Creative Principles

“I had a story I wanted to tell,” said Eleanor Coppola, filmmaker and wife of Francis Ford Coppola. “Some of it was a little bit personal and I didn’t want to make a documentary out of it, so I made a fiction piece.” Prior to her fiction features Paris Can Wait and Love Is Love Is Love, Eleanor made documentaries such as Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, A Visit to China’s Miao Country...

Cousins Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo both felt a deep connection to storytelling, but it wasn’t until they formed a partnership that they were able to break into the industry. Their script Ruin, about a nameless ex-Nazi captain after WWII who hunts down the surviving members of the SS Death Squad, actually won the 2017 Black List (and is now listed as pre-production with Margot Robbie attached and Jus...

As an actress, Justine Bateman is best known for her early television role as Mallory Keaton on Family Ties, but she also starred on Lois & Clark, Men Behaving Badly, Still Standing, Desperate Housewives, and Arrested Development, alongside her brother Jason Bateman. But, since the age of 19, she’s wanted to be a director. After graduating from UCLA a few years ago, she made two shorts - Five Minu...

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is best known for his role as Tommy on 3rd Rock from the Sun and for movies like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, 50/50, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Lincoln, and Snowden. In this interview, we discuss Joseph’s work as a writer-director, for the film Don Jon and the new series Mr. Corman. In the 2013 film that co-stars Scarlett Johansson, “A New Jersey guy dedicated to h...

In ‘Mayday,’ Ana is transported to a dreamlike and dangerous land where she joins an army of girls engaged in a never-ending war. Though she finds strength in this exhilarating world, she realizes that she's not the killer they want her to be. The films stars Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Yoko, and Juliette Lewis. In this interview, Karen talks about untraditional filmmaking styles, how to protect y...

"We were thinking about a comedic version of Psycho,” said Justin Long (Live Free or Die Hard, Dodgeball), about his latest project, Lady of the Manor, which he co-wrote and co-directed with his brother, Christian Long (Hop, Accepted). This idea morphed into more of a buddy comedy, involving a ne’er-do-well played by Melanie Lynskey and the ghost of a mansion, played by Judy Greer. The two meet wh...

For twenty years, Marina Zenovich has been making documentaries about subjects that interest her. Past subjects include Lance Armstrong, Robin Williams, Roman Polanski, and Richard Pryor. For her latest project, What Happens in Hollywood, the series takes a candid look at Hollywood’s role in framing society’s overall view of sex and sexuality. Subjects include Robin Wright, Minnie Driver, and Bobb...

While in college, Tracy Oliver was interested in the performing arts, but she eventually realized she was often the “sassy, funny sidekick and not the lead.” This realization - and her mother - actually inspired her to start writing rather than wait for someone to cast her. Oliver was tired of being the “cigarette-smoking friend” or in the “slavery movie,” so she started to write about herself. “T...

Husband-and-wife writing and directing team Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapill met while working in local television news. Despite being at competitive stations, they both despised local television news and wanted to find a more creative path to “visual storytelling” where they weren’t “forced to tell a story in 30 seconds.” Together, the couple has credits for documentaries like The Elephant Bath, Th...

Michele Civetta got his start making commercials and shorts. This taught him the balance of creativity and commerce, while also teaching him a technical background to eventually move into features. In his first project, Agony, the movie focused on psychological uncertainty within past traumas. In his latest film, The Gateway, a social worker assigned to care for the daughter of a single mother int...

After working as a writer-director on her first film, Timer, Jac Schaeffer discovered she could land more jobs as a screenwriter. The description of Timer reads, “If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?” After Timer, she worked on a handful of screenplays, created a short called Mr. Stache, and even worked on the short Olaf’s Frozen Adventure for...

Growing up on comedies like Monty Python, Trent O'Donnell has always been fascinated with “dumb comedies.” He got his start making shorts, commercials, and eventually landed some work in television. As a writer-director, he’s known for The Moodys, No Activity, and most recently, the movie Ride the Eagle. Trent O'Donnell met Jake Johnson while directing episodes of New Girl for Fox. In their latest...

Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky met doing comedy in New York, where they eventually landed jobs together on Broad City. Today, they’re the Creators of the new comedy series, Hacks, for HBO. For the series, Jean Smart stars as Deborah Vance, a legendary Las Vegas comedian who begrudgingly takes an outcast 25-year-old named Ava (Hannah Einbinder) under her wing. In this interview, the...

