“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 heroic action necessary. So if that’s the function of the hero in the story, to be called to heroic action, then the first conflict that’s readily available to you is reluctance or a sense of being unworthy… and then after that, the hero will be called to take on a new shape and often that will be in response to the shape of the danger, in response to the shape of the wickedness a foot,” says Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Jon Spaihts, about the classic hero-villain relationship in Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, based on the books by Frank Herbert. 

In this episode, Jon Spaihts talks about the importance of hand-to-hand combat in mythic storytelling, his favorite scene in Dune 2, and we do a deep dive into his most adored character, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. We explore the nature of her mystical powers and why she’s so feared by the men in the story. 

Spaihts also shares his advice about what it really means to get personal with your writing. 

“When people say to make your story personal, they don’t really mean look at yourself. You are the least qualified person to say something meaningful about yourself. What people are really talking about is that you should focus on the things that obsess you. You can look at the things that are most plangent to your feelings, that are most itchy and sticky for your intellect, the things you can’t stop thinking about. You can focus on the experiences that have impacted you most profoundly. Those things – the things that push on you and pull on you – that is personal storytelling. You look not at yourself, you look at the things that have moved you, that have affected you, that have changed you, redirected your life and the things that preoccupy you. Those are your seeds of personal storytelling,” says Spaihts.

To hear more about writing Dune 1 and 2, listen to the podcast. 

“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 widows until they died. And then, being undead, rising from the grave, you know Dracula and Jesus have had the most movies made about them of any popular characters in Western cultures, so there must be something to that as well,” says Robert Eggers, writer/director of Nosferatu, starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård. 

In this episode, Eggers talks about the play-version of Nosferatu that he wrote and directed when he was in high school, writing the Ellen character (Depp) as a woman at war with herself, and making Orlok (Skarsgård) the villain without making him too arch or campy. 

“[Orlok] has a sense of humor and he has a sense of poetry. He’s a well-learned man so that’s enjoyable. It’s fun to write dialogue for someone who had their heyday in the the 16th century and English was like their 17th language, that’s fun,” says Eggers. 

We also asked Eggers about telling an old story but making it relevant to today. He says that while he doesn’t worry about making a film with a specific message, “I don’t live in a vacuum. So even if I’m not trying to write a film with a message, whatever is happening around me is coming out. Also, it’s interesting that the movie didn’t get made until when it did. The original Nosferatu came out a couple of years after the Spanish flu. This is coming out a couple of years after the pandemic. And I wrote all that stuff before the pandemic. In fact, they had face coverings originally, and I took them away because it felt too much on the nose. So, I think it’s all there for the taking,” he says. 

To hear more about the power of vampires and Egger’s writing process, listen to the podcast. 

“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 two anti-heroes. They do not abide by typical moral codes. They both have been scarred deeply. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about them is that the worst thing that’s ever happened to them is also the source of their superpowers. Which I think, by the way, is something worth thinking about in all our lives – that the things that we had to get over are also the source of our strength,” says writer/director of Deadpool & Wolverine Shawn Levy. 

In this episode, we discuss the elements that Levy thinks make a great hero and also a powerful villain like Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). 

“There was something really juicy about [Cassandra’s] twinship with Charles Xavier, that this villain is a new villain who has never been in a movie, who has never been anywhere other than the pages of a Marvel comic book. But there is this connective tissue to deep beloved, extensive mythology with Professor X and Charles. So we did lean into her resentment, her envy of Charles. You know, I think maybe one of my favorite couplets of our writing in this movie is when Cassandra says to Wolverine, ‘He must have really loved you.’ And he says to Cassandra, ‘He would have loved you too. He would have torn a hole in the universe if he knew where you were.’ I get goosebumps saying it now!” says Levy. 

We also break down that hilarious fight scene between Deadpool & Wolverine that takes place entirely inside a Honda Odyssey.

To hear more insights about the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time, listen to the podcast. 

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 he began the process by using written storyboards to visualize the scenes, which were later converted into a screenplay with the help of co-writer Joselyn Barnes. 

We also discuss his decision to limit the violence depicted on screen. “It’s a tough space because on one hand, you want people to understand the things that happened and their horror. But I feel as a culture, we’ve been overexposed to it and specifically overexposed as it relates to people of color because we don’t have so many iterations of visuals of people of color. If that’s most of it, then how does that work on the culture and psyche?” says Ross. 

Ross also shares his take on writing a movie with historical elements. “I don’t think that what we understand to be history is history. I think that it’s a collection of familiar ways of analyzing or engaging with the past that fits comfortably in the socio-political language of reflection. I don’t know what it’s like to be a person in the past. And I know that a lot of the narratives that we have these days are guided by a person’s either nefarious unconscious or they have another type of motivation behind them. And so I want people to think about the past as something that has the freedom of interpretation, that we would like to be given to all of the things that we’ve done in our lives. I just don’t believe in historical reproduction,” he says. 

Listen to the podcast to find out more about Ross’s filmmaking process. 

