Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast

“For me, I don't know how you could not make [a script] personal. I think drama allows you to hide how personal it is. I think that's kind of what I like about writing in the genre space. On the outside looking in, it just looks like a big action movie. It doesn't look like a personal story. But there are personal elements like my mom was a working mom as well. And so that's why you have Kyra in the movie who has to come back to her son because she's been working to protect him. That's a very personal thing… but you would never assume that it's a personal story because it's wrapped up in the action,” says Leon Chills, co-writer of the new film Shadow Force, about writing action from a very personal point of view.  On today's episode, we talk with director/co-writer Joe Carnahan and co-writer Leon Chills about the new action flick Shadow Force that puts a family at the center of the action. With a bounty on their heads, Kyra (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must go on the run with their young son (Jahleel Kamara) to avoid their former employer, a unit of shadow ops that has been sent to kill them. Carnahan and Chills talk about the challenges of writing action set pieces and the power of giving the story emotional weight. We also discuss trying to push the boundaries of the action genre to invent set pieces that are fresh and inventive, and writing action scenes on the page that are compact and concise.  “As an older writer and doing it as long as I have, I'll tell screenwriters, if I see four or five lines of scene description, I'm telling you, do it in two. Do it in one. Let people spend 40 minutes reading your script. No more. You know what I mean? Get through it with that kind of economy. If you've ever read M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense script – it's an absolute masterclass in how to do that. Just so sparse and beautiful and pitch perfect the way that things are written,” says Carnahan.    To learn more about action writing and hear more advice, listen to the podcast. 

On today's episode, we speak to writer Brandon Osterman, whose short script ‘The Naughty List' won last year's Final Draft Big Break Short Screenplay Category. As part of his prize package, he received a consultation with Sav Rodgers, Marketing Manager for Seed&Spark, the film industry's most popular crowdfunding platform. Sav joins the conversation to tell us exactly what crowdfunding is and help all writers understand that funding for their project is possible to achieve.  “Who is your audience? At Seed&Spark, we always say that great crowdfunding is audience building first and fundraising second. While there is definitely a fundraising need, finding your audience is invaluable… Something that I always tell prospective crowdfunders is you already have the tools you need to do this. You know how to tell a story. You're here because you're a storyteller. You know how to invite people in. You already know how to talk about yourself persuasively,” says Sav Rodgers.  Osterman also shares his journey creating his award-winning short script and gives advice to writers who are thinking of creating their own short film project. “I don't think there's been a better time to be making short format content than right now. The demand for it seems to be expanding every time I turn around. I think if that's something that you're interested in, go after it. You know, I think there are more opportunities to distribute that form of content than there have ever been. I think we've got a generation now that's grown up with TikTok and social media and much shorter, digestible content that, whether it's conditioning or just sort of lowering of attention spans, I think more people are more tuned into short form content than they have ever been before. It's a really, really exciting time to be making shorts,” says Osterman.  To hear more about the short filmmaking process and crowdfunding, listen to the podcast. 

“One of the things we talked a lot about in the room is that very rarely do people set about their day saying, ‘Okay, I'm going to go do some evil.' But for most people, we're all sort of the leads in our own stories and we're all crafting the narrative of who we want the world to see us as. And we do start to believe that. You tell yourself these stories about yourself that you want to be true and you move through the world and you make decisions based on that narrative. And I think that one of the things that as writers, we really try to do is get into the shoes and the heads of the characters that we're writing and really try to break down why they're doing what they're doing and make it feel as real and true as possible. The things that these characters believe – or convince themselves that they believe – have to feel really real and grounded to us,” says Katie Robbins, co-showrunner of Good American Family, on writing flawed characters who prefer to live in fantasy, not reality.  On today's episode of Write On, we speak to Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland, co-showrunners on the explosive limited series, Good American Family. The show tells the story of a midwestern couple who adopts what they believe is little girl with dwarfism. Soon they are in the midst of a battle fought in the tabloids, the courtroom and ultimately their marriage. The show is based on the real-life story of Natalia Grace that made many headlines. Robbins and Sutherland talk about the unusual yet brilliant structure of telling various episodes from different characters' points of view, and how the tone changed when they got to the episodes told from Natalia's perspective. They also talked about the messiness of writing a dysfunctional family while still keeping the story grounded.  “We all know family is this wonderful, beautiful thing, but it's so complex. And I think that it's really hard to talk about the complexities of family because we're afraid to undermine the sacredness of it. It's my view that if we are actually more open about what is hard about coexisting as a unit who loves each other, but also what's not perfect, it would make us all better. And I think that that's true both for family but also even for our enemies. We're not writing autobiographies, but I think that we take those very real emotional experiences that we all have and then put them into a story that is cinematic, that is more interesting than our lives, but that is deeply steeped in those real moments of heartache and joy and confusion,” says Sutherland.  To learn more, listen to the podcast but be aware there are SPOILERS ahead.   

“If you can make the twists [in the story] hit your character in an emotional way and set up their emotional arc, then when the case twist intersects with them, if it's hitting them in the deepest way, in the most unexpected way, maybe – then you've done your job. So it's getting that emotional arc to really bounce off of the crime story in the most impactful way,” says Gina Lucita Monreal about the most powerful way to fuse together story and character.  On today's episode, we talk with David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, showrunners and creators of the CBS show NCIS: Origins that brings a fresh perspective to one of television's most beloved franchises as it dives into the early career of a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs (played by Mark Harmon in the original NCIS). Set in the 90s, NCIS: Origins taps into the nostalgia of the era, from great music from bands like Pearl Jam to life with pagers and payphones.  North and Monreal discuss getting to know each other a decade ago writing for the original NCIS, and how now they are pushing the boundaries of procedural television by creating more complex, character-driven storylines. “The biggest challenge for us isn't the going back to the 90s. I mean, I think for a lot of procedural writers, that would have been a challenge, that you're losing the DNA and the fingerprints, all that stuff. But for Gina and I, that's not really ever the way we leaned into NCIS or wrote the show. Our episodes were definitely more about the characters, so that's what we looked forward to. And obviously in each episode of Origins, it's very character based. I would say the most difficult part of going back is just sticking to canon, knowing it. Weaving in and out, trying to, when you hit something and saying, ‘Okay, well, we know this happened in season three of NCIS,' so trying to honor it while also using it to our advantage – that's difficult.  We get beat up a lot on X, and sometimes we have to just pick a path,” says North about the challenges of writing beloved characters with a lot of well-known history.  To learn more about North and Monreal's writing process and hear their advice for emerging TV writers, listen to the podcast.   

On today's episode of Write On, we chat with Kim Rosenstock, co-creator and co-showrunner for the new limited series, Dying For Sex, starring Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate and Sissy Spacek.  Based on a true story, Dying for Sex is about a woman diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer who abandons her husband of 15 years to begin a journey of sexual discovery. Rosenstock talks about her background as a playwright, nearly missing out on the opportunity to write for the hit show New Girl, and navigating the complicated tone of Dying For Sex that balances a woman having unconventional, often hilarious sexual escapades with facing her own mortality.  “We need humor the most as human beings, so don't be afraid of injecting humor and joy and levity into these sort of subject matters… If you have the impulse to make it funny or to make it feel joyful or hopeful, lean into that and don't be afraid of it. I also think that is what makes it feel real, actually. To me, that makes it feel more honest, not the other way around… I think what's exciting is that audiences are embracing these kinds of stories that can kind of go into darker and lighter places at the same time,” says Rosenstock about mixing joy and sadness in Dying For Sex.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. Please be advised the interview includes discussion of sexual abuse.  Dying for Sex is currently streaming on Hulu.   

