Write On: A Screenwriting 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 wa...

"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 telev...

"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...

"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. J...

"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...

"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 y...

"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...

"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 encapsul...

"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...

"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...

"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 t...

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...

"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 bi...

"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 ov...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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 t...

"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 ne...

"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 Ro...

"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 effe...

"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 Jud...

"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...

"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'...

"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 the...