’s] twinship with Charles Xavier, that this villain is a new villain who has never been in a movie, who has never been anywhere other than the pages of a Marvel comic book. But there is this connective tissue to deep beloved, extensive mythology with Professor X and Charles. So we did lean into her resentment, her envy of Charles. You know, I think maybe one of my favorite couplets of our writing in this movie is when Cassandra says to Wolverine, ‘He must have really loved you.’ And he says to Cassandra, ‘He would have loved you too. He would have torn a hole in the universe if he knew where you were.’ I get goosebumps saying it now!” says Levy.
We also break down that hilarious fight scene between Deadpool & Wolverine that takes place entirely inside a Honda Odyssey.
To hear more insights about the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time, listen to the podcast.
On today’s episode of the Write On podcast, we speak with RaMell Ross about his new film Nickel Boys about two young Black men who get sent to a reform school in 1960s Jim Crow South. The film is heartbreakingly beautiful and already getting plenty of Oscar buzz.
In the interview, Ross admits he didn’t know how to write a screenplay when he decided to adapt Colson Whitehead’s book Nickel Boys, so he began the process by using written storyboards to visualize the scenes, which were later converted into a screenplay with the help of co-writer Joselyn Barnes.
We also discuss his decision to limit the violence depicted on screen. “It’s a tough space because on one hand, you want people to understand the things that happened and their horror. But I feel as a culture, we’ve been overexposed to it and specifically overexposed as it relates to people of color because we don’t have so many iterations of visuals of people of color. If that’s most of it, then how does that work on the culture and psyche?” says Ross.
Ross also shares his take on writing a movie with historical elements. “I don’t think that what we understand to be history is history. I think that it’s a collection of familiar ways of analyzing or engaging with the past that fits comfortably in the socio-political language of reflection. I don’t know what it’s like to be a person in the past. And I know that a lot of the narratives that we have these days are guided by a person’s either nefarious unconscious or they have another type of motivation behind them. And so I want people to think about the past as something that has the freedom of interpretation, that we would like to be given to all of the things that we’ve done in our lives. I just don’t believe in historical reproduction,” he says.
Listen to the podcast to find out more about Ross’s filmmaking process.
“You’re reading these interviews [in the book The Bikeriders by Danny Lyon] and they’re all interesting, but Kathy’s are just fascinating. You could just tell she was a character, meaning she was just this interesting, dynamic person, a person that was trying to figure out how she found herself in this world because she really talks about walking into this bar and meeting this charismatic young bike rider. And so, it was a really beneficial crutch for me to kind of get into this world. And then before you know it, by the middle of the script, I’m writing words for Kathy that never existed. It didn’t hurt that, in my research, I reached out to Danny and he turned over hours and hours of recordings. I would drive around town just listening to Kathy talk. I mean, I had this woman in my head and I felt pretty confident midway through the script that I could write in her voice. It just gave this perspective to a very masculine, aggressive subculture. It gave this feminine point of view, but to me it was just a really interesting point of view,” says writer/director Jeff Nichols about writing the character Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, in his film The Bikeriders.
In this episode of the podcast, we speak to Jeff Nichols about his departure from Southern Gothic storytelling and going deep into the world of a 1960s motorcycle club for The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy. We also discuss some of his other films like Loving, Take Shelter and Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey – a film Nichols thought would never get released.
“I thought Mud was a failure. We had taken Mud to the Cannes Film Festival, and although we had a really nice reception there, you know, standing ovations and whatnot – no one bought the film. And we went an entire year with no one buying that film. In fact, no one ever did buy that film. The financier put up half the money to market and distribute that film and luckily, Roadside Attractions came in and put up the other half and then it became the film that everybody knows,” says Nichols.
To hear more about Nichols’s writing process, and his advice for building stories around “emotional impact,” listen to the podcast.
“I find action scenes really hard to write, I usually save them for the end. I need to get very caffeinated and then just try and get into the adrenaline of what they should feel like. With this [film] in particular, those robberies and the heist… I kind of like to really understand an environment and a landscape before I can write an action sequence. Because if I can’t figure out when a car is overtaking another car or where characters are in relation to it, then it’s impossible to write dialogue. I really try and map out the choreography of things and when to have those spikes of violence. I think you just feel it. You feel it on the page where hopefully you’ve built the tension. There needs to be some kind of release. And that’s maybe a gunshot or maybe it’s a line of dialogue that pulls someone in another direction. I’m pretty prescriptive in the way I write action and I write it in the way I hope it will be shot and it’s not just like an overview of a scene,” says screenwriter Zach Baylin on writing action sequences in his new film, The Order.
The Order stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult and tells the true story of an FBI agent (Law), who’s determined to bring down a group of domestic terrorists in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Zach Baylin about writing action sequences and also his film King Richard, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He also shares this advice for writing a period film that might have parallels to today’s society:
“In terms of keeping things entertaining and not wanting to be preachy and didactic, I think that the approach that I took was just to try and tell the story of what happened in 1983 and ‘84 accurately and not to over relate it to today. The parallels to today are so obvious that if we were to throw in lines about things that felt like they were alluding to the present, it would totally take out both the veracity and the intention, which was, I want to tell this story correctly. And if I do, then you’ll walk out of it, both having been entertained and informed,” says Baylin.
The Order is in theaters now. To hear more about Baylin’s writing process, listen to the podcast.
“About 12 years ago, I had my very first meeting to staff. It was a show being run by a playwright named Beau Willimon, and he'd done one season of a show that hadn't dropped yet, and they were going to do this crazy new model where the whole season was going to drop at once and they didn't know how it was going to go. And that was a show called House of Cards. And I was staffed for season two of that show before season one dropped. So, that was my entrance into television. It was my first meeting to staff on any show!” says Laura Eason, playwright and current showrunner for Starz’s TV show Three Women.
In this episode of the Write On podcast, we chat with Laura Eason about her illustrious career as a playwright and how she made the intimidating transition to TV writing.
“I got a call a week before the [House of Cards] room started and I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the book How to Write the One Hour Drama. I'm not kidding. I was like, oh my God. And I called everyone I knew that had been in TV and said, ‘Tell me everything you can about being in a room and how it's supposed to go.’ And then I was very lucky my first year in TV,” says Eason, who was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards in 2017.
Eason also talks about her latest show Three Women, its unique structure, and also shares her advice for writing a TV pilot as the tides in Hollywood are changing.
“Well, we're coming into a different moment with this contraction that we're having in the [TV] industry. We had a very beautiful time where I think there was a lot of room for idiosyncrasy, and a lot of room for things to not quite check the list of everything a pilot should probably be, but because the voice was really unique or the world was interesting, those shows still got made. And I think we're in a moment now where all of the fundamentals need to be really, really strong. Like the engine of your pilot really needs to work. Someone needs to read that pilot and understand how you're going to be able to make 10 episodes or 20 or 50 episodes of that show, especially because there's less interest in limited series. So, making sure that you're paying as much attention to engine, to character, to your act structure, that the action is really moving and the acts the way it should as much as your voice, the unique things you bring, because of course that's the special sauce. But you really need to have both now, in a really strong way."
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“We never wanted to make a show about dogs. We wanted to make a show about people. And then secondary to that, people who love dogs. We made sure we had some of Colin [the dog, in season two], like there’s that lovely episode in seven where Gordon becomes a stage mum to a TV dog, which is so funny. But yeah, we just wanted it to be interesting,” says Harriet Dyer, co-creator and star of Colin From Accounts about the shift away from Colin the dog to focus more on the relationship between Ashley and Gordon, and develop the supporting characters.
In this episode of the Write On podcast, we check in with the real-life Australian married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer now that season two of Colin From Accounts is out on Paramount+. Brammall and Dyer talk about balancing the tone of the show that continues to have a few scatological elements and misbehaving body parts, but keeps the characters grounded as Gordon deals with a loss. “Episode five is a bit of a departure from the structure of the show and mixes the light and the dark with the comedy butting right up against the tragedy. We played a bit more with that as well. We did stuff that interested us and made us laugh,” says Dyer.
Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. “I started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. You’re waiting for the phone to ring. You’re waiting for someone to give you work. You can’t create your own work. And I’m like, well, fck this. I want to create work. But you definitely need a big old fcking dose of luck on the way… And now more than ever, there are ways to make your own stuff and get it out there and produce it. But of course, the flip of that is that there is way more people doing that as well. How does one stand out? I don’t know. All I would say is it’s not going to happen if you don’t start doing it!”
To find out more about Brammall and Dyer’s writing process, listen to the podcast.
“What I wanted to do with this movie was take this interesting relationship that I have been exploring over the course of my writing, over 20 years, and this dynamic, and set it against the backdrop of something so objectively worse than anything the characters are going through. I wanted to put this funny, fraught relationship that seems like the stakes are quite high – are these two people going to continue on together? Against the backdrop of stakes that are so much higher, we can put their relationship into perspective,” says Jesse Eisenberg, writer/director and star of the new buddy movie A Real Pain that takes place on a holocaust tour of Poland.
In this episode of the Write On podcast, Eisenberg talks about spending years trying to get this particular story just right, how it was personal to him, what it was like to shoot at a concentration camp and the great advice his producer Emma Stone gave him. He also shares his criteria for writing a road trip/buddy movie.
“It has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I read so many scripts as an actor and I’ve written so many things, that [a script] has to have two things: it has to be specific enough to feel real and personal. There are just so many movies in this road trip/buddy movie genre, if it doesn’t feel specific I think an audience can sniff it out immediately. The other thing is to make it feel new, to have a new reason to tell this story so it doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen 10,000 other times,” says Eisenberg.
Listen to the podcast to learn more.
“One of the things that I really wanted to focus on, and I felt it immediately after meeting Lina the housewife in Indiana [played by Betty Gilpin in the show], whose husband no longer wanted to kiss her on the mouth, I felt like this woman was as important as the Queen of England, as important as Napoleon. I felt her dreams and fears are just as universal as someone who has defeated an army and the only reason we're not hearing about her is because we have these sorts of rules in place for what possesses historical significance. And I don't really think that that's necessarily true,” says Lisa Taddeo, author of the book Three Women, on which her new TV show is based.
In today’s episode, we speak to Lisa Taddeo, creator of the show Three Women that stars Shailene Woodley, Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise and Gabrielle Creevy as “ordinary” women searching for their sexual identity and fulfillment in disparate and surprising ways. The show is an intimate, often stark portrayal of forbidden female desire and the consequences of that desire – both good and bad.
We also talk about writing the “female gaze” into the scripts, filming with prosthetic penises, the power the book Twilight has on teenage girls, and the uncanny way our mothers influence our own sexuality.
“My mother made up her face every morning, even when she wasn't going to leave the house. Who is she? My father sees her before she puts on her face as they say, so it's not for him. Nobody is coming to the door today, so it's not for them. It's certainly not for me, because I see her without makeup when she washes it off at night. So, who is it for, you know? And that was a question I had but didn't really know how to frame,” Taddeo says.
To hear more about the groundbreaking show Three Women that’s airing on Starz, listen to the podcast. Trigger warning: contains mentions of sexual explicit material, sexual assault and trauma.
“The streaming bubble finally popped, and I think the tip of the spear that popped it was the double strikes we had last year and now we’re calling it the great contraction. It’s a really tough time for up-and-coming writers to break in. It’s tough for everyone, even up-and-coming agents and managers, anyone coming out to Hollywood to pursue a career. It’s one of the toughest times ever, so you need to be patient,” says literary manager Jeff Portnoy, of Bellevue Productions.
On today’s podcast, guest host Lee Jessup, Hollywood’s leading screenwriting career coach and judge of the Big Break screenwriting competition, interviews Jeff Portnoy, literary manager for Bellevue Productions. They discuss the current state of the industry and how it’s affecting writers.
“We’ve been encouraging a lot of new writers to focus on features at the moment and explaining how bleak the TV staffing market is right now. So if they have hopes of getting staffed, it’s very difficult right now. Typically, if we had a client who wants to write in the TV space, we’d help them get a TV agent and we, the agents and I, would go out and try to get them staffed. But agents aren’t really signing anyone below mid level right now, so they’re not taking on those up-and-coming writers,” says Portnoy.
But there is hope considering business trends are always cyclical. Portnoy shares this advice about writing spec features in this climate: “You want to stand out and that comes down to your ideas. The execution has to be great. It’s about choosing ideas that really stand out in a pack – the words I like to use are loud, bold, audacious. Managers, agents, producers – we see thousands of loglines a month and if we see a logline that’s loud, audacious and bold, it’s going to stand out.”
To hear more about the state of the industry, listen to the podcast.
“I think [Here] has some of the imagination of Forrest Gump, but it's not Forrest Gump. It's a different animal. I mean, it has the same kind of humanity to it, which is what I'm pretty good at,” says Eric Roth about his latest film Here, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and reuniting actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
On today’s podcast, we speak with Oscar winning screenwriter Eric Roth about the challenges of writing the screenplay for Here that mostly takes place in one room, with a fixed camera that never moves. The movie explores the ordinary lives of multiple generations of families in a way that many will find relatable, heartbreaking and, at times, claustrophobic.
“I'm not sure [the characters in Here] are extraordinary or not, but they show the length and breadth of what people can and can't do and when they're trapped. I think when it works that way dramatically, it's quite lovely and quite beautiful. I don't want to use the word profound, but I think the [movie] is profound to a certain extent because it is just about the regularity of life. And that, from dinosaurs to the future, it's going to keep going. Hopefully people will find great joy in how they're living and I'm sure great pain too, but I think that's just sort of the circle of life,” he says.
We also discuss some of his other films like Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
He shared this advice about using subtext in screenplays. “I think that I'm always trying to find a way to enhance the scene with not only subtext, but with some kind of metaphor and make it possibly more interesting as to getting to the root of people's feelings without them having to vomit out what they're saying you know. It's not easy, but I think as I've gotten more successful and more accomplished at it,” he says.
To hear more of Eric Roth’s advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.
“Comedy and scares are so similar. I've found that in a lot of my scripts, it's almost like you're taking the peaks and valleys of humor, and the peaks and valleys of scares, and flipping them on each other. So, you have the scare that you come down from for a moment of brevity and humor, or just character work, and then you do another scare. You’ve relaxed them and then scare them again. The effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,” says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide.
In this episode, we speak with Seth Sherwood, writer of horror movies like Leatherface and Hell Fest. He was also nominated for an Emmy for writing the TV show Light as a Feather. I chat with him about the long process of making Hell Fest with producer Gale Ann Hurd, the difference between internal and external horror, and his definition of grounded horror that’s so popular these days. He also gives his advice on what he thinks is the single best thing an emerging horror writer can do to help their career.
“Right now, the industry is in a retraction, there’s an implosion and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break in, I say I don’t know, but I think you’ll never go wrong in actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know it’s a whole other path and it’s a difficult thing to do but people will always watch stuff before they read stuff if they’re not writers. And those people are the gatekeepers. I always wanted to make my own films, but my writing career took off and I'm actually in a spot where I'm going backwards, where I have done so many writing assignments in the last few years but things aren't getting made – so, I’m going to go make a microbudget horror film on my own with my friends. The thing that I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. Because at least it's a thing that can be seen. And that has more weight than a script right now,” he says.
To hear more about horror writing from Seth’s perspective, listen to the podcast.
“We wanted the whole series, but specifically the pilot episode, to lure you in with the kind of comfort and coziness of the 80s nostalgia and the trappings of John Hughes movies, and all of that, while also giving it the 80s heavy metal flavor, and then start to build paranoia and change the vibe a little bit throughout. But we always knew that the series was going to hinge on this scene with Judith [Jessica Treska] where you realize that the beautiful girl next door is actually so much trouble!” says Matthew Scott Kane, creator and showrunner of Peacock’s Hysteria! Starring Julie Bowen, Anna Camp and Bruce Campbell.
The show explores the so-called Satanic Panic that actually happened in the 1980s at a fictionalized high school in the midwest. When a varsity football player disappears under mysterious circumstances, a struggling teen heavy metal band realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by creating a fake Satanic cult – to their surprise, everyone is into it. Things quickly get out of control when the town takes the cult more seriously than the high school band members.
In this episode of the Write On podcast, Kane talks about delving into the generational fear of teenagers, balancing horror with humor, and writing characters who need “to be seen” by their peers. He also shares details about his journey to becoming a professional TV writer, specifically the many benefits of being an assistant in Hollywood.
“The biggest gift of being an assistant – which is not an easy job, it’s very difficult, it’s very time consuming, you have to be available 24/ 7 and it takes a lot out of you – but the best possible thing that you can get, and not all showrunners will do this, is to make yourself available to watch every step of the creative process. Make sure you are in the room while they are breaking story. Make sure you are reading outlines that are coming in. Make sure you’re in concept meetings, tone meetings, production meetings, all of these things that might feel like they don’t have anything to do with writing, but they have everything to do with writing,” says Kane.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“Sometimes I think [the show Pachinko] is almost too personal. I feel like every show, you look at it and say, ‘How much of myself is in this show?’ I did a show [The Whispers] about children who were communicating with an invisible alien force and somehow, I had to figure out how to make it part of me as well. We try to put ourselves in as much of our work as possible. But with this show, the tipping point almost fell in the other direction, where I felt so personally invested. I felt very much like this is my family’s story, as well. That responsibility sometimes felt burdensome. So many of the cast and crew have said that there's a responsibility with this show that almost feels too much. But at the end of the day I think it's a thing that made us work harder. I think the show is as good as it is because people cared,” says Pachinko showrunner and creator Soo Hugh about making the story personal to her.
In this episode, we speak to Hugh about the challenges of writing a show where characters speak in three languages, making the characters relatable to an American audience, and the responsibility of telling the stories of strong women over generations.
“In Korean families, we always have these jokes that everyone knows who’s running the house – your mother! I think it's the strength of Korean women that have just carried us through,” she says.
We even ask Hugh about her work on one of my favorite shows The Terror, and what she thinks really happened to the real-life British crew on the Terror and Erebus ships that got stuck in the Artic ice. Her answer may surprise you.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“I think what Tim [Burton] does is he's always trying to simplify. That’s the essence of a classic filmmaker. People think he's wild and crazy and does all these things. His movies are brilliantly composed frames and he's always looking for simplicity. All of his big movies, they're really family dramas dressed up in whatever genre he's in. That's really what they are. And I think people think he’s always strange and weird and likes dark thing, but no! It's a classic story with good drama. And then he brings his sensibility to it,” says about the biggest lesson Al Gough has learned working with director Tim Burton on both the TV show Wednesday and the new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
In this episode, we speak with writing team Al Gough and Miles Millar about creating the hit Netflix show Wednesday, how they cultivated a relationship with director Tim Burton and how that led to the sequel to Beetlejuice after more than 15 sequel scripts have surfaced over the last 36 years.
Gough and Miles talk about crafting a mother/daughter love story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and delving into grief, something that all families face at some point or another. The writers also share their insight into adding new characters in the mix and creating the strange yet rewarding musical numbers for the movie that includes one totally bonkers song.
Miles Millar also shares this career advice about staying in your lane when it comes to genre:
“If you write a spec or a script that sells, and it's a romantic comedy, then you should really stay in the romantic comedy world and arena for a while. We always jumped around which I think hurt us initially. We did an action movie, we did a comedy, we did this, we did that. We did a fantasy. So, pick a lane. I think successful writers usually pick a lane and get known to do one thing – which can be constricting and suffocating, but I think it's something that's important in terms of a career.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out now in theaters.
“I think that Sunny [the robot], as a character, is kind of emblematic of this conundrum we have with A.I. In one scene she is cute and warm and is serving Suzie's [Rashida Jones] emotional needs and is brimming with potential. And that's really enticing. And then in the next scene, she is diabolical, and is going to like, cut a bitch! That is A.I. There are so many great things it can do, and there's so many terrible scary things that it can do. At the end of the day, it's up to us as society to figure out how we're going to use it,” says Katie Robbins, showrunner and creator of the AppleTV+ show Sunny. In this episode of the Final Draft’s Write On Podcast, we talk with Katie Robbins about delving into artificial intelligence, Japanese culture and making a robot appealing (and frightening) to audiences in her show Sunny. Based on the book, The Dark Manual, by Irish writer Colin O’Sullivan, Robbins says she made changes to the story to allow for exploring isolation and the importance of female friendships. “I was excited about the idea of giving [Suzie] a couple of female friends. So one is in the body of a robot and then the other is this aspiring mixologist who she meets in the pilot, Mixxy [Annie the Clumsy]… and telling the story of a friendship like love triangle. Mixxy is a little jealous of Sunny's relationship with Suzie and Sunny is really jealous of Mixxy's relationship with Suzie. The film The Favourite was a big influence for a lot of their relationship dynamics. And it was really fun exploring what that is if one of the friends is an A.I.” she says. To hear more about the show Sunny that’s currently streaming on AppleTV+, and hear Robbins’s advice on writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.