“I didn't really set out to make Cordelia (Uzo Aduba) quirky. I just wanted to make her distinctive. I just really thought about who I wanted her to be and how I thought [birdwatching] would be an interesting way for her to approach her job. And the very first thing that came to me was just her use of silence and her ability to just be comfortable in situations that might make other people uncomfortable. And it's a quality that I've seen in certain people that I've always admired and been fascinated with because there's nobody quite like Cordelia, but I've seen glimmers of it,” says The Residence creator and showrunner Paul William Davies about creating his lead character Cordelia, a detective who uses her birdwatching skills as framework for solving cases.  On today's episode, we talk with Paul William Davies about The Residence, the new Shondaland show streaming on Netflix. Set behind closed doors at the White House, The Residence follows an offbeat detective, Cordelia Cupp (Aduba), as she investigates the murder of a lead member of the White House staff. Davies says the idea came to him watching a hearing on C-SPAN that went into details of the White House's layout. But the show is more than just a game of Clue set in the upstairs-downstairs world of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The show goes deep into character and offers plenty of laughs along the way.  Davies talks about what he's learned working with television revolutionary Shonda Rhimes, the intense work that goes into structuring a murder mystery, and shares his advice for anyone who may be working on their own TV mystery.   “I think it's really important that you think about what the environment is that you're having this murder mystery in, and making the motive something that feels like it's related to the world that you're working in. In most murder mysteries, the murderer is doing it for money or for love or lust. And that's probably in 98% of the ones that you read. And that's fine… But I think really giving a lot of thought to, what is the motive here? How do I keep it organic to this world and these people, as opposed to it just being grafted onto it, which I think sometimes does happen. Make sure that the killer is doing something that feels like it's part of that world for a reason that is related to that world,” he says.    To hear more, listen to the podcast.   

“Sameness is terrible. Your goal is to cut through it. If you have a unique perspective, you're going to take vampires or anything that everybody thinks they know and do it in a way that's really exciting and gets people really pumped up about it. There are all these incredible worlds to explore, but there just needs to be somebody that can take you there that has a different way of doing it… I want to see creators that offer something specific and unique. Specificity is key to me. I don't want a cover band. I don't want people covering what has been before. I want to see something new. I want to see a badass band with a new singer or new lyrics, a new style of music,” says Peter Katz, founder of Story Driven, a literary management and production company.  On today's episode, we speak to Peter Katz, a manager and producer championing writers with fresh, unique voices who are forging new ground. We talk about what he looks for in a writing sample, why he loves being a judge in Final Draft's Big Break screenplay competition, and why short stories are having a bright moment in the film industry.  “Recently, I've actually seen TV executives starting to think about short stories as a foundation for potential shows. It's a really effective way to communicate an idea quickly, in a really conceptual way, but also, it's not like a pitch. It's very tonal. You have character perspective and you have the style that the author brings to it. So I think it has a really unique marriage between pitching the concept, but also immersing you in a world in a very short period of time. That's why I think it's been effective in selling to a market, because you could share a short story with somebody and it doesn't demand a lot of time. If it's developed properly, you're able to learn about the potential of this project and then quickly share with somebody else on your team. And overnight, a lot of people can sign on to a project because it doesn't take as long as other mediums,” says Katz.  To hear more about Katz's perspective on the industry and what he looks for in a writer's voice, listen to the podcast.  

“With an adaptation, you can never give back your first read. So, what are you taking away? What fills your soul? Why do you want to tell this story? And then that becomes sort of the North Star. And I'm tethered more by that North Star than by the actual moves that are happening in the book,” says Long Bright River showrunner, Nikki Toscano, about adapting Liz Moore's best-selling novel for television.  Long Bright River is an emotional suspense thriller that follows Mickey (Amanda Seyfried), a police officer in a Philadelphia neighborhood hit hard by the opioid epidemic. As a string of murders unfolds, Mickey must find her missing sister who's also battling addiction before it's too late – but long buried family secrets stand in the way.  On the surface, the show is a highly engaging murder-mystery, but beneath the whodunnit is a love story between two sisters. We chat with Toscano about delving into the sisterly dynamic that is both compassionate and toxic at the same time.  Toscano shares tools for building an enticing mystery that includes giving your characters secrets to help drive the story.  “I think that in the beginning of anything, you have to determine what your character wants and then put a bunch of people or things in that character's way. So that's how secrets are born, right? And that's how you have your audience leaning in. Is the secret going to come out? Who's going to tell the secret? You and I could be having a conversation and I say, ‘Don't tell anybody!' And then the next scene is you being in a situation where do you tell, do you not tell? It's about setting up those kinds of things. I mean, whenever building any kind of show, whether it's an adaptation or not, determine what your character wants and then stick a bunch of people between them and that goal that either complement or compromise your character's journey,” says Toscano.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. Long Bright River streams on Peacock March 13.

“My recommendation to anybody who is writing animation is to take advantage of the things you can do in animation that you can't do in live action, which is to spend an infinite amount of money, right? If you and I are going to write a scene and you say, ‘Oh, let's set it on a battleship, but then space aliens come and suddenly we're transported to Jupiter,' it better be animation because if it's not, we're never going to be able to shoot that. But if it is animation, that's exactly what we should be doing all the time. You want to create the most expensive set in the world because it costs nothing to draw that battleship and send us to Jupiter. And that's really the glory of an animated show,” says Brent Forrester, about what he learned writing for The Simpsons for three seasons.  On today's episode, we chat with Emmy-winning writer Brent Forrester about his prolific comedy writing career that includes shows like The Office, King of the Hill and Space Force. He shares why the writing room for The Simpsons was so intimidating and his surprise when The Office showrunners had to teach him the specific tone and structure for the show after he turned in his first episode and just wasn't getting it.   “I had gotten the tone wrong – it was largely my attempt to make it wall to wall funny. I wasn't getting that you really had to make it serious. There were other aspects, too, that I had to pick up. One of them is the use of what are called ‘talking heads.' It's when the character speaks directly to camera. It comes from reality TV where they pull the subject of a reality show aside and ask them a question and they just speak directly to camera. So we stole that device and it's a great crutch for writers because one of the hardest things for us is getting the exposition across,” says Forrester.  He also shares his advice for writing a great TV pilot that will hook the reader and offers a simple formula for writing jokes by mixing the sacred with the profane.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“Fugler (Robert Carlyle) was a character that I really connected with from the beginning. I know it sounds a little strange that the Nazi was my way into this, but it really was that idea of, ‘How can we get inside his head and make sure that he's a fully fleshed out person that way?'” says Josh Salzberg about trying to make his villain, a Nazi named Damien Fugler, a three-dimensional character. Josh Salzberg wrote the screenplay for The Performance with co-writer/director Shira Piven. In this episode, Salzberg talks about the challenges of adapting a short story by playwright Arthur Miller that's about a Jewish-American tap dancer (Jeremy Piven), who's willing to compromise his own core values to find fame and fortune in Nazi Germany.  “The idea of all [the characters] is that they're all performing on some level. They all have another life. And that's true to show business, that we all have sides of ourselves that we're not sure we want everybody to see or that it's okay for everybody to see. And then in Berlin in the ‘30s, there's all these different communities that were impacted – not just the Jews in Germany,” he says.  Salzberg also talks about his background as a film editor, how it helped him transition to screenwriting, and the challenges of writing morally compromised characters like his protagonist, Harold.  “I think embracing the mistakes that they make, embracing those flaws and leaning into that is important. Sometimes we can care about our characters to the point where we want them to be likable, which is a note we always get, but we've got to be okay with the mistakes – and the consequences for those mistakes. And that was a lesson that Shira and I kept learning as we were developing the script,” he says.  To hear more about Salzberg's writing process, listen to the podcast. Please note: this episode contains discussions regarding racism and anti-semitism. 

