Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Anything I am working on, that is really the first question I ask myself: “What is the point of the story? What is this about?” If I don’t have the answer to that, I almost am incapable of writing it...for me, I always have to really justify-- What is the point of the story? What are you going to get out of watching the story? I need it to be emotionally true, and then I will believe anything. As...

Annabelle: Creation is not a fully successful film. For all that’s great about it, it’s also full of holes, gaps in logic, violations of its own rules, crappy dialogue… but there’s also a ton you can learn from it as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to how to write your first ten pages.

"...When we think about traditional television series, there are certain confines of the narrative structure. We have to be able to sustain a half-hour or an hour every week. But one of the things that I think is really exciting about Web Series is, because Web Series are so short, you can kind of blow the roof off the house...you have the freedom to do it your way"

"... The Big Sick is a hugely successful film adaptation of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s true life story. But the structure of the film actually differs in many ways from the true life events that inspired it. In this Podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger discusses how to adapt a true life story, and how to navigate the pressure between truth and fiction to get the real story...

"There’s no doubt that some of the most successful movies ever, from Dead Poets Society to Little Miss Sunshine, have more than one main character. And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we start telling a story from the point-of-view of more than one main character. In this podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger shows you how to write a script with more than one main charac...

For all its many structural problems, Atomic Blonde succeeds in its fight sequences in the same way that Iron Man succeeds. Atomic Blonde and Iron Man both succeed because they realize that guns are no fun...

... in addition to being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre…”

"...and you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn't just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script. Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that...

"...one of the cool things about movies and one of the cool things about life is that pretty much everybody in the world thinks that they are the hero and that other people are the bad guys. And that means that if we want to learn to write bad guys, we need to learn to step into their shoes, and see the world through their eyes-- to empathize with the people that we hate the most, the people that...

"... As a screenwriter, you need to see, hear and feel everything. And this is really the hardest part, because we have this urge to finish. And that urge to finish makes it really hard to actually see, hear and feel everything. We want to put a band aid on it. If you’ve ever had a fight with a loved one, you have probably had the same urge, “I want the fight to end.” And the desire for the fight...

"...The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action. For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue. Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialog...

"...If you’ve been following my podcast, you know that I’ve been talking for some time about the desperate need for some smart people to start writing superhero movies. Action movies and superhero movies are the mythologies of our time-- millions of people see them, and as much as we might like to dismiss them as pure entertainment, the truth is, they irrevocably shape our view of the world, our c...

"...As Dan O’Bannon has noted in interviews, the idea that actually spawned the original Alien, was the horror of rape and forced pregnancy-- a horror that so many women have gone through in their real world lives, but that few men could viscerally understand. So instead of going after women in an exploitative way, as so many horror movies have done, he wanted instead to go after the men-- to make...

"...hidden underneath this little character driven drama is actually an adaptation of three different stories. The first is the true life story of Chuck Wepner, a down and out fighter who went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali and was the inspiration for Rocky. At the same time, it is also an adaptation of the Rocky film. It is a reimagining of Rocky-- stripped all of Sylvester Stallone’s American dream...

"...If you listened to my podcast on Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 1, you know that I’m a huge fan of James Gunn’s writing. Not just for the brilliant execution of pretty much every moment of his scripts, but also for his overarching use of Theme to give real emotional resonance to these goofy action sci-fi comedies. So, it’s interesting to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 to see James Gu...

"...as anyone who’s written comedy professionally can tell you, comedy is not about making the audience laugh. Comedy is about looking inside of yourself and making yourself laugh. Looking inside of yourself and laughing at the things that have hurt you: turning pain into laughter. Or, to quote How To Be a Latin Lover, turning sadness into Salsa... "

As Colossal illustrates so powerfully, our job as screenwriters is actually very simple: to look inside of ourselves and find the emotions, the characters, the questions that live there. To look inside of ourselves, find the things that are true, and then externalize the internal. To take the things that live under the surface for us, and put them up on the screen where everyone can see them. Some...

Learn how to know if your screenplay rewrite is finished and how to deal with conflicting feedback and coverage notes about your script with Jacob Krueger.

Lear how to pitch your screenplay or TV show and advanced pitching techniques for Screenwriters, TV Writers, Web Series Writers, Novelists and Playwrights.

...Recently, we’re starting to see a shift with original movies like Get Out, La La Land, Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight and Arrival not only winning awards, but also hugely exceeding box office expectations. We’re also starting to see a trickle up effect, as companies like Amazon and Netflix have started entering the feature film market-- reinvigorating both writers and producers for the potent...

Horror movies are obviously about fear. But the best horror movies are not just about scaring the audience. They’re about scaring yourself. About scaring your characters. They’re about reaching into those unexplored corners of yourself left over from childhood traumas, bad life experiences, emotional and physical wounds, paranoias and nightmares that you know you should be over emotionally-- but s...

One of the truly interesting things about Inception is that its structure is actually based upon the principles of hypnosis. In fact, the organizing principles of the dream within a dream within a dream structure of the film almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training you’d receive during a basic hypnosis certification class. Why is this important to you as a writer? Because as writers...

This week we’ll be looking at Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Which is about as far as we can go from last installment’s Oscar Winner Manchester By The Sea. Rogue One is a silly joyride of a script, built with half-drawn characters, nonsensical plot twists, and a hundred other flaws. And yet, while clearly feeling a bit trifling in scope compared to the other Star Wars films, it nevertheless deliver...

Whenever your character has a really strong backstory, one of the questions you need to ask yourself is: Does the movie take place then or does the movie take place now? Is this a movie about the present or a movie about the past? Or is it truly about both? As  Manchester By The Sea demonstrates, flashbacks work best when the most interesting part of the story takes place in the story between the...

This week, Jake takes a look at the new movie musical La La Land.