Almost all the characters [in Fallout, the TV show] are brand new… We really took the world of Fallout that had been built up and iterated upon by other video game writers over the years and we wanted to do our own version of it rather than retell any version that someone else has already done. Our attitude was like, ‘Okay, let's say this is a new Fallout game. What would it be?’ So, we took the world, the background, the themes of the games and the tone. It's a new story. New people,” says Graham Wagner, co-creator and showrunner of Fallout on Amazon Prime. In this episode of the Final Draft’s Write On Podcast, I talk with Graham Wagner about Fallout, a show based on the beloved videogame, that’s earned 17 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Wagner talks about taking the structure and tone from Sergio Leone’s Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and focusing on three central figures: Lucy (Ella Purnell), The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and Maximus (Aaron Moten), and intertwining their disparate storylines. “We made an intentional collision of genres because Walton Goggins' character is very much of the wasteland of the Western genre, which is sort of apocalyptic in its own way, depending on your perspective. There isn't the infrastructure and people are trying to build civilization on the ashes of the civilization that has been eradicated before them. You know there's a lot of parallels there,” says Wagner. To learn more about the show Fallout and hear Wagner’s advice for writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.
“We were all six or seven years old when [the first Karate Kid movie] came out. So all of us saw it in the theater and I think for all of us, it was probably the first time any of us had seen a movie where there was such an amazing twist that happened. The whole time, we’re thinking that Daniel LaRusso's not learning [karate], that he's doing all these chores for this guy and then suddenly it's, ‘Wait! He's been learning karate the whole time!’ So anyone who watched the movie was blown away by that moment, but when you're six or seven it's a formative memory.
So it was a movie that was meaningful to all of us,” says Jon Hurwitz, showrunner and executive producer of the Netflix show Cobra Kai.
In this episode, I speak to all three showrunners of Cobra Kai, Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg about what the show means to them now that we’re in the sixth and final season. We discuss why they thought it was imperative to tell the story from the character Johnny Lawrence’s (William Zabka), point of view and they hint at the possibility of a new spinoff show – perhaps about a young Mr. Miyagi – coming soon.
They also shared their advice for writing a spec script. “It's really tough to stand out. And that's what you have to figure out. In our early scripts, it was that first page – it was being R-rated and provocative and saying something that gets you noticed and stands out in the marketplace. Because if you're just writing a genre story, it's just like why?” says Josh Heald.
To hear more about the sixth season of the show and their great advice for writing spec scripts, listen to the podcast.
“I came up doing improv where failure is the golden standard. And in improv, if you're not failing, you're doing something wrong. I feel really lucky that that was one of my bridges into entertainment and creativity, to have such a loving relationship with failure because, boy! As a writer, your days are filled with it and rejection and killing your darlings. I think comedy and improv have taught me how wonderful failure can be and how much we can get out of it for sure,” says Carrie Solomon, writer of the new Netflix romantic comedy, A Family Affair starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Ephron.
In this episode, Carrie talks about working as an assistant when she first came to Hollywood, calling it a job that can be, “Thankless at times, certainly, but really rewarding in the amount of information that you can absorb.”
She also talks about bringing her own life experience – like being an assistant – to her storytelling.
“Thematically, I think a lot of lot of the arcs in this movie are certainly my own. It’s my own therapy coming to the screen, going to the page. I should probably send my therapist a Netflix., QR code to go check out the movie,” Carrie says.
Carrie also shares a lot of advice, including how to get your writing noticed. “For anyone who wants to make a splash or write something crazy or noticeable, write something that's crazy to you. Don't worry about what. If you yourself were entertained or wowed by an idea or you think, oh my god, that's absolutely like ass backwards crazy. Try it. I have a lot of friends that the minute they stop worrying about audiences or development execs or what people want to read, that's when they really found their voice and it clicked. I think being personal is one of the one of the quickest ways to find success.”
To hear more about Carrie’s writing journey, listen to the podcast.
In this episode, I talk with Dave Holstein, co-writer of the upcoming Disney/Pixar sequel Inside Out 2, which takes us back into the mind of a now teenage Riley as she navigates a whole new crop of personified emotions, including Envy, voiced by The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, and of course, Anxiety, voiced by Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke.
Dave describes what it’s like working with a well-oiled storytelling powerhouse like Disney/Pixar, as well as co-writing with Inside Out franchise veteran Meg LeFauve to not only recapture some of the magic of the original film but to also create some of their own.
“Just a shout out to everybody who's listening who has ever written a movie. This is a true story –
I was writing a movie. I had been paid to write a movie and I was writing a movie when I got Late Night. And when I got Late Night, my first thought wasn’t, 'Oh my god, I'm going to have my own talk show.’ My first thought was, ‘Oh my god, I don't have to finish that screenplay. I'm so happy!’” says Seth Meyers, adding, “Anybody who can finish a screenplay – I have so much respect for you. It's so much harder than anything else. And that's the thing, when I watch a terrible movie, I always think, ‘Shout out to whoever finished it. They got three acts. All the characters had names, they did it!’”.
In this episode, I talk with Emmy-winning talk show host and former SNL head writer Seth Meyers. Seth talks about his origins of becoming a comedy writer and performer, his time on SNL, what he looks for in a TV writer, and how Late Night with Seth Meyers has grown over the years as he celebrates the show’s 10th anniversary.
I also asked Seth about the best ways to get your voice as a writer to show through in your writing sample. He says it’s difficult considering the highly competitive environment, but it comes down to making fresh choices.
“The hardest thing I would have to do when I was at SNL was we would receive say, 200 packets of sketch submissions and we'd split them up amongst four of us. It was a slog – not because they were bad sketches but because we'd spent our whole year reading sketches and so you could tell when somebody was aiming to write an SNL script. But then, every now and then, sometimes it was just one line in a sketch, sometimes it was even a character's name, there would be something that would just sort of break through the noise, and you'd look at it and say, ‘Oh, I don't think I've ever seen anybody make that choice before.’ So I just encourage people to try to do the thing that even you haven't seen,” says Seth.
To hear more of what Seth Meyers has to say, listen to the podcast.
“From Robert De Niro, I learned not to force anything. Not to force your idea of how something should be and then go from there. Not, ‘Oh, this should be funny,’ or ‘Oh, I'm going make you cry.’ That's the wrong thing. You just need to think about the thing the character is experiencing and don't push it – have it happen. And he was obsessive with me about not trying to make anything funny and he would say to me, ‘Tony, it's very funny. But I want you to see the funny happen naturally from the authenticity of it,’” says Tony Spiridakis on working on the screenplay for Ezra with Robert De Niro who stars in the film, along with Bobby Cannavale, William A. Fitzgerald, and Rose Byrne.
In this episode of the Write On podcast, Spiridakis talks about how Ezra was inspired by his own journey of raising a son with autism. The film shows the very human side of parenting from the point of view of a standup comedian who loves his son desperately but doesn’t know how best to help him. Part road movie, part comedy, Ezra tackles both the perils and heart-felt comedy of the father and son bond.
Spiridakis also talks about getting cast as an actor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, then unceremoniously getting let go from the film. He shares how he turned his disappointments as an actor into a career as a playwright, screenwriter, and director.
“Okay, so the acting didn't pan out as I had hoped it would, but I'm still a storyteller and I think that's the beautiful thing about whatever it is that we gravitate towards – one superpower or another,” says Tony.
To find out more about writing the screenplay Ezra, listen to the podcast.
“One of the main things I’ve learned from Shonda [Rhimes] is to focus on what you really want to see, yourself, in a season. Not necessarily what should happen. I remember on Scandal, in the writers room, we would craft what we thought were these perfectly structured stories. And Shonda would come in and pitch something that was really wild, kind of out there and maybe didn’t fit perfectly into the structure,” says Jess Brownell, showrunner for Bridgerton Season 3. “Ultimately, when the show aired, that would always be the thing that Twitter would light up about. So it’s taught me to work from that place first. Don’t just worry about, ‘Okay, what are the beats that make sense to get from A to B?,’ but ‘What’s juicy? What do you want to see?’”
On today’s episode, Jess talks about the friends-to-lovers storyline with Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlin), and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), why the show leaned into super fun rom-com tropes this season and why sex scenes always have to be character-driven.
Jess also shared this advice for writing period drama: “My advice for approaching a period piece would be approach it the same way you would a modern piece. Focus on: What are you trying to say that’s new? And how are modern audiences going to connect with these characters? You can always go back and do a regency pass at the end. I often write a scene just like I would for a modern-day show and go back and fix the dialogue later,” she says.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“Tennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because it’s so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game that’s so steeped in repression, but also in wild abandon. There’s all these rigid rules and prescriptions of movement and boxes that the ball has to fall into. It’s all so tightly organized and yet, once the ball is in play, physics takes over and it’s wild chaos. You see these two people responding to each other in an almost instinctual and subconscious way. So, it felt like there was a lot of energy in tennis that was exciting to me cinematically.”
In this episode of the Write On podcast, Justin talks about using tennis as a metaphor for relationships, the complicated choices his characters make, and the challenges going from playwright to screenwriter. “It’s really useful to have some knowledge of yourself as a dramatist or as a storyteller before you go into writing a screenplay because screenplays are so unforgiving. If you’ve already been working as a playwright or novelist, you’ve got an advantage there. The main thing I was focusing on writing Challengers was that I wanted to feel like I could see the movie on the page because it was a movie I really wanted to watch…You can’t tell if something is good as you’re writing it. You can’t tell if something is going to be a safe bet for anybody to make. All you can tell is if the movie is alive to you. If that’s true, there is a chance that the movie will be alive on the page for other people, to the point where they’ll want to make it with you,” he says.
To hear more from Justin, listen to the podcast.
“We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It was a long journey. You have to laugh sometimes, because we had some really grotesque imagery in our film. We even have a demon phallus in the film and nobody was worried about that. It was really the image of the vagina that was getting us that rating,” says Arkasha Stevenson, director, and co-screenwriter for The First Omen, about initially getting an NC17 rating from the Motion Picture Association. After much back and forth, the film is now rated R.
The First Omen was written by Tim Smith and Arkasha Stevenson with Stevenson also directing. The film is a prequel to the classic horror film The Omen (1976) and stays true to the narrative that brings Damian, the antichrist, into the world. But keeping faithful to the original film proved to be challenging in a number of ways.
“Because we grew up on The Omen,” says Stevenson, “it has such a special place in our hearts. We knew that it has such a special place every horror fan’s heart, too… We didn't want to tarnish anything, so trying to find a balance where we were trying to create something new, and have our own world, and characters and messages within that, but also pay homage to the original omen, and also have tie-ins and callbacks – it was interesting to try and figure out how to have a conversation with the original film,” she says.
We also discuss how the film explores the theme of control over women’s bodies and how the current political climate factored into the story considering abortion is such a hot-button issue. To hear more about the writing of the film and how Stevenson and Smith came to the project, listen to the podcast.
Writer Michael Brandt is no stranger to the big and small screen. Having written such thrilling films like 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Catch That Kid, he is also the co-creator of NBC’s Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Justice. His latest film, which he adapted from the book, "Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home," is a story of friendship and survival. The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu. Final Draft sat down with Brandt to find out how this story of an adventure racing athlete who goes on a 435-mile journey through the jungle with his newfound friend, Arthur the dog, came to life. “Producer, Tucker Tooley, said, 'Here's this book. ESPN has done the story on this guy, but I'm not sure it's for you,'" said Brandt. "Meaning he didn't think I'd be into it. He gave me the one-line, and I said that sounds amazing.” We sat down with Brandt to hear about this heart-warming true story and how he brought it to the big screen. Listen to hear the full interview.
"When I sat down to start writing it, I sort of like came up with air a couple of hours later with a movie," says writer/director Kobi Libii about the origins of his new satirical comedy, The American Society of Magical Negros. “I think it's kind of beautiful that people don't have a reaction that I recognize because my job is to be really honest, especially about stuff that is that I'm sort of afraid to say.”
Final Draft sat down with the writer/director to talk more about how he created this story about a man who is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who spend their time making life easier for white people. The film stars Justin Smith and David Alan Grier and releases into theaters March 15.
Listen to the podcast to hear more about Libii's journey in making The American Society of Magical Negros.
“Just write a story you want to tell and don't try to write something which you think you can sell to somebody because that way is madness. You have to write what you want to write whether it works or not for other people. But if it's not authentic to you, it's doomed at some point along the road. So stick to your guns!” says award-winning writer, Andrew Bergman about writing your first spec script.
The Writers Guild of America East has again partnered with FilmNation and Final Draft for the NY Screenwriting Fellowship that fosters underrepresented New York screenwriters to help get them career mentorships as they navigate their way into the business. On today’s episode, I speak to two of the program’s mentors, award-winning screenwriter Andrew Bergman, best known for his script Blazing Saddles, and producer Caroline Kaplan, known for the recent Oscar-nominated animated film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I also speak to their mentee, Irina Rodriguez about her journey as an emerging writer and what it’s like to get guidance from these two accomplished filmmakers.
“I have always just felt like mentorship is such a big part of the independent film community and what we all do – it's really such a supportive community in that way,” says producer Caroline Kaplan, adding, “This program is really exciting because of how that they create it, both from an artistic mentorship and sort of a business mentorship so we can holistically help somebody… I think connection and community is what it’s all about.”
To hear more advice and what Andrew learned from working with director Mel Brooks, listen to the podcast.
“The movie in many ways is about creativity. And it's one of the reasons why I really love it. It's not just about an evil haunted teddy bear. It's about the power of imagination. There's a reason why the movie isn't called Chauncey - it's called Imaginary. It was really fun as screenwriters to just let our creativity run wild and think of all the different ways we could explore imagination and creativity through the lens of a movie,” says Jeff Wadlow, director and co-writer of Blumhouse’s new film Imaginary. In this episode, I talk with Wadlow and his co-writers, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, about digging into scary tropes and how the character Chauncey the Bear evolved over four years of development and numerous script drafts. We also discuss how movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Labyrinth, Friday the 13th and Alice in Wonderland served as inspiration and why horror films should be a good time. “I would tell people to make their horror fun. I think those very grim dirges that can sometimes get made as horror films – while they certainly are satisfying to a segment of the audience – they're not my favorite. I think you're going to have a lot more luck getting your movie made if you capture the fun of horror. There's no reason why you can't have a good time and be scared. It should be it should be a roller coaster,” says Jeff. To dig deeper into Imaginary, listen to the podcast.
“I would encourage anyone to lean into the specificity of their personal experience [when it comes to writing]. I mean, we're at a time now, fortunately, where everyone is more open to those kinds of stories… Look at something like Beef. The specificity of that storytelling is what makes it special. It's not like they come out with a logline, saying, ‘This is a story about Asian families.’ It's a story about two people who get involved in the road rage incident, but all of that is set in the context of a very specific community. That's what makes it really special,” says Albert Kim, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Currently the most popular show on Netflix, Avatar: The Last Airbender is based on the animated Nickelodeon show that premiered back in 2005. There are many challenges going from a beloved animated show to live-action, but Albert Kim helms the show with integrity and his own personal cultural specificity. “One of the first notes I gave to the crew and our props and set department was: food is really important. We’ve got to get the food right. Asian families are often, a little reticent about expressing emotions. It's very uncommon, at least in my experience, for parents to tell their kids they love them. Instead, they express it other ways – for example, through food. Whenever an Asian parent comes and asks, ‘Have you eaten? Are you eating enough?’ It's their way of saying, ‘I love you.’ So, food has a lot of meaning in Asian communities,” says Albert. Albert also talks about his unusual journey to become a TV writer and the surprising way he thinks Avatar: The Last Airbender can bring hope and joy to today’s world. To go deeper into the show, listen to the podcast.
“I think what's unique about this biopic and about Bob [Marley’s] story is that it really wasn't about his ego, it wasn't about him trying to be the biggest star in the world. It was about him connecting with God. I mean, he would smoke weed to kind of lower his ego and raise his consciousness so that he could read scripture, right? He would take these basic concepts: love thy neighbor, all people are equal, and try and channel that and inhabit that,” says Frank E. Flowers, co-writer of Bob Marley: One Love. On today’s episode, I speak to Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter about taking on reggae icon Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) for their new biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, also written by Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green. After an assassination attempt on Marley and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) in 1976, Marley went to London in self-exile. It’s there Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded Exodus, which some consider to be the best album of the 20th century. With scattered flashbacks, the film mostly takes place from 1976 to 1978. “With the screenplay, we talked a great deal about how to tell the story. It's obviously a big life and a huge canvas and certainly, you could do the cradle-to-grave version where this happened, that happened, etc. But I'm always a fan of opening a movie as hot as possible, like start with an incident that just grabs you and is undeniably compelling and we both obviously arrived at the biggest incident in the movie in that sense is the shooting which is just horrific and feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere. It also lent itself to the classic structure of the Hero's Journey where our hero is shot, has this incident that happens in his home and then has to leave home and learn about himself before he comes back home again,” says Terence Winter. I also talk to Winter about writing The Wolf of Wall Street, The Sopranos and one of my favorite shows, Xena: Warrior Princess. He also talks about the downside of writing for a dolphin when he worked on the show Flipper. “There were only 10 stories in the world that organically involve a dolphin. When you get to the eleventh one and then you look at each other like what do we do now?” says Winter. To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“I always go back to theme. Why are you writing this story? What is that final couple of minutes of the movie and what do you want the audience to feel? I kind of always build backward from that in some ways. In a movie, how do I make the 118 minutes preceding those two minutes build to those last two minutes? To me that’s a really good film. And anything that's not helping build to those last two minutes, throw it out!,” says John Orloff, writer/creator of Masters of the Air, the new nine-part series streaming on AppleTV+.
In this episode, Orloff talks about being an un-produced writer and the unusual way he landed the job writing for HBO’s Band of Brothers.
He learned a lot from Executive Producer Tom Hanks:
“One of the things [Tom Hanks] said to me is, ‘We're going to reveal character through procedure.’ That means how you get a plane ready to go, it means pushing buttons, how you do all that stuff. I will take you back to Apollo 13. That is about three guys in a room the size of a bathtub – just pushing buttons. And yet we know and care about them. And so, the procedures of getting an airplane in the air was an opportunity to remind the audience that okay, there's no magic buttons to push in 1943 to get an airplane in the air… Let's capture that and let's explain that to the audience early on in the first episode or two and then they'll know that that happens every time,” says John.
For a deeper dive into the show Masters of the Air, now streaming on AppleTV+, listen to the podcast.
"You want to write stuff you want to see, that's the key. Just write something new something fresh, something interesting," says director and co-writer William Eubank of Land of Bad, the new intense, action-packed movie about a Delta Force team that gets ambushed in enemy territory. Final Draft sat down with Eubank to talk about his writing process, directing Liam Hemsworth, Russell Crowe and Luke Hemsworth in this unhinged survival story full of exciting set pieces and big action moments.
So, what's his advice to a young writer wanting to get in on the action movie game? "I write very short and sweet, so it's fast to read because that anxiety needs to be read quickly, in my opinion. You don't want to get the page so thick. I'll just buzz through it so there's a lot of white space and it's easy and it's punchy," says Eubank. For more tips like this and to hear the whole episode, click below.
“I grew up as a huge fan of Westerns but the reality of the landscape at the time was that it was incredibly diverse. And we've rarely seen that diversity on screen. I feel incredibly fortunate and humbled by the opportunity to show what life was really like in Indian territory in 1875. That it was a melting pot of cultures and races. It speaks to the beauty of Reconstruction,” says Chad Feehan, showrunner for Lawmen: Bass Reeves on Paramount+. The show is part of the highly successful Taylor Sheridan television landscape, that includes shows like Yellowstone and 1883.
On today’s episode, I speak to Chad about taking on the historical figure of Bass Reeves (played by David Oyelowo), who lived during America’s Reconstruction period that is rarely depicted in film or TV. Though Chad and Bass come from very different backgrounds, Chad says he was able to write the character of Bass by focusing on the big emotions the two men shared. He gives this advice about writing people different than yourself:
“Tap into your deepest emotions and find a way to relate them to what the character is going through. I think a lot of times when, you start writing, you try to imagine emotions, right? But the range of emotions that we all feel is relatively universal. They just take different shapes and sizes, right? We all know what heartbreak is, we all know what joy is. Tap into that and then transpose it into a situation that the character is also experiencing, if that makes sense. I learned about sudden loss with my mom. I've learned about deep-seated overwhelming love through my children and that emotion is universal,” he says.