“People think sequels are easier, and I'm like, ‘No, no, it's much harder. It is much harder to write.' They have never written sequels, those people, because you need to do everything as well as the first and yet better, and go to new places, follow all the world rules, but create new ones. I mean, it's just so many balls in the air,” says Meg LeFauve, co-writer for Inside Out 2, along with Dave Holstein.  In this special live episode from the Writers Guild Foundation Library, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein talk about tackling a whole new set of challenges as they wrote the sequel to the beloved movie Inside Out. They also discuss the 5-year Pixar development process that includes the concept of failing fast. “They really want you pushing to things that are new and innovative, so they expect you to fail. They actually want you to fail but they want you to do that quickly, right? Because we only have five years, so it's always like, hurry up, hurry up. You know, fail. Go again. Go again,” she says. Holstein shared some very personal advice for writing coming of age stories, like the Inside Out movies: get micro-focused.  “Sometimes it's better to zoom in than to zoom out. For me, it helps to zoom in on a detail and let the detail be a microcosm for the rest of it. I know that when we were writing this film, I was thinking about my anxiety at that age and where that came from. I had a speech impediment, I had a stutter, so I hated Spanish class because I had to read out loud, and my stutter always came out in front of people, which made me very, very anxious. And I feel like, for Riley, there's a three-day hockey camp that could determine the rest of her life. That's where I sort of sunk into and if I was writing a different story about me, I would have gone into those details. But for me, it was about finding something very specific and very small,” says Holstein. To hear more about the writing process, listen to the podcast.   

“The most subversive thing this show could do is make you cry… If you really boil down television, really cook it in the pan, it's the character business. I'm in the character business. Movies are in the plot and spectacle business, for television, there's a thing about laying in bed and watching someone in your bedroom or living room that you really care about, you're inviting these people into your house. The more you care about them, the more your show will succeed. There's no simple formula, but you could boil down every single TV show to if the characters work, that show is likely going to work. If the characters don't work, no matter what that show is, no matter how much money you throw at it, that show is not going to work,” says Eric Kripke, creator and showrunner for The Boys on Prime Video.  In this special episode hosted by screenwriting career coach Lee Jessup live from the Writers Guild Foundation in Los Angeles, Kripke talks about the functions of a showrunner, the excellent training he got doing 15 seasons of the show Supernatural, and what it's like when the real world mirrors the darker aspects of The Boys.  Kripke also shares his sage advice for writing dialogue.  “I was interviewing people about their life experiences – it was a romantic comedy so I was asking people about their love lives. I wanted to transcribe it, so I had about 20 hours of material that I'm just transcribing and that's how I learned to write dialogue, just from doing that because you learn how people really speak. No one speaks in straight, declarative sentences. It's this weaving thing where they'll start and they'll back away and throw in a new idea. When you start to pay attention to what real language looks like on a page, it's very different than what you think it looks like. So, to know what it looked like and how to recreate it, was huge. I recommend everyone try that,” says Kripke.  To hear more, listen to the podcast.  You can also watch this episode here. 

“If everything's being played on the surface, it's very hard to make that character come to life. You want hinterland, you want subtext. You want the things that are buried, the things that we don't know about them, the things that maybe they don't know about themselves. And always, the story is about this excavation of what's underneath the surface. One way or the other, that's kind of what story is. It's about bringing things to the surface,” says Conclave screenwriter Peter Straughan, about the importance of giving your characters secrets.  In this episode, we speak to Peter Straughan about his powerful film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow. Based on the book by Robert Harris, the movie follows five very different modern Catholic Cardinals as they go through the process of electing a new Pope. Straughan talks about why he loves a flawed hero, getting to tour the Vatican, what surprised him the most, and whether or not he thinks the real Pope will watch this movie.  Having also written the TV show Wolf Hall about Tudor England, Straughan also talks about the surprising connection between King Henry VIII and the modern Catholic Church.  “Both the world of the Tudors and the world of Conclave give us a way of looking at human behavior and the pursuit of power from a sort of angle that makes it particularly clear and fresh, without the clutter of the normal secular world of elections, that really anchors it in the human individual. So, Tudor England was maybe the last time where the sexual desires of one man was going to dominate the political landscape of an entire country. Maybe not the last time. Maybe this still happens in the world. But it becomes really pared down to basics, so you see very clearly what's going on. And I think it feels the same with Conclave, it's about the personalities and the morals of these few individuals,” says Straughan.  Just a warning, there are spoilers about the ending of Conclave in this episode, but we give you plenty of warning before they are discussed.  To hear more about Straughan's writing process, listen to the podcast.   

“There's no greater laugh than when you're at your most vulnerable. You're at a funeral, or you're in church and something's happening and there's great reprieve from the most human moments through humor. And even in those moments, something is funny or human and fumbling. And that scene itself [when Charles discovers Sazz's ashes], when I was watching it, I really felt like this scene is encapsulating the whole experience of the best of this show for me when he is standing there and then watching him wipe her ashes off and he's in deep pain over it, but caring so much. And then she pops in the doorway. I don't know, things like that just made me happy to have been able to do anything like that,” says John Hoffman, co-creator and showrunner for Only Murders in the Building, about balancing the humor and the grief in the show. In this episode, we go deep into Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building with co-creator, showrunner and writer/director John Hoffman. He talks about writing from theme, shares details about that rip-roaring fight scene between Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy, and exploring visual motifs this season.  “The twins and the reflections made me think of so many of my favorite films and the way cinema is used to show reflections and to do parallels and the Bergman-esque stuff. And I mean, granted, none of that might relate to what you're watching on this show. But playing off that theme felt really good. We are a show that's about three isolated, very lonely people in New York City and finding connection and so I think that recognition of we're more alike than we're apart also plays a huge part in the telling of the stories of Season 4. I like organizing them that way,” he says.  Hoffman also shares his advice for writing great scenes: “Know what a scene is and know that a scene wants to move in a certain way, and flip in a certain way. It might not take you in the direction you thought it was going to, but sometimes it will give you something of great comfort. Check yourself over and over again… is it honest? And check yourself on the truth of a character's motivation. Would a human being do that, ever? And if not, what could compel them to do it? There are all those things that are just very basic to me,” he says.  To learn more about Hoffman's writing process, listen to the podcast.  Please note: this episode contains mention of suicide.   