“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 bike rider. And so, it was a really beneficial crutch for me to kind of get into this world. And then before you know it, by the middle of the script, I’m writing words for Kathy that never existed. It didn’t hurt that, in my research, I reached out to Danny and he turned over hours and hours of recordings. I would drive around town just listening to Kathy talk. I mean, I had this woman in my head and I felt pretty confident midway through the script that I could write in her voice. It just gave this perspective to a very masculine, aggressive subculture. It gave this feminine point of view, but to me it was just a really interesting point of view,” says writer/director Jeff Nichols about writing the character Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, in his film The Bikeriders. 

In this episode of the podcast, we speak to Jeff Nichols about his departure from Southern Gothic storytelling and going deep into the world of a 1960s motorcycle club for The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy. We also discuss some of his other films like Loving, Take Shelter and Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey – a film Nichols thought would never get released. 

“I thought Mud was a failure. We had taken Mud to the Cannes Film Festival, and although we had a really nice reception there, you know, standing ovations and whatnot – no one bought the film. And we went an entire year with no one buying that film. In fact, no one ever did buy that film. The financier put up half the money to market and distribute that film and luckily, Roadside Attractions came in and put up the other half and then it became the film that everybody knows,” says Nichols. 

To hear more about Nichols’s writing process, and his advice for building stories around “emotional impact,” listen to the podcast. 

“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 overtaking another car or where characters are in relation to it, then it’s impossible to write dialogue. I really try and map out the choreography of things and when to have those spikes of violence. I think you just feel it. You feel it on the page where hopefully you’ve built the tension. There needs to be some kind of release. And that’s maybe a gunshot or maybe it’s a line of dialogue that pulls someone in another direction. I’m pretty prescriptive in the way I write action and I write it in the way I hope it will be shot and it’s not just like an overview of a scene,” says screenwriter Zach Baylin on writing action sequences in his new film, The Order. 

The Order stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult and tells the true story of an FBI agent (Law), who’s determined to bring down a group of domestic terrorists in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s. 

In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Zach Baylin about writing action sequences and also his film King Richard, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He also shares this advice for writing a period film that might have parallels to today’s society:

“In terms of keeping things entertaining and not wanting to be preachy and didactic, I think that the approach that I took was just to try and tell the story of what happened in 1983 and ‘84 accurately and not to over relate it to today. The parallels to today are so obvious that if we were to throw in lines about things that felt like they were alluding to the present, it would totally take out both the veracity and the intention, which was, I want to tell this story correctly. And if I do, then you’ll walk out of it, both having been entertained and informed,” says Baylin. 

The Order is in theaters now. To hear more about Baylin’s writing process, listen to the podcast. 

“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 that show before season one dropped. So, that was my entrance into television. It was my first meeting to staff on any show!” says Laura Eason, playwright and current showrunner for Starz’s TV show Three Women. 

In this episode of the Write On podcast, we chat with Laura Eason about her illustrious career as a playwright and how she made the intimidating transition to TV writing. 

“I got a call a week before the [House of Cards] room started and I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the book How to Write the One Hour Drama. I'm not kidding. I was like, oh my God. And I called everyone I knew that had been in TV and said, ‘Tell me everything you can about being in a room and how it's supposed to go.’ And then I was very lucky my first year in TV,” says Eason, who was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards in 2017. 

Eason also talks about her latest show Three Women, its unique structure, and also shares her advice for writing a TV pilot as the tides in Hollywood are changing. 

“Well, we're coming into a different moment with this contraction that we're having in the [TV] industry. We had a very beautiful time where I think there was a lot of room for idiosyncrasy, and a lot of room for things to not quite check the list of everything a pilot should probably be, but because the voice was really unique or the world was interesting, those shows still got made. And I think we're in a moment now where all of the fundamentals need to be really, really strong. Like the engine of your pilot really needs to work. Someone needs to read that pilot and understand how you're going to be able to make 10 episodes or 20 or 50 episodes of that show, especially because there's less interest in limited series. So, making sure that you're paying as much attention to engine, to character, to your act structure, that the action is really moving and the acts the way it should as much as your voice, the unique things you bring, because of course that's the special sauce. But you really need to have both now, in a really strong way."

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“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 Accounts about the shift away from Colin the dog to focus more on the relationship between Ashley and Gordon, and develop the supporting characters.

In this episode of the Write On podcast, we check in with the real-life Australian married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer now that season two of Colin From Accounts is out on Paramount+. Brammall and Dyer talk about balancing the tone of the show that continues to have a few scatological elements and misbehaving body parts, but keeps the characters grounded as Gordon deals with a loss. “Episode five is a bit of a departure from the structure of the show and mixes the light and the dark with the comedy butting right up against the tragedy. We played a bit more with that as well. We did stuff that interested us and made us laugh,” says Dyer. 

Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. “I started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. You’re waiting for the phone to ring. You’re waiting for someone to give you work. You can’t create your own work. And I’m like, well, f*ck this. I want to create work. But you definitely need a big old f*cking dose of luck on the way… And now more than ever, there are ways to make your own stuff and get it out there and produce it. But of course, the flip of that is that there is way more people doing that as well. How does one stand out? I don’t know. All I would say is it’s not going to happen if you don’t start doing it!” 