Neill Blomkamp grew up in South Africa before he moved to Canada to work in VFX, and found his natural path into filmmaking. Known for the science fiction fable, he’s created iconic movies like District 9, Elysium, Chappie, and most recently, Demonic. In District 9, an extraterrestrial race is forced to live in slum-like conditions on earth. In Elysium, the wealthy live in a man-made space station...

Tim Long got his start writing for magazines where he eventually landed a job writing for Bill Maher on ‘Politically Incorrect,’ and then ‘Late Night with David Letterman,’ where he eventually became the head writer. Today, Long is best known for writing for ‘The Simpsons’ and he’s just created a movie about his life as a teenager. In ‘The Exchange,’ the fictionalized Tim Long is played by Ed Oxen...

Bruce Miller spent the first part of his career penning movies that rarely got made, until he started writing television movies. All of a sudden, his stories were coming to the silver screen and then he moved to television. Today, Miller is best known for writing on ‘ER,’ ‘Everwood,’ ‘Medium,’ ‘The 4400,’ ‘In Plain Sight,’ Alphas,’ ‘The 100,’ and now, he’s the creator of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ On...

Alena Smith got her start as a playwright, which she believes “uniquely prepares you for what it takes to be a creator and show runner of a television show.” This background, of being a collaborator and visionary, helped Smith and many of her Yale peers transition to television work. She’s known for working on Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’ and fellow alum Sarah Treem’s ‘The Affair.’ In her most re...

Jeffrey Paul King’s creative pursuits came from an interest in opera at an early age. While in boarding school, he spent time writing and in college, he had a play accepted to the Fringe Festival in Scotland. Then, he moved to LA, worked his way up from being an assistant, and eventually interning at ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ King’s first gig was on the series ‘Elementary,’ where he worked for seven seaso...

Rachel Dickinson writes about travel, history, bits of science, and anything else that interests her from her home in perpetually cloudy Upstate New York. One non-fiction book took her to the wilds of Southern Indiana to research ‘The Notorious Reno Gang,’ an account of the world's first train robbers. In ‘Falconer on the Edge,’ she followed a hardcore falconer through a hunting season in Wyoming....

As a kid, Aaron Rahsaan Thomas could be described as the good kid living vicariously through his bad kid friends. Essentially, he took this perspective with him to the page. Thomas, who has worked on shows like Friday Night Lights, Numb3rs, CSI:NY, Southland, The Get Down, and S.W.A.T., says he has a love/hate relationship with human beings, which comes alive in his silver screen characters. Thoma...

At Robin Block’s company Creator VC, the company focuses on “community-powered entertainment.” The independent producers work on crowdfunded content for superfans. ‘In Search of Darkness’ is described as “An exploration of '80s horror movies through the perspective of the actors, directors, producers and SFX craftspeople who made them, and their impact on contemporary cinema.” ‘In Search of Tomorr...

David Weiner originally moved to Los Angeles to get involved with filmmaking, where he mostly worked as Assistant Director. Soon after, he started writing and found journalism, where he worked for Entertainment Tonight, The Hollywood Reporter, and he even ran the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. There, Robin Block recruited him. At Block’s company Creator VC, the company focuses on “community...

Originally a painter, Daniel Minahan wasn’t a fan of the solitary nature of painting, which led him to documentary filmmaking and then television. He’s best known for working on ‘Six Feet Under,’ ‘Deadwood,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘House of Cards,’ and most recently, ‘Halston.’ The 5-episode series ‘Halston’ stars Ewan McGregor. The story follows a man who leverages his single, invented name into a wo...

Anna Konkle followed a typical pursuit into acting until she and Maya Erskine (Wine Country, Plus One) decided to created their own web series. Now, the series is on Hulu, where the duo plays middle school girls. On Pen15, the description reads, “The comedic story of middle school seen through the eyes of two 7th grade girls dealing with the awkwardness of being a teenager.” In this interview, Ann...

As a kid, Eytan Rockaway would film toy soldiers in an effort to model his hero, Director Steven Spielberg. By the time he was twelve, he was shooting short films with friends, then after the army, he went to NYU to study film. In his new film ‘Lansky,’ Harvey Keitel stars as Meyer Lansky. The description reads, “When the aging Meyer Lansky is investigated one last time by the Feds who suspect he...