“In most genre fiction where heroes and villains clash, the hero is intrinsically reactive. The villain starts making trouble and that's the beginning of the story. If the villain had never showed up, the hero would have lived a pleasant and unremarkable life and had a lovely time. And nothing novel-worthy would have popped up. But the villain comes along and does something terrible and that makes heroic action necessary. So if that's the function of the hero in the story, to be called to heroic action, then the first conflict that's readily available to you is reluctance or a sense of being unworthy… and then after that, the hero will be called to take on a new shape and often that will be in response to the shape of the danger, in response to the shape of the wickedness a foot,” says Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Jon Spaihts, about the classic hero-villain relationship in Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, based on the books by Frank Herbert.  In this episode, Jon Spaihts talks about the importance of hand-to-hand combat in mythic storytelling, his favorite scene in Dune 2, and we do a deep dive into his most adored character, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. We explore the nature of her mystical powers and why she's so feared by the men in the story.  Spaihts also shares his advice about what it really means to get personal with your writing.  “When people say to make your story personal, they don't really mean look at yourself. You are the least qualified person to say something meaningful about yourself. What people are really talking about is that you should focus on the things that obsess you. You can look at the things that are most plangent to your feelings, that are most itchy and sticky for your intellect, the things you can't stop thinking about. You can focus on the experiences that have impacted you most profoundly. Those things – the things that push on you and pull on you – that is personal storytelling. You look not at yourself, you look at the things that have moved you, that have affected you, that have changed you, redirected your life and the things that preoccupy you. Those are your seeds of personal storytelling,” says Spaihts. To hear more about writing Dune 1 and 2, listen to the podcast. 

“As someone who's been obsessed with vampires since I was a little kid, I don't totally know [why we love vampire movies so much]. Obviously, sex and death are always interesting and in vampire stories, including the very earliest accounts of folk vampirism in Eastern Europe, that connection has always been there. Some of these early folkloric vampires didn't drink blood but fornicated with their widows until they died. And then, being undead, rising from the grave, you know Dracula and Jesus have had the most movies made about them of any popular characters in Western cultures, so there must be something to that as well,” says Robert Eggers, writer/director of Nosferatu, starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård.  In this episode, Eggers talks about the play-version of Nosferatu that he wrote and directed when he was in high school, writing the Ellen character (Depp) as a woman at war with herself, and making Orlok (Skarsgård) the villain without making him too arch or campy.  “[Orlok] has a sense of humor and he has a sense of poetry. He's a well-learned man so that's enjoyable. It's fun to write dialogue for someone who had their heyday in the the 16th century and English was like their 17th language, that's fun,” says Eggers.  We also asked Eggers about telling an old story but making it relevant to today. He says that while he doesn't worry about making a film with a specific message, “I don't live in a vacuum. So even if I'm not trying to write a film with a message, whatever is happening around me is coming out. Also, it's interesting that the movie didn't get made until when it did. The original Nosferatu came out a couple of years after the Spanish flu. This is coming out a couple of years after the pandemic. And I wrote all that stuff before the pandemic. In fact, they had face coverings originally, and I took them away because it felt too much on the nose. So, I think it's all there for the taking,” he says.  To hear more about the power of vampires and Egger's writing process, listen to the podcast.   

“I would argue that the movies, the plays, the stories that endure and certainly that resonate in the most populist and global way are the ones where we're not just observing a piece of storytelling, we're participative in some way and it's connective. How can any of us who are flawed humans connect with a flawless hero? The beauty of Wade [Deadpool] and Logan [Wolverine] is that really, they're two anti-heroes. They do not abide by typical moral codes. They both have been scarred deeply. And I think one thing that's really interesting about them is that the worst thing that's ever happened to them is also the source of their superpowers. Which I think, by the way, is something worth thinking about in all our lives – that the things that we had to get over are also the source of our strength,” says writer/director of Deadpool & Wolverine Shawn Levy.  In this episode, we discuss the elements that Levy thinks make a great hero and also a powerful villain like Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).  “There was something really juicy about [Cassandra's] twinship with Charles Xavier, that this villain is a new villain who has never been in a movie, who has never been anywhere other than the pages of a Marvel comic book. But there is this connective tissue to deep beloved, extensive mythology with Professor X and Charles. So we did lean into her resentment, her envy of Charles. You know, I think maybe one of my favorite couplets of our writing in this movie is when Cassandra says to Wolverine, ‘He must have really loved you.' And he says to Cassandra, ‘He would have loved you too. He would have torn a hole in the universe if he knew where you were.' I get goosebumps saying it now!” says Levy.  We also break down that hilarious fight scene between Deadpool & Wolverine that takes place entirely inside a Honda Odyssey. To hear more insights about the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time, listen to the podcast. 

On today's episode of the Write On podcast, we speak with RaMell Ross about his new film Nickel Boys about two young Black men who get sent to a reform school in 1960s Jim Crow South. The film is heartbreakingly beautiful and already getting plenty of Oscar buzz. In the interview, Ross admits he didn't know how to write a screenplay when he decided to adapt Colson Whitehead's book Nickel Boys, so he began the process by using written storyboards to visualize the scenes, which were later converted into a screenplay with the help of co-writer Joselyn Barnes.  We also discuss his decision to limit the violence depicted on screen. “It's a tough space because on one hand, you want people to understand the things that happened and their horror. But I feel as a culture, we've been overexposed to it and specifically overexposed as it relates to people of color because we don't have so many iterations of visuals of people of color. If that's most of it, then how does that work on the culture and psyche?” says Ross.  Ross also shares his take on writing a movie with historical elements. “I don't think that what we understand to be history is history. I think that it's a collection of familiar ways of analyzing or engaging with the past that fits comfortably in the socio-political language of reflection. I don't know what it's like to be a person in the past. And I know that a lot of the narratives that we have these days are guided by a person's either nefarious unconscious or they have another type of motivation behind them. And so I want people to think about the past as something that has the freedom of interpretation, that we would like to be given to all of the things that we've done in our lives. I just don't believe in historical reproduction,” he says.  Listen to the podcast to find out more about Ross's filmmaking process.   

“You're reading these interviews [in the book The Bikeriders by Danny Lyon] and they're all interesting, but Kathy's are just fascinating. You could just tell she was a character, meaning she was just this interesting, dynamic person, a person that was trying to figure out how she found herself in this world because she really talks about walking into this bar and meeting this charismatic young bike rider. And so, it was a really beneficial crutch for me to kind of get into this world. And then before you know it, by the middle of the script, I'm writing words for Kathy that never existed. It didn't hurt that, in my research, I reached out to Danny and he turned over hours and hours of recordings. I would drive around town just listening to Kathy talk. I mean, I had this woman in my head and I felt pretty confident midway through the script that I could write in her voice. It just gave this perspective to a very masculine, aggressive subculture. It gave this feminine point of view, but to me it was just a really interesting point of view,” says writer/director Jeff Nichols about writing the character Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, in his film The Bikeriders.  In this episode of the podcast, we speak to Jeff Nichols about his departure from Southern Gothic storytelling and going deep into the world of a 1960s motorcycle club for The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy. We also discuss some of his other films like Loving, Take Shelter and Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey – a film Nichols thought would never get released.  “I thought Mud was a failure. We had taken Mud to the Cannes Film Festival, and although we had a really nice reception there, you know, standing ovations and whatnot – no one bought the film. And we went an entire year with no one buying that film. In fact, no one ever did buy that film. The financier put up half the money to market and distribute that film and luckily, Roadside Attractions came in and put up the other half and then it became the film that everybody knows,” says Nichols.  To hear more about Nichols's writing process, and his advice for building stories around “emotional impact,” listen to the podcast. 