To hear more about Chad Feehan’s background, working on the FX show, Ray Donovan, and his overall writing process, listen to the podcast.
“Personally, I think writing is bleeding. It's blood magic. It's very hard to do,” says writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett of the new Southern gothic romance, Miller’s Girl.
Bartlett started her career as an actress, but it was an unexpected journey that led her to Los Angeles and magically landed her in the world of studio screenwriting. After spending a year at Marvel Studios, writing a draft of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – only to be replaced on the job – Jade’s first feature film is now in theaters.
In the podcast, Bartlett talks about dealing with rejection, getting hired to rewrite scripts and making the shift to directing. But at the end of the day, she says writing is really about overcoming your fear to get your big ideas onto the page – even if the first draft sucks.
“You’ve got to give up the perfectionism. It is not going to come out perfect. I think a lot of writers are editing in our head while we're doing it as opposed to just like letting it flow out. I would say let yourself write the 170-page draft. There's going be so much magic that will come from it,” says Jade.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“I think that approaching the grand things through the smallest entryways possible is the best way to go about taking on these massive issues… So yes, this movie is about race and racism and art and who's allowed to make certain kinds of art - these are really big, unwieldy issues. But the reason that I think people can relate to them –and it doesn't feel so top heavy or clumsy – is because you see it through a character that was deeply personal to me,” says Cord Jefferson, writer/director of American Fiction.
Based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction is a powerful and often poignantly funny exploration of race in literature, film, family and the marketplace. It toes the line between being relatable and absurd.
“I wanted to make a movie that felt satirical but never farcical. I wanted the movie to feel like life and life is neither one thing or another, it’s neither comedy nor tragedy,” says Jefferson who made the decision to use humor in the film but he never let the comedy get too broad.
Jefferson also talks about his journey from journalist – an editor at Gawker – to writing for TV shows like The Watchmenand Succession.
“If you can write an interesting article, you can probably write a novel. If you can write a novel, you can write a screenplay. I think that it's the same basic idea, which is you need to keep somebody interested in what you're saying from the beginning to the end and what is the best way to keep somebody interested in what you're saying for this long?” says Jefferson.
Take a listen to the podcast for a deep dive into the screenplay for American Fiction.
“The lesson we keep learning is that the thing that breaks you [into Hollywood] is your weirdest idea. The thing that only you can write… All of our friends who have done that – it's been a fulcrum in their career,” says Phil Lord, co-writer of Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.
On today’s episode, I chat with Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham about taking the Spider-Man franchise into the modern era, making it fresh, heartfelt and multicultural. While Lord and Miller both won Oscars for 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, they brought Callaham on board to help finish the sequel and collaborate on the third installment, Beyond the Spiderverse.
What surprised me most about my Zoom chat with the trio was how down to earth they seemed, how open and honest they were about struggling to make Across the Spiderverse work for everyone, including their discerning animators in India.
Lord, Miller and Callaham also talk about taking a risk with the first act of Across the Spiderverse, turning their villain Spot into a multidimensional character and why creating a “multiverse” of Spider People was important to them.
Callaham also shared this turning point in his career: “I had not gone to film school so everything I learned about screenwriting was from Syd Field and from coffee table books and there were all these rules about how you have to write and how a structure has to be. And how you have to handle things on the page. Ten years in, I got really bored. I felt like I wasn't being honest about the way I was writing material… So I wrote this fairly idiotic, ridiculous script but I wrote it in a style that sounded like the way that I talk, it was conversational and it was fun. I had little of asides to the reader which I know sounds really awful, but it seemed to work at the time and that opened my career up pretty substantially… That happened because I was being more honest with myself as a writer and I was not trying to write like other people anymore. It worked and I never looked back,” he says.
Listen to hear more about the writing process for Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.
“When we were starting [to write screenplays], we were told, ‘Write your story, write your story, write your story.’ But our story is not that interesting. So, I would say, don't write your story necessarily, write the story that you fall in love with and find the human connection between you and the characters that you are depicting,” says Dumb Money co-writer Rebecca Angelo.
On today’s episode, I talk with writing partners Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo about their recent film Dumb Money, that tells the true story of the Game Stop stock roller coaster ride led by real-life populist hero, Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, played by Paul Dano. Lauren and Rebecca talk about writing the screenplay super quickly because there were at least nine other competing projects in development at the time. It seems everyone in Hollywood wanted to tell this feel-good story that has a happy ending for the common man.
They also tell me about using the structure from sports movies to craft the screenplay, how they employ “radical empathy” will their characters and the importance of adding comedic elements when telling complicated stories.
“You know, we could have made a choice to have this movie be a heavy drama. But it felt like we were able to land some bigger ideas when people are laughing before or after even during those moments,” says Lauren Schuker Blum.
For a deeper dive into their writing process, take a listen to the podcast.
Final Draft's Write On Podcast sits down with Blackberry writers Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller to talk about how they wrote this epic story of the rise and fall of the world's first portable email machine.
Johnson and Miller loosely adapted the script from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. The film Blackberry is a bio-pic dramedy that follows the fictional story of the Blackberry creator Mike Lazaridis, played by Jay Baruchel and his main investor played by Glenn Howerton.
“Because we had the book, it was the blueprint for the movie. It has so many of the facts and details that we extrapolated and then sort of placed in the script," says Miller.
The production of the movie was a bit like the push to get Blackberry into the marketplace - there was a lot of hustle. “The structure of the movie as it stands came from needing to reuse the same locations over, and over again,” says Johnson.
We sat down to hear about this wild ride from true story to script to budgetary concerns and on-screen production. Click to hear more and listen to the podcast.
“I just really encourage people to truly go to those darker places because the way forward in dealing with dark material is not to do some partial version of it. Go there so that it sparks a truth to people watching it because people want to be moved. People want to see their experiences reflected in a new way back at them. If you're drawn to it and it's meaningful to you, chances are it's going to be meaningful to others. Stick with it and be brave,” says writer/director Sean Durkin about exploring the darker side of human nature on film.
Durkin’s new film is The Iron Claw, starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White as brothers from the real-life wrestling family, the Von Erich Brothers, who are said to be cursed. Durkin talks about his childhood obsession with wrestling, using the structure of a Greek Tragedy to craft the screenplay and investigating American masculinity through the lens of this one Texas family.
Just a warning: This podcast discusses suicide as it relates to the characters in the film. If you or anyone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crises Lifeline.
To hear more about Durkin's journey of writing and directing The Iron Claw, click to listen to the podcast.
The film Air was released in theaters back in April – right before the WGA Writer's Strike. It tells the story of how the iconic partnership between Nike shoes and basketball player Michael Jordan came to be way back in 1984. It’s one of those partnerships that really wasn’t supposed to happen, but when it did, it changed the world of sports marketing forever.
Directed by Ben Affleck, the script is written by Alex Convery and made the Blacklist in 2021. But just like the partnership between Nike and Michael Jordan, there are a million reasons why this film shouldn’t have happened but luckily, it did!
“If you are really passionate about an idea and believe in it, you should write it. Whether it seems practical or not because that’s typically going to produce your best work. And producing your best work is ultimately the goal, right?” says Convery.
Convery also says it’s important to be patient and persevere. “I came out from Chicago in 2010 and it took until 2023 to get a movie released. It can take a long, long, long time and that’s okay…there’s no finish lines. Just invest in the work itself. Surprise yourself on the page, have fun and make yourself laugh!”
For a deeper dive into Convery’s screenplay, listen to the podcast.
“I like having sympathy for the devil. And all of them are devilish!” says Emerald Fennell about her characters in the new film Saltburn.
Writer/director/actress Emerald Fennell dazzled us with 2020’s Promising Young Woman, for which she took home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Now she’s back with Saltburn, a shocking romantic tragedy (or triumph according to her!). On this episode of the podcast, I speak to Emerald in depth about crafting the screenplay for Saltburn and finding empathy for even the most devilish characters.
Just a note: there are spoilers in this interview which I feel are crucial to breaking down some of the most controversial scenes in the film, including the taboo “vampire scene” and the startling “bathtub scene.”
“That scene was never meant to be disgusting. It is a love scene. It’s an act of, not service quite, but of devotion. It’s a kind of prayer. I think the thing films often get wrong about sex is that it’s just two people rubbing up against each other, it’s penetration. But the really fascinating thing about sex and desire is that it’s much, much more complicated than that,” says Emerald Fennell.
Saltburn stars Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi and Rosemund Pike. It’s currently playing in theaters and streams on Amazon Prime Dec. 22.
“It really comes down to scene work. Do these characters pop? Is this fun to read? Is it fun to imagine what’s going to happen next? When you get to the end of that pilot do you want to find out what’s going to happen in the next episode? It’s all of that,” says Graham Yost, showrunner for Silo on AppleTV+.
You may not know the name Graham Yost, but you certainly know his TV shows: Justified, The Americans, Slow Horses, Sneaky Pete, From the Earth to the Moon, and Band of Brothers just to name a few – he also wrote the blockbuster film Speed in 1994.
On today’s episode, I chat with Graham about his show Silo on AppleTV+ which is a startling apocalyptic thriller that’s been renewed for a second season. It stars Rebecca Ferguson, David Oyelowo, Common and Tim Robbins. We talk about the lessons he learned making Speed, which show impacted his writing the most and if a new season of Justified – that includes Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), will be coming back to television.
Graham also shares his advice for emerging writers. “The big thing I say to writers who are starting out is, ‘What are you working on next?’ If they only have that one project, well, you need more. You need to find out what you’re good at. That’s the job. We’re paid to write,” he says.
“We can’t make Lawrence of Arabia anymore – not that that’s not a good movie, but it’s kind of a thing of the past,” says screenwriter David Scarpa about writing the script for Napoleon.
Scarpa says both he and director Ridley Scott wanted to bring a freshness to the historical figure from our history books by, “Showing the more irreverent, dark, more psychologically motivated side of [Napoleon].”
In our conversation, we dig into writing the battle scenes at Toulon and Austerlitz and how to know when to stick to history and when to embellish scenes for dramatic effect.
We also talk about the complicated relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, played by Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby, respectively, in the film, and how the power dynamics shift through the movie.
And if you’re wondering why Josephine has short, spiky hair at the beginning of the film – Scarpa gives an explanation based on the shocking fashion trends of the time period that will make your blood run cold.
David also gives his expert advice on tackling historical figures and finding the scintillating details that may have been lost to history. “[Take] those little moments that tell a part of the story that you wouldn’t have otherwise known and then expand on those. Find things that are so small, they’re relatable on a human level,” says Scarpa.
“My cardinal rule – the rule that you cannot break is: don't be boring. Because you can have the perfect script that follows every screenplay formatting rule, but if you're boring, it doesn't matter. First and foremost, you’ve got to hook the reader,” says screenplay and short story writer Chris Hicks.
Hicks is the author of a short story called “I Am Not Alone,” that recently was the subject of a five-party bidding war that came down to Warner Bros. and Netflix, with Netflix proving the victor. Genre writer Misha Green (Lovecraft Country) is set to write the screenplay and Jessica Chastain is attached to star.
Hicks is part of a growing group of short story writers who are quickly making the jump from Reddit (r/NoSleep) to the big screen. But Hicks’s success didn’t come overnight. He talks about the long process, sometimes even years, it takes to perfect a short story. But it’s clear he understands the relationship between reader and writer better than most.
“You have a very limited window to grab somebody's attention. In the case of writing on Reddit, you have to have a clickbait title, something to entice somebody to click, ‘Oh, what is this?’
And then you've got a paragraph to set the hook…The internet is a vast place and people are fickle with their time, so you have to make it worthwhile for them to hang around,” says Hicks.
To go deeper into Hicks’s writing process and hear details of the bidding war, listen to our podcast.
“I don’t write sex scenes. I write character scenes and sometimes they’re having sex during their character scenes. It’s a beat about character,” says Tony McNamara.
Known for the TV show The Great on Hulu and 2018’s The Favourite, screenwriter Tony McNamara’s new film is Poor Things, staring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe with a genius performance from Mark Ruffalo who’s already getting Best Supporting Actor buzz.
Adapted from the book Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, this film is part Frankenstein story, part fairytale and part coming-of-age story full of female sexual liberation! I chat with Tony about his ability to create fascinating female characters, sex without shame and the ways Poor Things is similar to this year’s blockbuster Barbie – both are wildly different takes on the theme of feminine identity.
“This is a great Frankenstein premise to wrap a story of a young woman entering the world completely naïve and also be a satire about the seeming need for human beings, men in particular, to control. It was about this woman having this adventure and creating herself while everyone around her is trying to control what that creation is,” says McNamara about his vision of the protagonist, Bella Baxter, played by an electric Emma Stone.
To go deeper into McNamara’s writing process, take a listen to the podcast. Poor Things is in theaters Dec. 8.
Eddie Murphy’s new holiday comedy Candy Cane Lane pokes fun at the idea of being super competitive during the Christmas decorating season. Kelly Younger sat down with Final Draft’s Write On podcast to talk about writing the spec script that became a reality in our latest episode.
“My manager who I've had for years always sort of keeping track of my projects, and we put some under when he calls the three Ps: passion, propel, and paycheck. Write something that's a passion project, something that can propel your career and something that’s just a paycheck!” says Younger about writing his passion project Candy Cane Lane on spec.
“I feel extremely lucky to have been on set for every single day and night of the shoot and that is what the director, Reggie Hudland, wanted. We would talk through the scenes with each other we would talk it through with the actors in the moment I was able to pitch alternate lines,” Younger says of the process of filming the holiday movie. Click below to hear more in the full episode.
Candy Cane Lane comes out on Amazon December 1.
“I'm now at a place where I say to myself, ‘What haven't we seen?’ And then we take it to a place that’s completely, absolutely bonkers,” says writer Kirk Ward about his new show The Continental: From The World Of John Wick. “You take the audience down the road of a trope and then turn. That's the joy of collaboration and creativity for me.”
The Continental is a disco noire three-part miniseries that tells the origin story of The Continental Hotel from the famed John Wick universe. In my discussion with Ward and director Albert Hughes, we talk about creating The Continental Hotel as a character in the show, writing a totally unhinged role for Mel Gibson and depicting the High Table in the most unexpected way – even though they were told not to go there.
“Chad [Stahelski, the director of the John Wick films] said, ‘Whatever you do, don't reveal the High Table. Do not come up with your own impression of what the High Table is.’ Well, I don't know what it is. So, we had to really lean into the mysterious elements of this show for that,” says Hughes.
To learn more secrets about The Continental, take a listen to the podcast. The three-part show is currently streaming on Peacock and is a must-see for every John Wick fan.
“A lot of the scenes are [shot in] one take. The space that they hold, the amount of air that they let sit there before saying their next line. I mean it’s an incredible amount of tension and intimacy,” says screenwriter Samy Burch about her new film May December, which streams on Netflix December 1st.
It sounds so simple and commonplace, but it's a lesson in not only great acting but also writing great subtext. Directed by Todd Haynes and starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, May December is about Gracie (Moore), a middle-aged woman who seduced and later married a 13-year-old boy. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress who gets to know Gracie so she can play her in an upcoming film. In my interview, Burch talks about taking inspiration from the real-life story, handling delicate material and finding the dark humor in this strange story of human folly. Samy also breaks down Elizabeth’s powerful monologue at the end of the film which is both hilarious and heartbreaking. “I think it's an intersection of a lot of things. I think it's the climax of Elizabeth's performance. I think we get the sense that it's she's never going to do better than this, she's never going to feel as confident.” To go deeper into the script, take a listen to the podcast.
Final Draft's Write On podcast sits down with Showrunner Chris Black to talk about his new show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. “For it to be successful as a TV series, it couldn't be a show about monsters. It had to be a show about people who happen to live in a world where monsters are real," Black says when describing what it was like to pitch the show to Apple TV. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters picks up the "monsterverse" story after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans and follows one family's journey to uncover secrets about their history linking them to Monarch.
Known for his work on Apple's mind-boggling workplace drama Severance, Black knows what it takes to make a successful TV series. Listen to our podcast to find out more on how to expand a universe, writing for monsters and creating new characters. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premieres on Apple TV+ on November 17.
“Be sneaky and read every script that you can get your hands on. If you can work in a studio, read the original draft, read the revisions, see how the script got to the final script. That's what I was doing. I would use the opportunities of working in that system to learn,” says screenwriter Julian Breece on Final Draft’s Write On Podcast.
Julian, along with Dustin Lance Black, wrote Rustin, the new biopic about little-known civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, played exquisitely by actor Colman Domingo. Rustin, alongside Martin Luther King, helped make the 1963 March on Washington a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement, while dealing with racism and homophobia as an out gay Black man in the 1960s.
Julian shares his inspiration for writing the film, Bayard Rustin’s belief in non-violent civil disobedience and what it was like working with Ava DuVernay on the Netflix series When They See Us.
Julian also talks about sneaking his own scripts into the reading pile while he was working at Disney and other risks he took to help jumpstart his career. Take a listen to the podcast to see what you can learn from Justin’s journey.
Director Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers, is set in the 1970s and tells the story of a grumpy ancient history instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school who’s forced to remain on campus during the Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of the students, an oddball troublemaker (Dominic Sessa), and the school’s cafeteria lady (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose son was recently killed in Vietnam. We speak to screenwriter David Hemingson about getting a very unexpected call from Alexander Payne (which at first he thought was a prank!) asking him to write the screenplay after reading one of his original TV pilots. Hemingson talks about his journey to craft just the right characters for the story, how to make their arcs feel authentic and give them meaningful, emotional lives. “The movie is a love story. I wanted these people to fall in love and do right by each other. Different people, from very different backgrounds with different problems and histories but they find a way, almost impossibly, certainly improbably, to come together over this small period and fall in love with each other and kind of save each other. I want to believe that’s possible,” says Hemingson. He also talks about bringing his own personal experience to the story even when it’s emotionally challenging. “I need to get to the place where I am very heartbroken about what’s happening on the page and really feeling it. There’s an honesty to it,” he says. To go deeper into the screenplay, take a listen to the podcast.
One year after saving the town of Angel Falls from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve, Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) can’t let the fear and guilt of the event go. Struggling to make sense if her life, she wishes she’d never been born – only to find herself in a nightmare parallel universe. The film is a mash up of the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life and Scream.
On this episode, I speak to screenwriter/producer Michael Kennedy about using a classic Christmas movie as inspiration for a slasher horror/comedy film. We also talk about the importance of queer representation in the horror genre.
“I wanted to give this a cornucopia of vastly different types of representation in the movie, but I also didn’t want for that to be what the movie is about. I wanted it to be just matter of fact. For me, if I can make a movie where seven of the characters are gay, then I should do that!” says Kennedy.
He went on to say that the quest for queer representation in Hollywood has been slow, but those who want to see it need to speak up. “It is satisfying as a producer to see that a lot of the change and stuff in this industry can happen if you just ask for it. Sometimes, you won’t be in the position to be able to do that and I really bided my time with that, so I’m really fortunate. It was great to not only ask for what I wanted but also get it,” he says.
For a deeper dive into the screenplay, take a listen to the podcast.
Season 3 of The Morning Show is now streaming on Apple TV+. With some of the most engaging actors working in television (Jennifer Anniston, Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup and Nicole Beharie), showrunner Charlotte Stoudt talks with us about some of the most shocking and groundbreaking scenes that are meant to blow your mind this season.
This dramaturge-turned-showrunner, Stoudt’s love of working with other writers is palpable. “The delight of sharing a story space with other writers is one of the great joys of this job. I never get tired of sitting across from a writer and having them say, ‘What if we did this?’ It’s like a Christmas present every day,” Stoudt says.
Stoudt also gives her advice on what to include in a spec script, no matter what kind of writing job you’re up for. “The best writing samples give some insight and truth about what it means to be alive. That can take any form – comedy, sci-fi – I don’t think the genre matters if you’re able to put something of your most primal self on the page. There has to be something that’s alive inside of you, that hooks you and makes you go, ‘Who is this person telling this story?’”
To hear more about the challenges and delights of running The Morning Show, take a listen to the podcast.
