“[My dad] really started to inhabit the characters, especially Ray, speaking as him during the writing process. That was when I realized this was going to be its own kind of special beast. Working with him taught me so much as a writer and storyteller; by the time we got to set, we had a shorthand for everything,” says director and co-writer Ronan Day-Lewis about writing the script Anemone with his father, Daniel Day-Lewis. The film Anemone, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, paints a portrait of a family torn apart as they struggle to come to terms with their past and present after their harrowing experiences with the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Isolation, shame, regret and the true meaning of brotherhood are themes explored in this hyper-focused family drama. On today’s episode we sit down with Ronan Day-Lewis to find out more about his edgy first feature film, what it’s like writing a screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis, and Ronan’s personal connection between his visual art and the imagery in the film. Ronan also shares this advice to screenwriters tackling family and generational stories: “Whatever you can fall in love with, latch onto that: an image, a feeling, a character. Don’t put pressure on approaching a script a certain way. Stay open, be patient, and keep sight of what originally gave you the impulse to enter that world. Over time, the story will reveal itself to you.” To learn more about this surprising and deeply emotional film, listen to the podcast.
“You have to love all your characters. Even if you're writing a bad guy. You, the writer, have to write them with love and empathy, and treat each character, give each character, a full life and a full arc in your story, even if their screen time is small. Essentially, if you were following that character, they also have a full story, a full life,” says actor/writer Brett Goldstein about how he approaches writing characters in film and TV. On today’s episode, we chat with writer/director Will Bridges and writer/actor Brett Goldstein about their new film All of You, starring Imogen Poots and Brett Goldstein. The film centers on two best friends, Laura and Simon, who harbor an unspoken love for one another even after a futuristic test matches one of them up with their supposed soulmate. Though the set-up of the story sounds like science-fiction, the movie stays firmly grounded in reality and examines the human need for love and how we often sabotage that love. If you’re a fan of the show Black Mirror, you likely know Will Bridges’ Emmy-winning episode “USS Callister,” the only Black Mirror episode to get a sequel. Brett Goldstein is perhaps most famous for playing Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, where he was a writer on the show before acting on it. He talks about his self-taped audition for the show and how taking that one risk changed everything for him. Bridges and Goldstein talk about working together on an early project where they were forced to bunk in a “spider infested Airbnb,” and they also discuss the nuances of their writing in the film All of You, including why they left out all exposition. “We never wanted to be too specific about where Simon and Laura are in their relationship, but we want to draw you in quickly. We want you playing detective: Where are they now? What's going on with them? So we just trusted the audience would get it,” Bridges says. They also discuss why you never see Laura or Simon separate from each other. “One of the rules of the film,” says Goldstein, “we only see them when they're together. We don't see their lives when they're apart, and that's kind of fun and interesting to me, that we are watching the film of them. We are not watching the film of what it’s like to be Simon, what's it like to be Laura, we only know what it's like to be them.” To hear more, listen to the podcast.
On today’s episode, we speak with director Joe Wright whose new limited TV series Mussolini: Son of the Century, explores fascism through the early political career of Italy’s Prime Minister Mussolini in the 1920s. The show is incredible storytelling from beginning to end, mixing opera and techno rave music while drawing chilling comparisons to the current rise of fascism around the world. “We all have a dark side. We all have the choice to be the best of ourselves, or the worst of ourselves and we usually land somewhere in the middle. Working on Mussolini allowed me the opportunity to look at my relationship with my own masculinity and it helped me understand the man I want to be,” says director Joe Wright about the way he personalized Benito Mussolini’s story to make it more accessible to a modern audience, adding, “I wanted the audience to be at times seduced by him, and then in a Brechtian sense, to kind of pull the rug from underneath their feet, and ask them to apply some critical distance.” Wright also discusses what he learned about storytelling growing up with his parent’s puppet theater, his early films like Pride and Prejudice, and dealing with his own self-doubts as a filmmaker by making a movie about Winston Churchill called Darkest Hour. “Darkest Hour is a movie about doubt. When I made that movie, I just made a movie called Pan, which the critics hated and lost a huge amount of money. I was sort of consumed afterwards by self-doubt. I was thinking, what have I got to say? I can't reach audiences anymore, I'm out of step. So, then the opportunity came along to do Darkest Hour, and I immediately perceived it as a story about a little man who was consumed by self-doubt, and who was doubted by others all around him. Yet he persevered and overcame enormous odds to lead a nation at their darkest hour. So, for me, that became a story worth telling,” says Wright. To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“The thing that started it all off was me saying [the character Toxie] should be a guy in a suit. In other words, let’s not do a computer-generated creature, let’s have a person