“I find action scenes really hard to write, I usually save them for the end. I need to get very caffeinated and then just try and get into the adrenaline of what they should feel like. With this [film] in particular, those robberies and the heist… I kind of like to really understand an environment and a landscape before I can write an action sequence. Because if I can't figure out when a car is overtaking another car or where characters are in relation to it, then it's impossible to write dialogue. I really try and map out the choreography of things and when to have those spikes of violence. I think you just feel it. You feel it on the page where hopefully you've built the tension. There needs to be some kind of release. And that's maybe a gunshot or maybe it's a line of dialogue that pulls someone in another direction. I'm pretty prescriptive in the way I write action and I write it in the way I hope it will be shot and it's not just like an overview of a scene,” says screenwriter Zach Baylin on writing action sequences in his new film, The Order.  The Order stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult and tells the true story of an FBI agent (Law), who's determined to bring down a group of domestic terrorists in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.  In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Zach Baylin about writing action sequences and also his film King Richard, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He also shares this advice for writing a period film that might have parallels to today's society: “In terms of keeping things entertaining and not wanting to be preachy and didactic, I think that the approach that I took was just to try and tell the story of what happened in 1983 and ‘84 accurately and not to over relate it to today. The parallels to today are so obvious that if we were to throw in lines about things that felt like they were alluding to the present, it would totally take out both the veracity and the intention, which was, I want to tell this story correctly. And if I do, then you'll walk out of it, both having been entertained and informed,” says Baylin.  The Order is in theaters now. To hear more about Baylin's writing process, listen to the podcast.   

“About 12 years ago, I had my very first meeting to staff. It was a show being run by a playwright named Beau Willimon, and he'd done one season of a show that hadn't dropped yet, and they were going to do this crazy new model where the whole season was going to drop at once and they didn't know how it was going to go. And that was a show called House of Cards. And I was staffed for season two of that show before season one dropped. So, that was my entrance into television. It was my first meeting to staff on any show!” says Laura Eason, playwright and current showrunner for Starz's TV show Three Women.  In this episode of the Write On podcast, we chat with Laura Eason about her illustrious career as a playwright and how she made the intimidating transition to TV writing.  “I got a call a week before the [House of Cards] room started and I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the book How to Write the One Hour Drama. I'm not kidding. I was like, oh my God. And I called everyone I knew that had been in TV and said, ‘Tell me everything you can about being in a room and how it's supposed to go.' And then I was very lucky my first year in TV,” says Eason, who was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards in 2017.  Eason also talks about her latest show Three Women, its unique structure, and also shares her advice for writing a TV pilot as the tides in Hollywood are changing.  “Well, we're coming into a different moment with this contraction that we're having in the [TV] industry. We had a very beautiful time where I think there was a lot of room for idiosyncrasy, and a lot of room for things to not quite check the list of everything a pilot should probably be, but because the voice was really unique or the world was interesting, those shows still got made. And I think we're in a moment now where all of the fundamentals need to be really, really strong. Like the engine of your pilot really needs to work. Someone needs to read that pilot and understand how you're going to be able to make 10 episodes or 20 or 50 episodes of that show, especially because there's less interest in limited series. So, making sure that you're paying as much attention to engine, to character, to your act structure, that the action is really moving and the acts the way it should as much as your voice, the unique things you bring, because of course that's the special sauce. But you really need to have both now, in a really strong way." To hear more, listen to the podcast.   

“We never wanted to make a show about dogs. We wanted to make a show about people. And then secondary to that, people who love dogs. We made sure we had some of Colin [the dog, in season two], like there's that lovely episode in seven where Gordon becomes a stage mum to a TV dog, which is so funny. But yeah, we just wanted it to be interesting,” says Harriet Dyer, co-creator and star of Colin From Accounts about the shift away from Colin the dog to focus more on the relationship between Ashley and Gordon, and develop the supporting characters. In this episode of the Write On podcast, we check in with the real-life Australian married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer now that season two of Colin From Accounts is out on Paramount+. Brammall and Dyer talk about balancing the tone of the show that continues to have a few scatological elements and misbehaving body parts, but keeps the characters grounded as Gordon deals with a loss. “Episode five is a bit of a departure from the structure of the show and mixes the light and the dark with the comedy butting right up against the tragedy. We played a bit more with that as well. We did stuff that interested us and made us laugh,” says Dyer.  Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. “I started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. You're waiting for the phone to ring. You're waiting for someone to give you work. You can't create your own work. And I'm like, well, 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.   

“I think that Sunny [the robot], as a character, is kind of emblematic of this conundrum we have with A.I. In one scene she is cute and warm and is serving Suzie's [Rashida Jones] emotional needs and is brimming with potential. And that's really enticing. And then in the next scene, she is diabolical, and is going to like, cut a bitch! That is A.I. There are so many great things it can do, and there's so many terrible scary things that it can do. At the end of the day, it's up to us as society to figure out how we're going to use it,” says Katie Robbins, showrunner and creator of the AppleTV+ show Sunny.   In this episode of the Final Draft's Write On Podcast, we talk with Katie Robbins about delving into artificial intelligence, Japanese culture and making a robot appealing (and frightening) to audiences in her show Sunny. Based on the book, The Dark Manual, by Irish writer Colin O'Sullivan, Robbins says she made changes to the story to allow for exploring isolation and the importance of female friendships.   “I was excited about the idea of giving [Suzie] a couple of female friends. So one is in the body of a robot and then the other is this aspiring mixologist who she meets in the pilot, Mixxy [Annie the Clumsy]… and telling the story of a friendship like love triangle. Mixxy is a little jealous of Sunny's relationship with Suzie and Sunny is really jealous of Mixxy's relationship with Suzie. The film The Favourite was a big influence for a lot of their relationship dynamics. And it was really fun exploring what that is if one of the friends is an A.I.” she says.   To hear more about the show Sunny that's currently streaming on AppleTV+, and hear Robbins's advice on writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.

Almost all the characters [in Fallout, the TV show] are brand new… We really took the world of Fallout that had been built up and iterated upon by other video game writers over the years and we wanted to do our own version of it rather than retell any version that someone else has already done. Our attitude was like, ‘Okay, let's say this is a new Fallout game. What would it be?' So, we took the world, the background, the themes of the games and the tone. It's a new story. New people,” says Graham Wagner, co-creator and showrunner of Fallout on Amazon Prime.   In this episode of the Final Draft's Write On Podcast, I talk with Graham Wagner about Fallout, a show based on the beloved videogame, that's earned 17 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Wagner talks about taking the structure and tone from Sergio Leone's Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and focusing on three central figures: Lucy (Ella Purnell), The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and Maximus (Aaron Moten), and intertwining their disparate storylines.   “We made an intentional collision of genres because Walton Goggins' character is very much of the wasteland of the Western genre, which is sort of apocalyptic in its own way, depending on your perspective. There isn't the infrastructure and people are trying to build civilization on the ashes of the civilization that has been eradicated before them. You know there's a lot of parallels there,” says Wagner.   To learn more about the show Fallout and hear Wagner's advice for writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.

