Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast

• Write On: 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Director/Co-Writer Trey Edward Shults

  “It was a lot of empathizing. I would do long phone calls with Abel (Tesfaye, aka the Weeknd) after we had met, just basically talking to him and finding out more of his history, where he was at in different phases of his life, where he’s at today, and using those to create a character. And part of creating that character is I’ll find my own personal stuff to attach to it… Portions of his life I can relate to very much. And past all of that, I think this is the deepest I’ve gone with my therapy background and my mom and stepdad being therapists. I tried to make the movie work to where if you just want to watch the movie at surface value and go on a ride with it and experience it and not think about it again, hopefully it works on that level. But also if you want to look at it and interpret it on a whole deeper, hopefully richer level, there’s a lot going on,” says Trey Edward Shults, director and co-writer of the new film Hurry Up Tomorrow on how he took Able “the Weeknd” Tesfaye’s story and made it personal to him.  On today’s episode, we sit down with writer/director Trey Edward Shults to discuss his new film Hurry Up Tomorrow that stars the Weeknd, Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, about a rock star who goes on an existential odyssey after losing his voice on stage.  Shults shares his journey to becoming a filmmaker, working with visionary director Terrence Malick, making the highly biographical film Krisha (2014), and the shockingly ominous horror film It Comes at Night (2017).  He also shares this advice for writing your first film: “It has to be something you are so hungry to tell. And it has to be something you would die to make. You know what I mean? At least to me, my approach was I like to make stuff personal and they always say like, write what you know, write the personal thing. But I just think it needs to be something you’re crazy hungry to do no matter what,” says Shults.   To hear more, listen to the podcast.  

  --------  

  39:05
• Write On: 'Nonnas' Screenwriter Liz Maccie and Director Stephen Chbosky

  “Sometimes it’s easier to find and access your truth through ‘pretend’ characters. So I had this embarrassment of riches of this true story but in my heart, I was like, ‘I totally get to tell my truth!’… So my advice is find a way to do it, and if you have to do a mind trick by saying, ‘I’m writing this pretend character’ that’s fine, but put all the stuff that’s real to you into that pretend character, because I find there is an immense amount of freedom in being able to write through these characters because they aren’t exactly my family, they are pieces of them. Writing your truth is possibly the scariest thing, but your truth only belongs to you, you are the person who experienced it in the exact way you experienced it. Know that you are giving a great gift to the world by doing it,” says Liz Maccie, screenwriter for the new film Nonnas, about how to make someone else’s story personal to you.  On today’s episode we chat with Nonnas screenwriter Liz Maccie and director Stephen Chbosky about turning this true story into a heartfelt movie about a man who risks everything to honor his late mother by opening an Italian restaurant with actual grandmothers as the chefs.   Maccie and Chbosky, a real-life married couple, talk about their own families and how they were able to put pieces of themselves on the screen. They discuss the hilarious Nonnas’ food fight scene and how to balance grief with humor in the writing.   “I feel that the other side of grief is hope,” says Maccie, adding, “Because I have lost so much of my family, sometimes you’re drowning in the grief. Then you have that moment when you suddenly feel that spark of hope again… we are all going to lose someone, even losing a pet. When we love something, someone and it goes away it’s a devastating feeling and I think that connects us.”  Chbosky shared this advice for writers:  “The one bit of solace or encouragement that any writer of any age can find is that sometimes, the more specific you write about your experience the more universal the script and the movie is… I really am a humanist at heart. I believe in using this art form to find ways to unify people, inspire them and certainly give them hope, put on their shoes and go at it the next day, I just think that when you write about your own personal experience it can lead to great things. And it doesn’t mean that it has to be a dramedy or comedy, it could be horror, it could be sci-fi, it could be any genre that you feel as long as it is specific to you.”.  To hear more, listen to the podcast. Nonnas is currently streaming on Netflix.       

  --------  

  38:25
• Write On: 'Shadow Force' Director/Co-Writer Joe Carnahan and Co-Writer Leon Chills

  “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. 

  --------  

  28:59
• Write On: 2024 Big Break Short Film Winner Brandon Osterman and Seed&Spark

  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. 

  --------  

  42:22
• Write On: 'Good American Family' Co-Showrunners Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland

  “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.   

  --------  

  43:22

Weitere TV und Film Podcasts

Trending TV und Film Podcasts

Über Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast