Write On: 'Nickel Boys' Writer & Director RaMell Ross
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
Release Date: 12/13/2024
Write On: 'Countdown' Creator/Writer Derek Haas
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“One thing I’ve found in the crime genre is that homicides are always interesting. When somebody’s killed, whatever that case may be, it’s usually compelling drama. So then it’s up to you as the writer to surprise the audience and do things that they didn’t think were coming. I’ve described it like this before: If you can hit the sweet spot of, ‘I didn’t see that coming! I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t see it coming,’ That, to me, is the best writing. It’s like, when you got to the end of The Sixth Sense, and you were like, ‘Oh my god, I should have seen...
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Write On: 'Apple Cider Vinegar' Creator and Showrunner Samantha Strauss
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“In my mind, Belle is going through life, at least our version of Belle – I've never met the real Belle – she’s going through life with this hole inside, this overwhelming need for approval, that social media absolutely capitalizes on and she just keeps trying to feed the beast. She hasn't grown up with the healthiest of role models herself. She has learnt that being sick is a shortcut to being loved and to getting attention,” says Samantha Strauss, creator and showrunner for the Netflix limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, about understanding her main character’s disgraceful...
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Write On: 'Matlock' Creator & Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“The most important thing that I've learned as a storyteller is that I have to treat every character in the show as though they're the lead in the show, and they are never doing anything so that I can prompt a move from another character. They are doing things that are true to what they want and their motivation. So that's what makes that architecture hard, because you know you want things to happen, but they have to happen coming out of character, not coming out of what the room wants to see happen. So it's like the merging of those two. We know what architecture we want, but if it doesn't...
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Write On: 'Running Point' Showrunner David Stassen
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“It’s not ripped from the headlines. We’re not using any of [the Buss family’s] real-life stories and putting them into our show. Because Mindy [Kaling], Ike [Barinholtz], and I have so many influences like Arrested Development, 30 Rock, The Office and Succession, we’re coming up with our own fun stories and fun situations to put this dysfunctional, very wealthy, successful family into a blender and then have them going back and forth and arguing and solving problems together and against each other,” says David Stassen, showrunner of Running Point, about taking inspiration from Los...
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Write On: 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Director/Co-Writer Trey Edward Shults
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“It was a lot of empathizing. I would do long phone calls with Abel (Tesfaye, aka the Weeknd) after we had met, just basically talking to him and finding out more of his history, where he was at in different phases of his life, where he’s at today, and using those to create a character. And part of creating that character is I’ll find my own personal stuff to attach to it… Portions of his life I can relate to very much. And past all of that, I think this is the deepest I’ve gone with my therapy background and my mom and stepdad being therapists. I tried to make the movie work to...
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Write On: 'Nonnas' Screenwriter Liz Maccie and Director Stephen Chbosky
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“Sometimes it’s easier to find and access your truth through ‘pretend’ characters. So I had this embarrassment of riches of this true story but in my heart, I was like, ‘I totally get to tell my truth!’… So my advice is find a way to do it, and if you have to do a mind trick by saying, ‘I’m writing this pretend character’ that’s fine, but put all the stuff that’s real to you into that pretend character, because I find there is an immense amount of freedom in being able to write through these characters because they aren’t exactly my family, they are pieces of them....
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Write On: 'Shadow Force' Director/Co-Writer Joe Carnahan and Co-Writer Leon Chills
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“For me, I don’t know how you could not make [a script] personal. I think drama allows you to hide how personal it is. I think that’s kind of what I like about writing in the genre space. On the outside looking in, it just looks like a big action movie. It doesn’t look like a personal story. But there are personal elements like my mom was a working mom as well. And so that’s why you have Kyra in the movie who has to come back to her son because she’s been working to protect him. That’s a very personal thing… but you would never assume that it’s a personal story because it’s...
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Write On: 2024 Big Break Short Film Winner Brandon Osterman and Seed&Spark
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
On today’s episode, we speak to writer Brandon Osterman, whose short script ‘The Naughty List’ won last year’s Final Draft Big Break Short Screenplay Category. As part of his prize package, he received a consultation with Sav Rodgers, Marketing Manager for Seed&Spark, the film industry’s most popular crowdfunding platform. Sav joins the conversation to tell us exactly what crowdfunding is and help all writers understand that funding for their project is possible to achieve. “Who is your audience? At Seed&Spark, we always say that great crowdfunding is audience...
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Write On: 'Good American Family' Co-Showrunners Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“One of the things we talked a lot about in the room is that very rarely do people set about their day saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to go do some evil.’ But for most people, we’re all sort of the leads in our own stories and we’re all crafting the narrative of who we want the world to see us as. And we do start to believe that. You tell yourself these stories about yourself that you want to be true and you move through the world and you make decisions based on that narrative. And I think that one of the things that as writers, we really try to do is get into the shoes and the heads of...
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Write On: 'NCIS Origins' Showrunners David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“If you can make the twists [in the story] hit your character in an emotional way and set up their emotional arc, then when the case twist intersects with them, if it's hitting them in the deepest way, in the most unexpected way, maybe – then you've done your job. So it's getting that emotional arc to really bounce off of the crime story in the most impactful way,” says Gina Lucita Monreal about the most powerful way to fuse together story and character. On today’s episode, we talk with David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, showrunners and creators of the CBS show NCIS: Origins...
info_outlineOn 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.