To find out more about Brammall and Dyer’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

“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 to continue on together? Against the backdrop of stakes that are so much higher, we can put their relationship into perspective,” says Jesse Eisenberg, writer/director and star of the new buddy movie A Real Pain that takes place on a holocaust tour of Poland.  

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Eisenberg talks about spending years trying to get this particular story just right, how it was personal to him, what it was like to shoot at a concentration camp and the great advice his producer Emma Stone gave him. He also shares his criteria for writing a road trip/buddy movie.

“It has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I read so many scripts as an actor and I’ve written so many things, that [a script] has to have two things: it has to be specific enough to feel real and personal. There are just so many movies in this road trip/buddy movie genre, if it doesn’t feel specific I think an audience can sniff it out immediately. The other thing is to make it feel new, to have a new reason to tell this story so it doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen 10,000 other times,” says Eisenberg.    

Listen to the podcast to learn more. 

“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 the only reason we're not hearing about her is because we have these sorts of rules in place for what possesses historical significance. And I don't really think that that's necessarily true,” says Lisa Taddeo, author of the book Three Women, on which her new TV show is based. 

In today’s episode, we speak to Lisa Taddeo, creator of the show Three Women that stars Shailene Woodley, Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise and Gabrielle Creevy as “ordinary” women searching for their sexual identity and fulfillment in disparate and surprising ways. The show is an intimate, often stark portrayal of forbidden female desire and the consequences of that desire – both good and bad. 

We also talk about writing the “female gaze” into the scripts, filming with prosthetic penises, the power the book Twilight has on teenage girls, and the uncanny way our mothers influence our own sexuality. 

“My mother made up her face every morning, even when she wasn't going to leave the house. Who is she? My father sees her before she puts on her face as they say, so it's not for him. Nobody is coming to the door today, so it's not for them. It's certainly not for me, because I see her without makeup when she washes it off at night. So, who is it for, you know? And that was a question I had but didn't really know how to frame,” Taddeo says. 

To hear more about the groundbreaking show Three Women that’s airing on Starz, listen to the podcast.

Trigger warning: contains mentions of sexual explicit material, sexual assault and trauma.

“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 need to be patient,” says literary manager Jeff Portnoy, of Bellevue Productions.  

On today’s podcast, guest host Lee Jessup, Hollywood’s leading screenwriting career coach and judge of the Big Break screenwriting competition, interviews Jeff Portnoy, literary manager for Bellevue Productions. They discuss the current state of the industry and how it’s affecting writers. 

“We’ve been encouraging a lot of new writers to focus on features at the moment and explaining how bleak the TV staffing market is right now. So if they have hopes of getting staffed, it’s very difficult right now. Typically, if we had a client who wants to write in the TV space, we’d help them get a TV agent and we, the agents and I, would go out and try to get them staffed. But agents aren’t really signing anyone below mid level right now, so they’re not taking on those up-and-coming writers,” says Portnoy. 

But there is hope considering business trends are always cyclical. Portnoy shares this advice about writing spec features in this climate: “You want to stand out and that comes down to your ideas. The execution has to be great. It’s about choosing ideas that really stand out in a pack – the words I like to use are loud, bold, audacious. Managers, agents, producers – we see thousands of loglines a month and if we see a logline that’s loud, audacious and bold, it’s going to stand out.”

To hear more about the state of the industry, listen to the podcast. 

“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 Roth about the challenges of writing the screenplay for Here that mostly takes place in one room, with a fixed camera that never moves. The movie explores the ordinary lives of multiple generations of families in a way that many will find relatable, heartbreaking and, at times, claustrophobic. 

“I'm not sure [the characters in Here] are extraordinary or not, but they show the length and breadth of what people can and can't do and when they're trapped. I think when it works that way dramatically, it's quite lovely and quite beautiful. I don't want to use the word profound, but I think the [movie] is profound to a certain extent because it is just about the regularity of life. And that, from dinosaurs to the future, it's going to keep going. Hopefully people will find great joy in how they're living and I'm sure great pain too, but I think that's just sort of the circle of life,” he says. 

We also discuss some of his other films like Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar, and Killers of the Flower Moon. 

He shared this advice about using subtext in screenplays. “I think that I'm always trying to find a way to enhance the scene with not only subtext, but with some kind of metaphor and make it possibly more interesting as to getting to the root of people's feelings without them having to vomit out what they're saying you know. It's not easy, but I think as I've gotten more successful and more accomplished at it,” he says. 

To hear more of Eric Roth’s advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.

“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 effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,” says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide.

In this episode, we speak with Seth Sherwood, writer of horror movies like Leatherface and Hell Fest. He was also nominated for an Emmy for writing the TV show Light as a Feather. I chat with him about the long process of making Hell Fest with producer Gale Ann Hurd, the difference between internal and external horror, and his definition of grounded horror that’s so popular these days. He also gives his advice on what he thinks is the single best thing an emerging horror writer can do to help their career. 

“Right now, the industry is in a retraction, there’s an implosion and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break in, I say I don’t know, but I think you’ll never go wrong in actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know it’s a whole other path and it’s a difficult thing to do but people will always watch stuff before they read stuff if they’re not writers. And those people are the gatekeepers. I always wanted to make my own films, but my writing career took off and I'm actually in a spot where I'm going backwards, where I have done so many writing assignments in the last few years but things aren't getting made – s­o, I’m going to go make a microbudget horror film on my own with my friends. The thing that I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. Because at least it's a thing that can be seen. And that has more weight than a script right now,” he says. 

To hear more about horror writing from Seth’s perspective, listen to the podcast.

“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 Judith [Jessica Treska] where you realize that the beautiful girl next door is actually so much trouble!” says Matthew Scott Kane, creator and showrunner of Peacock’s Hysteria! Starring Julie Bowen, Anna Camp and Bruce Campbell. 

The show explores the so-called Satanic Panic that actually happened in the 1980s at a fictionalized high school in the midwest. When a varsity football player disappears under mysterious circumstances, a struggling teen heavy metal band realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by creating a fake Satanic cult – to their surprise, everyone is into it. Things quickly get out of control when the town takes the cult more seriously than the high school band members. 

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Kane talks about delving into the generational fear of teenagers, balancing horror with humor, and writing characters who need “to be seen” by their peers. He also shares details about his journey to becoming a professional TV writer,  specifically the many benefits of being an assistant in Hollywood. 

“The biggest gift of being an assistant – which is not an easy job, it’s very difficult, it’s very time consuming, you have to be available 24/ 7 and it takes a lot out of you – but the best possible thing that you can get, and not all showrunners will do this, is to make yourself available to watch every step of the creative process. Make sure you are in the room while they are breaking story. Make sure you are reading outlines that are coming in. Make sure you’re in concept meetings, tone meetings, production meetings, all of these things that might feel like they don’t have anything to do with writing, but they have everything to do with writing,” says Kane. 

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“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 tipping point almost fell in the other direction, where I felt so personally invested. I felt very much like this is my family’s story, as well. That responsibility sometimes felt burdensome. So many of the cast and crew have said that there's a responsibility with this show that almost feels too much. But at the end of the day I think it's a thing that made us work harder. I think the show is as good as it is because people cared,” says Pachinko showrunner and creator Soo Hugh about making the story personal to her.

In this episode, we speak to Hugh about the challenges of writing a show where characters speak in three languages, making the characters relatable to an American audience, and the responsibility of telling the stories of strong women over generations.

“In Korean families, we always have these jokes that everyone knows who’s running the house – your mother! I think it's the strength of Korean women that have just carried us through,” she says.

We even ask Hugh about her work on one of my favorite shows The Terror, and what she thinks really happened to the real-life British crew on the Terror and Erebus ships that got stuck in the Artic ice. Her answer may surprise you.

To hear more, listen to the podcast.

“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’s always strange and weird and likes dark thing, but no! It's a classic story with good drama. And then he brings his sensibility to it,” says about the biggest lesson Al Gough has learned working with director Tim Burton on both the TV show Wednesday and the new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

In this episode, we speak with writing team Al Gough and Miles Millar about creating the hit Netflix show Wednesday, how they cultivated a relationship with director Tim Burton and how that led to the sequel to Beetlejuice after more than 15 sequel scripts have surfaced over the last 36 years.

Gough and Miles talk about crafting a mother/daughter love story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and delving into grief, something that all families face at some point or another. The writers also share their insight into adding new characters in the mix and creating the strange yet rewarding musical numbers for the movie that includes one totally bonkers song. 

Miles Millar also shares this career advice about staying in your lane when it comes to genre:

“If you write a spec or a script that sells, and it's a romantic comedy, then you should really stay in the romantic comedy world and arena for a while. We always jumped around which I think hurt us initially. We did an action movie, we did a comedy, we did this, we did that. We did a fantasy. So, pick a lane. I think successful writers usually pick a lane and get known to do one thing – which can be constricting and suffocating, but I think it's something that's important in terms of a career.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out now in theaters. 

“We were all six or seven years old when [the first Karate Kid movie] came out. So all of us saw it in the theater and I think for all of us, it was probably the first time any of us had seen a movie where there was such an amazing twist that happened. The whole time, we’re thinking that Daniel LaRusso's not learning [karate], that he's doing all these chores for this guy and then suddenly it's, ‘Wait! He's been learning karate the whole time!’ So anyone who watched the movie was blown away by that moment, but when you're six or seven it's a formative memory.

So it was a movie that was meaningful to all of us,” says Jon Hurwitz, showrunner and executive producer of the Netflix show Cobra Kai.

In this episode, I speak to all three showrunners of Cobra Kai, Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg about what the show means to them now that we’re in the sixth and final season. We discuss why they thought it was imperative to tell the story from the character Johnny Lawrence’s (William Zabka), point of view and they hint at the possibility of a new spinoff show – perhaps about a young Mr. Miyagi – coming soon.

They also shared their advice for writing a spec script. “It's really tough to stand out. And that's what you have to figure out. In our early scripts, it was that first page – it was being R-rated and provocative and saying something that gets you noticed and stands out in the marketplace. Because if you're just writing a genre story, it's just like why?” says Josh Heald.

To hear more about the sixth season of the show and their great advice for writing spec scripts, listen to the podcast.

“I came up doing improv where failure is the golden standard. And in improv, if you're not failing, you're doing something wrong. I feel really lucky that that was one of my bridges into entertainment and creativity, to have such a loving relationship with failure because, boy! As a writer, your days are filled with it and rejection and killing your darlings. I think comedy and improv have taught me how wonderful failure can be and how much we can get out of it for sure,” says Carrie Solomon, writer of the new Netflix romantic comedy, A Family Affair starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Ephron. 

In this episode, Carrie talks about working as an assistant when she first came to Hollywood, calling it a job that can be, “Thankless at times, certainly, but really rewarding in the amount of information that you can absorb.” 

She also talks about bringing her own life experience – like being an assistant – to her storytelling. 

“Thematically, I think a lot of lot of the arcs in this movie are certainly my own. It’s my own therapy coming to the screen, going to the page. I should probably send my therapist a Netflix., QR code to go check out the movie,” Carrie says. 

Carrie also shares a lot of advice, including how to get your writing noticed. “For anyone who wants to make a splash or write something crazy or noticeable, write something that's crazy to you. Don't worry about what. If you yourself were entertained or wowed by an idea or you think, oh my god, that's absolutely like ass backwards crazy. Try it. I have a lot of friends that the minute they stop worrying about audiences or development execs or what people want to read, that's when they really found their voice and it clicked. I think being personal is one of the one of the quickest ways to find success.”

To hear more about Carrie’s writing journey, listen to the podcast.

In this episode, I talk with Dave Holstein, co-writer of the upcoming Disney/Pixar sequel Inside Out 2, which takes us back into the mind of a now teenage Riley as she navigates a whole new crop of personified emotions, including Envy, voiced by The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, and of course, Anxiety, voiced by Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke.

Dave describes what it’s like working with a well-oiled storytelling powerhouse like Disney/Pixar, as well as co-writing with Inside Out franchise veteran Meg LeFauve to not only recapture some of the magic of the original film but to also create some of their own.

“Just a shout out to everybody who's listening who has ever written a movie. This is a true story –

I was writing a movie. I had been paid to write a movie and I was writing a movie when I got Late Night. And when I got Late Night, my first thought wasn’t, 'Oh my god, I'm going to have my own talk show.’ My first thought was, ‘Oh my god, I don't have to finish that screenplay. I'm so happy!’” says Seth Meyers, adding, “Anybody who can finish a screenplay – I have so much respect for you. It's so much harder than anything else. And that's the thing, when I watch a terrible movie, I always think, ‘Shout out to whoever finished it. They got three acts. All the characters had names, they did it!’”.

In this episode, I talk with Emmy-winning talk show host and former SNL head writer Seth Meyers. Seth talks about his origins of becoming a comedy writer and performer, his time on SNL, what he looks for in a TV writer, and how Late Night with Seth Meyers has grown over the years as he celebrates the show’s 10th anniversary.

I also asked Seth about the best ways to get your voice as a writer to show through in your writing sample. He says it’s difficult considering the highly competitive environment, but it comes down to making fresh choices.

“The hardest thing I would have to do when I was at SNL was we would receive say, 200 packets of sketch submissions and we'd split them up amongst four of us. It was a slog – not because they were bad sketches but because we'd spent our whole year reading sketches and so you could tell when somebody was aiming to write an SNL script. But then, every now and then, sometimes it was just one line in a sketch, sometimes it was even a character's name, there would be something that would just sort of break through the noise, and you'd look at it and say, ‘Oh, I don't think I've ever seen anybody make that choice before.’ So I just encourage people to try to do the thing that even you haven't seen,” says Seth.

To hear more of what Seth Meyers has to say, listen to the podcast.

“From Robert De Niro, I learned not to force anything. Not to force your idea of how something should be and then go from there. Not, ‘Oh, this should be funny,’ or ‘Oh, I'm going make you cry.’ That's the wrong thing. You just need to think about the thing the character is experiencing and don't push it – have it happen. And he was obsessive with me about not trying to make anything funny and he would say to me, ‘Tony, it's very funny. But I want you to see the funny happen naturally from the authenticity of it,’” says Tony Spiridakis on working on the screenplay for Ezra with Robert De Niro who stars in the film, along with Bobby Cannavale, William A. Fitzgerald, and Rose Byrne.  

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Spiridakis talks about how Ezra was inspired by his own journey of raising a son with autism. The film shows the very human side of parenting from the point of view of a standup comedian who loves his son desperately but doesn’t know how best to help him. Part road movie, part comedy, Ezra tackles both the perils and heart-felt comedy of the father and son bond.

Spiridakis also talks about getting cast as an actor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, then unceremoniously getting let go from the film. He shares how he turned his disappointments as an actor into a career as a playwright, screenwriter, and director.

“Okay, so the acting didn't pan out as I had hoped it would, but I'm still a storyteller and I think that's the beautiful thing about whatever it is that we gravitate towards – one superpower or another,” says Tony.

To find out more about writing the screenplay Ezra, listen to the podcast.

“One of the main things I’ve learned from Shonda [Rhimes] is to focus on what you really want to see, yourself, in a season. Not necessarily what should happen. I remember on Scandal, in the writers room, we would craft what we thought were these perfectly structured stories. And Shonda would come in and pitch something that was really wild, kind of out there and maybe didn’t fit perfectly into the structure,” says Jess Brownell, showrunner for Bridgerton Season 3.  “Ultimately, when the show aired, that would always be the thing that Twitter would light up about. So it’s taught me to work from that place first. Don’t just worry about, ‘Okay, what are the beats that make sense to get from A to B?,’ but ‘What’s juicy? What do you want to see?’”

On today’s episode, Jess talks about the friends-to-lovers storyline with Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlin), and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), why the show leaned into super fun rom-com tropes this season and why sex scenes always have to be character-driven.

Jess also shared this advice for writing period drama: “My advice for approaching a period piece would be approach it the same way you would a modern piece. Focus on: What are you trying to say that’s new? And how are modern audiences going to connect with these characters? You can always go back and do a regency pass at the end. I often write a scene just like I would for a modern-day show and go back and fix the dialogue later,” she says. 

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“Tennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because it’s so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game that’s so steeped in repression, but also in wild abandon. There’s all these rigid rules and prescriptions of movement and boxes that the ball has to fall into. It’s all so tightly organized and yet, once the ball is in play, physics takes over and it’s wild chaos. You see these two people responding to each other in an almost instinctual and subconscious way. So, it felt like there was a lot of energy in tennis that was exciting to me cinematically.”

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Justin talks about using tennis as a metaphor for relationships, the complicated choices his characters make, and the challenges going from playwright to screenwriter. 
 
“It’s really useful to have some knowledge of yourself as a dramatist or as a storyteller before you go into writing a screenplay because screenplays are so unforgiving. If you’ve already been working as a playwright or novelist, you’ve got an advantage there. The main thing I was focusing on writing Challengers was that I wanted to feel like I could see the movie on the page because it was a movie I really wanted to watch…You can’t tell if something is good as you’re writing it. You can’t tell if something is going to be a safe bet for anybody to make. All you can tell is if the movie is alive to you. If that’s true, there is a chance that the movie will be alive on the page for other people, to the point where they’ll want to make it with you,” he says. 

To hear more from Justin, listen to the podcast. 

“We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It was a long journey. You have to laugh sometimes, because we had some really grotesque imagery in our film. We even have a demon phallus in the film and nobody was worried about that. It was really the image of the vagina that was getting us that rating,” says Arkasha Stevenson, director, and co-screenwriter for The First Omen, about initially getting an NC17 rating from the Motion Picture Association. After much back and forth, the film is now rated R. 

The First Omen was written by Tim Smith and Arkasha Stevenson with Stevenson also directing. The film is a prequel to the classic horror film The Omen (1976) and stays true to the narrative that brings Damian, the antichrist, into the world. But keeping faithful to the original film proved to be challenging in a number of ways. 

“Because we grew up on The Omen,” says Stevenson, “it has such a special place in our hearts. We knew that it has such a special place every horror fan’s heart, too… We didn't want to tarnish anything, so trying to find a balance where we were trying to create something new, and have our own world, and characters and messages within that, but also pay homage to the original omen, and also have tie-ins and callbacks – it was interesting to try and figure out how to have a conversation with the original film,” she says.

We also discuss how the film explores the theme of control over women’s bodies and how the current political climate factored into the story considering abortion is such a hot-button issue. To hear more about the writing of the film and how Stevenson and Smith came to the project, listen to the podcast.   

"When I sat down to start writing it, I sort of like came up with air a couple of hours later with a movie," says writer/director Kobi Libii about the origins of his new satirical comedy, The American Society of Magical Negros. “I think it's kind of beautiful that people don't have a reaction that I recognize because my job is to be really honest, especially about stuff that is that I'm sort of afraid to say.”

Final Draft sat down with the writer/director to talk more about how he created this story about a man who is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who spend their time making life easier for white people.  The film stars Justin Smith and David Alan Grier and releases into theaters March 15.

Listen to the podcast to hear more about Libii's journey in making The American Society of Magical Negros. 

“Just write a story you want to tell and don't try to write something which you think you can sell to somebody because that way is madness. You have to write what you want to write whether it works or not for other people. But if it's not authentic to you, it's doomed at some point along the road. So stick to your guns!” says award-winning writer, Andrew Bergman about writing your first spec script.

The Writers Guild of America East has again partnered with FilmNation and Final Draft for the NY Screenwriting Fellowship that fosters underrepresented New York screenwriters to help get them career mentorships as they navigate their way into the business. On today’s episode, I speak to two of the program’s mentors, award-winning screenwriter Andrew Bergman, best known for his script Blazing Saddles, and producer Caroline Kaplan, known for the recent Oscar-nominated animated film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I also speak to their mentee, Irina Rodriguez about her journey as an emerging writer and what it’s like to get guidance from these two accomplished filmmakers. 