“We were all six or seven years old when [the first Karate Kid movie] came out. So all of us saw it in the theater and I think for all of us, it was probably the first time any of us had seen a movie where there was such an amazing twist that happened. The whole time, we're thinking that Daniel LaRusso's not learning [karate], that he's doing all these chores for this guy and then suddenly it's, ‘Wait! He's been learning karate the whole time!' So anyone who watched the movie was blown away by that moment, but when you're six or seven it's a formative memory. So it was a movie that was meaningful to all of us,” says Jon Hurwitz, showrunner and executive producer of the Netflix show Cobra Kai. In this episode, I speak to all three showrunners of Cobra Kai, Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg about what the show means to them now that we're in the sixth and final season. We discuss why they thought it was imperative to tell the story from the character Johnny Lawrence's (William Zabka), point of view and they hint at the possibility of a new spinoff show – perhaps about a young Mr. Miyagi – coming soon. They also shared their advice for writing a spec script. “It's really tough to stand out. And that's what you have to figure out. In our early scripts, it was that first page – it was being R-rated and provocative and saying something that gets you noticed and stands out in the marketplace. Because if you're just writing a genre story, it's just like why?” says Josh Heald. To hear more about the sixth season of the show and their great advice for writing spec scripts, listen to the podcast.

“I came up doing improv where failure is the golden standard. And in improv, if you're not failing, you're doing something wrong. I feel really lucky that that was one of my bridges into entertainment and creativity, to have such a loving relationship with failure because, boy! As a writer, your days are filled with it and rejection and killing your darlings. I think comedy and improv have taught me how wonderful failure can be and how much we can get out of it for sure,” says Carrie Solomon, writer of the new Netflix romantic comedy, A Family Affair starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Ephron.  In this episode, Carrie talks about working as an assistant when she first came to Hollywood, calling it a job that can be, “Thankless at times, certainly, but really rewarding in the amount of information that you can absorb.”  She also talks about bringing her own life experience – like being an assistant – to her storytelling.  “Thematically, I think a lot of lot of the arcs in this movie are certainly my own. It's my own therapy coming to the screen, going to the page. I should probably send my therapist a Netflix., QR code to go check out the movie,” Carrie says.  Carrie also shares a lot of advice, including how to get your writing noticed. “For anyone who wants to make a splash or write something crazy or noticeable, write something that's crazy to you. Don't worry about what. If you yourself were entertained or wowed by an idea or you think, oh my god, that's absolutely like ass backwards crazy. Try it. I have a lot of friends that the minute they stop worrying about audiences or development execs or what people want to read, that's when they really found their voice and it clicked. I think being personal is one of the one of the quickest ways to find success.” To hear more about Carrie's writing journey, listen to the podcast.

In this episode, I talk with Dave Holstein, co-writer of the upcoming Disney/Pixar sequel Inside Out 2, which takes us back into the mind of a now teenage Riley as she navigates a whole new crop of personified emotions, including Envy, voiced by The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, and of course, Anxiety, voiced by Stranger Things' Maya Hawke. Dave describes what it's like working with a well-oiled storytelling powerhouse like Disney/Pixar, as well as co-writing with Inside Out franchise veteran Meg LeFauve to not only recapture some of the magic of the original film but to also create some of their own.  

“Just a shout out to everybody who's listening who has ever written a movie. This is a true story – I was writing a movie. I had been paid to write a movie and I was writing a movie when I got Late Night. And when I got Late Night, my first thought wasn't, 'Oh my god, I'm going to have my own talk show.' My first thought was, ‘Oh my god, I don't have to finish that screenplay. I'm so happy!'” says Seth Meyers, adding, “Anybody who can finish a screenplay – I have so much respect for you. It's so much harder than anything else. And that's the thing, when I watch a terrible movie, I always think, ‘Shout out to whoever finished it. They got three acts. All the characters had names, they did it!'”. In this episode, I talk with Emmy-winning talk show host and former SNL head writer Seth Meyers. Seth talks about his origins of becoming a comedy writer and performer, his time on SNL, what he looks for in a TV writer, and how Late Night with Seth Meyers has grown over the years as he celebrates the show's 10th anniversary. I also asked Seth about the best ways to get your voice as a writer to show through in your writing sample. He says it's difficult considering the highly competitive environment, but it comes down to making fresh choices. “The hardest thing I would have to do when I was at SNL was we would receive say, 200 packets of sketch submissions and we'd split them up amongst four of us. It was a slog – not because they were bad sketches but because we'd spent our whole year reading sketches and so you could tell when somebody was aiming to write an SNL script. But then, every now and then, sometimes it was just one line in a sketch, sometimes it was even a character's name, there would be something that would just sort of break through the noise, and you'd look at it and say, ‘Oh, I don't think I've ever seen anybody make that choice before.' So I just encourage people to try to do the thing that even you haven't seen,” says Seth. To hear more of what Seth Meyers has to say, listen to the podcast.

“From Robert De Niro, I learned not to force anything. Not to force your idea of how something should be and then go from there. Not, ‘Oh, this should be funny,' or ‘Oh, I'm going make you cry.' That's the wrong thing. You just need to think about the thing the character is experiencing and don't push it – have it happen. And he was obsessive with me about not trying to make anything funny and he would say to me, ‘Tony, it's very funny. But I want you to see the funny happen naturally from the authenticity of it,'” says Tony Spiridakis on working on the screenplay for Ezra with Robert De Niro who stars in the film, along with Bobby Cannavale, William A. Fitzgerald, and Rose Byrne.   In this episode of the Write On podcast, Spiridakis talks about how Ezra was inspired by his own journey of raising a son with autism. The film shows the very human side of parenting from the point of view of a standup comedian who loves his son desperately but doesn't know how best to help him. Part road movie, part comedy, Ezra tackles both the perils and heart-felt comedy of the father and son bond. Spiridakis also talks about getting cast as an actor in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, then unceremoniously getting let go from the film. He shares how he turned his disappointments as an actor into a career as a playwright, screenwriter, and director. “Okay, so the acting didn't pan out as I had hoped it would, but I'm still a storyteller and I think that's the beautiful thing about whatever it is that we gravitate towards – one superpower or another,” says Tony. To find out more about writing the screenplay Ezra, listen to the podcast.

