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âWe 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 thereâs 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,â 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. âEpisode 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,â says Dyer.
Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. âI started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. Youâre waiting for the phone to ring. Youâre waiting for someone to give you work. You canât create your own work. And Iâm 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 donât know. All I would say is itâs not going to happen if you donât start doing it!â
To find out more about Brammall and Dyerâs writing process, listen to the podcast.
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âWhat 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 â 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,â 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.
âIt has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I read so many scripts as an actor and Iâve 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 doesnât 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 doesnât feel like something Iâve seen 10,000 other times,â says Eisenberg.
Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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âOne 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,â says Lisa Taddeo, author of the book Three Women, on which her new TV show is based.
In todayâs episode, we speak to Lisa Taddeo, creator of the show Three Women that stars Shailene Woodley, Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise and Gabrielle Creevy as âordinaryâ 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 â both good and bad.
We also talk about writing the âfemale gazeâ 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.
âMy 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,â Taddeo says.
To hear more about the groundbreaking show Three Women thatâs airing on Starz, listen to the podcast.
Trigger warning: contains mentions of sexual explicit material, sexual assault and trauma. -
âThe 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 weâre calling it the great contraction. Itâs a really tough time for up-and-coming writers to break in. Itâs tough for everyone, even up-and-coming agents and managers, anyone coming out to Hollywood to pursue a career. Itâs one of the toughest times ever, so you need to be patient,â says literary manager Jeff Portnoy, of Bellevue Productions.
On todayâs podcast, guest host Lee Jessup, Hollywoodâs 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 itâs affecting writers.
âWeâve 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, itâs very difficult right now. Typically, if we had a client who wants to write in the TV space, weâd help them get a TV agent and we, the agents and I, would go out and try to get them staffed. But agents arenât really signing anyone below mid level right now, so theyâre not taking on those up-and-coming writers,â says Portnoy.
But there is hope considering business trends are always cyclical. Portnoy shares this advice about writing spec features in this climate: âYou want to stand out and that comes down to your ideas. The execution has to be great. Itâs about choosing ideas that really stand out in a pack â the words I like to use are loud, bold, audacious. Managers, agents, producers â we see thousands of loglines a month and if we see a logline thatâs loud, audacious and bold, itâs going to stand out.â
To hear more about the state of the industry, listen to the podcast.
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âI 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,â says Eric Roth about his latest film Here, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and reuniting actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
On todayâs 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.
âI'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,â 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. âI 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,â he says.
To hear more of Eric Rothâs advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.
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âComedy 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. Youâve relaxed them and then scare them again. The effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,â says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writerâs 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 thatâs 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.
âRight now, the industry is in a retraction, thereâs an implosion and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break in, I say I donât know, but I think youâll never go wrong in actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know itâs a whole other path and itâs a difficult thing to do but people will always watch stuff before they read stuff if theyâre 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 â sÂo, Iâm 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,â he says.
To hear more about horror writing from Sethâs perspective, listen to the podcast.
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âWe 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!â says Matthew Scott Kane, creator and showrunner of Peacockâs 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 townâs sudden interest in the occult by creating a fake Satanic cult â 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 âto be seenâ 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.
âThe biggest gift of being an assistant â which is not an easy job, itâs very difficult, itâs very time consuming, you have to be available 24/ 7 and it takes a lot out of you â 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 youâre in concept meetings, tone meetings, production meetings, all of these things that might feel like they donât have anything to do with writing, but they have everything to do with writing,â says Kane.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
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âSometimes I think [the show Pachinko] is almost too personal. I feel like every show, you look at it and say, âHow much of myself is in this show?â 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 familyâs 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,â 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.
âIn Korean families, we always have these jokes that everyone knows whoâs running the house â your mother! I think it's the strength of Korean women that have just carried us through,â 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.
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âI think what Tim [Burton] does is he's always trying to simplify. Thatâs 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 heâs 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,â 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:
âIf 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 â which can be constricting and suffocating, but I think it's something that's important in terms of a career.â
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out now in theaters.
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âI 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,â says Katie Robbins, showrunner and creator of the AppleTV+ show Sunny. In this episode of the Final Draftâs 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 OâSullivan, Robbins says she made changes to the story to allow for exploring isolation and the importance of female friendships. âI 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.â she says. To hear more about the show Sunny thatâs currently streaming on AppleTV+, and hear Robbinsâs advice on writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.