The new film Nyad tells the true story of athlete Diana Nyad (Annette Benning) who, at the age of 60 and with the help of her best friend and coach Bonnie (Jody Foster), commits to achieving her life-long dream: a 110-mile open ocean swim from Cuba to Florida. We talk to screenwriter Julia Cox about what it was like getting to know the real Diana Nyad, structuring the screenplay to create a satisfying sports movie and creating one of the most daunting physical antagonists on the page: the ocean. “I did think of the ocean as the mother of all antagonists and I tried to structure the screenplay so it didn’t feel too episodic, really focusing on a different obstacle with each attempt [to swim from Cuba to Florida]. In real life, there are sometimes two or three reasons why something happens or doesn’t happen, but in a screenplay, you have the impulse to distill it down and confront each obstacle with enough attention to make that feel tense and satisfying when she overcomes it,” Cox says. Cox also discusses how this story didn’t fit into typical sports movie tropes. “It's an unconventional sports movie in that she doesn’t have an opponent. We get a whiff of other people attempting to do the same thing and that creates some tension, but for the most part this is about one woman in the sea, supported by her team but competing against herself. So along with the ocean, her obstacle was often her own body and her own mind and when all these things were aligned, when she made peace about continuing to try, when the elements were working for her, that’s when she was able to make it.” For a deeper dive into the screenplay, take a listen to the podcast.
“Starting to write a project like this, we always begin with a set of very strong personal desires,” says Anatomy of a Fall writer/director Justine Triet, adding, “I’m quite reticent of scripts that are too clever or that clearly have the intension of disseminating things where information or the person disseminating information has the upper hand over my ability to navigate the narrative.”
The new film Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or at the recent Cannes Film Festival and could be called Anatomy of a Marriage – at least one that ends in a mysterious tragedy. Set in a remote village in the French Alps – perhaps reminiscent of the hotel in The Shining, frustrated writer Samuel (Samuel Theis), is found dead in the snow beneath his family’s chalet and his wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller), becomes the number one suspect in his suspicious death. In this shocking family drama that moves into a chaotic courtroom, the verdict comes down to the couple’s 11-year-old blind son’s gut-wrenching testimony.
Directed by Justine Triet from a script written by Triet and her own life-partner Arthur Harari, Triet talks about writing the film from an emotional place and not relying on structure or over-used devices like flashbacks to create a deeper sense of mystery.
This film is the best lesson on how to tell a character-driven murder mystery – while keeping the audience guessing – I’ve seen in a long time! Listen to the podcast to go deeper into how Triet crafted the story.
“I’m not happy with a script unless I can look through it and find at least five or six pages where there’s no dialogue – where the story tells itself through imagery,” says horror screenwriter Dennis Paoli. Feeling strongly that the screenwriter’s job is to help the director see their vision for the scenes and characters, he says that instead of writing shot-by-shot, he writes, “Visual by visual. I try to give the important visuals that are inherent in that scene that help tell the story.”
Famous for writing the cult-classic body-horror film Re-Animator from 1985, Paoli has a new film called Suitable Flesh starring Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton just in time for Halloween.
In Final Draft's Write On podcast we talk about the importance of a screenwriter embracing visual storytelling on the page and discuss the challenges of reinterpreting H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Thing on the Doorstep to create two bewitching female leads.
Listen to the podcast to hear more about Paoli’s long working partnership with the late Stuart Gordon (director of Re-Animator), making the “Miskatonic-verse” feel fresh and modern, and planting Easter eggs in the new movie.
“The Fly was our biggest reference," first time feature writer/director Anna Zlokovic tells Final Draft's Write On podcast about her inspiration for her horror film Appendage. The spooky thriller is about a young fashion designer who sprouts a mysterious growth on her body that changes her life forever.
We sat down with the exciting newcomer -- who was recently listed on IndieWire's 28 Rising Female Filmmakers to Watch in 2023 -- to discuss her inspiration for the film. "That movie just has such an amazing blend of tone where it's tragic and sincere in its tragedy," she said.
Listen to Final Draft's Write On podcast to hear more.
Appendage premieres on Hulu October 2.
Adult Swim’s animated sitcom Teenage Euthanasia is back for season 2.
Set in a futuristic Florida, the Fantasy family is back at it with comedy and unbearable suffering. The show’s cast includes Cheer’s alum Bebe Neuwirth.
Final Draft sat down with the show’s co-creators Alissa Nutting and Alyson Levy - a rare female animation duo in a male dominated industry - to hear about what it’s like to work together, come up with ideas and write this hit show.
Teenage Euthanasia's final season premieres September 27 on Adult Swim. Listen to our podcast here.
The new film Golda – starring a bewitching Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, the Iron Lady of Israel, was written and produced by Nicholas Martin. Martin is best known for writing the 2016 film Florence Foster Jenkins. With two amazing biopics about strong, defiant women, we talk about how to find the moment that defines a character and how to focus the story on a short period of time instead of a cradle-to-grave saga. For Florence Foster Jenkins, it’s her journey to Carnegie Hall and for Golda Meir, it’s the 18-day Yom Kippur War. To Martin’s surprise, that focus on the war turned the film Golda into a thriller.
“The structure was dictated by the phases of the war,” says Martin. “So, it was really a thriller and a war film rather than a personal drama about a woman’s struggle to command a nation at war. That’s what gave it its thriller shape.”
To pinpoint that moment, Martin turned to a quote from Winston Churchill.
“He famously said at the beginning of the Second World War, when he became Prime Minister, ‘All of my mistakes have brought me to this point.’ … And then I thought I think this is the same for Golda… We’ve got such a thumping narrative of the Yom Kippur War, such a clear beginning, middle and end and she’s under so much pressure, I think if we cut away from this it would dilute the tension and it would be mixing genres in a way. So, it seems that just sticking to this one story which is complicated enough, let’s try and keep it simple, tell this one story well,” says Martin.
Listen to this episode to find out more about Martin’s research process, how learning to use a spreadsheet upped Martin’s structure game, and hear why Meryl Streep threatened to never speak to Martin again while making Florence Foster Jenkins.
The Apple TV+ series Physical, starring Rose Byrne, is set to launch its third and final season on August 2. Set in the idyllic but fragile beach paradise of sunny 1980s San Diego, Physcialis a half-hour dark comedy following Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) as she navigates her personal demons, most of which come in the form of noxious self-talk and an eating disorder.
I talked with series creator and showrunner Annie Weisman about writing this highly personal show that explores the dark undercurrents of the feminine experience. “I think about things like beauty culture and diet culture and it’s easy to dismiss them as something women are locked in, are trapped in,” says Annie, “but in many ways, for a lot of women, that’s all the control they have is their appearance. One of the goals of the show is to show a woman who feels really trapped in that way, really torturing herself, and have her go on this journey of discovering a way – this opening a door – into a new way to be in her body, a new way to be in the world, and a sense of empowerment. But I wanted to be honest about the struggle of it, it’s not easy! It takes three seasons of this show for her to get somewhere!”
We also discuss her beginnings as a playwright and her journey to making the transition from stage to television. “I didn’t necessarily know a lot about visual storytelling – that was what I had to learn,” says Annie. “My first television scripts were filled with dialogue, I didn’t really understand how the camera worked, I had characters entering and exiting in every scene. I had to learn about the way time works in television and film.”
Annie also shares her advice for writing original TV pilots and using your own authentic voice. Take a listen.
When one woman's business trip turns into a quest to find her family, things get super funny in the new comedy Joy Ride, a raunchy road trip movie with a global spin. The film stars Oscar-nominee Stephanie Hsu, Ashley Park, Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu.
Screenwriters Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, who wrote the movie with writer/director Adele Lim, sat down with Final Draft to talk about writing a passion project they never thought would get made. “We were just going to write this dumb thing together and it's going to be just for us and then all of a sudden people are like, oh, we like it we want to make it, we're like, right now?” Hsiao said.
The writers were thrilled, and they had worked together years before on the animated show Family Guy. “We were well versed in being collaborative and working together so when we started writing the spec it was very natural,” says Chevapravatdumrong.
Listen to Final Draft's Write On podcast to hear about the writing process, the laughs and making a movie they never thought would get made.
Joy Ride is out in theaters July 7.
The world out there is a brutal place. If you have a hankering for some of the rough justice you remember from old-school lawman Raylan Givens – you’re in luck. Justified: City Primeval is about to drop on FX starring the same Raylan (Timothy Olyphant), we all came to know and love in the six seasons of the hit-show Justified. His hair has more sliver streaks, partly due to age but also due to worrying about his precocious 15-year-old daughter Willa (played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter Vivian), in this thrilling 8-episode limited series.
I talked with showrunner Michael Dinner about evolving Elmore Leonard’s beloved lead character in this spinoff that’s set in the mean streets of Detroit, while staying true to the risk-taking Raylan who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty in the hollers of Kentucky. Now the father of a teenaged girl, Raylan’s priorities have shifted – so will he still reach for his gun with the same ease as before?
“In a way, this is the second chapter of his life,” says Dinner. “His first chapter is, ‘You can’t go home again.’ We pick him up 8 or 10 years later, he’s divorced, he has a daughter. I look at the work in these 8 episodes and it’s more adult and I feel he’s made another step – not the actor, but the character. So, I think it’s interesting to look at it with that kind of perspective, that it is a character who is further down the road.”
Dinner also shares his advice for creating characters who ignite conflict and push each other’s buttons in ways that help sustain a show over time and engage the audience in deeper ways. Also, I ask the question, who is Raylan Givens without Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), and if we might see Boyd Crowder anytime soon. Dinner’s answer may surprise you! Click to hear more from our podcast with Dinner about the new limited series Justified: City Primeval. Hear more in Final Draft's Write On podcast.
Justified: City Primeval comes to FX on July 18.
With an excited fanbase and even more exciting plot twists, the drama/thriller series Cruel Summer is back for Season 2 on Freeform. Final Draft sat down with showrunner Elle Triedman to talk about murders, music from 1999 and the show's impressive ratings. (Season 1 was the most watched series in the Freeform's history!).
This delicious show tackles teenage friendships, betrayals and characters with very big flaws. Triedman says one of her favorite parts of the show is all the room to play with morality. "Saints are boring. No one wants to write a saint, no actor wants to play a saint," she says.
Character flaws make things interesting, she says. And teenage life is about the bond you create with those around you. “It is that ride-or-die, it is the person where you call and you say I need you to help me... you know, bury a body and they say where should I meet you? That sort of crazy intense with all the highs and all the lows. And so, to build that friendship from ground zero and then blow it up,” she says. It's not only super fun to create, it's fun to watch. Click to hear more from our podcast with Triedman about the new season of Cruel Summer.
The surprise hit and breakout role for Jenna Ortega as the titular character in Netflix's spin off of the Addams Family, Wednesday, was just as exciting to create as it is to watch. "The writer's room started the first week of lockdown, so writing a Wednesday show during a global pandemic felt on brand," says creator Al Gough about writing the pilot before selling the show to Netflix.
Final Draft's Write On Podcast sits down with Gough and his co-creators Miles Millar to hear about how they revitalized this character with a modern twist and brought back nostalgia with the return of Christina Ricci in the 8-episode series that follows Wednesday's life as she attends a boarding school for other teens with magical abilities.
Wednesday is currently streaming on Netflix.
Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World tells the emotional journey of the world famous boxer from his poor upbringings in Texas to his rise to Heavyweight Champion of the World and then onto reinventing himself when it was time to look beyond the gloves.
Final Draft's podcast Write On sits down with writer/director George Tillman Jr. (Soul Food, The Hate U Give) to hear the inspiration behind this film. "Biopics are very complicated to do, so I just started falling in love with the idea of this journey that this man took from a young man to an older one," says Tillman Jr. on how he chose Foreman's story. "Everybody knows him as the grill guy, so we really showed how he became the pitchman that led to the grill you know." Listen to hear more about bringing this larger than life man to the big screen.
Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World released in theaters April 28.
The story of how Daisy Jones & the Six went from book to TV show is a fascinating one. Scott Neustadter, best known for comedies like 500 Days of Summer and The Disaster Artist, was sent the unpublished manuscript about the rise of a rock band in Los Angeles in the 1970s, on a whim.
Little did he know it would become a bestseller. At the time, he had given the book to his wife, with whom he had never worked before. But she just so happened to be at Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. They loved the book and his adaptation and the show was born. Now, Neustadter is the co-creator and co-showrunner of the Amazon show.
Final Draft’s podcast Write On sat down with Neustadter to hear about his process. “If you're going to write television– it's an important, huge undertaking so you have to have passion, you have to love the thing... It isn't something you can do on the side. It will become your whole life, so you better love it,” he said. Daisy Jones & the Six is available on Amazon Prime.
Final Draft's Write On podcast series sits down with co-creator Rafael Casal on the second season of his half-hour comedy series Blindspotting. The show centers on Ashley, who lives in Oakland, Calif. When her partner (who is also the father of her son) is sent to prison, she must move in with her mother-in-law, played by Helen Hunt. “That’s a part of writing for actors. You know what they're capable of and so sometimes in the script you're not writing everything they do, but you're writing the window into them having the freedom to do what they do best,” Casal says about writing for actors.
He also discusses what he looks for in a writer when hiring to fill his room. “I don't want somebody who's just trying to color within the lines book, especially for a show like ours that is really non-traditional. I'm looking for people that are willing to kick out an idea and try something even if it only works 70% of the way but you took the swing,” he says. Blindspotting airs on STARZ.
Written by screenwriter Dana Stevens, The Woman King is a historical epic about an all-female warrior unit that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the 17th to the 19th centuries. The film is set in the 1820s and stars Viola Davis who is tasked with training the next generation of young warriors. Stevens chatted with Final Draft about discovering the “richness of the story” while writing the script. “I just could not believe that I did not know this story, that I had never heard of it,” Stevens said. “And the more I delved into it, just on my own… I mean, I was watching things on YouTube, like things in French, you know, I was just I was just blown away.”
When asked for advice to aspiring screenwriters trying to break into the industry or write a passion project such as The Woman King, Stevens had some inspiring words. “Go ahead and write. Write a lot. Have a few things you're working on. Have your personal project that you just love, that you think maybe no one will ever make, but also maybe have another project that's your, you know, more commercial thing,” she says.
The Woman King is now available on a variety of streaming platforms.
From visionary director Robert Eggers, The Northman follows a young Viking prince (Alexander Skarsgård) on a quest to avenge his father's murder. Eggers and his co-writer, Sjón, chatted with Final Draft about the collaborative process of working on the script. "I had lunch with Alexander Skarsgård, who said that he wanted to make a Viking movie," Eggers said, "and I said, 'I can make a Viking movie, and I know the perfect person to write it with me,' and luckily, Sjón wanted to... I wrote the first draft, and from there, we just [passed] it back and forth for eternity, all through production, all through post-production."
When asked if they would recommend collaborating with a writing partner on a project, Sjón said, "I really recommend working with a co-writer on films. I've written poetry and novels and all sorts of things, but when it comes to film, I really think it works when you're writing with someone you know because film is already a medium of collaboration, and to go into it from the beginning, from the story level as a collaboration, I think is really great."
The Northman is now available on Amazon Prime.
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Based on the true story of Mamie Till, Till follows Mamie as she seeks justice for the brutal lynching of her son, Emmett Till. When asked about how she chose to capture Mamie's spirit on the page, Chukwu says, "It's not just resiliency; it is survival, it is an active suppression of certain emotions that Black women are constantly put in a position of having to do; it is a difference between the public and the private self. Mamie was acutely aware of that... when I'm constructing scenes, I am always thinking about masks - who are they when they're all alone? ... Who is Mamie when she's by herself?"
Chukwu goes on to discuss coping with the weight of telling such heavy stories: "Writing these stories that I've written so far, when I write it in a deeply spiritual, all immersive process... I live, breathe, dream whatever it is that I'm writing, and that takes a deep emotional and spiritual toll, and I'm not really good with self-care when I'm writing... Prioritize your own self-care as well - in the writing and in the aftermath."
Till is now playing in theaters.
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From Little Fires Everywhere writer Raamla Mohamed, Reasonable Doubt follows Jax Stewart (Emayatzy Corinealdi), a fearless defense attorney in Los Angeles who bucks the justice system every chance she gets. Mohamed comments on how the show deals with its deeply complex protagonist: "The show is through Jax's eyes and her experiences and what she's doing, and as you can see, she has different relationships with different people, so people are getting parts of her. But [in] the show... we get to see all the parts."
Mohamed goes on to discuss her choice to have an all-Black writer's room for the show: "95% of my characters on the show are Black, and they're all different types of Black, and I realized I need to be able to have conversations without having to explain to one half of the room what we're talking about - let's just cut the shorthand so that we can actually have conversations... [about] relationships and traumas and love and work and pressures and microaggressions... I was trying to just make it more comfortable and easier."
You can catch new episodes of Reasonable Doubt Tuesdays on Hulu.
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From Insecure alumni Jean Elie and Mike Gauyo, Send Help follows a first-generation Haitian American (Elie) struggling to overcome the challenges in Hollywood while coming to terms with a recent family tragedy. Gauyo shares his thoughts on how partnering with the Allblk [All Black] Channel benefited their overall storytelling process: "At the core of it, we didn't have to negotiate our Blackness or our culture in order to make the show... There was already a baseline of understanding of why our characters acted the way that they did or did the things that they did; it didn't have to be explained."
Elie goes on to share how the series came together in the first place: "The pandemic happened, and [Mike and I] were talking on Clubhouse about Haitian creatives and how stories get told, and how we need to not just be in front of a camera but behind the camera in order for our stories to be told in a way that feels real to us... A couple of weeks later, we got an email talking about 'How much you think you need to make the show?'"
Send Help is now streaming on the Allblk Channel and the Roku Channel.
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Based on writer-director Adamma Ebo's 2018 short film of the same name, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. follows Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall), the first lady of a prominent Southern Baptist Mega Church, as she attempts to help her pastor-husband, Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), rebuild their congregation after a scandal. Adamma shares how a visit from writer-director Damien Chazelle and editor Tom Cross during her time at UCLA influenced her decision to film a short as a proof of concept for the feature: "...they talked about how they made Whiplash as a short as a proof of concept, because in actuality, the movie is a thriller about jazz musicians, and you're like, 'What does that mean?' It's easier to show than tell... I knew it was going to be a pretty tough elevator pitch, and so I was like, 'I need to make something to show for it.'"
Adamma's sister, Adanne Ebo, serves as a producer on the film; when asked what advice she would give to aspiring writers from a producer's perspective, she said, "Read as many scripts as you can. I didn't go to film school… I learned how to write just by working with Adamma... even if you don't go to school for it, even if you don't go about it the institutional type of way, reading scripts will always make you a better writer."
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is now playing in theaters and on Peacock.
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Starring Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg, Me Time follows a stay-at-home dad (Hart) who joins an old friend (Wahlberg) on a wild birthday adventure while his family is away. Writer-director John Hamburg discusses his approach to balancing character and laughs in a comedy: "I really do aim to keep the characters grounded and to treat them as human beings. Frankly, even in a movie as absurd as Zoolander, we tried to give an emotional arc to Derek Zoolander and to Hansel, and it's no different with this movie that takes place in the real world."
Despite having hugely impressive titles like Zoolander and Along Came Polly under his belt, Hamburg still experiences insecurity as a filmmaker: "...it took me a while to stop [comparing myself to others], and I fall into that trap today, having been in the business for more than two decades... I think the advice I would give a younger, more naïve John Hamburg is, 'Just focus on yourself and listen; watch stuff, and get inspired.'"
Me Time can be streamed on Netflix starting August 26.
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2017 Big Break Category Winner Kevin Bachar stopped by the Write On podcast to discuss his new feature, The Inhabitant, starring Dermot Mulroney and Leslie Bibb. "It's a relative of Lizzie Borden set in modern times," says Bachar, "and she starts experiencing visions of Lizzie Borden, starts getting feelings of hurting her family. The question is, is this a sort of demonic possession? Is it schizophrenia? What's going on here?"
Bachar also shares the secret of how he transitioned from filming content for National Geographic to writing feature screenplays: "I think it's finding any time where you can actually get in front of the laptop. [When I lived in New York] I used to commute into the city, and that was a solid hour on the Long Island Railroad... I made a conscious decision to use this hour to write. and that was it. So that's 10 hours a week that I was able to just really focus on writing. Any time you have that free time, write."
The Inhabitant is coming to theaters later this year.
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Thor Odinson makes his triumphant return to the MCU with the franchise's latest installment, Thor: Love and Thunder, once again starring Chris Hemsworth in the titular role alongside Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, and writer-director Taika Waititi. Waititi's co-writer, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, discusses the process of landing her first Marvel gig: “My journey with Marvel has been long; I pitched on Black Widow, I pitched on Hawkeye, I pitched on Captain Marvel 2, so I pitched on several different films. Kevin [Feige] is so specific and such a genius when it comes to putting the right person on the right project… and Kevin was like, ‘This is not the right thing for you, but we’re going to put you on Thor...' and then a week later, I was in a room with Brad [Winderbaum] and Taika talking about the lore and coming onto the project.” Robinson goes on to share the importance of pushing yourself and not being afraid to make mistakes: "Don't let the fear of the thing being bad or wrong or weird get in the way of you doing it... If you mess up, if you fail like I've failed, it's fine... you just have to blindly believe in yourself because no one is going to care about you as much as you. No one is going to believe in you as much as you." Thor: Love and Thunder is now playing in theaters. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Created by Bisha K. Ali, Ms. Marvel follows Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old superhero fan who's just trying to get through high school when she discovers she has powers of her own. Ali discusses how she put together the writer's room for the MCU series: "I had a room that [reflected] the experience of the characters that we're talking about... We had to have authentic writers; we had to have writers who understood what intergenerational trauma is, what it is to be an immigrant, what it is to be a second-generation immigrant, what it is to be an outsider... in order to get this arc that I wanted to get."
Ali goes on to share her advice for writers of color struggling to tell the stories they want to tell: "I think specifically [with] writers from marginalized backgrounds... there's this conflict of, 'I just want to do what I want to do, but I've never seen an example of that. I've never seen that made because people like me don't get to tell stories...' Stop worrying about that voice and really push yourself to be true to who you are."
Ms. Marvel is now streaming on Disney+.
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Based on true events, Black Bird follows Jimmy Keene, a prison inmate who cuts a deal with the FBI to befriend a suspected serial killer in exchange for his freedom. Famed crime novelist and series creator Dennis Lehane discusses where he places his focus to make every project of his stand out: "Every single thing comes down to the characters - every single thing. I've always been character-centric, but never as much as when I started to really get into TV, because that's what it is... that's what people watch TV for... They watch it for an emotional journey of the main characters." Lehane goes on to share his process for adapting source material for the screen: "My job is to be absolutely as true to the spirit of the novel as I can be. You should be able to read the novel, look at the TV show, and go, 'Oh, wow, it's the same thing...' It reaches the same conclusions about the human beings in the story, about humanity." Black Bird is now streaming on Apple TV+. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Based on the viral YouTube short from 2010, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On follows Marcel (Jenny Slate), a 1-inch tall shell who lives a colorful existence with his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) and their pet lint, Alan. When asked about creating and writing for such a unique protagonist, the original video's creator Dean Fleischer Camp says, "I think the thing that's always appealed to me about Marcel is he doesn't think of himself as small or weird or a talking shell or anything, and the film itself does not treat him with anything less than 100% dignity as a documentary subject and doesn't freak out over the fact that he's a talking shell."
Camp's co-writer Nick Paley goes on to share his own take on writing "weird" subject matter: "Do everything you can to cultivate high-sensitivity-listening to your own tastes. I think that is a skill that no one really taught us in film school: to self-authorize around the things that you love, even if you think they're dumb and kind of beside the point or not relevant to what's happening. I think the only type of work that is really special is the stuff that someone is really not sure is going to work for other people, and this film is a wonderful proof of that."
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is now playing in theaters.
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Based on George Saunders' short story Escape from Spiderhead, the Netflix adaptation follows inmates at a state-of-the-art penitentiary who volunteer as medical subjects to shorten their sentences. Paul Wernick describes the moment he and co-writer Rhett Reese were introduced to Saunders' story: "Jeremy Steckler was the executive [at The New Yorker] at the time. He put it in front of us when it first was printed about ten years ago, and we fell in love with it. We said, 'We're doing it. We have to write this.' We were so passionate about it... George had laid out what was the makings of a movie, but we had to expand it out."
When asked what advice he would give to his younger writer self, Reese muses, "I feel like a part of what you need to tap into is that naive, ignorant optimism where you just go, 'Look, the odds are against me, and they're against anyone, and I'm going to go write what I want to write... and commit to it with both halves of my brain, and do as great a job as I can, and then keep doing that over and over until I break through."
Spiderhead is now streaming on Netflix.
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Created, written, and directed by Nida Manzoor, We Are Lady Parts follows a British punk rock band consisting entirely of Muslim women as they strive for musical success. Manzoor discusses the pressure of feeling like she was representing an entire community and how she ultimately decided to write from her own experience: "I'd had a few meetings as a new writer where I was sort of being asked to write about the suffering of being a Muslim woman or to portray it as being a victim, [which] didn't reflect my experience or the women I knew, and so I found that frustrating. I was like, all right, if I was going to examine this aspect of my identity, how would I do it? ... The frustration pushed me into developing something which is my dream show to make." Manzoor goes on to describe her connection to the story itself and how that ties into her creative roots: "I grew up in a very creative household old - a very musical household - which is why the show is sort of about a band, so I think music was my first passion. But then after doing a degree in politics, I realized very quickly I didn't want to have anything to do with politics; I wanted to be a filmmaker… and, you know, Lady Parts was really my first foray into writing and directing something that was really kind of myself and true to the kind of work I wanted to make." We Are Lady Parts is now streaming on Peacock. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Inspired by Stephanie Land's memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, Netflix's Maid follows Alex (Margaret Qualley), a young mother who escapes an abusive relationship and gets a job cleaning houses in order to provide for her daughter. Showrunner Molly Smith Metzler recalls the moment she knew she had to adapt the memoir for TV: "[John Wells] handed me the book, and I went home, and I read it that weekend, and I was like, 'Oh, no, I have to do this.' I say 'Oh, no' because I knew it was going to be very hard. It's an incredible memoir, but not a natural fit for television... I knew it was going to be hard to adapt, but I also couldn't picture anyone else doing it."
Metzler goes on to speak on the importance of taking notes and moving on to what's next: "You get all these notes because something is exciting to people, and then what can happen is you just spend all of your time rewriting it... My big advice is when you have the thing that finally gets read and people get excited, don't spend two years rewriting it; write the next thing because you can't rewrite things for different people. You just lose your sense of self, and you'll lose your mind, so always be thinking about the next thing; always be writing the next thing."
Maid is currently streaming on Netflix.
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Based on the Marvel Comics featuring the character of the same name, Moon Knight follows Marc Spector / Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), two alters of a man with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who gets drawn into a deadly mystery involving Egyptian gods. Head writer Jeremy Slater discusses the series' approach to featuring a protagonist with DID and the creative challenges it posed: "It was the biggest creative opportunity and also one of the hardest things about the show. It's actually surprising how few characters we have in the show; it's really kind of only three. It's just that Oscar Isaac is doing so much as Mark and as Steven and commanding the screen as both sides of that system... on screen, it's just the actor, and they have to convey who's in charge and what's going on."
Slater goes on to share what drew him to adapting this particular Marvel story and bringing a brand new character to the screen: "One of the reasons I gravitated towards Moon Knight was because he didn't have that former baggage... No one knows who the hell Moon Knight is; no one knows what his powers are; no one knows who his villains are. So for me, I view that as really creatively liberating, because we can come in here and put our own stamp on this."
Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney+. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Based on the novel Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty chronicles the 1980s Showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team featuring notable NBA stars Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Series co-creator and showrunner Max Borenstein describes the challenges of having to imagine what certain moments and conversations looked like without having been in the room: "Our role is to take the things we know - I look at it as the tip of the iceberg... the role of the drama is to then imaginatively reconstruct what might have been or could have been underneath the surface, and oftentimes.. you're imagining your way into that room where you have no idea exactly what was said."
Borenstein goes on to explain what drew him to tell this particular story from this particular time period: "I happen to be a basketball fan, but what was exciting to me was not just retelling the story of this particular basketball team; it was that this particular basketball team and this dynasty speaks to a change in the way entertainment worked and the way celebrity works... I think the Showtime Lakers [are] a perfect prism through which to view that moment in time."
Season one of Winning Time is now available on HBO Max.
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Based on the novels by Julia Quinn, Bridgerton follows eight members of a powerful family in Regency-era England as they attempt to find love. Series creator Chris Van Dusen describes the pressure he felt writing season two after the overwhelming success of the first season: "There were a lot of expectations that were put onto it after it became Netflix's most-watched English language series ever, and it was embraced in such a huge way around the globe. I think going into season two, it [was] a very different thing from creating and producing and writing the first season of an unknown show."
Van Dusen goes on to break down the core themes of the show and how he approached centering a new member of the Bridgerton family in season two: "It all comes down to character and character development, and with Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), we got to develop and explore his story across two amazing seasons. I've always said that the underlying narrative arc of Bridgerton is this question of whether love can conquer all. Season two looks at that question through the lens of familial duty, so we were exploring this push and pull of head versus heart, of love versus duty."
Bridgerton is now streaming on Netflix.
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Set in modern-day America, Bel-Air is a re-imagination of the beloved sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, following a young Will Smith (Jabari Banks) as he makes his journey from the streets of West Philadelphia to the gated communities of Bel-Air. When asked how he got his start in filmmaking, series creator Morgan Cooper says, "I didn't grow up around filmmakers. I didn't know filmmaking was a career, a possibility. I didn't go to college; I didn't go to film school. I was 18. I had to just figure it out, and so I bought a little Canon T2i. After two days of spending time with that camera, I fell in love with it. I really caught the bug and I said, 'This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. There is no plan B.' And with that camera, I built my career."
Cooper goes on to recall getting the official blessing from the original cast and crew of Fresh Prince to reboot the series: "I remember being on the set of the Fresh Prince reunion, so I got to meet all the original cast. We were all sitting on the set together, and we were all just talking. I remember Daphne Reid - Aunt Viv - she looked at me and said, 'We're passing you the baton. Just run with it. We believe in you.' Having that weight on my shoulders but knowing I had amazing support... I knew we were equipped to get it done."
Bel-Air is now available to stream on Peacock.
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Featuring an all-star cast including Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, and Renée Elise Goldsberry, Girls5eva follows a one-hit-wonder 90s girl group as they try to reignite their pop star fame while simultaneously having to navigate their grownup lives. Series creator Meredith Scardino shares how she prepared for pitching the series to NBC: "I tried to watch as many things and listen to as many things as I could about pitching. I ended up watching Shonda Rhimes' masterclass on pitching, and something that she said put me more at ease when she was just like... 'You're a writer. They know you're not an actor... you don't have to be this incredible, incredible pitcher. You can just try really hard to convey what you want people to know about the show."
Scardino goes on to share her advice for putting yourself on the page: "You have to just make things and trust that the thing that you connect to, someone else will connect to it. A few of the things that I have worked on in the show that have been the most personal have been some of my favorite things, and I feel like [those are] the things that maybe other people liked a lot too... just trust that if you find something funny or if you find something to be true, someone else will also feel that way."
Season 2 of Girls5eva is now available to stream on Peacock.
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Starring Academy Award® winners J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, Amazon Prime's Night Sky follows married couple Franklin (Simmons) and Irene York (Spacek), who discover a portal in their backyard that leads to a deserted planet. Series creator Holden Miller speaks on why he decided to use the sci-fi genre as a vessel for such an intimate character-driven story: "The story really takes on a life of its own, and all the themes that were of interest to me, like mortality and aging and enduring love - to tell that story about these characters seems to demand this science fiction aspect that could add a different level of grandeur and mystery and epicness to this very intimate story."
After being approached by an executive at Legendary, Daniel C. Connolly agreed to come on board as showrunner and pilot Miller's vision. On his experience as a first-time showrunner: "There's a lot of different aspects to this job that I've not experienced before in terms of this [being] my first time showrunning. I think it's just keeping a certain flexibility and trying to fight your ego sometimes when it feels like it's screwing up... it's not that hard, though, when you put the show front and center."
Night Sky is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.
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Disney+ is taking us back to a galaxy far, far away with its upcoming limited series Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor reprising the titular role alongside Hayden Christiansen's Darth Vader. Star Wars superfan Joby Harold explains what drew him to writing the six-episode series for Disney and Lucasfilm: "I always thought [Obi-Wan] was this great, unexplored character when it came to canon because there is that gap between what Ewan had done with the character and what sir Alec Guinness did with the character... I was just, as a fan, eager to see what they were going to do. When I got to sort of be a part of it and figure out what they had done and what they were looking to explore, it just seemed like a really exciting opportunity."
Harold also shares the screenwriting advice that's stuck with him throughout his career: "I had a screenwriting professor named Lou Hunter who would always say at the end of his correspondences, 'Write on' ... and he would say, 'You're not good until your seventh script.' And I was like, 'I appreciate you saying that, but I feel like I've got this figured out. I know what I'm doing,' and it's just crazy to me how true that was, and I think a lot of writers get caught up in rewriting their first or second or third scripts, just trying to complete that first thought... writing and rewriting different projects is so important to finding the vocabulary of writing."
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Commonly described as "anti-historical" historical fiction, The Great follows the comedic rise of Empress Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) and explores her marriage to Emperor Peter III of Russia (Nicholas Hoult). Series creator Tony McNamara shares how watching the show as it's being made affects his writing process: "I don't write the whole season. I write about half of it, which puts a lot of pressure on me as a writer. I've learned to watch the show and watch what's happening between characters while we shoot, and then that starts to be reflected in the writing."
McNamara goes on to discuss the challenges of finding your voice and shares his tips for burgeoning writers: "I think you’re going to imitate who you like when you start writing, and there’s nothing wrong with that – that’s why you’re drawn to certain things… I think you imitate for a while and then you slowly lose that a little bit. I always think it’s too much pressure to [find] ‘your own voice…’ I think as much as finding your voice, you’ve got to find your process and then you’ll find your voice as well."
Season 2 of The Great is now streaming on Hulu. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
MST3K is back! Originally running from 1988 to 1999, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was revived in 2017 due to a crowdfunding campaign led by the show's creator, Joel Hodgson. The show follows a human test subject who is forced to watch "B" movies by evil scientists alongside a group of captive robots who provide colorful commentary on the films. Hodgson explains, "We have kind of a unique relationship with the audience because it's a unique format, and it behaves differently than most shows. For some people, that's very disorienting, and for what we call the 'right people,' it just totally makes sense."
Hodgson goes on to describe what each episode looks like on the page and how they come up with each side-splitting jab: "We use about 10% of what we write. It's more like 7000 riffs that we start with... that kind of gets melted down to about 700 riffs in total. But when we brainstorm... it's wide open, and we're not necessarily looking for great ideas as much as more ideas, and out of those come the good ideas."
You can check out season 13 of MST3K on their new exclusive streaming service, The Gizmoplex!
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Based on the incredible true story, Pam & Tommy tackles a major landmark in the early days of the Internet: the leak of Pamela Anderson's (Lily James) and Tommy Lee's (Sebastian Stan) sex tape. Co-showrunner D.V. DeVincentis discusses what surprised him the most while researching the backstory of the case: "Something that continued to come up was... how well [Pamela] dealt with it, considering she's obviously very upset by it. I would have completely lost my mind, and she really kept it together. That was surprising to me - the inner strength of this person that is most often not given a lot of credit."
Co-showrunner Robert D. Siegel goes on to share the amount of care that ultimately went into writing Pamela's character: "We were both very, very protective of the character; she's ultimately the hero of the show. There are times during the show when [Rand Gauthier and Tommy] are the protagonists, and then there are times they're also the bad guys.... but we're really with Pam the whole way. It's kind of a love letter to her in a sense."
Pam & Tommy is now available to stream on Hulu.
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Starring Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul, Dual follows a woman (Gillan) who has to fight a clone of herself to the death after she unexpectedly recovers from a terminal illness. Writer-director Riley Stearns discusses how he crafted the film's out-of-this-world sci-fi premise while staying grounded in reality: "I didn't want the world to feel like this futuristic sci-fi space. I wanted it to still feel like we could relate to it... It's like another alternate reality where everything's the same except for this... How do people interact with each other in a world where this procedure exists?"
Stearns goes on to describe how he's evolved as a filmmaker since directing his first feature in 2014: "I would say that making Dual was the most confident and comfortable I've felt on set... There are times where you second guess yourself, and I still had those moments on Dual, but I think that knowing that your ideas have value, and trusting that, and trusting the people around you, I felt like Dual was just that experience that maybe... you wouldn't be the same person if you didn't learn those lessons."
Dual is now available in select theaters and will be available On Demand on May 20.
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Based on the insane yet shockingly true story, Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn, delivers a modern take on the Watergate scandal that shines its light most prominently on Arkansan socialite Martha Mitchell (Roberts). Showrunner Robbie Pickering discusses what audiences can expect to take away from the series: "We made it for people who aren't necessarily Watergate geeks. It's really about the human dynamics and the scandal and the ways people destroy their own lives... and [become] complicit in dirty deeds for somebody in power." Robbie goes on to discuss what he learned as a first-time showrunner: "It's a lot harder [than directing]... but through trial and error, I had learned how to be a better leader, how to come into a room knowing that if you're the showrunner, you set the tone... when I went to become a showrunner, it was an easier transition than I thought, and being a staff writer had allowed me to let go of my ego in a way that directing really hadn't." Gaslit is now available to stream on Starz. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Coming off of an enormously successful eight-season run on ABC, Black-ish follows Andre 'Dre' Johnson (Anthony Anderson) as he tries to create a sense of cultural identity for the members of his family while raising his kids in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. Showrunner Courtney Lilly discusses the expectations of being a showrunner: "Your job when you're running a show is essentially accountability; that's it. Whether it's the story, whether it's the budget, whether it's casting, the buck needs to stop with you. And you say, 'Here's what we're doing, this is why you're paying me this money. This is my job, and this is how I know how to do it.'"
Courtney goes on to discuss his hope for similar shows to be made in the future and the impact the series has had on the world of television: “People have a lot going on, and they want to laugh, they want to get to know characters, and my hope is that… there’ll be a moment where everybody will recognize that [Black-ish is] actually just traditional in the way that people want to watch television, and we'll see more stuff like what we’re doing now.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Inspired by the true story of Michelle Carter's unprecedented "texting-suicide" case, The Girl from Plainville starring Elle Fanning is a Hulu miniseries that explores Carter's relationship with Conrad Roy III and the events that led to his death. Show creator Liz Hannah (The Post, Mindhunter) talks about tackling the true crime case: "I think the reaction from the media, the reaction from the general public towards Michelle and towards the case was very vitriolic, very much making her the villain... I'm very interested in the gray area of people and morality and ethics... as you start to peel away the layers, you realize just how little was talked about of what actually happened in this case, and what actually happened between these two people and the sort of mutual toxicity between the two of them."
Liz goes on to talk about how to handle the pressures of writing: "I think I would say just don't take things too seriously, and that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take it seriously.... I take my job very seriously. I feel incredibly fortunate and incredibly lucky to have this job and to be able to tell the stories that I've gotten to tell, and hopefully will continue to tell. I think earlier in my career, everything felt like the beginning or end of the world, and that's just not a good way to be creative at all."
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Based on the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria that resulted in her husband, Russ' conviction, though he insisted he did not kill her. This brutal crime set off a chain of events that would expose a diabolical scheme deeply involving Pam Hupp, played by Renée Zellweger. Creator/Showrunner Jenny Klein talked to Write On about bringing this true crime story to life: "We had a heavy research phase, and talked to as many of the real-life people as possible. And of course, this is a dramatic retelling, and some elements were fictionalized like timelines or composite characters. But we really did need to understand the facts to the best of our ability."
Jenny goes on to talk about her writing process: "Writing is rewriting. I feel like when you're starting out as a writer, I would love my first draft, and it's like, no, that's not the thing. It's going to go through so many phases and just try to find the joy in the rewrite the same way you did with the first draft. Now I love rewriting, and I can't wait to get notes and hear what other people read into it and do the next pass."
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King Richard tells the story of how tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams became who they are after the coaching from their father Richard Williams, played by Will Smith. Academy Award® nominated screenwriter Zach Baylin talked to Write On about getting the depiction of Richard Williams right for this biopic: "Richard was just such a dynamic guy. It was what you look for in any kind of protagonist. [He had] had a very distinct voice… really driven, had very clear goals that he wanted to achieve. But he could be incredibly self-defeating and self-sabotaging, and he could get in his own way and in other people's way... that just felt like such a compelling character to me."
Zach goes on to talk about getting his start as a screenwriter later in life: "I didn't sell scripts until I was 34… when I was writing from the time I got out of college to when I moved to New York and started working in film production solely with the purpose of getting a job as a writer. But I didn't really meet a ton of other writers, and I did it very in isolation. I would say that was a big mistake. I don't know if I was being too private about the fact that I wanted to do it, or that I felt I wasn't ready to show people, but I realize now that just having that network around you of other people who are doing it, who can give you feedback and also give you encouragement -- the whole networking aspect of it is so frustrating, but it's so necessary."
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Winner of the Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, Mass is the story of the aftermath of a violent tragedy that affects the lives of two couples in different ways. Writer-Director Fran Kranz talks to Write On about his inspiration for the film: "It was the day of the Parkland shooting, where I got so overwhelmed. You know, this sounds like a strange thing to say, but there was a kind of timing to it, sort of a perfect timing of a vulnerability where I was just kind of a freaked out dad... feeling anxieties and concerns and fears that I had never felt before… and worried about the kind of country and things that she [my daughter] was going to growing up into. So I went down kind of a rabbit hole that started just mostly because I was sort of this concerned parent."