“One of the main things I've learned from Shonda [Rhimes] is to focus on what you really want to see, yourself, in a season. Not necessarily what should happen. I remember on Scandal, in the writers room, we would craft what we thought were these perfectly structured stories. And Shonda would come in and pitch something that was really wild, kind of out there and maybe didn't fit perfectly into the structure,” says Jess Brownell, showrunner for Bridgerton Season 3.  “Ultimately, when the show aired, that would always be the thing that Twitter would light up about. So it's taught me to work from that place first. Don't just worry about, ‘Okay, what are the beats that make sense to get from A to B?,' but ‘What's juicy? What do you want to see?'” On today's episode, Jess talks about the friends-to-lovers storyline with Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlin), and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), why the show leaned into super fun rom-com tropes this season and why sex scenes always have to be character-driven. Jess also shared this advice for writing period drama: “My advice for approaching a period piece would be approach it the same way you would a modern piece. Focus on: What are you trying to say that's new? And how are modern audiences going to connect with these characters? You can always go back and do a regency pass at the end. I often write a scene just like I would for a modern-day show and go back and fix the dialogue later,” she says.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“Tennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because it's so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game that's so steeped in repression, but also in wild abandon. There's all these rigid rules and prescriptions of movement and boxes that the ball has to fall into. It's all so tightly organized and yet, once the ball is in play, physics takes over and it's wild chaos. You see these two people responding to each other in an almost instinctual and subconscious way. So, it felt like there was a lot of energy in tennis that was exciting to me cinematically.” In this episode of the Write On podcast, Justin talks about using tennis as a metaphor for relationships, the complicated choices his characters make, and the challenges going from playwright to screenwriter.    “It's really useful to have some knowledge of yourself as a dramatist or as a storyteller before you go into writing a screenplay because screenplays are so unforgiving. If you've already been working as a playwright or novelist, you've got an advantage there. The main thing I was focusing on writing Challengers was that I wanted to feel like I could see the movie on the page because it was a movie I really wanted to watch…You can't tell if something is good as you're writing it. You can't tell if something is going to be a safe bet for anybody to make. All you can tell is if the movie is alive to you. If that's true, there is a chance that the movie will be alive on the page for other people, to the point where they'll want to make it with you,” he says.  To hear more from Justin, listen to the podcast. 

“We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It was a long journey. You have to laugh sometimes, because we had some really grotesque imagery in our film. We even have a demon phallus in the film and nobody was worried about that. It was really the image of the vagina that was getting us that rating,” says Arkasha Stevenson, director, and co-screenwriter for The First Omen, about initially getting an NC17 rating from the Motion Picture Association. After much back and forth, the film is now rated R.  The First Omen was written by Tim Smith and Arkasha Stevenson with Stevenson also directing. The film is a prequel to the classic horror film The Omen (1976) and stays true to the narrative that brings Damian, the antichrist, into the world. But keeping faithful to the original film proved to be challenging in a number of ways.  “Because we grew up on The Omen,” says Stevenson, “it has such a special place in our hearts. We knew that it has such a special place every horror fan's heart, too… We didn't want to tarnish anything, so trying to find a balance where we were trying to create something new, and have our own world, and characters and messages within that, but also pay homage to the original omen, and also have tie-ins and callbacks – it was interesting to try and figure out how to have a conversation with the original film,” she says. We also discuss how the film explores the theme of control over women's bodies and how the current political climate factored into the story considering abortion is such a hot-button issue. To hear more about the writing of the film and how Stevenson and Smith came to the project, listen to the podcast.   

Writer Michael Brandt is no stranger to the big and small screen.   Having written such thrilling films like 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Catch That Kid, he is also the co-creator of NBC's Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Justice.    His latest film, which he adapted from the book, "Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home," is a story of friendship and survival. The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu.    Final Draft sat down with Brandt to find out how this story of an adventure racing athlete who goes on a 435-mile journey through the jungle with his newfound friend, Arthur the dog, came to life. “Producer, Tucker Tooley, said, 'Here's this book. ESPN has done the story on this guy, but I'm not sure it's for you,'" said Brandt. "Meaning he didn't think I'd be into it. He gave me the one-line, and I said that sounds amazing.”    We sat down with Brandt to hear about this heart-warming true story and how he brought it to the big screen. Listen to hear the full interview. 

"When I sat down to start writing it, I sort of like came up with air a couple of hours later with a movie," says writer/director Kobi Libii about the origins of his new satirical comedy, The American Society of Magical Negros. “I think it's kind of beautiful that people don't have a reaction that I recognize because my job is to be really honest, especially about stuff that is that I'm sort of afraid to say.” Final Draft sat down with the writer/director to talk more about how he created this story about a man who is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who spend their time making life easier for white people.  The film stars Justin Smith and David Alan Grier and releases into theaters March 15. Listen to the podcast to hear more about Libii's journey in making The American Society of Magical Negros. 

“Just write a story you want to tell and don't try to write something which you think you can sell to somebody because that way is madness. You have to write what you want to write whether it works or not for other people. But if it's not authentic to you, it's doomed at some point along the road. So stick to your guns!” says award-winning writer, Andrew Bergman about writing your first spec script. The Writers Guild of America East has again partnered with FilmNation and Final Draft for the NY Screenwriting Fellowship that fosters underrepresented New York screenwriters to help get them career mentorships as they navigate their way into the business. On today's episode, I speak to two of the program's mentors, award-winning screenwriter Andrew Bergman, best known for his script Blazing Saddles, and producer Caroline Kaplan, known for the recent Oscar-nominated animated film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I also speak to their mentee, Irina Rodriguez about her journey as an emerging writer and what it's like to get guidance from these two accomplished filmmakers.  “I have always just felt like mentorship is such a big part of the independent film community and what we all do – it's really such a supportive community in that way,” says producer Caroline Kaplan, adding, “This program is really exciting because of how that they create it, both from an artistic mentorship and sort of a business mentorship so we can holistically help somebody… I think connection and community is what it's all about.” To hear more advice and what Andrew learned from working with director Mel Brooks, listen to the podcast.

“The movie in many ways is about creativity. And it's one of the reasons why I really love it. It's not just about an evil haunted teddy bear. It's about the power of imagination. There's a reason why the movie isn't called Chauncey - it's called Imaginary. It was really fun as screenwriters to just let our creativity run wild and think of all the different ways we could explore imagination and creativity through the lens of a movie,” says Jeff Wadlow, director and co-writer of Blumhouse's new film Imaginary.    In this episode, I talk with Wadlow and his co-writers, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, about digging into scary tropes and how the character Chauncey the Bear evolved over four years of development and numerous script drafts. We also discuss how movies like Pan's Labyrinth, Labyrinth, Friday the 13th and Alice in Wonderland served as inspiration and why horror films should be a good time.    “I would tell people to make their horror fun. I think those very grim dirges that can sometimes get made as horror films – while they certainly are satisfying to a segment of the audience – they're not my favorite. I think you're going to have a lot more luck getting your movie made if you capture the fun of horror. There's no reason why you can't have a good time and be scared. It should be it should be a roller coaster,” says Jeff.     To dig deeper into Imaginary, listen to the podcast. 

“I would encourage anyone to lean into the specificity of their personal experience [when it comes to writing]. I mean, we're at a time now, fortunately, where everyone is more open to those kinds of stories… Look at something like Beef. The specificity of that storytelling is what makes it special. It's not like they come out with a logline, saying, ‘This is a story about Asian families.' It's a story about two people who get involved in the road rage incident, but all of that is set in the context of a very specific community. That's what makes it really special,” says Albert Kim, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Currently the most popular show on Netflix, Avatar: The Last Airbender is based on the animated Nickelodeon show that premiered back in 2005. There are many challenges going from a beloved animated show to live-action, but Albert Kim helms the show with integrity and his own personal cultural specificity.  “One of the first notes I gave to the crew and our props and set department was: food is really important. We've got to get the food right. Asian families are often, a little reticent about expressing emotions. It's very uncommon, at least in my experience, for parents to tell their kids they love them. Instead, they express it other ways – for example, through food. Whenever an Asian parent comes and asks, ‘Have you eaten? Are you eating enough?' It's their way of saying, ‘I love you.' So, food has a lot of meaning in Asian communities,” says Albert. Albert also talks about his unusual journey to become a TV writer and the surprising way he thinks Avatar: The Last Airbender can bring hope and joy to today's world. To go deeper into the show, listen to the podcast. 