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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, âOkay, let's say this is a new Fallout game. What would it be?â So, we took the world, the background, the themes of the games and the tone. It's a new story. New people,â says Graham Wagner, co-creator and showrunner of Fallout on Amazon Prime. In this episode of the Final Draftâs Write On Podcast, we talk with Graham Wagner about Fallout, a show based on the beloved videogame, thatâs earned 17 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Wagner talks about taking the structure and tone from Sergio Leoneâs 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. âWe 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,â says Wagner. To learn more about the show Fallout and hear Wagnerâs advice for writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.
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âWe 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, weâre thinking that Daniel LaRusso's not learning [karate], that he's doing all these chores for this guy and then suddenly it's, âWait! He's been learning karate the whole time!â 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,â 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 weâre in the sixth and final season. We discuss why they thought it was imperative to tell the story from the character Johnny Lawrenceâs (William Zabka), point of view and they hint at the possibility of a new spinoff show â perhaps about a young Mr. Miyagi â coming soon.
They also shared their advice for writing a spec script. âIt's really tough to stand out. And that's what you have to figure out. In our early scripts, it was that first page â 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?â 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.
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âI 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,â 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, âThankless at times, certainly, but really rewarding in the amount of information that you can absorb.â
She also talks about bringing her own life experience â like being an assistant â to her storytelling.
âThematically, I think a lot of lot of the arcs in this movie are certainly my own. Itâs 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,â Carrie says.
Carrie also shares a lot of advice, including how to get your writing noticed. âFor 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.â
To hear more about Carrieâs writing journey, listen to the podcast.
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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 Thingsâ Maya Hawke.
Dave describes what itâs 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.
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âJust a shout out to everybody who's listening who has ever written a movie. This is a true story â
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 wasnât, 'Oh my god, I'm going to have my own talk show.â My first thought was, âOh my god, I don't have to finish that screenplay. I'm so happy!ââ says Seth Meyers, adding, âAnybody who can finish a screenplay â 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, âShout out to whoever finished it. They got three acts. All the characters had names, they did it!ââ.
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 showâs 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 itâs difficult considering the highly competitive environment, but it comes down to making fresh choices.
âThe 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 â 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, âOh, I don't think I've ever seen anybody make that choice before.â So I just encourage people to try to do the thing that even you haven't seen,â says Seth.
To hear more of what Seth Meyers has to say, listen to the podcast.
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âFrom 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, âOh, this should be funny,â or âOh, I'm going make you cry.â That's the wrong thing. You just need to think about the thing the character is experiencing and don't push it â have it happen. And he was obsessive with me about not trying to make anything funny and he would say to me, âTony, it's very funny. But I want you to see the funny happen naturally from the authenticity of it,ââ 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 doesnât 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 Kubrickâs 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.
âOkay, 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 â one superpower or another,â says Tony.
To find out more about writing the screenplay Ezra, listen to the podcast.
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âOne of the main things Iâve 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 didnât fit perfectly into the structure,â says Jess Brownell, showrunner for Bridgerton Season 3. âUltimately, when the show aired, that would always be the thing that Twitter would light up about. So itâs taught me to work from that place first. Donât just worry about, âOkay, what are the beats that make sense to get from A to B?,â but âWhatâs juicy? What do you want to see?ââ
On todayâs 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: âMy 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 thatâs 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,â she says.
To hear more, listen to the podcast.
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âTennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because itâs so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game thatâs so steeped in repression, but also in wild abandon. Thereâs all these rigid rules and prescriptions of movement and boxes that the ball has to fall into. Itâs all so tightly organized and yet, once the ball is in play, physics takes over and itâs 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.â
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.
âItâs 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 youâve already been working as a playwright or novelist, youâve 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 watchâŠYou canât tell if something is good as youâre writing it. You canât 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 thatâs true, there is a chance that the movie will be alive on the page for other people, to the point where theyâll want to make it with you,â he says.To hear more from Justin, listen to the podcast.
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âWe 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,â 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.
âBecause we grew up on The Omen,â says Stevenson, âit has such a special place in our hearts. We knew that it has such a special place every horror fanâs 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 â it was interesting to try and figure out how to have a conversation with the original film,â she says.
We also discuss how the film explores the theme of control over womenâs 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.
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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 NBCâs 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. âProducer, 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.â 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.
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