Fran goes on to talk about his writing process, or lack of one: "I don't really have a process yet, necessarily. I wish I could just like go to a Starbucks and write. I have to, like, disappear, like I have to really go deep and I try to get up before dawn, like before the sun is up so that I'm ready to go... I need as much on my side as possible to get these emotions going."
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Nominated for three Academy Awards®, Flee tells the extraordinary true story of a man, Amin, on the verge of marriage which compels him to reveal his hidden past for the first time. Filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen talks to Write On about the process behind making the documentary/animated feature: “It is about finding out when we go into the memories, which ones do you really want to see. Which one of those are kind of scenic? And when is it more about the emotion? It's really about trying to show as much as you can instead of just telling it.” Jonas goes on to give advice to not only other creatives but also himself: “I would definitely say that I should trust my voice more. Not try to look too much at what other people do, but really trust what I have inside. And then just to surround yourself with people that could challenge you in a good way.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Promised Land is an epic, generation-spanning ABC drama about two Latinx families vying for wealth and power in California's Sonoma Valley. Showrunner and creator Matt Lopez tells Write On: “The show… tackles immigration, assimilation, what it means to chase the American dream, what it means to achieve the American dream, and the costs that are sometimes extracted from us when we try and achieve it or maintain it.” Matt goes on to talk about how a writer’s room works and gives advice to up-and-coming TV scribes: “I would say the most frequent advice I give to writers is... if you haven't already developed a thick skin, develop one. The barriers to entry in screenwriting, television writing - they're extremely high, and it can be hard to bust in. But if you keep working and keep at it, I do believe eventually your talent will get recognized.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
When a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands, a wild card CIA agent joins forces with three international agents on a lethal mission to retrieve it, while staying a step ahead of a mysterious woman who's tracking their every move in this action thriller directed by Simon Kinberg. Co-Writer Theresa talks about transitioning from playwriting to screenwriting: "I think you really have to have tremendous respect for the form of a screenplay. It's different from theatre in that… language needs to do less. One of the things you have to figure out is how to deliver character and movement of emotion in gesture." Theresa goes on to discuss what it’s been like for her working as a female writer: "I started at a different time where, as challenging as it can be to be a woman in this industry, it was considerably worse. You felt, a lot of times, that you didn't have any options, you just had to put up with it, and it was extraordinarily painful and spiritually challenging, and I feel like the consequences of that stay with you longer than you think they will." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Cyrano is a musical drama starring Peter Dinklage based on screenwriter Erica Schmidt’s stage play of the same name. Erica talks to Write On about transitioning from writing for the theater to screenwriting: "It was challenging because I didn't know the form, and I had to really learn the form. It was really exciting as well; I love movies, I've always loved movies, and I never would have started out with something so big so it was kind of a great way to jump off the board and into the pool." Erica goes on to talk about the involvement of the band The National in contributing music for the project: "I listened to [The National's] music over and over again as I was writing the play, and that kind of necessitated making the language less and less to allow the music to be the heartbeat of the piece, but then when it was going to be a screenplay, I had a lot more freedom." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Directed by Denzel Washington and starring Michael B. Jordan, A Journal for Jordan is based on the true story of First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a soldier deployed to Iraq who begins to keep a journal of love and advice for his infant son. Screenwriter Virgil Williams tells Write On: "It's really quite a remarkable love story… I used to say to Denzel [Washington], 'Look at us. We're doing all this work, all because these people loved each other.' That's astounding to me.” Virgil goes on to give advice on forging a screenwriting career: "Work on your craft all the time. Make it part of what you are, and it doesn't mean that you're sitting at the keyboard all the time; the better part of writing is listening - listening to the way that people talk… listening to your director, listening to your instinct, listening to your story because your story will tell you what it needs and wants." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The hit Netflix horror series is adapted from a found footage horror podcast about ritual, stories, and sound. Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine talks to Write On about the adaptation process: "In terms of adapting something, you just have to crack it wide open, and we diverge in many places, and in many ways, it's very different from the podcast. In many ways, it has the same spirit but we definitely made a lot of changes… but a lot of that was adapting to the television format and the visual way of telling stories." Rebecca goes on to talk about what advice to take as a writer: "Sometimes you take a note, and then you're sorry you took the note. In terms of writing, I think there's a balance between believing in what you're doing and listening to other people's thoughts… I have this tendency - I think a lot of women do - to want to be a good student and take all the notes, and sometimes you just can't do that." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The acclaimed British screenwriter, showrunner and producer breaks down writing the haunting Princess Diana biopic for director Pablo Larraín (Jackie): "The instruction I gave to myself is that because this is a princess and it's a castle, it's a fairy tale, and I think most fairy tales are horror stories with a happy ending… I wanted to go there to make this a fairy tale, and it does have a happy ending, but along the way, it's a princess who's held captive in a haunted castle." Steven goes on to give advice about hooking the reader in the first ten pages of your screenplay: "Don't think that there is a 'right' way of doing this… The thing that writers should try to do - especially those first ten pages - is make it as unlike anything that anybody's ever seen because we all know that the people who are going to read the script have read a thousand scripts that month and have seen it all, know it all, but if something happens when they're reading it that they weren't expecting, you have attention. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
In this special 2-part episode of Write On we talk to Flatbush Misdemeanors staff writer and co-writer of Hip Hop Family Christmas Saeed Crumpler about his career transition from rapper to screenwriter: "Coming from music, I used to look at each song as a ball of clay that had to be sculpted. I look at scripts the same way, even more so. I feel like you get even more time to make it better. I feel like in music, you only have a certain amount of time but with screenwriting, you have a lot of time to make it better, so why not make it better?" Saeed gives advice for how to make your screenplay the best it can possibly be: "Get [notes] early and often. To me, the sooner you can get notes on something, the better because then you don't get attached to it… if you wrote something in a month, and somebody gives you notes, it's like, 'All right, cool.' But if you've been working on it for six months or a year, then it's way more personal." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The hit Netflix series starring Henry Cavill returns! Geralt of Rivia, a solitary monster hunter, struggles to find his place in a world where people often prove more wicked than beasts. Showrunner Lauren tells Write On: "I think I always think about keeping all of [the] fans in mind while also laying out a world that people who have never heard of The Witcher can follow and can enjoy. The way that I did that, alongside the writers, was to make sure that any person who wanted to watch the show felt like they were represented in the show." Lauren goes on to talk about her career, writing process, and how she assembles a writer’s room. "When I was putting together the writer's room for season one, season two, and season three, I looked for a real mix of people. I think that everyone has to love genre somehow; everyone has to be able to tell me that they love science fiction, they love fantasy, they love comic books, they love something - something that feels not of this world necessarily." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
In this special 2-part episode of Write On we talk to Flatbush Misdemeanors staff writer and co-writer of Hip Hop Family Christmas Saeed Crumpler about going from rapper to screenwriter: "I had to make a change; I always loved film, and I just went back to school. I took $5,000, invested it in myself, took a UCLA online writing course… and I came out of there with two specs and an original pilot, and that original pilot is the one that's getting me jobs." Saeed goes on to talk about collaborating with other writers: "When you're co-writing, you go through so many drafts, so many polishes. We worked so well together that I don't remember [who wrote what]. To me, when you're writing with a partner, it should feel like that, where at the end of the day it becomes a cohesive thing." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The late night TV writer talks to Write On about breaking in and his early inspirations: "I was kind of the weird kid who at, like, 11 was watching David Letterman… [the realization] came to me in my very early teens like, 'Oh, this guy's not just saying jokes off the cuff, there are people writing there?'" Robert goes on to give advice to writers aspiring to work in late night: "I would say to folks out there who want to do a late night packet that you should do one! It's intimidating - especially your first one - but you can do it. You can sit down for six hours and make your packet really perfect and good." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Kelly is a development executive turned writer and author of ‘The Executive Chair: A Writer’s Guide to TV Series Development.’ She spoke to Write On about her decision to leave the executive world after 30 years and pursue her passion: "[Writing] was my own little private secret; I'd go home, and I'd write, and I'd enjoy the little worlds that I'd create and the short stories that I would write and the scripts that I would write, but I wasn't really actively pursuing it." Kelly goes on to discuss what she learned as an exec and how it can be applied to the work: "It's really not about the concept. You need material that shows how good of a writer you are and how deep a thinker you are and how emotive you can be on a page… if you can be as honest and authentic and as deep and as rich with your characters as you possibly can, people will respond to that." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Tracey talks to Write On about tackling the life story of music icon Aretha Franklin: "I began to live, breathe, eat Aretha 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I listened to nothing but her music, everything I read was about her; I just completely submerged myself into that world." Tracey goes on to talk about her writing process and how she fosters her own creativity: "Part of the beauty of writing is that you evolve with it. As you change, your writing changes. The most important thing is you being in touch with your feelings and conveying that honesty and conveying that passion through the writing." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
An elite squad of Navy SEAL's, on a covert mission to transport a prisoner off a CIA black site island prison, are trapped when insurgents attack while trying to rescue the same prisoner. Co-Writer/Director James Nunn talks to Write On about what it takes to make an action movie: "When I'm reading an action movie, I think what separates the [direct-to-video] stuff from the stuff that gets a wider release is concept, predominantly, and character. If there's a really unique concept for an action movie, hold onto it and make it; those are the ones that are really going to transcend a normal fight movie." James goes on to discuss his filmmaking career and what inspired him to get behind the camera: "I knew [I wanted to be a filmmaker] when I saw Jurassic Park when I was nine. I was just like, 'Right, I can be a paleontologist or I can be a moviemaker…' Something hit me in that screening where seeing a dinosaur and having this level of storytelling come to life transcended the movie, and it was like, 'Wow, I want to do that.'" Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
A soldier has been tasked with preventing an imminent terrorist threat to the Vatican in this action thriller from filmmaker Abel Ferrara starring Ethan Hawke. "[The film is a] real inside take on the CIA but it's also the understanding of truth,” Abel tells Write On. “We're living through the pandemic, so it's news, it's fake news, it's Photoshop, it's images, it's 'What's the truth?' What are you seeing?" Abel goes on to talk about his writing process: "I'm writing [the script], and I don't know where the film is going. I'm writing it, and I’m feeling it, and I'm feeling it organically from scene to scene. I don’t have anything structured, I don't have any outline; I'm letting it surprise me." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Screenwriting career coach and guru Carole once again joins us on the podcast to talk about her system of networking as a screenwriter: "This business is based on relationships, and it's risk-averse. They want to hire people they know or hire people who've been referred to them by someone they know, so your job in addition to being a kickass writer has to be to build your community of mutually beneficial relationships." Carole goes on to discuss how you can make the most of every opportunity that comes your way: "The business, in terms of succeeding, is a lot about preparation and opportunity. You have to be ready, and one way, in terms of the opportunity part of it, is to know a lot of people because the more people you know, the more opportunities you're going to find out about." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The 47 Meters Down filmmaker talks the latest installment of the phenomenally successful Resident Evil horror franchise and how he tackled it: "I find it quite intimidating at times. There is a lot of pressure to get this right. I'm always wary about making something for someone, making a movie for the fans because who knows, really, what they want? So you really just have to do it for yourself." Johannes talks about staying faithful to the Resident Evil video games and how he managed to make a movie that was also personal: "I created this movie with love, and it's a very unusual franchise movie in that… it feels like a retro 70's thriller. You can tell my personality in that movie; it's a very quirky, odd, but hopefully hugely scary movie." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
A team of wildly talented high school girl soccer players becomes the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness in the Showtime series. Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson talk to Write On about the journey it took to get the series to screen. "We took [Yellowjackets] out to fifteen networks; we pitched so many times,” Ashley said. “It was all fully scripted and memorized because that's how we have to pitch - especially when there are two of us. If we don't have it scripted, it's just too easy to step on each other or have a weird gap, so we just memorized 35 minutes word for word and then pretended it was all off the cuff." Ashley and Bart go on to talk about their collaborative process. According to Bart, "Learning how to write or be a writer is something that you will always feel like you are so far behind on, and you are so incomplete, and the way that you do this is insane and weird, and not only is it okay, but you can continue to be adjusting that approach. Be okay with it feeling weird and hard." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Dexter is back! Showtime’s beloved serial killer returns in a new limited series, and original showrunner Clyde Phillips wants to right some of the wrongs of the controversial season finale. "It's no secret that the final season was a great disappointment,” Clyde tells Write On. “In fact, if you look up 'Worst series finales ever,' Dexter will show up on every top ten list… we felt, collectively, that we owed a very faithful fanbase another shot." Clyde goes into detail about what it takes to write a show like Dexter: "By the time we start really breaking down the show, we know how it's going to end, and it's what I call 'Putting your nose against the white board' where the ending is and walking backwards. All of these doors are on either side like a hotel hallway, and each one of those doors is an episode, and then you get back to episode one - room one - and you start building the show." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The animated adventure comedy is the story of Barney, an awkward middle-schooler, and Ron, his new walking, talking, digitally-connected device voiced by Zach Galifianakis. "When I start a film… I need to know the big idea,” Co-Writer/Director Sarah Smith tells Write On. “In this case, the idea that everyone has a walking, talking device, and this kid has one that doesn't work. I need to know what it's really about, and what it's really about is friendships in the world of algorithms." Sarah goes on to talk about writing movies for kids: "To me, the biggest threat to cinema is not streamers; it's actually not giving kids intelligent enough movies that make them love the cinema. That's my aim in life - give our kids movies that are as interesting and entertaining to them as really good books are, and then we'll have a cinema in the future." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Kourtney talks rebooting the beloved TV classic Doogie Howser, M.D. but with a twist for Disney+: "I think in this day and age, folks get excited about IP; they just do. [It's] something solid that everybody can believe in. What I was then tasked with is 'How do you make this reboot worth doing?' and then 'What's my special sauce that I can put into it? What's the story I want to tell that makes this a story worth telling for me?'" Kourtney goes on to discuss the importance of diversity both in front of and behind the camera: "It's important to have more folks of color and diversity in front of the camera, but where I think you can really make a difference is the folks behind the camera, the people in charge, the people who are making the show, who get it." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Set in contemporary Washington D.C., Really Love is about a rising Black painter who strives to break into the competitive art world, while balancing a bittersweet romance he never expected. Co-Writer Felicia Pride talks to Write On about her screenwriting career: "My core is I'm a writer. I went to school for business because it sounded like a way to get a job, so I had a degree in marketing. I was very quickly bored at my first marketing job so I started writing on the side." Felicia gives advice on how to approach your writing career without fear. "Don't run from your gift… I've lived many lives and had many careers, and thankfully, they all now have helped me in some way in my current career, but the truth of the matter is that I was running from writing, I was running from my gift because I was scared to realize it." Really Love is now screening on Netflix. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
In The Beta Test, a married Hollywood agent receives a mysterious letter for an anonymous sexual encounter and becomes ensnared in a sinister world of lying, infidelity, and digital data. Writer-Director Jim Cummings tells Write On: "I had the idea for the letter service, and I called PJ and I was like, 'What would you do if you got a letter in the mail, personally, that invited you to a no-strings-attached sexual encounter?' And he said, 'I wouldn't go because that would be insane,' and then I thought, 'Yeah, but what if you were somebody that would?'" Writer-Director PJ McCabe goes on to discuss their collaborative process: "It's really just the two of us with our laptops out in [Jim's] garage, and we'll just walk around acting it out, and we'll do it a million different ways until we find the way we do it that makes us laugh… and the best setup and payoff in a scene that keeps it the most interesting and moves it, logically, to the next step in the plot." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The latest film from director Edgar Wright is about an aspiring fashion designer who is mysteriously able to enter 1960s London. Wright tells Write On: "[I started] having daydreams about being a kind of cultural time traveler, about how great it would be to go back to that decade. But then the more I would have these dreams, the more it would start to nag at me that that was a problem. Was nostalgia itself a retreat? Was it a failure to deal with the present day?" Co-Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns details the collaborative process between her and Wright: "We both worked together in the room. I think the first draft took us about six weeks. There was a lot of writing, throwing things back and forth, sharing your deep dark secrets - the terrible things that have been said to us over the years and the things that have stung and distilling them into the characters, and then every so often stretching our legs around Soho. It was a very wonderful and holistic process." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
There’s Someone Inside Your House is a Netflix horror movie based on the YA novel by Stephanie Perkins. Shazam! writer Henry Gayden adapted the book and talks to Write On about tackling the horror genre and injecting it with emotion: "I've always liked slasher movies, but they've been my least favorite subgenre because you never really get emotionally invested in them… [Stephanie Perkins] comes from a YA romance background. [There's Someone Inside Your House] was her first horror book, so she created all these characters that were great, and I loved them, and there was a love story inside of this slasher book, and I really responded to it. And because I was emotionally invested, I suddenly wanted to write a slasher movie." Henry goes on to give advice on taking your time developing a career: "I think a lot of people are in a rush to succeed right away when they're just not mature enough, mentally and also as a writer, to handle what you've gotta go through." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The Netflix drama series created by Ava DuVernay and famed football player Colin Kaepernick explores Kaepernick's high school years and the experiences that led him to become an activist. Showrunner Michael Starrbury talked to Write On about how the writers' room was assembled: "If you put good people in the room together, and they really care about what you're trying to accomplish, then good things will come out of it. I wasn't really looking for 'TV writers;' I was looking for people who could write TV." Michael goes on to discuss what it takes to have a career in writing. "Have your own goals. Don't let anybody gas you up and tell you that you're doing great when you have your own measurement for greatness… I can't control the yes's and no's in Hollywood, but what I can do is I can make adjustments for myself in order to reach my goal." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Chucky is back! Everyone’s favorite killer doll is soon to have his own TV series on SYFY, and writer Kim Garland talked to Write On about what it took to get on the writing staff: “I sat down one weekend, and I watched all seven films in a row, just back-to-back-to-back. I binged it hard, and a lot of it was I really wanted to take the full journey and compress what [creator Don Mancini] had done in 30 years." Kim goes on to discuss why she thinks Chucky has remained popular as a character for so long. "I think part of what's so fun is [Chucky] is this guy who has given up on trying to go back in a human body and is fully embracing the doll, but it's still a person in there that's living and evolving and changing." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Mike talks to Write On about his work as a mentor and the founding of his organization Black Boy Writes: "I have 11 mentees; they're all great, and they all span different genres. [We're] just breaking that myth that Black people are monolithic, we can only write one thing or we all experience the same thing, when that’s not true. We live varied experiences, and we write many types of things." Mike discusses getting his first writing job with Issa Rae, and gives advice for the aspiring writer. "You have to remember that you're only as good as your last writing sample. You're only as good as your last project, so you have to keep the momentum. You have to keep writing. . . if I wasn't writing all the time, I would not have the opportunities that I have now.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Sera talks about the latest season of the hit Netflix series starring Penn Badgley as the obsessive and murderous Joe Goldberg: "We [gave] ourselves total permission to go in a new direction. This is not one of those premises that you can repeat in the same way for more than one season. We knew when we were making season one, we will never be able to tell exactly this kind of story again because now the viewers are onto us, and this show is only really fun if it's surprising, so we're forced to step outside of the previous box every time." Sera goes on to talk about how she goes out building a writers’ room: "I really like building a room where people come from dramatically different writing backgrounds… I think of the Tetris as being about finding people who are interesting and different and have really different points of view about the world, and then put them all together because they're going to have a really rich discussion about this subject matter." The third season of You is now streaming on Netflix. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Gloria talks to Write On about her process for choosing a writers’ room. "For One Day at a Time, we wanted a heavily Latino room because we were doing Latinx storylines, and we wanted to make sure that we were specific because it was a Cuban family, but also, it was great to hear from all the other Latinos in the room that were not Cuban that were like, 'Oh my God, my family did that too!'" Gloria goes on to discuss what makes a good TV staff writer: "Ultimately, if you are on a staff, you are there at the service of the showrunner. You are there to help them make the show they want to make, so how can you help them? What idea can you give them so that we can all go home? What thing are you going to do that's going to crack it? I think once that became crystal clear, everything became much, much easier for me." Gloria’s new series, With Love, will premiere on Amazon later this year. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The Hulu series starring Michael Keaton takes viewers to the epicenter of America's struggle with opioid addiction. Creator Danny Strong talks about putting the show together in the midst of the pandemic: "One of the ways that I dealt with [having a virtual writer's room] was that I just started doing my own outlines, so I would be showrunning and working as a writer's assistant at the same time, and it would sort of confuse the staff. They'd be like, 'Are you sure?' and I'd be like, 'Hold on, I'm just writing this down!'" Danny goes on to discuss how he crafts stories based on real life. "A technique I use in nonfiction dramatic storytelling like this is that there are scenes that are there as a conduit - a fictional scene - that's there as a conduit to get true facts out. So the goal of the scene is to get real, true information out, and yes, if the scene is fictionalized in order to do so, it's fine because at the end of the day, what the scene is about is a truthful concept, idea, something along those lines." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