in a suit and have that handmade, hand-stitched kind of quality to it where you can sort of see the seams a little bit and have that be part of the fun. I also said let’s have it be rated R. Hopefully y’all are not interested in a family-friendly PG-13 version of this movie, because that’s not what the fans of the original are going to want, so let’s keep it in the R-zone. And let’s make sure it stays very silly. That silliness is what was so appealing to me about the original, and I just wanted to make sure that we weren’t going to try and do something that was too self-serious,” says The Toxic Avenger writer/director Macon Blair about pitching Legendary Studios his version of how he would reimagine the classic black comedy splatter film for a modern audience while staying loyal to the fans of the 1984 version. On today’s episode, we chat with writer/director/actor Macon Blair about his previous films like Blue Ruin and I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which won the Sundance Grand Jury award in 2017. His latest film is a reboot of The Toxic Avenger starring Peter Dinklage and Kevin Bacon, and is a whole lot of gory, gross-out fun. Blair talks about the need to dig into the over-the-top absurdity of the franchise while still making the modern version of the story feel authentic. “I’m always looking for something that I can connect to on a personal level. I don’t mean autobiographical. I mean to be able to have that electrical current with what I’m typing out,” he says. Blair tells us about his on-going journey to finding his voice as a writer and what it was like waiting two years to get distribution for The Toxic Avenger. He also explains why he skewers a famous screenwriting trope in the film that involves a cat named Mr. Treats who was apparently quite the menace. To hear more insight, listen to the podcast.
“Our goal in writing [Sirens] was to write something that makes you think, and offers the opportunity to re-examine your own assumptions that you made about these characters. And it's taxing. We ask some difficult questions. It's not The Perfect Couple. It's not a murder show. We're going after something thematically that’s really large and really ambitious, and that's why the Greek mythology came to mind. These are epic stories. These are about blood, and moms, and torture, and trauma, and pain. These themes are not tiny. These are complicated, juicy stews,” says showrunner and creator, Molly Smith Metzler about why she wanted to invoke big themes from Greek drama in her TV show Sirens. On today’s episode, we chat with Molly Smith Metzler, showrunner and creator of the hit Netflix limited series Sirens starring Julianne Moore, Meghann Fahy and Kevin Bacon. The show is based on her stage play Elemeno Pea from 2011. Smith Metzler talks about making the transition from playwriting to television and what she learned about being in the writer’s room for Orange is the New Black. "Everything you do in a [writer’s] room is an offering. I'm here to serve, I'm here to serve you. Come in with ideas, offer them. If they don't hit, back off of them. You are a sous chef and a waiter," she says. She also talks about writing edgy female characters unapologetically, like the ones in Sirens, and the numerous times she was asked to remove a certain risqué scene from the pilot script – which she refused to do. "We have to write these women in their truest form – they're complicated, and they don't have to explain themselves, either. My job is not to soften her so an audience won't turn off the TV show," she says. To hear more about creating Sirens listen to the podcast.
“Write your own anxieties. Get into your own psyche. I think if it scares you – like, I'm terrified of guns, and that's where The Purge came from. But here, there were various generational fears and whatnot that led to The Home, Adam's fears and my fears about getting older and our anxiety. So I would say if it's born from your fear, the majority of the audience probably has a similar fear. I think we are communal in that way. Fears are not singular, so I think you should work off your own fears, and on a practical level, if you can keep the budget small, you're in a much better place getting it made. That was key to The Purge getting made, that it was one location,” says James DeMonaco, director and co-writer of the new horror film, The Home. On today’s show, we talk with both James DeMonaco and Adam Cantor, co-writers of the new horror film The Home. The Home is about Max (Pete Davidson), a troubled young man, who starts working at a retirement home only to realize its residents and caretakers harbor sinister secrets. As he investigates the building and its forbidden fourth floor, he starts to uncover connections to his own past and upbringing as a foster child. DeMonaco, best known for creating The Purge franchise, and Cantor, an actor-turned-writer, talk about their favorite horror films from the 1970s, the challenge of bringing a 70s vibe to modern horror films, and working with their Staten Island buddy, comedian Pete Davidson and bringing out his intense dramatic performance. DeMonaco also talks about the impact The Purge films have had on our culture. “I grew up watching Romero and Carpenter films and George Miller. I always thought they put great mirrors up to society, and there was always some kind of smuggler's cinema idea, where they were smuggling socio-political themes into the genre's pieces. So sadly, The Purge is reflective of the world we're living in and becoming, I think, more reflective, which is scary. And terrifying. I wish it wasn't, I wish it was a complete fantasy to purge. Unfortunately, it's not right now, and it's seemingly getting worse,” says DeMonaco who weighs in on whether something like The Purge could happen in real life. “I used to say, ‘Absolutely not!’ Now, I don't know if I would say that any longer, and that's even scarier to me,” says DeMonaco. To hear more about The Home and the spooky events that h appened on set, listen to the podcast.
