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“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, f*ck this. I want to create work. But you definitely need a big old f*cking 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.
“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.
"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.
“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 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.
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, Physcial is 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.
Please note: this podcast was recorded prior to the WGA Strike.
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.
Triangle of Sadness is a satirical black comedy from writer/director Ruben Ostlund. The film, staring Woody Harrelson, takes the world of luxury boating to the next level with its wry comedy that exposes many upstairs/downstairs differences among the characters. Ostlund discusses the importance of pitching his project before he starts writing. “If you are a writer or if you are a director, your profession is to be the artistically responsible for the product that you are producing. You are the one that is deciding what ideas should be put into this, what should taken be taken out,” he says.
The film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This was Ostlund’s second win at Cannes. He talked about how special it is to him to have had these successes. “I have been kind of lucky because every time that I have finished a previous film and we have had a premiere of the film in Cannes, there's a little table on a small cafe where I walk to with my producer and my mentor. Two of my best friends and we sit down and we talk about what is going to be the next project that we are working on. And so, it is kind of how to say astonishing that we have been on this little cafe and exactly the same table four times now and decided which next project is.”
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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
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+.
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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
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.
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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!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.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Write On Podcast on iTunes! Now available on Google Podcasts!
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.