TV and feature writer Eileen Jones talks about her career with screenwriting coach Lee Jessup. Eileen Jones made her entry into screenwriting through the Warner Brothers' Television Workshop, which led to being staffed on the TV series Lethal Weapon. Eileen has since moved into feature films, penning the original female-led action western Highwayman after participating in the inaugural Lucky Exports Pitch Program. She is currently writing the female-led spy movie Marks for New Line Cinema, The Safran Company, and Hodson Exports. Eileen talks about breaking in, sustaining her career, and how to stay inspired: "What makes you excited? What is going to be fun for you to sit down and write every day? I've certainly had experiences where I wrote a script where I was like, 'This is small, it's really personal, I just need to write it, so I'm gonna do it,' and that's been valuable. But for me, now, I'm really thinking about, 'How do I have that meaningful conversation with as many people as possible?'" Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
After suffering a stroke, Judith Albright moves into a historic nursing home, where she begins to suspect something supernatural is preying on the residents in this Amazon Original Movie. Writer-Director Axelle Carolyn talks about how her personal family experiences shaped the story: "I saw my dad and my granddad both go to nursing homes, and I saw how it changed them, and it changed the way that people look at them and speak to them, and I think that when people address you a different way, you become someone else." She goes on to discuss the horror genre and the films that inspired her to be a filmmaker. "It was a combination of David Cronenberg's The Fly, which kind of taught me the power of characters and emotion in a horror movie… and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, and it just felt like working on that set would have been the most fun thing in the world." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Taylor Orci is a TV and screenwriter known for their work on Vida and the Emmy-nominated series Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on Netflix. Taylor is also known for creating the web video ‘Bitchy Resting Face’ that went so viral it got the term in the dictionary! Taylor talks about how they navigated their writing career and forged their own path: "If I followed all the well-intended advice that people looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I'm trying to help you,' I wouldn't have a job right now. I wouldn't have a career." Taylor goes on to discuss the need for more diversity in the industry, especially in positions of power: "You need to have more queer people and POC people occupying levels of authority… from mid-level to upper level to the executive level and beyond… We need to be seeing more representation and more butts in seats because different decisions are going to be made when you have those people in the room." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The feature comedy is about an aimless ne'er-do-well who becomes a tour guide in a historic estate and winds up befriending the manor's resident ghost. Co-writers, directors and brothers Justin and Christian Long talk to Write On about collaboration. Christian says: "We happen to agree a lot creatively, so there's usually not a lot of conflict. We definitely have different approaches as people in that Justin… has a really big personality. I'm a little more reserved, a little more shy, so it takes me a minute to open up to people." Justin talks about how writing the movie helped reconnect him with his brother: "I was working in London and kind of lonely, it was kind of a lonely job… [collaborating on the script with Christian] was a way to feel like I was back with my brother, and it was an easy way to bond from a distance, and it always made me laugh to get these scenes from him, and then he would get my scenes, and he'd punch them up and make them better, and I would try to make his better, and that's kind of how we worked." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The Disney Plus Original series is about a young Cuban-American girl who embarks on a journey to become the future president of the United States. Creator Ilana Peña talks about the very personal origins of the main character, Elena Cañero-Reed: "Elena is very much based on me… I wanted to write about that nerdy, type A, messy middle school girl that I hadn't really seen." Ilana goes on to discuss finding universality in her own personal story."We're all human beings, and that's what I want to present on the screen while also honoring my identity and my background. I didn't wake up every day and say, 'Another day as a Latina!' I woke up and I was like, 'Did I forget my social studies assignment?'" Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The biopic about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker is based on the documentary of the same name. Writer Abe Sylvia talks about what drew him to the project: "I grew up in Oklahoma in the 80s, and that's right in the middle of the Bible Belt, and while I wasn't raised religiously, it was all around me, and when that scandal first hit, it was everywhere. I wasn't familiar with [Tammy Faye] before that but it certainly made a huge splash in the neighborhood." Abe also dives into the process of writing and researching a biopic. "I think there's a little bit of osmosis that happens from watching so many hours of footage… the important part of the research was to get it into my own DNA and to separate that from 'How do I include all of these facts?' I think that was the ultimate value of the research." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Eliza talks to Write On about how she approached adapting a 20-year-old comic book series for FX: “I really wanted to update the way we talk about gender and the diversity of gender in this landscape… it's a more nuanced look at the diversity of the gender spectrum and also making clear that gender and chromosomes are not equal to one another." Eliza goes on to discuss how she built her writer's room for the show. "We had playwrights [in the writer's room], we had TV writers, we had a novelist, and it was a really exciting group of people who kind of all brought pieces of themselves to the table. The writer's room is one of my favorite parts of television. I really love the collaborative aspect of TV." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Alissa and Alyson talk to Write On about creating the adult animated comedy series for Adult Swim starring Maria Bamford and Tim Robinson. Alissa explains: "I had this thought, somehow, that [animation] is easier than live-action, and that is not true at all… and I feel so lucky that I was able to do this with Alyson and that we have the incredibly talented team that we do because, I mean, it's not for wimps." The collaborators go on to discuss what it’s like working together in the animation realm. "I actually didn't even understand how hard [animation] was until we set out on the journey,” says Alyson, “but it also is really fun to write because you can do anything, and it's a way to be silly… the two of us together made more sense for it to be animated." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
The playwright turned screenwriter talks about what it’s like to write material based on real people for the FX TV series. "My job was to adopt 20-something Monica [Lewinsky]'s point of view… and so I wrote based on Monica's story, and then I had the incredible asset of Monica Lewinsky herself reading my scripts and giving me feedback, so I basically trusted that in the writing of it, the scripts would reflect on how Monica experienced it." Sarah talks about her beginnings as a writer and how it doesn’t matter where you’re from. "You need something that's good on the page; that's all you need. You can live in Idaho, you can live in Ottawa, you don't have to live in The East Village or Santa Monica… if you are in any position to be able to write, I do think that having faith in what you put on the page is really what matters." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard on the hit show Ted Lasso, talked to Write On about writing the second season of the series along with his co-creators Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, and Joe Kelly: "I think we were very fortunate that we had our first season under our belt pre-lockdown because part of why we were still able to do, hopefully, a half-decent job on Season 2 was that we had the whole crew back plus one, so we knew each other, and we had a sense of each other… it was not preferable, but we made it work."
He goes on to describe what he thinks is one of the hardest things to do as a writer: believing in yourself. "If you do the part where you believe in yourself, which is theoretically the harder part, then believe not just that you can do the big picture thing… but that you can do these hurdles. If every schmuck in town has a screenplay, then you can at least be one of the schmucks."
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Our Lady J speaks to Write On about the challenges of creating a show like POSE. "Writing a lot of these storylines for POSE was challenging for my mental health because they were so triggering of experiences that were really hurtful to me and experiences that changed me as a person. But being able to not be triggered while I'm writing, and to work through that was key to the success of getting those stories onto the page and onto the screen.” Our Lady J goes on to speak about getting her first Emmy nomination, selecting the music featured on the show, and her creative process. "The more we know ourselves, the better artists we are, the better storytellers we are, and the more honest we're able to be in our storytelling and in our relation to others. For character writing, you absolutely cannot think you're better than the character. For story writing, you can't be afraid to go places that might be scary. You really have to know who you are to be able to get to that place as a storyteller." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Ali talks to Write On about how she selects writers for the Paramount + original series. "For a lot of people, it's about the specificity of 'Can they write for my show?' For me, it was a little bit more 'Can they write?'… Some of the writers that we met with, I just loved the concept of their script, and I felt like they could bring that weirdness that we were going to want." Ali goes into the specifics of what it takes to craft a TV show for tweens. "You can't try to pander… even with kids - they'll smell it from a mile away. For us, it was 'Does this make us laugh? Does it feel true to the show?' We tried not to overthink it." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Stacie was a Grand Prize Winner in 2020 for her feature film script Clementine. Big Break Contest Director Kala Guess talks to Stacie about what it was like winning the contest, how her network has expanded since then, and what it takes to get a screenwriting career going. "You really, really don't know when your script is going to connect with people, so just believe in what you're writing and write what you love, write what you're passionate about." Stacie also discusses how being bi-racial informs her work: "I am bi-racial, and I feel like people who are bi-racial can connect with each other so much more in regards to identity, regardless of what our racial makeup is because we have so many feelings of not belonging to whichever side or we identify too much with one and not so much with the other, and there's always someone else who's trying to define our existence." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Following a tragic car accident in Greece, Beckett, an American tourist, finds himself at the center of a dangerous political conspiracy and on the run for his life in this Netflix thriller. The writer and director discuss what it was like to collaborate. Writer Kevin A. Rice explains: "What was great about the process was Ferdi and I clicked very early, and we just met over lunch. It was very, sort of, informal… at the time, Ferdi had, like, a page description of what he was shooting for with this movie, and I was given that, and I was like, 'Oh yeah, I'd love to work on something like this.'" Director Ferdi Cito Filomarino goes on to talk about the central character of Beckett and how he subverts the useful thriller tropes. "We set [Beckett] in a way that is basically the worst possible character type to be in a man-hunt-thriller in some ways: the type of person that he is, the type of demeanor that he has, and attitude… By the end of the movie, he basically has to confront all of that." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Naked Singularity, based on the novel by Sergio De La Pava, is about an idealistic young New York City public defender burned out by the system who decides to rob a multi-million drug deal of one of his clients. Chase talks to Write On about adapting the novel for the screen. "The unifying voice of the film, I hope, comes from the book, which is the reason I wanted to do this. The author, Sergio De La Pava, is a public defender of 20 years; his wife, Susanna, is a public defender of 20 years, and he wrote this book that is a very well observed, funny, absurdist, kind of outraged novel that juggles in all of these different genres, but there's something very specific about his voice. It was like a new way into a discussion about social justice, and it was sort of a new way into seeing a story about a young public defender." Chase goes on to discuss the challenges of adapting: "With [adapting] a book, the first thing is 'What's the spirit of the book?' and trying to really get into your head, like what do you love about it? And what's the spirit of it, before even getting into the nuts and bolts of what characters are you going to cut and consolidate and plot points? It's just sort of understanding what you're writing from the book or what are you extracting tonally from it." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Mira won Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Contest in 2020 for her TV Pilot Beirut. She talks to Write On about what it takes to win a screenwriting contest: "I personally suffer from perfectionism, but the most important thing is to get [your script] done, get it to a place so you can actually submit it on time. What also helps is getting lots of feedback. That's one of my favorite parts of the process of writing, is sharing it with other people, getting their opinions, and having them help me punch it up." Mira goes on to talk about her role as a Script Coordinator on the show Lucifer, and how being support staff led to her first on-screen story credit. "Being in support staff positions has been such a learning curve for me. I wouldn't be the writer I am today without all that experience, without being invited to sit in the room and listen, being invited to pitch, getting opportunities to write outlines and write story documents.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
‘Nine Days’ is the story of a reclusive man who conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born. Edson Oda talks to Write On about the challenges of being a Writer-Director: "You have to think with different hats. An instructor at Sundance just told me you wear two hats: one hat while you're writing, and then when you're directing, another hat, another color… and not think of that piece as something you wrote, but as something that's there, and now you can change whatever you want." Edson goes on to discuss how it is important to love the process of creating: "Do it not because of the result, but more because you love doing it. Write a story as only you can write… if you could just make one movie, and nothing else, what movie would you make? And don't care about what people say, just do it." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Gary Goldstein is known for producing such hits as Pretty Woman, Under Siege and The Mothman Prophecies. He is also known as the author of the book Conquering Hollywood: The Screenwriter's Blueprint for Career Success. Gary talks to Write On about coaching writers, collaborating, and what makes a great story: "I just want something that is, all at once, a journey that's really going to, on some deeper level, be very satisfying to an audience because ultimately, we're all in the service of that - not money, not the distributor, we're in the service of being the storytellers for our culture, so I want something that comes from a place of such depth and truth and authenticity that no one else could have written it." Gary goes on to give advice on the writing life and the importance of nurturing your own talent: "Believe in yourself. Give yourself the gift of self-belief. Don't care what others think, don't play by the rules - do what your gut tells you is true for you.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Carole talks to Write On about how to prepare for submission to a fellowship or mentorship, and how to use what she calls the “Four Pillars of Success” to your advantage. "Throughout my career, I've been really fortunate to work with some very successful people, and I was always curious about what separated the successful people from the people that gave up and went back to Ohio and sold insurance. So I studied the successful people, and I thought, 'What do they have in common?' and I came up with four things, and I call them the Four Pillars of Success." Carole gives great advice on networking and how to build relationships effectively over time. "People get in their mind this idea that only one person is going to make or break their career, and they've gotta get to that person. You're starting out in the business, you're growing up with a group of people… start these relationships early, and they're going to end up being people who hire you or that you work with, or they recommend you, and as everybody moves up, they bring each other up." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Joshua talks to Write On about being a writer on the original iconic series and how it has been updated to reflect current times. "We are looking at how social media has changed the landscape of who we say we are and how we put ourselves out in the world, and so a new Gossip Girl rises, much like Game of Thrones… and targets a new crop of young students at the Constance Billard school." Joshua discusses how he runs a writers room and the creative benefits of being in that environment. "I always tells writers, 'Get in a writer's room…' Be a part of someone else's creation; that's how you learn. I learned so much. I thought I knew everything, but I learned so much." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Eric talks delving into the history of the elusive Black Widow: "We approached it with the lens of 'This is a Natasha Romanoff story.' I wanted to see what it's really like inside the most mysterious Avenger - the Avenger that intentionally closes herself off from people socially and emotionally. What's the best way to bring that out of her - the part of her emotion and her heart that she can't really control the way she controls everything else?" On coming on board after two writers have already worked on the script, Eric explains: "You just kind of have to go in and give your honest opinion. You're the custodian of the script; you're the one in charge of that document, and you're the one who has to make sure that we're being true to our characters and our story and that everything kind of makes linear sense and that what our characters are doing makes sense to their characters." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Thomas is Director of Development for Los Angeles-based production company Branded Pictures Entertainment and talks to Write On’s Phil Galasso about what the company looks for in a screenplay. "I think the [scripts] that really stand out are when something is sort of attacked in a very different way in a singular voice. That's something that you can't mimic or copy. Everyone has their sort of unique take and perspective on how to tell the story." Thomas talks about his approach to producing and the importance of supporting your creative team. “You always want to make sure, as a good producer, that at any stage in the process, you're supporting your creative team's vision. That there's a shared and collective vision, whether you came up with the idea or the writer did, or a director-writer did." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
Navot talks writing the explosive female-driven action-thriller starring Karen Gillan and Carla Gugino: "When you strip down this [assassin] genre… it's got this rich history of this hitman following this code and laws of the underworld… but, like in all of these movies, there's always someone innocent introduced into this equation that puts our hero into a dilemma: do I keep the code, or do I go with my heart?" Navot talks about his process with his writing partner Ehud Lavski and how a screenplay is never a fixed object. "A script is a living thing, and you have to be aware of it every step of the way… the worst thing you can do is be fixated on something, and I have to compliment my writing partner [Ehud Lavski], who is always on his toes, always thinking, and once I have an idea, we just jump at it." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
The famed Bill & Ted writer talks working with director Steven Soderbergh on the HBO Max crime thriller No Sudden Move: "I was asking Steven [Soderbergh] what style of film I should watch, because a lot of times when he and I work together on stuff, he'll say, 'Watch these six movies,' and I always love that because then you get into a kind of mindset." Ed goes on to discuss his lengthy, varied career, and how he stays inspired. "The only way to stay writing, I think, is a combination of reinvention but, like, real reinvention. How do you reinvent yourself in a way that keeps you in your wheelhouse but just outside your comfort zone so you're… constantly pushing in ways that, mostly, you can succeed in?" Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
False Positive is a horror-thriller about a mysterious and possibly dangerous fertility doctor that tackles some serious themes relating to pregnancy. Director John Lee explains: "'Mommy brain' is a real thing. Postpartum is a real thing, and prepartum is a real thing, and so in the movie, we just wanted to point out how we don't actually talk about it or support it or, like, actually do anything about it. We give it a cute phrase." John also offers advice on how to complete your first draft: "Get past the first act. Don't keep rewriting the first act. When you go in to rewrite or you go to write the next day, don't start on page one; start on the page you left. So if day one, you write page 1-14, whatever it is, the next day, don't even read it. Just start on page 14 and go forth… You have to get to the end, and then you have to basically destroy and rebuild and support as much as possible after that." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Award-winning writer, actor and director Josh Ruben burst onto the horror scene with the immensely popular Scare Me. His follow-up, Werewolves Within, is a feature adaptation of a videogame about werewolves attacking a small town. Josh talks about how he landed the gig and offers advice on how to show passion for your project. "The easiest way to describe how to pitch a film… is take a film that you love and that you know, and write down what happens as if you were talking to your best friend describing what happens in that movie in under 10 minutes, and for a total of 15 minutes, tack on an intro where you talk about why you're the best person to make this movie and why it's personal to you." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Good on Paper is a romantic comedy that tells the ‘mostly’ true story of finding Mr. Right but discovering he may be too good to be true. Writer and star Iliza Shlesinger talks about how being a stand-up comic informed her writing process. "As a comic, you're so sensitive to cadence and syllables, and those really can make or break someone laughing or not laughing… and then there's also putting it in other people's voices… it's up to the actor to bring it to life." Iliza talks about how important it is to practice your craft to get it right. "Each time you write, you get better and better, and the more screenplays you read, the more things you audition for, you see what… doesn't translate." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
HBO’s Hacks explores a dark mentorship that forms between a legendary Las Vegas comedian and an entitled, outcast 25-year-old. "The story of this show, in a lot of ways, is about two women who come together and work together,” says Jen. “They make each other better as writers and comedians, and as people.” Jen talks about the challenges of starting out on her own writing journey and how she overcame them. "[As a writer] you're in a race with no one but yourself. I think early on in my career, I would look at what other people were doing, and it was really hard; someone's success felt like my failure, and that is such a trap that you can easily fall into in this industry. But it's so important to do the work to not fall into that because the truth is… the thing you want to say with your story? Only you can say it in that specific way, so there's no comparison to anyone else." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Showrunner Bruce Miller talks to Write On about what he looks for in a successful staff writer: "Being a staff writer, you have to be able to write, you have to be able to re-write based on notes, and you have to be able to contribute in the room… You want to develop a way to be in the room that's comfortable for you because the most important thing in the room is not talking; it's listening." He goes on to discuss the complexities of the show’s main character, June (played by Elisabeth Moss): "I don't know if I want people to cheer for [June]; I want them to understand her and kind of understand her point of view… the fact is, she's gone through a trauma that we can barely fathom… the road through trauma and back is very, very long, very difficult, and different for everybody." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Evan talks to Write On about how he used an existing IP, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, to get noticed in Hollywood, and ended up with a hit show. "Cuckoo's Nest was always one of my favorite movies and books. I loved that [Nurse Ratched] was this incredibly complex character but didn't have a backstory to her… so I wanted to do something with IP where I wasn't retelling; I was creating and inventing." Evan takes us through his obsessive outlining process, how he navigates the business, and what he does when he hits a creative wall. "It's so important to go through those days of writers' block where you are stuck, to keep going and keep trying to work your way out of it, and if something's not working, move onto something else - even a totally different project that you're in a different stage in, and even if you're just getting something small done on that, getting little victories is huge." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Alena Smith talks to Write On about the TV series that offers an inside look at the world of famed American poet Emily Dickinson. "Dickinson, at its core, is really just a family drama as well as the coming of age story of a young artist." Alena discusses the feminist overtones of Dickinson and how it relates to current day struggles. "This is the whole point Dickinson makes: in the 1860s, women were not allowed to vote; they were not allowed to legally own property; they belonged to their fathers; they belonged to their husbands. The idea of women as independent citizens with agency and college educations and careers is much newer than we realize, and we're still figuring it out." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Write On talks with Little Marvin about his thought-provoking new show and how Lena Waithe boarded the project. "I wrote the pilot… probably three years back. I did the rounds; I got some agents, I did the rounds for a few months, and I got linked up with Miri Yoon, who's an executive producer at Vertigo with Roy Lee, and she asked me… 'Who would you like to sign on as a collaborator?' And I threw out Lena Waithe as kind of a dare almost, just like, 'Let's see what you can do about it…' and like two days later, I was sitting down with Lena."
