Creative Principles

Welcome to Creative Principles! In this special episode, we’re sharing the audiobook version of Ink by the Barrel - Secrets From Prolific Writers by author Brock Swinson, which is based on interviews from this very podcast. It’s our mission to give away 100,000 copies of the book in 2023! We’ve given away thousands of copies already. To help our cause, please share these episodes and you can also...

Welcome to Creative Principles! In this special episode, we’re sharing the audiobook version of Ink by the Barrel - Secrets From Prolific Writers by author Brock Swinson, which is based on interviews from this very podcast. It’s our mission to give away 100,000 copies of the book in 2023! We’ve given away thousands of copies already. To help our cause, please share these episodes and you can also...

Welcome to Creative Principles! In this special episode, we’re sharing the audiobook version of Ink by the Barrel - Secrets From Prolific Writers by author Brock Swinson, which is based on interviews from this very podcast. It’s our mission to give away 100,000 copies of the book in 2023! We’ve given away thousands of copies already. To help our cause, please share these episodes and you can also...

Welcome to Creative Principles! In this special episode, we’re sharing the audiobook version of Ink by the Barrel - Secrets From Prolific Writers by author Brock Swinson, which is based on interviews from this very podcast. It’s our mission to give away 100,000 copies of the book in 2023! We’ve given away thousands of copies already. To help our cause, please share these episodes and you can also...

“I moved out to LA in 1999 with my best friend from high school. Every summer in college, we would write a screenplay. We were waiters during the day and then at night we would write,” says Lee Eisenberg. “Primarily, we would write comedies, or at least what we were attempting to be comedies.” Eventually, the partnership dissolved. Eisenberg’s friend got a real job and he eventually landed a PA jo...

The son of an actor, Australian screenwriter Abe Forsythe grew up around creatives. “I spent a lot of time backstage as a kid,” he says. “Sitting in the green room, watching Dad perform. Subconsciously, it made me realize you can have a career following your creative path.” Outside of his immediate influences, Forsythe was influenced by the early work of Peter Jackson, specially a horror film call...

“You get to a point where it hurts more not to make than to make,” says author and writing coach Daniel Willcocks. “I know how I work best.” Daniel Willcocks is an international bestselling author and award-nominated podcaster of dark fiction. This is our second call, so make sure to also check out Episode 258 for more. In this interview, we talk about getting 11 million downloads, the making of D...

“I met Stuart Gordon in high school,” began Dennis Paoli. “We overlapped in several ways. We had the same sense of humor and loved the same movies and books.” This led to sketch comedy in early years, but later in life, the duo focused on horror. In Paoli’s latest film, Suitable Flesh, Joe Lynch leads Heather Graham in the story of a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with one of her young patients...

“I spent most of my career in advertising,” says George Olson. “I had always wanted to write for movies and television, but I live in Colorado, not exactly the screenwriting mecca of North America, so I started reading scripts, screenplays, and just started writing.” As a former copywriter and creative director, Olson his start really came from “writing bad screenplays.” He continues, “That’s the...

“I always had a camera growing up. I know that’s cheesy, but I didn’t know it could be a job,” says writer-director Anna Zlokovic. “I didn’t know what to do with that interest. No one in my family did film. No one I knew did film, so I ended up going to music school to study music-business.” While at USC, Zlokovic realized it wasn’t a fit. Across the street from music, she found Film School. She t...

Scott McConnell is a story consultant and script developer who helps ambitious producers and screenwriters develop their concepts, themes and plots to create resonant scripts in order to advance their careers. Known as “the story guy,” Scott has over 30,000 followers of LinkedIn, where he frequently publishes advice on writing screenplays and producing films. In this interview, we talk about Scott...

The film ‘On Fire’ “follows a family who lives in a trailer home in the woods and are suddenly confronted by a wildfire. Survival becomes their main objective.” In this interview, director Nick Lyon and editor Don Money talk about the making of their new film, we go into the weeds about post-production, the importance of a good director-editor relationship, creating a short-hand with key team memb...

