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Screenwriting career coach and guru Carole once again joins us on the podcast to talk about her system of networking as a screenwriter: "This business is based on relationships, and it's risk-averse. They want to hire people they know or hire people who've been referred to them by someone they know, so your job in addition to being a kickass writer has to be to build your community of mutually beneficial relationships."

 

Carole goes on to discuss how you can make the most of every opportunity that comes your way: "The business, in terms of succeeding, is a lot about preparation and opportunity. You have to be ready, and one way, in terms of the opportunity part of it, is to know a lot of people because the more people you know, the more opportunities you're going to find out about."

 

The 47 Meters Down filmmaker talks the latest installment of the phenomenally successful Resident Evil horror franchise and how he tackled it: "I find it quite intimidating at times. There is a lot of pressure to get this right. I'm always wary about making something for someone, making a movie for the fans because who knows, really, what they want? So you really just have to do it for yourself."

 

Johannes talks about staying faithful to the Resident Evil video games and how he managed to make a movie that was also personal: "I created this movie with love, and it's a very unusual franchise movie in that… it feels like a retro 70's thriller. You can tell my personality in that movie; it's a very quirky, odd, but hopefully hugely scary movie."

 

A team of wildly talented high school girl soccer players becomes the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness in the Showtime series. Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson talk to Write On about the journey it took to get the series to screen. "We took [Yellowjackets] out to fifteen networks; we pitched so many times,” Ashley said. “It was all fully scripted and memorized because that's how we have to pitch - especially when there are two of us. If we don't have it scripted, it's just too easy to step on each other or have a weird gap, so we just memorized 35 minutes word for word and then pretended it was all off the cuff."

 

Ashley and Bart go on to talk about their collaborative process. According to Bart, "Learning how to write or be a writer is something that you will always feel like you are so far behind on, and you are so incomplete, and the way that you do this is insane and weird, and not only is it okay, but you can continue to be adjusting that approach. Be okay with it feeling weird and hard."

 

Dexter is back! Showtime’s beloved serial killer returns in a new limited series, and original showrunner Clyde Phillips wants to right some of the wrongs of the controversial season finale. "It's no secret that the final season was a great disappointment,” Clyde tells Write On. “In fact, if you look up 'Worst series finales ever,' Dexter will show up on every top ten list… we felt, collectively, that we owed a very faithful fanbase another shot."

 

Clyde goes into detail about what it takes to write a show like Dexter: "By the time we start really breaking down the show, we know how it's going to end, and it's what I call 'Putting your nose against the white board'  where the ending is and walking backwards. All of these doors are on either side like a hotel hallway, and each one of those doors is an episode, and then you get back to episode one - room one - and you start building the show."

 

The animated adventure comedy is the story of Barney, an awkward middle-schooler, and Ron, his new walking, talking, digitally-connected device voiced by Zach Galifianakis. "When I start a film… I need to know the big idea,” Co-Writer/Director Sarah Smith tells Write On. “In this case, the idea that everyone has a walking, talking device, and this kid has one that doesn't work. I need to know what it's really about, and what it's really about is friendships in the world of algorithms."

 

Sarah goes on to talk about writing movies for kids: "To me, the biggest threat to cinema is not streamers; it's actually not giving kids intelligent enough movies that make them love the cinema. That's my aim in life - give our kids movies that are as interesting and entertaining to them as really good books are, and then we'll have a cinema in the future."

 

Kourtney talks rebooting the beloved TV classic Doogie Howser, M.D. but with a twist for Disney+: "I think in this day and age, folks get excited about IP; they just do. [It's] something solid that everybody can believe in. What I was then tasked with is 'How do you make this reboot worth doing?' and then 'What's my special sauce that I can put into it? What's the story I want to tell that makes this a story worth telling for me?'"

 

Kourtney goes on to discuss the importance of diversity both in front of and behind the camera: "It's important to have more folks of color and diversity in front of the camera, but where I think you can really make a difference is the folks behind the camera, the people in charge, the people who are making the show, who get it."

 

Set in contemporary Washington D.C., Really Love is about a rising Black painter who strives to break into the competitive art world, while balancing a bittersweet romance he never expected. Co-Writer Felicia Pride talks to Write On about her screenwriting career: "My core is I'm a writer. I went to school for business because it sounded like a way to get a job, so I had a degree in marketing. I was very quickly bored at my first marketing job so I started writing on the side."

 

Felicia gives advice on how to approach your writing career without fear. "Don't run from your gift… I've lived many lives and had many careers, and thankfully, they all now have helped me in some way in my current career, but the truth of the matter is that I was running from writing, I was running from my gift because I was scared to realize it."

 

Really Love is now screening on Netflix.

 

In The Beta Test, a married Hollywood agent receives a mysterious letter for an anonymous sexual encounter and becomes ensnared in a sinister world of lying, infidelity, and digital data. Writer-Director Jim Cummings tells Write On: "I had the idea for the letter service, and I called PJ and I was like, 'What would you do if you got a letter in the mail, personally, that invited you to a no-strings-attached sexual encounter?' And he said, 'I wouldn't go because that would be insane,' and then I thought, 'Yeah, but what if you were somebody that would?'"

 

Writer-Director PJ McCabe goes on to discuss their collaborative process: "It's really just the two of us with our laptops out in [Jim's] garage, and we'll just walk around acting it out, and we'll do it a million different ways until we find the way we do it that makes us laugh… and the best setup and payoff in a scene that keeps it the most interesting and moves it, logically, to the next step in the plot."

 

The latest film from director Edgar Wright is about an aspiring fashion designer who is mysteriously able to enter 1960s London. Wright tells Write On: "[I started] having daydreams about being a kind of cultural time traveler, about how great it would be to go back to that decade. But then the more I would have these dreams, the more it would start to nag at me that that was a problem. Was nostalgia itself a retreat? Was it a failure to deal with the present day?" 

 

Co-Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns details the collaborative process between her and Wright: "We both worked together in the room. I think the first draft took us about six weeks. There was a lot of writing, throwing things back and forth, sharing your deep dark secrets - the terrible things that have been said to us over the years and the things that have stung and distilling them into the characters, and then every so often stretching our legs around Soho. It was a very wonderful and holistic process."