“I have always just felt like mentorship is such a big part of the independent film community and what we all do – it's really such a supportive community in that way,” says producer Caroline Kaplan, adding, “This program is really exciting because of how that they create it, both from an artistic mentorship and sort of a business mentorship so we can holistically help somebody… I think connection and community is what it’s all about.”

To hear more advice and what Andrew learned from working with director Mel Brooks, listen to the podcast.

“I would encourage anyone to lean into the specificity of their personal experience [when it comes to writing]. I mean, we're at a time now, fortunately, where everyone is more open to those kinds of stories… Look at something like Beef. The specificity of that storytelling is what makes it special. It's not like they come out with a logline, saying, ‘This is a story about Asian families.’ It's a story about two people who get involved in the road rage incident, but all of that is set in the context of a very specific community. That's what makes it really special,” says Albert Kim, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

Currently the most popular show on Netflix, Avatar: The Last Airbender is based on the animated Nickelodeon show that premiered back in 2005. There are many challenges going from a beloved animated show to live-action, but Albert Kim helms the show with integrity and his own personal cultural specificity. 

“One of the first notes I gave to the crew and our props and set department was: food is really important. We’ve got to get the food right. Asian families are often, a little reticent about expressing emotions. It's very uncommon, at least in my experience, for parents to tell their kids they love them. Instead, they express it other ways – for example, through food. Whenever an Asian parent comes and asks, ‘Have you eaten? Are you eating enough?’ It's their way of saying, ‘I love you.’ So, food has a lot of meaning in Asian communities,” says Albert.

Albert also talks about his unusual journey to become a TV writer and the surprising way he thinks Avatar: The Last Airbender can bring hope and joy to today’s world. To go deeper into the show, listen to the podcast. 

“I always go back to theme. Why are you writing this story? What is that final couple of minutes of the movie and what do you want the audience to feel? I kind of always build backward from that in some ways. In a movie, how do I make the 118 minutes preceding those two minutes build to those last two minutes? To me that’s a really good film. And anything that's not helping build to those last two minutes, throw it out!,” says John Orloff, writer/creator of Masters of the Air, the new nine-part series streaming on AppleTV+. 

In this episode, Orloff talks about being an un-produced writer and the unusual way he landed the job writing for HBO’s Band of Brothers. 

He learned a lot from Executive Producer Tom Hanks:

“One of the things [Tom Hanks] said to me is, ‘We're going to reveal character through procedure.’ That means how you get a plane ready to go, it means pushing buttons, how you do all that stuff. I will take you back to Apollo 13. That is about three guys in a room the size of a bathtub – just pushing buttons. And yet we know and care about them. And so, the procedures of getting an airplane in the air was an opportunity to remind the audience that okay, there's no magic buttons to push in 1943 to get an airplane in the air… Let's capture that and let's explain that to the audience early on in the first episode or two and then they'll know that that happens every time,” says John. 

For a deeper dive into the show Masters of the Air, now streaming on AppleTV+, listen to the podcast.

"You want to write stuff you want to see, that's the key. Just write something new something fresh, something interesting," says director and co-writer William Eubank of Land of Bad, the new intense, action-packed movie about a Delta Force team that gets ambushed in enemy territory. 

Final Draft sat down with Eubank to talk about his writing process, directing Liam Hemsworth, Russell Crowe and Luke Hemsworth in this unhinged survival story full of exciting set pieces and big action moments.  

So, what's his advice to a young writer wanting to get in on the action movie game?  "I write very short and sweet, so it's fast to read because that anxiety needs to be read quickly, in my opinion. You don't want to get the page so thick. I'll just buzz through it so there's a lot of white space and it's easy and it's punchy," says Eubank. 

For more tips like this and to hear the whole episode, click below. 

“I grew up as a huge fan of Westerns but the reality of the landscape at the time was that it was incredibly diverse. And we've rarely seen that diversity on screen. I feel incredibly fortunate and humbled by the opportunity to show what life was really like in Indian territory in 1875. That it was a melting pot of cultures and races. It speaks to the beauty of Reconstruction,” says Chad Feehan, showrunner for Lawmen: Bass Reeves on Paramount+. The show is part of the highly successful Taylor Sheridan television landscape, that includes shows like Yellowstone and 1883.

On today’s episode, I speak to Chad about taking on the historical figure of Bass Reeves (played by David Oyelowo), who lived during America’s Reconstruction period that is rarely depicted in film or TV. Though Chad and Bass come from very different backgrounds, Chad says he was able to write the character of Bass by focusing on the big emotions the two men shared. He gives this advice about writing people different than yourself: 

“Tap into your deepest emotions and find a way to relate them to what the character is going through. I think a lot of times when, you start writing, you try to imagine emotions, right? But the range of emotions that we all feel is relatively universal. They just take different shapes and sizes, right? We all know what heartbreak is, we all know what joy is. Tap into that and then transpose it into a situation that the character is also experiencing, if that makes sense. I learned about sudden loss with my mom. I've learned about deep-seated overwhelming love through my children and that emotion is universal,” he says. 