“I think what's unique about this biopic and about Bob [Marley's] story is that it really wasn't about his ego, it wasn't about him trying to be the biggest star in the world. It was about him connecting with God. I mean, he would smoke weed to kind of lower his ego and raise his consciousness so that he could read scripture, right? He would take these basic concepts: love thy neighbor, all people are equal, and try and channel that and inhabit that,” says Frank E. Flowers, co-writer of Bob Marley: One Love.    On today's episode, I speak to Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter about taking on reggae icon Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) for their new biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, also written by Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green. After an assassination attempt on Marley and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) in 1976, Marley went to London in self-exile. It's there Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded Exodus, which some consider to be the best album of the 20th century. With scattered flashbacks, the film mostly takes place from 1976 to 1978.    “With the screenplay, we talked a great deal about how to tell the story. It's obviously a big life and a huge canvas and certainly, you could do the cradle-to-grave version where this happened, that happened, etc. But I'm always a fan of opening a movie as hot as possible, like start with an incident that just grabs you and is undeniably compelling and we both obviously arrived at the biggest incident in the movie in that sense is the shooting which is just horrific and feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere. It also lent itself to the classic structure of the Hero's Journey where our hero is shot, has this incident that happens in his home and then has to leave home and learn about himself before he comes back home again,” says Terence Winter.    I also talk to Winter about writing The Wolf of Wall Street, The Sopranos and one of my favorite shows, Xena: Warrior Princess. He also talks about the downside of writing for a dolphin when he worked on the show Flipper. “There were only 10 stories in the world that organically involve a dolphin. When you get to the eleventh one and then you look at each other like what do we do now?” says Winter.    To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“I always go back to theme. Why are you writing this story? What is that final couple of minutes of the movie and what do you want the audience to feel? I kind of always build backward from that in some ways. In a movie, how do I make the 118 minutes preceding those two minutes build to those last two minutes? To me that's a really good film. And anything that's not helping build to those last two minutes, throw it out!,” says John Orloff, writer/creator of Masters of the Air, the new nine-part series streaming on AppleTV+.  In this episode, Orloff talks about being an un-produced writer and the unusual way he landed the job writing for HBO's Band of Brothers.  He learned a lot from Executive Producer Tom Hanks: “One of the things [Tom Hanks] said to me is, ‘We're going to reveal character through procedure.' That means how you get a plane ready to go, it means pushing buttons, how you do all that stuff. I will take you back to Apollo 13. That is about three guys in a room the size of a bathtub – just pushing buttons. And yet we know and care about them. And so, the procedures of getting an airplane in the air was an opportunity to remind the audience that okay, there's no magic buttons to push in 1943 to get an airplane in the air… Let's capture that and let's explain that to the audience early on in the first episode or two and then they'll know that that happens every time,” says John.  For a deeper dive into the show Masters of the Air, now streaming on AppleTV+, listen to the podcast.  

"You want to write stuff you want to see, that's the key. Just write something new something fresh, something interesting," says director and co-writer William Eubank of Land of Bad, the new intense, action-packed movie about a Delta Force team that gets ambushed in enemy territory.  Final Draft sat down with Eubank to talk about his writing process, directing Liam Hemsworth, Russell Crowe and Luke Hemsworth in this unhinged survival story full of exciting set pieces and big action moments.   So, what's his advice to a young writer wanting to get in on the action movie game?  "I write very short and sweet, so it's fast to read because that anxiety needs to be read quickly, in my opinion. You don't want to get the page so thick. I'll just buzz through it so there's a lot of white space and it's easy and it's punchy," says Eubank.  For more tips like this and to hear the whole episode, click below. 

“I grew up as a huge fan of Westerns but the reality of the landscape at the time was that it was incredibly diverse. And we've rarely seen that diversity on screen. I feel incredibly fortunate and humbled by the opportunity to show what life was really like in Indian territory in 1875. That it was a melting pot of cultures and races. It speaks to the beauty of Reconstruction,” says Chad Feehan, showrunner for Lawmen: Bass Reeves on Paramount+. The show is part of the highly successful Taylor Sheridan television landscape, that includes shows like Yellowstone and 1883. On today's episode, I speak to Chad about taking on the historical figure of Bass Reeves (played by David Oyelowo), who lived during America's Reconstruction period that is rarely depicted in film or TV. Though Chad and Bass come from very different backgrounds, Chad says he was able to write the character of Bass by focusing on the big emotions the two men shared. He gives this advice about writing people different than yourself:  “Tap into your deepest emotions and find a way to relate them to what the character is going through. I think a lot of times when, you start writing, you try to imagine emotions, right? But the range of emotions that we all feel is relatively universal. They just take different shapes and sizes, right? We all know what heartbreak is, we all know what joy is. Tap into that and then transpose it into a situation that the character is also experiencing, if that makes sense. I learned about sudden loss with my mom. I've learned about deep-seated overwhelming love through my children and that emotion is universal,” he says.  To hear more about Chad Feehan's background, working on the FX show, Ray Donovan, and his overall writing process, listen to the podcast. 

“Personally, I think writing is bleeding. It's blood magic. It's very hard to do,” says writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett of the new Southern gothic romance, Miller's Girl. Bartlett started her career as an actress, but it was an unexpected journey that led her to Los Angeles and magically landed her in the world of studio screenwriting. After spending a year at Marvel Studios, writing a draft of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – only to be replaced on the job – Jade's first feature film is now in theaters.  In the podcast, Bartlett talks about dealing with rejection, getting hired to rewrite scripts and making the shift to directing. But at the end of the day, she says writing is really about overcoming your fear to get your big ideas onto the page – even if the first draft sucks. “You've got to give up the perfectionism. It is not going to come out perfect. I think a lot of writers are editing in our head while we're doing it as opposed to just like letting it flow out. I would say let yourself write the 170-page draft. There's going be so much magic that will come from it,” says Jade.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“I think that approaching the grand things through the smallest entryways possible is the best way to go about taking on these massive issues… So yes, this movie is about race and racism and art and who's allowed to make certain kinds of art - these are really big, unwieldy issues. But the reason that I think people can relate to them –and it doesn't feel so top heavy or clumsy – is because you see it through a character that was deeply personal to me,” says Cord Jefferson, writer/director of American Fiction.  Based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction is a powerful and often poignantly funny exploration of race in literature, film, family and the marketplace. It toes the line between being relatable and absurd.  “I wanted to make a movie that felt satirical but never farcical. I wanted the movie to feel like life and life is neither one thing or another, it's neither comedy nor tragedy,” says Jefferson who made the decision to use humor in the film but he never let the comedy get too broad.  Jefferson also talks about his journey from journalist – an editor at Gawker – to writing for TV shows like The Watchmenand Succession.  “If you can write an interesting article, you can probably write a novel. If you can write a novel, you can write a screenplay. I think that it's the same basic idea, which is you need to keep somebody interested in what you're saying from the beginning to the end and what is the best way to keep somebody interested in what you're saying for this long?” says Jefferson. Take a listen to the podcast for a deep dive into the screenplay for American Fiction.