“Vampires hold incredible destructive power, and so we're very drawn to them, sort of like moths to a candle, right? I think that's sort of eternal, and that's the reason every culture, pretty much around the globe has some version of the vampire because it represents that very human conflict of what we desire which is so in tune with and aligned to things that can also destroy us. That just feels very honest and eternal, so I don't think [vampires] will ever go away. I think they will be an eternal part of our mythologies,” says writer/director Natasha Kermani, about the everlasting appeal of vampires on film. On today’s episode, we chat with Natasha Kermani about her new movie Abraham’s Boys that extends the world of Dracula into a psychological family drama with its own chills and thrills. The movie centers on brothers Max (Brady Hepner) and Rudy (Judah Mackey) Van Helsing, who have spent their lives under the strict rule of their father, Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver). Unaware of their father’s dark past as a vampire hunter, they struggle to understand his paranoia and increasingly erratic behavior. But when the brothers begin to uncover the violent truths behind Abraham’s history with Dracula, their world unravels, forcing them to confront the terrifying family legacy. Kermani talks about adapting the Joe Hill short story of the same name, shares tips for structuring a short story into a feature film, and ways a writer can bring a classic monster story like Dracula into a modern setting. “I think it's about examining our world through an eternal lens of these mythologies that don't change. Power dynamics. Authority. Submission. These are eternal. So the question is, if you take that structure, and apply it to our world, how do things fall into place? And when you can start to look at the world around us through that lens, I think you start to get really interesting, truthful stories because you're not trying to come up with a new structure, or a new classic. You are obeying the laws of how our brains work and how our stories work. “I think it's a question of, ‘What are the things that you desire, but also fear? What are you drawn to, like a moth to flame?’ For me, with Abraham's Boys, it's that we're so drawn to the idea of someone coming to you and saying, ‘I know what the monsters are, I know what the heroes are. Follow me and you'll be safe.’ That's very dangerous,” says Kermani. To hear more, listen to the podcast.
“One thing I’ve found in the crime genre is that homicides are always interesting. When somebody’s killed, whatever that case may be, it’s usually compelling drama. So then it’s up to you as the writer to surprise the audience and do things that they didn’t think were coming. I’ve described it like this before: If you can hit the sweet spot of, ‘I didn’t see that coming! I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t see it coming,’ That, to me, is the best writing. It’s like, when you got to the end of The Sixth Sense, and you were like, ‘Oh my god, I should have seen that coming!’ That was great writing,” says Derek Haas, creator and writer for the show Countdown on Prime. You may know Derek Haas from the popular NBC procedural dramas like Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago PD. Now, he’s got a new crime drama on Prime called Countdown that tells one twisty crime story over 13 episodes – all written by Haas. Set in Los Angeles, Countdown follows a secret task force who discover a sinister international plot that threatens millions of lives. The show stars Eric Dane, Jensen Ackles and Jessica Camacho as undercover agents all harboring dark secrets of their own. On this episode of the podcast, we chat with Haas about starting his career as a crime novelist, writing movies like 2 Fast 2 Furious, 3:10 to Yuma and Wanted before making the switch to TV. Haas talks about working with director John Singleton, prolific TV producer Dick Wolf and writing characters that hook audiences. He also shares his advice for writing action sequences that both stun visually and surprise the audience. “When I think about action sequences, I always go back to Raiders of the Lost Ark. My favorite action sequence of any movie ever is when Indiana Jones has to fight this gigantic Nazi guy, and – in any other movie – that would have been the only thing that’s happening. But they put Marion in a plane where she gets trapped because the cover of the plane closes. Then the plane’s propellers start spinning. The plane starts spinning, gas is leaking out of the plane, there’s other people running by with machine guns. So it’s not just, ‘Oh, here’s a fight,’ it’s ‘Here’s a fight, but there’s eight other things happening at once.’ I really try to do that in these chase sequences, because you have seen a million of them. What’s the other factors I can bring to it? How can I show you something you haven’t seen before? Sometimes it’s character, and sometimes, it’s the stunt itself,” says Haas. To hear more screenwriting advice from Haas, listen to the podcast.
“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.
Michéal Coughlan
wish you'd let the man talk - poor interview technique and as for all the "uh um" etc
apricotic
sooo sounds like she's saying it's no longer about the writer but THE BRAND. very on brand right now with how writers can't get published unless they have some social following already now...
Raj B
za