To hear more about Chad Feehan’s background, working on the FX show, Ray Donovan, and his overall writing process, listen to the podcast. 

“Personally, I think writing is bleeding. It's blood magic. It's very hard to do,” says writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett of the new Southern gothic romance, Miller’s Girl.

Bartlett started her career as an actress, but it was an unexpected journey that led her to Los Angeles and magically landed her in the world of studio screenwriting. After spending a year at Marvel Studios, writing a draft of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – only to be replaced on the job – Jade’s first feature film is now in theaters. 

In the podcast, Bartlett talks about dealing with rejection, getting hired to rewrite scripts and making the shift to directing. But at the end of the day, she says writing is really about overcoming your fear to get your big ideas onto the page – even if the first draft sucks.

“You’ve got to give up the perfectionism. It is not going to come out perfect. I think a lot of writers are editing in our head while we're doing it as opposed to just like letting it flow out. I would say let yourself write the 170-page draft. There's going be so much magic that will come from it,” says Jade. 

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“I think that approaching the grand things through the smallest entryways possible is the best way to go about taking on these massive issues… So yes, this movie is about race and racism and art and who's allowed to make certain kinds of art - these are really big, unwieldy issues. But the reason that I think people can relate to them –and it doesn't feel so top heavy or clumsy – is because you see it through a character that was deeply personal to me,” says Cord Jefferson, writer/director of American Fiction. 

Based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction is a powerful and often poignantly funny exploration of race in literature, film, family and the marketplace. It toes the line between being relatable and absurd. 

“I wanted to make a movie that felt satirical but never farcical. I wanted the movie to feel like life and life is neither one thing or another, it’s neither comedy nor tragedy,” says Jefferson who made the decision to use humor in the film but he never let the comedy get too broad. 

Jefferson also talks about his journey from journalist – an editor at Gawker – to writing for TV shows like The Watchmenand Succession. 

“If you can write an interesting article, you can probably write a novel. If you can write a novel, you can write a screenplay. I think that it's the same basic idea, which is you need to keep somebody interested in what you're saying from the beginning to the end and what is the best way to keep somebody interested in what you're saying for this long?” says Jefferson.

Take a listen to the podcast for a deep dive into the screenplay for American Fiction.  

“The lesson we keep learning is that the thing that breaks you [into Hollywood] is your weirdest idea. The thing that only you can write… All of our friends who have done that – it's been a fulcrum in their career,” says Phil Lord, co-writer of Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.

On today’s episode, I chat with Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham about taking the Spider-Man franchise into the modern era, making it fresh, heartfelt and multicultural. While Lord and Miller both won Oscars for 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, they brought Callaham on board to help finish the sequel and collaborate on the third installment, Beyond the Spiderverse.

What surprised me most about my Zoom chat with the trio was how down to earth they seemed, how open and honest they were about struggling to make Across the Spiderverse work for everyone, including their discerning animators in India.

Lord, Miller and Callaham also talk about taking a risk with the first act of Across the Spiderverse, turning their villain Spot into a multidimensional character and why creating a “multiverse” of Spider People was important to them.

Callaham also shared this turning point in his career: “I had not gone to film school so everything I learned about screenwriting was from Syd Field and from coffee table books and there were all these rules about how you have to write and how a structure has to be. And how you have to handle things on the page. Ten years in, I got really bored. I felt like I wasn't being honest about the way I was writing material… So I wrote this fairly idiotic, ridiculous script but I wrote it in a style that sounded like the way that I talk, it was conversational and it was fun. I had little of asides to the reader which I know sounds really awful, but it seemed to work at the time and that opened my career up pretty substantially… That happened because I was being more honest with myself as a writer and I was not trying to write like other people anymore. It worked and I never looked back,” he says.

Listen to hear more about the writing process for Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.

“When we were starting [to write screenplays], we were told, ‘Write your story, write your story, write your story.’  But our story is not that interesting. So, I would say, don't write your story necessarily, write the story that you fall in love with and find the human connection between you and the characters that you are depicting,” says Dumb Money co-writer Rebecca Angelo.

On today’s episode, I talk with writing partners Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo about their recent film Dumb Money, that tells the true story of the Game Stop stock roller coaster ride led by real-life populist hero, Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, played by Paul Dano. Lauren and Rebecca talk about writing the screenplay super quickly because there were at least nine other competing projects in development at the time. It seems everyone in Hollywood wanted to tell this feel-good story that has a happy ending for the common man.

They also tell me about using the structure from sports movies to craft the screenplay, how they employ “radical empathy” will their characters and the importance of adding comedic elements when telling complicated stories.

“You know, we could have made a choice to have this movie be a heavy drama. But it felt like we were able to land some bigger ideas when people are laughing before or after even during those moments,” says Lauren Schuker Blum.

For a deeper dive into their writing process, take a listen to the podcast.