Little Marvin also talked about his experience as a first-time creator and showrunner. "This was not only my first job as a showrunner; this was my first job in television. I didn't come from other people's writers' rooms, I'd never experienced any piece of making a TV show, and then I was the creator, writer, showrunner, and executive producer of my first thing… I spent every minute of it white-knuckling it… through the entire experience because what they don't tell you about it is just how much you're going to be doing."
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Jac Schaeffer talks to Write On about the challenges of crafting the unique and complex story that is the hit Marvel Studios show WandaVision. "I was so dazzled by the idea but I was also like, 'This is not gonna work. This is crazy!' But the challenge of it was so irresistible that I immediately set about trying to figure out well, okay, if this is the thing, how do you do it effectively? How do you do it in a way where you actually do care about these characters?” Jac discusses her process and how the show’s famous twists and turns came about. "First, I came at it from a way of, like, 'What's the most interesting watch?' And, for me, that's always when you're ahead of the audience for a while and then sort of blindside them and give them a lot of information and then jerk them in another way, so that was part of my design. And then it was about just remaining true to her authentic journey and tethering everything to the love story." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Write On talks with legendary TV writer Marta Kauffmann about the highly anticipated Friends reunion and what makes the show still resonate today. "I think these characters [are] incredibly loveable, and you'd love to hang out with them and have a beer with them and invite them into your home. The show is kind of warm and cozy, and I don't know that that goes out of style." Marta also talks about her approach to showrunning and how to get the best out of writers. "The best way to lead is by collaborating, and as a showrunner, I feel like one of my jobs is I'm like the camp mom where everybody in the production camp are my campers; they're my kids, and I have a responsibility to make sure that they are happy doing this job. I work really hard for a happy crew." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Solos is a dramatic anthology series created by David Weil and produced by Amazon. The series features stars such as Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway and Helen Mirren, among others. David talks to Write On about the genesis of the project: “Solos was born out of a time of great disconnection and loneliness and solitude. I always wanted to tell a story that returned me to the origins of how I fell in love with storytelling.” David takes us through his career and the long journey from writing his first spec to becoming the creator of the Amazon Prime series Hunters. “All of the no’s will one day lead to a yes. I can't tell you how many no’s I had in the ten years it took from moving out to LA to then getting Hunters made… every script that is passed on will one day have its moment.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Pete Goldfinger is no stranger to the Saw franchise, having previously penned Jigsaw about the eponymous villain of the series. He talks to Write On about servicing the fanbase and what it’s like to craft the set pieces the franchise is known for. "We always do the traps last… even though that's often the featured thing that you'll see in the trailers, mostly what we try to do, in our dreams, is more of a Usual Suspects kind of whodunit-y suspense sort of thing." Pete also delves into his own writing process and rituals. "Every Monday when I'm working on a project, no matter what, I read the entire project from the beginning. You might find new things that inspire you, that will help you, and then you're always on top of everything so you know what you're writing about." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
‘Blackjack’ is the story of Brooklyn-native street basketball legend Jackie Ryan. Writer Antonio Macia is a self-proclaimed ‘basketball junkie’ who says writing this film was a dream come true. "The story takes place in the world of street ball and basketball, but it's really not about that. It's really about a young man trying to find his way, trying to deal with his family dynamics, trying to get out of his own way." Antonio talks about how he molded this true-life sports biopic. "I was able to work with Jackie [Ryan] quite a bit. I spent time with him, did extensive interviews talking to him about different periods in his life, and he definitely read over different drafts and would help navigate certain things. He was such a great resource because he was very open and vulnerable, especially dealing with his low points in his life." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Feral State is the story of a misfit gang of runaways and orphans who are taken in by a dark and charismatic father figure and together wreak havoc throughout swamps and trailer parks in central Florida. Writer-Director Jon Carlo talks to Write On about how the film came about: “Location was the starting point for everything. This movie came about in such an untraditional kind of way where the money was there first before there even was a script, and part of the stipulations was to shoot in a specific area in Florida, so I went down to meet the producers and kind of scope out the scene, and the story kind of grew organically out of what I was seeing in the community.” Jon talks about his background as an actor, applying to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and how hard work is the key to a successful career. “I think the one thing that I’ve learned that I think is the most important lesson is you have to do the work. There is no easy way around: you can’t just scribble something down and hope that it’s good. You have to write and rewrite religiously until it’s there.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Entertainment career coach, author, speaker, CBS Writing and WGA Showrunner Training Program director Carole Kirschnertalks toWrite Onabout mentorships, fellowships and training opportunities for writers and showrunners. “You cannot teach somebody how to be a showrunner in six Saturdays, but what you can do is… give an idea of what to expect." Carole breaks down the role of the showrunner and what it takes to be in charge of a TV show. “The job [of a showrunner] is all-consuming, and throughout, people say, 'This is an impossible job, this is a huge job, this is a terrible job, this is a big job,' and so I always have to say, 'Well, why would anybody do it then?' And then you hear the great parts about how wonderful it is to have a group of people create something together, how satisfying it is, how wonderful it is to be the person who gets to say, 'Yeah, we're gonna do it this way.'" Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Since 2005, each December The Black List releases its annual list, a survey of the most liked unproduced screenplays of that year. The Black List also works to foster a large community of writers through screenwriting labs, online resources, and in-person events. Write On’s host Phil Galasso talks with The Black List’s Director of Community Kate Hagen about how The Black List supports writers and what she looks for in a script. “I think for me, two of the biggest things comes down to personal voice and tone. If you have a strong personal voice, I literally do not care what a script is about; but if you are giving me personality, if you are giving me a personal story world I have not seen before… I think that goes a really long way.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Moisés Zamora, creator of Netflix's Selena: The Series about the legendary singer, talks to guest host Lee Jessup about why it was important for this show to have a writers room primarily made up of Mexican American voices. "All of the writers I hired [for Selena] were Latinx because it was important for the storytelling… and within that Latinx monolith, there's a lot of diversity, and so I was really proud to be able to cultivate those sort of relationships with those writers and getting to know them and realizing there's so many more stories to tell, from the Latin American, Indigenous, Afro-Latinx point of view." Moisés takes us through his varied writing career, starting with writing novels in Spanish, working in advertising and marketing, to landing his first TV job on American Crime. "I don't think writing is, in any form, wasted. So if a pilot doesn't give you the results that you wanted, it doesn't matter! It just starts developing a layer of talent on top of another layer of talent, and without that pilot, maybe it doesn't lead to another project, so keep your mind open to always growing." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
The New York Screenwriters Workshop sponsored by Final Draft is a weekly intensive for early-career, New York City-based screenwriters who are under-represented in the film industry. Write On host Phil Galasso talks with one of the workshop’s fellows, Beanie Barnes, along with fellowship mentors Jim Hart and Anne Carey about the program. They are also joined by Brit Fryer from the WGA East. Beanie talks about what the program has done for her writing and career, and how she approaches her own work. “I was talking to someone about screenwriters being anthropologists. I tell my kids that as well; we’re kind of anthropologists and sociologists and psychiatrists, and we are really holding mirrors up, not just for the word but also for ourselves.” For more information on the workshop visit www.wgaeast.org/theworkshop/ Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Craig Brewer, Writer-Director of Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan and TV’s Empire, talks to guest host Sade’ Sellers about directing the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s hit comedy Coming to America. “I felt that there was a noble theme inside the sequel… and I was like we gotta stay strong with that because comedy - it’s hard to sustain. But if you have a beating heart for a theme that is relevant… I think the movie became more relevant as it came to being completed.” Craig also discusses TV Writers Rooms, the difficulties of doing comedy well, and the importance of the entertainment industry, especially in times like these. “Entertainment just might be an essential industry… I don’t know if I could have gotten through the pandemic without The Mandalorian, without WandaVision or Borat, or even Gordon Ramsay’s chef show on Amazon.” Coming 2 America is now available on Amazon Prime. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Mike Jones speaks to Write On host Phil Galasso about the unique process of writing for Pixar, and how he, Pete Doctor and Kemp Powers collaborated on Soul. “It was a great, kind of fantastic partnership because it's hard to force partnerships, and Kemp [Powers] was so open and willing and also so honest and so forthright with what he believed the script should be or what he believed, in particular, the character of Joe needed to be. That was just great to have his… confident voice alongside us.” Mike discusses his journey to becoming a screenwriter and how it wasn’t straightforward. “I did not grow up wanting to be a storyteller. I grew up loving story; I grew up with a dad who loved movies… and I grew up with a love of that kind of visual storytelling. But I grew up in south Texas, and that wasn't an option - being a screenwriter or working in the movies. It wasn't an option; it was like another world to me.” Soul is available to stream on Disney+. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, Minari is the story of a Korean family who start a farm in Arkansas in the 1980s. For Writer-Director Lee Isaac Chung, the film is deeply personal. “It’s really a family story… a journey that this family takes to understand each other a little better,” Lee tells Write On host Phil Galasso. “The story originated with an exercise that I was doing writing down as many memories as I could, from the age of about 5 years old up to 8 years old.” Lee discusses a writing method he uses that he learned from Steven Soderbergh, how he decided in his last year of college as a science major that he really wanted to be a filmmaker, and how he had no idea what would happen with the script for Minari after he wrote it. “I thought, maybe I’m just going to write this because it means so much to me, and I don’t know if it’ll get made, but at least maybe my daughter will read it one day.” Minari is now available on VOD and in theaters where it is safe. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Supernova is the moving story of Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), who after Tusker’s dementia diagnosis travel across England in an RV to visit family, friends and places from their past. For Writer-Director Harry Macqueen, an enormous amount of research went into ensuring he did justice to the subject of dementia. “I think the key thing for writing this script really was several years of spending time with people who were living with this kind of dementia… Not only did I learn a huge amount about the medical side of dementia and the biology of it… but also, very, very importantly, the human element of it.” Harry discusses his writing process, how to develop complex characters while maintaining simplicity of narrative, and how important it is to have a close group of friends you can share your work in progress with. “I really think that filmmaking and scriptwriting is not about ego at all… it's about taking responsibility for the project, [and] for the script.” Supernova is now available on VOD. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Jesse Chatham talks to guest host Sade' Sellers about how his screenplay about a bereaved woman seeking out a new life off the grid went from placing in the Nicholl Fellowship to becoming a feature directed by and starring Robin Wright (House of Cards). “I placed in the top 50… and one of the readers, Lora Kennedy, was the VP of casting at Warner Bros. She read it, and she fell in love with the script, and she was able to lasso in a producer named Allyn Stewart, who was just on Sully.” Jesse discusses how his journey to writing Land began in 2013 when he had just turned 40. “I was unhappy with where I was… and I was always writing something, but it was never really screenplays. I kind of had this moment of mortality, and I was like, ‘You know what? I should think about what I want to look back on when I'm 65, 70. Do I want to look back at a life that didn't take any risks?’ I finally decided, I just want to go for it.” Land is now in theaters where it is safe and will be available on VOD on March 5.
CONTENT WARNING: This podcast contains discussions of gun violence that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
G.O. Parsons has written one of the wildest rides of the year with Wally’s Wonderland, a B-movie homage that pits Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage against a horde of demonic animatronics. “I went into writing Willy's Wonderland with the intention, the sole intention, of just shooting it myself in a friend's garage with absolutely no money,” he tells Write On host Phil Galasso. “If you can set your script in one location, and you can keep the budget low, and you have just stellar writing, stellar characters, and a fun story, you can get your movie made.” G.O. Parsons discusses his roots in playwriting, his daily writing process, and what it takes to keep going when the odds are against you. "No's do not change your life. Somebody tells you no, your life stays exactly the same. But one yes can change your life… and I got a million no's until Nicolas Cage said yes." Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen talks to host Phil Galasso about his transition into writing and directing with Falling, a stirring drama he also acts in alongside Lance Henriksen. The film is about a man who along with his male partner and adopted daughter is visited by his aging father who possesses a very different world view and is also facing the onset of dementia. “Among other things, [Falling] is a story that explores communication - whether there are limits to it, whether there are people that you can't communicate with… (and) are there people who don't deserve to be communicated with?” Viggo discusses his writing process, how he makes progress every day and what he has learned from it: “You have to make mistakes in order to learn. That's just part of the process, and making a movie or writing a screenplay is about solving a series of problems, overcoming a series of obstacles. That's what life is, too.” Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Will Berson had been haunted by the story of the murder of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton by police since his hippy parents told it to him as a child. As Will watched events like the Ferguson riots unfold he realized Fred Hampton's story had to be told. After writing the script as a spec he discovered writer/director Shaka King had been working on the same story, and together they joined forces to make the powerful Judas and the Black Messiah.
On this episode of Write On, Will Berson and guest host Sade' Sellers discuss Berson’s roots in comedy writing and his particular approach to historical drama: “Essential truths are more important to me than historical facts.” He talks about writing strong female characters, what it is like to write with multiple collaborators, and how to manage a career in Hollywood. “My advice would be to play the game a little more. Just realize how ridiculous this town is and embrace it. Act like you're in an improv scene and just go with the flow.” Judas and the Black Messiah releases in theaters and on HBO Max on February 12. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Showrunner, writer, and mentor Jeffrey Lieber and our host Phil Galasso discuss what Jeffrey looks for when putting together a writer's room, his transition from acting on the stage to writing for the screen, his work helping new writers gain meaningful access with #StartWith8Hollywood, and more!
Jeffrey Lieber is the co-creator of Lost and has worked on shows such as NCIS: New Orleans, The Originals, and most recently, the reboot of Charmed.
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Promising Young Woman writer-director Emerald Fennell and our host Phil Galasso discuss the tonal tightrope of the film, its use of music, her unconventional writing process, and more.
Carey Mulligan stars in this darkly comedic thriller as Cassie, a young woman traumatized by an event in her past, seeking revenge on the "nice guys" that cross her path.
CONTENT WARNING: This interview contains discussions of sexual assault that listeners may find upsetting. Listener discretion is advised.
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Literary Manager and producer Peter Katz discusses his company Story Driven, Being a Judge in Final Draft's Big Break Contest, what writers can do to stay focused in 2021, and more.
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One Night in Miami screenwriter Kemp Powers discusses adapting his own play into a film, how his previous work as a journalist informs his screenwriting, the real history behind the film's events, and more.
Inspired by real events, the movie is a fictional account chronicling a memorable night when Muhammed Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cook, and Jim Brown gather in a Miami hotel room discussing their roles in the civil rights movement and cultural upheaval of the 1960s.
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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom writer Ruben Santiago-Hudson discusses with guest host Sade' Sellers his relationship with August Wilson, the characters of Levee and Ma, and much more. Starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, the film, adapted from the August Wilson play, follows one tension-filled day when trail-blazing blues singer Ma Rainey and her band gather at a recording studio in Chicago in 1927.
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The Beach House writer-director Jeffrey A. Brown discusses working within the horror genre, his writing process on the film, how his experience as a location scout helped him, and much more.
The Beach House follows two troubled college sweethearts on a romantic getaway that turns into a struggle for survival when unexpected guests.
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Archenemy co-writer and director Adam Egypt Mortimer discusses his approach to working in different genres, the tricky balance of withholding and disclosing information to the audience, and more.
In the movie, a teen meets a mysterious man played by Joe Manganiello who claims he lost his superpowers after arriving from another dimension. Together they take to the streets to wipe out a crime boss and his local drug syndicate.
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Wander Darkly writer-director Tara Miele and our favorite guest host Sade' Sellers discuss working with actors like Sienna Miller and Diego Luna, how a car crash she and her husband got into actually influenced the film and more.
In the film, a traumatic accident leads a couple to a surreal state of being that takes them on a disorienting journey through the duality of their shared moments.
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Storied Media Group's Vice President of Operations Kevin Fernandes and Founder & CEO Todd Hoffman discuss what they look for in an IP (intellectual property), their process for packaging, and more.
Storied Media Group was founded in 2013 and has quickly become one of the most powerful brokers and producers of intellectual property in Hollywood. Projects include Clint Eastwood's The Mule, Netflix's Insatiable, and many more.
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Happiest Season writer-director Clea DuVall discusses telling a universal story through a unique lens, working within the romantic-comedy and Christmas movies genres, her approach to writing characters, and more!Kristen Stewart stars as a young woman with a plan to propose to her girlfriend while at their family's annual holiday party, only to discover that her partner hasn't yet come out to her very conservative parents. You can stream Happiest Season now on Hulu!
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'Palm Springs' writer Andy Siara discusses how the story evolved through the writing process, the tricky tonal balance the script strikes, and much more.
The film stars Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as two wedding guests that develop a budding romance while stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over again.
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I'm Your Woman writers Jordan Horowitz and Julia Hart discuss telling genre stories through new lenses, the power of silence on screen, and much more.
Rachel Brosnahan stars in this 1970's set crime-thriller as a woman forced to go on the run with her baby after her husband betrays his partners in crime. I'm Your Woman is available now on Amazon Prime.
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Crosby Selander discusses Bringing Back,the spec script he recently sold to Legendary for 7 figures. Selander and guest-host Lee Jessup discuss the journey from writing the script to getting repped through Script Pipeline with Kaplan Perrone, and ultimately the sale itself. Lee Jessup is a screenwriting career consultant and long-time friend of Final Draft. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
The Good Lord Bird co-creator Mark Richard discusses the show's use of humor despite the serious subject matter, what it was like to work with Ethan Hawke, how he got his start as a writer, and more. The Showtime and BlumhouseTV miniseries is based on the James McBride novel of the same name. Ethan Hawke co-created and stars in the series as abolitionist John Brown as he mounts his crusade to end slavery - told through the eyes of a newly freed young man affectionately nicknamed onion. Catch the series finale Sunday, November 15 at 9:00pm PST! Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Emmy® nominated writer-director-producer Leslye Headland joins our host Phil Galasso to discuss her transition from playwright to screenwriter, her time working on the cult-classic The Terriers, the unique challenges of writing Russian Doll,and much more.
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The Wolf of Snow Hollow writer-director-star Jim Cummings discusses his unique writing process, what inspired him to become a filmmaker, scary movies, and much more. Set in a small, quiet, and snowy town, a werewolf starts killing people. Cummings stars as the deputy Sherriff trying to figure out what the hell is going on while he also deals with some personal stuff.
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Spontaneouswriter-director Brian Duffield discusses managing the tricky tone of the film, getting the audience to fall in love with your characters, his writing process, and some major spoilers if you haven't yet seen the film. Spontaneousis a heartwarming coming of age story starring Katherine Langford (13 Reasons Why) where a bunch of high school kids explode. You can find the film on your favorite PVOD platform now! Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Phil Galasso and co-host Sade' Sellers discuss Scare Me with writer-director-producer-star, Josh Ruben. He shares his experience in every facet of production, bringing the story to life with Aya Cash and Chris Redd, and more!
The film takes place in a cabin at the Catskills where two writers share scary stories during a power outage and confront their fears when reality manifests. You can watch Scare Menow on Shudder.
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HOST co-writers Gemma Hurley, Jed Shepherd, and Rob Savage discuss how they managed to produce the film safely during the on-going pandemic and more. What happens when five friends decide to do a totally normal thing and host a seance over Zoom? You’ll have to watch the movie on Shudder to find out. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes!
Jeff Barnaby discusses his fresh approach to the zombie genre, balancing theme and story, and more! Blood Quantumis about a zombie virus that decimates all of Earth's population except the native community of Red Crow who now has to contend with the living dead, and with each other. The film is available now on VOD, Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray.
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Guest host Sade' Sellers and The Boys writer Anslem 'Slem' Richardson discuss his early career with competitions and tokenism, writing for Season 2, and much more.
The Boysfollows a group of vigilantes that set out to stop corrupt superheroes who abuse their superpowers. You can new episodes each Friday on Amazon Prime.
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The Death of Me director Darren Bousman discusses how he generates story ideas, his writing process, and how it's evolved over his career, his work directing films in the SAWfranchise, and much more.
Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth star as Christine and Neil, a couple vacationing in Thailand. After a night of partying way too hard, they wake up to find a video of Neil murdering Christine, who seems to be very much alive, leading the couple into a web of mystery, black magic, and murder. The Death of Me
The Devil All the Time co-writers Antonio Campos and Paulo Campos discuss the challenges adapting such a sprawling novel, the use of voice over in the film, their writing process, and much more.
The film, based on the acclaimed novel by Donald Ray Pollock stars Tom Holland as a young man devoted to protecting his loved ones in a town full of corruption and sinister characters. The Devil All the Timeis available to stream now on Netflix.
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