Jennifer Hamady started her career as a professional singer. “There was no Plan B,” she said. “But I never fancied myself a writer.” She loved lyrics, started writing, and this is one piece of the puzzle that led to her writing books. “A lot of people had problems that seemed technical, but were actually emotional.” Known as “the Voice Whisperer,” she’s a coach, a counselor, a speaker, a singer, a...

Bitten by the acting bug in college, while teaching, Michael Jai White began auditioning for commercials and acting gigs on weekends and summer breaks. Michael landed the lead role of Tom Robinson in the first Off-Broadway adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird. Before long, Michael would go on to guest star on such hit television shows as Saved by the Bell, Martin, NYPT Blue, and CSI. Proving his ac...

“Writing is always something I did for my own delight and enjoyment,” said Kate Holland. “I would have these stories playing in my head, a scenario or a world, maybe mentally writing episodes of favorite TV shows.” This led Kate to some writing partnerships in the world of theater. “Then I met Marlowe in a writer’s group online. He and I hit it off right away.” “I’ve just gotten started,” said Mar...

“I’ve always loved reading, so it started more with books than movies,” said screenwriter Ariane Hahusseau. “That’s how I developed a passion for stories. While in college, I watched a lot of BBC shows. Adaptations of my favorite novels. Coming from a literature background, I realized I could adapt my favorite novels, but also write my own stories.” Ariane, a French expatriate, embarked on her aca...

"I think it's very important that the film demonstrated that it was an effort not done by one individual who started working as a farm worker and became an astronaut, but rather it was an effort of a family, of community, and the importance of having that support structure. That's what allowed me to flourish," says José Hernández. A Million Miles Away is directed by award-winning filmmaker Alejand...

Alex Mandel began his career as a composer at Pixar by providing the score for the Ratatouille DVD short "Your Friend the Rat" and was later selected by Pixar creatives to write two songs for Brave: "Touch the Sky" and "Into the Open Air" - which became global hits. His work spans across film (East Side Sushi); streaming (Super Giant Robot Brothers); and radio (NPR's Snap Judgment LIVE, where he p...

Paul Fairweather is a Brisbane-based, speaker, author, mentor, architect, and artist who believes we are makers at heart, and who is on a mission to get people to reconnect with their creative essence, and to clarify that artistry is not creativity, only a subset. Chris Meredith is a Sydney-based, business coach, innovation consultant, and award-winning photo artist, who utilizes this background t...

Jason Hellerman is an award-winning film and TV writer. His feature screenplay, Shovel Buddies, made the top ten of the annual Black List and was purchased and produced by AwesomenessTV. Since then, he's completed feature film and television work for a variety of producers and directors. Currently, he's writing an action comedy for Sylvester Stallone's production company called My Masterpiece, whi...

Sue Ellen Thompson’s poems have been read more than a dozen times on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, have been featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, and have received numerous awards, including the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, the 2003 Pablo Neruda Prize, and two Individual Artist’s Grants from the State of Connecticut. She is the author...

“I moved to New York fifteen years ago. Didn’t really have much interest in drawing at that time—vaguely interested, but when I found Threadless, this whole community of artists on the internet who help each other and bounce ideas off each other, and it was a way to make money,” says Nathan Pyle. In many of the episodes in Dan Harmon’s show Community, the character Abed is actually wearing a graph...

Melanie Figg has been writing poetry since college. Since then, her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in more than 70 print and online literary journals. Her poetry chapbook 'Hurry, Love', was published in standard & fine arts editions, and her full-length collection of poems 'Trace', won the Many Voices Project competition, and Kirkus Reviews not only gave it a prestigious Kirkus-sta...

Rich Cohen is a New York Times bestseller writer best known for his books 'The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse', 'The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King' & 'The Adventures of Herbie Cohen'. His new book, 'When The Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season', will be published on September 5th, by Random House. In this interview, Cohen talks about what inspired his wri...

Jesse V. Johnson is a British film director, screenwriter, and stunt coordinator, who is most known for 'Triple Threat', 'Avengement" & 'Debt Collectors". In this interview, Johnson talks about why he started writing, what he looks for in a script, why he thinks the perfect ratio for action movies is reality plus %10 fantasy, why he doesn't like to have too many fight descriptions on his scripts,...